by Julia London
The first part had been easy. He loved her smiling laughter, loved the way she adored her children, and the way she worked so hard to make their marriage work. Bonnie had, naturally, beamed like a ray of sunshine as he had listed those things, along with how they made him feel. Happy. Content. Loved.
And then there were the three things he did not love. He listed: her obsession with her looks, harping on him, and snoring. The snoring wasn’t even real—he’d just thrown it in there because he couldn’t think of anything else, and thought it was so innocuous that Bonnie would gloss right over it.
Bonnie did not gloss right over it. Bonnie didn’t gloss over anything, except the obsession with her looks, which was the one thing he thought would make her really mad. But oh no, she and Daniel agreed that it was a woman’s curse in life, which left plenty of room for Bonnie to get mad about the harping and the snoring.
After Daniel had Bonnie reveal and relate (this dude loved making up catchphrases) her feelings about Aaron’s list (and what the hell was the point, again?), it was Bonnie’s turn to list the three things she loved about him: generous spirit (not that he really had one, but he’d take it), his fierce love of his daughters (damn straight), and the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed (actually, he thought the lines were from chemo, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her). The things she did not love about him were: his illness (that was so safe to list that Aaron almost cried foul and accused her of cheating), his moments of self-pity (well, okay, he hated them, too), and the fact that he could not seem to understand her (it wasn’t like he didn’t try!).
And now, here they sat, side by side in his Lincoln town car, stuck in crosstown traffic on the way to Presbyterian Hospital, where he’d undergo his umpteenth round of chemo. Neither of them had said a word since they left the therapist’s office. Aaron was too afraid. Bonnie was too mad.
But as they turned onto Madison Avenue, she sighed, tapped her hand against the window. “I only harped on you about calling Rachel.”
“But even when I called Rachel, it still wasn’t enough for you,” he said, keeping his gaze straight ahead.
“That’s right—because you left her your typical message, that she’d better be doing things your way, or there would be hell to pay. What happened to nice, Aaron? What happened to trying a new approach with her?”
All right, so he hadn’t exactly been eloquent in his message. But he’d been really sick that day.
“I know you were feeling really sick that day, so I can’t help wonder why you’d choose that time to call her. It’s like you wanted to be in the worst possible frame of mind.”
Wow. Preemptive strike. A good preemptive strike. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never feel good anymore, so I’m not sure when a good time would be.”
“Here you go with the self-pity defense,” she said irritably.
“And here you go harping again,” he said. “Wasn’t that the whole point of today’s session? Try not to push each other’s buttons?”
“I’m not harping, Aaron. I am just trying to get you to hear me. If you want to get through to Rachel, try being nice instead of being an ass. And one more thing—I do not snore.”
Aaron leaned his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes, wondered if he even had it in him anymore to be nice or if they’d zapped that along with the cancer cells.
Chapter Nine
Subject: What’s going on?
From: Rebecca Parrish
To: Rach
Hi Rachel. I hadn’t heard from you in a while, and Mom said you and Dad had a fight and you haven’t talked to him since then. Is everything okay? Don’t let him get to you, because he really is just a lamb in sheep’s clothing for the most part.
BTW, I got an e-mail from Robbie, and she said that you said that your relationship with Myron was strictly platonic? Is that TRUE? I didn’t know that! Why didn’t I know that? I demand details! Rebecca
P.S. The herbs you sent for Grayson's allergies worked GREAT. Can you get some more?
Subject: Re: What’s going on?
From:
To:
Hey Bec. Glad Gray is doing better, and yes, I can get some more. I’ll check my connection (ha ha). As for Dad, I don’t know what he is other than a real asshole sometimes, but what else is new. Most of the time, we get along. But there are times he can really piss me off.
As for Myron, I did so tell you and Robin that it was “getting” to a platonic state that night we were drinking tequila at the ranch. Why can’t y’all EVER remember anything I say???? I don’t want to talk about it, because there is nothing to talk about. We had a thing. Now we’re friends. End of really very boring story. Gotta run. Say hi to Matt and Gray for me!
Rachel . . . who, BTW, met a guy. Sort of. Actually, Dagne and I used a little witchcraft to conjure him up, but he is SOOO cute! More later . . .
Rachel had so much to do the next day, so of course it would be raining.
Her first stop was Turbo Temps, where the employment agency had sent her. With a little luck—and okay, a little magic—Rachel hoped to get some sort of part-time gig. She pulled into a parking spot, found her umbrella, then opened the door, wrestling with the umbrella and the door while she tried to squeeze between her Bug and the SUV next to her, and in the course of it, stepped into a puddle and flooded her boot.
Clutching a soggy referral sheet, she pushed through the door of Turbo Temps, where a woman immediately barked at her to put her umbrella in the can. She did that, and then squished back to the counter and handed the woman her referral sheet.
The woman took it, grimacing, and made a huge show of straightening it out.
“I’m really sorry,” Rachel said. “It’s raining.”
