Page 44 of The Reveal
I can’t decide if it’s a relief or a stab to the heart.
She leans over—more nimbly than I expect—and reaches over for her cards. Then she places them on her lap. Decisively. She taps them expectantly and then looks at me, like she thinks I might ...
“I don’t want to mess around with your cards,” I say, and I think that I deserve all kinds of applause for notyellingthat. “You know I don’t like them. I never have.”
My grandmother only stares at me, pointedly, and I don’t have it in me to disobey her. Not even tonight, when it’s as if she’s transformed into someone else performing the role of the Gran I thought I knew.
I walk over and sink into her usual chair, there beside the bed. I don’t often sit here. It’s her chair, and I like to keep it sacred for her, since we have so few sacred spaces left.
But tonight, as I sit there with the window beside me with all those slatted iron bars and the moon coming in anyway, it reminds me of something else. A confessional, maybe.
Or, a voice inside me suggests,more like a drive-through retail window.
I have an immediate vision of my grandmother and her damned cards sitting at this window, telling futures to whoever might stop by in the dark. While I lie awake upstairs worrying about zombies in the fucking trash, which is at least better than the nightmares that come for me if I fall asleep.
But this can’t be true. This can’t be happening. This is mygrandmother.
The window lets in starlight, and a bit of moon, but that’s all. It’s just a window, or as near as we get to windows in a world that doesn’t encourage that many easy entries for the so-calledKind. My grandmother is an old woman. She has dementia.
And for all I know, this is a vampire dream I’m having on a rooftop in downtown Medford while Ariel slowly drains the blood out of me.
Maybe that’s why I say nothing as my grandmother shuffles and reshuffles her cards, then fans them out in front of her, making little sounds in the back of her throat as if she’s having a conversation with the images she sees.
“We have always had the sight in this family,” she tells me. “Like it or not. Sometimes they call us witches. Sometimes they call us grifters. But it doesn’t matter what they call us. They always come back, and, mother to daughter, down we pass it as the years go by.”
“The sight?” I shake my head, which is starting to ache again. “What are you talking about, Gran?”
“You and Augie used to say that I knew what you were going to do before you did it,” she reminds me. Her gaze meets mine. “Because I did.”
I can’t take this in. I don’twantto take this in. “The sight?Really?” I can’t bring myself to go fully scathing, but the look she slides my way suggests that I’ve come close enough. But I keep going. “And you couldn’t predict that Mom and Dad would take off?”
She stares at me, with a kind of knowledge in her gaze that I dislike. Intensely. “I did.”
Those two small words tear at me. Maybe they tear me apart. I feel something thick inside me, like a sob waiting to flood through me, but I can’t let it out. I can’t start, because I don’t know if I’ll stop.
I force a laugh, but it comes out weak and uneasy. “This is ridiculous.”
Gran continues to stare at me, like she expects me to ask for details, but I can’t. I won’t.I refuse.Then she sighs, and that same old shame wallops me once again.
“You are hardly the first member of the family to deny the truth, and the sight itself,” she says, which shouldn’t make the shame heavier, but it does. “Like that vampire, child, it exists whether you believe in it or not. And it is just as fickle.”
It strikes me as funny to think of Ariel Skinner asfickle, but there’s a different sort of tide rising in me now.
“He told me.” I frown at her, taking in that beloved face I know so well. The creases in the corners of her eyes and bracketing her mouth that I like to tell myself mean a life of fun. I might not have seen her laugh in a long while, but it’s not like there’s been much to laugh about. “The vampire king told me that you saw the Reveal coming. That you knew.”
The thing about this betrayal, from her, is that it’s all-encompassing and woven together, so it’s like a whole involved tapestry of a kick to the stomach.
Gran does nothing. She barely reacts. She only watches me, yet there’s nothing blank about her gaze. Nothing confused. It’s a steady focus, intent and unwavering.
It makes me want to sob, but I don’t.
“You knew,” I say, and it’s worse to say it out loud than it was to sit with on the long, dazed drive home. “You knew, Gran, and you didn’t eventryto save us.”
I’m not clear whichusI mean. Me? Me and Augie? My parents—wherever they are? All the people in the valley? The whole wide world?
Something changes on my grandmother’s face, though I can’t exactly track it. She looks sadder and wiser, all of a sudden.
“And how would I have explained it to you?” she asks quietly. “How would your senile old grandmother manage to convince you that every scary thing you ever heard of was suddenly free to roam and pillage at will? Do you suppose you would have believed me? Or do you think you might have started investigating options for a nursing home instead?”
