The Catalain Book of Secrets

by Jessica Lourey

  Then came Jerry, ten years older and driving a Harley, all snaggled teeth and a too-quick laugh. He hunted her like a deer, charmed her with his crazy jokes and obsessive attention, and had her pretty much living with him her senior year. Jasmine had missed her around, she knew that, but Ursula didn’t seem to mind she was gone. As soon as she was all but moved into his house, though, he was out prowling for someone else.

  Craig had been different, a college professor, reserved at first, which was surely a sign of maturity and ability to commit. They made it as far as engaged before she found the hundreds of porn sites on his computer, the secret emails from women looking for an anonymous screw while their husbands were away. She waited five years to commit to a serious relationship again. That relationship was Adam, who’d waited until they were married to cheat.

  In her childhood bedroom, though, now painted deep green and smelling of bitter, creamy paint, she couldn’t lie to herself. She had messed up again. She had believed that she needed to sacrifice to be loved, and then she’d chosen an unfaithful man. It was a fool’s dance, one step removed from Laura Ackerdan, nicknamed “Get-lucky Laura” in high school, a girl who would give a blowjob to any guy who asked—even the ones who must have giggled with nerves and scratched at the scabs on their arms while she went down—in the desperate hope that one of them would see her. Probably each one of those boys could better describe the part in Laura’s hair then her face, and why would any girl let that happen to her?

  Shit. She hadn’t thought of Get-lucky Laura in at least a decade. That’s what coming home will do to you. Roil up your brain like a river, unearthing liquid muck that you thought you’d built over, turning everything into a wet flooded mess.

  Adam.

  Something about him had made her feel like the only person in the world, capable, beautiful, necessary. They fought every other day, but that had seemed temporary. Their love was the real thing.

  The deal was, it was one thing to recognize a pattern, a whole other to own it, and as likely as learning to fly to change it. It hurt, what she’d let Adam do to her, a people reader. Sure, her gift was unreliable, but she thought she’d have an inkling. On good days, she’d been able to sense the desires, fears, and everyday thoughts of those closest to her. She didn’t want dishonesty or infidelity, right? No one did. So why hadn’t she been able to read those qualities in Adam? What had compelled her to pluck an unfaithful nowhere man out of obscurity and weave him into the fabric of her life, blind to the harm he’d do her?

  Her phone buzzed in the middle of that thought, an arriving text bringing her back to the pungent scent of fresh paint. She’d removed Adam’s contact information in a fit of rage the day she’d discovered the affair, and then written it in ink in her journal, overcome by fear that she’d forget it. As if she could. She recognized his number. Her heart hammered. He had written a single word: thanks.

  She shrank inside herself, and she heard something like the raw, wet pop of gristle releasing from bone.

  thanks.

  It was his first communication since she’d discovered his duplicity and kicked him out of the flat. After she’d first found out about his cheating, she’d alternated between walking past his workplace, hoping to run into him, and sobbing on her floor, praying she’d never see him again. She’d sustained that for a month before breaking her lease, giving away the few possessions she owned other than her favorite clothes, her laptop, toiletries, and a framed copy of a newspaper article she’d written in college. The frame was bulky, but she loved that story, an investigative piece she’d written on unfair housing practices. It had resulted in two families in the local homeless shelter being approved for rent-stabilized apartments and a Journalist-of-the-Year award.

  Her meager possessions in hand and her life a smoking mess in her rearview mirror, she’d returned home.

  She glanced back at his text, and the truth of it dawned on her. She hadn’t texted Adam to forgive him. She’d reached out to make him feel better, hoping that he would do the same for her, that he’d save her from herself, from this green room, from this haunted house, from her suffocating hometown. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. He was a selfish, emotional child.

  And so the tears came, tears of anger at herself. She missed him. She wanted him back.