The woman reviewed the referral sheet, the copy of Rachel’s résumé attached to it, and without a word, turned and punched a couple of buttons on her computer. An old dot-matrix printer began rattling behind her, during which time she stared at the computer screen. When the thing finally stopped printing, she swiveled around, extracted it from the printer, and handed it to Rachel. “Call before showing up,” she said.
Rachel took the paper and looked at it. Baumgartner Medical, it read under the word Client. Transcribing medical transcripts from draft to final form. Requirements: Typing, 50 wpms, use of computer and word-processing software.
Rachel glanced up at the clerk. She was staring intently at her computer screen, but said, “That’s all we have today. Baumgartner will give you a paper to bring back here for payment. If you want to get paid, don’t leave the job without getting that paper. And make sure someone signs it!”
The only good thing about Rachel’s visit to Turbo Temps was that when she came out, the rain had let up a little. Rachel threw the papers into the backseat and headed over to Providence Fabrics. Because the cops had busted her coven (at least her sense of humor was still intact) they hadn’t done the sight spell. So Dagne, in a great show of faith, left her pink spell book with Rachel. “I’ve gotta do some stuff on eBay tomorrow,” she said. Honestly, Dagne spent so much time on eBay that it was a wonder they hadn’t given her an honorary page or something. “Try it yourself!” she had cheerfully urged Rachel.
Rachel had at first laughed it off, but the more she thought about it, the more she thought, why not? She was doing all the work anyway—Dagne just stood around handing her stuff to drink and then telling her what to recite. And besides, she’d seen another weight-loss spell in there that she really wanted to try.
At the fabric store, she looked for the perfect swath of lavender. She figured it needed to be velvet or brocade—something weighty and therefore, meaningful. And on the next to the last aisle, she found what she was looking for. It was silk chenille and a beautiful shade of lavender. It was very expensive, so Rachel didn’t even look at her credit card as she handed it to the clerk. Can’t see it, can’t feel it.
&nbs
p; A quarter of an hour later, she left the store with three yards of the silk chenille and enough lavender silk fringe to trim it. She figured she had enough to not only cast a spell, but to make a shawl, too.
From there, Rachel headed for campus and the Brown University Library, where she spent the remainder of that soggy afternoon holed up at a desk with several books around her, working on dissertation theories.
Darkness had fallen when she returned home. There was a note from Dagne stuck in her door—Came by to pick up some stuff—and Rachel panicked for a moment, thinking “stuff” equaled the spell book. But it was exactly where she’d left it, on the kitchen bar, a couple of pages dog-eared. So she made herself a box of macaroni and cheese (not exactly healthy, but she really didn’t have much else, as it was obvious Myron had been by, too), then wandered into the living room, flicked on the TV, and then promptly got up and left it on, off to find her Pilates book.
She returned to the living room a little later dressed in yoga clothes, her hair knotted into what Dagne called her Mickey Mouse look—two knots atop her head—and her yoga mat. And while Korean TV played in the background—some sort of variety show—she worked through her Pilates book until her muscles screamed at her.
Now she was ready for a few spells.
Dagne said atmosphere was very important, so she wandered around her house and gathered up all the candles she could find.
Once she had the candles lit and placed around the room to create the right atmosphere, she flipped off Korean TV, opened the spell book to one of the pages she’d marked, took the lavender silk chenille and Dagne’s magic amulet, and placed them together. And then she rounded up a saucer, a pair of scissors, and some matches.
She read the spell several times. She thought if Grandma knew what she was doing, she’d have a double coronary on the spot. But Rachel was, she knew, attracted to this guy in a major way, and she supposed she was willing to walk the extra mile . . . albeit an extremely bizarre mile.
And in fact, the whole thing was so stupid to the intellectual side of her that she read the spell once more, wondered if the position of the moon or whatever really mattered like the spell book said, remembered all the things Dagne told her she had to do, and at last stood, let her hair down (atmosphere), draped the length of chenille on the floor, and cut an inch across the bottom. She picked up the chenille from the floor and draped it around her shoulders. She lit a match, and held it to the piece of chenille she’d cut. When it caught fire, she dropped it into the saucer, held the saucer up before her, and said solemnly, “From these ashes smoke will rise, and lift my color to his eyes.”
She put the saucer down, picked up the amulet, and began to swing it above the saucer as she walked in a circle. “The color of me shall my true love see,” she said, her voice rising and falling like she had heard on the WB’s Charmed, “and instantly know his desire for me.”
She paused there, watched the last of the chenille burn and tried not to wrinkle her nose, because it really stunk. Then circled again, chanting the same spell two more times. Once she’d done three recitations, she put the amulet down, and as Dagne had instructed her, she stood above the burned fabric and waved her hands in a circular, witchy way, dissipating the smoke.
After a few moments of that, it was over.
Rachel stood, hands on hips, and stared down at the plate. Was it her, or were all these spells a little anticlimactic? It would be cool if lightning would flash, or a clap of thunder would rattle her bungalow. But so far in her experience, there was only a mess to clean up.
When she’d picked up, she carried candles and her spell book upstairs. She put the candles around her bath and her bedroom, then started running the water for her bath. She undressed, added bubble bath, decided there wasn’t enough light in the bathroom, and looked out the door, into her room for the miniature twin torchères Myron had given her. How odd . . . they weren’t in her room.
