Wild Swans - Jessica Spotswood Page 0,3

feet beneath me. “Is that all you wanted to talk about? The way you looked, I thought it was something dire.”

“Actually…” He clears his throat. Drums his fingers on the armrest. The back of my neck prickles; it isn’t like him to hem and haw. “I heard from your mother today.”

“My—mother?” The word feels foreign on my tongue, like one you read in books and know how to spell but never learn to pronounce.

I must have misheard. Granddad hasn’t talked to my mother in years. She signed away her rights to me when I was four, and he hasn’t been in touch with her since.

Has he?

The lamp flickers back on. It illuminates the tired slump of his shoulders, the crow’s feet perching next to his blue eyes. “Erica called me at the office. She… Well, the gist of it is that she’s being evicted from her apartment and needs a place to stay. She asked to come home. I told her that I had to talk to you first, but I don’t see how we can say no.”

She left before I was two years old. Got pregnant again, dropped out of college, ran off with her boyfriend to New York City, and hasn’t looked back since. Not once. Granddad says it’s impossible for me to remember her, but I do. I think I do. White-blond hair and a smoky alto.

“I could say no.” I click off the flashlight. “She needs a place to stay, so suddenly she remembers we exist? That’s bullshit. That’s not how family works.”

I’ve never gotten a birthday card from her. Not a single Christmas present.

Granddad sighs, pinching the bridge of his long nose. Same nose as mine. What did I inherit from my mother? Her height? Her mouth? There are so few pictures from when she was my age.

Maybe she took them with her.

Or maybe she threw them away. Maybe she didn’t want the memories any more than she wanted us.

When I was little, I prayed for her to come home.

But I’m seventeen now, and this is way too little, way too late.

“I know,” Granddad says. He’s the one who raised me to believe that family is everything: duty and love and legacy. “But we have to think about your sisters.”

“Sisters?” I clutch the flashlight, knuckles white. “More than one?”

“Came as a surprise to me too. Isobel is fifteen. Grace”—his voice wobbles. That was Grandmother’s name—“is six.”

I’ve got sisters. Two of them. I wonder if they are perfect little Milbourn girls with marvelous talents. I wonder if they know that I exist.

“I know this won’t be easy for you, Ivy. It won’t be easy for me either. But Erica and her husband are getting divorced, and she lost her job, and she needs a place to stay. It took a lot for her to ask. I couldn’t turn her away.” He avoids my eyes and fiddles with his big, silver watch.

Those are his tells. Granddad is a terrible poker player.

“You already said yes,” I realize. “When are they coming?”

“Saturday.”

That’s four days from now. I run my fingers through my long hair, catching at the tangles. “I see.” My voice is frosty.

“It’s only temporary. Just till she can earn some money and get back on her feet. I’m sure she’ll want to get the girls back to their schools in September.”

“September? But that’s the whole summer!”

And this summer was supposed to be perfect.

Every summer, Granddad signs me up for activities: writing camp up at the college or watercolors at the Arts League or a production of Oklahoma at the Sutton Theater. This year I put my foot down: no classes. I’m volunteering at the library and I’ll be swimming every day. I need this, I told Granddad—a real summer. A break before senior year and all its pressures: captaining the swim team, copyediting the yearbook, taking three AP classes, and applying for college. And most of all (though I didn’t say this part) I am desperate for a break from the restless, relentless search for my talent.

Granddad agreed, as long as I promised to submit some of my poems for publication.

How am I supposed to relax with my mother and newfound sisters living here all summer long.

“Can she do that?” I ask. “Take them out of New York? Their dad won’t mind?”

“I don’t get the sense that Isobel has a relationship with her father, and Grace’s dad—” Granddad clears his throat, avoiding my gaze again. “They don’t live in New York. Haven’t for a while. They’re over