The Graces (23 page)

I found the words practically vomiting up my throat in their eagerness to be out. As if my stopper had been uncorked and my liquid secrets were
spilling everywhere, staining the sand.

‘Sometimes, when I was younger, I’d wish for things, and then they’d happen. Mostly they never happened at all – but sometimes, just sometimes, something would. One time I wanted this teacher in primary school to get in trouble so he’d stop picking on me in class. He got suspended two days later for fraud or something. He swore up and down that he was innocent, but he still got a criminal record.

Another time, I wanted it to be sunny so I could go outside and play. We had a drought that summer. Literally just in our area – the rest of the country was fine. It was so bad our cat died.

This boy felt me up at a bus stop once, and I wanted something horrible to happen to him. After he was done with me, he went to cross the road to go home, and he got run over. I never even saw a car coming. He was in a wheelchair after that.

And I … I saw Jase surfing and showing off, and I thought he was such a dick for what he’d said to you. And I just thought it would serve him right if he broke his leg. And with Wolf, I—’ But I couldn’t finish that.

They knew why that had happened.

‘Maybe it was just coincidence, see. I could never be sure, not truly, absolutely sure it was me. And it was only bad things that happened around me, never good.
So for a long time, I tried to think only good thoughts, just in case.’ I choked on each syllable as they came out, dragging their sharp edges like razor blades against my throat. ‘But no one can think only good thoughts. I thought I was broken. Now I just think … maybe I’m cursed, like you. Because it doesn’t matter how sorry I am about any of it. Sorry never brings anyone back.’

Thick, thick silence and the rolling sound of the sea.

‘All this time. You knew what you were. You lied to us. You hurt us.’ Summer, thin and sopping, her eyes raised to me.

I shook all over. ‘But I didn’t know. I didn’t know for sure.’

‘We trusted you,’ said Fenrin. ‘I trusted you, and then you took him away from me. I loved him and you took him.’

He started to cry.

We sat there, drenched and cold, silent underneath his quiet sounds. Thalia was stroking his wet hair. I made sure that I listened to him. He deserved at least that from me.

He needed a grand, evil reason why Wolf was dead, but all I had to give him was the banal truth – sometimes people died for the stupidest reasons in the world. Just for a moment, the betrayal I felt at seeing
Fenrin with someone else was enough for me to want to punish him. It was a childish tantrum. Anyone else and they’d just be embarrassed for a while. Life would go on.

A moment was all it took. One life gone, a few others ruined. It was such a tiny thing, a moment. But it was the most powerful reality shaper there was. It was the power I seemed to have, to change moments.

I wished I could explain all this to them, all this I had inside my head. But the words didn’t come. They never had. I’d been so afraid of what I could do for so long that I could no longer tell the truth to anyone, about anything. It was the best way. You built up walls and you trusted no one because you knew how untrustworthy you were yourself, so why should anyone else be any different?

If there was something wrong with you, there could be something wrong with everyone. If you were capable of such awful moments, no matter how sorry you were afterwards, no matter how much you screamed and begged the universe to take it back, then maybe everyone else was, too.

I’d give anything to reverse the things I’d done, but that was the one thing I’d never been able to do. That was my tragedy. My punishment. My curse.

Summer was watching me. I didn’t know what my
face told her, but she started to move towards me. She still had the athame clutched in one hand as she crawled over the sand. I was so stiff and cold I felt my whole body twitch occasionally, but I couldn’t get it to do anything I wanted. Kick her in the face before she stabbed that thing into my chest, for example. All I could do was watch as she disappeared behind me. It was over.

Faint tugging against my wrists. Jerk jerk jerk. Pause. Jerk jerk jerk.

‘Don’t,’ said Thalia. ‘Summer, don’t.’ But the jerking didn’t stop.

I didn’t even realise at first when my hands came free. I tried to rub life back into them, but it was like rubbing an ice block with a brick. Summer sat back, leaning against the post next to me, her legs bent. She tipped her head back. Her lips were almost white.

‘You can’t bring him back, can you?’ she said to me.

I was shivering. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve tried every time to reverse it. It never works.’

‘Then it’s over.’ Thalia stood, her arms tucked around herself. ‘Look, I’m really sorry about what I just did. We never meant to hurt you. We just wanted to bring it out of you.’

I bit back a hysterical laugh. ‘Thalia, you … had a knife. You said you were going to kill me.’

She shook her head tightly. ‘Because you kept lying to us. We just figured, if we threatened you, we’d bring it out of you … and you’d bring him back. We weren’t really going to kill you. I never meant it.’

