why in a dreamy sort of way. I’d been drawing it for weeks now. There was a wide grassy center

and a stone altar, and she appeared between the veils of mist. Her achingly beautiful heart-shaped

face, a few long ringlets escaping to bob against her cheeks. She wore black capris and a white button-down, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back. The cut of the clothes somehow said “old.”

You could just tell she wanted to iron her hair flat and do some macramé.

She held malaika, the slightly curving wooden swords, with sweet natural grace. One of them made

a half-circle, so sharp you could hear the air being cut. Perched atop the altar, her Keds shuffling as

she stepped back and the swords made a complicated pattern, she was a deadly beautiful bird

mantling its wings.

“Straighten your leg,” Christophe said from the shadow under the wall on the right. The sunlight

was a physical weight, golden-grainy like old honey. His eyes burned blue, and he watched her critically, his eyebrows pulled together.

Each time I saw him, it was as if I’d forgotten how well his face worked together, every angle and

line fitting just so. He was in jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair pure Liverpool mod touched with

blond highlights. “Wrist,” he said mildly, and my mother stopped. She half-turned and gave him a

Look.

Oh but I recognized that; it was the way she’d look at Dad when he was late for dinner, or when he

said something joking about her washing dishes. It was the mock-glare of a pretty woman looking

at a man she knows very well. Half-teasing, almost angry, and very aware of him looking at her.

The wingbeats of my pulse paused. The pins and needles stabbing static fuzzed through the scene,

but I focused, just like holding the pendulum over Gran’s kitchen table and searching for the little

internal tickle that would make it answer questions.

I couldn’t get enough of seeing her again. She was breathing easily, and she pushed away a stray

curl with the back of her hand, the malaika held as easily as a butter knife. She was so graceful. I

saw, as if I had a pair of binoculars, that her fingernails were bitten down, too.

Just like mine.

She looked so young. In the picture Dad carried in his wallet, the shadows in her eyes were darker,

and she seemed older. Right now she looked, well, like a teenager.

Every little girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. But my mother was.

She really was.

Her mock-glare turned into a set expression, mouth firm and eyebrows drawn together a little. “I

feel like an idiot, stuck up on here. Why can’t we practice inside?”

Christophe’s face was unreadable, but he was tense. The tightness in his shoulders, the way his feet