8. Selena
CHAPTER EIGHT
Selena
My mother lived in a house that the ocean had built for her, or that’s how she liked to tell it.
Three stories of bleached cedar and floor-to-ceiling glass on a bluff the engineers said would erode into the sea within twenty years.
Well, it had been nearly forty since my father had built it there, and it was stronger than ever.
The ocean would not be reclaiming Marina Torres.
They had an arrangement.
I sat in my Jeep in the driveway with the engine off, drinking the dregs of a gas-station coffee and trying to remember why I had come.
I was going to be reasonable. That was the plan.
I was going to walk in there and say, in the calm professional voice I used at the shack when a tourist tried to get a refund on a melted popsicle, that my tournament had been going for years, that Elliot’s turtles did not care about RipTide’s broadcast schedule, that the full moon was the full moon and could not be rescheduled.
I was going to make my case.
She was going to listen.
I would not cry.
I would not ask the question I actually wanted to ask, which was Why did you do this without telling me? Because I already knew the answer to that.
I got out of the Jeep.
I could already hear them. Three high, hysterical barks stacked one on top of the other.
They had heard the engine before I’d even turned into the driveway.
By the time I got to the porch, they had organized themselves into formation behind the front door—Kiwi in front, Gordo next, vibrating, and Tormenta at the back, howling bloody murder because Tormenta was Tormenta.
My mother’s Pomeranian familiars.
The door opened.
“Mi corazón!” my dad said, grinning from ear to ear. “I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“Yeah, surprise.” I shrugged.
“You want coffee? I just made coffee.”
“I have coffee.”
“Gas station?” He lifted a brow.
I nodded.
“I’ll make you a real one.”
He pulled me into the hug he’d been giving me my entire life, the one that smelled like wood shavings and the orange-oil polish he used on the boats in his shop, and for a few moments I let myself sink into it.
It was the comfort I needed, the calm before the storm. The Pomeranians lost their minds at my feet.
“Hi, you three. Yes. Hi. No, I don’t have treats.”
Kiwi—five pounds of red fluff and command authority—accepted one ear scratch and then stepped back because she had better things to do. Gordo threw himself onto my shoes and rolled, all pretense and dignity set aside. Tormenta retreated behind the couch and barked at me from there.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Backyard, trying some new spell for her circle. I didn’t ask. I have a policy.”
His policy was forty years old, and it had kept him sane and married to my mother, so I had no business questioning it.
I gave him the gas-station cup, which he took without commenting, how he had been not commenting on things for my entire life.
“I’ll bring it out when it’s ready.”
“Thanks, Papá.”
He squeezed my shoulder and went back to the kitchen, and I stood in the entryway for a second, bracing myself.
You can do this. You are twenty-eight years old and you have run a business by yourself for six years and you have organized the same tournament eight times and you are not afraid of your mother.
That last one was a lie.
I walked through the house. Familiar smells from my childhood rose up: salt spray, my father’s coffee brewing, and smoke from a recently extinguished candle.
I went out onto the back deck.
My mother was standing barefoot at the edge of the bluff with her hands held slightly away from her body, palms down.
A gentle, cooling breeze stirred across the deck.
Beyond the railing, however, a flurry of wind and ocean spray churned in a rapid spiral stretching into the sky, turning the air into a column that caught the late-morning light and made it shimmer.
The hum of her magic was almost overpowering.
She wore a linen dress. Her hair was twisted into a pair of low buns. She was, I had to admit, absolutely stunning. Her golden skin showed only the smallest hint of wrinkles around her eyes, and her dark black hair was smooth and straight, unlike the brown curls I’d inherited from my father.
When we went out together, she often got asked if she was my sister.
Mostly by waitstaff looking for a bigger tip. But she ate it up.
“Mija,” she said, without turning around. “Watch this part.”
Not hello. Not you’re upset. Watch this part.
The column tightened, glittered, threw a rainbow across the deck, and she held it an extra few seconds—for her audience of one—before letting it collapse.
“The circle is doing a ritual at the solstice.”
The column of air collapsed completely and she turned around.
“Sandra wanted to lead it. Sandra. So I had to remind everyone what the position requires.”
She crossed the deck in three steps and kissed me on both cheeks, hard, and held my face in her hands for a beat. Her hands were warm.
“You’ve been out in the sun too much. You’re getting so dark.”
“Mamá…” I tried not to let my exasperation show.
She released my face and walked past me to sit on the porch swing she’d had my father install last summer. She patted the seat next to her.
“Sit. You look tired.”
I did not sit.
“The dates conflict,” I told her.
She said nothing.
“RipTide’s broadcast weekend. It’s the same weekend as my tournament.”
“Oh.”
She checked her phone.
Actually checked it, mid-sentence, a flick of her thumb.
“Yes, they’ve been holding it since February. It’s going to be enormous. National coverage. Do you know they asked for me specifically? The network wants local color, somebody told them about the matriarch on the bluff—”
She laughed, delighted.
“I said I’d allow it if they shot the house from the good side.”
February. My tournament had been on the public calendar for eight years. Anyone could look it up in three seconds. She’d signed knowing exactly what she was overwriting, and she’d waited until yesterday to tell me.
“You should move your tournament. The Sunday after—you’ll catch the leftover crowd, double the foot traffic. You should be thanking me, honestly.”
I did not breathe. My fingers buzzed and I clamped my fists so tight my nails cut into my palms. I would not cry.
