things they do to us. There must be something to this mother-daughter thing. Some kind of binding spell.”
“They don’t deserve us,” I said, trying it out. It was something my mother liked to say about Cherry to her boyfriends, that Cherry didn’t deserve a good daughter. I never told her I saw it the other way around most the time—that Cherry didn’t deserve a bad daughter. “Good daughters like us.”
“But if Daisy up and left, I’d be the same as you. It would eat me alive.”
“Please talk to her,” I said.
She disappeared up the stairs to her mother’s room and was gone a long while. I fingered the stationery on Florin’s desk, Ain’t nothing finer than a call with a Diviner . . . the pens in a cup with satin roses taped to them, and tore each flower off in a fit of nerves. It panicked me to think that since my mother had left, she had already missed nine of my lives. We would never be the same as we were that day in front of the church in the photograph, even if she came back tonight, even if she appeared before me from thin air. She had already missed so much.
Daisy came down the staircase in white silk pajamas, her hair pulled up in a bun with chopsticks. She wore a clear plastic mask over her face. “My compression mask,” she said. “Don’t be alarmed.”
I pulled skin from my cuticles.
Daisy pressed her lips together. “You really want to go stare down ugliness?” she said to me. “You really can’t let well enough alone?”
“Nothing about this is well enough,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can,” she said finally. She gestured to the door. I realized Florin was looking at her mother with an expression I’d never seen. Then I realized what it was: hope. She wanted this as much as I did.
I WAITED ALL day at the red house for fear that if I left, Daisy would flat out say no and my plan would slip away. I took a few calls and when I wasn’t on the phone I sat next to Florin and we looked at Internet pictures of Reno, casinos and lights, strip malls and event centers. Desert plain everlasting, hilled mountains cactus-spotted with straggled trees.
She went to the weather page and both of our mouths fell open.
“You have any warm clothes?” she said, pointing at the snowflake on the screen. February, cold and possible snow showers. “Been in this hellhole so long I forgot it’s winter.”
“I’ve never seen snow in my life,” I said.
“They’re gonna do a documentary or something on you one day, cult girl. What next, you’ve never seen the ocean either?”
I looked down.
“Oh my god.”
WE WENT INTO the attic and filled a duffel bag with old clothes and sweaters of Daisy’s, a puffy winter coat. “She used to love skiing,” Florin explained, putting ear warmers over her dark hair. We dressed up in the clothes, bags and bags of beautiful wool sweaters, soft cashmeres. Long cardigans that dusted the ground.
“Look at these,” Florin said, holding up a strange pair of jeans with a high elastic panel at the top. I recognized them immediately from my magazines. She tossed them at me and I put them on. The band stretched over my stomach and cradled it. They were the best invention I’d ever encountered.
“Maternity wear,” I said. “The real thing.”
“You can have them. No one’s getting pregnant around here.”
It was dark out the windows by the time we went back to the entryway and sat at Florin’s desk. She messaged a boy she liked and a girl she liked and giggled softly to herself. I felt miles from her when she messaged her friends on the computer. Those were her real friends. I had just happened to her.
Daisy finally emerged from the stairs dressed completely in black leather. She stared at the door with determination. I thought of the time I saw a gymnast at the end of the vault runway on Cherry’s TV over the summer, her face steely with intent. That was Daisy now, her gaze narrowed, her step a force. We followed her out without a word, afraid to break the spell. We got in the car and she clicked her seat belt. She put on lipstick in the rearview mirror with a shaky hand. Then she blazed down Old Canal Road, her hands a strangle on the wheel. I sat in the