by Susan Conley
Annabelle took her hand out of her pocket and held out the hazelnut. Maria Grazia and Lorna both leaned forward. They all looked at it in silence.
It lay there.
“Good Lord,” huffed Lorna.
“It’s a hazelnut,” said Annabelle.
“Uh huh,” said Maria Grazia calmly, while wondering if anybody she knew had a shrink who would do a drive-by.
“This nut hit you on the head,” said Lorna.
“Yes.” Annabelle nodded avidly.
“From out of nowhere.”
“Yes.”
“And this … woman. She wasn’t surprised or shocked or anything.”
“She said, ‘Well, there you are.’”
“Did she say what it was, or maybe what she thought you should do with it, or if it was a … special hazelnut?” Maria Grazia applauded herself silently on her aplomb, as years of dealing with loony relatives paid off at that very moment.
“I’d say any hazelnut that dropped out of thin air had to be pretty ‘special’.” Lorna’s voice dripped with frosty sarcasm. “I’d say that any kind of Celtic medium or whatever that could conjure up a magical nut has to be rather bloody talented — ”
“Could you maybe not be such a snot for a second?” Annabelle snapped, and Lorna gaped. Not like Anna to snap. Not like Anna at all. “I know you don’t believe in my spiritual pursuits and that you think I’m a wacko, but quite frankly, I don’t believe in any of this — “ She waved her arms around, her gestures taking in Lorna’s office, Zoe, and the whole of Matrix PR. “I don’t think that that any of this matters, but you’re my friend, so I go with it. I would appreciate the same suspension of disbelief from you at this time.”
Lorna was aghast. “You believe in magical nuts and you don’t believe in public relations?”
“Girls! Please! Let’s keep to one thought at a time,” Maria Grazie begged. “Belle, honey, do you really think that this is a magical hazelnut?”
Annabelle narrowed her eyes at MG, who held up her hands, palms out, in a pacifying manner. She shot her eyes at Lorna, who sat frozen, disbelieving, at her desk.
“I left the shop, got my breath back. Then I wanted to ask about those cards, the ones I saw on the table, but when I turned back, it was gone.”
“The table?” Maria Grazia was feeling hopelessly confused.
“The shop!” Annabelle shouted. Lorna’s face was as blank as if it had been shot full of Botox.
“Gone! Dusty windows, the doorknob came off in my hand, all the books and statues and candles — gone! I banged on the door, on the window — and it — the hazelnut — laughed at me. I had it in my hand and it shook and rolled around like it was laughing at me.” Annabelle poked at the nut. It wobbled a bit at the prodding, but otherwise remained still and dumb.
“Sweetie … you have to admit that this is all a teeny bit out there,” said Maria Grazia, softly.
“I guess.” She glared at the nut, and poked it again.
MG grasped at another straw. “Maybe we could go on the web and do a bit of research?”
“Maybe she could chop it up and make a batch of magical snickerdoodles. Maybe she can put under her mattress and in the morning find out if she’s a princess. Maybe she could take it out to the Sheep Meadow and plant it — ”
“Hey!” Annabelle’s face cleared of its dismay and her eyes lit up. She scrambled to her feet, and slipped the nut back into her pocket. She started to say something — stopped — started again — whispered “Bye!” and charged out of Lorna’s office so suddenly that Zoe leaped straight out of her seat and fell on top of her desk.
Lorna looked at Maria Grazia. “Now tell me that you’re not worried. Tell me that you’re not terribly concerned.”
“I am worried and terribly, terribly concerned.” Maria Grazia raked her hands through her hair.
“What’s she going to do?”
Maria Grazia looked at her balefully. “What you said, I guess.”
“Good Lord. This is nonsense.”
“What if it isn’t nonsense?” Maria Grazia curled up on the couch. She herself would have luxurious pillows scattered all over the thing; maybe she’d make some for Lorna tonight. “Maybe this did happen. Maybe she is magic and psychic and all that. I mean, look how good she is with the tarot, right? She is always right. Always.”
