Chapter Text
The room became cooler and quieter. Orla shut her eyes tightly and let her head drop on her breast. And started singing in a high, melodic voice.
“Я кажи ми, облаче ле бяло,
отде идеш, де си ми летяло?
Не видя ли бащини ми двори
и не чу ли майка да говори... ” [1]
Blue shivered.
“She’s here, Joseph. You can talk to her,” Calla whispered.
“I wanted to… I mean… Hello?” he stammered and stared at Orla. It wasn’t that hard to imagine someone’s spirit in the room. It was a lot more difficult to imagine it inside another human being. “I wanted to talk to you, because… Does she hear me?”
Orla hummed back.
“Keep going, Joseph,” Blue prompted.
“Because I haven’t talked to you for a very long time. Because we haven’t talked since we moved to Henrietta. You have always been… Not here. Either high or with someone you brought home. High more often than not recently. And I needed to get used to the fact that you weren’t present in my life, but you died and I still can’t get used to it and I was thinking…”
“What were you thinking, Joseph?” Orla asked sweetly and so unlike her real self.
“I was thinking that… Since you died… Since you died and got sober… Maybe you could remember that… That…”
The door opened and closed behind Joseph’s back. Blue startled. Everyone in the house knew that the closed door to the reading room meant that the room was not to be entered and if someone broke the rule…
But no. Nothing bad had happened. It was Ronan. He didn’t say anything. He regarded everyone gathered around the table, took a step forward and placed his hands on Joseph’s shoulders. Kavinsky didn’t look back. Blue noticed him stiffen for a moment and then slowly lean back to the touch. And then - then and not while he was talking, as there was nothing surprising to her about the things that he or any other visitors of 300 Fox Way were saying - she saw that he was capable of vulnerability.
“Go on, boy,” Calla said. It was not an easy task to match the word ‘boy’ to Joseph Kavinsky, but Blue found herself succeeding bit by bit.
“I was thinking that maybe you will remember that you loved me once. And that you will explain to me why you stopped. My aunt loved me. She came when you… Proko’s mom loved me. But not you. And I don’t understand, why.”
It was quiet for a few seconds, for half a minute, for longer. Joseph was looking down at the candle and was biting his bottom lip. Orla was silent and suddenly Blue thought that she was going to keep silent and if Kavinsky had a heart, and the way Ronan was holding him suggested that there was a heart or something alike inside his chest, it would break and never be whole again. Blue tried to imagine not being loved by her mother. She couldn’t.
“Шегуваш ли се?” [2]
Joseph looked up and leaned forward. So far forward as possible with Orla and Calla holding his hands and Ronan gripping his shoulders. Like this, he resembled a dark grim picture yet to be painted based on a dark grim myth yet to be told. The picture’s name could be ‘Grief’ or ‘Death’, ‘Premonition of grief’ or ‘Premonition of death.’
“Why? You really don’t remember, why? Joseph, you set our house on fire. And then you started doing it several times a week. We had to move, if you don’t remember that as well, when our neighbours started suspecting you were going mad or got possessed by the devil.”
“That was an accident. It’s not the…”
“Was your father’s death an accident, too, Joseph?”
Blue stifled a gasp. She was used to gossips around Joseph Kavinsky’s name and dismissed most of them as being surreal. This one in her opinion was one of the craziest ones.
“How did you… What…” he exhaled and said nothing else. Blue was searching his face for fear, anger, denial or anything else expected from a person just accused of murder by a ghost. But she found only pain. She got trapped in the absurdity of it all.
“How? Не ме приемай за глупак, кученце. [3] Your father aims his gun at you and doesn’t wake up the next morning, dead by natural causes, кучи син [4] dead by ‘natural causes’, my ass, Joseph,” she huffed with contempt. “You know what? I wanted to leave you there. At an orphanage. You know why I didn’t do it?”
Blue saw the knuckles of his fingers go white. It was better to not know sometimes. You won’t see a thing if you are not looking. You won’t get an answer if you are not asking. Tarot reading is a possibility. Séance leaves no place for a compromise.
