Ruth raised an eyebrow. “Only good things, I hope?” She adjusted a vase filled with bursting white roses on a stone accent table that likely weighed over a thousand pounds. “Never mind,” she said archly. “Don’t answer that.”
Mom laughed. “Of course,” she lied, as easily as I usually did. Impressive. “It really is such a pleasure to be able to finally meet Noah’s family. We love having him around. Is your husband here?” she asked innocently. Knowing full well that he wasn’t.
Ruth’s smile didn’t falter, but she shook her head. “I’m afraid David’s in New York at the moment.”
“Maybe another time, then.”
“He would love that,” Ruth said. She lied as well as Noah.
Noah leaned over and said, “You know, this is rapidly becoming as painful as you indicated it would be.”
“Told you.”
“Right, then,” Noah said loudly. “I’m sure you ladies have much to discuss and would rather do so in privacy, yes?”
Ruth looked at my mother for a cue.
Mom waved at us. “Go on.”
Noah handed the wriggling dog off to Ruth. “I’ll give you the tour,” she said, and led my mother away.
I had no idea how long the tour or their conversation or this meeting would last, so I urged Noah up the wide, curving staircase and raced behind him to his room, taking no time to enjoy the view.
Once we arrived, though, I couldn’t help but stare. At his low, simple modern bed, an island in the middle of a neat sea of books. At the floor-to-ceiling windows that splashed amber sunlight onto the shelves that lined his room. It felt like forever since I was last in here, and I missed it.
“What?” Noah asked, when he noticed I hadn’t moved.
I stepped inside. “I wish I could live here,” I said. I wished I could stay.
“No, you don’t.”
“Fine,” I said, my eyes drawn to all the spines. “I wish I had your room.”
“It’s not a terrible consolation prize, I’ll admit.”
“I wish we could make out in your bed.”
Noah sighed. “As do I, but I’m afraid we have a ritual burning to conduct.”
“It’s always something.”
“Isn’t it though?” Noah retrieved the doll from his desk in the alcove, and I finally tore my eyes from the books, ready to get this show on the road. Noah led me to one of probably a dozen unused sitting rooms; the walls were mint green and dotted with ornate brass sconces; there was some furniture, but it was all covered in sheets.
Noah handed me the doll and began to search the room. I immediately set it down on the arm of what appeared to be a chair. I didn’t want to touch it.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I am preparing to start a fire.” He was opening and closing drawers.
“Don’t you still smoke?”
“Not around your parents,” Noah said, still rummaging. “But yes.”
“You don’t have matches on you?”
“A lighter, usually.” Then Noah looked up, mid-crouch. “My father had the fireplaces rewired for gas. I’m looking for the remote.”
The statement dashed my fantasy of throwing a match onto the crude doll and watching it burn. Until I approached the fireplace, that is. The logs looked awfully real.
“Um, Noah?”
“What?”
“You sure it’s gas?”
He walked to the fireplace then and removed the screen. “Apparently not. Shit.”
“What?”
“They might smell an actual fire all the way down there. I don’t know.”
I didn’t care. I wanted this over with. “We’ll think of something.” I picked up the doll from the chair with two fingers, pinching its wrist. I held it out in front of me. “Light it up.”
Noah considered it for a moment, but shook his head and turned to leave. “Wait here.”
I dropped the doll on the floor. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long; Noah returned in short order with lighter fluid and kitchen matches in arm. He approached the fireplace and struck a match. The smell of sulfur filled the air.
“Go on,” he said, once the fire was set.
Showtime. I picked the doll up off the floor and threw it into the flames, swelling with relief as they consumed it. But then the air filled with a bitter, familiar smell.
Noah made a face. “What is that?”
“It smells like . . .” It took me a few seconds to finally place it. “Like burning hair,” I finally said.
We were both quiet after that. We watched the fire and waited until the doll’s arms melted into nothing and the head blackened and fell off. But then I noticed something curl up in the flames. Something that didn’t look like cloth.
“Noah . . .”
“I see it.” His voice was resigned.
I took a step closer. “Is that—”
“It’s paper,” Noah said, confirming my fear.
I swore. “We have to put it out!”
Noah shrugged languidly. “It’ll be gone by the time I bring back water.”
“Go anyway! Jesus.”
Noah turned on his heel and left as I crouched over the fireplace, trying to see more clearly. The paper inside the doll was still burning. I leaned in even closer; the heat lit my skin, bringing color to my cheeks as I moved closer—
“Move,” Noah said. I drew back and Noah doused the flames. Steam rose and hissed from the logs.
I immediately reached toward the dying embers, hopeful that maybe some part of the paper escaped unscathed, but Noah placed a firm hand on my waist. “Careful,” he said, drawing me back.
“But—”
“Whatever it was,” he said firmly, “it’s gone now.”
I was stung by regret. What if it was something important? Something from my grandmother?
What if it had something to do with me?
