The applause is meant to sound sweeter to her ears. She’s meant to be proud, to be sitting straight and tall with a barely concealed smile—or maybe not concealed at all—and relishing the audience’s delight and enthusiasm. That’s the way this works, after all; it’s the greatest triumph imaginable, the climax of the story in a lot of ways, or at least of this part of the story, and she’s meant to feel that this is in a way her triumph too.
But it doesn’t, and she’s not, and the only thing Liliana feels is annoyance.
She masks it with a polite, empty smile and the least sarcastic clapping she can manage, and at least the cane gives her a plausible excuse for not joining in the standing ovation. Mentally, she pats herself on the back for the foresight to have brought it along, although she couldn’t exactly have done otherwise, not when she’d tried to use her health and fatigue as an excuse not to come at all. But Roger hadn’t insisted on much in the five years they’d been married, and while she could have convinced him otherwise, it would be…inconvenient if he remembered he really wanted her to come.
She should have put a stop to this years ago, she thinks as the lauding goes on around her. Moved into school districts that were cutting the arts rather than encouraging them, pushed him towards athletics, something. Maybe taught him at home like Mary did Gerard, or asked to have them taught together. At the very least, she should have paid better attention when Roger and Melanie tried to tell her what she missed. She’s always just assumed it’s a class like any other, something Martin gets middling grades in and skates by on by stammering and smiling awkwardly and trying really hard so people excuse things (she’s done her best to curtail that, to keep him from attracting too much attention from the Web, but it’s useful in a pinch so she lets some of it slide). When he said he was auditioning for…whichever program, something up in Edinburgh of all places…she assumed he would fail, badly, and it would be that much easier to convince him to stop wasting his time on schooling and go into helping with the books and…other things full time.
She didn’t know he was decent. More than decent. From the cheers of the crowd and the way the director spoke, he’s good.
Two solos. Two! Three if you count his director encouraging him to come out and perform his “audition piece” as an encore. Liliana isn’t sure if the program he somehow managed to get into is actually that impressive or if boys from this school don’t generally continue studying music when they get to their A-levels, but she’s definitely not going to be able to talk Martin into turning this down no matter how hard she tries.
Damn the luck. They were counting on him.
The murmur of the crowd starts up and people begin to move. Roger drops back into his seat next to her, beaming. “Wasn’t that a wonderful performance?”
“That’s the best one ever,” Melanie says enthusiastically from his other side.
Roger laughs. “You say that every time.”
“It’s always true.”
Roger pats Liliana’s hand. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t miss this one?”
Liliana returns his smile and squeezes his hand, and doesn’t answer. Roger is a good man. A good provider. She made a good choice when she picked him out of the group at the SPARK meeting, and his naivety is usually an asset. Once in a while, though, it’s just the teensiest bit irritating.
Melanie gives her a sharp look, just for a second—she always understands when Liliana is neither pleased with nor impressed by Martin—but Roger, sunshine incarnate, merely looks around the crowd. “It’s a shame Mary and Gerard couldn’t make it back in time for this.”
“Someone might have recorded it,” Melanie says. “I know it’s not the same, but at least G—they can hear it.”
Liliana suppresses the urge to roll her eyes, but Melanie’s right; Mary wouldn’t enjoy this any more than Liliana did. Too many people, too much noise, and nothing inspiring whatsoever about the music, plus she would only be sitting there getting progressively more irritated that Martin clearly wouldn’t be going into the business.
Unless something happens to his voice. Surely there’s something in one of Mary’s books…but that will take time and care. She’ll have to wait until Mary gets back, probably in early September, and discuss it more fully with her.
“Want me to go find Martin?” Melanie offers. “Then we can go get dinner or something.”
“Thank you, Melanie, but I will go get him,” Liliana tells her. “You go with your father to fetch the car, and we’ll meet you out front—will that be acceptable?”
A sudden look of confusion flits across Roger’s face. “Did we—we didn’t drive here. We…walked?”
Liliana’s smile is a bit more genuine as she pats Roger’s hand. She’s been noticing these little lapses in memory, and while she’s not above using them to her advantage when necessary, she is actually sympathetic to his struggles. “We did, dear, but I’m not going to be able to walk much longer, so why don’t you two go to the house and bring the car back, and then we can decide where we’d like to go out to eat? It’s a special occasion, after all.”
“Oh!” Roger looks relieved. “Of course, that’s a wonderful idea. You and Martin will be all right until we get back?”
Liliana laughs lightly. Roger probably can’t tell it’s forced. “I probably won’t even be able to get to him for all the well-wishers until you get back. Off you go, then.”
She waits until Melanie and Roger are out of sight before she stands up so that neither of them notice she doesn’t need the cane to do so, or to shuffle out of the row.
