Saturnalia

Chapter 2-3

‘The tornado missed you,’ I say.

She sighs and shrugs her backpack straight. ‘You go first.’ She wants to catch me if I lose my balance. I hold out my hand for the key – the third-floor landing only has space for one person. I’m afraid I won’t be able to open the door, but the muscle memory is stronger than my dizziness. Angle the key down slightly, wiggle it after the first notch, press my knee against the door as I push the knob. Even in the winter, the wood swells.

There’s a new mirror, huge and round, on the opposite wall. Beneath it, a narrow table holds a bowl with spare change. The living room has a new armchair, zebra print, its seams closed with big silver caps. Only the old navy couch, pushed against the far wall, is the same.

‘We need to find Rhea,’ I say. ‘And this.’ My hand shakes between us – a tremor in my limb or my vision or both. ‘The Mandragora’s following it and it’s stuck.’

She tilts her head, quizzical, and I’m afraid she’s going to question me, resist, and I’m already swaying, and if I fall now, we have no chance. She leads me to the old sofa, and I mutter, ‘No, please, no,’ as she nudges me to sit.

‘Hold your arm up. I have to get oil,’ she says, and leaves for a moment, returning with a plastic jug. She coats my fingers, then hoists herself onto the armrest. I hold my arm straight while she twists and tugs, her hair in my face. A sharp line of pain, and my shoulder shudders in the joint. Amparo wobbles with the force of the ring’s release, and I grab her legs.

The ring chimes against the wood, a dent in the wall of noise growing between me and the world, me and my body.

Amparo scoops the ring off the floor. ‘Lie down,’ she says. ‘You need to rest.’

• • •

I don’t want him to be the last person who touched me, I told Max on Blue Christmas. He was hesitant at first, but I wasn’t. I was desperate to put East in the past, to be a different person – not the woman who lay still, who waited. I didn’t want to take off our clothes. I didn’t want to be beneath him. I wanted to feel free, in control, like I could stop, could leave whenever I chose, and then I wanted the opposite. I wanted him to go faster, harder, even though it hurt, because it hurt.

A real friend would have let me bare my soul, but not my body. I don’t think Max even cared about s*x. He cared about being the master of my vulnerability.

Of course, I didn’t realize that then, as we lay together in the quiet house. Everyone had left, probably; Blue Christmas was over.

‘What am I going to do?’ I asked Max.

‘You’ll do whatever you want to do.’ As if it was that easy, to know what you want and then to ride out in search of it.

‘That’s Saturnalia,’ I said, ‘and Saturnalia’s over.’

‘It’s the end of the world,’ Max said. ‘From now on, it’s always Saturnalia.’

• • •

After a few minutes – I think a few minutes – I wake to the sound of Amparo moving around in the kitchen. I sit up and wait for the dizziness to return, and when it doesn’t, I cross the hallway. The walls are a clean white, the floors smooth and unsmudged, new to match the furniture.

In the kitchen, Amparo leans against the counter, stirring a bowl. She’s changed her clothes, trading the black for a camel sweater, skinny jeans, and knee-high oxblood boots with a tall heel. She’s wearing a string of pearls. There’s a new wooden table and a bright new faucet, and the row of cereal boxes and stack of takeout menus have been replaced by an elegant fruit bowl (empty) and a pot of basil (overgrown).

Her idol is still there, a polished wooden figurine with a blank face, red fabric wrapped around her middle and feathers glued to her back. A gift from Amparo’s mother: Oya, the transatlantic goddess of change and wind and fire and storms. I used to feel a little sorry for the idol, looking out over a cement alley instead of the sss or Niger River. I would leave nuts and pennies and grains of rice at her joined feet. Amparo rolled her eyes and swept my offerings into the sink when she cleaned the counters.

Now Max’s ring sits before Oya. Just like the councilman guessed, there’s an engraving, m.g., and even more in Latin.

‘Why did you leave it there?’

‘I don’t know, what am I supposed to do with it?’

I hike up the window. It used to stick, but now it slides easily, hitting the frame with a bang. I launch the ring into the alley, and it disappears from view before it completes its arc, a lightless bit of metal in the night. I slam the window shut again, sending a frigid gust into the room. We shiver and look away from each other, our feud suddenly casting an awkward shadow over tonight’s crisis.

‘The place looks nice,’ I offer.

She taps her fork against the bowl. ‘That window blew out,’ she says. ‘Everything’s new. When was the last time you ate?’

‘Lunchtime, I think.’ The microwave clock reads 3:17 a.m.

She hands me the bowl: rice and peas and shredded beef. Her mother’s cooking, as comforting as my father’s. She fills another bowl from the open container on the counter and we eat in silence. I’m tired and cold and scared, but I was also starving. I take a deep breath. I feel a little bit like myself again.

