18. By Candlelight
18
BY CANDLELIGHT
Dance First. Think Later. It’s the natural order.
— SAMUEL BECKETT, WAITING FOR GODOT
“ I t’s not a date,” I told Reina for the tenth time as I examined myself in the floor-length mirror in Gran’s closet.
Ghosts swirled around me as my shoulders brushed the lace and silk of vintage dresses hanging there. Tonight, I wasn’t in a hurry to chase the fragments away. The rest of the house had remained irritatingly silent despite my continued attempts to find any knowledge of Gran’s death, but her closet wasn’t quite so stubborn, welcoming me with open arms and happy memories. My hands were bare, reaching out for any and all remnants of Gran’s energy I could find, to take her confidence with me tonight.
Through my phone’s speaker, Reina snorted. “I can Sense your nerves from here. You’re more jittery than a cup of espresso, and I know it’s not just because he annoys you. It’s definitely a date.”
I frowned at the light blue dress I held up to my body. Usually blue worked well with my eyes, but this one washed out my pale skin. I put it back.
Okay, yes. I was still irritated with Jonathan’s cryptic responses in the parking lot. But I was also determined to go to this dinner, where I would get some answers, and somehow, that had evolved into putting my best foot forward. I wasn’t going to sit across from Mr. GQ model looking like a ratty college student. Jonathan Lynch was immaculately groomed and put together whenever I’d seen him, and tonight, I’d manage the same whether it killed me.
Unfortunately, all I had brought from Boston was a few other pairs of worn jeans and my favorite sweaters, and Manzanita wasn’t exactly awash with fashion. Gran’s closet was the only place I could shop.
“That cute, is he?” Reina asked
I recalled Jonathan’s large green eyes, his thatch of tawny hair, the aquiline shape of his mouth–the details of which I hadn’t described to Reina once I’d called to fill her in on everything she’d missed since leaving.
And the glasses. I couldn’t forget about the glasses.
Yeah, cute didn’t even begin to cover it.
“Dang,” she muttered.
“Your range is getting annoyingly good,” I replied as I turned back to my suitcase and pulled out a pair of jeans. This didn’t have to be a big deal, even if it was kind of, not really the first real date I’d had in an embarrassingly long time.
“Not as good as that boy’s butt. Damn. Two scoops right there.”
I sighed. I hadn’t even known my thoughts had gone there, but now the image was front and center. “Fine, I’ll admit, he’s reasonably attractive?—”
“I think you mean Henry Cavill-level hot?—”
“But, Rein, he’s also an annoying know-it-all?—”
“Who challenges you and doesn’t take your crap?—”
“Who’s impossibly arrogant!” I huffed and threw my jeans back on the bed. Nothing I had was appropriate.
Reina chuckled. “But it’s not a date.”
Two people. A nice restaurant. I sort of couldn’t get away from the facts.
“You don’t have to be so damn smug about it.”
Another snort. “Whatever. I live half my life in scrubs these days. Sue me if I want to get dressed up with you for the date with the pretty, pretty man.”
“I didn’t tell you he was pretty.”
“Baby, you didn’t have to.”
I gave up arguing and turned back to the closet. Gran’s scent, a soothing mixture of sea salt, lavender, and some perfume no one made anymore, floated from the silks and knits as I sifted through them. It was a punch to the gut.
Holding my breath, I snatched the first outfit I saw to distract myself in the mirror and immediately scowled. Turquoise polyester jumpsuits were definitely not my thing, but that scent still dug a pit of sadness in my belly.
“Don’t wear that. You’ll look like Cher.”
Obediently, I put the jumpsuit back. “When did you start being able to See this far?”
“For the last few months. Penny said that would happen right about now. She once told me that by the time she turned thirty-three, she could See clear to Ireland when she tried. We’re getting closer now, so…”
“You just turned twenty-nine.”
“Yeah, but think about it. Reaching our paragon is supposed to be like going through puberty all over again. Growth takes time.”
“Sounds super fun.” At thirteen, I’d been a bundle of knees, elbows, acne, and attitude. I wasn’t looking forward to a magical version of that awkwardness.
“Seriously, though. Aren’t you even a little excited to see what you’re going to be able to do?”
No , I wanted to say. Not even a little. My power was already out of control. One bad day had me out for another after that, and now I was running into frozen ponds to escape these visions. I already lived as isolated as I could to avoid the worst of things. I had no interest in finding out just how bad things were going to get in a few more years.
“You’ll probably gain some more control,” Reina said, clearly reading my mind all the way from Portland. “Listen, I came out for lunch last month, and Penny said it’s going to be great. She was so excited for you to come home and start training with her.”
