CHAPTER TEN
RHYS
Moira didn’t like having serious conversations in the car, so Rhys drove to her favorite vegan ice cream shop in the Brookline neighborhood. She ordered two heaping scoops of taro ice cream sprinkled with carob chips and cherry boba and studiously worked through them in a booth in the back of the café. Sweets were her security blanket.
“Do you remember Meemaw?” she asked at last, apparently out of nowhere. Rhys was eating toffee gelato drowned in rich espresso.
“Of course.”
Rhys didn’t know how he could forget the small old woman who had beckoned him over to the kitchen table the first time he’d met her family. Moira’s father had met him at the door with a friendly handshake, and her mother, taller than Moira was, had emerged from the kitchen to envelop him in a hug. He thought he’d handled all the touching pretty well, considering he came from a family where that was only appropriate at weddings and funerals.
“He’s got The Eye,” the aging matriarch had pronounced, looking him over. “He’s got plenty of scruples, too, which counts for something in this life. Respectful. Smart as a whip. But oh, he’s hungry. Wants the whole world on a silver platter.” She arched an eyebrow at her granddaughter. “You like that?”
An impish smile had crossed Moira’s face. “Yes, Meemaw. I do.”
Moira’s grandmother had given his hand a squeeze. “Well alright, then. Looks like we’re gonna have a wedding.”
She had died just last year, and Moira had been quietly but utterly devastated. Millie Delacroix had taught her granddaughter how to make a proper galette, how to embroider a pillowcase and deliver a baby goat and let her yes be her yes when she made promises. Moira’s accountant mother, Margo, had taught her plenty too: how to calculate natal charts by hand and braid hair for pocket money and balance a whole household’s zero-sum budget. But Moira’s grandmother passed down the most precious family knowledge: rootwork spells and West African folktales carefully preserved by shared community memory.
Moira took another bite of her ice cream, chewing miserably.
“Love,” Rhys said, lowering his voice and putting his head close to hers. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
Moira brushed her nose against his, and he kissed her cold, sweet mouth. “There’s just…” She sighed. “There’s a lot. Have you ever wondered why I don’t work with the dead?”
“You said it was for ethical reasons.”
“Oh, it is… I just… I had some bad experiences when I was a little girl, too.”
Moira had never mentioned any of this, and they had had heated discussions over the last year about being honest with each other. But this didn’t sound like a lie coming to the surface; it sounded like something personal, potentially a site of distress. So he listened without passing judgement or saying a word.
“I’ve always been intuitive, you know that. I know what people need without asking; I can feel what they’re feeling, even if I don’t want to. But what I’ve never told you is that it’s not just live folks. Sometimes, it works… on dead people.”
“Dead people,” Rhys repeated slowly. The information filtered through his existing knowledge of his wife, coloring and informing every single conversation they’d had about spirit work. “You mean you can feel the feelings of… dead people?”
“Sometimes, if the feelings are strong enough. Other times it’s just little impressions. Sounds. Glimpses.” All the fastidiously applied lipstick she had put on before doing battle with David was gone, eaten away with the ice cream. “Once, after Meemaw died, I woke up and saw her standing in our room, clear as day. She came and sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at me, and I know I wasn’t dreaming, Rhys. It’s not the first time something like that’s happened.”
Rhys swallowed hard. He wrangled down entities that would love to see him skinned alive on an average Thursday night, but demons, at least, made sense. They followed rules, they wanted things, they could be tricked or bribed into working for you. Ghosts were a different matter entirely. They lingered like watercolor washes over a painting, always just out of perceptibility but heavily, heavily felt. Ghosts were ripples of trauma echoing through the living world, reminders of horrible deaths and broken hearts and long, dark passages to realms Rhys wasn’t ready to contemplate. He had never seen a ghost and didn’t care to.
Moira was summertime and cool bed sheets against flushed skin and a wholesome meal straight from the oven. Everything she touched bloomed: flowers, babies, grown people. Moira was so tied up with verdant life that it was almost impossible to wrap his mind around the thought of dead things clamoring to speak to her.
“Baby?” she asked. It was hardly more than a whisper.
Rhys shook himself out of his staggered daze. This wasn’t about him. There would be time enough to process the ramifications on his image of her later. Now, Moira was frightened and desperate for affirmation, holding open the delicate shell of her heart to reveal a dark, secret pearl. He couldn’t blow this.
“I still love you,” he said quickly, bringing her hand up to his mouth. “You’re still my wife.”
“But you’re scared of me,” she said, voice trembling. Her brown eyes filled with tears.
“No, no! Why would I be scared of you? Is this something you’re scared of?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and the floodgates opened. She curled up into his jacket and sobbed.
Rhys’s jaw tightened. He didn’t do well with public displays of emotion, but he slid his arms around her and let her cry anyway.
Rhys smoothed back her hair and kissed her forehead.
“I’m not angry you didn’t tell me. But you could have. You know that, don’t you? I would have listened.”
“I know,” she sniffed. “But I don’t like talking about it.”
“Then you don’t have to.”
Moira groaned and put her face in her hands, wiping off her tears. She daubed at her face with a napkin, doing her best not to disturb her mascara.
“But I need to. I can’t ignore it anymore. The more I ignore them, the harder they try to get my attention. I thought I had all these imaginary friends, when I was a little thing. I didn’t realize that boy on the swing set had been dead since the eighties, or know why the little girl who played with me in the sandbox at school was always there waiting for me. When I told my momma about it, she went white as a sheet and told me in no uncertain terms that spirits were nothing to fool with, that we didn’t touch that sort of magic in our house. She was only trying to protect me. I promised her I would stay away from it. But it won’t leave me alone.”
She sagged against him, emptied. He wasn’t strong enough to lift anyone, much less a woman as sturdily built as Moira, but he wanted terribly to scoop her up in his arms so she wouldn’t have to walk the hundred feet to their car.
Rhys heaved a heavy sigh. “And that’s where David comes in.”
“I don’t want his hands in this. But he might be the best chance I have. He’s the most powerful medium on the east coast, and we just happen to know him. It’s hard not to see that as a sign.”
Rhys could feel the strands of an invisible net drawing closed around them both, tighter and tighter. They were on the brink of something they could both walk away from, in theory, but probably wouldn’t be able to. His stomach churned.
One smart son of a bitch was right.
“Do you think he could do it?” Moira asked. “Show me how to get a handle on this?”
“Yes. That isn’t the same thing as it being a good idea, or him being nice about it. But, yes.”
She nodded numbly, eyes not really fixed on anything. He was shocked he hadn’t noticed the strain this was taking on her. But she flittered from client to client and from spell to spell like a busy bumblebee, always buried in her work. And if he was being honest, he didn’t emerge from the dark cavern of his study and his research half as much as he should to check on her. This was how things this big fell through the cracks.
“Are you going to help him out?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Rhys said, even though he knew damn well that he would commit crimes for an hour alone with those books. David knew that too. It had been checkmate the instant Rhys had seen the library. “Are you?”
“I need to think about it.”
Rhys nodded and pushed away the rest of his affogato. Moira’s skin had taken on an ashen undertone he didn’t like. She needed rest, preferably tucked into bed with a hot mug of tea.
“Can I take you home?”
“Yes, please.”
“Come on, little goddess,” he sighed, rising from the table. She let him lead her back onto the street by the arm, and they both tried to ignore the heavy certainty hanging in the air around them.
The wind of their lives was shifting course, blowing towards the unknown.