by Kat Turner
“Sure.”
“Yay.” She clapped. “Thank you. Which card has the highest limit?”
He pointed to the black one he’d planned to use for his and Helen’s trip to the slopes or beach and tried to ignore the churn of his guts.
Tilly scooped it up and re-opened her computer, doing a little dance as she keyed in numbers. “Your girlfriend is the real deal, by the way. At first I thought she was annoying, but I think she’s actually a superhero missing her cape.”
He forced himself not to picture Helen. It was all still too soon, even as he transitioned into the zone of categorizing her as a person from his past. “How so?”
“Yesterday, she took charge. It was cool. I think she knows what she’s doing, what she’s talking about. It was just neat to watch was all. I dunno. I can’t explain it, exactly.”
A smile made of memories graced his lips. “Can you try?”
“It’s like she doesn’t take any shit. She took control of the situation even when everyone was resisting her, was all assertive without being bitchy. Just strong. It was cool. I never got to apologize for being bratty to her, either. Speaking of apologies, I’m sorry that I said that I hated you and that you suck and ruined my life. I didn’t mean those things.”
“A real boss lady,” Brutus said.
Assertive and strong, competent and decisive. A real boss lady. That was his Helen. Sorrow amassed in Brian, dense and indigestible. He needed to exorcize this “his Helen” nonsense. “All is forgiven, darling. And Helen is something alright. One of a kind.”
“So why did you let her get away?” Tilly’s question forged a spike, with Brian a bubble headed to the point.
“I didn’t let her get away. She decided she needed to leave, and she did.”
“But you didn’t tell her all of your feelings. All of the reasons you wanted her to stay.”
He bristled, though his wise child was right. “I did. I tried.”
“Not hard enough. You didn’t make her stay.”
“Well, I’m not in the habit of coercing women, and I wasn’t about to beg.”
“Nah, but what you did was worse. You pulled into your shell, didn’t you? Let everything with Mom and Kris and all the rest get to you.”
“I don’t want to have this personal conversation with my teenage daughter. Besides, what’s done is done.”
Victory glimmered in her eyes. “Ah. So I am hands-down correct.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sure you did, in your own words.”
He grumbled. “Okay, out of the mouths of babes it is, I suppose. So what am I to do, sage little one?”
Tilly put her hand over her chest and affected a theatrical swoon. “Duh. You execute a grand gesture to win her back. Prove and profess your love in a sweeping declaration of performativity. Like John Cusack with his stereo thingy in that ancient movie. Or a romance novel.”
He drummed his fingers on marbled granite. She made a solid case, and what was he if not a performance artist? Still, though, he had practical facts to grapple with. “It sounds good on paper, but it wouldn’t work in practice.”
Silence followed. He circled a hand, urging Tilly to counter his claim.
Instead, she keyed in the numbers of a different one of Brian’s credit cards.
He narrowed his eyes at her.
With an innocent expression on her face, she said, “I need to collect my fee for counseling services rendered before offering more advice.”
“Fine.”
She clapped and clicked the track pad, completing some purchase. “Yay. And to your point, that’s a total cop-out. You’re afraid is all, afraid to fight for the person you love.”
He flinched as Tilly skated near a tough truth, but fortunately she was so absorbed in online shopping she didn’t catch the reaction on his face. “I’m not afraid. I’m wary.”
She shrugged. “Same thing.”
“It is not. Acting with caution is smart, self-protective. Acting out of fear, on the other hand, is a way of mitigating risks by shrinking one’s world.”
“And you don’t see how the thought processes you described reflect the exact same sort of cowardice?”
He slid his juice glass back and forth.
“Look, all I’m saying is that we humans have two baseline motivations that drive our choices.” She flipped open a palm. “One, fear. Fear is shrinking, as you said. Small, contracted, all about limits and boundaries and avoidance. Avoiding harm, risk, feeling.”
Tilly presented her opposite, upturned hand. Two fans of long fingers hung in the air like balanced scales. “The other driving force is love. In stark contrast to fear, love is expansive. Opening, welcoming of possibilities. Heart, a big tent, accepting.”
His daughter never ceased to surprise or amaze him. “Where did you learn all of this parlance?”
“We live in Los Angeles, Daddy, otherwise known as woo-woo central. So I dunno, I think a psychic on the Santa Monica boardwalk said it to me once. But it’s insight, you know? It stuck with me. And speaking of woo-woo insights, I would have thought that Moonbeam Starchild, the crystal witch, would have imparted all of this hippie yoga wisdom to you already.”
She had, in her own way, imparted spiritual wisdom to him. By showing him that he had the courage to love again.
“It’s complicated.” It wasn’t. He was still in hiding, secreted away in self-created emotional witness protection. But it was time to leave.
Helen tried to tell him her feelings. Albeit in a terribly inopportune moment when he’d been hurting too badly to allow himself to absorb the message. But that didn’t make his conduct right.
She’d been ready to open up, and he’d lacked the capacity to see past his own pain and meet her in a place of emotional honesty. If he could take back that moment, backtrack and allow himself to feel the entire array of things that surged through him before she’d left, their goodbye would have happened differently. She might have still left, but they would have parted with hearts unburdened.
“Tell her how you feel,” Tilly said.
