“May I be excused?” For the past few weeks, Gemma had seen her father for dinner more than she had in the previous ten years. Usually, Gemma and Kristina ate takeout sushi in front of the TV in their pajamas, or Gemma was left to scour the refrigerator for whatever Bernice hadleft her while Kristina floated between various benefits and social obligations.
But after Gemma had come back from Florida, and Lyra, Caelum, and Mr. Harliss had been packed off (protected, Kristina said;given new life, her father said, although Gemma thought it was more like out of sight, out of mind), Gemma’s parents had determined they needed moretogether time.As if everything Gemma had learned, everything she’d seen, was just a nutritional deficit and could be resolved by more home-cooked meals.
It turned out Geoffrey Ives’s idea of family time was simply to bring his business home. In the past week alone they’d had dinner with a professor of robotics at MIT; a General Something-or-other who’d helped Ives land a lucrative consulting contract with a biotech firm that did work for the US government; and a state senator on recess whom Gemma had surprised later on that night in her kitchen, standing in his underwear in the blue light of the refrigerator, staggering drunk.
“You may not.” Geoff forked some more steak—home-cooked by Bernice, of course—and barely missed a beat. “But I don’t think air strikes are going to get the job done, not when these psychos are so scattered. Warfare keeps evolving, but have our methods evolved with it?”
Gemma felt a sudden hatred light like a flare inside her. She turned to Kristina, who had said next to nothing.Normally she didn’t pill-pop when they had company. But Gemma thought she was getting worse. Two, three, four glasses of wine, a Valium or two, and by bedtime she could hardly speak a word, and her smile was blissed out and dopey, like a baby’s, and made Gemma sick to look at.
“I’m thinking of going to visit Lyra this weekend,” Gemma said loudly, and there was a terrible, electric pause, and then Kristina let her wineglass drop, and suddenly Geoff was on his feet and cursing and Gemma felt sorry and triumphant all at once.
“I spilled,” Kristina kept saying dumbly. Red wine pooled over her plate and made a handprint pattern on her shirt. “I spilled.”
Geoff was shouting in staccato bursts. “For God’s sake, don’t just sit there. The carpet. Gemma, get your mother something to clean up with.”
In the kitchen, Gemma wound a long ribbon of paper towel around her hand like a bandage. She was shaky. It felt as if someone was doing a detail number on her insides, vacu-sucking and carving and hacking her raw. Muffled by the door, Kristina’s words took on the bleating, repetitive cadence of an injured sheep.
Before she could return to the dining room, the door opened and Geoff appeared. She was sure he was going to yell at her for mentioning Lyra’s name in the presence of a guest—not that anyone could guess who she was.
But he just took a step forward and held out a hand for the paper towels.
Feeling bolder, she took a deep breath and repeated herself. “I want to see Lyra this weekend,” she said. “You promised I could.” For a second, their hands touched, and she was briefly shocked. They almost never touched. She didn’t think her father had hugged her more than once or twice in her life. His fingers were cold.
“This weekend is your mother’s birthday,” Geoff said. “Did you forget about the party?”
“I’ll go Sunday,” she said, unwilling to give up. She half suspected that he was filling her time with celebrations and dinners and obligations precisely so shecouldn’tsee Lyra.
“Sunday we’re going to church,” he said, and his voice was edged with impatience. “I’ve told you we’re going to do things differently from now on, and damn it, I meant it.”
“I’ll go after church,” Gemma said. She should have dropped it. She knew her dad was getting angry; a small cosmos of broken blood vessels darkened in his cheeks. “I’ll get Pete to drive me. It’ll only be a few hours—”
“I said no.” He slammed a fist on the counter so hard that the plastic kitchen timer—untouched by anyone but Bernice—jumped. “Sunday is a day for family, and that’s final.”
Gemma turned away from him, balling her fists tight-tight, as if she could squeeze out all her anger. “Some family.”
“What did you say?” He got in front of her, blocking her way to the stairs, and for a moment she was gutted by a sudden fear. His eyes were hollowed out by shadow. He looked almost like a stranger. She could smell the whiskey he’d had at dinner, could smell the meat on his breath and the way he was sweating beneath his expensive cashmere sweater and she remembered, then, seeing her mother once sprawled at his feet after one of their arguments.
She tripped,he’d said.She tripped.Gemma had never known whether to believe it or not.
And in that second, weirdly, she felt time around her like a long tunnel, except the tunnel collapsed, and became not a road she was traveling but a single point, a compression of ideas and memories; and she saw her father with a dead baby, his first and only born, and knew that he’d done what he’d done not from grief but because it offended him, this natural order over which he had no control, the passing of things and the tragedy of a world that whip-snapped without asking his permission. He’d done it not for love but to restore order. Nothing would break unless he was the one to crush it. People didn’t even have the right to die, not in Geoffrey Ives’s house.
“Whether you like it or not, you follow my rules,”he said, and she wanted to cry: this was her father, who should have been both a boundary and a promise, like the sun at the edge of every picture, the thing that gave it light. “You’re still my daughter.”
“I know,” she said, and turned away. But in her head she saidno. In her head, and in the deepest part of who she was, she knew she wasn’t. She was born of the sister, the self, who had come before her. She was the daughter of a silent memory, except the memory wasn’t silent anymore. It had reached up out of the past and taken Gemma by the throat, and soon, she knew, it would begin to scream.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Lyra’s story.
THREE
GEMMA COULDN’T REMEMBER THE LAST time her father had been home for one of Kristina’s birthdays, or for one of hers. Last year, she had been patched through to the Philippines by his secretary so that he could wish her a happy fifteenth. She dimly recalled a party when she was five or six at a petting zoo, and crying when her mother wouldn’t take her closer than ten feet from the animals, fearing Gemma would catch something.
The guests began to arrive midafternoon. For a short time, she forgot about Haven and poor Jake Witz, who had died trying to expose the truth about Haven and Spruce Island; she forgot about the feeling that she was sleepwalking through someone else’s life. Her parents often hosted parties, mostly to support one of Kristina’s dozens of causes—the Mid-Atlantic Breast Cancer Prevention Society, the North Carolina Nature Refuge, theEquestrian Society, the Garden Club—or a political dinner for some local candidate Geoffrey was supporting. Those parties were stiff-backed and yawningly boring, and usually Gemma stayed out of the way or hung out in the kitchen stealing leftover nubs of filet mignon from the caterers and anxiously tracking how often Kristina came into the kitchen to refill her glass in private.
But this was a real, true, honest-to-God party.
The theme was Hawaiian, a nod to the bar that Kristina had been working in after college, where she and Geoffrey had met; Geoff liked to tell people that he’d never seen a girl make a grass skirt look so classy. Fifty or so of her parents’ friends had been invited, including April’s moms, who both showed up wearing coconut bras over their regular clothing. April’s mother Diana was a computer programmer and software engineer who designed malware detection systems for big companies; Gemma had hardly ever seen her in the daylight hours. April’s other mother, Angela Ruiz, was now a renowned prosecutor for the state. Watching them swish around with leis and fruity cocktails gave Gemma the same dizzying upside-down feeling of trying to do a cartwheel. Meanwhile, April stomped around, looking absolutely miserable, dressed pointedly in all black.
“What happened to aging gracefully?” she muttered, gnawing a pink cocktail spear she’d been using to stakeolives from the bar. But Gemma thought it was funny, all her parents’ friends in ugly Hawaiian shirts and plastic flower crowns, getting drunk on piña coladas and rum punch.
