Free White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi Page B

Sometimes I talk to her reflection instead of her, and she doesn’t seem to find anything strange in that. As a child, Lily had had the whole floor to herself.
    “Weren’t you scared?” Miri had asked.
    Lily shook her head. “I liked it. I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”
    Miri and I looked at each other. “Alive,” we said. “Alive like how?” I added.
    Lily laughed. “Alive like they were alive. They talked and moved and told me who I was. I’ll never forget.”
    “What did they say to you?” I can’t remember which of us asked that.
    “Lily Silver, you are more precious than gold,” Lily chanted, and she looked a little bit different, the lines of her face were finer, she looked like a drawing herself. Miri yawned.
    “Is that all they said?”
    “Yes.”
    “Booooooooooring.”
    Lily gave me a handful of notes to sign; I scrawled my name and passed them to Miri.
    “It was all I needed. I’m not even sure if they spoke out loud. I was very lonely. Nobody’s fault, though. I hate blame culture.”
    I didn’t say anything, but I knew what I thought; it was her mother’s fault for abandoning her. Babies get me down, but I’d seen photos of Lily as a baby and she looked robust and fun. There was a consciousness in her eyes that made her pudgy helplessness seem sarcastic. She looked as if she could easily have been adapted into an accomplice for many practical jokes. And she’d only been a year old. Our grandma Jennifer was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon) and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been.
    Miri and I wanted to know what they looked like, the people that Lily drew. Lily laid five stamps on her palm, licked them all in one go, and flicked them onto envelopes. “People,” she said. “Just . . . people. No one I’d ever seen. People I made up. They looked the way I felt they should look. I stuck them on my walls. In fact I left them there when I went to college; when I brought you two back to visit your GrandAnna here, I sort of expected the pictures to be still there.”
    “We used to visit? Here?”
    “We did, and your dad too. Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A . . . well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,” Lily said.
    “I remember,” my sister said. This was news. I stared at her but she didn’t look up from the cards on the floor in front of her. She dotted the
i
’s in her name with sharp hearts.
    Lily stretched her legs out in front of her and cricked her neck. “Oh yes? What do you remember, my Miranda?”
    “GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,” Miri said. She put her pen in her mouth, the inky end on her tongue, then hastily removed it when Lily narrowed her eyes.
    “Oh was it . . . was it like
the heraldic pelican
?” I said.
    Lily tugged my earlobe. “Let your sister speak.”
    “It was,” said Miri. “The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.”
    I looked at Lily. “I did say you wouldn’t remember,” Lily said, calmly. “I can’t think where you got that from.”
    Miri turned to me. “She rubbed it on our lips, Eliot, but you wiped it off.”
    “Er . . . I think I’d definitely remember that,” I said.
    “Miranda,” Lily said, and we knew she was getting annoyed because the music in her voice was stronger. “I did say you wouldn’t remember. You were three. You can’t remember everything.”
    “Her whole hand was covered with blood, and she had her hand over her face and we could see her looking through her fingers, and she got down between our beds and—”
    “There is nothing . . .