Page 83 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“Yes,” said Joanna, from the shadows of the back seat. “Bees or honey. They’re the same.”

Esther fell silent, unnerved by this nonsensical solidarity.

She tuned into herself, feeling for bees or honey, but there was only the everyday tide of her pulse. “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “Nothing unexpected, anyway.”

For the first time she could see Nicholas’s total certainty begin to waver around the edges, and she felt a sudden childish choke of disappointment. Of course she wasn’t magic. It was ludicrous she had ever allowed herself to believe otherwise. She was an ordinary person with ordinary blood and ordinary skills, like reading blueprints or calibrating flowmeters.

He said, “Is there another song that you have a stronger connection to? One with less... yelling, perhaps, and more... sharing?”

Esther began to run through the jukebox in her mind, then hesitated. An idea had come to her, though she was embarrassed to say it aloud. “Do I have to know it by heart?” she said. “Could I read it, instead?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It’s religious.”

Nicholas sighed. “Do you have a connection to it?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“We may as well try.”

Esther swallowed and glanced at Joanna. “What happened to that book of prayers Dad used to pull out sometimes?” she said. “With the Mourner’s Kaddish? Do we still have it?”

Joanna’s face went taut with understanding, and she nodded before pushing open the back door and vanishing in a gust of cold air and bright sun. Esther settled back in the driver’s seat, hoping this would work and irritated to realize how badly she’d let herself want this. Even after all these years, even after Abe was gone and it was too late, she was still striving to find a place for herself in her family, grasping for anything that might finally tell her,Yes, you belong.

Joanna reappeared quickly with the old prayer book, its pages yellowed by age, its spine cracked. She’d already flipped to the right page and when she opened the driver’s door to hand it in, Esther grabbed her by the wrist.

“Will you sit up here with me?” she said. “Like you used to?”

Joanna glanced to Nicholas to see if he’d mind, but he was already out the door and clambering into the backseat, re-situating himself and his supplies. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “We can work around the odd angle.”

Joanna took his place beside Esther in the passenger seat, relaxing back almost automatically, one booted foot coming up to settle on the dash, and Esther smiled. This, too, was familiar.

“You’re supposed to say this standing up,” Esther said to Nicholas. “Is it okay if I kneel on the seat?”

“It doesn’t matter what you’resupposedto do. Do whatever feels right.”

Awkwardly, Esther raised herself to her knees, bending her head a bit against the roof. She had forgotten, until now, that she’d had a fleeting resurgence of that old desire for religion in the months following her father’s death, and had gone to several Portland churches and synagogues attempting to mourn. Her grief had felt so heavy and she had wanted to find somewhere to put it, a container big enough and strong enough and old enough to hold it.

She’d wanted toshareit.

These were the feelings she focused on as she squinted down at the page and began to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish; her deep grief for her father, and the endless, yawning chasm inside her that had always sought to be a part of something bigger. Of a family, of a tradition, of the whole unknowable world.

She thought of Abe as she’d known him in childhood, loving and good-humored and eccentric and impractical, a great dancer and a meticulous cook who’d made her a five-course meal every year on her birthday. She thought of how safe she’d felt when he hugged her, how she’d always been able to make him laugh until he cried. She imagined all the people who’d been reciting this same prayer for their lost fathers for thousands of years, in thousands of homes beneath thousands of skies, while ancestors from her other line drank wine together in church each Sunday, holding it on their tongue as blood. She felt Joanna reading over her shoulder to recite the Kaddish along with her, very quietly, this mystifying person who had never understood Esther’s ache for belonging, because Joanna had always loved Esther so completely that to her it must have felt like a completion. There were thousands of years of wine and blood shared between them, a lineage of ritual and belief and longing and connection, of magical thinking and of real magic.

And suddenly Esther began to feel it.

Crystals of old honey on her body’s tongue, long hardened, were loosening in the warmth of her spilling blood, turning from grain to syrup, a slow sweet hum of wings unfurling from deep within her and loopingoutward, solid and multitudinous, the comb in her chest and the workers in her veins and the hive all around her.

Nicholas said, “Esther?” just as Joanna said, “I hear it.”

Esther was trembling. This was what Joanna and Abe had been hearing all those years. This was what they’d devoted their lives to listening for—and meanwhile Esther had believed she was on the outside when really, she’d been inside all along. Shewasthe inside. The warm, humming center. It came from her.

“It’s working!” Nicholas said.

Esther laughed, exhilarated. “What, now you’re surprised?”

“It’s one thing to suspect,” he said. “Or even believe. It’s another to know. Quick, roll up your sleeve.”

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