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It’s silly, perhaps, to be reminded in this moment of Elspeth, but that’s who Miranda thinks of when she looks up and sees the Lady who approaches, more Honeywell than any Honeywell Miranda has ever met. The presence, the puissance that Elspeth commands, just for a little while when Elspeth takes the stage, is a game. Elspeth plays at the thing. Here is the substance. Power is something granted willingly to Elspeth by her audience. Fe
Can the Lady see what Miranda is thinking? Her gaze takes in all. Fe
“I have no key,” Miranda says. “And he does not want to go with you.”
“He did once,” the Lady says. She wears armor, too, all made of ice. What a thing it would be, to dress this Lady. To serve her. She could go with Fe
Down inside the dress where the Lady ca
“I went with you willingly,” Fe
“But you would leave me now? Only speak it and I will let you go at once.”
Fe
“He can’t say it,” she says. “Because you won’t let him. So let me say it for him. He will stay here. Haven’t you kept him from his home for long enough?”
“His home is with me. Let him go,” the Lady says. “Or you will be sorry.” She reaches out a long hand and touches the chain around Miranda’s dress. It splinters beneath her featherlight touch. Miranda feels it give.
“Let him go and I will give you your heart’s desire,” the Lady says. She is so close that Miranda can feel the Lady’s breath frosting her cheek. And then Miranda isn’t holding Fe
Only it isn’t Elspeth at all, is it? It’s the Lady. Miranda almost lets go of Daniel. Fe
“Be careful, girl,” the Lady says. “He bites.”
Miranda is holding a fox. Scrabbling, snapping, carrion breath at her face. Miranda holds fast.
Then: Fe
“It’s okay,” Miranda says. “I’ve got you.”
But it isn’t Fe
“No,” Miranda says, suddenly boiling with rage. “No, you’re not here. And I can’t do anything about that. But I can do something about this.” And she holds on to her mother until her mother is Fe
“Very well then,” the Lady says. She smiles, the way you would smile at a speck of filth. “Keep him then. For a while. But know that he will never again know the joy that I taught him. With me he could not be but happy. I made him so. You will bring him grief and death. You have dragged him into a world where he knows nothing. Has nothing. He will look at you and think of what he lost.”
“We all lose,” says an acerbic voice. “We all love and we all lose and we go on loving just the same.”
“Elspeth?” Miranda says. But she thinks, it’s a trap. Just another trap. She squeezes Fe
Elspeth looks at Fe
Fe
“Such talk! You are going to be wasted on my Miranda, I’m afraid,” Elspeth says. “As for you, my lady, I think you’ll find you’ve been bested. Go and find another toy. We here are not your meat.”
The Lady curtseys. Looks one last time at Elspeth, Miranda. Fe
Then the Lady is gone and the snow thins and blows away to nothing at all.
Elspeth blows out a breath. “Well,” she says. “You’re a stubborn girl, a good-hearted girl, Miranda, and brighter than your poor mother. But if I’d known what you were about, we would have had a word or two. Stage magic is well and good, but better to steer clear of the real kind.”
“Better for Miranda,” Fe
“And now I suppose we’ll have to figure out what to do with you,” Elspeth says. “You’ll be needing something more practical than that coat.”
“Come on,” Miranda says. She is still holding on to Fe
So she says, “Let’s go in.”
I didn’t tell anyone how dire shit had become.
Yeah, maybe my old man could slip a few bucks in an envelope, mail it to my Brooklyn apartment (where it might get carried off by a pack of gangster rats), but he had his own worries. He was saving up for my little sis’s summer camp. And our dog, Peanut—probably the most flea-bitten, bucktoothed crossbreed you could ever imagine—had just required an emergency dental extraction. I know, right? The dog with the busted grill has dental needs. Okay. But according to my sis, the procedure cost over three hundred bones, and they had to put my old man on some kind of payment plan.
It’s fine.
I’d just go hungry this holiday season.
Nothing to see here.
“Mijo,” he told me over the phone on my first full day of cat sitting. “Everything is good up at your college?”
I stuck Mike’s acoustic guitar back on its stand. “It’s all good, Pop.”
“That’s good,” he said.
This word good, I thought. How many times did he and I throw that shit around these days? My old man because he didn’t trust his English, me because I didn’t want him to think I was showing off.
“Next year we’ll get you a ticket so you could fly home for Christmas,” he said. “And me, you, and Sofe will be together as a family. How we belong.”
“Sounds good, Pop.”
He didn’t know it yet, but by next Christmas I pla
It would be impossible to describe the weight of that guilt.
There was a long, awkward pause between me and my old man—we’d yet to master the art of talking on the phone—before he cleared his throat and told me: “Okay, mijo. You will be safe from that storm. The news says it’s very, very bad.”
“I will, Pop,” I said. “Tell Sofe to stay away from dudes.”