The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “Come, dear.” Tucker takes me by the elbow. “Let’s go downstairs and have breakfast.”

  “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but now is not the time to eat.”

  “Yes, it is. My girl, no harm will come to you or my granddaughters. Not here. But you have to go back home with them, where a confrontation is surely in the works, and you must have food in order to keep your strength. Buck up!”

  I let Tucker lead me downstairs, too relieved by his assurances—and too numb, as I try to process info (a confrontation is surely in the works???)—to protest more. We find the girls in the kitchen. Cleo sits at the table holding a small cup of milk, and Romola is scooping food onto two plates. They both handle the chinaware with a care beyond their years. The stove burners are off, a frittata is cooling on a trivet, and I wonder if Romola did that or if it was all magicked into a safe readiness by her grandfather.

  Tucker serves me up a plate of eggs and bacon, and pours two mugs of coffee. We sit with the girls and eat for a while like normal people until Tucker says, “Isaac is Sadie’s brother.”

  Okay. We’re going to talk about Tucker’s family tree.

  “My ex-brother-in-law. He was a very powerful witch. Very powerful. But undisciplined. Too smart for his own good. He bored easily, and so he immersed himself in drugs and drinking. We had very little in common.” Tucker takes a sip of coffee. “His daughter Cheryl disappeared from their little Vancouver homestead when she was eighteen or nineteen and resurfaced about five years ago as that rock-and-roll person, Cheradon Badler. Disappearing must run in the family because Isaac did so himself when Cheryl was a little girl.” He palms Cleo’s head. “Not much older than this one when he left.”

  I calculate what he’s saying. “Okay, so Cheradon is Sadie’s niece, which makes her Viveka’s cousin, which makes her Romola and Cleo’s first cousin once removed. Right?”

  Romola swallows a bite of food and asks, “Who’s our cousin?”

  Cleo doesn’t bother to swallow and says through a mouthful of frittata, “That lady with the blue-and-pink hair.”

  “First cousin once removed, second cousin, I never could get that straight.” Tucker wipes his mouth with his napkin.

  “And Gru is her grandmother?”

  Tucker nods.

  My thoughts are jumping all over the place, trying to make connections. I wish Cooper were here. He would sort this out with that elegant logic with which he seems cursed. “What can you tell me about this confrontation?”

  Tucker shakes his head. “It’s only a guess. But from all you’ve told me, it’s inevitable.”

  “But…but what is it? I’m assuming it’s bad, right?”

  “If it’s the Flower Bowl Spell, then yes. It’s bad.”

  “Excuse me.” I put my napkin on the table and stand up, beckoning Tucker to come with. He follows me to the hallway. “It seems to me going into the belly of the beast is idiotic. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, these are your granddaughters. Someone murdered Bright Vixen and this fairy. And you’re just sending us back out there? Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

  Tucker shakes his head sadly. “My dear, I have tried. Last night, after you all went to bed, I stayed up and used every spell I know and called upon every power in my arsenal to figure out what I could do. And what I learned is…this is not my fight. It’s yours.”

  Mine. Great.

  We argue some more, but he won’t budge on this. He insists the girls need to stay with me and that we are safest all together. It’s like arguing with that brick wall people talk about.

  Man, do I need a break. “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to check out your garden.”

  Tucker points the way. I grab my coffee mug and head through a set of French doors off the dining room.

  Tucker’s backyard is plain but well cared for. There are a few statues here and there, as well as flowerbeds and a patch of squash, which is yielding a bumper crop of pumpkins and zucchini. I sit in a canopied glider and watch as a marble bunny holding a basket in its mouth grooms its ears with its paws. The statue of a girl in the style of Sylvia Shaw Judson, with smooth features and hollow, ghostly eyes, pets her dog. Both look my way now and then. I close my eyes and count back from ten, imagining delicious lollipops, all the colors of the rainbow. And I ask myself the age-old question: What the hell is going on?

  The argument, discussion, grilling—whatever you want to call it—with my higher self, my Smarter Memphis, goes on for some time. And at the end, I know what I have to do to get closer to answering that question.

