Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (44 page)

“I wonder if your policeman friend would agree with that.”

“Constable Schenk was here?” I stabbed another potato and
scooped fried onion with it, desperately wanting a drink of water. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to ask about your psychic abilities.”

Schenk didn’t have to come here for that; he’d seen my abilities first hand. I suspected he was here for other reasons, though I
couldn’t imagine what he was nosing around for. “What did you tell him?”

Mom raised her mug to her lips but didn’t drink. “I told him you were the real thing.”

“Oh?” I blinked in surprise.

“Yes.” She put her mug down carefully, deliberately, like she didn’t want it knocked over in the event of a rumble. I braced for it. “I told him the way it all started, how it worked.”

“From your point of view.”

“I could hardly do otherwise,” she said. “I speak my mind, Marnie-Jean. It’s not a crime to have an opinion that differs from yours.”

Oh, Aradia, give me strength.
I took a steadying breath. “Well, I
can’t wait to hear this. Go ahead, Mother.”

Her lips did a prim little twist. The Blue Sense told me she knew
she was going to come off badly, but was resigned to the fall-out
from
her choices. Hers was a stubborn brand of cruelty. She’d been
punishing
me for my choices for a decade, now, but no harder than she
punished herself, so she felt she was being fair. “I told him a monster stole my real daughter away at the tender age of seventeen, and replaced her with a lunatic witch with no moral compass and no sense of—”

“Enough!” The bark that cut the air made me jerk in my seat. It had been a long time since I’d heard Harry’s voice so sharp. I noticed he was holding Dad’s Moleskines, and felt through the Bond a press of irritation and anxiety; Harry had had his fill and was ready to go. “At the risk of sounding ungentlemanly, might I say, madam, that your hospitality leaves much to be desired. I am no disease that has
infected your home, stealing away your loved ones like a cancer, though you seem determined to see me as such. I am a gift that your mother chose to offer, which your daughter freely and shrewdly
chose to accept. Under my care, she continues to flourish and prosper. Your husband has, in his wisdom, come to accept this, and though I do not hold a hope that you will join him in this opinion, I will thank you to keep in mind that I am your daughter’s most loyal supporter, her guardian and companion, whether she be a lunatic witch or not.”

“Um,
not
,” I piped up between the two, waving my fork in the air to make my point. “Not a lunatic witch.”

Harry continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “And you ought to guard your tongue from passing blasphemous slurs against a
gentleman of my
caliber.” He passed a smoothing finger across his thrice-pierced
eyebrow,
and then brushed away imaginary lint from his shirt front. “Say
goodnight to your father, my pet, and bid him sweet dreams. We
must be about our business.”

I was quick to abandon the table, feeling Harry’s patience
dwindle rapidly. I popped in to see my dad, and then let Harry help me with my parka. We hurried into sub-zero temperatures that were far more cheery than the atmosphere in my mother’s kitchen.

“Way to stick up for me, Harry,” I said.

He looked surprised. “But of course you can speak for yourself?” He made it a question, studying my face. “You don’t need me to rescue you. However, if it would please the secret damsel that lies in distress behind your bold front, I will rally to your charge and return to battle.” He balled a fist and made to return to the porch where my mother stood glaring.

I grabbed his forearm. “No. You’re right. Leave it.”

“Are you certain?” he asked, holding the passenger door open for me. “Only, it seems after rousting the dragon of your father’s
jealousy from its decade-long hibernation and slaying it neatly, I am feeling rather heroic.”

I had to smile, though I wasn’t quite up to laughing just yet. “Home, brave Galahad. I need a drink of water like you wouldn't believe.”

I’D LAST SEEN
Rowena when she was a sullen tween in braids and short-shorts, long before her bar hopping and her drinking and her
accident and her slap on the wrist from the courts. She was a
woman, now, but no less sullen.

The morning sun was glaring off the snow, and Mr. Merritt had some seriously bad-ass sunglasses on; Combat Butler goes
Men In
Black
. I, on the other hand, looked like I’d been beaten down from all sides and left for dead. I pulled the ski mask off and left it on the passenger seat, smoothed back my bedraggled hair, checked my fat
lip
in the rearview mirror, and then got out to face the youngest of my five sisters. A mere eleven months older than Wesley, Rowena would, before long, look like she'd lapped him in physical age.
Where Wesley
would continue to look a scarred twenty forever, Rowena was weathering with the stresses of life like a normal, mortal human, even without her living harder than most of the family was happy
with.

