I thought I ought to feel like crying, then, but my eyes weren’t even a little wet. Or I should be angry, or something, but I was just nothing. I was so full of nothing that it was something.
“Go and relax on the sofa. I’ll be in the workshop, and I’ll take you home when I’m done.”
I didn’t answer, because nothing had no voice. I just did what she said and retreated to the living room, reaching for the image of Luke holding me, and finding nothing.
I watched Cops reruns until the shadows shifted and lengthened over the edge of the white wicker couch. The eight-hundredth cop was slamming the eight-hundredth criminal over the back of their car when my phone rang. I looked at the number and picked it up. “Hi.”
“Capital D!” James’ voice exclaimed, distantly.
I couldn’t work up the same enthusiasm. “Sorry I didn’t call you today. I’m at—”
“Granna’s. Your mom told me. She sounds pissier than an incontinent water buffalo. Can I come over and hang out?”
I considered. I didn’t know what I wanted, but being alone wasn’t it. “That would be great.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” James said, and I heard a car door shut outside the window. “Because I’m already here and it would suck to drive back home now.”
The phone went dead in my hand, and then I heard the screen door slam. James found me in the living room, and I stood up to move a stack of holistic healing books from the other end of the sofa.
He set a large, fast-food cup on the end table. “I know Granna doesn’t make it sweet enough, so I brought you some of the real stuff from Sticky Pig.” He eyed my arm, which was clean but obviously chewed on. “Are you okay?”
He looked so normal and safe, standing there with his summer-brown arms and his Sarcasm: Just Another Service I Offer T-shirt. He looked like every summer I’d ever known and reminded me of everything I couldn’t seem to have right now. I fought valiantly with a strange rush of emotions for about one-third of a second, and then I burst into tears.
“Hey, hey!” James sat down with me on the couch and let me cry onto his sarcasm T-shirt. He didn’t ask any questions or try to get me to talk, because that’s how awesome a friend he is. Realizing that just made me cry more. And then I thought of how pathetic this whole crying jag was, which made me cry even more.
James bundled me closer as I started to shiver, his arms wrapped tightly around me like a living sweater. My teeth chattered. I finally stuttered, “I think I’m in shock.”
He reached up and wiped tears from my cheeks with the side of his writing-scrawled hand. “Does this have anything to do with the chomp marks on your arm? If you had them before, I don’t remember them. And I’ve got, like, a crazy eye for detail.”
I laughed pitifully. “If I’d had a video camera when I got them, I’d be rich. It was this giant cat-thing.” I swallowed a new batch of stupid tears and shuddered again, involuntarily. “When will the shivering stop?”
“When you calm your ass down.” He stood up and tugged on my good arm. “C’mon. You need fries, obviously.”
I let him haul me up, feeling better already. “What I need is a supernatural stun gun.”
“Maybe they’ll have one of those, too. I didn’t look closely at the daily specials.”
A thought occurred to me. “I have to tell Granna I’m going. She’s doing some sort of voodoo in her workshop.”
We headed into the hot day, following the rock step-stone path Granna had made to her workshop. Herbs and gangly flowers intruded into our way, along with their insect retinues, and I laughed when James swung wildly at a bee that came too close.
“Squealing like a little girl,” I said.
“Shut up, you!”
Granna’s voice came from inside the open door of her shop. “Is that you, James?”
James followed me into the dim blue of the workshop. “Uh-yup.” Though the workshop was lit by three exposed lightbulbs, and light fell in through the open door, it was no match for the blazing sunlight outside. I blinked until my eyes got used to the change.
“What brings you here?” Granna looked up from her main work table. She’d pushed her paint cans, brushes, and varnish to one side to make room for her latest project; presumably, the faerie equivalent of a bug bomb. Or maybe just the equivalent of insect repellent. Whatever it was smelled sharp and unpleasant, like too much air freshener sprayed in a small room.
“A little bird told me Dee was hungry.” James poked around Granna’s smaller work tables, looking at the wood plaques painted with complex patterns and prodding at a large rock tumbler. “I rode to the rescue. I know where I can find her some good saturated fats.”
Granna laughed. She liked James; but then again, everybody did. “She could use a bit of looking after right now.” Then she paused. I think she was waiting to see how much I’d told James before going on.
James picked up a stone with a hole in it and looked at Granna through the hole. “We wouldn’t want anything unnatural to carry her away, hmm?”
Granna, satisfied, went back to mercilessly mashing an innocent plant into a green paste. “No, we wouldn’t. Have you got anything iron on you?”
“Nope.”
Granna offered him the iron band from her wrist; it was smooth and dull, with knobs on the two ends that almost met. “This is the last bit I have. Take it.”
“I think you need it more than I do.”
She shook her head and gestured to the pile of paste. “This stuff will work a good sight better than iron when it’s done. If you’re going to be going out and about with her, you’ll need it.”
James accepted it, reluctantly, and spread the two ends of the band to fit around his wrist. “Thanks.”
Granna gestured to me with a green-muck covered pestle. “Use your head, and remember what I told you. I’ll see you later this evening. I’ll bring this over. Don’t tell your mother I’m coming or she’ll feel compelled to make a truffle cake or slaughter a pig.”
I laughed. It was too true not to.
James, at my elbow, tugged me toward the door.
“Oh.” Granna frowned at me. “And watch what you say around Delia.”
How interesting
ten
It was always noisy at the Sticky Pig, the only real restaurant in town. It was still too hot to eat outside, though, so we joined the ranks of loud, hungry people waiting to get a table. Smelling the smoky scent of barbecue and standing behind the “Please wait to be seated” sign with the smiling pig on it, I had a momentary sense of déjà vu, or missing time or something. Something about coming here so many times over so many years made me forget how old I really was now, and what I’d been doing before I walked in. James brought me back to the present by elbowing me.