The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

CHAPTER 34

  Death did not come to my mother Like an old friend.

  -Josephine Miles

  When Tana was little, she hadn't liked it when her mother went to parties.

  She'd loved watching her get ready: loved the chiffon and silk dresses, the velvet jackets, even the crisp, just-back-from-the-dry-cleaner suits with safety pins attached; the glittering earrings and necklaces and brooches; the magic of rouging cheeks, outlining lips, and darkening eyes with shadow then liner and mascara; the spray of perfume hanging over everything like a sweet musky cloud, clinging to her mother's skin and hair, giving her a cool, remote elegance.

  "Should I wear the pearls tonight or the gold dangles?" her mother had asked her, holding them up.

  Lying on top of the duvet on her parents' bed, Tana studied her mother very carefully before choosing. You couldn't ask Pearl questions like that, because she picked the pearls every time, for her name. This time, though, Tana picked the pearls, too. They looked pretty with Mom's dress.

  But as her mother's high heels clacked on the parquet wood floor, Tana always started to get nervous about the night ahead. Her mother might not be back before bedtime, and Dad didn't understand that Tana was allowed to keep her light on for an extra half hour if she was in the middle of a really good book, plus he flatly refused to check the closet for monsters. The milky tea they had before bed was never quite sweet enough, and when he read to Pearl, he didn't do the voices. Since he didn't know how to do all those things right, bedtime went all wrong.

  At ten years old, she was supposed to be a big girl. Dad would tell her that she was too grown up for night-lights and worrying about monsters under the bed. When she tried to explain that it was the closet she worried about, he smiled as if she'd told a joke.

  But if you didn't believe in monsters, then how were you going to be able to keep safe from them?

  That's how Tana wound up staying awake, waiting for her mother to come home. After an hour, tossing and turning in the dark, she snuck downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, with a single lamp on, eating dry saltines. For a while that was fine, but then, with shadows closing in and Dad and Pearl sleeping all the way upstairs, she got a little bit scared. The wood of the house creaked slightly and the pipes groaned. Outside the window the wind shivered through the bushes, and her gaze kept darting to the movement as she wondered if something was there. She kept thinking of the news programs and the attacks that all the grown-ups didn't want her to know about.

  By the time the headlights of Mom's car swept over the lawn, Tana had completely freaked herself out, but she made a vow that she wouldn't let Mom see it. She was a big girl, as Dad said.

  What she didn't expect was the way her mother looked when she walked in-ashen-faced, her mascara smeared as though she'd been rubbing her eyes or crying. For a moment, she just stared at Tana, her face haunted. Then she smiled a sickly, forced, horrible smile.

  "Oh, did you stay up, waiting for me, my good girl?" her mother asked.

  "Mommy," Tana said, crossing the kitchen to throw her arms around her, calling her something she hadn't called her for years. "Mommy, what's wrong?"

  "Nothing, sweetheart, peanut, lamb chop," her mother said, and even her voice sounded strange. "Time to go to bed. "

  They walked up the stairs. Tana yawned. She was glad her mother was back, even though something bad must have happened, something that she felt inadequate to the task of understanding.

  At the landing, her mother crouched down and took Tana by the shoulders, staring at her with a blazing intensity.

  "I love you," she said. "You and your sister. I love you both so much, and nothing is ever going to change that. "

  Tana nodded, thoroughly frightened.

  "I would do anything to protect you," her mother told her, eyes gleaming in the dim light. "Anything to get to stay with you both and watch you grow up. Anything, okay?"

  "Okay," Tana said.

  But as her mother tucked her into bed, leaning over and pressing her cool mouth against Tana's cheek, with the odor of perfume wafting all around them and locks of her mother's black hair hanging loose from her bobby pins, forming a curtain, Tana decided that she didn't want to grow up. She didn't want to be a big girl too stupid to check the closet for monsters, and she didn't want to go to parties where awful things happened that you had to pretend about, not even if it meant you got to wear pretty dresses and glittering jewels.

  She didn't want to grow up, and yet she knew there was not a single thing she could do to stop it.