She moved to the couch and glared at him from there. “You didn’t need to be so rude, you know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jericho mumbled.
“To Mabel! You could at least try to be polite.”
“I’m not interested in being polite. It’s false. Nietzsche says—”
“Leave Nietzsche out of this. He’s dead, and for all I know he died of rudeness.” Evie fumed. “She’s very smart, you know. As smart as you are.”
Jericho deigned to look up from his book. “She’s under her parents’ thumbs. She thinks what they think. What she said tonight about society making monsters—that was her mother talking.”
“So you were listening!”
“She needs her own opinions. She needs to learn to think for herself, not just parrot what other people say.”
“You mean the way you hang on Uncle Will’s and Nietzsche’s every word?” Evie swiped the book away from him.
“I do not,” Jericho said, taking it back. “And why are we having a conversation about Mabel? Why is it so important to you?”
“Because…” Evie trailed off. She couldn’t very well say, Because Mabel’s goofy over you. Because for the past three years, I’ve gotten letters full of her longing. Because every time you walk into the room, she takes a breath and holds it. “Because she’s my friend. And nobody is rude to my friends. Got it?”
Jericho let out a sigh of irritation. “From now on I will be the picture of politeness to Mabel.”
“Thank you,” Evie said with a bow. Jericho ignored her.
LIFE AND DEATH
Memphis tore out the page from his notebook and crumpled it in disgust. He’d tried working on the poem again, the one about his mother and her coat of grief, but it wouldn’t come, and he wondered if he was doomed to be a failed writer as well as healer.
The wind whistled through the fall leaves. It had been April when his mother died, the trees budding into flowers like girls turning shyly into young ladies. Spring, when nothing should be dying. Memphis’s father had roused him from sleep. His eyes were shadowed. “It’s time, son,” he’d said, and he led the sleepy Memphis through the dark house and into his mother’s room, where a lone candle burned. His mother lay shivering under a thin blanket.
“Please, son. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to keep her here.”
His father, leading him to the bed. Memphis’s mother wasn’t much more than bones, her hair thinned to candy floss. Beneath the blanket, her body was still. She stared up at the ceiling, her eyes tracking something beyond Memphis’s vision. He was fourteen years old.
“Go on, now, son,” his father said, his voice breaking. “Please.”
Memphis was afraid. His mother seemed so close to death that he didn’t see how he could stop it. He’d wanted to heal her before, but she wouldn’t let him. “I won’t have my son responsible for that,” she’d said firmly. “What’s meant to be is meant to be, good or bad.” But Memphis didn’t want his mother to die. He put his hands on her. His mother’s eyes widened and she tried to shake her head, to duck his hands, but she was too weak.
“I’m going to help you, Mama.”
His mother parted her cracked lips to speak, but no sound came out. Memphis felt the healing grip take hold, and then he was under, pulled along by currents he couldn’t control and did not understand, the two of them carried out to a larger, unknown sea. In his healing trances, he always felt the presence of the spirits around him. It was a calm, protective presence, and he was never afraid. But it was different this time. The place he found himself was a dark graveyard, heavy with mist. The shades did not feel quite so benevolent as they pressed close to him. A skinny gray man in a tall hat sat upon a rock, his hands made into fists.
“What would you give me for her, healer?” the man asked, and it seemed to Memphis as if the wind itself had whispered the question. The man nodded to his fists. “In one hand is life; in the other, death. Choose. Choose and you might have her back.”
Memphis stepped forward, his finger inching closer. Right or left?
Suddenly he saw his mother, gaunt and weak, in the graveyard. “You can’t bring me back, Memphis. Don’t ever try to bring back what’s gone!”
The man grinned at her with teeth like tiny daggers. “The choice is his!”
His mother looked frightened, but she did not back down. “He’s just a boy.”
“The choice. Is. His.”
Memphis concentrated on the man’s fists once more. He tapped the right one. The man smiled and opened his palm, and a shiny black baby bird squeaked at him.
Memphis’s mother shook her head. “Oh, my son, my son. What have you done?”