Chapter 32 Dove
DOVE
My breath caught at the mention of Margaret’s name, the way it slipped off Rachel’s lips so calmly yet so full of awe.
“You knew her?” I asked nervously, running my damp palms along my shorts.
Rachel let out a laugh that trembled through her. “Knew her? The woman nearly scared the life out of me. I’ve thought about the day I met her so often… I play it back over and over in my mind.”
My heart rattled in my chest, and Liv—who had been hovering—stared between me and her mother, looking perplexed. “How does my mother know your grandmother?”
Rachel cleared her throat and set the cards down as if she were handling important evidence. The Judgment card lay faceup, the red stain as prominent as ever. Crossing her arms, she leaned back in her chair.
“I met Margaret the summer I was pregnant with Liv,” Rachel said slowly.
“Well, I was very, very pregnant. Overdue pregnant. I was miserable and angry, so some friends dragged me down to the Santa Monica pier for some fun, and to see if we could walk Liv out of me.” A faint smile danced on her lips.
“It was so busy that day—it only served to make me more irate. Imagine me waddling down the pier, pushing through crowds of people. My friends quickly abandoned me for the attractions I couldn’t go on, so I ended up carrying handbags and everything else. ”
Rachel clicked her tongue and sighed.
“I needed a break. I found a bench and sat myself down, and I just remember staring out over the water, feeling Liv kicking inside me, and for maybe half a second that day, I felt peace. True peace. I mean, it wasn’t just the pregnancy wearing me down.
” Rachel once more toyed with her pendant.
“Liv’s father—he’d always been depressed.
He was worse during the pregnancy, and I was exhausted.
Part of me just wanted to stay in that moment forever on the pier, on that bench. ”
I glanced at Ellis, still feeling like I couldn’t breathe, as she leaned forward, listening with her whole body.
“This flapping sound began to ring in my ears, and I remember seeing this shabby-looking blue tent with a hand-painted sign in front of it. Tarot and Medium—$5. I don’t…
I don’t really know what possessed me to get up and go over to it.
” Rachel pursed her lips, her eyes far away.
“Maybe I wanted some answers. I was about to be a new mom, my boyfriend was at best flaky—obviously he had mental health issues, and that wasn’t his fault, but he never wanted help—and I just wanted to know if I’d be okay, I guess. If we would be okay.”
Rachel’s eyes darkened for a moment.
“So, I went inside. A woman sat behind a table draped in red velvet with a deck spread before her—that deck there. She looked middle-aged. Wise, I guess. She had long, dark hair and a friendly-enough face. I found myself sitting down when she waved her hand toward the seat.”
I could hear my heart beating in my ears as she spoke, and I felt Ellis’s eyes darting between us.
“I felt like when she looked at me, she could see through me,” Rachel said.
“And she just knew things no stranger could know about me. She told me she knew I was carrying a daughter. She told me my boyfriend was drowning in his depression, and that his life of despair would take him before his time was truly up.”
Her voice caught as she spoke of Liv’s dad, and Liv watched her mother with wide eyes before glancing back at Dove and then the deck of cards.
“And then she said to me—she—she looked me right in the eye and told me I had a gift, and that I needed to learn how to use it.” Rachel shook her head and swallowed. “If I didn’t, I would hurt the people I loved most.”
Her gaze dropped to her hands, and I realized she had unconsciously pressed them against her stomach—against the ghost of the swell that had once carried Liv.
“You’ll hurt that one in there,” Rachel said, her voice almost an echo of Margaret’s words.
“I knew what gift she was talking about. I had experienced strange things from a young age, but my parents refused to talk about it, and I didn’t dare bring it up.
I was so angry that day, and her words, for whatever reason, just sent me over the edge.
I thought she was being cruel. When I tried to shove the cards off the table, I cut my hand on an old nail sticking up through the velvet, and I bled everywhere. Right on that table, and on this card.”
Rachel leaned forward and tapped the Judgment card once.
“I ran before she could stop me,” Rachel said. “Well, waddled and ran. I never looked back. Then I went into labor an hour later.”