But her words sounded hollow. I remembered the wild dark in her eyes as she crouched on me. I remembered the white-hot wire across my chest.

Thalia would do anything to protect her family.

She was facing me, but her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. She looked so strange and thin shorn of her hair. ‘So if you can’t bring Wolf back,’ she said haltingly, ‘then we’re quits. Please just … promise to stay away from us. I think it’s best. And we promise we’ll stay away from you. Okay?’

Okay?

Fenrin dragged himself up to standing, but he wouldn’t look at me. Thalia clutched his sopping sleeve, and she wouldn’t look at me. Summer’s eyes were on them and she wouldn’t. Look at me.

‘But …’ I said stupidly, and then stopped.

No, no, this was all wrong. This was my worst nightmare come true.

They were supposed to understand. They were the only ones in the world who could understand. In fact, they were supposed to
hug
me, reassure me, delight all over their faces, because they knew how to
harness it. They were supposed to know how to point it and urge it and calm it and direct it like a horse. They were supposed to think it was wonderful, what I could do, and embrace me as one of them.

I was one of them.

But the fear that had stopped me from being truthful, on top of the doubt that I was even causing anything at all, was this: that they’d look at me and see the same thing my parents had.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I know I … look, I should have told you from the beginning, but I was too scared, okay? All I’ve ever wanted was to find someone like me. I just wanted to know what I am. And I finally found you, and I … I thought you could help me.’

‘We can’t help you. No one can help you.’ Fenrin put his arm round Thalia as he spoke.

‘But … you can.
You
can.’

Thalia’s voice rose up and down, up and down the hysteria slide. ‘No, River, no. What you do … it’s evil. You said it yourself. It’s only bad things that happen around you. What if we fall out again? Will you kill us, too?’

Black despair crawled up my back and over my shoulders, settling on me solid and heavy, a cement cloak. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please, please don’t be afraid of me.’

But they were. Oh, they were.

Summer unfolded herself. She looked like the ghost of a drowned rat. She paused, as if to say something. Above the noise of the sea, I heard Fenrin call to her, Thalia pressed to his side. He held out his hand.

For a moment, Summer stood still. Her gaze roved over my face.

Then she moved forward and slipped her hand in his.

They took the path that led them up over the dunes, and then eventually to the back of the grove. They were going home. They did not want me to come with them. They didn’t want me at all.

I watched the rolling dunes swallow their shapes. They would go back to that house, dressed up with its objects that made its owners feel like they had power. Pretty, vacuous objects to display their pretty, vacuous lives. They would touch the seashells, the soft charm bags hanging from the lintels. The horseshoe over the front door for luck. They needed these things that helped them make sense of the world; otherwise it all just descended into confused, miserable chaos. I understood the comfort of that.

But I was not one of them.

That moment, when it came, was small. Just a quick, fleeting twinge of realisation, there and gone. That was where the power was, wasn’t it? It lay in small moments, small realisations:

He doesn’t love me.

She is afraid.

He thinks I’m crazy.

I’m alone.

I’m going to die.

I’m not one of you.

I’m not one of
you.

I’m one of me.

Right then, I knew what was coming. I knew what I had done.

I sat on the beach and waited, watching the sea.

It took a few minutes for the shape to emerge.

It crawled out of the sea like a pale, jerking spider.

I thought I was full numb now, full dead inside, but not quite, not all the way, because I felt a surge of stuttering panic. Everything about this pale spider thing was wrong. It stopped, right on the tideline, its limbs braced into the sand. Then it collapsed into a heaving lump.

It reminded me of a documentary I saw once about the strange creatures that lived way down in the dark, in the blackest sea depths where the pressure would cave in your chest in seconds. They were translucent, with flat dish-plate eyes and needle teeth so long they could never close their mouths. If you brought them near the surface, they’d gasp and flop, blubbery lumps on their way to death.

The tide receded as the sea retreated from what it
had vomited up.

I saw the lump shift, ever so gently.

I heard a sound like a long, whistling groan.

I knew what it was, but I was afraid. I was afraid of what it wasn’t.

I stood up, unsteady, and forced my stiff body to walk. My chest gave a sharp ache, and then quieted, throbbing. I couldn’t think about the cut Thalia had given me right now – I’d clean myself up later. The lump grew in my vision as I approached, and it stopped being a shapeless spider mass. A back appeared, the long groove down the spine. Legs. Arms. It was curled on its side. I had to walk all the way round it to find the head. Hair matted with sand and dripping. Eyes closed. It coughed, a rattling sound.

