Cold Spell

insisted Kai tuck one into his sock each time he left, so he’d be protected even away from her fortress of charms. More than once, Kai removed it at school to contribute to the cost of a candy bar at the vending machine.

On the couch, Kai frowns—we’re trying to work out how to personalize the funeral service. “We could sing that song.” He coils his fingers around my hair, which is spread out across the pillow in his lap. I look up at him and raise an eyebrow. “You know,” he says. “That old one she sang all the time, the Kelly one—‘Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y, has—’ ”

“Oh god, now it’s stuck in my head,” I groan, curling in and covering my face with my hands.

“What? She loved it. We could sing it in rounds at the funeral,” he says, laughing a little. The sound seems to throw him; he swallows the happiness down, then speaks. “Maybe I should just play the violin.”

I pause. “I think she’d really like that.”

Kai looks at me—there are still red spots under his eyes from crying earlier. “Thank you, Ginny,” he says quietly. “I know she wasn’t your favorite person.”

“I wasn’t her favorite either,” I remind him.

“No one was her favorite,” Kai adds. “Let’s be honest. She was mean. And I think a little racist.”

“She is going to haunt the hell out of you if you keep talking like this,” I say.

“Yeah, well… she was. Is it wrong I loved her anyway?”

“No,” I say firmly. “Not at all. You’re family.” I say that like I understand the misery on Kai’s face, but to be honest, I think only losing him could make me look that way.

We’re silent for a long time.

“When is your aunt getting here?” I ask. Kai’s aunt is related by marriage and met Grandma Dalia only a handful of times. Still, she was supposed to show up and help Kai with the mountain of paperwork piling up—life insurance forms, credit card debts, estate taxes.

“I’m not sure,” Kai answers. “She said today, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.” He glances at the window—it’s still snowing heavily, the cold seeping in through the pane that cracked while the paramedics were here. We repaired it as best we could with duct tape, but it felt a little like taping up a leak on a submarine.

Kai shivers and looks back to me. “You don’t think my aunt will miss the funeral, do you? I’m worried.” Kai was the center of Grandma Dalia’s universe; this is his first time being alone among stars. I imagine it’s jarring, having your world change so fast, and I’m oddly grateful that my parents distanced themselves from me a little at a time, farther and farther away from the center, until I was barely in their orbit.

“Let’s just figure out the music,” I suggest, avoiding his question. “Work that out, and then we’ll start worrying about your aunt after dinner.”

“Right. Dinner. I’m not hungry,” Kai says, seeming confused that meals are still a thing.

“Get hungry,” I say firmly. “Because every old lady in the building has brought over a casserole. Anyway. Music—we’re figuring out music.”

“Okay—what if I can’t play tomorrow?” Kai says. He swallows. “What if I’m not able? If I’m too…”

Sad.

I nod and think for a moment. “Then we should have a backup plan,” I say. “And I think I know where to look.” I hurry to the kitchen, nearly sliding on the beat-up rug on the linoleum, There it is, on the shelf above the oven, wedged between a statue of a chicken and a dozen editions of the annual Southern Living cookbook.

I pause. I shouldn’t touch it. It’s not mine. It’s not Kai’s, even. It’s Grandma Dalia’s, even in death, and she was never crazy about Kai and I looking at it. I inhale, raise a hand, and slowly, gently tug it down. It’s a book—her cookbook, she called it, spattered with age. The cloth binding is so worn that it’s missing entirely around the top of the spine and the corners, and it’s misshapen due to all the clippings, photos, and dried four-leaf clovers I know are inside.

“Good idea,” Kai says behind me. We sit on opposite sides of the tiny kitchen table, and it feels every bit as weird as holding the book—there are only two chairs, which was Grandma Dalia’s excuse as to why I could never eat dinner with them. Kai offered to give up his seat each time he asked me to stay; she wouldn’t allow that. I slide the book across the table into Kai’s waiting palms as I remember her words. “You’re not giving your seat to that neighbor child.” It feels strange now, to just take a seat at the table when for so long one wasn’t offered.

The cookbook flops open easily to a page in the middle, one that’s marked by a thick collection of magazine clippings, stuck together with a paperclip. This page is still mostly blank, though I suspect it’s the only one of its kind. Most of the book is packed with recipes, quotes, and inspirational sayings. But there are pages, several dozen or so, that are very different. Pages of charms. Of warnings. Descriptions of beasts, of their teeth and claws. Grandma Dalia gathered information on them from all sorts of people—psychics, scholars, hoboes—and wrote it all down, as if she planned on writing a book on her paranoia.

When Kai and I were small we loved this section. We’d sneak into the kitchen, pull the book down, and stare at these pages with delighted fear. Descriptions of creatures that ate children, lured them into the forest, broke into their homes—sometimes men, sometimes wolflike, but always terrifying. There was a map of the country, faded with time, on which Grandma Dalia had drawn thick lines, defining the territories of the beasts: their world, laid atop ours.

Grandma Dalia would inevitably catch us. Her expression was always the same one she gave me and Kai when she found us mesmerized by the body of a dead cat on Seventh Street—horror and disgust. This is serious. This isn’t for play. You’d best learn to mind the beasts, or they’ll come for you.

Yet we’d always sneak into the kitchen again, stare at the pictures, and reenact the horrors described on the page in our play. We had to take turns playing the beast. Just seeing the images for the first time in a few years rushes memories back to me; Kai looks up at me and smiles a little.

“Maybe we can just tell these at the funeral. The world’s worst bedtime stories.”

I laugh a little at how inappropriate it would be. “Careful, Kai,” I say, trying to sound serious. “Mind the Snow Queen.” The Snow Queen doesn’t have a page full of scribbles and sketches like the other beasts do; her page is the blank one in the center of the book. I could never tell if Grandma Dalia didn’t know much about the beasts’ ruler or if she was just too afraid to write it all down.

Kai chuckles, raps his fingers against the book, and flips the page. “I can’t tell what she’d be madder about—how wrong it would be to use a scary bedtime story as her eulogy, or the fact that I’m telling everyone about the beasts. Though I guess she doesn’t need to worry about anyone thinking she’s crazy anymore. So… she’s got that going for her, at least.” The sadness is still in Kai’s voice, underneath the joke, but it feels good to hear him push it aside at least for a moment.

“And she doesn’t need to worry about the beasts, period,” I add.

“True. Though she was never really worried for herself. She was worried for me. Like the whole world was waiting to eat me up.” He rolls his eyes but then gets quiet. “I should have come back down when it was snowing, even if it got us in trouble. You know the snow was the worst for her. She must have been so scared for me. She probably died—”

“Knowing you were fine. She saw you before she died,” I cut him off. He swallows, and in the silence our eyes simultaneously wander to the window. How is it still snowing? It’s over a foot now, record-breaking, I think. When he looks back at me he smiles a little, though it seems as if the expression’s only purpose is keeping him from crying.

“It looks like it’s just me and you,” he says, and manages a small laugh. “You’re the only family I have now.”

I trail my hands down to his and smile as he lifts my palms to kiss them gently. Kai has felt like my only family for ages; I’m relieved that he sees me the same way now.

“You know I’m in love with you, right, Ginny?” He’s looking at my knuckles, running his thumb across them. His eyes flicker to mine. It’s the first time he’s said it aloud, or at least, aloud and meant it like this. “I’ve always been in love with you.”

“I know,” I whisper, and he smiles, leans forward, and kisses me. I lift out of my chair and move to him; he pulls me down into his lap and wraps his arms around me. My fingertips curl at the nape of his neck, and when we break away he finds my eyes and is silent for a long time. He exhales, reaches up, and tucks my hair behind my