Rachel wrapped a bath sheet around her and did a quick search of her house for the torchères, but still couldn’t find them. She supposed she had put them upstairs in the guest room and shrugged it off. She had enough candles, and besides, her tub was filling.
She hurried back to her bath, turned off the water, and studied her last spell. This was the one for insurance, the shot at losing her butt, otherwise known as Ben and Jerry.
Outside, on Slater, the rain had deteriorated into a heavy mist and fog was rolling in. Parked outside her house, below the limbs of an old sycamore tree that badly needed trimming, Flynn watched the windows of Rachel’s little house.
He’d thought to go to the door to present himself, and was working on a plausible explanation, but he had noticed that Rachel was the sort to leave her blinds open, and there she was, lying on the floor, doing some sort of strange thing with her legs, while on the telly, images of singing Asians flashed across.
Naturally, he’d not wanted to disturb her in the middle of whatever it was she was doing, but he really didn’t want to sit out in the car like some pervert, either.
While he was debating it, however, Rachel suddenly popped up, turned off the telly, and disappeared into the back. Flynn got out of his hired car, put on his trench coat . . . but then she had reappeared, carrying an enormous book of some sort, put it down, disappeared again, and just as quickly reappeared with an armful of candles. Something told him to wait. Something told him to get back into the car.
He watched, fascinated, as she lit the candles, let down what looked to be a mane of gorgeous, wavy hair from that odd poodle-ear arrangement, and opened that enormous book. She knelt in front of it, studying it for what seemed an eternity, and, he thought, she laughed once or twice.
Suddenly, she was up on her feet.
He couldn’t quite make out what she was doing, and she disappeared from his sight for a moment, stooping to the floor—but after a moment, she stood again, with a cloth draped across her shoulders. And then she lit something, another cloth, it looked like, dropped it onto a plate, and began to move in a circle, swinging something over it.
Flynn drew a long and soft breath. Perhaps he’d been running on fumes so long that he’d lost his mind, but then again, he could swear the bird was doing some sort of witchcraft.
He was so fascinated by it, in fact, that when she had finished her strange little dance and moved to the back part of the house, he did, too, stealing into the darkened area between houses.
Certainly he knew what he was doing was not only lewd but unlawful, and really, he could lose his job and be booted back across the pond were he caught. He knew all that, but the man in him was far too intrigued to pay much mind to the laws of this country, and standing between the neighbor’s rubbish bins as he was, he watched her emerge in a towel from a candlelit bathroom, watched her with that large book again, watched her do some sort of dance around two of those candles, her lovely back exposed, before disappearing into the bath again.
At that point, Flynn regained some of his senses—precious few, really, but enough to make him move back to his car.
He sat in the driver’s seat, staring blindly at the windshield, imagining her, naked, in her bath, doing some sort of witchcrafty thing.
That had been remarkable. That had conjured up all sorts of images of Wiccan-like sex (whatever Wiccan-like sex might be, but at the moment he was beyond randy and ready to entertain any number of theories). That had cast this enticing young woman in a whole new light.
A light that was, strangely, a lovely shade of lavender.
An hour later, Flynn met Joe at the coffeehouse where the locals liked to read poetry. Joe was seated in the very back, in the shadows. So deeply shadowed, in fact, that Flynn had a difficult time finding him He sat, asked the girl who followed him for a cup of hot tea, then turned and smiled at Joe.
“Any luck?” he asked.
Flynn shook his head.
Joe groaned. “You’re starting to make me think I’m gonna have to do it for you, pal.”
Fl
ynn laughed, straightened his tie. “The day I need you to do it for me is the day I will bloody well kill myself, thank you.”
Joe laughed, clapped him cheerfully on the back. “If it comes to that, you have my word we’ll ship you home in one piece—at least no more than two. Scout’s honor, dude.”
Chapter Ten
Rachel was beginning to get a little depressed.
It wasn’t her temporary job, which, incidentally, was not typing medical transcripts as she had been led to believe, but in fact, a backlog of autopsy reports (DOB 8-16-39. Subject a fully developed Black adult male. Legs unremarkable. Arms unremarkable. Torso unremarkable . . .).
It was enough to depress anyone, and while reading about people’s unremarkable body parts was not exactly ego-boosting, it wasn’t that which had Rachel down. And it wasn’t her weight-loss program, either, which, if anyone was interested, wasn’t working for shit, regardless of her trips to the gym and general state of poverty. All right, it had only been a couple of weeks or so. But still.
Nor was it the fact that she had just received her utility bill, which was now officially forty-five days delinquent. That came to $175 plus fines and penalties.
It was none of that. It was that Flynn had disappeared. As in, off the face of the earth. As in, one day, she was seeing him all over the place and the next day, it was like he’d never existed. Which, Rachel thought, was not exactly out of the realm of possibility. In spite of Dagne’s assurances to the contrary, she was nearing the end of her one-week experiment in “really believing,” and no Flynn.