I closed my eyes and tried to stop punishing myself. There was nothing I could do about the paper now, but at least the doll was gone. I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore and Jude wouldn’t be able to scare me with it anymore. That was worth something.
That was worth a lot.
Finally, the fire died out and I stood over it, satisfied that nothing was left. But then something caught my eye. Something silver in the ash.
I peered closer. “What is that?”
Noah noticed it, too. He leaned down to look at it with me. “A button?”
I shook my head. “There were no buttons.” I reached for the thing, whatever it was, but Noah pulled back my wrist and shook his head.
“It’s still hot,” he said. But then Noah crouched down and reached for the ashes himself.
I moved to stop him. “I thought it was still hot?”
He glanced back over his shoulder. “Have you forgotten?”
That he could heal? No. But, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
An indifferent shrug was my only answer as Noah stuck his hand into the dead fire. He didn’t flinch as he sifted through the ashes.
Noah carefully extracted the shining thing. He placed it in his open palm, brushed off the soot and stood.
It was an inch long, no bigger. A slim line of silver—half of it hammered into the shape of a feather, the other half a dagger. It was interesting and beautiful, just like the boy who always wore it.
Noah was impossibly still as I pulled down the collar of his T-shirt. I looked at the charm around his neck, the one he never took off, and then stared back at the charm in his hand.
They were exactly the same.
29
WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON?
“Noah,” I said, my voice quiet.
He didn’t answer. He was still staring.
I needed to sit down. I didn’t bother with furniture. The floor would do just fine.
Noah hadn’t moved.
“Noah,” I said again.
No response. Nothing.
“Noah.”
He looked at me, finally
. “Where did your pendant come from?” I asked him.
His voice was low and cold. “I found it. In my mother’s things.”
“Ruth?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
Noah shook his head, just as I expected him to. His eyes locked on the pendant again. “It was just after we’d moved here. I’d claimed the library for my room and had taken my guitar up when—I don’t know.” He ran a hand over his jaw. “I went back downstairs feeling like I had to unpack, even though I was jet-lagged and exhausted and planned to pass out for a week. But I headed directly to this one box; inside was a small chest filled with my mother’s—Naomi’s—silver. I began setting the silver aside for absolutely no reason at all and then took the chest apart. Beneath the drawer that held the knives, there it was,” he said, nodding at the charm. “I started wearing it that day.”
Noah reached down—to hand me the charm, I thought—but instead pulled me up from the floor and onto the sheet-covered sofa next to him. He handed me the pendant. My fingers curled around it, just as Noah asked, “Where did you get that doll?”
“It was my grandmother’s,” I said, staring at my closed fist.
“But where did it come from?”
“I don’t—”
I was about to say that I didn’t know, but then remembered the blurred edges of a dream. Hushed voices. A dark hut. A kind girl, sewing me a friend.
Maybe I did know. Maybe I watched while it was made.
Impossible though it was, I told Noah what I remembered. He listened intently, his eyes narrowing as I spoke.
“I never saw the charm, though,” I said when I finished. “The girl never put it inside.”
“It could have been sewn in later,” he said, his voice level.
With whatever that paper was too. “You think—you think it really happened?” I asked. “You think the dream could be real?”
Noah said nothing.
“But if it was real, if it really happened . . .” My voice trailed off, but Noah finished my sentence.
“Then it wasn’t a dream,” he said to himself. “It was a memory.”
We were both quiet as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea.
It made no sense. To remember something, you have to experience it. “I’ve barely left the suburbs,” I said. “I’ve never seen jungles and villages. How could I remember something I’ve never seen?”
Noah stared at nothing and ran his hand slowly through his hair. His voice was very quiet. “Genetic memory.”
Genetic.
My mind conjured my mother’s voice.
“It isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”
“But who in our family has had any kind of—”
“My mother,” she had said. “Your grandmother.”
That was just before she recounted my grandmother’s symptoms.
Grandmother’s symptoms. Grandmother’s doll.
Grandmother’s memory?
“No,” Noah said, shaking his head. “It’s nonsense.”
“What is?”
Noah closed his eyes, and spoke as if from memory. “The idea that some experiences can be stored in our DNA and passed down to future generations,” he said. “Some people think it explains Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.” He opened his eyes and the corner of his mouth lifted. “I’m partial to Freud, myself.”
“Why do you know this?”
“I read it.”
“Where?”
“In a book.”
“What book?” I asked quickly. Noah took my hand and we headed for his room.
Once inside, he scanned his shelves. “I don’t see it,” he said finally, his eyes still on the bookcases that spanned the length of his room.
“What’s it called?”
“New Theories in Genetics.” He tipped out a thick book, then replaced it. “By Armin Lenaurd.”
I joined in the search. “You don’t alphabetize,” I said as my gaze traveled over the spines.
“Correct.”
There was no order to any of the titles, at least none I could discern. “How do you find anything?”
“I just remember.”
“You just . . . remember.” There were thousands of books. How?
“I have a good memory.”
