Ironside (5 page)

“That’s bullshit.”

“You heard what Lutie just said.”

“It’s still bullshit.” Corny kicked at a stray pillow with his toe. “What about seriously stretching the truth?”

“That’s not lying,” Kaye said, taking a deep swig out of the mug.

“Say that the tea is cold. Just try. Maybe you can lie if you push yourself.”

“The tea is…,” Kaye said, and stopped. Her mouth was still open, but it was as though her tongue were frozen.

“What’s stopping you?” Corny asked.

“I don’t know. I feel panicked and my mind starts racing, looking for a safe way to say it. I feel like I’m suffocating. My jaw just locks. I can’t make any sound come out.”

“God, I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t lie.”

Kaye flopped back down. “It’s not so bad. You mostly can make people believe things without actually lying.”

“Like how you made your grandmother believe I was with you last night?”

He noticed that she wore a small smile as she took the next sip from the cup.

“Well, what if you said you were going to
do
something and didn’t? Wouldn’t that be lying?”

“I don’t know,” Kaye said. “Isn’t that like saying something that you think is true, but turns out not to be? Like something you read in a book, but the book turns out to be wrong.”

“Isn’t that still lying?”

“If it is, I guess I’m in good shape. I sure have been wrong about things.”

“Come on, let’s go to the city. You’ll feel better when you get out of town. I know I always do.”

Kaye smiled, then sat bolt upright. “Where’s Armageddon?”

Corny glanced at the cage, but Kaye was already shuffling toward it on her knees.

“He’s there. Oh, jeez. They’re both there.” She sighed deeply, her whole body relaxing. “I thought he might still be under the hill.”

“You brought your rat?” Corny asked, incredulous.

“Can we just not talk any more about last night?” Kaye asked, pulling on a pair of faded green camouflage pants.

“Yeah, sure,” Corny said, and yawned. “Want to stop for breakfast on the way? I’m feeling like pancakes.”

With a queasy look, Kaye began to gather up her things.

On the drive up, Kaye put her head down on the ripped plastic seat, gazing out the window at the sky, trying not to think. The strips of sound-insulating forest cushioning the highway gave way to industrial plants spouting fire and billowing white smoke that blew up until it blended into clouds.

When they got to the part of Brooklyn her mother claimed was still Williamsburg, but was probably actually Bedford-Stuyvesant, the traffic grew less congested. The roads were riddled with potholes, the asphalt cracked and pitted. The streets were deserted and the sidewalks heaped with banks of dirty snow. Only a few cars were parked on the sides of the road, and as soon as Corny pulled up behind one, Kaye opened the door and stepped out. It was strangely lonely.

“You okay?” Corny asked.

Kaye shook her head, leaning over the gutter in case she vomited. Lutie-loo’s tiny fingers dug into Kaye’s neck as the little faery tried to keep perched on Kaye’s shoulder. “I don’t know which part of feeling like shit is from riding for two hours in an iron box and which part is from a wicked hangover,” she said, between deep breaths.

Bring me a faery that can tell an untruth.

Corny shrugged. “No more driving for the whole visit. All you have to do now is put up with riding on the subway.”

Kaye groaned, but she was too tired to smack him on the arm. Even the streets stank of iron. Beams of it propped up every building. Iron formed the skeletons of the cars that congested the roads, clogging them like slow-moving blood through the arteries of a heart. Gusts of iron seared her lungs. She concentrated on her own glamour, making it heavier and her senses duller. That managed to push away the worst of the iron sickness.

You’re the only thing I want.

“Can you walk?” Corny asked.

“What? Oh, yeah.” Kaye sighed, shoving her hands into the pockets of her purple plaid overcoat. “Sure.” Everything felt as if it were happening in slow motion. It took effort to concentrate on anything but the memories of Roiben and the taste of iron in her mouth. She pressed her nails into the flesh of her palm.

It is a weakness. My affection for you.

