Chapter 4 Clara #3
When night fell, a half-moon low in the sky spread a stripe of white light over the ocean.
I set the piece of hair on my windowsill and tamped it under a hunk of white quartz.
I added the bandana, too, smoothing it alongside the hair—maybe there was a reason that I’d been compelled to take it, after all.
Before I fell asleep, I felt for the place at the base of my skull where the hair had come from, the short spikes sharp to the touch.
I dozed off looking at the quartz, bright in the moonlight, the hair a streak of red beneath it, and waited to see what the world would offer me in exchange for this little piece of myself, what kind of secrets it might tell.
AS SOON as I woke up the next morning a vision came over me.
At first, the only thing I saw was a pale shape against a splotchy background.
I couldn’t make sense of it, nor could I push it away.
The throbbing began in the middle of my forehead and spread behind my eyes.
I tried to focus on whatever this vision was asking me to see.
A whitish square. Smears of red around it.
Crisscrossing lines, like wrinkles. Skin.
My mouth filled with the slightly sweet, metallic taste of blood and my stomach lurched, which was how I realized that the pale shape was a tooth that had come loose.
I came to, feeling disoriented, dizzy. The vision didn’t make sense to me.
The bloody tooth had no origin, no context, no person attached to it, someone on the other side yearning to be seen or told something.
There had always been rules, limits to how my gift worked.
Some clients thought I could see their entire futures like a film reel—beginning, middle, end.
But usually, what I saw was a glimpse of the past—a moment that pulsed with intensity for them.
Something essential to their personalities, an instance in their life that shaped the way they thought. So what was this? Whose tooth?
And why? Once again, I ached for my mother. I reached for the letters I kept in a shoebox under the bed.
Dear Ava,
If you are anything like me, this is the year when you will come to realize the power of your intuition.
You’ll be able to see things that no one else can see.
Women like us have power, have a deeper understanding, a greater capacity for attention than most. All you have to do is step out of your own way and believe in it.
There will be things you know without reason or proof.
You’ll see things that should be impossible for you to see.
Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. You have more power than you can even imagine.
You have more to learn, and I can teach you.
The letter had come a little late. Starting that school year, my head had already begun spinning with images—I think it was something about all those bodies and hopes and worries crammed so close together.
That was the year that Des started me in the shop after school and on weekends, when she decided to call me the Great Clara Voyant.
Sometimes ideas and images came to me with the suddenness and clarity of magic, but most of the time it meant observing, thinking, trying to understand who someone was the old-fashioned way—watching them and waiting for them to reveal a particular desire or wish.
To be honest, it had a lot in common with what Des taught me about stealing: understanding where a person’s attention was, how much you could get away with, what to do if it went wrong.
I ran the tip of my tongue over my gums and winced as I imagined how much force it would take to knock a tooth loose.
The hair on the windowsill was red as a wound against the white paint.
The morning was already hot, the air close and thick.
But the drowsy, unreal feeling that had pervaded my days was gone.
My senses were alert, my attention sharpened to worry.
I wondered what exactly I had opened myself up to, what I had asked for.
DES ROSE at eleven, bleary-eyed and smelling like the club: baby oil, stale beer. It took her a while to get ready, to arrange her hair to hide the hickey on her neck, before we could go try our luck at the spa again.
We walked toward the jitney stop at Bally’s, and on the way Des stopped to reach into a tourist’s tote bag as the woman paused in front of the salt water taffy shop. Des was too slow and the woman felt her, wheeled on her heels.
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, it’s such a pretty bag. I didn’t want to bother you, just wanted to see if it was real leather.” She put her hand on the woman’s elbow, her smile sickly sweet, and the woman smiled back.
“It’s actually from Target,” she said.
“Get out of here,” Des shrieked. “You’d never know!”
“Fucking piece of cheap trash,” Des said, and huffed, as soon as we were out of hearing range.
I could tell she was embarrassed. Maybe it was the hangover, or maybe she was losing her touch.
Either way, I knew better than to say anything.
We passed a poster of Julie Zale in the window of the arcade.
I should find a way to return the bandana, I thought.
Track down the uncle or put it in the mail.
The air was so thick it was hard to breathe, and I felt that same tightness in my throat.
We weren’t on the jitney for more than a minute when the tingle crept into my forehead, soft and slow, before it moved down my neck, to my shoulders.
I heard music: that Bruce Springsteen song that people around here played all the time, that I couldn’t help but know the words to.
It was about being in love with a Jersey Girl, Springsteen’s voice crackling through a staticky radio.
A song about dancing all night, holding hands under the spangle of carnival lights.
About how being in love made everything else seem okay.
I looked around as the music got louder, then so loud that my ears throbbed.
“I wish he’d turn that down.”
Des jumped and dug her nails into my arm. “Jesus! Turn what down? Why are you yelling?”
“Shit. Nothing,” I said, trying to lower my voice, even though I couldn’t hear myself over the wail of the saxophone.
I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes.
The jitney smelled sour, like lemon cleaning solution, but for a moment I felt sun and fresh, cool air on my face.
I was filled with a thrilling sense of speed, and of hope. I tasted caramel on my teeth.
The song fading to a tinny whine in my ears, I opened my eyes as the jitney lurched to a stop outside of the casino entrance.
After I stepped off the bus, I stood in the sunlight and looked around, but there wasn’t anyone else nearby, aside from the hot dog vendor who clanked his metal tongs against his cart.
I dug the heels of my palms into my eyes. What had I done with that spell?
“What’s with you?” Des asked. “This was your idea. I need you to be focused.”
“Give me a second. I … I feel carsick.”
“You don’t get carsick.”
I didn’t want to tell Des about any of it.
That I had done a spell in the first place.
That I thought it might have worked, that now I was seeing things, hearing things, tasting things that I didn’t understand.
Des applied another coat of red lip gloss, air kissed the little circle of her compact mirror.
Her mouth had the hard, wet sheen of patent leather.
The song finally went quiet, but I didn’t like the way Des was looking at me.
Like I was making her nervous. I felt something against my thigh, a quick brush of sensation, like a bit of string or a hair stuck to the skin, but when I looked down there was nothing there.
Des watched me scratch at it. I felt it again, on my shoulder blade, but ordered myself not to move.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.” I pushed the song and the skin-crawling feeling and the bloodied tooth from my mind, shook my hair from its ponytail, and we stepped inside, the dim of the casino familiar and cool.