Page 9 of The Last Wish of Bristol Keats
Bristol tried to make sense of it, reliving the moment when the knife sliced into her neck and her mother’s eyes widened. A second later, she sent them on their way. “Maybe it was the blood that saved us. My mother always hated the sight of blood. When we were small, my father was in charge of our skinned elbows and bloody noses.” Bristol reached up and traced the faint line on her forehead where a scar disappeared into her hairline. Her mother had fainted at that one. She’d been unloading her loom from the top of the van when it suddenly jerked free and hit Bristol in the head. Heads bleed magnificently, and her mother collapsed in a heap when she saw the gash.
“Forgive me,” Tyghan said, “but I have a hard time believing Maire is bothered by blood. Buckets of it have been shed by her hand, and she bragged about shooting Cully. I don’t think it was just the sight of blood that made her stop.”
Bristol couldn’t argue with that. Still, her mother had reacted when Bristol’s neck started bleeding. Maybe the sight of the blood made her mother stop thinking Bristol was only a clever deception. Or maybe it jolted a sliver of memory free . . . a memory that she’d had a daughter once.Three daughters. Did some lost part of her remember, or was Leanna Keats gone forever?
Tyghan wished he could erase Bristol’s pain, make it disappear with the right words, but there was no magic that could undo what she heard and saw that day. He was grateful for the knock at the door and jumped from the sofa to answer it.
“It’s supper,” he said, taking the tray from the servant so Bristol wouldn’t have to endure any more sideways glances. “After all the blood you lost, you need extra nourishment.” He also hoped some routine and normalcy would give her a break from the thoughts that were overwhelming her.
He set the tray on the low table, spreading out plates and silver, but at the first rattle of dishes, the fox she’d been feeding emerged from the burrow woven into her carpet—art come to life at every meal. He sniffed at the table, investigating. “Back to your burrow, freeloader,” Tyghan said, trying to shoo him away, but Bristol intervened.
“No. Give him something.”
Tyghan sighed and handed over a red pear from the fruit bowl, and the fox happily scampered back into his hole. He was probably her fox for life now. Tyghan filled their goblets, and they both ate—and drank. He had ordered her favorites. A mellow red wine from the north country, braised boar shanks, warm buttered rolls, stuffed figs, raspberry cream tarts. Like the fire, it seemed to be a welcome distraction for her. He kept her goblet full and watched her shoulders loosen and warmth return to her cheeks.
Sometimes everyone needed a break from their thoughts, but when she set her last shank bone on her plate and sat back, staring at the hearth and crackling logs, he knew her mind had circled back to the same thought: Her mother had ordered him to kill her. Even he was shocked and still reeling from that moment, and the risk he had taken. He was a fool to have put any hope in Maire caring for her daughter.
“She’s gone,” Bristol said. “The mother I knew is gone, just like my father warned.” The emptiness of her tone gripped Tyghan, and he wished he had a remedy for her anguish. “For me, it’s like she’s died all over again,” she went on. “The first time I was angry, but this time . . . This is different. It feels like I’ve stopped existing too. She gave birth to me. On a dark and stormy night. She always laughed about that, like I had to make an overly dramatic entrance. After thirty-two hours, she’d remind me, like she was as proud of my endurance as her own. And now, in her mind, I’m no one. That story, that life—it’s gone. When there are no memories left of you, do you even exist?” She turned to him, her eyes bright again. “Kiss me, Tyghan. Kiss me like you will never forget me. Please don’t ever forget me.”
Tyghan gently tucked her hair behind her ear, and with a single finger, he slowly lifted her chin. His lips grazed hers, so lightly they barely touched, and yet it was a sunrise, a sunset, the lifetime he wanted with her. He pulled her closer, and her head rested on his shoulder, sinking into him like she was anchored again. He calmed the blaze in the hearth and summoned the shadows around them like a blanket, and she fell asleep in his arms.
Forget her? Never. She was sewn into his soul.
CHAPTER 8
Cat dropped the heavy cardboard box into the back of the van and went back to the house for another. She and Harper were moving into an apartment in town. They could afford that now. In addition to the windfall that came from their father’s painting, the money from the da Vinci and Escher sketches had come in, and thanks to Sonja’s wise negotiating, it was a fortune. After a lifetime of living out of duffle bags, they now had whole boxes’ worth of possessions, and yet their lives didn’t seem any fuller. There was a hole. There would always be a hole until Bristol returned.
Cat and Harper passed each other several times on the old creaking porch as they loaded boxes. Harper was not happy about the move, but the apartment was far more practical and safer. With Cat commuting long hours to the music institute now—they had welcomed her back—she didn’t want to worry about Harper riding her bike back and forth along deserted country roads to school. Especially not the one where their father had died—or at least disappeared. Enough people had disappeared from Cat’s life. She wouldn’t lose Harper too.
“Hey, don’t look so glum,” she said, ruffling Harper’s hair as she dropped another box into the van. “There’s a pool at the new place. And the library is only a block away. You’re going to love it.”
“Yeah.” Harper sighed. “I just worry. What if she comes back and we’re not here? What if—”
Cat looped her arm around Harper’s shoulder. “Come on.” She walked her to the mudroom where the portal had once been. “Look. She is not going to miss that note, or the card. With all the tape you used to fix them to the washing machine, they’re not going anywhere.”
They stared at the cheery envelope that Harper had illustrated months ago with balloons and a birthday cake for Bristol’s twenty-second birthday. Blocking most of the floor in the mudroom in front of the washing machine was the gift they had planned to surprise Bristol with before she left unexpectedly. It was a new bike to replace her rusted one. It had shiny baby blue fenders and a basket filled with a new hoodie. The bike was secondhand, but they had saved like crazy to buy it for her.
“I promise you, Harper, we will never touch this house or that bike until she returns. It will always be here for her.”
“Did you know, Cat? Tell me. Did you know what they were?”
Whatthey were. Cat had shed so many tears over what had transpired, she didn’t think she had any more, but she felt her eyes welling, still feeling the guilt. Would it ever go away?
She had already told Harper what she knew. But maybe sometimes the truth had to be revisited more than once, especially when so much of your life had been a lie.
“I swear, I didn’t think Daddy was telling the truth. Would you have believed him? After Mother died, he wasn’t the same. You know that. When he called me at school with this wild story about Elphame and leaving to find Mother, I thought he had finally lost it. And when he warned me about Bristol and her birthmark, I was certain he had. He said I should know in case anything happened to him. When he died, or I thought he had, I was as grief-stricken as everyone else and forgot about his wild stories. They didn’t seem important then.”
Harper nodded and looked down as if ashamed. “I went to the library and got a book of spells. I tried a few, but nothing happened.”
“We’re not fairies, Harp.”
“But Mother was. That has to be where Bri got it from.”
Their dead mother. It was possible Bri got it from her, but now they would never know. These past months they had tried to put the pieces together. They were still trying to unravel their past. At least they had each other. But who did Bristol have to help her? Cat’s throat swelled.
“She’ll manage,” Harper said, as if she could read Cat’s thoughts. “Those were the last words she said to me so I wouldn’t worry:You know me. I always manage.”
But Bristol’s last spoken words to Cat were the ones she would always hear.How could you not tell me? I trusted you. Get away from me. Get the hell away.
