The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “And the girls?”

  “What about them?”

  He gives a little laugh. “Where to begin?”

  I wait for him to do just that.

  “Their mother abandoned them—”

  “Not true,” I interrupt. “She’s coming back.” I decide then and there that I need to read the tarot cards when I get home. I need to be able to back up my statements, which are unanchored buoys at the moment.

  “Well, where is their father?”

  “I don’t know.” I put down my utensils. “He might be the reason Viveka left home. I haven’t been able to figure it out. Yet.”

  “I see.”

  “Good, because I don’t.” I laugh halfheartedly.

  “I hope,” he says, touching his mostly untouched champagne flute, “that you know what you’re doing.”

  You and me both, dude, I want to say, but I just sigh.

  Our waitress sweeps in with a water jug. We both sit back from the table to give her room. I’m feeling pissy and I’ve lost my appetite. Cooper has finished his food.

  “I’m done,” I blurt. The waitress, taking it in stride, signals to a busboy to clear our plates. We sit in silence as our table is de-crumbed and small dessert menus are placed in front of us. There’s nothing more I want to eat, but this is a celebration. We agree to split an apple tart and order coffees.

  Cooper pulls out a small box from his blazer pocket and hands it to me.

  “Just a little something,” he says.

  All the tension I’ve been feeling falls away. Gifts can do that—not just the thing, but the intention. It’s too big to be a ring, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if it were. I remove the wrapping paper and pop open the box. It’s a silver locket, an oversized butterfly with a pattern of abstracted petals and feathers. It looks antique, or a good replica.

  I haven’t worn much jewelry since I gave up the craft. Since Alice died. Since I failed her. This locket is nothing like the simple bead on a leather cord I gave to her, the entire amulet steeped in my strongest protection charm.

  Just because it’s a necklace doesn’t mean it has to remind me of all of that. “I love it,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Cooper takes my hand and kisses it. I put on the necklace and open it. It’s empty.

  “You will be proud of me, your vieux mec. I bought it online. I won it, I should say, in an online auction.”

  This is surprising news. Cooper, a Luddite through and through, has little patience for e-commerce, or e-anything. He tells me the details, relishing them, of having a dream about a butterfly locket and then, after hunting around on the Internet, finding one up for auction. He figured out how to open his own eBay account and was thrilled by the idea of needing to be a winner rather than simply a buyer. He sniped at all comers, and while he’s too much a gentleman of manners to tell me his winning bid, he confesses that there were eight separate bidders vying for the piece.

  “The seller’s name is Foxy Lady. Can you believe it?”

  I laugh.

  “Whose picture will you put inside, I wonder?” he says.

  “Probably Rexie’s.”

  He rolls his eyes. “You and your puppies.” But he’s smiling.

  We get up to go. I’m just about to shrug my shoulders into my coat when Remy appears by my side. He takes the coat from me and slips it up my arms. I always feel awkward when someone helps me do that, like my arms aren’t bending the right way and I’m sure to miss the armhole. But it goes on without a hitch. His hands rest lightly on my shoulders for a moment, and, I hate to admit it, I feel a little sparkly inside.

  “I hope you and your father enjoyed dinner,” he says, so softly I’m not sure he’s really spoken. I turn and look at him. His face is too close to mine and his eyes are laughing at me.

  “We did.” I step away. “Thank you.”

  As I push aside the velvet curtain at the door, an object on the floor, no larger than a pinecone, glows up at me. I pause to peer down at it. It’s a stone boot-scraper in the shape of a goat. It looks up at me and blows out its lips, a perfect, childlike raspberry.

  Chapter Ten

  Romola carefully places slices of Black Forest ham and provolone on pieces of focaccia. We are assembling road snacks at eight in the morning. Cooper has already checked the tires and fluid levels of my middle-aged Passat, pecked me on the cheek, and headed off to school. There’s no reason to rush. We can’t check in to our Santa Barbara hotel until three, and the concert is at eight. I’ve already called ahead, and the woman at the front desk assures me they have a reliable babysitting service. It’s not the best situation—leaving Viveka’s daughters in a hotel with a stranger until the wee hours of the night—but Romola seems fine with it, and Cleo only whined a little. It’s slightly unsettling to me that I rely on them for cues as to what is okay.

