Julia Vanishes by Catherine Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

this. I cheer myself hoarse.

    This is what I remember: My parents were in love, and they were unhappy. My mother was a washerwoman who did a bit of palm reading too—a dangerous side job, in Agoston Horthy’s Frayne. She wouldn’t read my palm, though. “It’s mostly bunk,” she said lightly. “The lines on your hand might tell your path, but you can surely wander off it.” The brick courtyard behind our flat was always hung with other people’s laundry, and when we were very small, Dek and I used to play hide-and-seek among the great white sheets and fading underthings of Spira City’s residents. My father was a famous jockey before I was born, but I knew him only as an opium addict.
    My mother was pretty, with olive skin and thick hair, but I find it harder and harder to recall her face exactly, its proportions and expressions. I remember better her hands, both the feel of them and the look of them: small, brown, callused hands, deft and clever,
moving
hands. I remember her hands folding paper scraps into little animal shapes to delight us, working a hairbrush through my tangles, cutting bread, pouring milk, reaching to wipe a smudge from my face. I can see vividly, still, her fingers striking a match or pinning laundry to the line. The way she gestured when she and my father were arguing, her hands like twin knives slicing the air asunder. Afterward, the air was in shreds, but nothing had changed.
    If anyone asked, we said proudly, “Our mama is Ammi, the washerwoman.” We called her that—everyone called her that—but we all knew she was more than that. Sometimes she’d be gone for days, and when she came back her hands moved even faster than usual, her worried fingers never still. Cloaked figures turned up in the middle of the night to whisper and pass messages that she burned in the stove. By day, the denizens of the Twist tipped their hats to her, gave her a good price at the market, called out “Good day, Ammi!” from across the street. The big men of the neighborhood nodded to her when they saw her pass. The old crones who had seen everything and knew everyone had things to whisper in her ear. She was at the heart of it all, connected deeply to the very pulse of the Twist, the secret and the not so secret, but more than that, people respected her and they
liked
her. They gave my father more chances than he ever deserved, for her.
    My father’s name was Jerel. I remember him giggling in a corner of the room at nothing, and sleeping in the stairs, and promising my mother, promising us, promising the landlord, promising the cabbies in the street, that he was going to quit and get a decent job.
    “Don’t believe him,” Dek told me, so I didn’t.
    My mother believed him, though, for years. Or maybe she didn’t, maybe she was just pretending to believe him, but she stuck by him, anyway. I think he was a handsome man once, but there wasn’t much left of that by the end.
    Dek took care of me most of the time, though he was only three years older. We ran wild with the other children, little bands of troublemakers in the Twist, always getting dragged home by the ear or whipped by whoever we were irritating that day. I learned early on that there was a secret space I could retreat to, sort of out the back of me, a shadowy place like a pocket in the world I could pull myself into, and nobody would see me. When I told Dek what I could do, he told me not to let on. So I was careful, and guarded my special skill. My secret. I liked having a secret, and somehow it made sense that it was dangerous. Maybe it’s because my mother was a witch that I can do it, but I am no witch myself. I burn very well and am a fine swimmer. A pen in my hand is just a pen; it wields no magic.
    I was still very young when I understood about my mother. I knew what witches were, of course: wicked things wielding their pens to disrupt the natural order, masquerading as human, always plotting to rule over the rest of us, worshippers