Chapter 22: She’s Watching Over Me

Lexie was out of the house by nine, which on a Saturday had never happened in her life.

Her dad was at the stove in his robe, making eggs nobody had asked for yet. He looked up when she came down the stairs with her boots already on.

“Where are you going this early?”

“Out.”

“Out,” he repeated, and pointed the spatula at her. “Out where?”

“Just out. I’ll be back for dinner.”

He looked at her a second longer, at the boots and the hoodie and the notebook-shaped lump in her pocket. Then he shrugged and went back to the eggs.

“Wear a real coat,” he said. “It’s supposed to snow.”

She didn’t. Her mom’s door was still shut at the top of the stairs. Lexie went out the front and closed it quietly behind her.

The bakery by the train station was the only one there was, so it had to be the right one. It was small and steamed up on the inside, with a bell over the door and a glass case full of things Lexie couldn’t name. The lemon cookies were on the bottom shelf, pale yellow with a crust of sugar on top, in a stack of white paper boxes tied with string.

“Just the one box?” the woman at the counter asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who are they for?” She was already tying the string. “Someone special?”

Lexie opened her mouth to say nobody.

“My grandparents,” she said.

It came out sounding strange, like a word she was trying for the first time. The woman smiled and slid the box across the counter, and Lexie paid with crumpled bills and left before she could be asked anything else.

The bus out to the old side of town took forty minutes. Lexie sat in the back with the box on her knees and both bandaged hands flat on top of it, so it wouldn’t slide.

She checked the faces on the bus out of habit. A man with a newspaper. Two kids in matching hats. An old woman asleep against the window. None of them were smiling too wide. None of them looked at her twice.

Outside, the city thinned into older houses with sagging porches and chain-link fences. Snow started, small and dry, blowing sideways across the windshield.

Twice she reached up for the cord to get off early. Twice she put her hand back on the box.

When the driver called out her stop, she almost didn’t move. Then she stood up, held the box against her chest, and climbed down onto a street she had not seen since she was nine.

The house was the same one. Lexie had thought it might not be.

It was narrow and white, with a porch that leaned a little to the left and a storm door with a dent in the bottom corner. Snow was collecting on the railing. She stood at the bottom of the steps with the cookie box against her chest long enough that her ears started to hurt.

Then she went up and knocked.

It took a while. She heard slow footsteps, and a lock, and another lock. The door opened on a tall old man in a brown cardigan, with glasses pushed up on his forehead and a newspaper folded under one arm.

He looked at her. He didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“You’re Lucia’s,” he said.

“Yeah. I’m…”

“Alexandra.”

Nobody really called her that. Mainly lawyers, substitute teachers, the dentist. He said it like it was his to say.

“Lexie,” she said. “Mostly.”

“Hm,” he said.

“Alexander, it’s snowing.” A woman’s voice came from somewhere behind him, sharp and small. “Let her in before she freezes on the step.”

He stepped back. Lexie went in.

The living room smelled like radiator dust. It was exactly the way she remembered, the plaid couch, the lamp with the yellowed shade, a clock on the mantel that ticked too loud. A tiny old woman in a gray sweater was standing in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a towel. She looked at Lexie, and then at the box.

“You didn’t have to bring anything,” she said.

“They’re lemon,” Lexie said. “From the place by the train station.”

Something happened to the woman’s face. It went away again before Lexie could tell what it was.

“Well,” her grandmother said. “Sit down.”

Lexie sat on the edge of the plaid couch with her boots flat on the rug. Her grandfather sat in the armchair across from her and set the newspaper on his knee and didn’t open it.

Her grandmother didn’t sit. She put the cookies on the side table, untouched, and went down the hall. Lexie heard a closet door, and a chair being dragged, and something being lifted down from a high shelf.

She came back with a shoebox.

It was an old one, the cardboard soft at the corners, taped shut all the way around with layers of packing tape. Across the lid, in black marker, in a fast slanted hand with the L looping back on itself:

Her grandmother held it out with both hands.

“She said you’d come for this,” she said. “Someday.”

Lexie took it. It was heavier than it looked.

“She brought it in the summer,” her grandmother went on. “Asked us to keep it, and not to open it, and to give it to you when you came. Not your mother. You.” She folded the towel over her arm. “We never opened it.”

“Not once,” her grandfather said, from the armchair.

They both looked at her, waiting. Lexie understood, slowly, that they were proud of it. That they had kept this box on a high shelf for months without touching it, because Cece had asked them to, and nobody else had ever come to see.

“Thank you,” she said.

Her grandfather nodded once, stiffly, and looked at the newspaper.

“We were starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said.

