Page 61 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

The first words he’d spoken to Isabel had been in Spanish, and she’d corrected his pronunciation even as she’d taken a golden needle from a chain around her neck, pricked her finger, and pressed the bloody tip to a wall that suddenly became a door. His standard line, when Esther asked him what Isabel had been like, was always: “She never missed a beat.”

Abe claimed to remember neither the name nor the location of the family’s store, though Esther did not believe him in the slightest. Her first week in Mexico City she landed a job doing under-the-table electricalwork for an expat interior designer and bought a by-the-month smartphone, and every afternoon after work let the maps app lead her from bookstore to bookstore in a city crammed full of them. In and out of the dusty, cluttered stores on Donceles; in and out of the hip, upscale ones in La Condesa and outside Coyoacán; she even looked in the chains, in the Gandhis and Sanborns.

At first each bookstore felt magical. Not the kind of magic Esther had grown up with but the kind she’d read about in novels, the kind that was all possibility, the chance that with one right turn in the forest or one fateful conversation with an old woman a person’s life might change forever. She would enter a store and take in the march of spines lined up on the shelves, the dust motes glittering in the sun, the mouthwatering smell of paper and cardboard and glue and words, and think,this is it.Every time.

It never was.

To each clerk and bookstore employee she repeated the same phrase, the first words her father had ever spoken to her mother, the phrase that had granted him entry into the bookstore’s secret room: “Sé verlas al revés.” A palindrome.I know how to see them backward.But all Esther ever received as a response were cocked heads, puzzled smiles. “I haven’t heard of that one,” they’d say. “Is it poetry? An art book?”

Esther was not a creature easily cast down. She had learned this about herself early on, when she’d become aware that much of life was either an opportunity to be discouraged or to press on, and she’d always chosen to press on. That fall she visited over two hundred bookstores and found not a single sign of either magic or evidence that her mother had ever been involved in them.

She’d Skyped with her father at the end of October, she locked in the bathroom away from her roommates, Abe backlit by the overhead lights of the local library. The row of computers behind him was all occupied by teenagers playing a jerky first-person shooter game, and every so often she could hear one of their triumphant cries through Abe’s headphones.

“Can’t you give me anything else to go on?” she had begged. “A neighborhood, a landmark, their last name, anything.”

This time he hadn’t claimed not to remember. Instead, he’d pressed his fingers into the back of his neck like he did when he had a headache and said, “Honey, please. It’s better to drop it.”

“What happens if I leave next week, stay away for a year, and then come back?” she said.

She’d been gone five years by that point and already Abe looked older, his face ossifying in folds at the stress points. “That’s a risk I’m gonna beg you not to take.”

She smacked her head back against the bathroom wall in frustration. “It would be a lot easier to follow these rules if I understood them.”

“You do understand them. You just don’t like them.”

“Why once a year? Why November? Why—”

“Askingwhyisn’t going to change anything. I could explain it all to you, every specific little detail of the wording of the codex, but I know you, Esther—it’d only make you think you could outsmart it, find a loophole. But if there was one, don’t you think I would’ve figured it out years ago? Don’t you think I want you to be able to stay in one place, to have a normal, steady life—to come home?”

Abe was like Joanna, his emotions always writ large across his face and waiting to come out his eyes, which were tearing up now, their rims reddening. It made him look even older.

Esther suddenly realized she would never see her father in person again.

The thought cracked her open so completely that she had to hang up before she wept in front of him. She closed her laptop and sat there in the corner of the tiny bathroom, the tile cool against her bare feet, and cried until one of her roommates banged on the door.

Then she did something she tried never to do. She gave up. She wasn’t going to press on. She could feel it in her entire body, the absolute discouragement: leaden limbs, chest of stone, throat of petrified wood. A few days later she was on a plane. It was a midnight flight and she lookeddown at that ocean of lights and remembered descending a year before, when the city had seemed incandescent with possibility. Leaving, the plane rose, and the lights were obscured by clouds.

Now Esther stared at the tiny dot of the research station as it vanished from sight, and her body again registered the same heavy, unfamiliar feeling she had felt on the floor of the bathroom in Mexico City. She did not want to use the word “despair.”

Pearl was safe, which was what mattered. Esther, too, for the time being. She had delayed disaster once more. She just didn’t know if she would have the energy to ever delay it again.

“I made it,” she said aloud, trying to convince herself it was true. Her voice was lost in the roar of the plane.

19

The house felt echoey the day after Cecily had been there, as if the floorboards and rafters were clinging to the sounds of voices. The weather had left off its flirtation with winter and was dallying once again with fall, warm enough that Joanna let the stove’s simmering coals fade to soft white ash for the first time in days. She checked Cecily’s mirror, but nothing had come through and the glass was solid beneath her fingers. The streaks of her mother’s blood were still stark and un-smudgeable.

When she went out on the porch to drink her coffee and deliver more canned tuna, the cat was curled up in the comforter she had left him. He startled awake at her arrival, then yawned, his mouth pink and cavernously complicated.

“Good morning!” she said, thrilled to see him in the blanket, and put the tuna down. He yawned again and then stirred himself to investigate his breakfast, and she slid down against the side of the house to sit with him as he ate. When he was finished, he began to busily clean himself. His actions were comforting in their pure explicability.

Joanna had always known that there was quite a lot she didn’t understand: about the world, about the books, about her parents and their history. But when the physical and emotional boundaries of one’s life were small, when one had walked every inch of one’s allotted space many times over, it was easy to forget ignorance and feel a sort of mastery, instead. This house, that path, those books, that mountain; Joanna was used to being the expert and used to the safety that came with expertise.

But the events of the previous day had revealed—or recalled—exactly how inexpert Joanna really was. All along, in her own house, there hadbeen a magicked mirror crouched dormant and waiting. All along, Cecily’s secrets had gone far beyond her desire to drop the wards, though it wasn’t her desire that had ever been a secret, but her reasons. All along, gears had been turning, and Joanna hadn’t even known there was a machine.

Worst of all, perhaps, was the realization that she was not even an expert in herself.

She kept returning to that moment in her mother’s living room, trapped behind the spell and believing the wards would come down, that moment of sudden, ecstatic relief. She hadn’t even known she’d had those feelings in her and suddenly there they were, like someone had shouted their names. For the first time, she’d fully understood that if the boundaries of the wards were dropped, the boundaries of her life would drop along with them.

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