  As soon as we get on the freeway, though, regret sinks into my stomach. These are little girls! They should be at home, not traipsing around California with a stranger. My dashboard hula girl seems to nod in agreement. I glance now and then in the rearview mirror at the sisters. They’re playing a thumb-wrestling game, except instead of fighting their thumbs kiss. I put on a Beatles CD.

  “Help!” Cleo sings along. “I need a fun bunny!”

  “Help!” Romola chimes in. “Not just some money!”

  “Help!” I join in too, my voice cracking a little. We have a singsong, getting most of the words wrong.

  “Who’s your favorite?” I ask, glancing back at them.

  The girls look at me politely.

  “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”

  Romola shrugs. “I like the dung beetle,” she says, and starts cracking up.

  “The purple beetle!” Cleo shouts.

  “No,” I say. “I mean the Beatles. The band? You know, Paul, John, Ringo, and what’s-his-name?”

  “Who’re they?”

  “They’re singers—musicians.” I point at the car stereo. “That’s them playing ‘Twist and Shout.’”

  The girls don’t say anything, their eyes roaming the speeded-up scenery of Interstate 280: rolling hills, reservoirs, power lines.

  “You knew that one song,” I say. “I’m sure your mom has played them for you.”

  Romola shrugs.

  “Doesn’t your mom like the Beatles?”

  “We don’t usually listen to music,” Romola says.

  “Unless we make it ourselves!” Cleo sticks out her tongue and emits a very loud, very wet raspberry that hits me a wee bit on the neck. Yuck. I’m reminded of the goat last night at Chez Remy, its blank stone eyes expressionless as it made itself known to me, for whatever reason. Was it calling Cooper an old goat, perhaps emphasizing Remy’s mistake about our relationship? Or was something else going on there?

  Romola is laughing as Cleo attempts to stick out her tongue and touch her nose with it. This is the silliest they’ve been since Viveka left them with me.

  “What do you mean, you don’t listen to music?”

  “Except at church,” Romola says, suddenly serious again. “There’s singing there. We had some CDs for a while, but Daddy took them when he gave the boom box away.”

  Hm. I wonder what my next question should be. We haven’t talked about their father since they informed me that he’s Jesus Christ. “What kind of music did he take?”

  In the mirror I see Romola shrug. “Same as what we listen to at church.”

  “Your mother used to adore the Beatles,” I say, more to myself than to them. I remember Viveka’s John-and-Yoko phase. She grew out her feathered hair, letting it go long and lank. She said she wished she were born a hippie, not a witch. Only now do I see the irony in this. “Maybe she used to sing ‘Help!’ to you?”

  “No,” Cleo says. “But Grandy did.”

  Romola makes a noise. I glance in the mirror again. She’s shaking her head at her little sister, a frown putting a crease between her eyes that will probably be permanent in a couple of decades.r />
  “What?” Cleo says. “It’s okay.”

  “Who’s Grandy?” I ask.

  “My grandpa.”

  I nod. “Does he go to your church too?”

  “No.” Cleo grabs her toes. “We visit him sometimes.”

  “He lives near Disneyland!” Romola can’t seem to help herself. There’s a look of excitement in her eyes. “His house is really neat and he gives us whatever we want to eat and takes us swimming.”

  I voice my appreciation. This must be Tucker, Sadie LeBrun Murray’s arranged Wiccan ex-husband. Disneyland. L.A. It’s hard to try to find someone with my mind while driving, and I’m also out of practice, but I zero in on the horizon and the snaking freeway lanes ahead of us. I reach out—I still can’t get a bead on Viveka. But Tucker is out there. I feel him wink at me, and it makes me lose my concentration. That’s never happened before.

  Maybe Viveka has gone to him.

  “Sometimes Mama listens to Pastor Dick,” Cleo puts in. I try not to laugh. “In the car,” she adds.

  “And who, pray tell, is Pastor Dick?”

