The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  I smack my lips in agreement. “Let’s get going, Cleo,” I say. “Your sister’s been really patient.”

  As we make our way through the darkened rooms, I speak to Tess.

  “So, Auntie.” I keep my voice low, which isn’t hard with the relentless murmur of school kids on field trips. “Isn’t it ironic that Viv’s married to a guy named Jesus Christ?” I have told her all that I know. I googled the Holy Revival Redeemer church last night and what the girls told me is true. Their father’s name really is Jesus Christ. No last name (although I think Superstar would be kind of catchy). He was born in Jamaica to a Nigerian father and American mother, who founded the church and gave their only son a whopper of a name, as well as no-brainer career plans. On the church’s website, there’s a picture of Romola and Cleo’s dad preaching to a crowd of hundreds in a field as it rains. And no one holds an umbrella.

  “Why is that ironic?” Auntie Tess asks in all seriousness.

  “Hm,” I say. “Because she was born and raised a witch?”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yeah, that. What do you think is going on? Why did she leave the kids with me?”

  “I have no idea. You should ask Gru.”

  “I know,” I say with a Romola-like grumble. “Wouldn’t she be surprised to hear from me?” Then I think: Would she really? I wonder if Gru already knows where her granddaughters are. But I can’t ask her—I don’t think Viveka wants me to talk to her. I could simply email her a casual hello, except she only occasionally checks her account at the Mendocino public library.

  To be honest, I have been half-expecting Gru to show up on my doorstep. She also sees fairies and animals talking to each other, and she helped me interpret auras. Gru is the real deal, as far as being magickal goes. She has shown me charms and spells of true power, not just the usual touchy-feely, window-dressing rituals that were fun and thrilling when I was a child, but became tedious and empty after I’d grown up. She made a flower wilt and dry up in the middle of a rain shower. She caused a cat to fly from her rooftop into the branches of a tree over thirty feet away. I bet if she really cut loose, her display of powers would put mine to shame. Unlike most witches I know, she has the light.

  “Viveka asked me not to tell Gru about this.”

  “But why?” Auntie Tess asks.

  “Still don’t know. She wouldn’t explain. Or couldn’t. She was kind of…terse.”

  We have arrived at the seahorses, and Romola is sitting in front of them, writing carefully in her spiral-bound notebook.

  “What do you know about Viv?” I ask Auntie Tess.

  “Not much.” She shrugs. “Something happened between Sadie and Gru. A falling out. So Sadie moved up north and took Viveka. Sadie left her husband, although they were never legally bound. It was a straight handfasting.”

  I’ve been to a few of these pagan wedding ceremonies. Lots of bare feet and flowers. Awesome. Monogamy is not high up on the list of to-dos for witches. Generally speaking, of course.

  “What was his name again?” I ask. “Viveka’s father.”

  “Tucker Murray. Gru handpicked him for Sadie. Found him living in a yurt near the Humboldt college campus when she did some lecturing there.” Tess frowns up at the information panel for the seahorses. “I think he came from money down in Southern California.” She turns to me. “Memphis, I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Sure, and I need to ask you one too.”

  “You go first.”

  I take a deep breath. “Can the girls stay with you while I’m on the Arsenic Playground tour? Please, please, please.”

  “Oh, lamb, I would but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, this is my favor.” She is beaming. “I’m doing it. Screw Gil and screw Ana & Co.! I’m going to the Mellora Islands.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going on vacation! The Mellora Islands. There’re very small, very unexplored, off the coast of Mexico. Well. There’s one spa resort. That’s where I’ll be.”

  I take her hand. “That’s fantastic!”

  “Thank you. I think so too. And that brings me to my favor.” She smiles. “Would you do a protection spell for me?”

  Without thinking, I take a step back. “I can’t.”

  “But…why not?” There is hurt in her voice. “Memphis, you know what it means for me to ask you.” I do know. Tess is very prideful when it comes to magick. She doesn’t like to appear powerless. She would do the spell herself if she didn’t doubt her abilities. Of course, I’ve doubted myself for a while now—and because of the very spell she wants me to do.

