SNEAK PEEK OF TRUST!
Cover of TRUST Between Lions Series Book One by Jodi Baker
When you're being chased down a magical staircase by mythological monsters,
your survival depends on knowing whom you can trust.
But the only person Anna ever trusted was her mother,
who lied about everything.
Enjoy this free sneak peek of first book in the series that
The New York Times called "The YA Series to follow"
& USAToday called "Must-Read YA".
My mother was telling the truth when she told me that the ordinary is much safer than the extraordinary.
“Inside this house, you are very important, Anna,” she had said, holding me close. “But when you are out there, don’t ever be extraordinary. Outside our house you must pretend to be middle of the pack.”
Middle of the pack was our mantra. It was the rule we lived by outside of the supposed safety of our brownstone. By the age of three, I had already learned not to talk enough to be remembered, but not to be so silent as to be noticed.
“Don’t trust strangers,” she told me.
Back then I had imagined they would try to lead me off the path like a wicked wolf.
“No,” she said sternly. “This isn’t a fairy tale, Anna. This isn’t a story. This is your life. I am the only one you can count on. Stay in the middle!”
“Inside this house, you are very important, Anna,” she had said, holding me close. “But when you are out there, don’t ever be extraordinary. Outside our house you must pretend to be middle of the pack.”
Middle of the pack was our mantra. It was the rule we lived by outside of the supposed safety of our brownstone. By the age of three, I had already learned not to talk enough to be remembered, but not to be so silent as to be noticed.
“Don’t trust strangers,” she told me.
Back then I had imagined they would try to lead me off the path like a wicked wolf.
“No,” she said sternly. “This isn’t a fairy tale, Anna. This isn’t a story. This is your life. I am the only one you can count on. Stay in the middle!”
Riding the subway, I sat in the middle of the train.
“Standing people don’t stare at sitting people unless they, or the people they are looking at, are crazy. Sitting people watch standing people, look out the window, or read, but they don’t stare at other sitting people.”
When I went out in the city, I always walked in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Busy New Yorkers weave through and past the middle too quickly to notice anything particular about you. Standing on the outside or the inside allows you to be seen,” my mother warned and I obeyed.
Back then I always obeyed.
Getting seen at school wasn’t an issue, since I never went. My mother taught me herself, at home. I was reading by the time I was two-and-a-half, but she didn’t have me at an advanced level as far as New York State was concerned. She sat with me as I filled out the tests, making sure I got just enough right and just enough wrong.
Instead of learning to draw circles and sing the alphabet song, I traced hieroglyphs and danced around the apartment acting out all of the parts of the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every day we’d sit on our comfy, tattered, red velvet couch and discuss something amazing like the disappearance of the Mayans or how many mitochondria could be in a tiny cell. We’d compare the ancient Roman and modern American systems of government against Hammurabi’s Eye-for-an-Eye code, take turns listing the next number in the Fibonacci Series, or giggle together at the idea of pigs with wings. The more I learned, the more my mother pushed me like an academic centurion, hurling a daily stream of never-ending, no-wrong-answers-allowed quiz questions at me on every conceivable subject, expecting me to answer not just in English, but Greek, Egyptian, and Latin as well.
I loved every second of it.
There was only one thing I ever thought was missing: a friend my own age. Before I was a teenager, I’d only actually talked to another kid once. Even though
I didn’t know his name, he was my first and only friend.
My mother would take me downtown with her twice a year to sell or barter for books. The bookshop wasn’t the kind of store you’d find at a mall; it was a labyrinth of bookshelves, full of what looked like priceless antiques, but whose titles were no longer legible, interspersed with huge glass cabinets showcasing first editions on well-lit pedestals. The floors and walls were covered in dust, but the treasures on the shelves were always pristine and the space in between the stacks was always empty.
Except one day, when tiptoeing through the maze of shelves, I came upon a boy a year or two older than me, sprawled out on the floor.
I panicked, the way you would if you came across a lion lounging in a store aisle.
My initial instinct was to back away quietly, but then our eyes met and I froze.
He smiled.
I didn’t.
His fingers were tangled up in a mess of colorful strings. A deeper look revealed that it was some kind of intricate circle of cords. Extending out from that inner sphere, like rays of the sun, were ornate, frayed strands that had been twisted into different sized and shaped knots.
“It’s a Kee-poo,” he said.
I wanted to laugh at the name, but the fact that he was acting as if I had asked, as if we were having a conversation - which, I had never really had with anyone besides my mother - was too gigantic. I took a few steps back.
“You don’t want to see?”
Disappointment was threaded through his words. The urge to please was apparently stronger than my need to flee because I moved towards him. He flashed a grin my way as a reward and then lifted the cords up to his face. The elaborate fringe framed his head like a mane. As the boy rose to stand beside me the sunlight hit, making the dust mites that floated between the multi-colored strings look like fairy dust.
“The knots talk,” he whispered to me, making the other-worldliness of the moment even more potent.
My eyes widened.
“Not out loud; the knots talk the way lines and swirls on paper talk.”
I knew, instantly, that he meant, like letters on a page.
“Most people can’t read them,” he said. “Most people can only read the alphabet, but I like to read other things too, like glyphs.”
To this day, I have no idea how the words managed to exit my well-trained-in-the-art-of-not-talking-to-strangers-mouth, but somehow, I found myself telling him:
“I love glyphs.”
“Me too!”
I felt the invisible magic strands that stretched between us quadruple and then entwine, binding us together.
“You must read a lot,” he commented.
“How do you know that?”
The grin came again. “Because you smell like books.”
I stared at him.
“Want me to show you how to read the Kee-poo?”
Before I could answer, my mother’s hand closed around my arm. She pulled me backwards, my heels dragging as I watched the only friend I had ever made get smaller and further away.
When we got into the cab outside of the store, my mother didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until after we were uptown and safely locked behind the brownstone door that she grabbed and shook me. I was shocked. My mother had never spoken harshly to me until that moment, at least as far as I can remember. I’ll never forget how her eyes sparked like a blue-gold gas flame, or the way the normally tan skin on her face turned sickly pale.
She was afraid. I know that now.
“You cannot talk to strangers. Once you open your mouth, they will know how smart you are. If anyone finds out you’re smart, they’ll take you from me,” she told me hoarsely and I felt myself start to tremble.
I looked at my beautiful mother and saw the most extraordinary woman in the world, my heart, my home, and my safety blanket. She was everything I knew. My lower lip quivered and tears blurred her from my sight. When she hugged me, I breathed deeply, inhaling her lavender and laundry scent, but her comfort made me more hysterical.
I hadn’t known until that moment that I could lose her.
She smoothed my un-smooth-able hair and kissed my tears away.
“I know it’s hard. But we don’t want anyone asking questions. The only way to stay together is for them to think you are like everyone else. Just stick to the middle of the pack,” she preached and I swallowed that sermon into my heart and bones.
But later that night when my mother wasn’t looking, I looked up Kee-poo knots. I told myself that it wasn’t disobedience… it was just research.
I used to convince myself of a lot of things like that.
The search engine informed me that Kee-poo was actually Quipu, an ancient Incan Writing System. They had used cord color, length, knot type, knot location, and the way the cords were twisted to record their stories the way Egyptians used glyphs on papyrus.
I also found out that Spanish invaders did their best to destroy all of the Quipu they could find centuries ago. Scholars were still struggling to translate the few that remained.
I wanted more than anything to see the boy again, find out how he had learned a secret language no one else understood and get him to teach me to read his magic knots. But my mother never took me there again and I knew better than to ask. Back then, when I had been a little kid, I would have never dared to do anything that might cause me to lose us.
After her freak out, I thought I understood why we needed to stay in the middle. Middle people were invisible. We had made a pact to be invisible to everyone on the island of Manhattan except each other, so that neither of us got taken away.
It wasn’t until my mom gave me a book called Canines of the Wild, that I found out what a pack actually was: a group of dogs with strict rules that had to be followed by every member or they would be punished - without exception.
“Punished how?”
“They get bitten. Food is withheld. They could be banished from the pack. It depends what they did wrong,” my mother shrugged. “The Alpha decides.”
“Alpha, like the first letter in the Greek alphabet?”
“Exactly. Alpha is first so they get the best of everything, but they get those rights because they have the most responsibilities. They’re responsible for protecting the pack, finding food for everyone, finding safe places to sleep. The others follow her rules because it keeps them alive.”
“Do they all have Greek letter names?”
“Alpha does always have a Beta, or a second in command, to help them enforce their laws, but the rest are just referred to as the pack.”
“What if the Beta gets tired of second best?”
She frowned. “Betas are usually prized for their loyalty.”
“But what if?”