Corny touched her shoulder. “So, which building?”

Kaye checked the number she’d written on the back of her hand and pointed to an apartment complex. Her mother’s apartment cost twice as much as one they’d lived in three months ago in Philadelphia. Ellen’s promise to Kaye that she’d commute to New York so they could stay in New Jersey had lasted until the first huge fight between Ellen and
her
mother. Typical. But this time Kaye hadn’t moved with her.

They walked up the steps to the apartment entrance and leaned on the button. A buzzer droned and Kaye pushed inside, Corny right behind her.

The door to Kaye’s mother’s apartment was covered in the same dirty maple veneer as the others on the eighteenth floor. A gold plastic nine stuck to the wood just beneath the peephole. When Kaye knocked, the number swung on its single nail.

Ellen opened the door. Her hair was freshly hennaed the same rootless red as her thin eyebrows, and her face looked freshly scrubbed. She was wearing a black spaghetti-strapped tank and dark jeans.

“Baby!” Ellen hugged Kaye hard, swaying back and forth, like the number on the door. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too,” Kaye said, leaning against her mother’s shoulder heavily. It felt weirdly, guiltily good. She imagined what Ellen would do if she knew that Kaye wasn’t human. Scream, of course. It was hard to think beyond the screaming.

After a moment, Ellen looked over Kaye’s shoulder. “And Cornelius. Thanks for driving her up. Come on in. Want a beer?”

“No thanks, Ms. Fierch,” Corny said. He carried his gym sack and Kaye’s garbage bag of overnight things into the room.

The apartment itself was white-walled and small. A queen-size bed filled up most of the room, pushed up against a window and covered in clothing. A man whom Kaye didn’t know sat on a stool and strummed a bass.

“This is Trent,” Ellen said.

The man stood up and opened his guitar case, settling his instrument delicately inside. He looked like most of the guys Ellen liked: long hair and the stubbly beginnings of a beard, but unlike most, his were streaked with gray. “I got to get going. See you down at the club.” He glanced at Corny and Kaye. “Nice to meet you.”

Kaye’s mother pulled herself onto the counter of the kitchenette, picking up her cigarette from where it scorched a plate. The strap of her tank slid off one shoulder. Kaye stared at Ellen, finding herself looking for some resemblance to the human changeling she’d seen in the thrall of the Seelie Court—the girl whose life Kaye had stolen. But all Kaye saw in her mother’s face was a resemblance to her own familiar human glamour.

With a quick wave, Trent and his bass guitar swept out into the hall. Lutie took that moment to dislodge herself from Kaye’s neck and fly to the top of the refrigerator. Kaye saw her settle behind an empty vase in what appeared to be a bowl of take-out menus.

“You know what you need?” Ellen asked Corny, picking up the half-empty beer beside her and taking a pull, washing down a mouthful of smoke.

He shrugged, grinning. “Direction in life? Self-esteem? A pony?”

“A haircut. You want me to do it for you? I used to cut Kaye’s hair when she was a little girl.” She hopped down and headed for the tiny bathroom. “I think I have some scissors around here somewhere.”

“Don’t let her bully you into it.” Kaye raised her voice so she was sure her mother could hear her. “Mom, stop bullying Corny into things.”

“Do I look bad?” Corny asked Kaye. “What I’m wearing—do I look bad?” There was something in the way he hesitated as he asked that gave the question weight.

Kaye gave him a sideways look and a grin. “You look like you.”

“What does that mean?”

Kaye gestured to the camo pants she’d pulled off the floor that morning and the T-shirt she’d slept in. Her boots were still unlaced. “Look at what I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re saying I look terrible, aren’t you?”

Kaye tilted her head and studied him. “No one in their right mind would
choose
a mullet as a hairdo unless they were trying to give the world the finger.”

Corny’s hand traveled self-consciously to his head. He smirked.

“And you have a collection of wide-wing-collared polyester button-downs in colors like orange and brown.”