I leaned forward, my head screaming
stop
. Pressed my hand into its chest to roll it onto its back. The skin was cold and wet, but there was life underneath there. I could feel it.

It rolled, unresisting, and opened its eyes. They were unfocused, but they found me eventually. They latched on to my face. Confused. Blank.

I swallowed, forcing my voice out. ‘Hey.’

The body moved. The limbs wavered.

‘Hey,’ I tried again. I had to be calm. I had to be unmoved. Maybe it could hear fear. ‘Say something.’

Its mouth opened, but nothing came out. Its eyes rolled away, focused on nothing. Its bare limbs twitched in the cold.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We have to go. You’re going to freeze to death. Come on. Get up. Please, you have to get up.’

It took some pushing with my hands, ‘please’ and ‘get up’ trickling out from my mouth like a litany, but it managed to roll onto all fours. I crouched beside it, putting my shoulder under its arm, trying to lift it to standing. It dragged itself up. Its skin was cold marble against my side, and its arm weighed a ton, biting into my neck.

‘We have to go,’ I said, and pulled forward.

It took a long time to get up to the dunes. It fell twice. The second time its arm wrenched my neck, and I was terrified it had broken me and itself. But my neck stopped flaring, and it got up again. When we reached the dunes I climbed up slowly and it followed, head hanging down, wet gritty hair plastered over its skull. Unformed – that was the word it made me think. It looked down at its legs like it had never seen legs before. It must have been so cold, but I had nothing to give it. All I could do was get it home as quickly as I could.

When we got to the top, I put its arm over my shoulders and my neck creaked in protest. I ignored it.
A little pain was needed. A little sacrifice of mine.

It stumbled beside me. I tried to think of things to ask.

‘Are you okay?’

But it never replied.

‘Do you know where you are?’

It was silent. The only sounds it made were the grunts when it fell.

I didn’t know how long this took.

It wasn’t even that far away, but it felt like we stumble-walked together for hours and hours. The clear night helped, and the path was lit with cold, white light from the moon and the stars. It should have felt magical. But magic never felt magical, I’d come to learn. It was hard, and weary, and sometimes awful.

My clothes were still wet and my muscles ached, but at least they’d warmed up now that we’d been moving a while. We reached the Grace house. I considered going round to the back garden, but it was leaning against me so hard by this point I didn’t think we could get much further.

We made it underneath the little stone canopy that framed the front door. I pushed the body gently against the wall so it didn’t fall down. It stayed. Its head almost brushed the underside of a little charm bag hanging from a nail on the wall.

I knocked on the door.

I knocked and knocked and knocked.

The door opened. It was Fenrin.

The gust of warmth from inside the house was enough to set me shivering again. They were all dry and dressed in clean clothes. Thalia looked drawn and odd without her hair.

They stared at me. I stared back.

‘River, please don’t come back any more,’ Fenrin said to me. ‘Please, River. Please leave us alone, or we’ll call the police.’

He was trying to seem strong, but he was frightened.

If I hadn’t been so weary, I think that would have irritated the shit out of me.

‘I just have something for you, that’s all, and then I’ll go,’ I said through chattering teeth. I pulled on the arm of the body beside me, and it stumbled into the light spilling from the house.

Naked and trembling, it stood there.

I stepped back.

‘This is my apology, okay?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything I’ve done. So I made it right.’

I caught Summer’s eye. Her jaw had dropped open. Her eyes were so wide.

The light and warmth spilling out from the house was sapping the last of my fire. The front of me strained
towards it. The back of me still faced the dark. All I wanted to do was fall down and sleep.

‘You said I couldn’t do good things.’ I took in a deep breath. ‘But you were wrong. You were
wrong
.’

‘Wolf?’ said Fenrin. His voice had gone unnaturally high like a child’s, quavering and lost. ‘Wolf? Wolf?’

All he did was repeat his name.

Wolf did nothing except stand there.

I no longer had a part in this. It was up to them now. I forced myself to turn my back on them and walk up the lane. As I walked I could hear their fluttering, panicking voices like birds. The front door shut with a bang. He was inside. He was safe, with them.

I hugged my arms to me. I was so cold, and the walk back was going to take a while. At least I could get a shower at the end of it. It was this that made my legs move, over and over.

I thought of my small house and of how much more comforting it now felt to be going back to it. I wondered if my mother was worried that I hadn’t come home yet. I’d tell her everything was fine.

I’d tell her everything was better than it had ever been before.

I’d tell her that maybe Dad didn’t have to be gone forever, after all.