by Amber Foxx
Mae knew she needed to go back down to the car to get the next load, but rest was more attractive. She took her shoes off and lay on the couch, leaving the clothes hanging over its arm, and closed her eyes. Fifteen minutes, and then she would get coffee and the other clothes, and try to solve all her problems, like where to live and how to answer Dana’s questions.
The edge of sleep fell through the tunnel.
The world Mae entered was dark and boisterous, yet elegant, with black leather chairs and candles that glowed in wall sconces and large glass tubes on the tables. A waitress in a black fitted dress brought drinks and hors d’oeuvres to a couple seated in a secluded corner. Pamela looked almost too young to drink legally. The younger, slimmer Charlie was somewhere in his forties, and strikingly handsome. There was a light in him, a kind of innocence in his eyes. In spite of their age difference, it was Pamela rather than Charlie who looked at home in this expensive, indulgent setting.
She licked the end of the straw she drew out of her fruity drink, and picked up an item from her plate. It was unclear what it was, but it seemed rich and oily. She made a show of putting it in her mouth, then reached over and fed one to Charlie. Awkward as the overtly sensual display seemed to be for him, he appeared hypnotized by her.
Then Mae was through the tunnel again, and the scene shifted to Charlie’s office. The window was open to the night air, the blinds up. Charlie and Pamela tangled on the floor, making love with violent energy. When they rolled over to change positions, his hip bumped the edge of a small table and dislodged something from its surface. Mae’s inner vision was drawn to the falling things, a small wooden Buddha and a tiny red ceramic bowl with a pale blue interior. In a vision within the vision, Charlie filled the bowl with water and set it like an offering, touched the head of the Buddha, then watered his plant. The reverent, contemplative image washed away as he locked and grappled with Pamela. The Buddha and the bowl fell in what looked like slow motion as the table rocked and righted itself. The bowl struck the edge of the radiator and cracked, and the little Buddha lay in a puddle on the rug, the finish on his robes and his upraised hand softening in the moisture, ignored by the lovers in their urgency.
The tunnel swirled around them and reopened. Now they lay on a white sand beach, Pamela still a Nordic goddess, Charlie heavier and older. Pamela crossed her long, firmly muscled white leg over Charlie’s, a surprisingly thin leg under his heavy torso. He was tanned, but didn’t look healthy for it.
“You’re no fun lately. I wish you’d lighten up.” She sat up, sighed. “Literally.”
“I believe you like it that I spend all my time and money helping you make money.” He slammed down his book and pushed himself upright. “Would you like fewer rental houses? Get rid of the wine store? The gallery? Cancel the new business so I can get back to yoga and running marathons? All you’ve done is go to school and then work on the shops and houses. You seem to forget I have a rather more responsible position.”
“Poor overworked Charlie.”
She jostled his belly, jumped to her feet, and ran across the sand to dive into the ocean, swimming along the shoreline with an angry speed.
Abruptly, the tunnel swallowed the image and reopened to show Pamela in a shop full of masks, exotic clothing, drums, and jewelry, with bright woolen weavings hanging on the walls. Outside the store windows it was dark, traffic passing on a misty, wet street. Lettering on the door that read backwards from Mae’s interior view flowed in bronze-colored, wild-looking script: Spirit Body.
Only one person remained in the store beside Pamela, a woman of uncertain race and age, about four foot eleven, wearing mismatched clothing. Her face was lined but her hair more dark than gray.
“Go ahead. Lock up.” The small brown woman smiled, twisting the ends of a bright shawl that covered her narrow shoulders. “Here he comes.”
Pamela locked the doors, and Charlie stepped out of the office, looking even bigger and taller next to this diminutive stranger. “Here I come. Yes?” His voice was playful and curious as he glanced over the woman’s head at Pamela for clarification. He asked in a stage whisper, as if the short woman couldn’t hear him, “Who is this?”
“She says some of the masks have a spirit. And that you can tell which ones.”
