To Jonathan,
who has always believed
The guitar rested against her back the way her mother's hand had when she was small and afraid. She pulled her fingers into the sleeves of her canvas barn coat, searching for warmth there. Above her, the stars burned cold; everything else was black and silent. No moon out to keep her company, to turn the dust of the crossroads silver where it speckled her hiking boots.
She shivered. She didn't know how long to wait, or whether waiting would even work. Old stories meant nothing or everything, depending on whom you asked. Her mother would have said that a story could change anything—the world, time, the future—but stories hadn't changed her mother's cancer. Hadn't changed the way she'd been eaten up from the inside, only a husk left by the end.
A breeze sprang up, tugging at her hair, and she tucked her chin into her collar. Clouds stretched like fingers across the stars, shuttering their lights one by one. She held up one hand. Her fingers showed as just one more shade of dark. She reached into her pocket for her phone to check the time.
"No need." A voice like wisps of stream rolling across water stayed her.
She fumbled for the switch on her flashlight. The light sputtered, then dimmed; and she hit it hard. For a moment, it caught, cast a stark white light across the dirt road. A woman stood before her, tall and long-limbed, in a red dress that dripped off her hips and blew loose around her calves. Her straight black hair blew as well, a rippling veil around her face. Eyes so dark they disappeared into the night; bare feet; a pair of red high heels dangling from one hand. No sign the cold bothered her at all.
The flashlight died again. The woman sounded closer—soft rustles, the slip of feet in the dirt. Suddenly, running seemed a reasonable option.
"I thought you'd be a man." The words limped out, tiny and lifeless. She cleared her throat and tried again. "If, you know, you're who I'm looking for."
So close now that she could feel the woman's breath hot on the side of her face. "Oh, I'm the one you're looking for. Question is, should you be, Blue Riley?"
Blue stood up a little taller. Something glowed between them like candle flame, only cold. The woman fingered the top button of Blue's coat, one red nail tapping against it.
"I came at the right time," Blue said. "The right place, too."
"Child, you did everything right, and that's a start. Most people have no respect for the right way of doing things these days. You even came prepared." The woman's hand moved to the neck of the guitar perched above Blue's shoulder. She could feel the wood begin to heat under the stranger's touch. More than heat—it vibrated, as if it were ready to play on its own.
The woman sighed. "She's been in more hands than yours, Bluebird."
It wasn't the wind that brought tears to her eyes. "That's private, that name."
"There's nothing private when you wait for me at midnight at the crossroads, little girl. Your history isn't more than a speck of dust on this here road. Can you play?"
She clenched her numb fingers, brought them to her face to blow on them. "I just need a minute—" she began.
The woman took Blue's hands in her own. Heat ran like water over and under her skin. Blue pulled away and unslung the guitar from her back. One strum. She winced.
"I just gotta tune it. The cold … It'll just take a minute."
"Listen, baby, you think I got all the time in the world? Hand it here."
"I got it." She bit down on the tip of her tongue and listened as she plucked the first string. Cass would have been finished already. Cass made everything into a show when she tuned and played, while under the eyes of others Blue felt like random pieces: hands, fingers, ears. A turn of the peg, another strum. She shivered as the breeze picked up a little.
"I expected a man," she said again, trying to fill the empty space.
"I call bullshit on that one." The woman leaned in closer. She smelled like … like honey cooked hot on the stove and oranges about to turn to badness—and something more, the faintest whiff of something familiar and forgotten. "I think I'm exactly what you expected."
Her hair blew across Blue's face. Blue's eyelashes fluttered against it as she turned the third peg. She strummed again, straining to hear whether she'd got it right.
"It's the cold, you know?"
The woman laughed. "Yeah, I know."
"I'm ready." She looked down at her fingers on the neck of the guitar, trying to count a beat in her head, slow and steady. She only made it to two before she jumped in, anxious hands rushing the start like a spooked racehorse. Her voice stumbled over the first verse. She struggled to remember the way the words rippled and rolled, irresistible as a river, when Mama had sung the song. She sounded tinny by comparison.
The second verse was better. By the third, the memories had fled, leaving her with her own voice, her own fingers that no longer tripped over all the strings. Sweat was dripping down her back by the time she reached the final chorus, and her bangs were damp on her forehead.