“My mom buys them at flea markets.”

Picking up her mother’s makeup case off of a mound of clothes by the bed, Kaye pulled out a stick of glittery black liner. “And you wouldn’t look like you without them.”

“Okay, okay. I get it—what if I didn’t want to look like me anymore?”

Kaye paused for a moment, looking up from smudging her eyelid. She heard a longing in his voice that troubled her. She wondered what he would do with a power like hers, wondered if he wondered about it.

Ellen came out of the bathroom with a comb, scissors, a small set of clippers, and a water-stained paper box. “How about some hair dye? I found a box that Robert was going to use before he decided to bleach. Black. Would look cute on you.”

“Who’s Robert?” Kaye asked.

Corny glanced at his reflection in the greasy door of the microwave. He turned his face to the side. “I guess I couldn’t look any worse.”

Ellen blew out a thin stream of blue smoke, tapped off the ash, and set her cigarette firmly on her lip. “Okay, sit on the chair.”

Corny sat down awkwardly. Kaye pulled herself up onto the counter and finished off her mother’s beer. Ellen handed her the cord for the clippers.

“Plug that in, sweetheart.” Draping a bleach-stained towel around Corny’s shoulders, Ellen began to buzz off the back of his hair. “Better already.”

“Hey, Mom,” Kaye said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Must be bad,” Ellen said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you don’t usually call me ‘Mom.’” She abandoned the clippers, took a deep drag on her cigarette, and started chopping at the top of Corny’s hair with manicuring scissors. “Go ahead. You can ask me anything, kiddo.”

The smoke burned Kaye’s eyes. “Have you ever thought about me not being your daughter? Like if I was switched at birth.” As the words came out of her mouth, her hand came up involuntarily, fingers curving as if she could snatch the words out of the air.

“Wow. Weird question.”

Kaye said nothing. She just waited. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to say anything else.

“It’s funny. There was this one time.” Running her fingers through Corny’s hair, Ellen found stray pieces and cut them. “God, you were not even two, toddling around. I’d stacked up a bunch of books on a chair so you could sit at the table at your grandmother’s house. It wasn’t real safe, but I wasn’t real smart, either. Anyway, I go out to the kitchen, and when I come back, you’re on the floor and the pile of books is all over the place. I mean, clearly you fell and clearly I am a terrible mother. But you’re not crying. Instead, you have one of the books open and you’re reading out of it—clear as a bell. And I thought: My child is a genius. And then I thought: This is not my child.”

“Huh,” Kaye said.

“And you were so honest—nothing like me as a kid. You’d bend the truth, sure, but you’d never outright lie.”

My life is a lie.
It was such a relief not to say it. It was a relief to just let the moments slide by until the subject got changed and the awful galloping of her heart slowed again.

“So did you ever imagine what things would be like if you were secretly adopted?” Ellen asked.

Kaye froze.

Ellen mixed the black dye in a chipped cereal bowl with a round metal spoon.

“When I was a kid, I used to pretend that I was a gypsy baby and the gypsies would come back for me and I’d have my own caravan and I’d tell people their fortunes.”

“If you weren’t my mother, who would give my friends fabulous makeovers?” As she said the words, Kaye knew she was a coward. No, not a coward. She was greedy. She was that cuckoo chick unwilling to give up the comforts of a stolen nest.

It was amazing how deceptive she could be without lying outright.

Corny reached up to touch the sudden spiky shortness of his hair. “I used to pretend that I was from another dimension. You know, like the mirror-universe Spock with the goatee. I figured, in that other dimension my mom was really the monarch of a vast empire or a wizard in exile or something. The downside was that she probably had a goatee.”

Kaye snickered. The cigarette smoke combined with the chemical stink of the hair dye turned her laughter to choking.

Ellen spooned a glop of black goop onto Corny’s head and smeared it with a comb. Flecks stained the back of her hand, and her bracelets jangled together.