Conjured

“Lake Horace,” a woman said behind her. Aunt Nicki, she reminded herself. “You spent summers there as a kid. Maybe you loved to canoe. Or swim. Or catch tadpoles. Whatever. You decide. That one, that’s Mario’s. Brilliant pizza.”

“I like pizza,” Eve said. She’d had it at the agency. Also, chicken lo mein.

Malcolm smiled at her warmly, approvingly, his eyes crinkling. She thought about smiling back, but then the moment passed. “You moved here …” Malcolm paused so she could fill in the blank.

“Three weeks ago,” Eve supplied. “My parents had a job transfer to South America, but they’re not ready to move me yet, so Aunt Nicki offered to take me in for the summer.”

“South America, how interesting,” Malcolm said. “Where in South America?”

Eve bit her lower lip. He’d drilled her on this. She should know it. Began with a P … Two syllables … “Pernu?”

“Peru,” Aunt Nicki said. “And don’t phrase it like a question.” To Malcolm, she said, “I’ll work with her. Stop mother-henning us.” Her face brightened with a smile, and she wrapped her arm around Eve’s shoulder. Eve stiffened. “Eve and I will be just fine. We’ll be buddies. Rent movies. Pop popcorn. Flirt with the pizza delivery boy.”

Eve held as still as stone. She reminded herself that she trusted them, sort of. Or at least she had no choice but to trust them, which was close enough.

Aunt Nicki released her.

Eve staggered back. “Do you mind if I just … I’d like to see my room.”

“I’ll show you—” Malcolm began.

She held her hands up, palms out to stop him. “You don’t have to. I remember.” She skirted around the coffee table and then backed out of the living room.

In the hall again, she felt as if the striped walls were leaning in toward her. She hurried to a plain white door and put her hand on the knob.

“Eve.” Malcolm.

She didn’t move.

“Eve, you’ll be safe here.”

She looked at him.

“I want you to feel safe here.” He did. She could see it in his eyes. And for an instant, she felt as if he’d wrapped her in a cocoon and nothing could hurt her. But then she remembered he wasn’t staying. She pushed the bedroom door open and entered.

Malcolm didn’t follow.

Inside the bedroom, half of her expected a rush of familiarity to fold around her like a homemade quilt. But of course, it didn’t. She studied the room: a bed with a checkered blanket and one flat pillow, a wooden dresser, a tiny desk with a chair. Eve closed the door and then sank down on the bed. Hugging her knees to her chest, she stared at the wall. The wallpaper had a swirl of leaves with birds perched on branches and caught mid-swoop in patches of blue. It was a nice bedroom, even if it didn’t feel like hers.

She wondered how she even knew this was a bedroom when she didn’t remember ever having one. She’d known what a car was too, though the seat belt had felt unfamiliar. She could recognize a few kinds of birds. For example, she knew that these painted ones on the walls were sparrows and the live one outside had been a wren. She didn’t know how she knew that. Perhaps Malcolm had told her in one of her lessons.

Or maybe it was a memory, forcing its way to the surface of her mind. But the sparrows she remembered flew. She pictured their bodies, black against a blindingly blue sky. She didn’t know where that sky was or when she had seen it. The birds had flown free.

Eve raised her hand toward the birds on the wall. “Fly,” she whispered.

The birds detached from the wall.

The air filled with rustling and crinkling as the paper birds fluttered their delicate wings. At first they trembled, but then they gained strength. Circling the room, they rose higher toward the ceiling. They spiraled up and around Eve’s head. She reached her arms up, and the birds brushed past her fingers. She felt their paper feathers, and she smiled.

Then she heard a rushing like a flood of water, and a familiar blackness filled her eyes.

* * *

I am alone in a carnival tent of tattered red. Music, tinny and warped, swirls around me. Fog teases at my feet as if it wishes to taste me. A trapeze swings empty above me, and then it’s not empty. A broken doll dangles from it.

I hear a man’s voice. Loud, as if to an audience, he says, “Choose a card.”

The trapeze vanishes, and I am standing in front of a table covered in red velvet. Cards lie in front of me: seven of spades, queen of hearts, jack of diamonds, a castle caught in thorny vines, a man hanging from a tree …

“Choose a card,” the Magician says.