Lexie sat on the couch with the box on her knees, the same way she had held the cookies on the bus, and didn’t know what to say to that.

Her grandmother sat down eventually, at the far end of the couch, with her towel still folded over her arm.

For a while nobody said anything. The clock on the mantel ticked. Her grandfather looked at the cookie box on the side table, then at the newspaper, then at the cookie box again.

“Well, open them,” her grandmother said. “Since she brought them.”

He untied the string and took one. He ate it in two bites and took another one without saying anything about it.

“I don’t want any,” her grandmother said, when he held the box out.

“Cece said you’d say that,” Lexie said.

Her grandmother looked at her sharply. Then she took one. Then, a few minutes later, while her grandfather was asking about school and Lexie was saying it was fine, she took another one, and later a third, and didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.

“She used to bring those every time,” her grandfather said. He brushed sugar off his cardigan. “Every single visit. Ever since she moved out.”

“She was always bringing something,” her grandmother said. “Even when she was little. Flowers from the neighbor’s yard. A frog, once.”

“The frog was Lucia.”

“The frog was Cecilia. Lucia cried about the frog.” Her grandmother turned to Lexie. “Your aunt was trouble. You know she broke her arm when she was nine? Told us she fell off her bike.”

Lexie went still.

“It was that treehouse,” her grandfather said. “Behind the Hendersons’. We told her a hundred times not to climb it.”

“We didn’t find out for two years,” her grandmother said. “Your mother finally told us. She’d promised Cecilia she wouldn’t, and she held out two whole years, and then one night at dinner it just came out of her, and she cried because she’d broken the promise.” She shook her head, almost smiling. “Thornes and their promises.”

Lexie looked down at the shoebox on her knees.

She knew this story. She knew it from the kitchen, from her mom in the gray hoodie, laughing a little wet, thanking her for an afternoon Lexie had spent at the studio. I told you about the treehouse. Her mom had told it to something wearing Lexie’s face. She had never once told it to Lexie.

“Are you all right?” her grandmother said.

“Yeah.” Lexie made her hands stay still on the box. “I just didn’t know that one.”

Her grandparents glanced at each other.

“Your mother doesn’t talk about her much,” her grandfather said. It wasn’t a question.

“She doesn’t talk about a lot of stuff.” Lexie hesitated. “She doesn’t really talk about you either. She says you guys never call.”

The clock ticked.

“We never call,” her grandfather repeated.

“She doesn’t call,” her grandmother said, at the same moment.

They looked at each other again. Nobody said anything else about it. Her grandmother picked a crumb of sugar off the arm of the couch and looked at it for a long time.

It was getting dark by four, the snow coming down thicker past the front window. Her grandfather stood up when she did and walked her to the door, slowly, one hand on the wall.

He held the door for her. The cold came in around them.

“Come back,” he said. He said it to the porch light, not to her. “Bring your mother.”

“Okay.”

He nodded, the same stiff nod. Then, just as she was turning to go down the steps:

“Lexie.”

She looked back.

“Tell your mother the cookies were good,” he said, and shut the door before she could say anything.

Eliana spent that Saturday at the studio by herself.

She hadn’t meant to. She had told her mom she was studying, which was the kind of lie that was almost true if you didn’t think about it too much, and then she had taken the two buses out to the river anyway, because sitting at home waiting for Lexie to text was worse.

It was cold inside. The windows were gray with snow light. She sat on the arm of Tommy’s couch with the guitar across her knees and the pick in her fingers and played PUSH at the coffee can marked ???, the way they had the first week.

It moved an inch. She played it again, harder. It moved another inch and stopped.

Without Lexie’s voice on top of it, the song felt thin, like half of it was missing. She played it a third time anyway, and the can didn’t move at all, and her calluses stung. She put the guitar down.

Up on the shelf, the salamander had gone dark.

Not dim. Dark. Every crack along its back had gone out, and it was pressed flat against the far side of its jar, as small as it could make itself.

Then Eliana felt it.

It came up slowly through the floor, the low heavy pressure in her chest, the feeling of someone standing just behind her. At the edge of her eye, something gray slid along the brick by the door. She didn’t turn her head to look at it. She knew there would be nothing there.

Someone knocked on the door.

One knock. Not loud.

Eliana didn’t move. Her hand found the pick on the couch beside her and closed around it. It was warm.

Nothing else happened. No second knock. No handle turning. Just the gray door, and the snow light around its edges, and the pressure sitting in her chest like a held breath.

It went on for a long time. She counted without meaning to. Thirty. Sixty. A train went by past the rail yard, long and low, and the floor shook, and when it was gone the pressure was still there.

It was waiting.