  I go back inside. Tucker and the girls are cleaning up, loading the dishwasher. I rinse my coffee mug in the sink and add it to the rack. Then I turn to Tucker and, after pulling it out of my jeans pocket, slap the locket on the counter. “Apparently, just as you said, I have to take the girls with me, much as I’d like to leave them here with you. And, apparently, just as you said, I have to get back to San Francisco ASAP. So, we’re leaving in one hour. But before that, I want you to tell me everything you know about Viveka and this thing.”

  He picks up the butterfly, running his fingers over it.

  “Where is she, Tucker?” I ask. “Where is Viveka?”

  The girls have stopped cleaning. They watch us with interest.

  “Girls.” Tucker beckons them over. When they are within reach, he gives them each a hug. “Now go upstairs and play.”

  Romola starts to say something, but stops when she looks in Tucker’s eyes. The girls turn and head for the stairs.

  Tucker gestures to a barstool. “Sit down, Memphis, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “Okay.” I sit. “Hit me with your best shot.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I let him gather his thoughts. “I’m not sure how to put this, so I’ll just say it. My daughter has left the country, and I hope it’s not for good.”

  I feel a slow twisting in my guts. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean… Well, the truth is that Viveka thinks she’s in love.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  We arrive in San Francisco around dinnertime, and as we approach my flat, the telltale fog has descended in all of its tired, metaphorical splendor. A blanket, a shroud, a puff of wet wool. In a blink, we pass from Indian Summer into this cold-weather front. I shiver in my thin cotton cardigan and turn up the car’s heater.

  No one has spoken for at least a couple of hours, and into this silence Cleo asks, “Are fairies angels?” We are passing a bus-shelter poster for a theatrical production of Angels in America. In the poster, an actress is suspended above the stage in a long, flowing gown. Enormous wings made of white feathers, probably swan, spread behind her back.

  “Nope,” I answer, concentrating on changing lanes.

  “Oh. Good. Angels are scary,” Cleo says.

  “No they aren’t,” Romola says. “They’re just weird and…strange. They’re just like people with bird wings.” She’s quiet for a moment and then she says, “I guess they are kind of scary.”

  “Fairies are weird too,” Cleo says. “And they’re little. But I bet they can get big too.”

  “No. Tinker Bell is little.”

  “Tinker Bell’s not real.”

  “No fairies are real,” Romola counters.

  “Yeah-huh.”

  “Nah-uh.”

  “They are. They live in little holes.”

  “Whatever,” Romola mutters, and there’s a finality to this statement that Cleo can’t argue against.

  The girls go quiet again, and I think about how a normal mother, babysitter, or aunt would find this conversation between young sisters charming and imaginative, instead of relevant and a little sad.

  In the long drive from Santa Cecilia to San Francisco, I’ve had plenty of time to mull over the things Tucker revealed before we left. He was not much help on the butterfly locket, although he thought Viveka got hers from Gru, which makes sense. Gru probably got it from Bright Vixen.
But is it magickal like mine? He didn’t know.

  He did tell me that Viveka is on a Mexican island where the man she has fallen for is apparently dying from pancreatic cancer. Which means I’m waiting for a total stranger to die before she comes back to collect the girls.

  I have faith in the power of mother love—perhaps the strongest love there is—to keep these girls safe. But it would be so much better if Viveka were physically here to watch over them. Though I felt strong at Tucker’s house, now I have my doubts. His home is an epicenter of supernatural mojo, and as soon as we pulled away from his driveway, the normal world flooded in. I wonder if I left some of my cosmic zing behind in that guest room, but I know I’ll be able to replenish as soon as the moon hits full again and I can sky-dance in our backyard. It’s a little epicenter unto itself.

  We’re going to be okay, I tell myself. Whatever I have to confront, we are going to be okay. But a huge part of me wants to turn around, speed back to the safety of Tucker’s house, and never leave. If only he’d let me.

  I’m not completely panicking because Tucker gave me something pretty damn cool before we left: his notebook on the Flower Bowl Spell.

