Page 26

“Yes, because I’m sitting right across from you, six thousand miles from where you left me, and the only thing on your mind is why some scumbag ran off with another woman?”

Scumbag hurts the defensive place in my heart.

Ran off hurts where I need him.

Another woman stabs me where I didn’t think I could be wounded.

If I could read my own emotions, they would be a mess. I would look utterly insane to myself.

My mother, however, has the emotional organization of a school therapist between 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.

How?

Suddenly, I’m running on fumes. Coming down here and pointing a gun at her took every bit of energy I had.

“Mom…” The child in me says her name.

Mom, why do I feel this way? Why am I so tired? Why do I want him so badly? Why is my neck hurting and tingling at the same time?

“He left you in thrall.” She slides the top card off the center stack and lays it down.

I can’t say the man in the picture is Carmine, exactly. He looks younger. Meaner. Harder. His chest is open. Inside it is a shiny silver bird.

“From the looks of you.” She glances up at me as if checking her assertion, and finding herself correct, she puts her eyes back on the cards. “And how long you were out, he took enough to own you down to your cells. It’s disgusting to witness.”

She sounds like my mother, but the emotions are all wrong.

Was she ever this way? When I was too young to know I was the only one who saw the shapes, what did hers look like?

This type of pattern, the way they bump against each other without fighting for dominance, have I ever associated it with her?

“What does that card mean?” I’m trying to buy time while I get my head straight, but she’s not selling.

“You tell me.”

“That isn’t how this works.”

She’s going to reprimand me for acting as if I know anything. She’d be right. I don’t know anything about these cards.

But she doesn’t do what I expect. “Try anyway.”

Fighting fatigue from blood loss, I’m trying to figure out why her shapes interact the way they do, so I have no energy for the detailed analysis she expects. I just say the first, most obvious thing that floats to the top of my head.

“That’s Carmine. The bird is me. I’m inside him.” Where is he, right now? The world is an endless liminal without him. Not even a void of sorrow or pain—just an in-between place where I wait. It’s a gray nothing.

“See? I knew you had it.” My mother was not the I-knew-you-could type unless the encouragement contained a liberal slathering of told-you-so.

“How do you even know who he is?”

Not a single emotion shifts. She’s flat, but not sociopathic.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She flips over the leftmost card. The villa we are in right now, but the burned side. A high tower in a halo of clouds. “What about this one?”

“I can’t begin to know.” The burned-out building frame is ascending into heaven. The Strega are entering their next phase.

“You do. Tell me. Make the connection.”

Connect why she is sane to the exhaustion of my ravaged body to the physical need for Carmine and the dot-dot-dash where he bit me?

You know who had shapes like this? Yaretzi. My mentor in the desert. The librarian who insisted I take self-defense classes. The lady on the side of the road, strumming her guitar. She and Mom had nothing in common, until now.

“How did you get here, Ma?”

“Hush. I have to think when I do this.”

“How do you know how to do this at all?”

“Been a long time.” She sighs, shifts a card with a woman trapped in a tangle of gummi worms closer to a card showing a neat stack of copper coins. “These two.”

“How long?” So tired. So weak. My heart furiously pumps blood that’s barely there. I am scared. Fear is keeping my eyes open, but not for long.

“Maybe fifty years.” There’s a shrug in her voice, but that number isn’t just a number.

Yet her shapes remain the same, as if it’s nothing. As if she’s got some normal stressor laid on top of a normal emotional framework.

Whatever energy Carmine left for me is getting used up. I can barely lift the gun to point it at her, and my brain isn’t mathing as it should.

Fifty years ago, Carmine was staked. My mother was just a kid.

My mother was never normal. The space around her never looked like anyone else.

“Put that down.” She’s not even a little afraid. “Look at the cards. Stupid girl.”

She smirks when she calls me stupid, as if it’s some kind of private joke we share.

“I still hate you.” I sound like a petulant teen who’s refused the car keys.

Mom shifts the cards ever so slightly, as if that will get the connections to reveal themselves.

“Luna?” It’s Nunzio, breaking into the courtyard at a run. He’s got his own gun, but he lowers it when he sees it’s just my mother and me. “Put that down.”

Nunzio’s getting closer. He’s wearing a scarf. It’s a tube. It moves.

“Is that a snake?” I ask.

“He’s fine,” Nunzio reassures me. “My sister brought him. Remember? With the hats? His name is Puzzo. It means stinky. I’m putting my gun away, okay? See?”

Mom taps each card twice.

“No.”

Gummi and money.

Pennies, stacked.

We collected pennies in a five-gallon jar that sat behind the blue velvet chair. It filled up, and one day, Mom brought home little paper sleeves. We dumped them out so we could stack them, fifty at a time, in the little tubes. It seemed impossible. How could such a mess be so organized?

Money and gummi.

The worms are the head-messes I make. Laro’s, in the draining house when he tried to bite me and I rewrote his emotions into an unreconcilable tangle. My mother’s insanity, which I wrote onto her emotional confusion after years of abuse.

The stacks, so neat on a separate card. Another world entirely.

It shouldn’t make sense, but it does.

Nunzio’s reaching for me. He’s going to take the gun—remove my power, my decision.

“Stop!” I point the gun at Nunzio. The snake slithers around his neck, but Nunzio’s calm, as if it’s a part of him. Slowly, his hands go up. Mine shake. “How is she here?”

“Okay, Luna,” he says. “She just appeared by the fountain and she knew you. She looked like you, and Ario and Viaro said they knew her, so?—”

“ Basta !” I shout, then glance at my mother. “Mom. Fifty years ago. You were separated from your… your what? Your sanity?”

“My powers, so, yes. My sanity.”

“How? Who did it?”

I’m half afraid she’s going to say that somehow, years before I was born, I split her, since everything else so far has been my fault. But I’m equally afraid Carmine did it.

“He didn’t know,” she says, as if reading me the way I’m reading her.

“Was it?—?”

“It was Laro. He split me in two. And when you fucked him up, you freed me.”

I lower the gun. Nunzio can take it if he wants. I can’t shoot him any more than I can shoot this woman I half-know.

“I’m so tired.”

Mom flips a card from the top of the deck.

A sky of gray clouds from corner to corner.

“Time to sleep.” She raises her hand ever so slightly, and says, as an aside to Nunzio, “Catch her,” before waving it.

I sleep.