“Birdie,” it said. “Don’t you miss me?”

It was his voice. Soft, a little hoarse, almost laughing, the way he talked when he was about to show her something.

Eliana put her free hand over her mouth.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t get up. She sat on the arm of the couch with the pick in her fist and her hand over her mouth and stared at the door until her eyes burned.

It didn’t say anything else.

After a while, she heard footsteps on the snow outside. Slow, unhurried, going away. The pressure went with them, a little at a time, the way it always did, until it was just a cold room again with a lot of dust in the air.

Up on the shelf, one crack along the salamander’s back flickered, and came back on.

Eliana didn’t open the door until it was fully dark.

The snow on the step was smooth except for one set of footprints. They came up from the street, stopped right in front of the door, and went back the way they’d come.

They didn’t go anywhere near the pipes.

She crouched down by the sixth one anyway, and reached behind it. The spare key was still on its hook, with a little cap of snow on top of it.

It had never even tried.

The door opened a little after six, and Eliana was on her feet with the pick up before she saw it was Lexie.

She was covered in snow, her hood soaked dark, a taped-up shoebox under one arm. She stopped just inside the door and looked at Eliana, at the pick, at her face.

“Birdie?” Lexie started.

“Don’t.” Eliana’s voice cracked. “It knows that one. Show me your hand.”

Lexie stared at her for a second. Then she put the shoebox down, pulled the glove off her left hand with her teeth, and peeled back the gauze.

Three rings and a bolt, pink and shiny, burned into her palm.

Eliana let the pick drop to her side.

“It knows Birdie?” Lexie said quietly.

“It came here.” Eliana sat down on the arm of the couch because her legs wanted her to. “It knocked. It talked to me. In his voice.”

Lexie looked back at the step behind her. “There’s footprints out there. One set. I thought they were yours.”

“They’re not.”

Lexie shut the door and locked it, and stood there with her back against it.

She didn’t say anything. She crossed the room, put the shoebox down on the workbench, and sat on the cushion beside Eliana’s knee, the way she had the night before. She smelled like snow and something lemony.

“Did you open it?” she said finally.

“No.”

“Good.”

They sat there a minute. Up on the shelf, the salamander had all its cracks lit again, faint and steady.

“How were they?” Eliana said.

Lexie thought about it. “Weird. Old. Nice, kind of.” She picked at the tape on her knuckles. “My grandpa calls me Alexandra.”

“Do you hate it?”

“Not sure yet.”

She got up and got Tommy’s box cutter from the workbench drawer, and sat back down with the shoebox in her lap, and started cutting through the tape. It took a long time. There were a lot of layers.

Inside was a notebook. A real one this time, hardcover, black, with the corners worn down to gray and the spine cracked from being opened flat. It was thicker than the pocket one, but nowhere near as thick as Tommy’s. The symbol was drawn small in the corner of the cover in silver pen.

Lexie opened it. The handwriting was Cece’s, the neat column kind, page after page of it.

Eliana leaned in. Then she reached for Tommy’s notebook on the floor and opened it to a page she had stared at since September. A setlist. Twelve song titles in his cramped hand, with no venue and no date, like a show that had never happened.

Pretty Pony was the fourth title down. Hungry Coal was near the bottom. Between them were titles that didn’t match any song she knew. Black Dog Blues. The Slender Man of Long Hands. Fear the Boggart.

“Lexie,” she said. “Find a list.”

Lexie turned pages until she found one. In Cece’s neat writing, down the left side of the page, was a column of dates and places. Down the right side was a column of names, years of them, in no order Eliana could see. Barghest. Kelpie. Boggart. Will-o’-the-wisp (swarm). The salamander was nearly at the bottom, with a date from four summers ago.

Eliana put the two notebooks side by side on the couch.

They matched, line for line.

“It’s not a setlist,” Eliana said. “It’s every one they fought.”

They went through it slowly, one line at a time, Tommy’s song titles on the left and Cece’s dates on the right. Some of the names Eliana didn’t recognize. Some of the places were in other states. The last few lines had no names at all in Cece’s column, just question marks.

Near the middle of the notebook, Lexie stopped on a short page with a heading in capitals.

Lexie skimmed it and turned the page. “Cool. So there’s more of us.”

“Were,” Eliana said, looking at the Aokis.

Eliana shook her head. Lexie shrugged and kept turning.

The last entry was at the very back of the notebook, alone on the page. The handwriting was Cece’s, but it wasn’t neat anymore. It leaned and wobbled and pressed too hard, the way Tommy’s did. The way Eliana’s had, this week, in chemistry.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Outside, the snow kept coming down over the one set of footprints on the step, until there was nothing left of them at all.