“You know, why?”
“No,” he answered dully.
“Because I thought that you would kill me too. And then, not long ago, someone told me that you died. I had a party. I thought that I would get higher than hell to forget my old life and would start over in the morning. But I didn’t wake up and you, seemingly, did. Съжалявам. [5]”
“Mom… I would never have laid my finger on you, you know that…”
“Joseph, I don’t think I knew anything about you. Listen, I don’t want you to contact me ever again. We talked, that’s amazing. There is a saying, ‘rest in peace’. That’s what I’m up to now.”
All warmth returned to the room. Orla shrugged, straightened her back and opened her cloudy eyes.
“That was nice,” she yawned and briskly withdrew her hands from Calla and Joseph and raised them up for a stretch.
“I’m going to be sick,” Joseph whispered but didn’t move.
“Third door on the left,” Calla answered, used to the reaction. “Blue, show him the way and take the money.”
He ran to the bathroom and slammed the door in Blue’s face. She muttered something about his ingratitude and retreated to the kitchen to make some tea. The house buzzed with life. Calla went upstairs. Orla got out to sit on the porch in the afternoon sun. Somewhere, the phone was ringing. Ronan knocked at the bathroom door and said something Blue couldn’t decipher and repeated the words until the lock clicked and Joseph let him inside and closed the door again. The water was running.
Blue took out a pack of a chamomile tea and poured the water into a cup with a bouquet of tulips and a small, almost invisible crack on its handle. The tea was supposed to calm the nerves, as the inscription promised. She wasn’t sure Joseph Kavinsky had had a drop of tea in his mouth for the past ten years but maybe that was exactly what he needed, now and in general.
They got out a few minutes later. Blue peered out of the kitchen not to miss them and waved at Ronan.
“Hey. I made some tea. Wait for Gansey with me,” she asked and returned to the kitchen, not waiting for an answer. She knew that if you didn’t wait for an answer, you were unlikely to hear ‘no’. Ronan came after her and raised his eyebrow, looking at the cup in the middle of the table.
“I’m not drinking it,” he snarled. Tea at 300 Fox Way was legendary.
“It’s not for you. It’s for calming the nerves. Chamomile is a flower that…”
“I know what a chamomile is, for fuck’s sake,” Joseph snapped, but sat down anyway and wrapped his hands around the cup. His eyes were glassy and his eyelids were reddish. He looked like Blue’s classmates did when they had just been crying over some bad mark. She was surprised at herself for not being surprised at his presumable tears. Joseph took several gulps and held out the cup to Ronan, but he only shook his head.
Blue was left wondering how many gestures betraying their feelings towards each other she had already missed.
“You should go with me. I know that you told Gansey that it was bullshit, Ronan, but it is going to be fun,” she blurted out and straightened her iridescent skirt nervously. Joseph frowned in a way that Ronan usually did. In this short moment Blue couldn’t but like him. “Really. You could dress as… Something nice, for a change.”
“Or I could just wear your shades and your stupid chain and pretend to be you.”
“I’m not giving you my shades and my stupid chain, Ronan Lynch, you will have to dream them up yourself. And don’t fuck it up this time,” Joseph curled his lip, challenging him.
“And you?”
“There’s nothing hard about dreaming up your shitty ‘Squash 1’ T-shirt and your leather bands. I’ve done that before.”
“You should hurry, Gansey is going to be here in five minutes,” Blue interrupted and Kavinsky took two bright pills out of his pocket and threw one across the table.
“See you on the other side then, Lynch?”
“Always.”
The phone kept ringing. Blue carefully pulled an empty cup from Joseph’s hands and rinsed it. He woke up first. In a black ‘Squash 1’ T-shirt, with five leather bands and a familiar Ronan’s smirk on his face. Blue nodded at him, approving his looks. He nodded back.
But she noticed something else, too. Tiny letters in a handwriting so similar to Ronan’s that it might have been his after all went down from his temple to his cheekbone, forming a word.
Lover.