I tilted my head. “Photographic?”
He shrugged a shoulder.
So that was why he never took any notes in school.
The two of us continued to search. Five minutes passed, then ten, and then Noah gave up and dropped down on his pristinely made bed. He lifted his guitar from its case and began aimlessly playing chords.
I kept looking. I didn’t expect the book to have all the answers, or any, really, but I wanted to know more about this and was mildly annoyed that Noah didn’t seem to care. But just as my back began to ache from crouching to read the titles on the bottommost shelf, I found it.
“Score,” I whispered. I tipped the volume out with my finger and withdrew it; the book was astonishingly heavy, with faded gold lettering on the clothbound cover and spine.
Noah’s brow creased. “Strange,” he said, watching me rise. “I don’t remember putting it there.”
I carried the book to his bed and sat beside him. “Not exactly light reading?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Meaning?”
“It was all I had on the flight from London back to the States.”
“When was this?”
“Winter break. We went back to England to see my grandparents—my father’s parents,” he clarified. “I accidentally threw the book I was reading in with my checked luggage, and this was in the seat pouch thing in front of me.”
The book was already growing heavy on my lap. “Doesn’t seem like it would fit.”
“First class.”
“Of course.”
“My father took the jet.”
I made a face.
“I would wholly embrace and mirror your disdain, but I have to say, of all the useless garbage he bleeds money on, that’s the one I’m not at all sorry about. No lines. No security misery. No rush.”
That actually did seem worth it. “You don’t have to take off your shoes or your jacket or—”
“Or be fondled by an overzealous TSA agent. You don’t even have to show ID—my father employs the pilot and crew. We literally just show up at the private airport and walk on. It’s extraordinary.”
“Sounds like it,” I murmured, and flipped open the book.
“I’ll have to take you somewhere, sometime.”
I heard a smile in his voice, but all it did was frustrate me. “I’m not even allowed to come to your house without adult supervision.”
“Patience, Grasshopper.”
I sighed. “Easy for you to say.” I began turning pages, but my eyes kept landing on jargon. “What else does Mr. Lenaurd think?”
“I didn’t bother to read the whole thing; it was terminally dull. What you said just reminded me of it—the author believes that some experiences we’ve never had can be passed down genetically.”
I blinked slowly as a key fit into place. “Superman,” I said to myself.
“Beg your pardon?”
I looked up from the pages at Noah. “When Daniel was trying to help me with the fake Horizons essay, he asked if the thing my fake character has—the thing I have—was acquired or if it existed from the time she—I—was born. Spider-Man or Superman,” I said, and snapped the cover closed. “I’m Superman.”
Noah seemed amused by this. “As delightful as I find that concept, I’m afraid that our unnatural attributes must have been acquired.”
“Why?”
He set his guitar down on the floor, and then met my eyes. “How many times have you wished someone dead, Mara? Someone who cuts you off on the highway, et cetera?”
Probably more than I should think about. I answered with a noncommittal, “Hmm.”
“And when you were little
, you probably even screamed to your parents that you wished they were dead too, yes?”
Possibly. I shrugged.
“And yet they’re still here. As for myself, my ability couldn’t have gone unobserved when I was a kid; I had to get shots and things like everyone else. Surely someone would have noticed I could heal, no?”
“Wait,” I said, leaning forward. “How did you realize you could heal?”
The change in Noah’s demeanor was subtle. His languid posture stiffened even though he was stretched out on his bed, and there was something distant about his eyes when I met them. “I cut myself, and there was no trace of it the next day,” he said, sounding bored. “Anyway,” he went on, “it has to be acquired. Otherwise we would have noticed long before now.”
“But you said you’ve never been sick—”
“What we should be thinking about is why the hell the same rather unusual pendant would be in my mother’s chest of silver and sewn into your grandmother’s creepy doll.”
Noah’s face was smoothed into an unreadable mask, the one he reserved for everyone else. There was something he wasn’t telling me, but pushing him now would get me nowhere.
“Okay,” I said, letting it go for the moment. “So your mother and my grandmother had the same jewelry.”
“And hid it,” Noah added.
I withdrew the silver charm from my back pocket and placed it flat in my palm. The detail was intricate, I noticed as I examined it. Impressive, considering the size.
I looked up at Noah. “Can I see yours?”
He hesitated for maybe a fraction of a second before slipping the fine black cord over his head. He placed it in my hand; the silver pendant was still warm from his skin.
I compared them both with an artist’s eye; the lines of the feather, the contours of the dagger’s half-hilt. The two pendants looked the same, but something bothered me. I turned the charm—my charm—over, and then I realized what it was.
“They’re mirror images.”
Noah bent over my open hand, then looked at me from under his lashes. “They are indeed.”
“And they’re not identical,” I said, pointing out the slight imperfections that distinguished one from the other. “They look handmade. And the design is a little—it’s a little crude, right? It kind of reminds me of the block printed illustrations you find in old books. And the symbols—”