Chapter Eight Nora
Chapter Eight
Nora
A coincidence is one of life’s common forms of magic.
—Rules for Witches
Two days later, Nora was set up to begin the mural on the Holly Theater.
She had made arrangements with Aggie to adjust her hours around her painting time, and it was nice to have an excuse to just never be at home.
Her communication with Ben was perfunctory, and it was costing her not to dig into that.
She felt like she was hovering in space in a small glass box. She had to stay there and not push too far forward, not push too deep, be careful not to shatter it.
She’d had that feeling quite a bit in foster care, like it would only take one wrong move for her to get booted out of the house she was in and sent somewhere else.
It was the same every time she’d gone to stay with her grandmother too.
One wrong move and she’d be right back in the system, which had happened a couple of times.
God. How had it come to this with her husband?
Where she was afraid to question him on when exactly he was coming back? What he was actually doing?
It was like she’d been put in time-out. Like she was being tested.
That wasn’t how marriage should work. Unilateral decisions cut across the other person when your life was built together.
She did her best not to dwell on that while she painted.
Writing had been difficult for her since Ben had left because her mind was continually wandering, and it was almost impossible to bring it back to focus.
While she painted, she liked letting her mind wander free.
It was one way that the painting supported the writing.
Usually, she used it to brainstorm new ideas, to think about the story she might write eventually and try to sell to a major publisher.
The novel she had always intended to get to someday, but that felt too big and too lofty for her.
Now, though, she wasn’t loving her free-range thoughts, roaming around and picking at poison berries, tormenting her with an unknown future.
Bullshit.
She had been so sure she was past uncertainty.
There were just so many potential consequences to this. So many potential dreams and versions of her future that could be destroyed.
Like kids. She and Ben weren’t sure if they wanted them.
They’d decided to wait. She’d been good with that, because she was the product of young, stupid parents who hadn’t been ready to have kids, and really, never got ready to.
She was a casualty of people who had procreated without giving it any thought, and she’d always imagined if she did become a mother, it would be when her life was settled and she’d really honed her writing, or her art, and his practice was solid.
When everything was financially in order.
Now she was thirty-five, staring down the reality of sundowning fertility and . . . What if she had to start over?
She was rescued from her own thought process when the side door to the Holly opened, and Sam walked past her ladder.
“Sam,” she called down to him.
He stopped and looked up, shielding his face from the sun. She could have jumped down and kissed him. Genuinely. It was just such a relief to see him. Because he made her feel sane. Because he made her feel grounded.
“What are you doing up there?”
“I’m painting a mural,” she said.
“That’s incredible. Back in high school, you would’ve been doing graffiti.”
“I never graffitied anything.”
“Untrue. I believe you spray-painted the building of one of the local political parties in protest one year.”
“Yeah, that was a protest, not vandalism. I have the courage of my convictions.”
“That you do.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m doing the electrical for the stage.”
“Oh. Did Daisy hire you?”
He shook his head. “No. Zach Woods.”
“Is he here?”
Sam shot her a long-suffering stare. “No. Sorry. You can’t thirst on him. I’ve never actually met him. But he shot me a text about doing some of the electrical on the set and also getting everything set up for the lighting. I’m putting in a whole new system. It’s going to be for all the shows.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah. It’s nice. Usually, the big jobs go to . . . well. You already know my beef.”
“I know. With Daisy’s husband. That’s funny that Zach isn’t supporting Jonathan, though, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Sam said. “He’s a tool.”
“But Zach is in business with him.”
“Yeah, true, but honestly, I’d believe it if he didn’t show his true colors to Zach either. Guys like that are pretty good at gauging who would call them out on their bullshit. They hide it. But once you catch a glimpse of it, you can’t unsee it.”
“Yeah.” She frowned and ignored the strange feeling sitting in her stomach.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Ah. I’m good. I have this mural.”
“What exactly is the mural of?”
“Trees and berries and shit,” she said.
“Nora,” he mock-scolded. “There are kids in there. Watch your language.”
“Okay, but seriously, a whole scene. The mountains will stretch along here.” She gestured across the upper part of the building.
“And trees in the foreground will be growing up and out of the space. There will be big blossoms framing it around the front and bottom. The Logtown rose, fritillaria, and then blackberry bushes, obviously, because those are everywhere.”
He gripped the bottom of the ladder, leaning into it. She felt a warmth in the familiarity and safety of him. And something else altogether. “They picked the best. It’s going to be amazing.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He let go of the ladder and turned away from her, and she was left wondering if anyone else had ever expressed that level of confidence in her.
When she finished her session for the day, she packed up all her art supplies and headed back toward her house, where she was meeting the Discarded Witches Club.
She’d changed the group text a couple of days earlier to that name, which Soraya did not find funny. But she hadn’t changed it back either.
They were going to bundle herbs at Nora’s tonight, part of Aggie’s eminent flexibility with them.
Daisy had the grimoire to help them, and every bundle would be assigned a spell card.
Soraya and Daisy would do most of the bundling, while Nora designed some spell cards, drew them by hand, then scanned them in and printed them on nice paper.
When she pulled up to the house, Soraya and Daisy were already there with containers of Chinese takeout.
“Blessed be.” She aimed that directly at Soraya.
“Jesus loves you,” she said.
Nora laughed. “Thank you. Because everyone else thinks I’m an asshole.”
They trooped up to the front door, and Nora unlocked it.
The bins of herbs were sitting in her kitchen, the scent sweet and strong.
The first order of business was food. Nora was starving.
She’d painted through when she should have had lunch, but once she got rolling on it, she hadn’t wanted to stop.
After she’d taken the edge off her hunger, she looked at her friends.