  “He’s on the radio. He talks and he plays rock and roll.”

  Christian rock, no doubt. I’ve reviewed a few bands. Some of them are pretty good. Upbeat.

  “Well,” I say, my ability to influence their sorely deprived ears with some of the classics swelling inside of me righteously, “Listen to the Beatles. They’re awesome and your mother used to love them. Especially ‘Yellow Submarine.’”

  Romola laughs. “Yellow submarine sandwich?”

  I fast-forward the CD until I find the song. I sing along under my breath. When it ends, Cleo demands to hear it again. I put the song on repeat and we cycle through it a few times more. Soon they’re singing it too.

  ****

  The girls both doze off, and I’m alone with my thoughts. I worry about Auntie Tess and my protection spell. I mull over Viveka and her mysterious disappearance. And when those thoughts go nowhere, I turn to fretting over my job, my boyfriend, Tyson, the fairies.

  When I was a child, whenever I was bad, I would wait for a different manifestation of disapproval: creatures like a staring doe on the hillside or a raccoon in our garbage cans scolding me. Sometimes it took on the form of my contraband—a packet of shoplifted chewing gum grew sticky legs and arms, climbed out of my pocket, and walked back into the corner store from whence it came while shaking its tiny fist at me. It made me wonder if there really might be something like the Devil—an almost all-powerful dude of mischief trying to get as many souls in trouble as possible. But I’m too keen on the idea of self-direction to buy into anything like pure evil.

  If there is a pattern to my little friends’ visits, I have yet to crack the code. They show up during good times and bad, when I’m hurting and when I’m overjoyed. I have never called for them, and I thought that when I declared my intentions to banish magick I had banished them as well. I wished them gone and I assumed they got that. But I have to admit they are beyond my ken. I should have known you can’t banish things over which you are powerless.

  In college, I watched the girls and boys who longed to be witches, for whatever reason—a break from their Christian upbringings, a get-back-to-nature effort—form their own hopeful little occult club. I went to one of their meetings, sneaking into the back of the lecture hall they occupied, using my invisibility. They were just like my mother and Tess and the coven: more kitchen than magick, more lonely than believer. What they didn’t know, what no one who forms these communities can know, is that they just aren’t quite ready yet, but they get so close—off by mere degrees—that they truly think they’ve reached perfection. And the thing is, you can’t. You just can’t. Nothing is ever perfect, and it never will be, and that’s why we’re here, trying to reach perfection. Once we do, we can get off this crazy planet and go home, be One. And who knows if that will ever happen? I find it comforting to have a purpose, even if it’s futile.

  I’ve sometimes marveled that my mother decided to play witch and drag Auntie Tess into it around the time I discovered my abilities, and that I discovered them in exactly the way I should, that something close to perfect happened. A miracle? But we witches don’t believe in miracles. What if my mother had been trying on Catholicism or atheism? What would I have done with what I am?

  ****

  We’ve been on the road for a few hours now and are approaching San Luis Obispo. My father taught here for a year, and my mother and I spent weekends with him before they decided to give up on trying to even appear interested in anything but themselves. It’s a pretty town, and the girls are hungry. I don’t think they’d ever actually complain, but since they woke up they’ve been sipping juice boxes and trying to determine whose tummy is growling the loudest.

  My cell phone rings, and I push randomly at buttons while keeping my eyes on the road.

  “Oh, you picked up,” says a surprised and slightly disappointed voice on the other end. Tyson. Ty.

  “Yeah. Is everything okay?”

  “Are you—Sorry, what?” His voice crackles over the line, some of his words swallowed up in the hills.

  “I’m driving,” I say loudly. “We’re going to stop for lunch in San Luis Obispo.”

  “That’s where I am now. Want company?”

  I’ve got one eye on an SUV bearing down on us, its roof loaded with surfboards. I’m only doing fifty. Clearly cell phones and driving don’t mix. I can only concentrate for a millisecond on the change in Tyson’s tone from the day of our interview. He actually sounds friendly.

  We agree to meet at a taqueria we both know. I toss the phone aside without a goodbye and concentrate on steering straight and keeping up with the speed limit.