  “This should inform you of everything that’s not on the Internet. I myself once tried my hand at the counter-curse on page eighty-three.” He tapped the page. “The Flower Bowl Spell, for all its prettiness of name, is a curse. Not on any particular individual. It’s a curse on the natural order of magick.”

  ****

  The lights are on in the living room windows, and we’re rewarded with the presence of Cooper, who has kept an extra-large pizza warm in the oven for us as well as a grandiose tub of ice cream chilling in the freezer. The girls and I devour the food before I tuck them in. Then I try to erase the memory of Tyson’s kisses by dragging Cooper off to our bed. Yet as we embrace, the memory of Ty’s lips covering mine burns in my thoughts, a mental sex toy.

  Cooper and I stay up late whispering in the dark. He tells me about what’s been going on. Hillary and her latest exploits—her mother’s discovery of a crumpled joint in Hil’s coat pocket (she insisted, as if it would exonerate her, that it was “too old to smoke”) after she’d been busted spending the night at a boy’s house when she claimed she was at a girlfriend’s. And it’s only the end of October, but Cooper is already weary of work. His students are especially cocky this year, complaining about their textbooks, which are twenty-odd years old. The French Club members—Cooper is the faculty adviser—want to sell temporary tattoos of fleurs-de-lys at the International Faire this year. He’s so sick of fleurs-de-lys. Is there no other French symbol worthy of notice? The Renault lion, perhaps, or a glass of red wine and mashed-out cigarettes. A pile of crotte.

  It’s my turn. I drain my tale of magick and kisses, but leave in the rest of the high jinks. It’s not difficult.

  To Tyson Belmonte freaking out on me, Cooper says, “Obviously, he’s conflicted. He has feelings for you, yet he blames you for his sister’s death.”

  “Feelings for me.” With that, I can’t argue. But are they good or bad? “Maybe.”

  To Jesus Christ showing up, Cooper is not surprised. He suggests we call Child Protective Services right then and there.

  “Hang on,” I tell him. “There’s more to that soap opera.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s a tale as old as time, Coop. A preacher’s wife falls for one of her husband’s parishioners, a sickly man from a subtropic island who has sought out said preacher for his touted healing ways. The wife, unable to do much more than lend a sympathetic ear, befriends the man, and before she knows it they’re sneaking off into the woods behind the revival tents. The man’s visa runs out, he returns to his island home, and the woman, realizing her true feelings, seeks him out in order to be with him before he passes into the great beyond.”

  Cooper doesn’t say anything right away. He stares at the ceiling and I stare too, wondering if my fairy is up there in his hole listening in. “He dies, yet her love lives on. Flaubert couldn’t write it any better.”

  “Oh, add a little cyanide poisoning and it’s got Flaubert’s prints all over it.”

  He turns to me quickly. “Has anyone been poisoned?”

  “Not in this storyline. No.”

  “In another?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Tell me.”

  This is the one I know would make him go ballistic if I told the whole truth. So I don’t. I don’t lie but I don’t tell him everything. This is the way it’s always been with us. “You know the locket you gave me—which I love, by the way?”

  “Yes,” he says warily.

  “The woman you bought it from died.”

  Cooper looks at me with the surprise I would expect. I tell him about tracking down Gladys Jones, about my discovery of the fact that she is someone with whom I share a past. I don’t tell him about finding her body, definitely not about her ghost, my hoodoo spell that called up her last minutes, or the other unsavory magickal tidbits that might cause alarm.

  Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to hop on the Internet this morning before leaving Tucker’s and scan the latest news on Bright Vixen’s exploding house. A gas leak, the news sites report. Gladys’s body crispified. Any traces of me or the girls or her murderer—gone. There were some bits from her jewelry business as well as some files from her old job as a software developer, but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing odd. If there had been, I might have told Cooper all about it. I still might. But now is not the time.

  He listens with the detached fascination of one who has been but remotely touched by a freakishly tainted tragedy. I picture his thoughts at work: should he say something profound or nothing at all, or perhaps make a witty but off-color joke?

