5. The Telegram
5
THE TELEGRAM
There’s a great roaring in the west, and it’s worse it’ll be getting when the tide’s turned to the wind.
— JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE, RIDERS TO THE SEA
T he next morning, after sleeping close to fifteen hours straight, I sained the bathroom again and took the longest bath on record before emerging a new woman in a cloud of lavender oils and one of Gran’s pine-scented beeswax candles.
The world was peaceful again as I shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of Irish breakfast tea, my drink of choice on Sundays.
The Box of Terror, as I’d named it, was still in the back of my closet, its darkness somewhat bound by the saining bundles I’d set on top of it. I figured we had an agreement, the Box and I—I would pretend it didn’t exist, and it could pretend I’d ever touched it.
So far, I was struggling on my end.
“Morning!”
I twirled around from the stove at the sound of Aja’s voice. Back on the sofa, this time she looked considerably more alert than yesterday, with her corkscrew curls freshly washed and a pile of books around her. Study time. What I needed to be doing too.
She bookmarked her page and flopped over the back of the couch toward me. “How’d it go?”
I frowned. “How did what go?”
“The talk, silly. I figured it must have been stressful if you walked through the snow all the way home.” She pointed at my boots, which were still drying out next to the heater.
I sighed. Gods, yesterday morning felt like eons ago. A pair of bright green eyes flashed through my head, along with that brief touch that seemed to reach all the way into my chest. Then the box that I had honestly thought might swallow me whole.
I took hold of the counter’s edge to steady myself. “It went well, actually,” I said, then turned back to the kitchen to prepare my tea.
To my surprise, Aja’s lingering energy seemed to remain at bay. It was there, certainly—she’d enjoyed a pot of macaroni she’d picked up with this oven mitt. But it still wasn’t jumping on me the way it would normally. Odd.
“Dr. Cardy is amazing, and it was a packed house,” I continued. “By the end of it, everyone seemed to forget that I was late. What are you reading?”
“ Laoghaire . You want some?”
I shook my head, smiling. “I had enough of that in my second year. I have to translate some Luccreth before bed and work on some revisions for James.” I sighed happily. It was actually nice to have the mundane work of my dissertation ahead of me after yesterday’s events.
The kettle whistled, and I finished pouring my cup. After I was done, I paused on my way back to my room.
It would just be an experiment, I told myself. Things were abnormally calm today. It wouldn’t hurt to try.
I laid one hand across the back of the couch so that my fingertips just brushed the back of Aja’s shoulder. She shrugged as if tickled but didn’t notice. Her thoughts immediately filled my mind: a deluge of Irish poetry as she scanned the page, locating her previous position, idly considering what she wanted for lunch while she went through the familiar text.
It wasn’t quite a deluge, but her thoughts were just as jumbled as anyone’s. Nothing like the clarity of the stranger’s in the car.
So, it was just him.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to know.
“Aj, I was thinking about the guy you met in the bar the other night. Do you happen to remember what he looked like? Maybe I know him.”
“Hmm? What guy?” She was listening, but only barely registered my query as she tried to remember what áilleacht meant again.
“Beauty,” I murmured.
“Huh?”
“The guy,” I pressed. “The one who asked about me at the bar. Do you remember what he looked like?”
Her thoughts were coming faster now, louder and even more fraught with emotion. A bit longer, and it would be more than I could handle. Deepest desires, animal instincts. Id-level thinking, which could be disturbing even with the most regular-seeming people.
Aja scrunched her brows and squeezed her lips together as she tried to recollect the man’s face. I watched as several people from the club appeared in her mind: her boyfriend, Nick, mostly, along with the faces of bouncers, bartenders, and a few other fans that became increasingly blurred the more she drank. By the time she recalled the incident in the crowd, the stranger’s face was all but completely obscured by the combination of her poor, intoxicated memory and the dim lighting. I sighed and pulled my hand away.
“I’m sorry, Cass, I just don’t remember. I honestly think I imagined it all. I did have a lot to drink,” Aja said, turning back to her poem.
I stood up, tea in hand. “Don’t worry about it. It was probably just a student or someone like that. Forget it.”
I went back to my room, where the mysterious cardboard box was poking out of the bottom of my closet. Gran still hadn’t called me back after I’d tried her last night, but right now, I wasn’t up to the inevitable lecture that I was sure I’d get when I told her what happened. Instead, I lay on my bed and picked up the soft wool blanket she had made me last Christmas, burying my face in the familiar scent of rosemary oil and baking bread that permeated our house in Oregon. I closed my eyes and focused, trying to capture a glimpse of her.
But if yesterday had been too much, right now I had nothing at all. Just the dull shade of black under closed eyelids.
“Cass?”
Aja’s soft knock yanked me out of my concentration.
I sat up. “Yeah, what is it?”
Aja opened the door and poked her head in. “Sorry. I know you don’t like being bothered. But there’s someone here for you.”
I frowned. “Who?”
She held her hands up. We both knew a social call was utterly out of the question.
Is it? My voice again, this time accompanied by another flash of those green eyes. Mentally, I waved them away. The stranger, whoever he was, had made his disinterest absolutely clear. Why was I still thinking of him?
“Some kind of delivery,” Aja was saying. “You have to sign for it.”
I followed her down the hall to where a man in a blue uniform was standing at our door with a clipboard and an envelope.
“Cassandra Whelan?”
I pulled on a pair of gloves, ignoring his curious looks. “Yes, that’s me.”
“I’m from American Telegram. If you’ll sign here, please?”
“A telegram?” Aja guffawed. “Who sends actual telegrams?”
Inside, I deflated. There was only one person who sent telegrams in a world of text messaging and email. Someone who deserved her own tinfoil hat for the number of conspiracies she shouted. Someone who walked the line of sanity more precariously than any madwoman in the attic.
“My mother,” I said grimly.
I scribbled my name, then accepted the creased yellow paper and shut the door after the courier.
“It’s kind of sweet.” Aja returned to the couch. “Like a sentimental gesture, I guess?”
“More like she’s a head case who thinks everyone is tapping her phones.” I waved away Aja’s mortified look. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
These messages were never good. Either she was asking for money (which I didn’t have), or she was warning me of yet another plot against witches everywhere. Last time she was convinced that with Mercury rising, salmon were magically poisoning all fae women under thirty. Salmon.
Aja furrowed her eyebrows in mild confusion. I had never mentioned Sybil to her, and we hadn’t been living together long enough for me to divulge that fraught history.
“Well, what does it say?” she asked.
Upon opening the letter, the dizziness from the afternoon returned. But this time it had nothing to do with attached memories.
“Cass?” Aja asked as I collapsed onto one of the chairs at the oak table. “Cass, are you all right?”
I cradled my head and sucked in sharp breaths. “Oh gods,” I moaned into my hands. “Oh no, no, no, no, no .”
The letter fluttered to the floor, a crumpled yellow bird. Aja picked it up to read aloud, every word landing like a hammer in the back of my mind.
CASSANDRA WHELAN
APT 5B / 12012 SUTHERLAND DR
brIGHTON MA 92210
PENNY DEAD -[STOP]- GO HOME ASAP -[STOP]- CANT LEAVE SEATTLE -[STOP]- SYBIL -[STOP]
“Who’s Penny?” Aja’s voice seemed very far away. “Cass? Cassandra. Who’s Penny?”
“It’s…she’s my grandmother,” I whispered into my hands. “Oh, Gran .”
Tears started to fall fast and hard.
My grandmother—the only real family I had left—was dead.