“How were your days?”
“I got more sourdough orders,” Soraya said. “I’m having trouble keeping up.”
“You?” Nora asked Daisy.
“Sam came by the theater to talk to me about what we need for electrical. He’s donating his time to my set, which is just incredible. I thanked him today, but please thank him again and again and again for me.”
“Zach arranged it,” Nora said. “I talked to Sam today.”
“Well, he’s amazing.” Daisy’s face glowed.
Nora experienced a twinge of discomfort over Daisy’s effusiveness about Sam. Nora knew he was amazing. She had known it for years. But the amazingness of Sam felt like a lovely secret that was only hers, and it felt strange to share it.
“And how are you?” Daisy asked.
“Great. I spent the afternoon boiling in the sun while I painted blackberries and pondered my dwindling fertility.”
“Wow,” Daisy said. “That’s . . . a lot.”
“It is. It’s another thing I didn’t think about when he left, because I just wanted him to come back.
Like the house, and how I’m going to live.
But if he wants a divorce, there are so many things it affects.
I was fine with not having kids yet. I’m still not sure that I want them.
But I also don’t not want them. I’m thirty-five, and if I have to meet someone else, and assuming I go through a bunch of wrong guys first, then meet another one, I’ll realistically be forty before I remarry, and then who knows if I’ll be able to get pregnant if I want to.
I hate this feeling that he’s taking choices from me.
Decisions we were supposed to make together. ”
“Yeah, I get that,” Daisy muttered.
“I’m scared to talk to him about it. I’m scared of what he’ll say. I’m scared of what all this means.”
“It’s not fair of him to leave you in limbo like this.
What David did was horrendous, but it was also definitive.
It’s something I can’t get over. I’m not going to get over it.
I’m not going to be able to be with him.
I—I have to divorce him.” Soraya’s eyes filled with tears.
“I can’t forgive it. More than that, I don’t want to. But at least I know what I want.”
Nora looked at Daisy. Daisy took her empty plate to the sink and returned to the table, then unwound a section of twine and began to bundle together some rosemary, sage, and basil.
“I just don’t think I can ever trust him again.
It’s not even the affair. It’s that he could look at me, devastate me in that way, and have absolutely no emotional response to it.
It’s almost better that he cheated. At least I can tell people that.
It’s quick, it’s easy. I can use it as this simple way to explain that he betrayed me, but the biggest betrayal was him walking past me when I was crumpled up on the floor crying because he told me he wasn’t happy with me.
That he was leaving me. I will never be able to get that image out of my head.
I will never be able to forget that he could do that.
It was cruel. I’ve always known Jonathan to have flaws, but he’s never been cruel.
But I’ve seen his capacity for cruelty now. I can’t unsee it.”
It was a weird thing to have these women feel sorry for her, because what they’d both gone through was so hideous.
Nora’s marriage wasn’t over.
But they were right. She was left suspended. Ben hadn’t given her a timeline or a plan or anything. He wasn’t giving her something to work on about herself. Something to work on about them. Except her emotional availability, she supposed.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Soraya said.
“Even when David did things I didn’t like, repeatedly, when we would have the same fights over and over again, I told myself it was okay because he was a good man.
A good man I loved, and so I would use that as my compass to find my way back to being content with him.
But that’s just gone now. I can’t look at him the same way.
But all the people around us still do. All our friends from church.
The kids. I feel exposed, I feel embarrassed, I feel like I’m the one who did the wrong thing.
I wish he could share even a percentage of my humiliation.
Just the tiniest bit. That’s what I want. I want him to be humiliated.”
“You should write it on a bay leaf.” Nora smiled slyly at her.
Soraya shot her a withering glare. “Embarrassing your ex isn’t a goal.”
“Disagree,” Nora said.
“I can’t put that on a vision board.”
“Your magical manifestation board?” Nora affected an innocent expression.
“Regardless. I can’t put it on there.”
Daisy held up the herb bundle. “This is sage, basil, and rosemary. There are properties of protection, cleansing, and healing. Also joy, transformation, manifestation, and growth. Which I think we could all use. Especially ahead of the baseball game.”
“I just don’t—”
“Aren’t you curious if it’ll do anything?
Because you are actually going to have to see him tomorrow,” Daisy said.
Usually not the antagonist, Nora was fascinated that Daisy was pushing now.
“All these wins happened after we did our little bay leaf spells. And even before that. All the victories lined up after we found each other. At this point, it could be a series of coincidences.”
Goose bumps rose on Nora’s arm. She rubbed at them. “I’m in. I could use some joy. Manifestation. Clarity.”
“We can add horehound for that, Nora, which seems right up your alley.”
“Some boys used to call me that in high school.”
Daisy laughed. Soraya looked like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to laugh or not.
“Can you get a bowl?” Daisy asked.
Nora grabbed a silver bowl out of the pantry and set it in front of Daisy. Daisy reached into her purse and took out a lighter.
“What do you have a lighter for?” Nora asked.
“Definitely not the occasional random cigarette since my husband left.” Daisy laughed. “I haven’t had one in about a week. I’m just hanging on to it for witchcraft now.”
She lit the end of the herb bundle, and sweet-smelling smoke filled the air. Daisy looked down at the grimoire.
“I bind the energy around me, which threatens my light. I cast it far away, and I draw all that is good toward me. I myself am sacred. Whatever harm has been meant for me, turn it back to the one who sent it. And so it is.”
If Nora could give that much credit to spiritual things, she’d have sworn she felt a wind blow through the room.
Daisy looked up, and Soraya had her hands pinned squarely to her chest. “Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Maybe,” said Daisy. “We’ll have to wait for the game tomorrow.”