“Betas usually become Alphas when the Alpha has passed away. Most of them wait their turn, Anna.”
“But what if they don’t want to wait?” I persisted.
I remember how she sighed.
“If a Beta disagrees with the way the pack is being led, or feels that the Alpha is no longer able to do her job, then the Beta can challenge the pack leader to a fight.”
I was hooked. “Like a duel?”
“Yes. But, as I said, all dogs instinctively understand that the key to their survival is to follow the rules. Alphas do not tolerate disloyalty. One broken rule can put the other dogs into danger,” she reminded me. “That’s why a Beta who loses a duel or shows disloyalty would be banished.”
“Then what happens? The Beta finds a new pack?”
“Sometimes they make a new pack. Hopefully, they make a new pack. If they don’t… well, dogs are pack animals. They can’t make it on their own. Now, if you can manage to finish the book in the next hour and pick one canine species to report to me on, I’ll take you to the park.”
I’ve wondered many times what ‘Would Not Have Been’ if I hadn’t managed to read that chapter in that hour, if I’d taken longer to decide which species was interesting enough to study, or if I had spent five minutes looking out the window instead of reading.
I’ve also thought about what ‘Would Have Been’ if she had allowed my life in New York to be normal. If she had let me think I was a regular teenager, I might have had friends or even a boyfriend, like other people my age, who would have been texting me that it was insane to be excited about hanging out with your mom after you did homework on a freaking Saturday afternoon.
But I wasn’t normal and nothing about my life would ever be. It happened the way it happened because she was what she was, and back then, I was who I was: her faithful and obedient Beta-child.
“What species did you pick?” she asked me after I had run down the stairs forty-five minutes later.
“I decided that jackals are my favorite.”
“Jackals?” she looked shocked. “Why do you prefer them?”
“They’re wild,” I said first and she groaned. “I like wild things. ‘I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself…’”
“Anna!”
We had quote battles as practice. My mother would quote someone from something she read and I would have to find a quote that fit, as though we were having a conversation with other people’s words. I used any and every excuse to insert my favorite line: “I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself.” It was from a poem by D.H. Lawrence and my mother insisted that poems did not count as quotations. She felt I was missing the point of the lesson and the opportunity to expand myself whenever I referred to it.
“Coyotes are wild. Wolves are wild. Gods, why jackals?”
My mother rarely swore, but when she did, she always said Gods, never God. I asked her once, why the plural when everyone else said God. She said she didn’t want to leave anyone out.
“They’re scavengers,” I answered and my mother gave me a look. “I think that’s respectable. They take care of the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted. Also, they aren’t always in a big pack. They hunt in pairs. I like that.”
“That’s not completely true. They hunt alone when there are children to protect,” my mother corrected, playing with her necklace. It was the only jewelry she ever wore: a two-inch, strangely-shaped, Egyptian cross she called an ankh, silver on one side and gold on the other. It was always hidden beneath her shirts, unless she fiddled with it, which only happened when she got nervous. “I prefer grey wolves. They mate for life.”
I rolled my eyes. “So do foxes, coyotes, gibbon apes, termites, swans, and pigeons.”
“Rats with wings,” my mother shuddered and then focused on me, all business. “What else, Anna? How many animals can you name that mate for life? In alphabetical order, please.”
I remember rolling my eyes before closing them to organize the list in my head. She always made me give her more.
“Let’s switch to hunting habits,” she said when I finished.
“I told you, jackals are scavengers-”
“Enough with jackals!” she snapped and my head dropped like a puppy. Anxious to win back her approval, I thought back to yesterday’s lesson.
“I could tell you about my favorite feline…?”
She nodded stiffly and I pounced back into good daughter mode.
“Jaguars are the best hunters because they can kill anything with a swipe of a paw. But because they can’t run as fast as other cats, they usually wait for prey up in the trees and then drop down, fangs at the ready. They can open their jaws further than any other animal so they just bite through the prey’s skull.”
“Classifications please.”
“Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Carnivora, Family Felidae, Genus Panthera, Species Onca,” I listed them quickly. “Common name, jaguar.”
She gave me a slow, beautiful smile. “Excellent darling. Now get your coat and we’ll go out.”
My mom announced that she believed a hot dog suited the theme of the day’s canine lesson. That may not sound like much to you, but she normally wouldn’t let me touch any kind of meat. In New York City there was a food stand on every corner ready to torture my salivary glands. Every time I’d beg she’d tell me, “Only eat creatures with two legs or less.”
As we approached, there was a gaggle of teenagers clustered around the stand. I hung back, waiting for the kids to move on, the way someone who knew how to stay invisible would do. But in truth, I was desperately attempting to overhear their conversation and record in my memory the type of clothes they were wearing, so I could observe and classify them the way I would with any mammal we studied. I told myself it was all research so I could do a better job of staying in the middle…
Just another lie.
I was still watching them all swoop away when the vendor snatched the money out of my hand and asked me how I wanted it. I was confused until he explained further.
“Mustard, kid. Do you want mustard, onions…?”
I ordered mustard, most of which was on my shirt by the time I turned around to offer a bite to my mother, who was talking to a stranger.
In that moment, my life changed.
His name was Patrick and he knew my mother was extraordinary. It might have been her eyes, so unexpectedly blue-as pen-ink, or her perfect olive skin and gloriously long, wavy hair that never ever frizzed, even in the rain. We didn’t look related at all. My eyes were a dull green and as big as a cow’s, my permanently tanned skin was darker than hers, and I had an odd smattering of freckles across my nose. Older Latino women occasionally asked me for directions in Spanish, thinking I must be Puerto Rican, and my mother had to wave them away since neither of us spoke it. Once, an African-American girl on the subway offered to relax my kinky hair for cheap, thinking I was half-black. We ignored her and slid into the next car to avoid the attention, even though I secretly would have loved to be able to make my hair look like my mother’s. Mine goes every which way but the way I wish.
Inside, I think we were similar. Both of us were fiercely intelligent and we were equally insatiable readers. Along with science, philosophy, literature, art, and language - neither of us were good with mathematics - I know she taught me what she thought was most important. I believed when I was younger that she knew everything.
Until Patrick came and changed all the rules.
He was a ruddy-faced, slightly overweight, Irish, balding, professor of Music at Columbia University. I hated it when he spoke bad Italian in his horrible Irish accent and called my mother ‘Bella’. I reminded him her name was Kali, which only made him laugh and my mother blush like an idiot.
“Kalista means most beautiful in Greek. In Italian, Bella also means beautiful, Anna! So it is all the same thing!”
It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same thing at all.
He took her to concerts, leaving me with his fifteen-year-old son. Before I met Clayton, I had wished for any possible friend the Gods would be kind enough to bring me. Afterwards, I realized I should have been much more specific. Being Patrick’s offspring was a huge strike against him, but when Clayton told me he hated reading, I knew a friendship between us was officially Never Going To Happen. Luckily, Clayton was as quiet as his father was loud - except when he played his violin. We only spoke for the three minutes after the pizza our parents had ordered for our dinner had arrived. He’d hand me two pieces on a paper towel, ask me what I wanted to drink and tell me not to spill. I took my slices to my room so I wouldn’t have to see his skinny limbs stretched out all over our red couch. But I had ten minutes of blissful silence while his hands were busy stuffing his mouth with food before the music started up again. After that, I had to read with cotton in my ears to drown out the sound of scales as he practiced.
Clayton and I only agreed on one thing: the simultaneous rolling of our eyes when our parents would kiss, told me he didn’t like them together either.
I was shocked when my mother told me she was going to marry Patrick.
“Why?” My voice sounded like Clayton’s whining violin.
“You don’t like him?” my mother looked surprised, which upset me even more. “He thinks the world of you.”
“He’s full of… blarney,” I spat, which made her laugh.
“He is Irish!”
“He thinks he’s Italian.”
“I’m Greek and Egyptian and I love things from all different cultures, Anna.”
“Mom, he’s an Alpha!”
“I’ve been leading our pack alone for a long time, Anna.”
“You’re not alone, I’m right here!”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“People notice him,” I warned. “If you let him in, we won’t be invisible anymore!”
“Maybe that’s okay,” she had answered, squeezing my hand with one of hers and twisting her necklace with the other.
Even then, she knew she was wrong, but she wanted it so badly that she tried pretending hard enough to make it true, which cost us all.
Patrick broke every rule we ever had. He walked on the outside of the sidewalk and he called attention to her beauty when people walked past us in the park.
“Isn’t she extraordinary?” he would bellow.
Strangers would nod and stare at my mother, smiling. Seeing her. Seeing us.
She lapped it up like a cat.
“He’s not going to take me away from you, Anna. I promise. We’re going to be a family. All together. You’ll see.”
