Chapter 28 Clara #2
“You never had a vision about your mother, huh? Limits to your talents, maybe?” There was a dangerous edge to her voice, a mean smile curling the corners of her lips, and I was looking directly at something that I had tried very hard, for a very long time, not to see.
“You want to go to your mother? Fine, but there’s something you’ll want to know first.” She reached for a stack of papers that had been behind her on the bed.
“Trust me, you’re not going to like what you see. ”
I shook my head. “You just want to keep me here with you so you don’t have to be miserable all by yourself. You want me to be unhappy, too.”
“You want to talk unhappy? She’s crazy, Clara!
Okay? Your mother. She has been for a long time.
She had a gift but it was like she had …
too much. It made her head go all wrong.
It started before she even left Atlantic City.
It got worse around the time you were born.
I told her she needed to get help and instead she up and ran away.
For a long time she was like you, and then she just went haywire.
Or maybe she saw something that made her brain go bad.
Either way, I can tell you that she needs more help than you or I do.
” She’s wrong, I told myself. She’s just lying again. This is just one more of her tricks.
“Here,” she said. “Have at it.” She pushed the letters against my chest, and I had to clutch at them so they wouldn’t fall. “I’ve been watching you lately, and something’s up with you. You twitch. You hear things that aren’t there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you are just like her.”
I always knew when Des was lying, so I could tell that she wasn’t just angry. She meant what she said. She had thought it all along, those times I flinched, felt the creep of the flies, and she narrowed her eyes at me. What if she was right?
I slid to the floor and pulled the first letter from its envelope.
Dear Desmina and Ava,
This is for both of you. I need you to read this carefully, and please do what I say.
There is a dark spirit living inside of me, in the space between my left ribs and my collarbone.
I have tried everything to get rid of him but now I will need to go to the shaman in the desert, who has experience with this kind of thing.
Please send me $500 for the bus ticket, and for the shaman’s fee.
If you cannot send the money, I think there are other ways I can barter with him.
I have had visions through this spirit that worry me—
I shoved the letter back in the envelope and opened the next.
Ava,
The men I warned you about are getting closer.
I have tried to come to you in your dreams but I wonder if it has been too long, if that portal between us is now shut.
If you had sent me the money I asked for I could have rid myself of the spirit, but instead I must sometimes speak in his voice.
Some days I don’t know which voice is his and which is mine, or if they are both the same, tangled together, twisted like vines.
I see so many terrible things now—wars and violence, children whose bellies are bloated with hunger.
The world is full of so much evil that rushes at me like arrows.
They pierce me, Ava, these things that I see.
My sister is angry with me, I think. She sent me away, after all, no matter what she tells you. Please send the money if you can.
The last letter was dated three years ago.
Her handwriting was so messy and frantic that I could hardly make out any of the words.
One of the others was written on a Big Mac wrapper.
A faded grease stain darkened the middle.
The reason was always shifting, but in every letter she asked for money.
I almost laughed; in that way she wasn’t much different from Des.
Sisters to the core. I had been a fool to think I could change my life by running away to somewhere new, that there was a different life waiting for me somewhere else.
I was always telling customers about their fates, that they still could make choices when facing obstacles—but maybe I’d been wrong.
Maybe fate did come for us all, slashing through our lives like a sharp knife.
At the bottom of the stack were more envelopes. The ones I had sent since I learned how to write. All of them were marked Return to Sender: Recipient Unknown. All of them had been opened. Des must have read each one.
“She never lived there,” I said. “She made it up.” All these years of pulling up the image of that guesthouse in the library, I had been hovering over someone else’s life.
The Wisdom of Tarot was splayed on the floor where Des had thrown it, but I didn’t move to pick it up.
The book felt more dangerous than comforting now.
I had so wanted to believe that my mother had magic, that she had grace.
That, once I found her, she could teach me how to redeem myself.
Instead, she was a warning. I could end up the same way she did.
“You see? You want to find her, you go ahead. You think that’ll make you happy? That’s fine. But let me save you a little time. You’re not going to like what you see. Check the homeless shelters and the park benches, okay? My guess is that she’s standing on a street corner, shouting at nothing.”
I couldn’t see straight. I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.
Was I like her? Would I go insane? Maybe it had already started—all the ways I couldn’t trust my brain.
Was that what the vision on the boardwalk was about, all of those women dead in the marsh?
The flies? The crying child? Was it just something horrible and ugly that my mind had turned over and spit out, the way the ocean churned up driftwood and bits of glass?
Des stood and pushed her shoulders back, lifted her chin in a mean tilt.
“Now excuse me,” she said, walking past me and out the door, her shoulder almost brushing mine.
I still thought, for a moment, that she might hug me.
That she would soften and feel sorry that I had found out about my mother this way.
That there might be a similar fate awaiting me, or maybe it had already begun.
I stayed up late and forced myself to look at the returned letters I’d written.
They were full of bargaining, pleading hope.
If you let me come, I’ll always clean my room.
If I can visit you, you won’t even know I’m there.
Why don’t I come help you with your clients?
I see things, too. Poor, stupid little girl.
THE NEXT morning, I sat in the shop, my eyes swollen with tears, turning over a few cards, tracing my fingers over the rivers, the stars.
I tried to form a question in my mind, something I could ask the tarot, but couldn’t come up with anything.
For the first time I could remember, I didn’t want to know what the universe had in store for me, what my future held.
My phone chimed. Lily: Text me back! What’s going on? We were supposed to talk …
How could I face her now, when everything I said, everything I saw, might be completely wrong? It chimed again and I picked it up to turn it off, but the text wasn’t from her that time. It was the man who had given me the burns.
I felt a pang of dread reading his message, but ignored it.
I thought about the money Des took, about what it would take to start over again.
I couldn’t go to my mother, but I also couldn’t stay—I would think of the marsh every single day, of those women, whether they were really there or not.
Luis, skulking through the grass. Wondering when Luis would come back and find me, ready to punish me for what I knew. Wondering who he’d take next.
One night, $500. The betrayal foretold in my reading had already come true.
The money I had hoarded was gone; Des had been the last person I could count on.
Maybe there had to be real, physical pain before I could be free.
For the price of one weekend, I could be away from Luis—his staring eyes, and whatever was in him that wanted to hurt.
I could be free of Des—her moods and her pills and the bitter way the corners of her mouth turned down.
I texted him back and asked where we should meet.