  The crying was starting again, only now she was in a theater watching a ridiculous romance with her family, three women who felt like strangers, wearing a Chanel dress that cost more than the car they’d driven here in. She felt Tara’s eyes on her. Her niece was watching her like she was the movie.

  “Stop it,” she hissed, suddenly angry. Her niece jerked her head back as if slapped, and Katrine stood, turned toward the audience, and repeated, “Just stop it!” in a louder voice. The whites of a stranger’s eyes flashed at her in the dark theater, but she ignored them and stomped out, unable to tolerate being still for a moment longer.

  The constriction in her chest eased only slightly when she got into the humid August air. She was doubled over, one hand on the brick of the Hobbes, the other trying to loosen an invisible scarf from her neck.

  “Are you okay?”

  Katrine knew her eyes were rolling like a panicked cow’s. She looked up and down streets both familiar and strange, feeling like the world was swallowing her whole. She forced herself to focus on the man who was talking to her. He was tall and worried-looking. She drew a breath. “You’re the same guy I bumped into outside of Seven Daughters the other day.”

  He nodded. He’d followed her out of the movie theater, but now that they were standing on the sidewalk, he appeared uncertain what to do.

  “Robin?”

  “Ren,” he said, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “But close.”

  “Sorry.” She indicated the theater behind her. “Did you witness that star performance? The one where I made an ass of myself in front of a theater full of strangers?”

  His eyes held hers. He repeated his question. “Are you okay?”

  She stood upright, running her fingers through her hair, her breath still shallow. What was she doing back in Faith Falls again? “As good as can be expected. You don’t have to miss the movie for me.”

  “It wasn’t that good.”

  Her brain was roiling. She couldn’t shake the trapped sensation. She didn’t know anything about this man with his curly hair and kind smile, but he felt safe. “Can you give me a ride home?”

  He looked at his watch. “My daughters are inside. Let me go tell them where I am, and then I can. The Catalain house, right?”

  She nodded. Where else?

  Chapter 15

  Tara

  Helena reached across the empty movie theater seat to pull her grand-niece closer, and whispered to Xenia, “Should we follow her?”

  “Let her go,” Xenia whispered back. “We’ll PINC her later.”

  Artemis kept eating popcorn, his eyes trained on the movie screen.

  “What’s pinking?” Tara asked, forgetting to whisper. She was shushed from behind.

  “Tell you after,” Helena mouthed.

  Tara nodded and returned her attention to the screen, but her mind was racing elsewhere. She’d witnessed it in Katrine, the fist-sized barbed thorn curved like a fishhook and resting just below her aunt’s heart, near her stomach. It was bone-white, sharp, and deeply embedded. The flesh around it was brackish and bruised, stretched tight from infection. Tara had always been able to see people’s wounds, but never one so vivid, and never one that the owner actually moved. Tara had seen her aunt tugging on it, but she’d been pulling on the smooth rather than the barbed end, causing the whole works to swell even more.

  Tara shook her head. She’d wanted to tell her aunt that she could pull it loose if she yanked the barbed end and suffered through a bit of pain, but she was intimidated by Katrine’s beauty. She was so pretty, and exotic, and smart. Her aunt had power pulsing through her and emanating from her like blue electricity, but Tara knew she was only focused on the barb.
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  Forty-five minutes and a happy ending later, they were out on the street, enjoying the pleasant bustle of being in a group of people all heading home.

  “So what’s pinking?” Tara asked again.

  “PINCing, not pinking,” Xenia said, unbuttoning the sweater she’d closed to ward off the chill in the theater. “It’s a code of conduct, not a color.”

  Helena smiled. “It stands for ‘Pretend It’s Not Crazy.’ Like, when we had to dig a new well and didn’t have running water outside the house for two days? It was the hottest summer ever and no place to hook up the hose. We could have run it from the kitchen sink to the garden and watered everything in a flash, but Ursula decided she didn’t want an old hose attached to her beautiful new kitchen faucet and running through her clean house for an hour.