“A card is a card. A laughing, magical hazelnut is another thing altogether. Did you hear her … yell at me?”
Maria Grazia giggled. “I did, and I saw your face when she did. Priceless.”
“She’s losing it.”
“She’s still hurting. It’s only been a couple of weeks, a month, tops. Whatever gets her over the repulsive Wilson, I say bring it on.”
Lorna rose and moved to lean against the front of her desk. “You think she’s really going to plant the thing?”
“It’ll probably just rot away in the dirt.” Maria Grazia got up from the couch, and went over to give Lorna, who looked as if her feelings had been hurt, a little hug. Lorna hugged back, and looked at Maria Grazia in a fresh wave of incredulity.
“How can she say she doesn’t believe in PR?”
Chapter Eight
“Ooh, baby, baby, love me like it was yeeeesssssterdaaaaaaay — ”
Annabelle’s fist descended on her alarm clock. “Shut. Up,” she snarled, and rolled over.
Love. Ha. Pop songs. Ha ha. It was all a bunch of crap, a mountain of garbage. Love, friendship, divination, spells, dreams, ambition — bullshit. What was the point of it all, anyway, love and friendship especially. Half the time you got dumped by your lover, mocked by your friends, and rejected by stupid agents who didn’t realize that she, herself, Annabelle Walsh, had written the latest hot historical fictional novel that was even better than the ones about those stupid paintings.
Annabelle flopped over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her hands fisted in the sheets, and she experimented with kicking her heels, tantrum-like. It felt good, so she did it again. And then again, harder, so her hips sprung up off the bed. This had definite possibilities, and she began kicking, steadily, harder, bam bam bam until the bed was a blur of bouncing sheets and blankets and limbs accompanied by a dangerous squeak of springs that threatened collapse until Annabelle, having broken a sweat, ended it all with a hearty, “Bleeearrghughaaaaaahhh!”
She rolled over yet again and curled up into a ball. Should have tried that in Lorna’s lame excuse for an office on her two-square feet of designer remnant carpet. Some friend, Annabelle thought sullenly. “Some stupid friend,” she said aloud, keeping herself company. And Maria Grazia. “Ha,” she said. Talking to me like I was crazy or something. Her heart was broken. “My heart is broken,” she reminded her pillow, “and they look at me like, oh, what’s your problem, get over it already, we all hated him anyway, so what are you so upset about, ‘Anna’ — or ‘Belle’ — or whatever you call me!
“My name is Annabelle. I hate those nicknames. I hate them. I hated that Wilson called me ‘Annie’. Like I was a stupid orphan in a stupid play!”
She sat up, propping her six pillows against the wall, and crossed her arms over her chest. She kicked her sheets and blankets onto the floor, and pulled her ratty, over-sized nightshirt over her knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her clock tick over from 11:15 to 11:16. She shifted the blinds a bit for the weather report. Sunny, sunny, sunny by the looks of it, not too windy, and the handful of pedestrians strolling up Union Street weren’t grimacing with cold — all the earmarks of a beautiful day.
Whoopie.
Annabelle slumped back against the pillows and took stock. At least she seemed to have dried up. There had been no floods of tears for almost two whole days. The grumpiness and tantrum thing seemed like the heralds of a new phase. Maybe it was like those five stages of grie
f, surely Maria Grazia would know — not that she was ever going to call her again or anything. She certainly wasn’t going to continue to foster a friendship with someone who thought she was a raving lunatic. And that went double for Lorna, that stuck-up bitch, what did she know about heartbreak? — “Not like she has a heart.” I need to stop talking to myself, Annabelle thought, at least out loud. She pulled the already stretched-out collar of her nightshirt over her mouth.
Obviously, the statute of limitations as regarded the public mourning of ex-relationships had expired. Obviously, she was meant to adhere to some sort of schedule of recovery not of her making. Obviously, she was just a big fat baby and nobody cared about her, or about her feelings.