Of all my sisters, Rowena had the oldest soul. Today, from a distance and with the winter sun turning her blonde hair to windblown threads of white gold, she seemed all of eighteen
everywhere but those
steady eyes. Bird’s egg blue, hers were full of melancholy and experience, and belonged on a grizzled old war veteran, not plopped
in the middle of an angelic face. She was wrapped in an afghan that had likely come from Claire’s talented hands. As she got closer, I saw the hint of bony shoulders under that blanket, a silver cross hanging outside
a grey Roots sweatshirt, thin legs in matching grey sweatpants,
cheeks gaunt but swept with a bit of blush. Or maybe that was wind burn from the chill off the lake. There were fine lines on her forehead and black circles under her eyes that shouldn’t have been so pronounced. If I didn’t know better I’d think she had taken Wesley’s place as the family addict, but these were the ravages of an internal war, of deep self-loathing and reparations, as if she could make amends with karma by starving herself or making her life more difficult than it needed to be. Her penance would never satisfy the jury in her head. Rowena saw a different end to the accident that had injured but not killed a pedestrian, and the end she saw was unforgivable.

Rowena didn’t hug me, or smile, but she came close enough to hand me a grocery bag.

I said, “Sorry to call around eleven. I know it’s time for
Coronation Street
.”

“My TV hasn’t worked in months,” she said with a one-shouldered shrug. Her voice was so different than I remembered it,
hard and edgy without the mitigating sweetness of adolescence. “Dad’s doing a bit better today. Mom’s happy… about Harry, I mean.”

“Not about me,” I clarified, not that I needed to.

“Fuck, no.”

“Why the heck would she be happy about Harry?”

“Heck, eh?” I thought she wanted to smile, and the frown that followed was caused by irritation that I was daring to amuse her. Humor as defense mechanism used as the best offense possible. She repeated as though she didn’t hear me right, “Heck?”

“I can’t afford swears,” I said, cocking one gloved thumb at the hearse where Mr. Merritt was pointedly not watching us over his New York Times. “I bet him a thousand bucks a pop, because I'm an idiot.”

She glanced over my shoulder towards the car. “Didn’t know people still read the paper.”

“He’s really super old,” I explained. “So why is Mom happy with Harry?”

“Because of Harry refusing to turn Dad.”

Turn him?
I didn’t know what to say, so I stuck with a safe, “Oh.”

“Harry said he’s not old enough to turn people into vampires,” Rowena said, and I sensed she was testing me to see if this was fact, “so he had to say no to Dad.”

I nodded and gave her another, “Oh.”

That seemed to satisfy her. The Blue Sense started to wake up,
but I did my best to squelch it, stomp it back. This was one case where I adamantly did
not
want to know what someone was feeling, about me or anything else. As if sensing this struggle inside me,
Rowena glanced at my leather gloves as I clutched the handles of the grocery bag. She stuffed her own bare hands inside the pockets of her sweatshirt and looked at me expectantly. I tried to imagine what in the world to say next.
An apology?
For what, exactly? For wearing gloves? For being psychic? For not calling to be yelled at and rejected? For not at least trying?
I’m not sorry about accepting Harry
. Rowena kept her eyes on my face and seemed to be waiting. She always could win a staring contest, and could go freakishly long without blinking. No one in their right mind would play poker with Rowena Baranuik.

“Anyway,” she said, letting me off the hook, “Mom’s pleased.” Pause. “With Harry.”

“Not with me,” I said again.

“Right.”

I nodded, chewing my bottom lip. “Well, this is all news to me. Harry didn’t mention Dad’s request.” He wouldn’t have mentioned it to me, though; he’d simply taken care of it and moved on, not wanting to upset me.

“Margot says not to break this board.” She looked at me with that expectant look again, like she was waiting for a fight.

“I hardly ever break stuff,” I lied.