  “That’s the way the world works, I guess, with no rhyme or reason.” He sighs, opting for a mild case of nihilism. “I suppose if our Chez Remy date had been a week later, my order wouldn’t have gone through.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “For the locket. She’d be dead and my order would be lost in the ether of her Internet service provider’s servers.”

  “Lucky for us it’s not.”

  “Yes.” He closes his eyes, ready to sleep. “I suppose her guardian angel was out to lunch. It’s a shame.”

  I can’t help thinking of Beulah’s mutilated fairy body, and am reminded of something. Angels again. Guardian angels. I wait until I hear the sounds of Cooper’s light snoring before I sneak out of bed.

  Centuries ago, Christians tried to turn the stories of fairies into evidence of angels, and with gobs of success. The thing is, I know a thing or two about angels. They are real, and they are not fairies, as Cleo wondered. Angels are humans who have evolved through many lifetimes to become pure goodness. Holy ghosts. They do their best to keep us safe, but they aren’t infallible. I met a future angel once. At the time, he didn’t know what he was, and neither did I, not until much later, after he had passed on from his last human life to his new angelic one. I think back to my conversation with Ty about particle physics. I don’t know if I can use that to explain angels. What he said makes sense though: Maybe magick is just magick.

  I walk down the hall to the girls’ room. They are curled away from each other on the bed, and I wonder how much longer Viveka will stay gone, how long it will take for her beloved to die.

  I turn to my bookcase, scanning the lowest shelf until I find what I want. It’s one of my old fairy research notebooks. I close the door softly behind me and tiptoe to the living room, where I settle into the big chair under a reading lamp and page through. Drawings, scribblings, random doodles. A jotting from the Encyclopedia of Fay Things jumps out at me under a poorly sketched St. Michael brandishing a sword that looks like it just fell out of a martini glass. Some believe that the majority of fairies who come in contact with humans are their guardians. (Like social workers? Angels?) I think about the fairy that has been tracking me. And about Beulah’s last flight to Gladys’s h
ouse, and how that ended—for both of them. Fairies, unlike angels, aren’t necessarily compelled to help anyone. But if they take a shine to someone, they’ll be there for that person forever. Could it be that I have a little guardian angel fairy on my hands? And if so, why?

  ****

  I wake up the next morning, and I remember. Confrontation.

  The girls are eating breakfast in the kitchen. I have a fuzzy memory of Cooper kissing me goodbye before heading out to work. We survived our first night back in San Francisco. Blessed be.

  We go through the day. I write my Yeah Right/Arsenic Playground profile and email it to Ned. The girls do homework. I take them to a playground. Cooper comes home and we have dinner on 24th Street. We watch some TV and go to bed. We sleep.

  Confrontation? What confrontation?

  And yet—still no call from Viveka.

  ****

  The next day, the sky is that hazy white-gray I associate with aging autumn in the city. I step out onto the street from the offices of the Golden Gate Planet, and a damp wind whips at my light wool coat.

  Ned insisted I come into the office for a meeting, and after a bit of panicked phoning around, I get Marisol’s mother Rosario to agree to drive over and watch the girls until Cooper gets home from work. Cleo asked to come with me, and when I told her no, she started to cry. I nearly gave in, but Rosario was already on the way.

  Before she arrived I muttered incantations inside the apartment, down the front stairs, and around the perimeter of our building. Both girls watched, Cleo with a look of concentration, Romola sporting mortification as I subtly fluttered my fingers by my sides, sprinkled sea salt and crushed rose petals, and slipped photos of Viveka and, as an afterthought, Alice Belmonte under the welcome mat. She may have perished violently, I might have failed her, but the protective magick of the dead we love is rarely weak.

  I’m paying Rosario handsomely for her time, but to thank Marisol for hooking me up with her “moms” I insist on taking her out to lunch after the editorial meeting, which could not have gone better. Ned loves my piece. I suggest Chez Remy, on a hunch that the raspberry-blowing goat is a sign I shouldn’t ignore any longer, and Marisol is happily surprised. “You read my mind!”