Charlie regarded the little woman thoughtfully and then pulled up a stool from behind the counter to sit, now eye to eye with her. In the dim, brown-gold light of the store, with its beaded hats and feathered fans, alpaca blankets and various carved deities from around the world, he sat still and quiet for a while. Then he looked at the woman, glanced around the room, and closed his eyes, hands resting palms down on his legs, heels hooked in the rungs of the stool.
“I can,” he said after a long pause. “I can tell.” He kept his eyes closed.
The little woman gestured to Pamela to bring her certain masks and indicated silently where to put them on the floor. Pamela brought them and spread them out as directed.
“Where are the ones with a spirit you can use?” the woman asked Charlie.
He gestured to his left, nodding his head with calm assurance. On the right were Northwest-coast Indian art masks, like the faces on totem poles. “Those,” he gestured to his right, eyes still closed, “have a spirit, too. But I can’t touch it. It’s ...” He searched for the words.
“Very pure. Yes. Very strong. And you’re right, you can’t use those. Those spirits are sacred.”
Charlie opened his eyes. On his left were three crude-looking wooden masks, all of a kind, with small square mouths and strings of vegetal hair. They looked like shrunken heads.
“The person who made those,” said the little woman, “put something into them, even though they’re not real ceremonial masks. He put a spirit in them.”
“So, am I going to conjure with this spirit?” Charlie bent down with a grunt, picked up one of the masks and held it to his face, standing and making a comical gesture as if shaking a rattle with his other hand, shuffling his feet in a mock dance.
“Not tonight.”
He lowered the mask, no longer clowning. “But you could teach me.”
“Yes.” The strange woman reached into her pocket, pulled out a little notebook and a pencil, and wrote down her address and telephone number and her name, Landy Childress. “You come see me. I’ll teach you.”
Charlie wagged the mask at her as he held it over his face once more, then lowered it, raising an eyebrow.
Landy Childress laughed. “No, you don’t need that. I was testing you. Your girlfriend, she didn’t do so well.” They didn’t look a likely pair, but this woman picked up their relationship with certainty, as if she knew them, though she seemed to be a stranger.
They let her out and locked up again, then went outside to a gray SUV parked on the street. “That bothered you, didn’t it?” Charlie asked as he got in on the driver’s side.
Pamela got in on the other side. “Yes, it did.”
He smiled and started the car. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Pamela tugged on her seat belt, and the car began to move slowly along a street filled with restaurant-goers, moviegoers, and a light mist of rain. “I sure as hell can’t see what we’ve been doing to get ready. Especially for her.”
“You don’t?” He sounded surprised. “I do.”
Mae’s vision shifted through a spin of scenes too rapid to identify, and then into a bedroom with drawn curtains that partially blocked bright daylight. Music with a heavy beat played on a stereo. A sheet and what looked like a silk duvet lay piled on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Pamela and a young man with a lean, muscled torso and thick, dark hair lay naked in the rumpled bed sipping wine, stroking each other slowly. He set his wine on the bedside table and took hers, setting it beside his glass.
“Do we have time for an encore?” he asked.
“We do.” She ran a finger along his chest and down his hard, sculpted belly. “I told Charlie I was working on the new house.
He won’t come here. And he’s at work anyway. He never leaves before at least four.”
The front door opened and closed.
“Pam? I saw your car here.” Charlie’s strong voice carried up the stairs as if he were in the same room.
“I’ll be right down.” She reached for her bathrobe, which lay on the floor beside the bed, and accidentally knocked over the bottle of wine. “Shit.” Red wine bled into the pale beige carpet. She turned off the stereo. The young man stood up and grabbed his pants.
“What are you doing? I thought you were at the new house. We’ve got a lot to do to get it ready. We’ve got tenants for the first of the month.”
“I thought I was getting a migraine.” She pulled on her robe.
“So you listen to that crap you were playing? That’d give me a migraine.”
Pamela shook her head and rolled her eyes, signaled the young man to be quiet, then left the bedroom and went to the head of the stairs. Charlie stood halfway up the steps, holding a set of car keys. He looked at her with cold, narrowed eyes, and began dangling the keys from a finger.