It’s not that she isn’t sick…well, diseased is probably a better word; corrupted fits best, really, but she shies away from using that word more than she has to. But she has good days and bad days, and while she admittedly has more bad days than good when Mary isn’t around to help with wards and rituals, this isn’t one of them. Or hasn’t been so far. She can feel her efforts beginning to fail, and she wasn’t exactly lying when she said she won’t be able to walk much longer. Still, she’s certainly not I’m afraid I’m not up to it tonight sick, and Roger and Melanie don’t need to know that.
She ignores the odd voice that seems to both whisper and shout in the back of her mind insisting that they do, actually, and begins making her way through the thinning crowd. For the first and only time, she wishes she had come to more of these concerts, not to hear Martin’s performances but so that people might recognize her as Martin’s mother. They look nothing alike—Martin looks more and more like his father every day, while she takes after her paternal grandmother, or so her father always insisted, you remind me of Mamusia—and of course she looks nothing like her stepdaughter. Roger doesn’t always make it to the concerts either, between his work and looking after her on her bad days, and without him or Melanie in tow, she’s…invisible.
She dislikes it. She dislikes it immensely. If she has to be here, she ought to be feted and lauded too, the mother of the evening’s star.
Then again, none of the people she passes seem to be talking about Martin specifically, so maybe he’s not as big a deal as the director wants people to think.
She finally finds Martin in a quiet alcove off to one side, his eyes bright and his smile somehow both shy and proud as he speaks to a woman almost as tall as he is, whipcord thin and very elegantly dressed, apricot-colored hair styled in a manner common to women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. She’s very nondescript, really, not particularly distinguishable from any other elderly woman in the crowd. Still, while Liliana can’t see her face, she immediately loathes her and wants her to be somewhere else.
Martin spots her over the woman’s shoulder, and surprise and delight flit across his face; he stayed after school to help get the auditorium ready, so this is the first time he’s seen her all day. “Mum! I didn’t know you were going to be coming…uh, ma’am, this is my mother, Liliana King. Mum, this is Mrs. Smith, she’s the one who told me about the program at Edinburgh.”
The woman turns around. Her lips tighten, very briefly; Liliana manages to keep a semblance of a pleasant smile on her own face. “Charmed. Martin, you should have told me you had solos.”
Why, so you could have made a better excuse? a bitter voice hisses in the back of her mind. She ignores it, mostly because it’s right, but it doesn’t need to be so judgmental about it.
“Oh, I…” Martin rubs the back of his neck, which, like his face, is slowly turning pink. “I, um, I didn’t want you to feel bad if you couldn’t make it.”
“Knowing that would have made no difference in my guilt levels,” Liliana says with perfect accuracy. She makes a quick, subtle gesture to ward off evil, possession, and the annoying little whisper that is calling her several rude names and adds, “Do you need to help with the cleanup, or put your music away? You’d best go do that. Then find out if Roger and Melanie are back with the car, there’s a good boy. I’ll wait for you here.”
“Of course, Mum.” Martin hesitates. “Do you want me to—there, um, the school office has wheelchairs you can borrow sometimes, for emergencies. Do you want me to see if there’s one available?”
“After you’ve finished the cleanup.” Liliana hates the idea, actually, but she has to admit she’s not going to make it to the front door under her own steam at this point, and being pushed in a hospital chair that probably has three flat tires and cracked vinyl that will pinch her in awkward places is going to be less of a humiliation than being carried in the arms of her fifteen-year-old son. “Go on, now. I’ll be fine until you get back.”
“Congratulations again, Martin.” The voice is low and slightly gravelly but very, very precise. Martin flushes a deeper shade of pink, mumbles his thanks, and escapes, leaving the two of them alone, Liliana leaning on her cane and the other woman with a chartreuse program in one hand and a tape recorder in the other.
“I told you to leave me alone,” Liliana says flatly.
Gertrude Robinson—excuse her, Mrs. Smith—raises one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “I was planning on it. You approached me. Besides, I assumed if you weren’t at his winter concert, you would hardly be bothered to attend this one.”
It would be a cheap shot if it wasn’t the absolute truth, but Liliana decides to be offended anyway. “You thought I would miss my own son’s last performance?”
“It won’t be his last by any means,” Gertrude says pointedly. She removes the smoked glasses, revealing her eyes—were they always that intensely green?—that are the only thing recognizable on her heavily made-up face. “His last in London, perhaps. If he has any sense, he’ll stay away.”
Because she cannot cross her arms petulantly over her chest, and for that reason only, Liliana regrets bringing her cane. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t think I need to tell you that, Liliana.” Gertrude’s eyes sharpen as she studies her. “You’re friends with Mary Keay—”
“That’s none of your business,” Liliana interrupts.
“I disagree, but nevertheless, that is hardly the point. You work at Pinhole Books. You know what is out there. Don’t lie to me. I tell you, I Know.” Gertrude purses her lips briefly. “You’re too close to Them.”
“That is also none of your business.”
This time, Gertrude ignores her. “Martin is a child. He is too young to decide to be bound to the Fourteen, and you have no right to make those promises for him until he’s able to make the decision—isn’t that why you refused to have him baptized despite your mother-in-law’s insistence?”
