Page 112 of Better in Black
Max shook his head ruefully. “Of course he does.” He started pushing the cart again, but this time, he and Clary walked side by side. He seemed slightly less tense without Jace there. Strangers were easier than family sometimes, Clary thought. Even family you’d never met. There was no pressure to have any kind of feeling about them. No pressure to stop feeling. “Look, I’m not a terrible person,” Max said. “I know what happened to me isn’t your fault, or Jace’s.”
“You’re just taking it out on us because we’re the only ones around?” Clary suggested.
“Exactly—well, all right, that sounds awful.” He nearly rammed his cart into a large display of cat litter, and sighed. “You think I don’t miss my sister?”
“Do you?”
He looked like he couldn’t believe she’d asked. “Of course! Do you think I wanted it this way? Do you think Ichosethis?”
“I think you made a choice you should never have been asked to make,” Clary said, carefully. “I can’t imagine how angry I would be. How heartbroken. But a lot has changed in the Clave since you left.”
“I know.” Looking slightly chastened, Max admitted that he’d been keeping tabs on the Shadow World. There was a barbershop in Willow Grove run by a werewolf who liked to gossip. “He moved there because he thought a place named Willow Grove might involve trees. Classic suburban story. Came for the nonexistent forest, stayed for the fro-yo.”
Max explained that wherever he’d lived, he’d always managed to find some source of information on the Shadowhunters. There were certain things a person needed to know—like whether their family was alive or dead. But he’d resisted the temptation to ask too many questions. The more details he had, the more he kept up with the world he’d left behind, the more it hurt.
“Then came the Dark War, and the Cold Peace, and…everything after,” he said. “So much loss. So much grief. So many peopleI’d once cared about dying for a cause they believed in. I couldn’t fight by their side, obviously.” Max looked down at his unmarked arms. She wondered how long it had taken him to stop feeling like he’d lost a piece of himself. Like the armor thatprotected him from the world had been stripped away. Maybe he never stopped feeling it. “It wasn’t my war anymore. But learning the names of the fallen, paying tribute to their sacrifice, that seemed like the least I could do.”
The thing about Max, Clary thought, was that she liked him. It was easy to imagine him fitting in with the Lightwoods. Imagine, she thought, if he had kids. They’d be older than Alec’s children, but still, there would be cousins to visit. The Law was softer than it had been, with Alec as Consul. Knowing Alec, he would probably recuse himself from any official verdict on Max’s exile. But the whole Council was different now. Everything had changed.
She just didn’t know if those changes had come too late for Max.
—
Next they went to a mall. Even cranky, Jace was amused by the enormous indoor atrium of stores and the strange food items—like Dippin’ Dots—that no one would ever try to foist upon the inhabitants of Manhattan. Although hewasconfused why the mundanes needed both a mall and a Costco.
“Sometimes you want a specific store just for knives,” Max said, and Jace nodded, as if this indeed made sense.
The mall smelled like cheap perfume and soft pretzels. Clary wondered if Max missed Idris as much as the Lightwoods did. And if he took any satisfaction from knowing most of the Clave had also been forced to choose a kind of exile. He’d made a life somewhere that felt about as far from the glittering spires of Alicante, the lush forests and emerald plains of Idris, as a person could get. Clary had grown up in a city of glamours, an artificial scrim laid across reality that kept her from seeing the world as it really was. But the suburbs felt like glamour on top of glamour. A willfulembrace of the artificial, the illusion, and she wondered if that was what Max liked about it. If living inside a bubble of plastic and Astroturf, where everyone was hiding from some kind of reality, made him feel less alone.
Or maybe I’m just a Brooklyn snob,she thought ruefully, as they passed a store that sold cookies the size of her head. Maybe Max just liked having a pretty lawn and easy access to oversized baked goods, and who could blame him.
Max led them to a store that sold devices Clary couldn’t believe someone had actually invented, much less fooled someone else into paying for: a wearable automated back scratcher for mid-sized dogs, a levitating alarm clock in the shape of Saturn that announced the time in astronomical units, a pillow that would wake you up if you started snoring. (Clary teased Jace that actually that one might come in handy.) Max selected a telescope, portable enough—according to the box—to take into the wilderness in search of darker skies, strong enough to see the cloud belts of Jupiter.
“You must really like astronomy,” Clary said, glimpsing the price tag.
“It’s a gift.”
“For who?” Jace asked.
Max ignored the question, and asked the woman behind the register if they could wrap it.
“I remember when my father taught me the names of the stars,” Jace said.
Max stiffened, but again, pretended Jace had said nothing. “You called Robert Maryse’s husband,” he said, after a moment. “But I was under the impression they’d gotten divorced?”
It was a transparent attempt to change the subject. And it worked.
“I thought you didn’t want to know anything about your sister,” Jace said.
“I thought so too.”
He’s so sad,Clary thought.We knew he might be angry, but he’s also just so…sad.
“They were separated,” Jace said.
“Because of what happened to Max? The other Max, I mean.”
“It was a lot of things,” Clary said, when it became clear Jace didn’t necessarily want to answer that. “But she still grieved him, when he died. We all did.”