It was, I realized, the first time an adult had lied to me. I hadn’t known she could. My stomach dropped out of my body, like it did when I rode on the Coney Island roller coaster. When I looked at her more closely, I saw the real truth: she didn’t know she was lying.
I had lost her already. I did the only thing I could think to do, the only thing I had never tried before: I disobeyed.
“You’ll be sorry!” I screamed, slamming my door behind me, forced to wait in my mounds of books for what I saw as the inevitable.
The wedding was at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The famous Catholic church was so huge and so empty that it was sad to me. All of the pews looked abandoned. Clayton and I, the only guests and members of the wedding party, stood next to them, ignoring one another while statues and stained glass depictions of elderly saints looked pessimistically down at us all. My mother wore a short, white dress with cap sleeves and carried purple calla lilies with white roses. Patrick bought her a strand of pearls, which she wore with her usual ankh necklace. When the priest saw it, he raised an eyebrow.
“My mother gave it to me before she passed,” she explained sadly. “Since she can’t be here today…”
I had hoped that he would scream, “Infidel!” or something equally as dramatic and toss us out on the street for bringing an Egyptian pagan symbol into a church, but he just cleared his throat and read the vows, which they repeated after him. I squirmed when she vowed to obey and crossed my fingers for her behind my back. We went to dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side. It was a nice one with candles on the table, a penguin-suited maître d’, and an accordion player. Not middle of the road. They stared at each other too much, kissed too much, drank too much, and then all four of us took a taxi. There were too many of us to fit, so I sat in the front seat with the driver. Patrick screeched out Italian arias on the way home.
After they moved in, I discovered Patrick was even louder than I had expected. He sang in the bathroom in the morning and serenaded my mother on the fire escape in the evenings. In the kitchen, he swung knives and slammed pots and drawers as he taught my mother to make spaghetti sauce from scratch and how to boil corn beef with stinky cabbage and bland potatoes. In our living room, he watched soccer and American football, screaming at the television. He tried to get me to join in the awful din by suggesting I sing, try the violin, take up the clarinet, but I refused.
“You’re happy with your books,” he sang finally, nodding and winking as though we were co-conspirators. “I understand. It is good to do what you love.”
I was miserable. There was always too much noise to concentrate on my books. Clayton and I didn’t speak any more than we had before, but he had plenty to say to them. I became the stranger in the house, banishing myself to my room, plugging my ears and hiding under pillows to muffle the sounds.
But.
But my mother was happy.
I watched them sometimes from the staircase. He would hold her, humming, and she would dance in his arms. Sometimes he would call Clayton down and tell him to play the violin. The slats on the banister would frame them like a picture. They looked like a perfect gypsy family, all musical and full of life.
When they both went off to school, she left the demented, domesticated, and docile housewife behind and focused back on my training. But as soon as it was time for them to come home, my mother would clean the room with a fine-toothed comb, hiding all evidence of our lessons and then usher me back upstairs. I felt like a cursed stepchild, like Cinderella exiled to the attic.
Sundays were heaven because the two males went to church together, leaving us alone. Patrick referred to himself as a ‘lapsed Catholic’ and my mother only and always considered religion in historical and cultural context. But she told me that he felt he owed it to Clayton’s mother, who had been religious before she passed away, to, “instill the Catholic Faith in him”. I don’t remember if Clayton appreciated the instilling or not, but I did. Every Sunday morning when they went to church, my mother took me across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I forgave her for everything on Sundays, hoping that she would enjoy our time so much that she would banish the boys forever from our sanctuary.
The Met, as my mother referred to it, was enormous. Every weekend we moved obsessively through a single section as she lectured me on art history. But at the end of our visits, we always went to look at her favorite artists, the Impressionists. My mother said it relaxed her to sit on the rectangular bench in the center of the Impressionist Wing and stare at Monet’s Water Lilies, or Van Gogh’s Irises.
“Irises always makes me sad,” I remember confiding. “That one white flower is all alone.”
“I think all the purple irises make the one white flower seem special, and the white makes the purple more beautiful,” my mother insisted and then added her usual tidbits to make sure every moment was a teachable lesson. “The Impressionists were all about perspective Anna. You can look at a thing every day and still not see it; the artists in this wing knew that. They fought their own eyes, pushing themselves and us to see beyond what is. That is what you must always do.”
“May we go to Egypt now?” I would beg as soon as she got the Impressionists out of her system. “Before we go home, let’s please, please, please go to the Egyptian wing?”
“Again?”
“Always. I want to see the statue of Anubis.”
Every week she tried to put me off. “You want to see the Funeral God? Don’t you think that’s a little creepy?”
“I don’t care about funerals, I just want to see Anubis.”
“Why don’t we walk through the Temple of Dendur instead?” my mother would suggest. “It’s a real temple! They flew all the pieces here and reassembled it so we can see what it would have been like way back then. You can translate the hieroglyphs that are on the walls to me!”
“Too crowded,” I complained. “Everyone always wants to see the temple.”
“Or we could look at the Greek and Roman statues? The marble one of Venus is my favorite!”
“She doesn’t have a head,” I argued dismissively. “I think that’s creepy.”
“This is the last time,” she’d say, every time. But every Sunday before we went home, I would beg her to take me to see my favorite piece and every week she reluctantly let me drag her back there.
The Met had room after room of flashy items stolen from tombs that tourists flocked to every day. All I cared about was the tiny, sixteen-inch statue that, to me, was the most beautiful item in the whole of the Museum.
The small, wooden statue stood atop a rectangular box painted with multicolored rectangular arches that looked like doorways. The Egyptian God was dressed in a short skirt and no shirt, just golden bands around each arm at the bicep. Both his hands were raised at the elbows, as though he was motioning for everyone in the Museum to calm down and be quiet just for me, which I loved. But the best part of Anubis was the head. His body was human, but he had the head of a jackal, with gold-tipped dog-ears that stood up straight, oval shaped eyes, and a long, black snout.
“Jackals are my favorite!” I would whisper to him through the glass case so my mother couldn’t hear, imagining it would please him.
After a few minutes, she would tap me on the shoulder.
“Time to go back.”
She told Patrick that we spent the time walking through Central Park. He was never allowed to suspect that she was teaching me things.
“He mustn’t know how smart you are, darling,” she’d say, rubbing her hand reassuringly on my back. “It’s our secret. Promise me. If we keep our secrets, everything will be fine.”
But the longer my mother’s marriage to Patrick went on, the more I watched her struggle. I still existed, so she was forced to twist rather than tie up loose ends. Her stories never fully did the trick; it was like when you’d rip off strings from a nearly worn-out sweater, so that no one could tell how bad it really was, and end up making it worse. She did everything she could to make lies ring true, all the while digging us more deeply into their lives, and all the while counting on me to protect our secrets. As time went on, keeping them became as natural for me as reading and breathing.
I only got caught once.
Clayton had come home a little earlier than expected from school when I was practicing a recitation. He suddenly appeared in the doorway of my room, which Patrick described as my, 'library with a bed', and said:
“I heard that.”
“You heard what.” I stated it, instead of asking.
“You. Speaking a different language.”
I thought if I ignored him he would get the hint and leave. He didn’t.
“How many do you speak?”
“English.” I answered flatly, eyes on my book. “Just English.”
He shook his head. “That was Italian. I recognized it.”
It was Latin, not Italian, and the recitation had been from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which I was actually holding, but I couldn’t tell him any of that. Instead, I gripped the sides of my book until my fingers turned white, praying Clayton wouldn’t notice that the title on the cover wasn’t in English.
He didn’t.
Eventually he left my doorway. But he brought it up at dinner. To his father.
“So you’re learning Italian?” Patrick boomed, hands resting on his bulging belly, open-mouthed, with red sauce dripping down his chin.
“Anna doesn’t speak Italian,” my mother shook her head and smiled. The others didn’t realize, but the way she twisted the necklace in her fingers gave everything away.
Patrick laughed. It was his response for anything and everything; even when he got mad he laughed. “You were confused!”
“I heard her,” Clayton insisted.
“Although, I think we should teach them some words so that when we visit Italy they can speak to the locals…” my mother swiftly changed the topic, spooning more food onto Patrick’s plate.
“Oh, you’ll love it Bella-” he was off, once again cleverly distracted by my mother. He was about to take his sabbatical, a year off from Columbia. He was going to take us all with him, on a musical tour of Europe, while he guest-lectured at some universities. It was all he could talk about, all they talked about; it was their favorite subject together. I had never left New York. All I could think was how memorable American tourists would be in the tiny village towns.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Clayton’s disbelieving stare. I felt for him. He was clearly stumped. In that moment, I felt my first pang of empathy. It grew uncomfortable, like a too-tight rubber band in my hair, until I almost confessed. I pushed my lips together and sat on my hands to keep myself still.