  “You know why,” I say.

  “Lamb.” She takes my hand. “You’re the best practitioner I know.”

  I laugh. “But Auntie, I’m not doing it anymore.”

  She appears to be choosing her words carefully. “I’m asking you to do this for me. That makes it different. It will work.”

  “Different than Alice, you mean?”

  She doesn’t say anything. We haven’t talked about Alice since right after I got the news she was dead. Which is, of course, how I found out my protection spell had not been successful in keeping Alice safe, even as she worked to keep the women and children of Gabon safe. My failure as a practitioner was not just bad—it was catastrophic.

  The room has emptied, and is quiet. Cleo is standing rapt in front of one of the aquariums a few feet away from Romola, who is still grinding away at her notebook. I kneel down beside Cleo. The tank she’s studying is a large, circular tube about six feet across and reaching from floor to ceiling. Inside, free-floating plants drift amongst kelp rooted in the watery, sand-covered floor.

  I look more closely and I can’t help but exclaim in surprise and delight. The floating plants aren’t plants at all but large seahorses, about the size of squirrels. They look like brownish-green seaweed, the kind with pods that wash up on the beach and pop when you squeeze them. The information panel says they’re called sea dragons and they live in the waters of Australia.

  Cleo glances at me. “I like them too,” she says, and I realize I am grinning.

  She walks over to Auntie Tess, who still looks crestfallen, and they begin to chat. I feel grateful, and turn back to the sea dragons. I do like them. I could stay here for hours watching them drift back and forth, up and down. They’re even cooler than the jellyfish.

  One floats near the glass, and I lean closer. It’s shaped differently, and I see that’s because a small mermaid the size of a fairy sits sidesaddle on the sea dragon’s back. Instead of wings she has fins growing underneath her arms. Her hair is black and swirls around her face like squid ink. An eye patch covers one of her eyes. Her other eye, the same violet as the interior of an abalone shell, stares straight at me. Her sea dragon’s nostrils blow steam onto the glass, and the mermaid leans forward with a crop that looks fashioned from the needle of a sea urchin.

  In the steam, she writes a message so small that I have to lean in even closer to read it: Do it for her. I look up and my eyes meet the mermaid’s. She winks—or, since she has a patch, maybe it’s just a blink. The sea dragon tosses its head and drifts off into the kelp forest.

  ****

  I’m surprised at how quickly Hillary agrees to babysit, although my up-front offer of fifty bucks probably did some fast swaying.

  Cooper arrives home later than usual, having played a round of golf at a municipal course after school. I introduce him for the first time to Viveka’s girls.

  He turns on the charm. “And how are you liking San Francisco? Do any sightseeing yet?” He hangs up his golf cap and jacket in the closet.

  “Not yet,” Romola says. She studies his bag of irons and grassy cleats. “We’ve been doing our homework.”

  Cleo doesn’t really have homework. She has picture books and is already reading on her own. I have watched carefully, and she hasn’t just memorized Alice in Wonderland. She really knows it. I sort of tested her by lending her one of my childhood favorite
s, In the Night Kitchen, which is like an eerie, urban re-creation of Gru’s backwoods home in Mendocino. Cleo sounds out the words to herself under her breath. She goes through it once, then reads it out loud for me, slowly but accurately, with hardly a mispronounced word.

  “Well, you should have—” Cooper stops and looks at me. He seems puzzled. It’s because, I realize, he’s not sure what they call me.

  “Memphis,” I say.

  “You should have Memphis take you—or we should take you—to Pier Thirty-nine. Or how about the carousel?”

  “We already went to the aquarium.” I point out the polished seashells I bought for them at the aquarium gift shop. Romola says she’ll use them in her school project, and Cleo has named hers Mani and Pedi after I said I needed one.

  I send the girls back into the living room, where Romola has her papers and books spread out on the coffee table. I’ve been correcting her multiplication tables exercises. She’s struggling with the sevens. Cooper heads down to our room and I follow. He sniffs the incense that lingers in the air from the protection spell I did for Auntie Tess. I sit on the bed and watch as he starts to take off his clothes, but he stops with a glance at the open door. I jump up and close it for him. On the floor behind it I find a jumble of dust bunnies and an earring I lost months ago. We rarely have to shut this thing.