“What?” she asked.
In a voice that was barely audible but hard as a blade, he said, “These were on the hall table.”
“I don’t—”
He pushed past her up the stairs. Mae noticed that he was the heaviest she had ever seen him. Tiredness shadowed his face, gray circles under his eyes dark against the flush of anger as he faced the young man, who scrambled to button his shirt.
“Take this worthless slut with you when you go.” Charlie threw the keys hard enough to make the young man flinch as he caught them. “She’s all yours.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man grabbed his shoes and socks. “I mean, no, sir, I won’t take her. I’m sorry, sir. I apologize. I shouldn’t have been here.”
He left in haste, without a word to Pamela, shoes in hand.
“He doesn’t want you, either.” Charlie regarded her coldly. “That’s too bad. Because a lazy slut like you will find it very difficult without a man.”
“You’re not kicking me out.”
“I own this house, and I am. If you’re not gone in two hours I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”
“You can’t do that. I have keys.”
“Try me.”
“Two hours?”
“Start packing. And leave the keys.” He went back down the stairs too fast and stumbled on the first two, twisting his knee and cursing as he caught himself.
Pamela, open-mouthed in a frozen rage, watched him for a moment. Then, as the door slammed below, she dumped the wine glasses out onto the sheets. She yanked paintings off the wall and kicked them, making holes in them. Muttering angrily under her breath, she pulled suitcases from the closet and filled them with an extraordinary quantity of clothing, cramming it in recklessly with no care for her things, in spite of their obvious quality, tossing jewelry in with shoes and dresses, leaving boxes behind.
As she hauled the suitcases to the foot of the stairs, she looked behind her. “Yes,” she whispered with a wild yet focused look at the second floor. She ran back up, dressed in the clothes that lay on the floor beside the bed, leaving her robe in their place, then strode into a room behind the bedroom. It appeared to be Charlie’s study and art studio.
Pamela turned to a near-blank canvas that stood on an easel. A few strokes showed the beginnings of a painting over a faint sketch of a landscape. Opening a box of pastels, Pamela began to scrawl an image over the canvas clearly meant to be a caricature of Charlie, naked. It was harshly cruel, exaggerating his girth, the darkness under his eyes, the size of his nose, even the smallness of his feet. Every flaw, she made worse than it was in life. She drew his penis small and limp, then tore with her painted nails at the heart of the man she had drawn, the color scraping away in the claw marks. She signed the drawing: Always, Pamela.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mae jolted awake as the Yellow Gentleman’s rubber tarantula landed in her face. The cat paused, front paws on the sofa, looking into her eyes, and mewed softly.
“Thank you.” She handed him his toy, and he dropped to the floor to bat it and chase after it. Sitting up, Mae shivered. What would she have seen next if he hadn’t woken her? She felt lost and stunned, disoriented, and contaminated. She’d thought she had better control over the sight now. How had she let this happen? And how had she seen so much of Charlie?
She looked at the stack of Pamela’s clothes. Her feet had been touching them while she slept. Of course. Mae had been wondering all morning what had happened between Charlie and Pamela. It looked like he didn’t guard his past the way he could guard the present. Mae had slipped in through the gateway of Pamela.
She hadn’t wanted to know this much, but now the knowledge raised more questions. Had Pamela’s betrayal and that cruel drawing somehow turned him into the wolf witch? He could have craved power after that. Or had he learned it from the shamans on that trip? Or from the woman in the store?
Mae stood, lifted the clothes by the hangers, and carried them to the closet in Bernadette’s room. She recognized one of the skirts from the vision, when Pamela was packing. A small evening purse with beads and brocade hung on the hanger with it. Mae put the clothes away and examined the purse. It was empty expect for a slip of yellowed paper stuck in a compartment where lipstick might fit. Mae lifted the paper. The writing on it was nearly illegible, half print, half script. I’m yours. CT.
