Chapter 4 Clara #2
I lifted the ID to my eyes. “Des, come on. This won’t work anywhere. And why didn’t you use my real name?”
She ignored me. “Come upstairs.”
“But what if a customer comes?”
“It’s dead out there. And we’ll be back in an hour, tops.” She rose from her chair and thumped up the stairs.
I called after her. “Des, come on! How are we ever going to fix the shop if we just bail in the middle of the afternoon?” But she was already gone. I dragged our chalkboard inside, drew the red curtains across the windows, and locked the door.
I found her in the bathroom, mixing water and brown powder in a plastic bowl until it formed a muddy-looking concoction. She saw me watching and held up a box of henna hair dye.
“I need to change my hair? No way.”
“You need to match the ID.” Des shrugged. “You really like it brown?”
“It’s just …” I had never thought about it, not really.
Des had been dyeing her hair the same bright red my entire life.
In the photos I had of my mother, her hair was the same color as mine, a medium brown.
Nothing special, maybe, but it tied us together in a small way, and maybe I treasured that more that I’d thought. “Nothing.”
“Well, sit down, then.” She gestured to the toilet.
I sat and closed my eyes as she rubbed the mixture into my hair with her fingers.
She worked the color from my roots through the tips of my hair, pausing now and then to wipe a stray streak of dye from my skin.
It was the gentlest she had ever been with me.
With my hair still wet, it looked the same, though I could make out a flare of color at the tips.
I sat in front of the mirror and waited.
Slowly, as the dampness lifted, I could see the change.
Gradual, and then sudden, a new me sprang up, stepping into a new life.
It’s only hair, I tried to tell myself. But I also knew that wasn’t exactly true.
I didn’t trust Des not to turn me into someone I wouldn’t like.
AFTER DES left for the club—heat stifling and no appointments in the book— I locked the shop again and walked to the library.
Des and I didn’t have a computer and we used burner phones, adding minutes when we could, so when I needed to know something I walked the eight blocks to use the library’s internet.
On the way, I passed two more posters of Julie Zale: one tucked under the windshield wiper of a parked car, another taped to the library’s front door.
Even in the photocopied pictures, her smile seemed to shine.
I felt the same tug in my gut as when her uncle came: What made her run?
Here I was, hoping to run toward love—California, my mother.
What about being loved had been intolerable to Julie Zale?
There were only three other patrons at the library, and no one seemed to be doing anything that looked like work.
A woman read a day-old newspaper. One man had his feet up on the table, trimming his fingernails.
Even the employee at the checkout counter was asleep with her chin in her hands.
I had come to search about my mother—a habit I indulged once a week—but this time I googled Julie Zale first. Her uncle had made a website where people could leave information by sending in an anonymous form, if they thought they knew anything or if they’d seen her.
It showed the photo from his posters, but others, too: Pictures of Julie running in a meet, her eyes narrowed on the finish line.
Julie at junior prom in a beaded blue dress, a flower in her hair.
Julie sticking her tongue out while wearing a pink feather boa.
I found more websites that mentioned her name, mostly articles from the local papers bragging about her track meet wins, her nomination to All State, the way she broke the record in the 400-meter at an event last fall.
Even though she was probably in trouble, and maybe even in worse trouble than me, I felt jealous of her.
She had a talent that made people love her, a talent that a whole town was proud of.
I had a talent, too, I guessed: I could see things now and then that most people couldn’t, but it felt like a burden.
Most of the time, I would have given it away.
Next, I found her Facebook page. More photos of her running track, her in a yellow sundress, eating an ice cream.
A shot of her giving a piggyback ride to another girl in front of a pretty redbrick school, the kind that I had only ever seen on TV.
I scrolled through the comments people had left behind.
Julez, we love you. Come back home, babe.
J, you are missed. I hope wherever you are, you are safe and sound.
I’m a stranger, but your story caught my eye. God Bless You.
I knew why I wanted to leave, but why would a girl like that just pick up and go?
I took my tarot deck out of my bag, shook the cards from their red silk pouch.
You weren’t supposed to ask the cards a question about someone else’s fate if they hadn’t requested it, but I couldn’t help it.
I’d only pull one card. Just a hint, I bargained.
What really happened to Julie Zale? I shuffled the deck and the cards stuck together in the humidity.
The card I drew was the Moon. The card for women.
The card that meant mystery, confusion, even insanity.
But it could also mean knowing, intuition, or a sign that you needed to face what scared you the most. When she taught me tarot, Des claimed it was mostly learning to bullshit, that the cards were just props, ways to tell a story.
But I believed in what tarot could tell me, in letting the cards speak.
I also needed to believe that magic and meaning sometimes reached into our world.
Or else there was just my life—the high school diploma I would never get, the shop, the mangy feral cats, the mother who never wrote anymore.
Des coming home from a shift at the club with her pupils huge and glossy, rubbing at her nose.
If I wanted to use magic, The Wisdom of Tarot was filled with rituals and spells that promised to guide you toward the information you desired.
I could try making an offering—I had never done it before.
The book claimed that these rituals were powerful, that if you wanted to cast one, you needed to take great care.
I imagined working alongside my mother, grinding dried flowers into powders, lighting sacred candles, arranging crystals into circles.
According to her last postcard, four years ago, she lived in the guesthouse of a movie producer: 518 Montvale Road, Los Angeles, California.
The main house was pristine and white with a wide semicircle of a driveway, a sweeping green yard.
I imagined myself there someday, my bare feet on the lush grass.
On the satellite image you could see the square of the guesthouse, its terra-cotta roof, next to the aqua rectangle of the pool.
She wrote once that sometimes when the oranges ripened, they grew so heavy that they fell from the trees and splashed into the water, that a jacaranda tree bloomed with tiny violet flowers right outside her window.
I’ll bring you here one day, my love, when the timing is right.
When I see the sign. I ran my finger over and over the words so many times that the ink was more faded than any other line.
I was still waiting for her to tell me when she was ready for me, when I could join her and start my real life.
I had written her so many letters over the years, letters full of questions: Which famous people have you met?
What are the parties like? Does it ever rain?
I looked up other things, too: Bus tickets to Los Angeles: $313.
A night at a cheap motel: $55. A taxi ride from the Greyhound station to Montvale Road: $45.
I checked them against what I had written in my notebook a few months ago—plus money for rent, for food, for clothes—I needed to save enough so that when I found my mother I wouldn’t be a burden to her, the way Des was always telling me I was.
Two thousand dollars was the amount I came up with, the number that would make me feel safe.
I walked home and slid The Wisdom of Tarot from underneath my bed.
Her handwriting was spidery and strange in the margins, like something that might crawl off the page.
The book was heavy in my lap; I flipped through it, a musty smell rising from the mold-flecked pages, until I found the section on the Moon.
The book said that the Moon represented what was in shadow, parts of ourselves or parts of others that had yet to be revealed.
To learn the truth behind a mystery, it advised leaving a crystal out at night to charge in the moonlight or even a sliver of your fingernail or a piece of your own hair.
There were notes scribbled in the margins that I couldn’t make out, but I assumed it meant the spell must be good, if my mother had done it before.
I fingered a ribbon of hair at the back of my head, one that I wouldn’t miss.
Then I sliced it off with a pair of kitchen shears and stroked it in the palm of my hand.