“Elliot’s release is timed to the full moon,” I said. “The hatchlings come up that weekend. The moon doesn’t move, Mamá.”
“Sit down.” She patted the seat beside her again. “Please.”
I sat down and the porch swing rocked.
“There are other full moons, corazón. Why must everything be a fight with you?”
“Because the tournament is my ceremony.”
I’m not going to cry.
“It’s what sets up my magic for the whole year. It’s not just about the volleyball, or the fundraiser. It’s about the magic. My magic.”
My mother tilted her head slightly.
“What?”
“The energy, the crowd, the community—”
I paused, unsure if I was going to be able to be this vulnerable with a woman who had never struggled with her magic.
“I need that, all of it. I need the ceremony I’ve built around the tournament to bolster my magic for the year and—”
She reached out, surprising me as she grabbed my hand.
“Mija, what magic?”
She might as well have slapped me, and my heart stopped.
I tried to speak, but an unmistakable sob came out instead.
“Corazón, don’t do this.” She let out a sigh. The long-suffering one.
“You have your hum. Your little way with the animals. It’s sweet. I’ve never said it isn’t sweet. But a ceremony—mija, I do ceremonies. I know what they cost. Let’s not borrow words.”
“It’s the ceremony I have.” My voice cracked.
“I heard you the first time.”
She said it lightly, like she hadn’t just driven a knife into my heart, with her face open and her hands over mine and her whole bearing communicating I am being patient with you, my child, who just can’t get anything right.
Suddenly I was sixteen again.
The invitational in Myrtle Beach, the one where the scouts had come.
I had played the best game of my life—had dug a ball from the sand that no one should have been able to reach, sent it over clean, and we had won.
I had stood there with sand on my knees and salt in my eyes and turned to find my mother in the stands.
She had been there. She was looking at me with the same face she wore now. It was waiting, as if she expected me to realize something I should have already figured out.
I had held the ball, breathing hard, certain that this was the thing that would finally be enough. That this was the version of me she had been waiting for.
She had smiled.
She had looked back down at her phone.
I’d spent years deciding what that look meant. Standing on her deck at twenty-eight, I finally had it: it hadn’t meant anything.
Meaning would have required her attention, and her attention had a guest list, and I had never been on it. Anything I said now would go unheard, because I had never mattered anyway.
“You have always been happiest with small, beautiful things,” she said, and her voice was gentle, which was the cruelest way she knew how to say it. “There is nothing wrong with that. You are so like your father.”
My father, who built beautiful boats and loved his family and had never once left this town or had magic, and whom she looked at sometimes with that same patient, waiting expression, as if she were still expecting him to become someone larger. Someone like her.
She meant it as a comfort.
That was the worst part.
In her accounting there was her, and there were the small, beautiful things that orbited her, and she’d just told me which one I was.
“It was a town decision,” she went on, “and I am the town’s consultant on these things. And frankly, mija, the town needed someone with my relationships to land it. Be happy for me. For us. People will finally come here for something.”
I didn’t say anything, all my focus on keeping my hands steady in hers, and the tears out of my eyes.
The screen door opened. My dad came out with a tray—two real coffees in real cups, with condensed milk.
“You two okay?”
“We’re great, Papi,” my mother answered.
I stood up
“I’m leaving.”
I felt her roll her eyes more than saw it.
“Mi corazón. The drama. You get this from his side.”
I walked through the house. I heard them both call my name, but I did not stop.
I kept an even pace until I’d slammed the door of my Jeep closed, setting off the Pomeranians again.
I sat in the driveway with both hands on the wheel and breathed for a count of ten.
It didn’t help.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, the saltwater a bitter traitor that likely would have listened to her, to her magic, her power.
Unlike me, the daughter who fought too much, who was too dramatic, who had worked for years to carve herself a small place in this town, and even that was too much to ask for in the life of Marina Torres.
My hands were warm. The Jeep’s center console was vibrating lightly. I made myself stop.
I started the engine.
I drove down the bluff road at an unsafe speed, the sharp curves pulling dangerously close to my Jeep’s tires.
It caught me at the third curve. A truth I had always known.
She had signed the contract before she told me. She had done it because she didn’t think of me as someone who needed to be consulted.
She didn’t think of me at all.
What magic?
Like it was nothing.
Like I was nothing.
Underneath the anger, a much older hurt surfaced. The feeling of standing on a court with sand on my knees and the game already won, turning to look for a face in the stands.
Wanting to be seen being good at what I loved. Wanting to be enough.
I shoved it back down. I was very good at that.
But I wasn’t nothing. And I was going to prove it.
I thought about the stranger on the beach. How he had walked out of the ocean like he owned it, with his cocky grin, and how I had felt for hours afterward. My magic had been loud and buzzing, just waiting for me to seize it.
This doesn’t have to be a fight.
Oh, she had never seen a fight. A real fight.
I needed every advantage I could get.
I pulled into the lot at the public beach. I sat there for a minute. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My hair was wild in the salt air, my eyes were red, and I was, I noted with some surprise, smiling.
I was going to find him.
I was going to find him and I was going to use him.
I was going to use him in the ancient, witchy, chapter-seven-of-the-grimoire sense.
I was going to use his stupid grin and his stupid abs and his stupid you want a closer look? teeth, and I was going to destroy this surf competition, no matter what it cost me.