The woman said nothing for a minute. A long slow minute, just the night and the wind and the shifting speckles of stars to mark the time.
"Used to be I met real musicians here." Used to be. She'd tried. She'd failed. Was it relief that rumbled through her? "Used to be they understood their instruments better than anything else in the whole world. They'd die for a few pieces of wood and string. They weren't the best, not when they met me, but they burned to be."
A faint glow, like what embers gave off, lit the air. "You, little girl, you love that guitar of yours, but only for what it's already done, not for what it could do. You're after something else tonight. Give it here."
The woman's words ran like cold water over Blue, goose bumps rising on Blue's skin. She shook her head, tightened her grip on the neck.
"No fear. I'm not taking or giving at the moment. Just hand it to me."
She did. Without it, she felt smaller, colder. She'd lost. Nothing would change, the same faces, the same mistakes waiting for her Monday morning. Teena, Beck, looking past her, through her, no one there to take their places. Weightless as a scrap of paper, a plastic bag, no meaning to her at all.
The woman tuned it again, faster than Blue had. She began to play, a pick pulled from who knew where. The song she launched into was one Blue'd heard a thousand times, a traditional tune that Mama and Tish had finished every concert with.
I'm a maid of constant sorrow
I seen trouble all my days …
The tears ran loose across her cheeks. It wasn't the song that moved her; it was her mother's voice. Everything: the tone, the places where she dragged out a word an extra beat, where the sad showed through like sunlight between the drapes. All coming from the woman in the red dress, nothing like Mama, her shag of brown hair, her speckled eyes and unpainted nails.
The woman had lied. She was giving and taking, right there, right then.
"You tricked me," Blue said, wiping her face, the wind stinging the damp skin.
"Don't you know what instruments do?" the woman asked. "They suck people in and continue to echo them out forever once they're gone. Didn't you ever wonder why some dusty old violin has so much power?"
Blue shook her head.
"I haven't done anything but let a bit of that echo out." The woman handed the guitar back. It was hot, almost too hot to hold. Blue ducked her head under the strap, returned the guitar to her back.
"Here's the thing, little girl. You know your chords, and your voice, it's …" A breath in, like a smoker taking one last drag. "That's not why you're here, though. You came looking for something else. Tell me."
She squared her shoulders. No wavering, not even to ask what the woman meant about her voice. The woman had already confirmed it, hadn't she? People came here when they burned to be the best. "I think you've been here before."
Another laugh, a little surprised. "Maybe. Maybe not. There's plenty of crossroads in this world. You think I remember every one?"
"I think you were here two years ago. You met Cass. My older sister." The salty taste of loss rested on Blue's tongue. "She was looking for something. I think she asked to trade with you."
The woman came closer, her scent changing to heat. Not smoke, not wood fire, just raw heat. "Might be. Lots of people do."
"She was seventeen then. I'm seventeen now. I haven't seen her for two years. She called four times, but nothing—" She stopped before the rest: But not when she should have. Three days ago.
"Kid, she could be doing anything. She's moved on. Probably a waitress somewhere. Not as though there's much to hold anyone here."
There's me, Blue thought. But she couldn't say that. She hadn't kept Cass, after all. "She isn't like that. She wanted something."
"Everyone wants something. That doesn't make her special." An owl called from far away, a distant Who cooks for you all. "She could have been picked up by someone. She could be dead."
"She's not." Because she had to believe that. Because being the girl who'd lost her mother was one thing, being the girl who'd lost her mother and sister something else entirely.
There was the promise, though, made seven years ago, their hands tightly clasped as they stared at each other in Halloween makeup, Cass with pointy ears and whiskers drawn in black pencil, tears erasing Blue's clown face.
"Don't go without me. Don't go at all. Please, Cassie. Not now."
Cass could have said anything. For a moment, Blue thought she would say, It's Halloween, ignore the rest—that it was also Mama's birthday, the first without her there.
Instead, "It's okay. We'll stay together. We need to fix your makeup first."
Incomplete relief. "Not just today." She couldn't ask too much, not from her quicksilver sister. "Every year, for Mama's birthday. Always. Even when we're old." She gripped Cass's hands more tightly.
A crack, tears pooling, unshed, in Cass's eyes. "Okay. I promise."