I’ve chastised myself many times for not telling her what happened that night. I’ve reminded myself that there’s no statute of limitations on telling the truth – if not to repair our friendship, then to allow us both some peace. I’ve held uncapped pens over sheets of blank paper. I’ve opened and closed email windows and text boxes. I couldn’t do it. Still, I believed that someday, somehow, I would tell Amparo my story – maybe when we had moved on with our lives, when her response would only be a distant pity for our younger selves and, perhaps, a flicker of fondness, weak but enduring.

Despite this strange truce, there’s no time for that story, and she doesn’t want to talk about what happened the night of the storm. Instead, I tell her about Max’s request and the homunculus’s bite, about their plan to dissect the tiny man, about the Mandragora and what it did to East.

Finally, I ask, ‘What if I die, too?’

‘No,’ Amparo answers quickly. ‘It killed everyone else immediately. That’s what you said. You’re fine. Come here, I want to show you something.’

She leads me to the living room and faces the mirror. ‘Come on,’ she urges, and I stand beside her. ‘It’s my new scrying mirror.’

Is she taunting me, alluding to our fight? She seems serious, though, staring intently into the glass, as if waiting for something to materialize. The original, her initiation gift, was never more than an ordinary mirror. But she agreed to trust me, on the street, when I couldn’t explain the museum or ring. I can’t repay her with doubt.

Together, we observe our reflections. For the first time, I see that we’ve aged. The slightest thickness at my jaw, the gray thumbprints under my eyes. Silver strands draw the outline of Amparo’s still lovely hair.

‘First, we ask a question,’ she says reverently.

Tears come to my eyes. ‘Ask it if I’m going to die.’

‘Cut it out,’ she says, with the first hint of real anger she’s expressed since she accused me of treason. Then it was shaded with bitterness; now it’s shaded with fear. Amparo has a bad habit of denying things she wishes weren’t true. She takes a deep breath. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t think it tells the future, but what’s happening right now, somewhere else. Watch.’

Amparo dips her finger in a tumbler on the table. She glares at her reflection. ‘Where’s East?’ she demands of herself, and then traces the mirror’s circumference, her wet fingertip squeaking against the surface. Halfway through she wets her finger again to close the circle and then steps back to stand beside me. Narrow rivulets drip down the glass, unweaving our faces into wavy threads and dissolving the distance between us. I reach for Amparo, light-headed: all I can think of is East on the museum floor – gray lips parted, long eyelashes resting on his cheeks, his tender throat, the top button of his shirt, the ring of blood around his head.

Amparo gasps.

Though the mirror still shows only our reflection, slightly misarranged by the dripping water, I know. ‘You saw him,’ I say.

Amparo takes her arm away, tucks her hair behind her ears, composes herself.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘For what?’

‘For confirming I’m not crazy.’

‘Maybe we’re both crazy,’ I say. ‘Or both thinking about East. I told you what happened to him.’

She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Really? After everything you’ve seen tonight? You told me a monster’s following you with a magic ring, and I believed you!’

‘That’s different,’ I argue. ‘I saw it in the flesh! Or… whatever.’

Amparo lets out a disgusted sigh. ‘This may be the stupidest argument I’ve ever had in my life.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Ask it where Rhea and the homunculus are.’

She nods, but when she repeats the ritual, she asks a different question. ‘Where’s Max?’

I open my mouth to protest, but I’m light-headed again, the sensation swift and devastating. An image flashes in my mind, bright and fleeting: a brick house with white trim and a red door. Not huge, but grand and old, framed by the shivering black fingers of leafless trees.

The cloud passes. Our rippling reflections stare back at us. ‘Pineapple Hill Mansion,’ Amparo says.

Wilhelm Kammer’s summer home. I haven’t been there since our Initiation Night, when Max held my hand under the moonlight and joked that it wasn’t too late for me to choose another path. That’s one thing Max reminded me, over and over. I don’t owe the Club anything.

‘I have to find Rhea,’ I say, ‘and get the homunculus back before they hurt him.’

‘I’m sure Rhea’s fine,’ Amparo says. ‘And the… thing. You’re not responsible for it.’

I hold up my wounded hand, tug the sleeve down to my elbow to show her my veins, thick and purple, all the way up to the crook of my elbow now. Amparo looks away, swallows hard. ‘Am I supposed to pretend none of this happened?’ I ask. ‘And let Max kill the homunculus?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Look what it did to you.’

I pull my sleeve down. ‘He bit me because he was scared. I don’t know if he’s human or not, but he wants to live as much as any of us. As much as you and me.’

‘Okay,’ Amparo says softly, reaching into her pocket. ‘I’ll call Rhea.’ She twists away, puts the phone to her ear. A moment later, she shakes her head. ‘I’ll try one more time.’ She taps the screen and returns it to her ear, but then she shakes her head again. The system must be overloaded.

But we have another option now: the scrying mirror.