My heart squeezed with more than a little guilt. In some ways, Reina had been the granddaughter Gran wanted. She certainly saw her much more than I had in the last six years.
“Stop that,” she said. “She knew you loved her.”
“Did she?” I pulled out a fuzzy sage green sweater.
“Of course she did, Kermit. She was a seer and a powerful one. She didn’t need you to say it out loud because she could feel it anytime she wanted.”
Oddly, the reminder helped as I returned the sweater to the rack.
But not for the first time, I wished I had the same abilities. Wished I wasn’t so limited by space and touch.
Which was why she had sent me the clothes, of course. The packages of things I probably could have found in Boston if I’d wanted. She’d wanted me to know she loved me too, of course. Because she’d always known how I felt, no matter what.
“It’s funny, though,” Reina said. “I couldn’t See you today until you got back from the beach, all mad about Jonathan.Was he shielding or something?”
“Oh-ho, yes,” I said as I pulled out a short red number. “He’s basically a one-man signal blocker. I bet NASA is super curious as to why Manzanita is a black hole. As long as he’s focusing, anyway.”
“It has been a little fuzzy whenever I check in. I wasn’t sure if that was me or something else. And don’t wear that. It’s the same color as ketchup. Too bloody.”
I sighed and went back to looking. “Anyway, yeah. The guy has been putting up big black walls from the beginning. I’mnot sure how he’s managing it, given that he’s not one of us. Some things slip through, but I don’t actually See much when we touch. Which he hardly lets me do at all.”
“Well, you must like that. A nice little break for you.”
“You’d think, but it’s actually incredibly frustrating. For once I actually want to know what someone is thinking, and I can’t. And yet, he can read me like a book whenever he wants.”
“Hmm…what do you think of him, then?”
“You can’t tell?”
“I’m trying to give you some privacy, you know.”
I chuckled as I took out a mustard-yellow sweater dress that reached my calves and held it up to the mirror. “Well. I find him irritating, cryptic, and stubborn. But Gran appears to have trusted him, so I guess I should give her the benefit of the doubt, right?”
“I guess. Also, I like that one. The yellow complements your eyes, and it’s pretty. Does he really wear suits everywhere?”
I rolled my eyes and draped the dress on the rack over the others. “No, just the one time in his memory with Gran. He had a mustache too.”
“The porn star kind or the Clark Gable kind?”
“Gable,” I had to admit. “Or maybe a silent film star.”
“Must have been some time, then.”
I considered saying out loud the truth I still hadn’t quite admitted to myself yet. That despite his prickly demeanor, there was a strange connection between me and Jonathan Lynch. A certain stillness that had no name yet, but drew us both.
It didn’t feel like a bad thing. Far from it.
“Wow…” Reina murmured. “So it’s like that?”
Of course. Even if she wasn’t actively searching my thoughts all the way from Portland, Reina sensed this feeling anyway. She would know in the way only sisters of the heart did.
Flickers of Penny’s memories danced around her clothes as I ran my hands over her clothes again. My family, what little I could call of them, had shrunken so much.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I think it might be.”
“Get out of that closet, okay? I can feel your misery, and you don’t want that energy on a date.”
“It’s not a date.” I fingered the yellow dress even as I slumped against the doorway, trusting that my friend would understand my reluctance to follow her order.
There was a long sigh. “Fine. Just promise me you’ll do your hair, all right? Don’t leave it all beachy. It doesn’t look effortless, just salty and gross.”
I stood back up, suddenly annoyed. “Thanks a lot.”
“That’s better. You’re more fun snippy than depressed.”
“Is that right?”
“I say because I love, my friend. Because I love.”
It was just after seven when I arrived at Blue Sky, the one and only “fine dining” restaurant Manzanita had to offer—meaning it provided a step above fish and chips or tacos, with dark wood interior and white tapered candles suited to first dates, anniversaries, and wishful thinking.
I took one final look at my appearance in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car. The simple blowout that Reina had talked me through on the phone had settled my hair into soft waves that were already curling around my shoulders, and I had taken some time to rim my eyes with liner and apply lip gloss. In the yellow dress and my favorite black boots, I felt more like a fortuneteller than a twenty-something girl on a first date, with the added quirkiness of a pair of black leather kid gloves for good measure. But at least I was comfortable.
“Hello, Cassandra.”
The deep, increasingly familiar voice made me jump as I locked the car door. I turned to find Jonathan watching me with frank appreciation that quickly morphed into bland disinterest. He looked even more dashing than normal in a charcoal suit and white shirt. His glasses were gone, though, and his eyes seemed to glow in the darkness. Was it my imagination, or was he purring?
“H-hi,” was all I could quite muster.
“You—your hair—it looks nice.” He cleared his throat and pulled at his tie. “Shall we?”