  ****

  He’s surprised to see me with Viveka’s daughters. I introduce him to the girls, who take him in with what I’m beginning to think of as their customary demeanor of faint, polite curiosity. I can’t really tell what they think of this slender young man with the mirrored sunglasses that make him look like an Asiatic Bono. A little in awe maybe. They’re acting shy.

  Tyson’s definitely less surly than before. His aura shimmers in rose and silver with near nirvana-like flawlessness. Even with the glasses on, I can identify the resemblance to his sister. Alice had a shimmering, happy aura too, when she wasn’t in classes. School was not her forte.

  Sitting on the taqueria’s patio, we chow down on fish tacos, chips, and guacamole. The restaurant is close to a playground. I used to come here as a kid to play, then fill up on quesadillas next door. There’s a new feature in the park, a petting zoo. Romola and Cleo really want to see the goats and ducks.

  After lunch we throw away our paper wrappings and cups, and enter through a picket gate into a replica of an idealized, miniature barnyard. There’s a goat-food pellet dispenser, and we buy some for a quarter a turn. A nanny goat wolfs down Romola’s handout in one second flat. Cleo holds her stash close to her chest and doles out the pellets one at a time. The goats respect this, standing back and waiting, taking the feed delicately out of her fingers between their yellow chompers.

  Tyson and I lean along the white-painted railing and watch. I check the goats, look them in their hircine eyes, but they are just animals. I find this a little disappointing. Two of the white ducks, however, are wearing clothes. One is knitting while the other taps something out on a small electronic device that I later realize is a Scrabble game. These two are tucked away on the side of a small duck house—like a henhouse except inhabited by ducks. I look to Tyson and the girls to see if they see what I see, but they glance several times in that direction without any sort of reaction.

  “So, what’s the deal with the munchkins?” Tyson asks in a low voice, gesturing to the girls.

  I tell him a shortened, PG version of Viveka’s out-of-the-blue visit. I’m too distracted by the ducks for more. The knitting duck is most impressive, the way her (his? It’s wearing a small Dodgers starter jacket) wings manipulate the small, duck-siz
ed needles. It appears she’s just started on something green. The other duck is dressed in a brown leather vest and is easily using his beak to press the buttons on his game.

  “How come Mr. Bailey’s not taking care of them while you’re on tour with us?”

  This question snaps me out of my duck study. There are at least three things about his question that poke at me.

  “You know, if you want me to call you Ty,” I say, “then you’re going to have to start referring to him as Cooper. Or my boyfriend.”

  His eyebrows raise above the sunglasses in mock-innocent befuddlement, which is actually rather sexy. “Right. Cooper. Your boyfriend.” He nods at Romola, who is following a duck—a naked one—and is unconsciously imitating its waddle. “Don’t they have school?”

  “They’re home-schooled.”

  “Home-schooled?”

  “You have heard of it, haven’t you?”

  He nods. “Oh yeah. I’ve heard of it. Isn’t it for religious freaks?”

  I kick him in the shins harder than is friendly. He elbows me in the side. He makes a face and I slit my throat with my finger. He grimaces in understanding.

  “Oh. I gotcha.” Tyson shakes his head and looks at the girls with a laugh. Cleo is about halfway through her pile of pellets, and dumps the remainder on the ground. She points at the goats and they wait, their sideways ears alert. She turns her back on them, walks a few steps away, and waves her hand. Voila! The goats fall on the food like famine victims.

  Cleo stops next to Tyson and looks up at him. “Do you like being home?”

  He smiles down at her and makes a little quizzical noise. “Do I like being home? Yeah. Do you?”

  “Not really. Sometimes. I like it here. “ She looks beyond us into the depths of the playground. “Romy, lets go on the seesaw!” They run to the little gate and let themselves out. Tyson turns back to me. This close, I can see his eyes behind the sunglasses, a different pair than the ones he wore the other day. I myself have one ten-dollar pair I bought at Walgreens five years ago. I never lose them. Tyson’s eyes linger on the locket Cooper gave me. It’s half-tucked in my blouse and I pull it free, patting it straight.