The Diviners

She wandered back to the Bennington and climbed the stairs to the roof, where she sat with the pigeons. She had that coiled tightness ballooning in her chest, like her skin was on too tight. Like she’d come around a blind corner, and every demon she kept at bay had been there waiting. Will lectured about belief in the supernatural, but the only ghosts that frightened Evie were the very real ghosts inside her. Some mornings, she’d wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won’t be such an awful mess of a girl. I won’t lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won’t go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I’ll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? “Oh, Evie, you’re too much,” people said, and it wasn’t complimentary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time.

So why wasn’t she ever enough?

Evie stared at the long columns of windows cut into the building across the street. So many windows. Who lived behind them? Were they happy? Or did they sometimes sit on a rooftop haunted by a deep loneliness for which there seemed to be no cure?

The door creaked open on its hinges and Jericho angled his broad shoulders through the opening. “Thought I might find you here. What happened with your uncle Will?”

Evie turned her face away and wiped her eyes. “I stirred the tea counterclockwise.”

Jericho slid down the wall, keeping a respectable distance between them. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Evie said nothing. To the south, the sun glinted off the steel tip of a building. Smoke belched from rooftop chimneys in fat, sooty puffs. A billboard advertised Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum in giant iron letters. On the roof’s edge, the pigeons arched their necks, hunting for food.

“You asked me about how I came to live with your uncle Will. I didn’t answer you right away,” Jericho started. He pulled a heel of bread from his pocket and unwrapped it.

“No, you didn’t,” Evie said. Once, she’d been very curious about that. She couldn’t see that it mattered now, with her expulsion imminent. But she was grateful to Jericho for coming after her, for trying to comfort her in his way. She just wanted him to keep talking. “Will you tell me now?”

He squinted in the sun. “I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania. Cows and pastures. Rolling farmland. Mornings seem newly born there. It’s about as far from here as you can get.”

“Sounds swell,” Evie said, hoping her words didn’t sound as hollow as they felt.

Jericho waited for a spell, as if gathering words. “There was an epidemic. Infantile paralysis. It took my sister first. And then I woke up with a fever. By the time they got me to the hospital in Philadelphia, I couldn’t feel my legs and arms, and I was having trouble breathing. I was nine.”

As he spoke, Jericho tore the bread into tiny pieces, which he tossed onto the flat tar roof for the birds, who swarmed the food.

“They put me in a machine, a prototype of something they were working on called an iron lung. It breathes for you. Of course, you’re trapped inside it—like a metal coffin. I spent whole days staring up at the ceiling, watching the light from the windows behind me shift like a sundial. My mother would come up from Lancaster by horse and wagon every Sunday and pray for me. But there’s a lot to do on a farm, and there were two other children back home and another on the way. Soon it was every other Sunday. Then she just stopped coming.” Jericho broke up more of the bread and tossed it into the scrum of squawking birds. “I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.”

Evie wasn’t sure what she should say, so she kept quiet and watched the birds clustering around the food, fighting for it.

“Then I heard a bird chirping on the windowsill, signaling spring. I knew that if the bird could get there, so could she. I knew the minute I heard that bird outside my window that she wasn’t coming back. Even before the doctors told me my parents had signed the papers that made me a ward of the state, I knew.”

Jericho wiped his hands on his handkerchief.

“How could your parents just leave you?” Evie asked after a while.

“Invalids don’t grow up to work plows or threshing machines. I was beyond their care. And they had other mouths to feed.”