“Okay, Walsh, cut it out!” She leaped out of bed, then briskly made it up, straightened her shoes to run in neat pairs at the foot of her bed, threw yesterday’s clothes into her laundry bag — and then caught sight of herself in the mirror above her dresser. Still a little on the wan side, hair a bit lifeless, but it all showed in her eyes, eyes that despite the flashes of anger and the blur of activity, still looked like two little blue pools of hurt and sadness and despair. She touched her reflection, barely recognizing herself — Who am I, who am I, who am I?
She got back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
If only she could sell her book. If only she had an agent. If only her blog would hit the big time. If only she didn’t have to pick up the odd sub-editing job, the occasional review, the random feature. She cared about history, not the dry, dull kind, but the kind that was about people who did interesting things in interesting times. If only her areas of expertise — artists, musicians, actors — weren’t so oversaturated. All she needed was the one break, the one subject, and she’d be minted. She cared about what people did, and how they did things, and the things they made, and she knew she was good at it, at translating their actions into words —
Maybe I just suck, she whined to herself. “Maybe I am, quite simply, a crappy writer and a crappy girlfriend and a crappy person.” Which is why I have friends that suck.
Lorna and her magical snickerdoodles. Bitch. Just to show her, Annabelle had gone and planted the hazelnut, liberating a long-dead fern from one of her prettiest pots, a hand-thrown, hand-glazed terracotta she’d picked up at a Celtic Arts Fayre, a beautiful bronze and green thingie covered in spirals and whatnot.
Ha. And Maria Grazia — “Now, sweetie, maybe you could let us know exactly what you mean by the phrase ‘out of thin air’. Do you mean that it is made, possibly, out of air, air that is thin, right?” Annabelle mocked MG’s thick Italian accent, and then felt terrible.
“Okay, get up now, Annabelle,” she said, “Get up up up up up and out of this bed and send out a query, write a post, get some crappy freelance gig, think positive! Gogogogogogoooooo — Go!”
She lay unmoving, staring at her one true friend, the ceiling: always willing to listen, always there. She closed her eyes, knowing that it wouldn’t be offended, and ran through her mental Rolodex, trying to come up with some names of people she’d worked for, trying to remember who might be busy enough to throw her a bone. She’d fallen out of touch with most of them. How’d that happened? Well … in the last year or so, if she was being honest, she had kind of blown off a few things, not returned calls, because, well … she and Wilson had always seemed to be away whenever a gig came up, or on their way out of town, or else, you know, they’d been busy with stuff … Then Wilson would talk her out of her self-chastisement and say it didn’t matter, and why should she take other people’s dregs. And what was the point of all this commercial stuff? She didn’t want to be a hired gun, he had insisted, there wasn’t much of a future in that, didn’t she want to be a serious writer anyway, it was certainly more legitimate cachet to be literary rather than commercial —
“Wait. A. Minute.” Annabelle sat up suddenly. Wait just one minute. That had been her idea … right? Literary historical fiction as opposed to straight biography, so much sexier and trendier and … She fisted her fingers in the hair at her temples. “It was my idea, wasn’t it? It was — oh my God. But. No, I said — I thought I decided — no way.” Whose decision was it?
Was she that far gone?
Annabelle finally got out of bed for the day. Shuffling her feet into her plush bear foot slippers, she decided that she couldn’t possibly investigate that train of thought without a serious infusion of fennel tea to ensure clarity.
Wow.
Way too much excitement for one morning.
She opened the door that led to her ‘living room’ — and gasped.
Chapter Nine
Overnight, a plant had grown in the pot in which Annabelle had sown the hazelnut, if grown is the proper word. No, on second thought, it didn’t even come close. A growing plant implies quiet, peacefulness, a gradual unfolding of branch and flower.
Overnight, a plant had exploded out of the pot in which Annabelle had planted the hazelnut.
“Holy shit!” shouted Annabelle.