The room spun around me as my throat closed up. I stared at the card I had always assumed was one of Margaret’s little white lies. Ketchup paraded as blood. That faint, stubborn rust-brown stain was real. It was Rachel’s. And, in a sense, it was Liv’s.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“I’ll say,” Liv added, her voice a little breathy.
“Everything she said came true,” Rachel said, rubbing her nose. “Liv was a girl—I already knew that—but her father left too soon. And I hurt Liv, because I didn’t learn what to do with the gift.”
Ellis sat frozen beside me, her eyes locking on mine for a beat before Rachel’s voice pulled us back.
“I have a photo from that day, actually,” she said, pushing to her feet.
“I stumbled across it the other night. Funny this should all be coming up now.” She shuffled to a small wooden box on a sideboard, popped it open, and rifled through until she pulled out a rectangular photograph.
Closing the box, she returned and handed it to me.
I took it gingerly, studying the picture.
“My friends and I snapped the shot before they all deserted me to go have fun—and made me their personal bag rack,” Rachel said with a roll of her eyes.
“Mom always did have shit friends,” Liv muttered.
Ellis and I studied the photograph, the image sun-faded with age.
Rachel stood in the foreground, far younger, her hair still dark and long.
Her hand rested across her swollen bump, and several other women stood around her, smiling and posing, arms flung wide as if they were doing something outrageous.
But my gaze snagged on the background.
Unmistakably in the back was Margaret, holding a baby in her arms—a baby with a mop of dark hair and fat cheeks. My breath caught, because beside my grandmother stood my mother, holding a phone and dressed in a pantsuit, looking away as she spoke.
“I’m in this picture,” I breathed, pointing. “I’m literally a newborn. That’s my mom.”
“What?”
Liv rushed over as Ellis leaned closer, and even Rachel bent down to see where I was pointing.
“Get out—no freaking way,” Liv said, breathless. “Man, you had a lot of hair for someone fresh out of the womb.”
“I know,” I said with a laugh. “Margaret loved that about me.”
Ellis suddenly stilled beside me, her body going rigid. She lifted a shaking hand, her finger pressing to another corner of the frame.
“That’s my mom.”
A young woman with her hair tied half up stood with a pale blue stroller. Beside her, a small boy peered curiously inside, rising on his tiptoes.
My heart thundered.
Ellis’s voice cracked as she whispered, “Oh my God, that’s Thomas. That—Mom still has that exact stroller in the attic. Which means… that’s me in there.”
The room fell silent.
The photo trembled in my hands as I stared down at it.
At Rachel. At Margaret. At the baby version of me.
At Ellis in her stroller, half obscured by her brother.
At the bump that was Liv. All of us in the same place at the same time, with no idea who the others were.
Our parents had no inkling how our paths would one day cross.
I gazed at Rachel, at the baby inside her who would one day die so the baby in the stroller could live.
Liv swayed on her feet, her mouth open as she gasped, “You mean… we were already…”
I looked at Ellis, then at Liv, then at Rachel, whose eyes were wet and face worn with shock.
“We were always meant to come together,” Ellis whispered.
Ellis stood beside me and faced Liv with tear-filled eyes, and both regarded each other in a way I’d never be able to put into words.
It was like the final closing of a loop, a lightbulb moment after hours of endless questioning, and then the pure acceptance that everything had well and truly been out of their hands.
“Well, shit, Langley,” Liv murmured, tugging at a lock of her pink hair. “Who would have thunk.”
Ellis laughed and wiped her eyes. “I feel like all I’ve done is cry the last few days.”
“Well, at least you can,” Liv muttered. “I’m stuck making awful, gawking noises. And I’m actually a really cute crier too. Like, I don’t look bad when I cry, so you guys missed out on that.”
I got to my feet, and Rachel straightened fully, the photograph clutched firmly in her hands as she looked down at it, her expression unreadable.
“You know how I feel,” Liv murmured. “We’ve already done this at Jedd’s.
But you know it’s not just words for me, okay?
