Mistwalker

SIXTEEN Grey

What’s most curious is that I have no idea where to start. The room she left behind should be full of clues.

I sit on the foot of the bed and ponder it like a puzzle. The family pictures are a lie. The brother is dead, one silver light in a jar that counts toward my tally. The boat is her father’s. The oars belong to no vessel; the witch balls are empty magic.

Willa doesn’t believe in magic. She accepts that I exist and disdains it at the same time. Now she disdains me; in this very room she believed the worst of me. I want her to take my place; my hands tremble to cover hers, and I want to breathe this curse into her mouth, feel my life come back on the warmth of her lips.

But willingly! Knowingly! I’m a creature, but not a beast. She doesn’t know the difference. I admit, I’m wounded, the smallest part. I put a ripple in her still pond. She put a pea beneath my mattress.

Slipping back on my elbows, I melt into her bed. It smells of her, but only faintly. Not enough to start that pang in my chest again. I stare into the net of her canopy. Bleached shells and sand dollars dot the lines, oceanic constellations to replace the stars. Everything is the sea: her photos, her memories—but I don’t think it signifies the same things to us.

My father’s boat was a hateful thing to me. Cutting ice is nearly as exciting as eating oatmeal. Our path varied only by the season—to Maine in the winter, to Nova Scotia in the summer. The cold and the slick pervaded the ship. I was never warm or dry, except in my thoughts.

Boats took me nowhere, again and again. The water was lonely. Blank and bare. No better than sitting in an empty room, without even a book for company.

Throwing my arm over my eyes, I hold my breath. My sea is not Willa’s sea. When I open my eyes, I intend to see it her way. I’ll let myself burn and feel a taste of desperation. She did last night; she coughed and struggled, even in her senselessness.

Now, it’s true I can’t die. My body’s not a real thing, but it plays the part beautifully. My imaginary whiskers grow. My wisplike hair falls in my eyes. An empty expanse imitates hunger. This insubstantial brain roils and sometimes has nightmares. The heart beats. It’s disconnected to me, but I think I feel it all the same.

So I sit up and try to see Willa’s room anew. She’s here, in the whites and blues and greens. The water, the photos. But I come back to the witch balls. They quiver in the window, put in motion by an ever-shifting earth. The vibrations break the light that shines through the glass. Rays flicker along the walls, dazzling and dancing. When sunlight plays the waves, it looks much the same.

That’s the answer, I decide. It’s not that she bears some secret well of magic. I remain her irritating exception.

Satisfied I’ve unlocked her, I slide to my feet. No, there’s no secret magic in her at all. It’s only another taste of the ocean for her. She loves it so much, she brings it inside. She longs to live on it.

Perhaps that’s the whole of Willa. It could be that she’s not so complicated after all.

But as I descend to my kitchen and my newest music box, I’m bothered. It feels like someone is pressing a finger behind my ear. It doesn’t hurt. It just lingers, coming from nothing, going nowhere. It makes me uneasy.

The brass bones of my oldest music box gleam in the light. I wished for a song to make sense of her, and this is what came with my breakfast. A clockwork I built a century ago, my very first. The parts hum when I touch them. Somehow, despite the hundreds I have, no matter the tedious hours I’ve spent building them, this one excites me.

Carefully, I pick up the movement and turn its key. The tinny pluck of each spike sounds on my skin. My body sings along; it mourns with the ballad. The lyrics are ghosts on a thin sheet of paper. They can float away; I already know this one. It’s the song my father’s piper played. An old tune; ancient even when I was alive.

My love said to me, “My mother won’t mind

And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kine.”

Then she stepped away from me, and this she did say,

“It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.”

The finger presses a little harder behind my ear. It means something. I’ll learn something. Sinking to my seat, I twist the key and play the movement again.