A grownup had lied. Again, it was my mother. To a kid it always seems impossible, but there it was. Clayton knew it had happened, but then I saw that he knew I knew it had happened. So when he tried to stare me down with his endless eyes, I asked to be excused. My mother nodded, watching Clayton carefully.
That night he appeared again at my door.
“Why?” he whispered. “Why did you lie?”
I pretended to be asleep, keeping my breathing as even as possible, but the question nagged at me.
Why lie?
In a house where Clayton is pushed to be an extraordinary musician, when she is married to a teacher who prizes talent, why did she ask me to lie?
“I think it’s cool. Kids at my school speak different languages, you know. I speak music language, reading the notes and all… that’s a language too.”
It was an argument I hadn’t thought of. He was absolutely right, but I still hesitated. Telling the truth was against my mother’s rules.
But so was letting anyone into our pack.
“Is it a secret?” he asked, voice cracking piteously. “I can keep a secret, you know.”
I thought about that. Clayton could keep things to himself. I barely knew anything about him. He was so… miserably alone. Knowing too well what that felt like, I held my breath, about to break.
“Lying is a sin!” he hissed, losing me the moment he chose the ‘S’ word.
I turned over and pulled the covers to my chin. A few moments later, I heard him creeping away.
I remember it all so clearly, even without the Meditations book to mark the memory, because the following day, Patrick died.
So tragic, his fellow teachers said at the funeral, happening so young. He had plans, you know. He was going to Europe with his loving family for his sabbatical; guest teaching at famous universities. And then, days before they were to leave, to be stabbed by a mugger in Central Park!
One never knows what is coming, make the most of the time you have, carpe diem… they went on and on and on.
I had planned various escape plots to get us away from Patrick every night since he had invaded our lives. His untimely death was not a situation I had actively wished for, not seriously anyway, and I was willing to be sympathetic towards Clayton’s loss before we moved on. I honestly thought, based on her rules, her mantras, everything she had ever taught me about the world and how it worked, that she was better off, safer, without either of them.
I expected my mother to cry for a few weeks at the loss of her husband, but then remember that she had me. I would hug her and reassure her that we were still, and always would be, a pack.
With that in mind, the day after the funeral, I took charge as Alpha.
I left the house on my own for the first time to buy paper towels and toilet paper, braving the streets as valiantly as I could. The first few moments were terrifying. My mother usually paved the way for me and without her I felt lost. Every time I attempted to cross an intersection, a car or bus tore through, ignoring the civilizing rules of the streetlights. On the sidewalk, throngs of people pushed against me, forcing me to twist and jerk myself into the tiny open spaces between them to get to where I needed to go. The sounds of jackhammers on every corner, homeless ladies babbling at themselves and constant sirens, mixed with the stench of car exhaust, sweaty people, and city garbage overheated from the summer sun, put me at full sensory overload.
But then I realized: because of all of that, no one was looking at me. My mother’s rules from our early days still proved true. In the chaotic cacophony of New York, as long as I moved with purpose and stayed in the middle, I faded into the crowd.
After that, inside and outside of our hobbit-hole front door, I was in full Alpha-mode, taking care of my pack. When she would let me, I’d draw my mother’s bath and help her wash her hair. When she would eat, I picked up soup from the Jewish deli. When he was home for dinner, I ordered pizza, took two slices up to Clayton’s room on a plate, asked him if he needed a drink and told him not to make a mess. Other than that, I left him to his business.
When Clayton wasn’t at school, he shut himself in his room and practiced. Since he stayed as far away from us as possible, the only sign in those two months that he was still in our house, still alive, and still miserable, were the sounds that drifted through the walls into my room. Those strings wailed for him like a lone wolf. I pitied him, since he had lost his mother at eight years of age and his father at seventeen. Beyond that, I thought of Clayton as an extraneous, Omega puppy that I was responsible for feeding and sheltering. He brought nothing to us and so he was of no importance. He had to stay with us until it was time to go off to music college and then we’d be alone again, the way we were before.
While I was waiting for that day, between his music and my mother’s sobs, reading became impossible. I still read at night, but in the morning, I put books aside and picked up the remote. Patrick had brought the television into our house, but I had never watched it since it would mean including something from them in my life. After the first day, sitting on the couch with a blanket and a pizza, it was easy to stumble downstairs and plop myself in front of it. At first, I stuck to relatively intellectual pursuits. I didn’t know how to cook, so I started off with cooking channel shows to teach me about food. A game show network was second for me, since I liked testing myself the way my mother used to test me. Then I discovered movie versions of the books I loved. I watched them the way Patrick had watched sports on Sundays, screaming at the characters when they did something that wasn’t in the book. Eventually, I completely caved and flipped to scripted programs. I tolerated the good, happy families laughing at everything the way Patrick had, but I was completely riveted by the bad families, especially those disobedient and rebellious teens. Between those shows and Reality Television, I quickly learned just how far away from reality my life had always been.
I started sleeping down there, reasoning that as Alpha, I could watch our hobbit-hole front door from the couch at all times and protect us. But the truth was that the later it got, the quieter it got down there… quiet enough to actually read. I had finished my library of children’s books long ago, so it also made more sense to be closer to my mother’s collection that lined the walls of the living room. At three a.m., I pushed off the power button and ran to those shelves to get lost in novels about Anne Boleyn, vampires, and the mythical island of Avalon. I made my way through Shakespeare’s tragedies and Chekhov’s comedies until I was calm enough to pass out around seven or eight in the morning, then, a few hours later, I’d lull myself awake with shows. For the next two months, the television and my mother’s books were my alarm clock, lullaby, and teacher - my new lifelines.
Once, just once, I took the train downtown, trying to find the magic boy’s bookstore. I pretended it was to trade books for money, even though the life insurance check was taking care of us just fine. It was idiotic really. Not only was I certain that after ten years he would never remember me, I had witnessed what had happened to my mother when she let someone else in, and yet somehow, I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t recall the name of it, so googling for directions was an impossibility. I figured that as soon as I got down there, I’d recognize the store.
But when I stepped out of the subway station, I immediately saw that each line of warehouse buildings in that part of town were too similar to tell apart.
Still, I walked up and down the maze of side streets trying to remember something, anything that would jog my memory and help me find the store. I searched until it got dark and a little bit dangerous, but I kept on until my feet ached too much to continue.
Of course, I didn’t find it. After that day, I never tried again.
On the way back uptown, I faced the hard truth: during the night, I could allow myself to get lost in imaginary worlds and circumstances, but only then.
Knights are only in fairy tales. Magic boys aren’t real, I reminded myself. This isn’t a story. No one is coming to rescue us.
If I wanted things to be okay, I was going to have to make them that way, myself.
Until she came back to me.
Eight weeks after Patrick died, my mother walked out of her room for the first time, stood in front of the television set and told me she was going out.
She was wearing a fancy dress Patrick had bought for her, which was blue and off one shoulder. Her cashmere wrap was as perfectly placed as her hair, which was swept up with graceful tendrils falling just so, and her necklace, flipped to the gold side, glistened brilliantly in the light from the hallway. I started to speak, but she interrupted me.
“You’ve done enough. It’s my turn again, my darling. I have to take care of some things and then I will come back for you.”
“You’re leaving?” was all I could manage to say.
“You’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Remember what I taught you - stay in the middle of the pack - and you’ll be fine.”
“But-”
“ ‘From them all things proceed-’”
“Who is them?” I asked, confused that I didn’t recognize the quote at all.
“’Unto them all things must return,’” she finished, blowing me a kiss and walking out the door without another word.
Clayton came down after hearing the front door close and was surprised to see me sitting on the couch, open-mouthed.
“She went outside?” he asked in disbelief.
I swallowed hard and nodded. “She said she had to take care of some things and then she’ll be back.”
For me. I added silently in my head. She will be back. For me.
He considered my words for a time, staring at the door, then at me. I could see him debating in his head.
Only one year left, I thought at him silently. Then you are free. Don’t get involved now. Don’t challenge. Don’t make me fight you. Just let it go.
“Whatever,” he said finally, grabbing his violin case off the shelf. He was seventeen and over us. “I’ve got practice.”
Then he stomped out the front door.
I sat there in shock for a while before climbing the stairs and going into my bedroom for the first time in what felt like forever. It was dusty, but comfortable, my library with a bed. I spent a long time selecting just the right book. I fell asleep a few hours later, clutching a well-loved and worn copy of the Phantom Tollbooth, dreaming of speeding through city archways in a miniature car, then climbing impossible stairs, only to enter the gates of a palace in the sky, where everyone I met told me that I alone had the power to restore Reason and Rhyme to the world.
