very small.
But it’s the letters that break my heart.
It’s obvious how painstaking she was and they still end up curved. Demeter, it reads above the girl in the dress, with one backward E and an M with a too-long downstroke. Did he have to tell her how to spell it?
Above the boy’s head she wrote Z and a wobbly but obvious heart. She must have asked him to write the date, because in the lower left corner there’s a sprawl of numbers that would make him about eight.
His voice cuts straight through me. “I told you not to come here.”
12
Zeus
Brigit’s eyes are wide and sad, tears glistening across the green but not falling. She doesn’t look particularly surprised to see me. Heartache is written all over her face instead. Heartache, when she’s the one who stomped on all of my ribs to expose the vulnerable organs. The drawing she holds is extraordinarily brittle by now, which is the only reason I don’t snatch it out of her hand and crumple it in my fist. It wouldn’t survive.
I would end it. Why do I care? It should be nothing to me. A useless artifact from a life that no longer exists.
A relic from another time.
“I couldn’t—” She turns slowly to face me, the journal tucked under her arm, and shifts it into her hands. The paper and the journal are the smallest ones, the easiest things to hide, and Brigit smooths the drawing carefully on the journal’s cover. “It can’t be a shopping list. You were too young to go grocery shopping, weren’t you?”
It’s the middle of the night. Sleep still clings to the edges of my brain but it’s getting torn apart like the rest of me. No one was ever supposed to see these things. I thought I punished the urge out of her. And to add stinging insult to injury, it’s too late. Brigit’s side of the bed was cold when I woke and found her missing. She’s been here long enough to ransack the vault that holds all these insidious, aching things. These things I try never to think about. I write them down, I put them away, and fuck. Fuck.
I can’t have this conversation. I won’t have it. I can already feel my face slipping into the expression I have spent years of my life honing to a fine precision. Mild interest. I could kiss you or kill you. That’s what it means.
“Get out of my office.”
Brigit straightens her back. “No.”
“Fine, sweetheart. We can do it this way.” I take a step toward her but she jumps back, shifting the note into both hands. It’s just a note. I try to tell myself that I don’t give a shit about it, about Demeter, about anyone. My fists open and close at my sides and it’s not entirely in my control. I don’t know what’s in my control anymore, now that she’s done this.
“It’s not a shopping list,” she repeats.
“It’s not a fucking shopping list.” Anger, familiar and friendly, bubbles to a boil. Yes. Good. That will make it easier to keep breathing, though I don’t necessarily want to. “What could it be, then? A puzzle for my little bird to figure out.”
It’s so fucking hot in here. My heart and lungs are going to be burned to a crisp.
“Why were you keeping track of the food like this? In such small amounts?”
No—no. Cronos, rifling through cupboards, through the antique refrigerator that was always on the verge of burning his farmhouse down. He had an excellent memory but not a perfect one. That’s why I could get away with doing what I did. That’s why I could create plausible deniability. That’s not what I called it then. Cronos, with his fingers in Demeter’s hair. He made her keep it long and at some point she stopped wishing she could cut it.
“It’s not relevant.” Take another step forward. I can’t take the step. “This is nothing to you. It’s not for you. It was never meant to be read by anyone.”
“Then why did you write it down?” Brigit’s voice is an inch from trembling. “I think this… this list… is important. It’s everything. God, Zeus. I think this is the reason you haven’t taken your people back.”
I laugh at her, putting all the cruelty of a lifetime behind it. “Because I kept lists as a child?”
“Because you loved her.” Christ, it’s like she has her hands in my chest cavity and she’s squeezing the life out of me.