  “Did you get the Chez Remy reservation?”

  He shakes the dust off his bathrobe—also rarely used—and puts it on. “Mais oui.” He pauses and then looks at me, leans down, and gives me a kiss. I smell the dampness of the fairway on his skin along with a musky scent, faint and familiar. Not entirely his—I’m mixed in there too.

  ****

  Hillary eyes one girl and then the other. This will be easy for her. Already, I gave them dinner, bathed them, and got them in their PJs. All she has to do is feed them snacks, watch TV with them, and get them to brush their teeth and into bed by—I’ve said—ten o’clock, although Romola has informed me they never go to bed after nine, not even on the weekends.

  The girls say hello to Hil in their pixie-light voices. They both jump up from the living room floor, where I have installed them with pillows, blankets, and a bowl of peeled oranges.

  “What are their names again?” Hil asks.

  “Romola and Cleo.”

  Cooper’s daughter wrinkles her nose with perfected tweener aplomb. “What kinds of names are those?”

  “What kind of name is Hillary?” Cleo pipes.

  Hillary stares at her then turns to me. “Is she back-talking?”

  “Cleo,” I say. “Are you back-talking?”

  “What’s that?”

  I look at Hillary. “She can’t be doing something if she doesn’t know what it is.”

  “She could poop and not know what to call it.”

  “Now, that’s back-talking.”

  “I know what poop is,” Cleo offers. “We call it caca.”

  The girls are fascinated by Hillary, and she is a fascinating being, the ideal American girl—blond, slender, fine-featured, with braces and just a touch of acne to make it all real. They follow her around the room and into the kitchen where she helps herself to a soda. They trail her back to the pillows. She finds Shrek on TV, already in progress, and watches it as the girls watch her.

  Cooper gets his sports coat on and gives Hillary a kiss on the top of her head. I notice she hangs on to him longer than she usually does. Her half-closed eyes shift to the girls. I want to reassure her, but with girls and their daddy issues—what can you do?

  ****

  Marisol told me about Chez Remy before the buzz hit the streets. As the Planet’s politics/sex/restaurant columnist, she’s a foodie, obsessed with restaurant lists, Yelp, and Zagat surveys. She’s my polar opposite, constantly jamming, canning, and cooking in her tiny apartment kitchen.

  “Chez Remy is not just about the food,” she has said on more than one occasion, after writing up a review of the place a couple of months ago. Each time she gives me a significant wink, which could mean either there’s (a) a really foxy host, (b) a really foxy bartender, or (c) a truly outstanding warm chocolate pudding cake.

  It soon becomes clear to me that choice (a) is the reason Marisol’s eye twitches. The blond host, dressed in a button-up shirt the color of oxblood and jeans similar to Tyson Belmonte’s expensive designer pair, dazzles us with his crookedly white smile. His face is etched with laugh lines. He’s about Cooper’s height, slightly smaller in the shoulders, and carries himself around the small, overstuffed, din-filled room with a lithe, puckish grace.

  “Your server will bring you water,” he says, his rich, French accent filled with z’s and e’s. “It will not have ice. I hope that is satisfactory?”

  “Wonderful,” I say.

  “Fine, fine,” says Cooper, exuding Francophile satisfaction.

  “Bon.” Our host looks into our eyes. His are so blue. “Can I get anything else for you at this moment in time?”

  “Champagne,” I say quickly.

  “Fantastic!” His eyes light up with approval. “A brut, non?”

  “Just two glasses,” Cooper says. “I have to drive.”

  So responsible. That’s why I love him.

  “Not a problem.” Our host’s smile shines down on Cooper. “I will return very shortly.”