When I woke up, I was between the lions.
“Standing people don’t stare at sitting people unless they, or the people they are looking at, are crazy. Sitting people watch standing people, look out the window, or read, but they don’t stare at other sitting people.”
When I went out in the city, I always walked in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Busy New Yorkers weave through and past the middle too quickly to notice anything particular about you. Standing on the outside or the inside allows you to be seen,” my mother warned and I obeyed.
Back then I always obeyed.
Getting seen at school wasn’t an issue, since I never went. My mother taught me herself, at home. I was reading by the time I was two-and-a-half, but she didn’t have me at an advanced level as far as New York State was concerned. She sat with me as I filled out the tests, making sure I got just enough right and just enough wrong.
Instead of learning to draw circles and sing the alphabet song, I traced hieroglyphs and danced around the apartment acting out all of the parts of the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every day we’d sit on our comfy, tattered, red velvet couch and discuss something amazing like the disappearance of the Mayans or how many mitochondria could be in a tiny cell. We’d compare the ancient Roman and modern American systems of government against Hammurabi’s Eye-for-an-Eye code, take turns listing the next number in the Fibonacci Series, or giggle together at the idea of pigs with wings. The more I learned, the more my mother pushed me like an academic centurion, hurling a daily stream of never-ending, no-wrong-answers-allowed quiz questions at me on every conceivable subject, expecting me to answer not just in English, but Greek, Egyptian, and Latin as well.
I loved every second of it.
There was only one thing I ever thought was missing: a friend my own age. Before I was a teenager, I’d only actually talked to another kid once. Even though
I didn’t know his name, he was my first and only friend.
My mother would take me downtown with her twice a year to sell or barter for books. The bookshop wasn’t the kind of store you’d find at a mall; it was a labyrinth of bookshelves, full of what looked like priceless antiques, but whose titles were no longer legible, interspersed with huge glass cabinets showcasing first editions on well-lit pedestals. The floors and walls were covered in dust, but the treasures on the shelves were always pristine and the space in between the stacks was always empty.
Except one day, when tiptoeing through the maze of shelves, I came upon a boy a year or two older than me, sprawled out on the floor.
I panicked, the way you would if you came across a lion lounging in a store aisle.
My initial instinct was to back away quietly, but then our eyes met and I froze.
He smiled.
I didn’t.
His fingers were tangled up in a mess of colorful strings. A deeper look revealed that it was some kind of intricate circle of cords. Extending out from that inner sphere, like rays of the sun, were ornate, frayed strands that had been twisted into different sized and shaped knots.
“It’s a Kee-poo,” he said.
I wanted to laugh at the name, but the fact that he was acting as if I had asked, as if we were having a conversation - which, I had never really had with anyone besides my mother - was too gigantic. I took a few steps back.
“You don’t want to see?”
Disappointment was threaded through his words. The urge to please was apparently stronger than my need to flee because I moved towards him. He flashed a grin my way as a reward and then lifted the cords up to his face. The elaborate fringe framed his head like a mane. As the boy rose to stand beside me the sunlight hit, making the dust mites that floated between the multi-colored strings look like fairy dust.
“The knots talk,” he whispered to me, making the other-worldliness of the moment even more potent.
My eyes widened.
“Not out loud; the knots talk the way lines and swirls on paper talk.”
I knew, instantly, that he meant, like letters on a page.
“Most people can’t read them,” he said. “Most people can only read the alphabet, but I like to read other things too, like glyphs.”
To this day, I have no idea how the words managed to exit my well-trained-in-the-art-of-not-talking-to-strangers-mouth, but somehow, I found myself telling him:
“I love glyphs.”
“Me too!”
I felt the invisible magic strands that stretched between us quadruple and then entwine, binding us together.
“You must read a lot,” he commented.
“How do you know that?”
The grin came again. “Because you smell like books.”
I stared at him.
“Want me to show you how to read the Kee-poo?”
Before I could answer, my mother’s hand closed around my arm. She pulled me backwards, my heels dragging as I watched the only friend I had ever made get smaller and further away.
When we got into the cab outside of the store, my mother didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until after we were uptown and safely locked behind the brownstone door that she grabbed and shook me. I was shocked. My mother had never spoken harshly to me until that moment, at least as far as I can remember. I’ll never forget how her eyes sparked like a blue-gold gas flame, or the way the normally tan skin on her face turned sickly pale.
She was afraid. I know that now.
“You cannot talk to strangers. Once you open your mouth, they will know how smart you are. If anyone finds out you’re smart, they’ll take you from me,” she told me hoarsely and I felt myself start to tremble.
I looked at my beautiful mother and saw the most extraordinary woman in the world, my heart, my home, and my safety blanket. She was everything I knew. My lower lip quivered and tears blurred her from my sight. When she hugged me, I breathed deeply, inhaling her lavender and laundry scent, but her comfort made me more hysterical.
I hadn’t known until that moment that I could lose her.
She smoothed my un-smooth-able hair and kissed my tears away.
“I know it’s hard. But we don’t want anyone asking questions. The only way to stay together is for them to think you are like everyone else. Just stick to the middle of the pack,” she preached and I swallowed that sermon into my heart and bones.
But later that night when my mother wasn’t looking, I looked up Kee-poo knots. I told myself that it wasn’t disobedience… it was just research.
I used to convince myself of a lot of things like that.
The search engine informed me that Kee-poo was actually Quipu, an ancient Incan Writing System. They had used cord color, length, knot type, knot location, and the way the cords were twisted to record their stories the way Egyptians used glyphs on papyrus.
I also found out that Spanish invaders did their best to destroy all of the Quipu they could find centuries ago. Scholars were still struggling to translate the few that remained.
I wanted more than anything to see the boy again, find out how he had learned a secret language no one else understood and get him to teach me to read his magic knots. But my mother never took me there again and I knew better than to ask. Back then, when I had been a little kid, I would have never dared to do anything that might cause me to lose us.
After her freak out, I thought I understood why we needed to stay in the middle. Middle people were invisible. We had made a pact to be invisible to everyone on the island of Manhattan except each other, so that neither of us got taken away.
It wasn’t until my mom gave me a book called Canines of the Wild, that I found out what a pack actually was: a group of dogs with strict rules that had to be followed by every member or they would be punished - without exception.
“Punished how?”
“They get bitten. Food is withheld. They could be banished from the pack. It depends what they did wrong,” my mother shrugged. “The Alpha decides.”
“Alpha, like the first letter in the Greek alphabet?”
“Exactly. Alpha is first so they get the best of everything, but they get those rights because they have the most responsibilities. They’re responsible for protecting the pack, finding food for everyone, finding safe places to sleep. The others follow her rules because it keeps them alive.”
“Do they all have Greek letter names?”
“Alpha does always have a Beta, or a second in command, to help them enforce their laws, but the rest are just referred to as the pack.”
“What if the Beta gets tired of second best?”
She frowned. “Betas are usually prized for their loyalty.”
“But what if?”
“Betas usually become Alphas when the Alpha has passed away. Most of them wait their turn, Anna.”
“But what if they don’t want to wait?” I persisted.
I remember how she sighed.
“If a Beta disagrees with the way the pack is being led, or feels that the Alpha is no longer able to do her job, then the Beta can challenge the pack leader to a fight.”
I was hooked. “Like a duel?”
“Yes. But, as I said, all dogs instinctively understand that the key to their survival is to follow the rules. Alphas do not tolerate disloyalty. One broken rule can put the other dogs into danger,” she reminded me. “That’s why a Beta who loses a duel or shows disloyalty would be banished.”
“Then what happens? The Beta finds a new pack?”
“Sometimes they make a new pack. Hopefully, they make a new pack. If they don’t… well, dogs are pack animals. They can’t make it on their own. Now, if you can manage to finish the book in the next hour and pick one canine species to report to me on, I’ll take you to the park.”
I’ve wondered many times what ‘Would Not Have Been’ if I hadn’t managed to read that chapter in that hour, if I’d taken longer to decide which species was interesting enough to study, or if I had spent five minutes looking out the window instead of reading.
I’ve also thought about what ‘Would Have Been’ if she had allowed my life in New York to be normal. If she had let me think I was a regular teenager, I might have had friends or even a boyfriend, like other people my age, who would have been texting me that it was insane to be excited about hanging out with your mom after you did homework on a freaking Saturday afternoon.
But I wasn’t normal and nothing about my life would ever be. It happened the way it happened because she was what she was, and back then, I was who I was: her faithful and obedient Beta-child.
“What species did you pick?” she asked me after I had run down the stairs forty-five minutes later.
“I decided that jackals are my favorite.”
“Jackals?” she looked shocked. “Why do you prefer them?”