She couldn’t take it in; an entire corner of her ‘dining room’ had been shanghaied by a twisting, gnarled, and enormous … tree, practically. If not for the large pink flowers that seemed to float above the knotty branches, the thing would look quite sinister indeed. It seemed to be swaying slightly, and dreading the mess if it actually toppled over, Annabelle inched over and propped the heavier bits over the back of a chair. The plant vibrated a bit at her touch, and seemed to send out a slight, airy hum as she arranged it. She lowered herself into the second of her two chairs, and stared.
Somehow, the pot was still intact despite the fact that, in theory, the roots of the … thing should have been as great in size as the plant itself. No horticulturalist, Annabelle at least knew that much, that the roots of trees went as far down into the earth as the tree itself shot up toward the sky … or something.
She cautiously extended a finger and lightly stroked one of the branches, and the result was a sound akin to delicate wind chimes. Oddly enough — as if things weren’t already odd enough — despite the fact that plant ranged up toward the ceiling and completely filled its corner of her ‘dining room’, it didn’t seem to be blocking light coming in from the window; always low lighted at best, the room actually seemed a bit brighter.
Annabelle thought longingly of a cigarette. As if it had read her mind, the plant quivered in distaste. “Great,” said Annabelle. “Not only enchanted, but judgmental. I’ll smoke if I damn well please!” Branches began to wave in reaction, and Annabelle scooted her chair back a bit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bough slowly edging a pack of Marlboro Lights toward the main body of the plant. “Shit,” Annabelle leaped up from her chair and backed up against the door to her flat. “This is getting too weird, even for me.”
The phone rang, and Annabelle was tempted to let the machine get it, but somehow the handset landed on the floor. As she picked it up, out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of branches waving a bit as if it had knocked the phone off its cradle. Annabelle took a deep breath, and answered without checking the caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Well, hi there! It’s Kelli callin’!” Her gushy Southern accent oozed down the line.
“Hey, Kell. How are things?”
“Oh, I’m just fine. But,” pause, lowering of voice, sympathetic. “How are you?”
Annabelle stared at the plant, and then turned her back on it.
“Oh, you know.”
“Yes, I do. I do know. Oh, Annabelle.”
“But I’m getting back out there, work-wise, I mean, sending off to the agents.”
“Good for you! Keep busy with work, that’s what I always say.”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Well, as to that! I’ve got a new show about to get off the ground, and I really need someone to develop the website for me. I�
��d do it myself, but I’m producing and directing, and gosh, I can’t do everything myself!”
“Yeah, I don’t know, Kell — ow!” She turned to look at the plant, which was quivering slightly in its pot.
Kelli’s molasses voice exuded solicitude. “You okay, sugar?”
“I just — something — hit me on the … head. Yeah, okay, okay, I’ll do it.”
“That’s so great! And maybe you could look at the script?”
“Uh, screenplays used to be more my thing, Kell — ”
Bright tinkling laughter made Annabelle wince. “Oh, close enough! Listen, my little brain trust is meeting tonight. You can come on down, can’t you?”
“Yeah, got nothing else going on,” Annabelle muttered as she put down the phone. She could have sworn that the plant folded in upon itself, smugly.
• • •
Trudging up the stairs of a restaurant so expensive she was surprised she was let in without showing the maitre d’ the contents of her wallet, Annabelle wondered, again, what the hell she was doing. Being gently bullied by Kelli was one thing, but being rather more tenaciously bullied by a plant was another entirely. She paused on a landing, not so much to catch her breath as to catch her … spirit. A roomful of strangers wasn’t exactly something to look forward to. The fact that these strangers had all been inveigled into doing something they probably didn’t have the time to do added another layer of lunacy to the whole mess.
She felt like she owed Kelli, but she didn’t really, not in material terms. An editor of the popular and influential NYC Weekly, the city’s most highly regarded alternative newspaper, Kelli had basically, for all intents and purposes, been keeping Annabelle solvent for the last few years. I do the work, it’s a fair exchange, she scolded herself. But there was this thing about Kelli, this eternal feeling of obligation, like the exchange could never be even-handed, because wasn’t Kelli so thoughtful, always thinking of Annabelle, ensuring that her name stayed out there — whether she wanted it to or not?