Page 78 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Us,Nicholas had said. Joanna stared at her sister.

“Nicholas has this theory,” Esther said, flicking her fingers as if to wave it away.

“A theory we’ll test soon enough,” said Nicholas. “You’re going to break Collins’s NDA.”

“Tell Jo about the NDAs,” said Esther, as if she wanted to change the subject as soon as possible.

“What is he saying?” Joanna said to Esther, then answered her own question. “He’s saying you can write magic.”

“Maybe,” said Esther.

But Joanna knew instantly it was true. She knew it like she knew the moon would rise, night after night, whether or not anyone could see it. Joanna might be able to hear books, but Esther was the truly magical one; she always had been.

How wrong Joanna had always been, about everything.

24

“Here,” said Joanna, putting a folded blanket in Esther’s arms. She added a pillow. “Let me know if you need more.”

“Thank you,” Esther said, feeling uncomfortable and oddly formal. She and her sister were standing in the living room, where Nicholas was passed out on the couch and Collins was crammed into the reclining leather armchair, eyes crossing as he tried and failed to stay awake. It had been past two in the morning when Nicholas had nodded off at the table and broken his coffee mug, and Esther had to admit she wasn’t far off from doing the same. She was at the point of tiredness where nothing seemed real, as if she’d already started dreaming. Or maybe it was being back in this house that felt so dizzying and unreal. Maybe it was looking at her little sister and seeing a grown woman.

Joanna had prepared dinner while her three guests had finally managed a full, beginning-to-end explanation of what had brought them there, and then she’d filled them in on her own account of the past few days. Esther had gone cold when she’d heard that Cecily had used mirror magic; it was too close to what she herself had just been through. She’d experienced a bright zing of hope that perhaps it had been her mother behind the glass the whole time, her mother who’d orchestrated everything to bring her child home to safety, but Joanna said she’d seen what Cecily had put through the mirror and it wasn’t a passport. It was Esther’s own postcard and a note as inexplicable as Joanna herself.

Esther remembered her little sister as a quiet, complicated, marvelously strange teenager, and though she’d grown into a quiet, complicated, marvelously strange young woman, it wasn’t quite a linear growth. As a kid she had been incapable of hiding her feelings or pretending to feeldifferently than she did, but what had been charming in her childhood, a vulnerable kind of warmth, was disconcerting in an adult. Disconcerting, but not off-putting. The opposite, in fact. Her sister’s face was mobile and legible in the way of someone unused to imagining themselves seen by others, and as a result it was oddly hard to look away. Joanna’s sweet awkwardness had turned to a compelling kind of charisma. She wasn’t certain Joanna herself was aware of the shift; though, Collins, at least, seemed to have noticed. Esther had caught him sneaking interested looks at Joanna since they’d arrived.

On her sister’s readable face, Esther read two things very clearly in relation to her sudden reappearance: Joanna was absolutely thrilled, and Joanna was absolutely furious.

Esther had not yet fully examined her own feelings, because they were so big she was worried they’d eat her if she let them open their mouths.

Now Joanna was politely leading her up the stairs of her own childhood home as if she were a guest in a B&B. Esther thought she might scream with the weirdness of it. It was, she reflected, a testament to how bizarre her life had recently become that she found her younger sister’s politeness even weirder than the fact that tomorrow morning she was supposedly going to bleed into a cauldron and embarrass herself by attempting to write a spell.

Dustballs had gathered in the corners of the steps, the runner was wearing thin, and the upstairs hallway felt so echoing and empty her throat began to close. She remembered running through this hallway, up and down those stairs, in and out of all the rooms, remembered shrieking and laughing, hiding in her parents’ closet to jump out and let them pretend terror; and later, she remembered tiptoeing past these closed doors to sneak out and meet—what was his name, the boy she’d met at the county fair? Harry something. She remembered banging on the bathroom door and shouting for Joanna to hurry up. She remembered living here.

“You can’t sleep in your old room,” Joanna said. “Not with the mirror in there.”

“It’s not dangerous, though, right? You said the wards wouldn’t let anyone put anything through, or see through to this side.”

“They won’t,” Joanna said. “But still. Too creepy. You can take my bed. I’m going to set up a futon in the dining room and sleep down there, to keep an eye on things.”

“An eye on Nicholas and Collins, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Could I... do you mind if I just look inside?”

“No, go ahead. The overhead light’s out,” she added, as Esther pushed her way through the door.

“Lucky you’ve got an electrician in the house,” Esther said, but Joanna had retreated back down the stairs. Esther turned on the standing lamp.

The room was full of old furniture but still recognizably hers. Her Kurt Cobain poster, her purple quilt, her glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars, her white bureau, her cold lava lamp in the corner. This was the room in which she and Joanna had constructed elaborate Playmobil villages, the room she’d snuck out of countless times, where her parents had come in to kiss her good night. All this, too, she remembered. She remembered Cecily rubbing her back and singing an off-key German lullaby as Esther fell asleep, remembered her dad lying on her bed with Esther on one side and Joanna on the other, his arm warm beneath her cheek, his voice pitching high and then low as he did all the voices for the story he was reading aloud.

She was glad not to be sleeping in here, after all. And when she crept in, she was relieved to find that Joanna’s room, at least, had changed somewhat—she’d gotten a new desk, a new bureau, and had repainted the walls from her high school lavender to a cool, adult gray. It looked nice. She sat on the bed for a while, preparing herself, then went back out into the hallway.

In front of her parents’ closed door she paused. This was where Cecily and Abe had slept all through her childhood and where Abe must have slept alone after Cecily had gone. Esther was bone-tired and shaken upand she didn’t have time to succumb to emotion, but she needed to look inside this room with an urge so strong it felt like instinct. She needed to see evidence both that Abe had been here and that he was now gone. Even years later it felt inconceivable.

She had been living in Oregon when he’d died and after she’d heard, had driven out to the gray, surging coastline to sit on the rocks and mourn him alone. Joanna’s voice was still ringing in her ears along with the waves:Come home, I need you, I can’t do this without you.It hadn’t seemed like the right time to explain that staying away was a last fulfillment of their father’s wishes. She didn’t want to warp Joanna’s memory of him. Let her sister have one family member who’d never disappointed her, she’d thought. At the time it had felt like a gift but now she wasn’t so sure.

The bedroom was almost exactly as she remembered it, though all traces of Cecily were gone. The light green walls were the same, and the green bedspread, and the nightstand piled high with books, and the dresser cluttered with tchotchkes, with the remnants of Abe’s life: a watch, a comb, a framed photograph of his daughters, and a photograph of Isabel holding an infant Esther. The only photo of Isabel Esther had ever seen.

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