Anger flares in Liliana’s chest. “Have you been stalking me?”
“Keeping an eye on you,” Gertrude says frostily. “I have obeyed your expressly stated wishes and left you alone, but that does not mean I was prepared to leave you to face the Fourteen unguarded.”
“I’m not,” Liliana boasts. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?” Static crackles on the air, and Liliana’s bones ache. She grips the head of the cane and presses her lips together as the feeling accelerates from gradual to rapid.
She’s come to think of it as the Hollowing. The sensation that her stomach has been removed with an ice cream scoop, that her bones have melted into paper straws, that her head could float away. Usually it’s the stomach first, then the skeletal system, and she can usually stop it before it goes to her head, but the effort of not answering the compulsion forces the marrow from her bones and leaves her weak and light. Martin had damn well better hurry up with the chair.
Gertrude looks suddenly contrite. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then opens them and looks at her seriously. “Liliana. I am addressing you on a professional level, not a personal one. The path you are on is dangerous, and it will not lead you where you want. Step off it while you still can.”
Liliana almost wants to laugh and point out that she can barely walk, but she doesn’t. “I will take that under advisement, Archivist.”
Gertrude scans her face. “And if I said it was also on a personal level?”
Liliana smiles sweetly. “Then I would tell you where you can shove it, Mother.”
“Yes.” Gertrude sighs. “I rather thought that might be your response. Well. I can’t say I haven’t tried.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve tried so hard,” Liliana says sarcastically.
“What do you want from me, Liliana?” Gertrude demands. “You asked to be left alone. I complied. You cannot say now that I was never there for you if—”
“You weren’t there for me before I told you to leave me alone,” Liliana snaps. “You turned up in my life on my eleventh birthday, calling me daughter, telling me—”
“I would have told you why I left, if you had given me the option,” Gertrude says, and it’s obvious they’re related; if they have nothing else in common, their tones of voice are identical. “Telling you now would do no good, but whether you believe it or not, I have always tried to protect you. And if you will not accept it, then I will transfer that to my grandson.”
Liliana narrows her eyes. “You told him that, did you?”
“I have not,” Gertrude says, surprising her. “For the same reason I left you with your father. It’s safer for you both if no one knows of our…connection. There are people—things—that would try to use you against me.”
“Unsuccessfully, I’m sure.”
Gertrude lets out a soft bark of laughter with no humor in it. “It seems we have more in common than you like to believe, don’t we?”
“And what is that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“It means that if the furtherance of your goals comes at the cost of someone you care about—or claim to care about, at any rate—you won’t hesitate to make that sacrifice. If you can call it that, since a sacrifice does imply that the loss means something to you. I don’t believe for a second you think of Martin as anything other than a possession.”
“He’s talented,” Liliana shoots back. “If you’ve truly been watching us all this time, you know that. He has a gift for this kind of work.” She sneers. “What kind of mother would I be if I let him squander it on music?”
“The kind of mother who recognizes that he has other talents as well, and is choosing for himself which ones he wants to nurture. Which, as I understand it, is considered ‘a good parent’. Alastair understood that, which was why he took the raising of you. I don’t know that I could have made the right calls about your life back then, even if I had believed the things I fought—fight—against would have let either of you live if they had known that you were precious to me.” Gertrude straightens and slides the smoked glasses back onto her face. “Remember what I have said, Liliana. And if you know what’s best, let Martin go. I do love you, despite what you believe, but I will not hesitate to retaliate if you prevent him from choosing his own destiny.” With that, she strides out of the room, leaving Liliana shaking and seething.
Martin returns a minute later without a chair, apologetic and worried. He wisely doesn’t comment on Gertrude’s absence, instead offering Liliana his arm. At least he doesn’t offer to carry her. She concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other, on making it out of the school without passing out, and on making it through dinner without it being obvious that she is both hurting and angry. Martin notices, of course, and is full of contrition for having made her suffer just to see him perform.
Liliana surprises herself by telling him that it isn’t his fault at all.
Later that night, lying in bed beside her husband and in too much pain to sleep, she stares at the ceiling and broods. There are several ways she could prevent Martin from leaving without actually preventing him. Perhaps if she tells him about the talisman, tells him that she sacrificed her own strength for him and that it’s been extracting payment one drop of blood at a time—probably not the truth but one of the best explanations she can come up with—he might stay of his own free will. That she manipulated him is immaterial. Or maybe it won’t be and Gertrude will come after her. Mary laughs at her, but Liliana knows her well enough to know it’s a front, and that she’s actually deeply afraid of her.
Maybe what she should start with is getting rid of Gertrude Robinson. Then she can focus on keeping Martin close, and then she can get well, and finally have everything she’s always wanted.
She considers summoning Kieran to ask his opinion—and then doing the opposite of what he suggests—but decides against it. Not tonight, not with everyone sleeping. Perhaps Monday when Roger goes to work and Melanie and Martin have school. For tonight, she’ll have to be alone with her thoughts.
She could have worse company.