You didn’t steal my life. Our lives were intertwined before I was even born.
Remember thirty years, Ellis, and probably more.
Don’t forget that. And don’t spend them apologizing for wanting more either. Just spend them, okay?”
Ellis’s laugh was wet with tears as she nodded. “I will. I promise.”
“Dove, Dove, Dove,” Liv said with a heavy sigh.
“The calming anchor in all this chaos. You helped pull me out of whatever afterlife holding cell I was in, and you let me tell my story. You didn’t push.
You were patient and thoughtful. Don’t second-guess your abilities and your gifts just because they don’t present like Margaret’s did.
” Liv frowned. “Don’t just pretend you’re some shop girl who knows all the meanings by heart.
You’re more, and you know it. Presence over performance, remember? ”
I nodded once, my throat tight.
“You’re not Margaret,” Liv said softly. “But you’re also not not Margaret, if that makes sense.”
“It does,” I told her, sucking back tears and nodding. “It does.”
Liv gave a small nod and turned back to her mother, a fond smile on her lips.
“Tell her I love her,” she murmured. “And I always will love her, no matter what. And tell her to keep living her life, or I’ll find a way to come back and haunt her ass.”
I barked a hysterical laugh before relaying the words to Rachel, whose chin wobbled as she toyed with the hem of her shirt.
“I love you, my Liv,” Rachel said, her voice almost reverent. “You saved the lives of more than one person that night, and the weight of that gift will follow you into whatever comes next. I’m so proud that you’re my daughter.”
Ellis cried softly beside me, her hand pressed to her chest, and I swallowed hard as I looked to Liv.
“Flip a card for me, Dove?” Liv whispered. “One last card, just to see?”
My chest tightened, but I nodded, scooping up the deck and shuffling the cards through my fingers. I drew in a deep breath, choking back emotion, before my trembling hands pulled the top card and set it down on the table, upright.
The World.
My breath caught as I turned it over, the faded image staring back at me—the figure encircled in a wreath, its arms outstretched and whole.
“The World,” Rachel breathed, gazing down at it.
We all stared at the card.
“It means fulfillment,” I said thickly, my eyes tracing the worn lines. “The ending of a cycle and the start of something new. It’s wholeness in its entirety, and it means freedom—finishing the journey and preparing for the next one.”
A breathless laugh slipped from my lips as I looked up, then blinked, glancing around. A soft gasp left Ellis. Rachel lifted her head, her eyes blinking as she stared back down at the card on the table.
“She’s gone,” Rachel said simply—the words final, yet spoken with calm. “I can feel it now.”
“Oh God, I felt it,” Ellis whispered. “Right here.” She pressed a hand to the center of her chest with a hiccupped cry. “Warm.”
Rachel’s trembling hands drifted to her lap as she lowered herself into her seat, slowly exhaling. Her shoulders softened, as though she had been carrying her daughter’s ghost—and all the things that had been left unsaid—inside her, and had now finally let them go.
“She’s at peace,” Rachel murmured. “And so am I.”
I looked at her—the exhaustion and relief etched into the lines of her face—and thought about how unfair it was that grief and love so often came braided together.
My gaze dropped to the tarot deck, the frayed and worn edges of Margaret’s cards. My pulse thrummed as I stared at Liv’s final card, pressing my hand over it, Margaret’s words ringing in my ears. Presence over performance, Dovey. And then Liv’s, You’re not Margaret, but you’re not not Margaret.
Maybe my gift was never about making predictions or communing with the dead the way Margaret had. Maybe it was about standing in the fire and agony of someone else’s truth, and holding steady while I spoke it for them.
Ellis leaned against me, silent tears sliding down her cheeks. I slipped my arm around her shoulders, pressing a kiss into the side of her head.
The room may have felt emptier, but it somehow felt fuller too, as if Liv hadn’t just left us but had spread herself into every corner of the space. Into Ellis’s chest. Into Rachel’s trembling hands. Deep into the marrow of my bones.
Yes, Liv was gone. But she would always be here.