  I put my napkin in my lap—it’s a warm poppy color. Everything in the restaurant is warm—the heavy velvet curtain encircling the door, keeping out the draft; the mahogany chairs and tables; the copper-accented zinc bar, muzzily reflecting the wine bottles stacked in the wall on its burnished surface. Scents of cooked food load the air: slow-braised lamb, simmering beef stew, spicy persimmon salads. I could crawl into the fragrances, and search the corners for magickal creatures. I would almost welcome them, tell them to pull up some saltshakers and stay a while.

  Of course, it’s not in their nature to fraternize outside their species. If they have to, they’re usually all business. Like the mermaid today. I appreciate that she got to the point. None of this mystical hide-and-go-seek her comrade has been pulling.

  Cooper asks me, “Why are you scowling?”

  Our champagne arrives and he toasts me: “To your career.” I smile and we clink glasses.

  Our conversation is like a hundred others we’ve had—what happened that day, what we read in the morning paper, what Hillary is doing. It’s nothing like it was in the beginning—the fervor of discovery—but I suppose it never is in any relationship, unless one of you has a multiple personality disorder.

  We dig into an appetizer of sausage and potatoes. The waitress, a Provencal version of Meg Ryan circa the mid-nineties, tells us it’s a regional specialty. I’ve finished my champagne and ask for a glass of pinot noir.

  “Ç’est bon,” she says with an approving smile and goes off to fetch it.

  “You should speak French with them,” I shout-whisper across the table to Cooper. It’s noisy in here under the tin ceiling.

  He nods.

  “It’ll be fun.”

  “Every time we go to a French restaurant you want me to speak French. You should do it. You speak.”

  “Not very well.”

  “Lousy teachers?”

  “Yeah.” I smile. It’s an old joke of ours.

  Meg Ryan puts my glass of pinot on the table and I thank her and take a bigger sip than intended. As I chug, my eyes meet the host’s. He’s bending over a table of three couples, chatting them up. We continue to look at each other as he smiles and winks. I smile into my glass and look away. When I look again, he’s gone from the room.

  “—at the aquarium?” Cooper is saying.

  “I’m sorry? What?”

  “Did you see the alligators at the aquarium?”

  “Oh. Yeah. They were asleep.”

  He nods. “Speaking of, how early do you have to leave tomorrow?”

  “Pretty early. I guess the show doesn’t start until eight, but it’s what, a five-hour drive? And I want to talk
to Yeah Right before the concert.”

  “Yeah who?”

  I try to explain the relationship between Arsenic Playground and Yeah Right. Cooper nods along, but his eyes are glazing. He has no interest in music, not even classical. Not even French music. I think he’s the only person I know who doesn’t have some sort of CD or LP collection, just whatever his daughter leaves around the flat. At first I thought it might be a deal-breaker, but I find that I always get to pick what we listen to in the car or at home, which makes me feel like a queen.

  Someone is placing steaming dishes of food in front of us. I’m enveloped for a moment in heat so strong I’m afraid the skin on my face will burn. My eyes water slightly from the garlic and vinegar that make up the compote of my roasted game hen. I look up to thank Meg Ryan, but it’s the host. He smiles at us, as equally dazzling to Cooper as to me.

  The soft pendulum light above us turns the pale hairs on his arm a white gold as he clasps his hands. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “Non, c’est super, le canard,” Cooper says, and the host purses his lips in Gallic delight. They rat-a-tat-tat in French for a while, too quick for me to understand, although I catch something on the regions of France and Cooper’s Toronto upbringing. By the time they’re done, my food has cooled sufficiently, and the host touches the backs of each of our chairs in turn as he wishes us bon appetit before hustling off to greet some just-arrived customers.

  Cooper picks up his fork and knife and starts sawing away at his meat. “That’s Remy.”

  “Remy as in Chez Remy?”

  “Um hum.”

  “So he owns the place.”

  “Along with his family.” Cooper points discreetly with his fork at our waitress and towards the kitchen. “His sister, cousins, and friends.”

  I study Meg Ryan, trying to see a resemblance. The blondness, I suppose, and the skinniness.

  “Tell me more about this trip,” Cooper says. “How long will you be gone?”

  “Three nights, I think.” I take a bite of hen. Divine.