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In New York she catches spiders in wine glasses, and leaves them on the windowsill in meager autumn sun. There they try, in silence, to escape, feeling carefully along the edges of the glass, scrabbling against it with the ends of spindly legs and nervously closing maxillae, scenting the air. After a day or so they settle into hunched quiet against the glass, as though it affords them some measure of protection, and stay there until their legs curl up beneath them and they die. They’re so small in her palms, afterward. Little curled legs and tiny furred mouths, black eyes too small to see her reflection in.
When she’s done looking, India opens the window and brushes them out onto the street, casual as you please.
Is one death worse than another? She thinks of all those birds, of the moments their hearts stopped and their worlds collapsed around the bullet that tore them to pieces. But it hardly seems the done thing to stuff her uncle, or that policeman. Or the boy from the diner, who looked at her the way Whip Taylor once did.
So she doesn’t keep trophies. But she remembers just the same.
Her mother calls her once, late in the evening. “The house is so empty now,” she says. “Come home.” Her voice is slow and soft with drink, but India can’t tell if she means it or not. It doesn’t matter.
“Don’t call me again,” India says. She hangs up.
From the corner of the room, near the window, Charlie tilts his head and smiles.
“India,” he says. He sounds pleased at such casual cruelty, as though she is something he has formed, as though she hadn’t spent the first eighteen years of her life unaware of his existence. And yet, she bears his mark as surely as she bears that of her father. It’s in her blood, in his blood too, whatever this is that makes her this way. A lifetime spent staring out warped glass windows, a childhood spent up trees and down in the long grass. The house had been a halcyon world all her own, seamless and self-contained as a snow globe. But it is no longer everything she knows.
“What,” she says, voice flat, brow arched. “Don’t you ever say anything else?”
He lies beside her in bed that night, fingertips ghosting just above her skin. A conservator’s touch. The touch of a man who’s afraid he’s dreaming. His breath is cool and he never puts a hand on her, but she comes anyway, gasping and twisting in the sheets.
She goes out, but only on occasion. She is still unused to the mad rush of city life, and prefers to stare out at the pulse of blood in the steel skyscrapers around her, to breathe, to breathe, to breathe. New York will never be her home, but she can fit here, among the towers and bridges and the men in suits, the women in heels as expensive as her own. She does not try to scrub her childhood from her skin or voice, the way Charlie had, and it makes people treat her differently. Men in bars, women in clubs, the older gentleman who handles her accounts at the bank. But she has read more books than anyone she knows, even Charlie, and she can slip masks off and on as it pleases her. She can play a coy young woman, a seductress, an heiress, a damsel in distress.
She wears her dark hair, a green dress, pulled close against her hips and then hanging soft against her thighs. The earrings are her mother’s, the shoes her uncle’s, the belt her father’s - but the dress is hers.
Under his clothes Charlie is as perfect as he is when fully dressed. Neat curves of muscle, slender and fit. He folds his trousers and lays them on the chair, and then does up all the buttons of his shirt. He lays her glasses on top, artfully angled toward the bed. And then he turns. Stops. His eyes shine in the violet city dark and she can see herself in them, distorted and pale.
“India,” he says. His voice is low and solemn and dark.
She takes off her belt.