“They’re wild,” I said first and she groaned. “I like wild things. ‘I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself…’”
“Anna!”
We had quote battles as practice. My mother would quote someone from something she read and I would have to find a quote that fit, as though we were having a conversation with other people’s words. I used any and every excuse to insert my favorite line: “I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself.” It was from a poem by D.H. Lawrence and my mother insisted that poems did not count as quotations. She felt I was missing the point of the lesson and the opportunity to expand myself whenever I referred to it.
“Coyotes are wild. Wolves are wild. Gods, why jackals?”
My mother rarely swore, but when she did, she always said Gods, never God. I asked her once, why the plural when everyone else said God. She said she didn’t want to leave anyone out.
“They’re scavengers,” I answered and my mother gave me a look. “I think that’s respectable. They take care of the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted. Also, they aren’t always in a big pack. They hunt in pairs. I like that.”
“That’s not completely true. They hunt alone when there are children to protect,” my mother corrected, playing with her necklace. It was the only jewelry she ever wore: a two-inch, strangely-shaped, Egyptian cross she called an ankh, silver on one side and gold on the other. It was always hidden beneath her shirts, unless she fiddled with it, which only happened when she got nervous. “I prefer grey wolves. They mate for life.”
I rolled my eyes. “So do foxes, coyotes, gibbon apes, termites, swans, and pigeons.”
“Rats with wings,” my mother shuddered and then focused on me, all business. “What else, Anna? How many animals can you name that mate for life? In alphabetical order, please.”
I remember rolling my eyes before closing them to organize the list in my head. She always made me give her more.
“Let’s switch to hunting habits,” she said when I finished.
“I told you, jackals are scavengers-”
“Enough with jackals!” she snapped and my head dropped like a puppy. Anxious to win back her approval, I thought back to yesterday’s lesson.
“I could tell you about my favorite feline…?”
She nodded stiffly and I pounced back into good daughter mode.
“Jaguars are the best hunters because they can kill anything with a swipe of a paw. But because they can’t run as fast as other cats, they usually wait for prey up in the trees and then drop down, fangs at the ready. They can open their jaws further than any other animal so they just bite through the prey’s skull.”
“Classifications please.”
“Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Carnivora, Family Felidae, Genus Panthera, Species Onca,” I listed them quickly. “Common name, jaguar.”
She gave me a slow, beautiful smile. “Excellent darling. Now get your coat and we’ll go out.”
My mom announced that she believed a hot dog suited the theme of the day’s canine lesson. That may not sound like much to you, but she normally wouldn’t let me touch any kind of meat. In New York City there was a food stand on every corner ready to torture my salivary glands. Every time I’d beg she’d tell me, “Only eat creatures with two legs or less.”
As we approached, there was a gaggle of teenagers clustered around the stand. I hung back, waiting for the kids to move on, the way someone who knew how to stay invisible would do. But in truth, I was desperately attempting to overhear their conversation and record in my memory the type of clothes they were wearing, so I could observe and classify them the way I would with any mammal we studied. I told myself it was all research so I could do a better job of staying in the middle…
Just another lie.
I was still watching them all swoop away when the vendor snatched the money out of my hand and asked me how I wanted it. I was confused until he explained further.
“Mustard, kid. Do you want mustard, onions…?”
I ordered mustard, most of which was on my shirt by the time I turned around to offer a bite to my mother, who was talking to a stranger.
In that moment, my life changed.
His name was Patrick and he knew my mother was extraordinary. It might have been her eyes, so unexpectedly blue-as pen-ink, or her perfect olive skin and gloriously long, wavy hair that never ever frizzed, even in the rain. We didn’t look related at all. My eyes were a dull green and as big as a cow’s, my permanently tanned skin was darker than hers, and I had an odd smattering of freckles across my nose. Older Latino women occasionally asked me for directions in Spanish, thinking I must be Puerto Rican, and my mother had to wave them away since neither of us spoke it. Once, an African-American girl on the subway offered to relax my kinky hair for cheap, thinking I was half-black. We ignored her and slid into the next car to avoid the attention, even though I secretly would have loved to be able to make my hair look like my mother’s. Mine goes every which way but the way I wish.
Inside, I think we were similar. Both of us were fiercely intelligent and we were equally insatiable readers. Along with science, philosophy, literature, art, and language - neither of us were good with mathematics - I know she taught me what she thought was most important. I believed when I was younger that she knew everything.
Until Patrick came and changed all the rules.
He was a ruddy-faced, slightly overweight, Irish, balding, professor of Music at Columbia University. I hated it when he spoke bad Italian in his horrible Irish accent and called my mother ‘Bella’. I reminded him her name was Kali, which only made him laugh and my mother blush like an idiot.
“Kalista means most beautiful in Greek. In Italian, Bella also means beautiful, Anna! So it is all the same thing!”
It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same thing at all.
He took her to concerts, leaving me with his fifteen-year-old son. Before I met Clayton, I had wished for any possible friend the Gods would be kind enough to bring me. Afterwards, I realized I should have been much more specific. Being Patrick’s offspring was a huge strike against him, but when Clayton told me he hated reading, I knew a friendship between us was officially Never Going To Happen. Luckily, Clayton was as quiet as his father was loud - except when he played his violin. We only spoke for the three minutes after the pizza our parents had ordered for our dinner had arrived. He’d hand me two pieces on a paper towel, ask me what I wanted to drink and tell me not to spill. I took my slices to my room so I wouldn’t have to see his skinny limbs stretched out all over our red couch. But I had ten minutes of blissful silence while his hands were busy stuffing his mouth with food before the music started up again. After that, I had to read with cotton in my ears to drown out the sound of scales as he practiced.
Clayton and I only agreed on one thing: the simultaneous rolling of our eyes when our parents would kiss, told me he didn’t like them together either.
I was shocked when my mother told me she was going to marry Patrick.
“Why?” My voice sounded like Clayton’s whining violin.
“You don’t like him?” my mother looked surprised, which upset me even more. “He thinks the world of you.”
“He’s full of… blarney,” I spat, which made her laugh.
“He is Irish!”
“He thinks he’s Italian.”
“I’m Greek and Egyptian and I love things from all different cultures, Anna.”
“Mom, he’s an Alpha!”
“I’ve been leading our pack alone for a long time, Anna.”
“You’re not alone, I’m right here!”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“People notice him,” I warned. “If you let him in, we won’t be invisible anymore!”
“Maybe that’s okay,” she had answered, squeezing my hand with one of hers and twisting her necklace with the other.
Even then, she knew she was wrong, but she wanted it so badly that she tried pretending hard enough to make it true, which cost us all.
Patrick broke every rule we ever had. He walked on the outside of the sidewalk and he called attention to her beauty when people walked past us in the park.
“Isn’t she extraordinary?” he would bellow.
Strangers would nod and stare at my mother, smiling. Seeing her. Seeing us.
She lapped it up like a cat.
“He’s not going to take me away from you, Anna. I promise. We’re going to be a family. All together. You’ll see.”
It was, I realized, the first time an adult had lied to me. I hadn’t known she could. My stomach dropped out of my body, like it did when I rode on the Coney Island roller coaster. When I looked at her more closely, I saw the real truth: she didn’t know she was lying.
I had lost her already. I did the only thing I could think to do, the only thing I had never tried before: I disobeyed.
“You’ll be sorry!” I screamed, slamming my door behind me, forced to wait in my mounds of books for what I saw as the inevitable.
The wedding was at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The famous Catholic church was so huge and so empty that it was sad to me. All of the pews looked abandoned. Clayton and I, the only guests and members of the wedding party, stood next to them, ignoring one another while statues and stained glass depictions of elderly saints looked pessimistically down at us all. My mother wore a short, white dress with cap sleeves and carried purple calla lilies with white roses. Patrick bought her a strand of pearls, which she wore with her usual ankh necklace. When the priest saw it, he raised an eyebrow.
“My mother gave it to me before she passed,” she explained sadly. “Since she can’t be here today…”
I had hoped that he would scream, “Infidel!” or something equally as dramatic and toss us out on the street for bringing an Egyptian pagan symbol into a church, but he just cleared his throat and read the vows, which they repeated after him. I squirmed when she vowed to obey and crossed my fingers for her behind my back. We went to dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side. It was a nice one with candles on the table, a penguin-suited maître d’, and an accordion player. Not middle of the road. They stared at each other too much, kissed too much, drank too much, and then all four of us took a taxi. There were too many of us to fit, so I sat in the front seat with the driver. Patrick screeched out Italian arias on the way home.