We were seated near the back of a room with only a few other diners. For whatever reason, my Sight seemed to be cooperating, with nary a glance of emotion nor a trickle of thoughts. I felt more clear-headed than I had in weeks.
“I should apologize again for surprising you this afternoon,” Jonathan said as he unbuttoned his jacket. “I must confess to having a rather severe phobia of the water.”
“You don’t say.” I spread a napkin over my lap, thrilled when I felt absolutely nothing.
“When I saw you dragged down by the seaweed, it brought out the more protective side of me. Which is what Penny paid me for, at least for a few days.”
As annoyed as I had been over his tantrum at the beach, the tension in my belly nonetheless softened at the sincerity in his voice and the kindness in his green eyes. “It’s all right.”
“Would you like a glass of wine? I thought I’d order a bottle. Do you prefer red or white? Maybe a specific region?”
I shrugged, unsure what to make of the sudden niceties. “Whatever you like.”
A server arrived, and Jonathan rattled off some unfamiliar name that sounded vaguely Italian while I perused the menu, trying not to look intimidated. We sat there for a moment in silence, both of us unnecessarily absorbed by a fairly typical menu. Jonathan rearranged his silverware around his plate multiple times and seemed trying, however inconspicuously, to smooth creases out of the white tablecloth.
Finally, I’d had enough.
“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”
His head jerked up. “ What? ”
“Because you’re so quiet.” My cheeks heated under the force of his glare.
“Ah.” He tugged at the collar of his shirt. Fidgeting again, I noted. “No, I was just thinking how much you look like your grandfather.”
Now it was my turn to jerk. “My grandfather ? ”
“The black hair.”
“How do you know what my grandfather looked like? Both of mine were dead before I was born.”
Now it was his turn to flush. “Er, I’ve seen pictures.”
He rolled his jaw and looked away again. I sniffed and reread the description of steak au poivre for the fourth time. Gran had shown her former lover to him but not to me? She hadn’t kept any pictures in the house—some superstition about how the images steal the soul. Whenever I asked about my family history, she simply told me to look in the mirror, and in the meantime, the stories I wanted would find me themselves.
I always assumed that was through her clothing or other items in the house. Did she mean now, through her lawyer?
I waited for Jonathan to continue, but he studiously examined the edge of his empty water glass instead, even buffing out a smudge with the tip of his napkin.
“Your wine, sir?” The waitress reappeared, holding a bottle face out toward Jonathan.
He gave a curt nod, and she poured a sample into his glass and waited while he tasted it.
“Yes, that’s fine,” he said, setting it back down so she could pour us each a glassful.
We ordered our dinners, and then sipped for a moment, eyeing each other over the rims.
“Well, what about you, Captain Taciturn?” I asked, suddenly tired of the fact that this person knew immeasurably more information about me than I did about him. My patience was starting to run out.
“Captain Taciturn?” His expression widened into the kind of smile that won’t let you look away, and I couldn’t help but smile back. “Has a nice ring to it.”
“You come, you go, you tell me absolutely nothing about yourself other than the fact that you were somehow best friends with my reclusive grandmother and that you happen to know what her lover, who by all accounts was never photographed, looks like. So, who is Dr. Jonathan Lynch, attorney and particle physicist?”
I pronounced the name in the same rounded syllables of his accent, which earned me one arched sandy brow and the scratching of a fingernail over the tablecloth in short, mechanical spurts of three.
“What would you like to know?” Scratch, scratch, scratch .
I stared at the fingers. “For starters, do you always fidget this much?”
Immediately the hand was withdrawn to his lap, and I was rewarded with a stalwart frown. “The condition seems to worsen in stressful situations.”
“Do I stress you out, Jonathan?” I was baiting him, but I just couldn’t help it. It was nice to see that polished exterior ruffled.
“In ways you couldn’t possibly understand.” He took a long sip of his wine and continued to cradle the bowl close while he spoke. “You do try your best, don’t you?”
At that, I reddened, so he kindly changed the subject.
“I was born in Italy. Schooled in Britain, summered in Ireland, then lived there…for a time. A bit of a vagabond, I suppose.”
“Italy? Really?”
“Northern,” he said with the kind of exasperation that told me I wasn’t the only person to question his origins. “Near the Austrian border. Most of the people in the village speak a bastardized version of German now. I boarded at a school in the Lakes District from the age of eleven or so, and thus…” He gestured his hands in a “ta-da” motion.
“Is your family Italian too?”
“My mother is from that village. My father was English, though.” His mouth pressed into a tight line, and he took a long sip of wine before pouring himself more.
I frowned. The mercurial behavior was maddening, and I wasn’t used to having to decipher emotions based on something so abstract as body language. “Now what did I do?”