  “So instead, she had us truck in and out with buckets, lugging them by hand, banging everything around and tracking in about a hundred pounds more dirt than we would have if we had just attached the hose to the faucet. It was crazy, but Xenia and I pretended like it wasn’t.” She shrugged, palms in the air. “We PINCed her and let her do what she’d made up her mind to do. Women PINC each other all time. It’s part of the unspoken code.”

  Tara rolled the concept around in her head, examining it from all angles. “Why wouldn’t you just tell Grandma she was being unreasonable and show her there’s a better way?”

  Artemis had been standing to the side, seeming not to listen until he spoke. “It’s not often you can convince someone who’s made up their mind that your way is the better way. You can just love them and hope to lead by example.”

  Xenia smiled one of her rare smiles, slow and cool like a cat’s stretch. “Exactly And here’s the thing about being a strong woman: you get so used to pushing up against everything just to be heard that sometimes, you push when you don’t need to, or see a fight where there isn’t one. PINCing is our way of helping each other conserve energy for the fights that matter.”

  Tara didn’t understand what Artemis or Xenia meant, but she liked Xenia’s smile and so she stored their comment away. “What happened to Aunt Katrine to make her so sad? Mom won’t tell.”

  Xenia sighed and glanced at her sister, who appeared to be leaning toward Artemis for strength. “She left her husband. After she found out he was cheating on her with a friend.”

  Tara nodded. That’s what she’d thought.

  The Catalain Book of Secrets: Blue Glass

  Store spells in blue glass because of its powerful magnification and healing properties. It used to be only women were allowed to handle the blue glass. The world might be a better place if that were still the case, but people forget about its nature and pour anything into it, liquor, bile, cheap perfume. Its purpose is holier than that, and do not forget it. And remember that the heart is like blue glass, a vessel for magic, hope, and dreams. It’s at its weakest when it’s empty. Deny it its due and it’ll break on a turn; fill it with chance and magic and it’s indestructible.

  Chapter 16

  Katrine

  They sat in his compact car outside of the Queen Anne. Not for the first time, Katrine was struck by how the windows of the house were arranged to look like a smiling face. She’d always felt like the house watched her. Sometimes she liked it, other times she didn’t. “You ever been inside?”

  Ren kept the car running, his hands on the wheel. He shook his head. “I didn’t grow up in Faith Falls. I moved here with my wife and daughters seven years ago.”

  “Oh.” Katrine put her hand on the door handle. She started to pull it open. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She stopped halfway out of her seat. “I’m not always…I’m actually a pretty stable person.” She laughed, but it sounded too high, artificial. “Anyhow, I don’t usually throw fits in a movie theater. It’s been a…challenging year.”

  He glanced over at her for the first time since they’d been in his car. She felt the tug of his blue eyes again, the invitation of the great wide ocean to come swim in its waves. She couldn’t look away.

  “My wife committed suicide two years ago.”

  Her cheeks grew hot. “I’m so sorry. Jesus, I’m behaving like a child.” Tears pushed at her eyelids. The man had lost a wife, probably an amazing one. All she’d lost was a shit of a husband who she should have known better than to love in the first place.

  He shook his head, tossing a curl into one of his eyes. The slow, kind smile made its way back to his face. “I didn’t say that to make you feel bad. I understand challenging years, is all. Go easy on yourself.”

  She didn’t know what to say to this stranger, and the suffocation was back, its fingers circling her neck. She slammed the car door and ran to Ursula’s cottage.

  Chapter 17

  Ursula

  The sharp yellow scent of a match being lit dominated the space around Ursula. She’d been smelling it on and off since Katrine had returned, and none of her potions could eliminate the sulfurous odor. She knew what it meant, what fire always meant: change.

  She wasn’t afraid of change. She knew better than to get attached to anything or anyone. So why did her heart feel lined with ice? She envisioned her sisters, daughter, and granddaughter safely at the movies tonight and Jasmine dining out with her husband. She didn’t sense any particular alarm when concentrating on each of the five women.