After they moved in, I discovered Patrick was even louder than I had expected. He sang in the bathroom in the morning and serenaded my mother on the fire escape in the evenings. In the kitchen, he swung knives and slammed pots and drawers as he taught my mother to make spaghetti sauce from scratch and how to boil corn beef with stinky cabbage and bland potatoes. In our living room, he watched soccer and American football, screaming at the television. He tried to get me to join in the awful din by suggesting I sing, try the violin, take up the clarinet, but I refused.
“You’re happy with your books,” he sang finally, nodding and winking as though we were co-conspirators. “I understand. It is good to do what you love.”
I was miserable. There was always too much noise to concentrate on my books. Clayton and I didn’t speak any more than we had before, but he had plenty to say to them. I became the stranger in the house, banishing myself to my room, plugging my ears and hiding under pillows to muffle the sounds.
But.
But my mother was happy.
I watched them sometimes from the staircase. He would hold her, humming, and she would dance in his arms. Sometimes he would call Clayton down and tell him to play the violin. The slats on the banister would frame them like a picture. They looked like a perfect gypsy family, all musical and full of life.
When they both went off to school, she left the demented, domesticated, and docile housewife behind and focused back on my training. But as soon as it was time for them to come home, my mother would clean the room with a fine-toothed comb, hiding all evidence of our lessons and then usher me back upstairs. I felt like a cursed stepchild, like Cinderella exiled to the attic.
Sundays were heaven because the two males went to church together, leaving us alone. Patrick referred to himself as a ‘lapsed Catholic’ and my mother only and always considered religion in historical and cultural context. But she told me that he felt he owed it to Clayton’s mother, who had been religious before she passed away, to, “instill the Catholic Faith in him”. I don’t remember if Clayton appreciated the instilling or not, but I did. Every Sunday morning when they went to church, my mother took me across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I forgave her for everything on Sundays, hoping that she would enjoy our time so much that she would banish the boys forever from our sanctuary.
The Met, as my mother referred to it, was enormous. Every weekend we moved obsessively through a single section as she lectured me on art history. But at the end of our visits, we always went to look at her favorite artists, the Impressionists. My mother said it relaxed her to sit on the rectangular bench in the center of the Impressionist Wing and stare at Monet’s Water Lilies, or Van Gogh’s Irises.
“Irises always makes me sad,” I remember confiding. “That one white flower is all alone.”
“I think all the purple irises make the one white flower seem special, and the white makes the purple more beautiful,” my mother insisted and then added her usual tidbits to make sure every moment was a teachable lesson. “The Impressionists were all about perspective Anna. You can look at a thing every day and still not see it; the artists in this wing knew that. They fought their own eyes, pushing themselves and us to see beyond what is. That is what you must always do.”
“May we go to Egypt now?” I would beg as soon as she got the Impressionists out of her system. “Before we go home, let’s please, please, please go to the Egyptian wing?”
“Again?”
“Always. I want to see the statue of Anubis.”
Every week she tried to put me off. “You want to see the Funeral God? Don’t you think that’s a little creepy?”
“I don’t care about funerals, I just want to see Anubis.”
“Why don’t we walk through the Temple of Dendur instead?” my mother would suggest. “It’s a real temple! They flew all the pieces here and reassembled it so we can see what it would have been like way back then. You can translate the hieroglyphs that are on the walls to me!”
“Too crowded,” I complained. “Everyone always wants to see the temple.”
“Or we could look at the Greek and Roman statues? The marble one of Venus is my favorite!”
“She doesn’t have a head,” I argued dismissively. “I think that’s creepy.”
“This is the last time,” she’d say, every time. But every Sunday before we went home, I would beg her to take me to see my favorite piece and every week she reluctantly let me drag her back there.
The Met had room after room of flashy items stolen from tombs that tourists flocked to every day. All I cared about was the tiny, sixteen-inch statue that, to me, was the most beautiful item in the whole of the Museum.
The small, wooden statue stood atop a rectangular box painted with multicolored rectangular arches that looked like doorways. The Egyptian God was dressed in a short skirt and no shirt, just golden bands around each arm at the bicep. Both his hands were raised at the elbows, as though he was motioning for everyone in the Museum to calm down and be quiet just for me, which I loved. But the best part of Anubis was the head. His body was human, but he had the head of a jackal, with gold-tipped dog-ears that stood up straight, oval shaped eyes, and a long, black snout.
“Jackals are my favorite!” I would whisper to him through the glass case so my mother couldn’t hear, imagining it would please him.
After a few minutes, she would tap me on the shoulder.
“Time to go back.”
She told Patrick that we spent the time walking through Central Park. He was never allowed to suspect that she was teaching me things.
“He mustn’t know how smart you are, darling,” she’d say, rubbing her hand reassuringly on my back. “It’s our secret. Promise me. If we keep our secrets, everything will be fine.”
But the longer my mother’s marriage to Patrick went on, the more I watched her struggle. I still existed, so she was forced to twist rather than tie up loose ends. Her stories never fully did the trick; it was like when you’d rip off strings from a nearly worn-out sweater, so that no one could tell how bad it really was, and end up making it worse. She did everything she could to make lies ring true, all the while digging us more deeply into their lives, and all the while counting on me to protect our secrets. As time went on, keeping them became as natural for me as reading and breathing.
I only got caught once.
Clayton had come home a little earlier than expected from school when I was practicing a recitation. He suddenly appeared in the doorway of my room, which Patrick described as my, 'library with a bed', and said:
“I heard that.”
“You heard what.” I stated it, instead of asking.
“You. Speaking a different language.”
I thought if I ignored him he would get the hint and leave. He didn’t.
“How many do you speak?”
“English.” I answered flatly, eyes on my book. “Just English.”
He shook his head. “That was Italian. I recognized it.”
It was Latin, not Italian, and the recitation had been from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which I was actually holding, but I couldn’t tell him any of that. Instead, I gripped the sides of my book until my fingers turned white, praying Clayton wouldn’t notice that the title on the cover wasn’t in English.
He didn’t.
Eventually he left my doorway. But he brought it up at dinner. To his father.
“So you’re learning Italian?” Patrick boomed, hands resting on his bulging belly, open-mouthed, with red sauce dripping down his chin.
“Anna doesn’t speak Italian,” my mother shook her head and smiled. The others didn’t realize, but the way she twisted the necklace in her fingers gave everything away.
Patrick laughed. It was his response for anything and everything; even when he got mad he laughed. “You were confused!”
“I heard her,” Clayton insisted.
“Although, I think we should teach them some words so that when we visit Italy they can speak to the locals…” my mother swiftly changed the topic, spooning more food onto Patrick’s plate.
“Oh, you’ll love it Bella-” he was off, once again cleverly distracted by my mother. He was about to take his sabbatical, a year off from Columbia. He was going to take us all with him, on a musical tour of Europe, while he guest-lectured at some universities. It was all he could talk about, all they talked about; it was their favorite subject together. I had never left New York. All I could think was how memorable American tourists would be in the tiny village towns.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Clayton’s disbelieving stare. I felt for him. He was clearly stumped. In that moment, I felt my first pang of empathy. It grew uncomfortable, like a too-tight rubber band in my hair, until I almost confessed. I pushed my lips together and sat on my hands to keep myself still.
A grownup had lied. Again, it was my mother. To a kid it always seems impossible, but there it was. Clayton knew it had happened, but then I saw that he knew I knew it had happened. So when he tried to stare me down with his endless eyes, I asked to be excused. My mother nodded, watching Clayton carefully.
That night he appeared again at my door.
“Why?” he whispered. “Why did you lie?”
I pretended to be asleep, keeping my breathing as even as possible, but the question nagged at me.
Why lie?
In a house where Clayton is pushed to be an extraordinary musician, when she is married to a teacher who prizes talent, why did she ask me to lie?
“I think it’s cool. Kids at my school speak different languages, you know. I speak music language, reading the notes and all… that’s a language too.”
It was an argument I hadn’t thought of. He was absolutely right, but I still hesitated. Telling the truth was against my mother’s rules.
But so was letting anyone into our pack.
“Is it a secret?” he asked, voice cracking piteously. “I can keep a secret, you know.”
I thought about that. Clayton could keep things to himself. I barely knew anything about him. He was so… miserably alone. Knowing too well what that felt like, I held my breath, about to break.
“Lying is a sin!” he hissed, losing me the moment he chose the ‘S’ word.
I turned over and pulled the covers to my chin. A few moments later, I heard him creeping away.
I remember it all so clearly, even without the Meditations book to mark the memory, because the following day, Patrick died.
So tragic, his fellow teachers said at the funeral, happening so young. He had plans, you know. He was going to Europe with his loving family for his sabbatical; guest teaching at famous universities. And then, days before they were to leave, to be stabbed by a mugger in Central Park!
One never knows what is coming, make the most of the time you have, carpe diem… they went on and on and on.