He sighed and shut his eyes a moment before refocusing them on me, the effect of which was instantaneous. I felt a chill down my neck that wasn’t just linked to the fact that sorcerers could easily manipulate air temperature. Perhaps I was the mercurial one.
“Nothing.”
“That feels…false.”
His eyes met mine with oddly potent force. “You’ve done nothing, Cassandra. I’m sorry. My mother…she is gone, and I don’t get on with my father. And I don’t enjoy talking about it either. Surely you can understand that.”
The shadows from the candlelight flickered long and lean, exacerbating the hollows of his cheeks.
I nodded slowly. “Yes. I do.”
His mouth twisted as he reached across the table and gave my hand a tentative pat. In spite of the leather, empathy and pity skittered up through my wrist and elbow. Jonathan, however, appeared to be no more affected than the tablecloth.
Suddenly, I felt ridiculous in my done-up hair and makeup. What was I trying to do here? Stage some hilarious seduction with eyeliner and a pretty dress? And for what? To ignore my broken, grieving heart?
I was more than pathetic. I was a stereotype.
I pulled my hand back and drained the rest of my wine. I was getting tired of this man’s hot and cold moods, bouts of stonewalling followed by half-hearted pity. I was getting tired of him, period. Better he just finished what he came here to do, and we could move our separate ways. I’d return to Boston, and he’d go back to…wherever he came from.
“I think you were right before,” I said. “Let’s not waste time. Why did you want to meet for dinner?”
He narrowed his eyes a moment before reaching down to retrieve a manila envelope from his briefcase.
“Another will?”
“Not quite,” he replied. “My instructions from Penny are quite clear. Upon your receipt of the will, I am to give you this. And then I am to act as the executor as it moves through probate, and escort you to Seattle to confer with your mother.”
“That’s really not necessary. I can drive there myself if she wants it, though I doubt she will. If she cared in the first place, she would already be here.”
The words had a bitter taste. I hadn’t realized how angry I was about the truth until I’d said it out loud. But that was what families did in time like this, wasn’t it? Gathered and mourned. Shared in each other’s grief.
My mother hadn’t even done that after my father died. I didn’t know why even a part of me hoped she would change now.
Jonathan seemed willing to wait for me to sort out my thoughts.
“My mother and I don’t talk much,” I said quietly. “She can come here if she wants the house, and you can mail her the documents, can’t you? I need to get back to Boston, and I’m sure you’ve got more important things to attend to back in…wherever you live.”
“Rome,” he offered easily, to my surprise. “And no, I don’t have anything else more important than this. You are my first priority at the moment.”
Something in me tingled when he said that. I looked down and realized I’d leaned access the table towards him.
I sat back.
“And,” Jonathan continued, “you are supposed to go see your mother. Penny was quite clear.”
“Well, Penny’s dead, isn’t she?”
He flinched, and for the first time, I saw some indication that he was mourning too. That he told the truth—they had been close, in some way.
For some reason, the fact of their relationship made me even angrier. I shook my head, causing a few errant strands of black hair to fall beside my cheeks. That felt more like me than I had since leaving the house: hair in my face, all too ruffle-able.
“We can drive up to Seattle tomorrow,” he went on like I hadn’t just snapped at him. “I’ll schedule your flight back to Boston from there.”
I gulped and nodded. He was tenacious and clearly used to getting his way. I didn’t have the energy to argue anymore.
As soon as the plates arrived, Jonathan immediately slid them both to his side of the table.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing for poison.”
The charm of the restaurant faded away as the memory of a chattering shadow rose in the back of my mind. Somehow, I had almost forgotten about the insidious killer still at large. I tucked my arms around my waist and tried to ignore the way my mouth had suddenly and completely dried out.
Jonathan murmured a few words in a language that sounded like Latin but didn’t quite match the classical version I knew. After a few seconds, he smiled and pushed my pasta back across the table. I thought I saw the edges of his eyes shimmer, but when he looked directly at me, they were their normal, lime-green color.
I smirked. “What, no wand?”
He rolled his eyes and took a bite of the salmon, muttering something about “bloody Harry Potter” under his breath. He pushed the manila envelope across the linen to my side of the table.
I eyed it suspiciously. “Is this one memory-locked too?”
I wasn’t sure I could take yet another trip down Emotional Baggage Lane, in the middle of a restaurant, no less. I took a bite of tagliatelle instead, though my appetite for locally foraged morels had vanished at the sight of my name written in Gran’s clear, curt script.
“It was linked with the other,” Jonathan said. “You should be able to read it without anything else.”
With a sigh, I peeled off a glove, then picked up the envelope. A flash of Gran deliberating over the document was in and out of my head in less than a second. I pulled out the folded sheets of paper and began to read.