Still, some kind of grudging loyalty had made Tamara turn in her dancing shoes, get Phyllis into Dev’s old car, and bring them up here to wait out the winter. It was more than she’d done for anyone else in her life, a kindness so new it still felt stiff and scratchy against her skin. Giving a cousin someplace to stay for a few weeks was one thing; for Pea, she’d given up the Pelican, the city. She couldn’t regret the choice, but faced with the stark reality of this small house with its peeling wallpaper and old-fashioned furniture and antiquated heating, she comforted herself with liquor. At least she could use her cards for good here. Someone had to; those hands needed taming.
After midnight, she poured a third glass of wine and started a very specific reading. Not for Phyllis, which Tamara had done dozens of times before, but for her hands.
She’d never thought to do that before. The oracle judged her own lack of imagination.
One card, cut, second card, cut, third card.
She opened her eyes. Seven-two-seven. The interpretation came nearly as quickly: seven of diamonds for luck, upright or in reverse, you couldn’t tell with the diamonds because there were no numerals printed on the cards. In the first position, it was a neutral beginning. But then came two, an inversion, spades pointed at the earth. And then seven again, seven of hearts: luck, but also courage in reverse, hearts falling down.
The hands had begun with all the luck in the world, poised neutrally between the sky and the earth—heaven and hell, if you like, though that wasn’t quite it—but over time, unused, or used for evil purpose, their destiny had been left to rot. The luck, and the power that moved it all, had turned on its once chosen vessel. The crisis embodied in the spades found its resolution in the falling hearts. They spoke of one last chance to stop the corruption, but the heart had failed the hands.
Lost, everything that the vessel had once dreamed of being.
The oracle put down the deck, though she left the cards, and the story they told, open on the table.
Tamara lifted her glass. She trembled, and the liquid splashed onto the wood. She wiped it with her sleeve, unthinking.
“The heart failed the hands,” she whispered, looking at nothing, anywhere but the numbers.
She thought of Phyllis sleeping upstairs, of that dreaming child in her belly, of the hands that had once been the terror of Manhattan and now just terrorized this lonely house. Those hands still longed for killing justice, but the man they wanted to reach was already dead.
Phyllis had killed so many, killed hundreds if you believed the whispers at the Pelican. Tamara did not know the details—she had tried not to hear—but she knew that Dev had killed Victor, at the end, and he would only have done such a thing to spare Phyllis.
“The heart failed the hands,” Tamara repeated, and swallowed. “Or the hands never gave one goddamn for her heart…”
There was more, she felt it. That baby, squatting inside Pea, drinking down dreams and spitting them up like poison. She scooped up the numbers in one smooth motion and shuffled. She laid out a star pattern. Left foot first: six of clubs. Right foot: six of diamonds. Seven of clubs and ace of spades, the left and right arms. And for the crown, the angel joker. The child herself, as close as breath. Wreathed in sixes and sevens, bound with clubs and spades. Her hands were strong, but fading. The curse had got to her. She felt the weight of the mother’s hands. Smelled the blood on them, rotting, like the floor of a butcher’s shop. Smelled something else, too—hair grease and Russian dumpling soup. Victor. There had been a curse, hadn’t there? A curse on the father and the mother. But they were the same thing, the curse and the rot, they fed one another. The poison was choking both mother and child. They wouldn’t survive it. The moment that baby tried to come into the world with her pulsing saint’s hands, the power would burn them clean. The mother wouldn’t survive it.
The mother—Phyllis—Pea—
How do I save her?
The answer was in the crown: the angel joker, tricky but merciful. Take it on yourself, young oracle. Bring that corruption over to you and free them both of its taint. Oh, sure, then you have to live with it: that burning anger of the saints without the hands to compensate, Victor grinning silver at you from over the breakfast table for the rest of your life, nightmares. Enough to drive you to drink and an early death. But you could do it. You could take it on for Pea’s sake.
Or you could leave it alone and let that bloody legacy strangle itself.
A log cracked in the stove. Tamara jerked upright and into her body. She found herself looking through the window above the kitchen sink, the one that opened onto the garden. Just beyond her own warm reflection, she thought she saw—she might have seen—
—a silver head and two button eyes, smiling.
Mrs. Grundy woke her up with the pointed toe of one black boot, thrust gently but firmly into Tammy’s lower right ribs. She grimaced against sudden awareness—the press of the noon sun against her eyelids, the chill of the kitchen floor, the acrid aftertaste of two bottles of Bordeaux and a bit of … ashes? Oh yes, she had forgotten the reefer. She groaned,