I had planned various escape plots to get us away from Patrick every night since he had invaded our lives. His untimely death was not a situation I had actively wished for, not seriously anyway, and I was willing to be sympathetic towards Clayton’s loss before we moved on. I honestly thought, based on her rules, her mantras, everything she had ever taught me about the world and how it worked, that she was better off, safer, without either of them.
I expected my mother to cry for a few weeks at the loss of her husband, but then remember that she had me. I would hug her and reassure her that we were still, and always would be, a pack.
With that in mind, the day after the funeral, I took charge as Alpha.
I left the house on my own for the first time to buy paper towels and toilet paper, braving the streets as valiantly as I could. The first few moments were terrifying. My mother usually paved the way for me and without her I felt lost. Every time I attempted to cross an intersection, a car or bus tore through, ignoring the civilizing rules of the streetlights. On the sidewalk, throngs of people pushed against me, forcing me to twist and jerk myself into the tiny open spaces between them to get to where I needed to go. The sounds of jackhammers on every corner, homeless ladies babbling at themselves and constant sirens, mixed with the stench of car exhaust, sweaty people, and city garbage overheated from the summer sun, put me at full sensory overload.
But then I realized: because of all of that, no one was looking at me. My mother’s rules from our early days still proved true. In the chaotic cacophony of New York, as long as I moved with purpose and stayed in the middle, I faded into the crowd.
After that, inside and outside of our hobbit-hole front door, I was in full Alpha-mode, taking care of my pack. When she would let me, I’d draw my mother’s bath and help her wash her hair. When she would eat, I picked up soup from the Jewish deli. When he was home for dinner, I ordered pizza, took two slices up to Clayton’s room on a plate, asked him if he needed a drink and told him not to make a mess. Other than that, I left him to his business.
When Clayton wasn’t at school, he shut himself in his room and practiced. Since he stayed as far away from us as possible, the only sign in those two months that he was still in our house, still alive, and still miserable, were the sounds that drifted through the walls into my room. Those strings wailed for him like a lone wolf. I pitied him, since he had lost his mother at eight years of age and his father at seventeen. Beyond that, I thought of Clayton as an extraneous, Omega puppy that I was responsible for feeding and sheltering. He brought nothing to us and so he was of no importance. He had to stay with us until it was time to go off to music college and then we’d be alone again, the way we were before.
While I was waiting for that day, between his music and my mother’s sobs, reading became impossible. I still read at night, but in the morning, I put books aside and picked up the remote. Patrick had brought the television into our house, but I had never watched it since it would mean including something from them in my life. After the first day, sitting on the couch with a blanket and a pizza, it was easy to stumble downstairs and plop myself in front of it. At first, I stuck to relatively intellectual pursuits. I didn’t know how to cook, so I started off with cooking channel shows to teach me about food. A game show network was second for me, since I liked testing myself the way my mother used to test me. Then I discovered movie versions of the books I loved. I watched them the way Patrick had watched sports on Sundays, screaming at the characters when they did something that wasn’t in the book. Eventually, I completely caved and flipped to scripted programs. I tolerated the good, happy families laughing at everything the way Patrick had, but I was completely riveted by the bad families, especially those disobedient and rebellious teens. Between those shows and Reality Television, I quickly learned just how far away from reality my life had always been.
I started sleeping down there, reasoning that as Alpha, I could watch our hobbit-hole front door from the couch at all times and protect us. But the truth was that the later it got, the quieter it got down there… quiet enough to actually read. I had finished my library of children’s books long ago, so it also made more sense to be closer to my mother’s collection that lined the walls of the living room. At three a.m., I pushed off the power button and ran to those shelves to get lost in novels about Anne Boleyn, vampires, and the mythical island of Avalon. I made my way through Shakespeare’s tragedies and Chekhov’s comedies until I was calm enough to pass out around seven or eight in the morning, then, a few hours later, I’d lull myself awake with shows. For the next two months, the television and my mother’s books were my alarm clock, lullaby, and teacher - my new lifelines.
Once, just once, I took the train downtown, trying to find the magic boy’s bookstore. I pretended it was to trade books for money, even though the life insurance check was taking care of us just fine. It was idiotic really. Not only was I certain that after ten years he would never remember me, I had witnessed what had happened to my mother when she let someone else in, and yet somehow, I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t recall the name of it, so googling for directions was an impossibility. I figured that as soon as I got down there, I’d recognize the store.
But when I stepped out of the subway station, I immediately saw that each line of warehouse buildings in that part of town were too similar to tell apart.
Still, I walked up and down the maze of side streets trying to remember something, anything that would jog my memory and help me find the store. I searched until it got dark and a little bit dangerous, but I kept on until my feet ached too much to continue.
Of course, I didn’t find it. After that day, I never tried again.
On the way back uptown, I faced the hard truth: during the night, I could allow myself to get lost in imaginary worlds and circumstances, but only then.
Knights are only in fairy tales. Magic boys aren’t real, I reminded myself. This isn’t a story. No one is coming to rescue us.
If I wanted things to be okay, I was going to have to make them that way, myself.
Until she came back to me.
Eight weeks after Patrick died, my mother walked out of her room for the first time, stood in front of the television set and told me she was going out.
She was wearing a fancy dress Patrick had bought for her, which was blue and off one shoulder. Her cashmere wrap was as perfectly placed as her hair, which was swept up with graceful tendrils falling just so, and her necklace, flipped to the gold side, glistened brilliantly in the light from the hallway. I started to speak, but she interrupted me.
“You’ve done enough. It’s my turn again, my darling. I have to take care of some things and then I will come back for you.”
“You’re leaving?” was all I could manage to say.
“You’ll be fine,” she assured me. “Remember what I taught you - stay in the middle of the pack - and you’ll be fine.”
“But-”
“ ‘From them all things proceed-’”
“Who is them?” I asked, confused that I didn’t recognize the quote at all.
“’Unto them all things must return,’” she finished, blowing me a kiss and walking out the door without another word.
Clayton came down after hearing the front door close and was surprised to see me sitting on the couch, open-mouthed.
“She went outside?” he asked in disbelief.
I swallowed hard and nodded. “She said she had to take care of some things and then she’ll be back.”
For me. I added silently in my head. She will be back. For me.
He considered my words for a time, staring at the door, then at me. I could see him debating in his head.
Only one year left, I thought at him silently. Then you are free. Don’t get involved now. Don’t challenge. Don’t make me fight you. Just let it go.
“Whatever,” he said finally, grabbing his violin case off the shelf. He was seventeen and over us. “I’ve got practice.”
Then he stomped out the front door.
I sat there in shock for a while before climbing the stairs and going into my bedroom for the first time in what felt like forever. It was dusty, but comfortable, my library with a bed. I spent a long time selecting just the right book. I fell asleep a few hours later, clutching a well-loved and worn copy of the Phantom Tollbooth, dreaming of speeding through city archways in a miniature car, then climbing impossible stairs, only to enter the gates of a palace in the sky, where everyone I met told me that I alone had the power to restore Reason and Rhyme to the world.
When I woke up, I was between the lions.
Want to read more?
You can get the first two books in this series at your fave bookseller:
Barnes & Noble
You can get the first two books in this series at your fave bookseller:
Barnes & Noble
TRUST Cover, Between Lions Series by Bestselling YA Author Jodi Baker
"Between Lions is the YA Series to follow!" -The New York Times
"Loved the mysticism and magic. World building made me want to jump in the fight alongside Anna. Must-Read YA & Recommended Romance List!" -USAToday
Watch your back for Were-animals. And liars. And voices in your head. Trust is a brilliant introduction to a series I can't wait to get to finish."
-Tina Brison, Librarian & Educator
“Baker created a fantastic world in the middle of urban New York City. Full of literary nods and historical and mythological details, TRUST is a treat for geeks, librarians, history and literature lovers. Great job creating strong female characters & portraying beautiful diverse characters!"
-Bookworms and Owls
“Mythological fantasy masterpiece. I couldn’t put it down.” -Amazon Reviewer
"Loved the mysticism and magic. World building made me want to jump in the fight alongside Anna. Must-Read YA & Recommended Romance List!" -USAToday
Watch your back for Were-animals. And liars. And voices in your head. Trust is a brilliant introduction to a series I can't wait to get to finish."
-Tina Brison, Librarian & Educator
“Baker created a fantastic world in the middle of urban New York City. Full of literary nods and historical and mythological details, TRUST is a treat for geeks, librarians, history and literature lovers. Great job creating strong female characters & portraying beautiful diverse characters!"
-Bookworms and Owls
“Mythological fantasy masterpiece. I couldn’t put it down.” -Amazon Reviewer
Bestselling Author Jodi Baker, creator of the Between Lions Series