Once upon a time, Pamela had thought this souvenir of a conquest worth keeping. Aware that she’d treaded again into Charlie’s past even by finding this, Mae threw it away, then put coffee on to brew and left the apartment to go back to her car for the next load of Pamela’s clothes. Even with exhaust smells and blowing street grit, the outdoor air under scudding gray clouds made her feel cleaner. She carried the load up, hung the clothes, and opened the bedroom window, then went into the kitchen and got a plastic produce bag and a rubber band. She put the bag over the smoke alarm, and then lit Bernadette’s sage and cedar smudge stick, borrowing Bernadette’s feather fan to brush the smoke over the clothes and over herself. When she felt the negative energy subside, Mae stubbed the smudge stick out in its ceramic pot.
She got her white quartz crystal from the closet and used it to brush the air around herself as she had with the smudge ritual, then sat in the rocker, holding the stone. Following the instructions from the meditation book, she closed her eyes and stayed with her breath, letting her thoughts slip into the background until her mind felt quiet. It took time, but gradually the noise settled and she felt like her mind could breathe.
When she finally sensed she could function without being fogged up by Charlie and Pamela’s world, she took the bag off the smoke alarm and returned to the kitchen. She cleaned the crystal in salt water, poured a cup of coffee and peeled a banana. Amazingly, the kitchen clock showed that the plunge into visions had lasted only half an hour. She felt as if she had been gone for days or years, and not at all rested. It didn’t feel like she had slept and dreamed, but as if she had traveled.
She drank coffee, ate the banana, and tried to think. Now what? Was this accidental vision, in all its unpleasant depth, what Dana needed to know? Would this information stop her from giving up her life for this man? Or would she hear it and think Poor Charlie, Pamela dragged him down?
Which she had, but not as far as he’d kept going. And he’d been the professor involved with a student, for all his air of innocence at the start.
Another vision with Pamela’s things was out of the question. Mae wanted all that energy out of those clothes. She planned to wear them for her work at Healing Balance. She didn’t want to feel those stories all over her, and hoped the smudge ritual had removed them.
She couldn’t stand to take another psychic journey over this, but still wanted to talk Dana out of moving in with Charlie. Knowing how he became the wolf-spirit witch might make it clear how to stop him, not only from ruining Dana’s life but anyone
else’s. If she didn’t use the sight, that left two choices for finding out. Mae could ask Pamela, or ask Charlie. One might cost her a client, and a good one. The other might cost her—what? The harm he could do in the spirit world, whatever that might be.
In case what she knew already was enough, and it seemed like it should be, Mae called Dana. No answer. She left a short message summing up what she knew with as little intimate detail as possible.
“Charlie had some affairs with students. It’s true. I don’t know how many, but he was doing it way back in the day, and he never seems to have stopped. He stayed with one, and I’ll give you her name if you have to have it, for at least five years, maybe longer—the basketball player, if he’s ever mentioned her. He does some kind of scary stuff with his spiritual powers. I’m planning to learn more about that. And he’s had at least one other lover at the same time he’s been seeing you. I don’t know if Dr. Hart was ever his girlfriend but she’s been like his best friend since she was a student. I’ll let you know when I find out more on the weird spiritual stuff. Because, honestly, if I were you, that’d bother me even more than the women.”
As soon as she ended that call, her phone rang. Arnie.
“Mae, honey?” He sounded anxious.
“Hey, what’s the matter?”
“I’ll be away when you come down Friday to see your girls. Wanted you to know that.”
“You going to Puerto Rico?”
“Not yet. In a couple of weeks. I decided to ... settle things with your mother first. I’m gonna go to my sister in Roanoke Rapids for a couple of days.” His voice faded out, and he cleared his throat. “Your mother could use some help packing.”
“Y’all really are splitting?” Even knowing that at least half of all marriages didn’t last, and that this one shouldn’t, it somehow still came as kind of a shock. “How are you holding up?”
“Better than I expected. We had a little talk about Dr. Hoggard.” Arnie took a breath. “Seems like they were just waiting for Mary Carter to qualify for Medicare, now that I had my benefits. But it looks the doc will just have to pay a little more alimony for a year or so.”