Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [85]
“Why don’t you contact her?” I said, interrupting her, afraid my name was next. “She lives so close. Riverton’s just a few hours away.”
Mandarin snorted. “She abandoned me when I needed her. So now that she wants me, why should I make it easy for her? She deserves to wait.”
I ran my fingers over the gritty surface of the stone floor, thinking about Momma. After the incident that morning, I could no longer deny it: she had tried to reach out to me over the years, in various, mostly misguided ways. But I’d ignored her efforts. I’d wanted to punish her, just like Mandarin did her mother.
“But for how long?” I wondered.
Mandarin shrugged impatiently. “She could make more of an effort than arrowheads. What the fuck’s that about? Like, embracing my maternal heritage?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s about how you’ve hurt each other. They’re weapons, after all.”
“When did you get so damn wise about mother-daughter relationships?”
My turn to shrug.
“That reminds me.” Shifting forward, I reached into my back pocket and withdrew the arrowhead I’d salvaged from the baby pool. “I shouldn’t keep this—it’s not right.”
Mandarin accepted it. She held it up, but there wasn’t enough light to make it glow.
“I don’t want her to know how messed up I am,” she whispered.
And then it all made sense.
Mandarin wasn’t just afraid of failing herself. She didn’t want to fail her mother.
That was what kept her in school. That was why she clung to her hopes of graduating, as impossible as she made it for herself.
I knew her failing wasn’t my fault. It would have taken someone a thousand times stronger to force Mandarin to finish a single math assignment on her own, let alone complete a service project for the community she hated. But even so, my chest ached for her. Like the first time I’d seen her with a man, I wished for the power to destroy whatever monster made her sabotage herself.
If one even existed. Maybe it was Mandarin’s official mythological creature.
“Mandarin …” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. “It’s getting kind of stuffy in here. Want to go out on top?”
When she nodded, I led the way, following a staircase of boulders to my lookout above the Tombs. The river reflected the colors of the sky. It looked like a gulch of molten lava. I heard the high-pitched whoop of night birds in the snarled vegetation bordering both banks. Beside me, Mandarin tapped the head of her jackalope.
“Where do you think those other animal heads went?”
“Maybe they’re tangled up in the tree roots somewhere, or stuck up against a beaver dam. Or maybe they sank.…” I glanced at Mandarin’s face. “But I’m sure they made it. Round the bend to the Missouri River.”
“The Missouri? I thought the Bighorn went into the Colorado River.”
“Apparently the Bighorn flows north,” I explained. “I read it in my history book. That almost never happens—most rivers flow south. It’s actually pretty amazing. So they’d end up in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. But who cares, right? An ocean’s an ocean.”
Though when I pictured the elk head bobbing out at sea, slapped by waves, it wasn’t a much better image than it being jammed among the other heads in the brush downriver. At least that way it wouldn’t be alone.
“Mandarin,” I began. “There’s something I just don’t get. You say the people here are one of the main reasons you want to escape. If not the only reason. But do you really think people are different outside of Washokey? What if you leave, only to find more of the same? Where’s there to go after that?”
Mandarin stared out at the river.
“Maybe it’s just your way of looking at them,” I added.
“Maybe you’re right.” Her voice shook. “Maybe I can’t be happy anywhere.”
Her tears looked like garnets in the light of the sunset. My heart broke. I closed the space between us, pressing myself up against her, placing my hand atop hers. It felt fragile, like a broken bird. For how strong she could be, how angry, how violent, how manipulative,