13. When It Rains #2
“Yeah, Indianapolis.” He took his phone out of his jacket pocket, apologetically referencing that he’d be taking notes with the Notes app. “Sorry, hideous habit, always being on my phone, I just have terrible handwriting—”
“Relatable,” I offered in solidarity. “Incoherent scrawl.” Actually, my handwriting was painstakingly neat.
He laughed again. “Right, yeah—”
“You should have Anyabeth give you a reading.” Tita Linda’s voice behind me made me jump—she’d been abnormally quiet, and she’d also pitched that particular sentence at a conspiratorial register, a timbre usually reserved for phrases like Magandang babae, how many boyprens you have now?
from any of the apartment building’s elders.
I’d conveniently forgotten for a second that she was there, just as she’d conveniently forgotten that she normally did the readings.
“Oh, uh…” The journalist gave me a look that suggested his MFA didn’t allow him to ascribe any legitimacy to psychic readings. “Well, I suppose while I’m here—”
I turned over my shoulder. “You’ll take the register?
” I asked Tita Linda, though of course what I really intended to do was privately roll my eyes in her direction.
The journalist was that particular flavor of clean-cut white man that makes older Filipina women irrationally excited, though I’d always suspected that Tita Linda hoped for my sake that I’d become an eccentric lesbian.
“Of course, Apo.” She always called me what my Grandma called me, apo for grandchild, but in this case I had a sense she was curating something.
Glorifying the aesthetic of the immigrant family business without overloading real immigrant pitfalls onto the grandiosity of the Los Angeles Times.
You’d think she and my mom would get along better, given this level of commitment to the bit, but then again, savviness didn’t always lead to friends.
“Fine.” I gestured the journalist over to the curtained area where we did the readings. It had been dressing rooms before, and my mother had spent an entire weekend repurposing them—with JR’s help, a detail she often chose to overlook.
“So, how does this work?” The journalist seemed to enjoy the opportunity to get closer to me. Meanwhile, the photographer snapped a picture of Tita Linda ringing up a pouch of crystals, the bag of chicharrónes resting open beside her like a lover lying provocatively in bed.
In terms of training, I could give the journalist any reading I wanted to. Palm would mean we’d touch, but people were typically more impressed by cards.
“Just relax,” I said, instructing him to hold the cards, to focus on a question in his head for purposes of guidance. “This is a simple one—past, present, future. I’ll just tell you what I see.”
“Can anyone do this?” He was teasing me, relaxing into my closeness. If only I had a need for local small business coverage beyond this visit. “Or do you have … you know.” He leaned in closer. “The gift?”
“A magician never reveals her secrets. And a lady never tells.” I checked for obvious personal and social markers—a ring, financial standing. By all accounts, I was preparing myself for a grift.
And that, of course, was when I felt it. The most dangerous thing a young woman can feel.
Boredom.
I didn’t know yet how dull it would all become to me.
The parties Emmanuelle would throw that varied in intensity and size.
The fact that there was always someone new to meet—a producing partner, a financier, some up-and-coming actor, some fussy member of the Academy, every now and then a casting director whose name I recognized.
The subsequent uptick in auditions and increasingly steady work, the antidepressant/eczema/diabetes commercials I could now use to pad my savings account.
For the first time in my life, money would not be a problem. Neither, arguably, would time. My mother was too busy to disapprove of my lifestyle; my relationship with Teddy was growing steadily more comfortable. My life should have been perfect, and it was, which was part of the problem.
It gave me the freedom I needed to disappear into the obsession I hadn’t noticed taking hold.
Even before clarity materialized fully in my head, I knew it was over.
I was already done for. Any possibility of alternate endings had sunk; they’d already been buried six feet in the ground.
It was like the ick, one of those things you couldn’t come back from—once you knew, you simply knew.
All that time I’d been spending so close to danger had anesthetized me for everything else.
There I was again, flipping the cards to grasp the immobility of fate.
A pair of eyes, rose petals bursting from the viscera of a dead girl.
A crescent moon, change on the horizon. Maybe a different version of me could have felt dizzy with it, the knowledge of it.
My hovering proximity. Every story ends in death.
Outside the store window, a palm frond crashed to the ground. I blinked back to cognizance.
“That bad?” the journalist teased me, gesturing to the spread I’d pulled, ostensibly for him.
There’s a devil on your back. In the cards it was usually a satyr, red-eyed, horned. But I knew what he really looked like, and he wasn’t on my back. He was somewhere worse—the back of my mind, lingering there, the tail end of every thought.
The devil was waiting for me, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
Somehow, without noticing, I’d begun to bide my time until I could return.