“She’s not painting another.”

“I won’t ask her to.”

“She had nightmares after she made this one. That’s why I had it. Stored it in my garden shed.”

I looked at the bent and battered green aluminum shed that had been there long before this place belonged to Rowena. It was draped with a blue tarp to block snow and rain from getting in the hole that some storm had made, and not all that recently, by the looks of it. If Harry thought my place was a dump, he’d have hauled both me and my sister out of hers bodily and would be on the phone to his renovators before either of us could squawk.

“Well, thank you for letting me borrow the board. Do you want it back?”

“It gave Margot the creeps,” she said, repeating. “She won’t make another.”

I got that much already, thanks
was trapped behind my teeth. With
anyone else I’d have been losing my shit by now, letting the expletives fly, but this was a chance, however slight, at an inroad to family peace. I peeked at the fancy scrying board in the bag, took a
deep breath, and let my frustration go on the exhale. “I’ll be careful with it. Do you want me to bring it back when I'm done?”

“It’s just something pretty to look at,” she said. “I don’t use it. I’m not into the occult. Taints the soul.”

Look at? I thought you kept it in the shed.
“Ah. So what I’m hearing you say is, 'I’d like something pretty to look at for Christmas.' Like, maybe a TV that works?”

“Witches don’t buy Christmas presents,” she said, too quickly, and with a cool little laugh. “You’ve never bought me a Christmas present.”

That was wildly untrue, but her barb struck home. I still held my
tongue, somehow; she was intentionally ignoring the extra stockings Carrie and I had made all the younger kids when we were teens, and, later, the gifts Harry and I lavished on the family, even as their resentment toward us planted roots that showed no signs of dying back or pulling free.

“Okay, Rowena,” I said, disappointed.
This isn’t how I wanted this to go
. “No presents.”

I made to get back in the hearse and Rowena’s hands came back out of her pockets; though she didn’t exactly reach for me, the gesture stalled my feet.

She said, “I, uh, contacted that Lennie Epp fellow like you said. Going to see him Thursday for an hour.”

“Not sure you’ll make much of a dent in an hour, but enjoy.” I added, “You do good work, kiddo. I’m proud of that, if it matters.” I nodded, not knowing what else to say but not prepared to give up as long as she was still willing to talk. “Good work, for sure.”

“I hear from Carrie that you do good work, too,” she offered, “except for all the people dying.”

She tried
. I didn’t smile, though a dark part of me found it deeply
amusing. “Yeah, well, I try to keep the death toll low in every case.
That’s a real source of pride for me. Is Claire out west?”

“Her last year,” Rowena said, and then, reluctantly, as if it was a
precious family secret I shouldn’t be privy to, she added, “Biology. But not monsters. No preternatural stuff. Real science. Marine biology.”

“Good,” I said, ignoring the little digs.
Real science
. I wondered if Mr. Merritt would mind taking me for a dozen donuts after this ordeal; I was
so
not used to biting my tongue. I opened my mouth to tell her that Carrie mentioned it to me, second guessed that, and shut up. Then I thought to mention Wesley staying with me, but felt that no one in the family was quite ready to handle his life choices, and kept my teeth together.

She watched me struggle and said nothing, waiting.

I did my best not to look behind her at the run down house, the
busted ten-speed bike stuck in a wedge of piled snow. If I asked Harry to, he’d send around a crew to patch the windows today,
spring for a new bike, or a car, or whatever else she was denying herself as self-punishment. “Do you need anything? Anything at all?”

“Trying to be a big sister, now?”

“No.” I sighed and tried again, a bit of my anger leaking out. “I just want you to understand, I’m a resource you can draw on if you need—“

She stopped me. “Your wealthy dead man can’t buy me, Marnie.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I insisted, but my voice had raised
enough to echo in the carport. I swallowed my frustration back,
afraid to lose what little ground I’d gained, afraid she’d shut down. “The door’s open, is all I meant. I understand that luxury is something you think you don’t deserve, kiddo, but adding a bit of
comfort to the
basics isn’t a crime. I’m here for you, even when I’m…” I made a flinging hand motion to the south to indicate Colorado. “There for you.”