  The Catalain Book of Secrets was out on the rough wooden bench in her workshop. Today, the book had opened up to a page titled “Mind, Body, Spirit”:

  The connection between the holy trinity has been forgotten as humans camp in their own minds like a baby afraid to be born. Until the brain is forced to again share with the heart and the two are reminded that they are children of the spirit, fear will dominate. It will be expressed in many ways: anger, anxiety, melancholy, a need to control or fix, exhaustion.

  To balance the holy trinity, you must bypass the mind and speak to the spirit. (Dancing and laughing are the best ways to achieve this.) The more people involved in this communion, the better it will work.

  You’ll know when you’ve succeeded because you will sleep deeper, forgive quickly, and roll in abundance.

  Ursula slammed the book shut. Entries like that annoyed her. It was a mixture of basic knowledge and vague instructions. She already understood that most people with mental disorders that responded to treatment, like depression or anxiety, were simply without guides. They felt and heard too much without understanding it was their own magic, and so became lost in their heads. Once they were trapped in their minds, medication became the route of least resistance. A form of this had happened to her beautiful Jasmine, and because her daughter was an adult, all Ursula could do was watch, and be present if Jasmine sought her help.

  But this idea that one could overcome the mind’s prison by dancing or sitting around and laughing, that she didn’t have time for. Ursula had a chemist’s sensibility, and she liked clear measures. She slammed the book shut and reshelved it.

  She tightened the apron over the worn but still beautiful dusty plum, empire-waisted dress Xenia had sewn her ten years earlier. People told her it made her black, silver-shot hair shine and brought out golden flecks in her eyes. She liked that it was comfortable.

  She was returning to a tincture of hempseed oil and peppermint, checking the blend with a whiff and a light touch against the glass tube, when she heard the footsteps coming down her stepping stones. She recognized them; her only question was whether or not Katrine would knock.

  She didn’t. The door swung open, and Katrine stepped inside, closing it behind her. She didn’t wrinkle her nose, as she had done when she was younger to convey her distaste at the strong, spicy smell of the workspace, the odor of alcohol, sage, and mystery. Keeping her eyes on the hundreds of tiny blue glass bottles lining the shelves, she spoke.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  Ursula’s heart tugged, and wondered what this moment would be like if she was a mother who e
mbraced her children, asked them how the movie had been, how their marriage had gone wrong. Ursula was not that woman, and Katrine’s emotional barricades were as visible as the bundles of thyme hanging from the rafters.

  “How are you?” she asked by way of response.

  Katrine picked up an empty bottle and held it in front of the window. The moon shot through it, reflecting the blue in a pale cerulean square over her right eye. “Don’t suppose you have anything for a broken heart?”

  Ursula studied her daughter. She was gorgeous, more beautiful even than Velda had been in her heyday. She could use some more meat on her, but her sharp cheekbones would only grow prettier as she aged, and her full lips and sea-glass eyes had bewitched many boys and then men throughout her life. The gray dust over her skin made her seem more precious, like a forgotten jewel waiting to be discovered. Ursula felt pride for her baby girl swell her throat.

  Yet, she knew Katrine didn’t want a spell. Her daughters had always refused their mother’s elixirs, initially out of childish spite, and then out of habit. She’d never forced her potions on them, vowing to always let them have their own choice in that regard and all others.

  “He wasn’t the man you thought?” The family had been informed of the wedding ceremony after the fact, the infidelity shared almost as an afterthought when Katrine came home.

  Katrine snorted. “I didn’t see it coming, if that’s what you’re asking. The Catalain magic doesn’t work consistently. Especially mine. You know it’s weak.”

  “Maybe it isn’t, and you simply didn’t want to see this coming.”

  Katrine dropped her hand so the glass was no longer reflecting the moon through the window. She gripped it so tightly that her hands shook. “You ever make a mistake with your potions?”