Last year on Halloween, a phone call, one she missed, and a voice mail left behind. Cass, saying nothing much. Happy Halloween, happy birthday, Mama, remember, I promised. This year? Silence.
She couldn't be dead. She just needed finding. "She came here, looking for something." It had been in the note she left. I walked out as far as the crossroads of Wendell and Burnt Hill roads last night, and I realized I needed to keep going, a lot farther, to get what I want.
"What if she did? What's it to me?"
Blue closed her eyes. She thought about being little in Mama's lap: Cass on one knee, her on the other. She thought about playing guitar with Cass—Cass using the one she'd bought herself, Blue on Mama's—and how they sang together, and it was like being inside and outside herself at the same time, like being the world. She thought about missing people until all you had was loneliness inside, and about the things you might try to fill that loneliness with.
"I want to find her and make her safe. My soul for hers. That's my trade." Said aloud, it sounded silly—the sort of thing a little kid might dream up. Yet here she was, saying it. And if she could find a woman in a red dress waiting at the crossroads at midnight, then surely Cass could have, too. They had been raised on the same stories after all, and if anyone burned to be the best, it was Cass.
A soft chuckle. "You think it's that easy? You think I'm swapping baseball cards here? That's not how things work."
"But a brave heart makes the difference." Mama's words, not hers. She raised her chin to look the woman in the eye.
The ember glow brightened. "A brave heart … You're living in the wrong time, little girl. Those are mighty big words for this day and age."
"No. It's always true. Like …" She scrambled for comparison. "Like water's always H2O."
Laughing, again, as if she'd made the funniest joke ever. "Well, now. Some things may be constant, that's true. Perhaps the more important constant is that sometimes I get bored. Sometimes I enjoy a game. Do you enjoy games, Blue Riley?"
She trembled. "Sometimes. I like poker and cribbage." Cribbage, the game Mama had taught them in motel rooms using the board her grandfather had made. Burnt holes and blue and red pegs. Cass always handing over the worn cards to Blue to shuffle, because no matter how good she was with other things, Cass couldn't shuffle worth a damn.
"Well, there you go. Let's say you and me have a little game. You win, your sister comes home, safe and sound. I win, two souls for the price of one."
"What's the game?" Fear and hope wriggled within her until she felt as though her skin must ripple with them.
"Six months, Blue. I'll give you six months to find her."
"But I don't—"
"Uh-uh, listen all the way first. I'll give you … let's call it a homing device. Like a bird, you'll know your direction. It'll be up to you to find your way."
"Like a map?"
"No, like instinct. No way to know how far. You just have to go."
"That sounds easy."
"Does it? Perhaps it is. Perhaps I'm feeling kindly toward a brave heart. You find her and reassert the sacred vows of sisters, and you'll both keep your souls."
Cass, safe. Six months. A direction. A chance to keep her soul and reclaim Cassie's. It was better than she'd hoped. "I'll do it."
"Splendid. Six months, Blue Riley. Let's see what you have in you."
"How do I get the homing device thing?"
The woman took Blue's chin in her hand. She moved all the way in, her breasts bumping warm against Blue, her hair tangled between them. She tilted Blue's chin up a little, paused, looking into her eyes. "Every time, little girl. Every single time, they ask …"
She kissed her. It was like nothing she'd felt before, not the dry peck of her aunt, or the awkward thrill of fumbling lips. This kiss dove deep, like fire burning away everything, like fear and wildness and want. As if she could lose herself in it and never be found. And at the very end, a pull—something giving way. Breath, maybe. Maybe more.
"Do you feel it?" The woman released her chin. Blue nodded. Like September, when the sunlight began to shift and in the middle of wildflowers she could feel the winter coming. A certainty lodged inside her, down in her feet within the cradle of her boots. Her feet knew where to go.
"Tell me you feel it, Blue."
Blue looked at her. The woman's dark eyes glittered. "I feel—" Blue began.
Nothing came out. She tried again. Again, this time with force. Nothing, not even a whisper.
"You were right," the woman said. "Too easy. This way is more fun. For me, at least. You win the game, you get your sister and your voice back."
She turned, walked a few steps away, and the dark swallowed her whole. Blue stood alone, the crossroad dust swirling around her.
