A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,52

for a couple of hours so I can work on something. I want to be long gone before my dad comes to. It can’t be your convent. He’ll go there first.”

Isabel dashed through the courtyard door and over to the twisting staircase. Once there, she put her foot on the bottom step and turned toward me.

“I need you upstairs.”

Isabel lived in a room of glass. If anyone were to have seen it from outside, they would’ve thought they were looking at a perfectly perched rooftop solarium. Rows of thick plants obscured the windows that lined the room on all four sides. I could just make out their tall shadows and hear the squeaks of their stems being dragged across the glass by the wind.

In the center of the room was a nearly rusted four-poster bed covered with a multicolored quilt and rumpled pages from old issues of El Nuevo Día. Stacks of books leaned against every immovable object, from the glass walls to the twin green nightstands to an armoire in the corner made of a dark-lacquered wood. Next to the armoire was a pile of canvases, and propped up against that was a folded easel. The whole place smelled like grass, oil paint, and turpentine.

Isabel yanked open the armoire doors and started tossing out clothing.

“I don’t remember where I put . . . here! Hold this.” She handed me a duffel bag, and then spun around to dig under the bed. Within seconds, she’d pulled out what looked like a child’s plastic suitcase.

She then moved over to her desk to search through the piles of junk there, including several teacups and a mason jar full of used paintbrushes.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked.

“I’m looking for thread. Spools of thread. It doesn’t matter the color. Check the trunks behind you.”

I turned. Lined up against one of the glass walls were four large trunks, the kind that fill grandmothers’ attics and contain costumes, old photos, and mothballs. Isabel’s contained none of that. The first was stuffed with mismatched sheets and blankets; the second was empty except for a handful of buttons, a single flower, dried to black, and a pair of opera glasses. The third trunk—made of wood stained blood red—was filled almost to the top with pieces of paper of all different sizes and colors. Some were scraps: receipts, torn corners of yellow notebook paper, pieces of matchbooks. Others were bigger: sheets of tracing paper and rolls held tight with disintegrating rubber bands.

Some of the stray papers fluttered out and fell to the ground. One was a blue square, the size of a drink coaster.

My knees hurt, someone had written on it.

Another, written in crayon on a page torn from a coloring book: Make my baby sister stop crying.

Another, on onionskin, in peacock-blue ink so old the words had faded to illegibility. Something about a daughter, or maybe a disaster.

They were wishes. There must have been hundreds.

“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” I muttered. Turning, I saw Isabel holding the little suitcase, along with the duffel and a folded white blanket. She’d thrown the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.

“You and your friends weren’t the first to drop wishes over my wall,” she said. “They still come, though not as often as they used to.”

“Why do you keep them?”

“Because they make me feel like I’m a part of people’s lives. I found the thread.” She held up the suitcase. “Do you know of a place we can go?”

“Yeah,” I said, closing the lid of the trunk. “I do. How long has it been since you’ve been to the beach?”

Part Three

Leaves

Seventeen

MY MOM LEFT on my first day of second grade. She’d fixed me oatmeal that morning as usual, and, as usual she’d packed my lunch and put it in my backpack. After driving me the short distance to my school while we both listened to news radio, she’d waved to me as I got out of the car and was absorbed by the mass of shrieking kids.

I remember her shouting out the car window, “I’ll see you later, Luke!”

At 3:45 that afternoon, my grandma—my mother’s mother—drove up to the empty school in her ancient forest-green Buick. I’d been on the swings, waiting in the warm late-summer sun. The other kids were long gone. That wasn’t abnormal. When my mom or dad had to work late, they’d ask my grandma to pick me up. They always told her that school let out at 3 p.m.—which was fifteen