The Secret Language of Stones by M. J. Rose Page B

blood-red earrings, rings, bracelets, and brooches. They shone with purple and deep blue highlights. And if I held them up to the light, I could find a rainbow of colors inside them. She owned a shell-shaped pendant set with opals. I used to put it up to my ear and listen to it.”
    â€œDid you hear anything?”
    â€œI heard the sea. My mother came in one afternoon and found me lying in her bed, the pendant up to my ear, and asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she seemed pleased. She explained that opals were layers of water trapped in a stone and maybe that’s what I could hear. I asked if she could hear it and offered it to her. She listened for a minute and then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m proud of you that you can.’ And then she smiled and gave me the pendant to keep.”
    â€œDid you know why things were different in your house?”
    â€œNot really. I thought it was because my mother was beautiful, the same way our house was exquisite, hanging off a cliff, high up in the hills, overlooking the sparkling bay.
    â€œOnly when I turned thirteen and my menses started did I begin to understand all that beauty contained. My awareness came with the extreme cramps that made me double over. Suddenly a layer coveringmy world lifted. All that had been invisible and inaudible before was revealed.
    â€œTo help ease the pain, my mother fed me tea and lavender honey that helped me sleep. When I woke, I would feel better until she came to check on me and the cramps would return. When she asked how I was, her words would turn into pearls rolling around on the floor. When she left, her footprints glowed red.
    â€œOne night, when my father had returned home, she brought him to my bedroom. Half asleep, I heard my mother tell him she was worried because she herself had never suffered so badly.
    â€œ ‘The difference,’ my father said, ‘is that Opaline is your daughter.’ ”
    â€œI opened my eyes then and saw a glance pass between them I didn’t understand. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
    â€œShe shook her head and said I shouldn’t worry about anything. Then she gave me more honey-laced tea. After I drank it, the pain went away. I tried making the same tea on my own when I got cramps and she wasn’t there, but it never helped. Only when she made it. The tea was bewitched, I know that now.”
    â€œOr dosed with laudanum,” Anna suggested, smiling.
    â€œDo you think so?”
    She nodded. “Much more likely than a spell. What about the stones? Were they more audible after that?”
    â€œYes, the day after I first became unwell, I went into my mother’s room for something and noticed a topaz bracelet on her vanity rattling like a snake. I went to find her. As soon as I entered her studio, a bowl of smooth round black stones started humming. When I explained, she told me not to worry. But the expression in her eyes informed me she was holding something back, keeping a secret from me.
    â€œI became a spy in my parents’ house after that. Listening at doors, peering through windows, stealing into my mother’s room and rifling through her things. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I wasdetermined to find something that would explain it all. My trespassing yielded nothing until one night the summer I turned fourteen.
    â€œWell after midnight, I woke up hearing a high-pitched hissing. I pulled on my robe and went out onto the balcony. A full moon splashed diamonds across a calm bay. The noise couldn’t have been coming from the sea. I crept around to my parents’ balcony and peered into their bedroom through the open window. With the moonlight’s help, I saw my father asleep on his side of the bed. My mother’s side was empty.
    â€œCreeping downstairs, I went outside. A glow emanated from her studio. I padded across the dewy grass toward the separate structure far