Brian never once faced a task so herculean. Especially now, since, thanks to his reactive behavior, he’d gone and broken what they’d shared. “I doubt she’s still speaking to me.”
“You’re making this harder on yourself than it has to be. Get her to come to your show, and do something awesome onstage that sends a poignant message. Do you know how many of your fangirls would kill for attention like that? And since it will be authentic, we’re talking high-impact wow factor. It’s your area of expertise, and I’m certain you’ll think of a better gesture than I will. But don’t give up. I haven’t seen you as happy as you were with your weird new girlfriend in a long, long time.”
“She isn’t weird. She’s quirky and interesting and intelligent and—”
“My point, proven.”
“You win.” Brian hugged his daughter. The boniness of her bothered him, but he’d keep working on her health. At least she was home and safe, consumed by excitement about her senior trip.
She still smelled a bit like her baby blanket, and always would carry that residual aroma of scalp and powder, but he wasn’t about to bring up her infancy like some sentimental slob. “You’ve gotten to be quite the sharp young woman.”
Wiggling out of his embrace, she shrugged. “School is going better. I like my tutor.”
Zero mention of modeling, a blessing he didn’t dare jinx. “Wonderful news.”
She slid him a sidelong glance. “I’m not going anywhere rural, ever, but maybe I’ll reconsider college. Tour some places around the country. New York, Colorado, Minnesota.”
Mention of the last location, though she spoke the state name casually, sent a jumpy sensation skittering over his torso.
Time to connect with Helen and grovel before he lost her for good. Screw this stupid curse. So what if she’d cursed him with witchcraft, so what if some demon she conjured was sharpening fangs at this very moment, eage
r to drag him to hell.
They’d manage. As a team, they’d not only manage. They’d prevail.
Brian kissed his daughter on the cheek and returned to his bedroom. He grabbed his mobile and was preparing his mea culpa when the sight of a staggering number of missed calls stunned him.
The number eighty-seven sat in the upper-right hand corner of the green phone icon.
He staggered backward, reeling from despair. Something awful had happened to someone, his mum or dad or brother Alan, or to Grandmother or one of the boys in the band.
Upon clicking on the square, cooling relief and a vortex of concern competed. Most of the calls were from Jonnie, with a smattering of others showing Thom’s and Jonas’s phone numbers.
Okay. An industry matter. He could cope. Mini-crises exploded in his professional world on a semi-regular basis. Such was expected in a field stocked with massive egos, bigger money, and hot-blooded artists with megawatt dreams.
He sat on his bed and rang his best mate.
Jonnie answered after one ring. “Are you sitting down?”
“Yes, why?”
“Joe Clyde died last night. They’re listing the official cause of death as suicide, but I’m not buying it.”
Vertigo contracted and expanded Brian’s perception. Had the termination driven Fyre’s former manager to suicide? “Why not?”
“The circumstances had ritualistic overtones.”
Twenty-One
Helen’s teenage years thundered in, bathed in hormones and wearing nihilism like cheap stilettos.
Her wardrobe of facile insights on life and love resulted from the embarrassingly immature error of mistaking depression for depth of intellect. During that bleak period, she’d cauterized her spiritual and psychic wounds with the mean tools of negativity and cynicism.
The concept of soul mates had been collateral damage, dismissed and derided as a prime example of the stupid nonsense concocted by the patriarchy to make women into docile sex objects. More capitalist malfeasance, an ideological arm of the wedding-industrial complex deploying flowery rhetoric to dupe needy girls into embracing their own submission and buying shit they didn’t need.
See? Look at that profound socio-critical analysis.
But this was before she’d met someone who got her, who saw a truth so real yet so atrophied she’d succeeded in neglecting its existence. Before meeting Brian, Helen would have never entertained the notion that she had a male counterpart. Someone with whom she shared a rapport that testified to synergy being an actual thing. Someone with whom she could simply be, drop any and all pretenses, airs, and general fake bullshit.
Stretched on her couch while an inane reality show played on the television, she pulled a fleece blanket over her head and tried for another half-hour snatch of sleep. Soon beaten, she stood on stiff legs, scuzzy and piqued from insomnia and anxiety.
Brian’s gifts to her—a bejeweled dream journal and a black gown complete with witchy bell sleeves—peeked out from a nest of white tissue paper in their opened box. She couldn’t look at the present or she’d start crying.
She should not have gone back to Minneapolis like a spineless coward. The chiding criticism knocked around her brain on repeat.
But what was she supposed to do? She went to her kitchen and prepped the coffee maker. Wait around and chance it that she would kill Brian while under the possession of the hex-cloud? Hell no.
An oppressive blast of white sunlight spilled through her window as the pot belched and hissed. The time on her microwave read eight-fifty-six. Not too early to call Nerissa.
She and Brian might be broken up, but she hadn’t given up on saving his life. Helen called the old witch.
“My poor child.”
Helen rubbed morning crud out of her eyes and sent a silent prayer of thanks to the universe that, at least, she didn’t need to endure Nerissa yelling at her about the spell. “I’m glad you aren’t angry.”
“Why would I be?”
“Because I didn’t listen to you and I cast another Left Hand spell. And, lo and behold, it caused huge problems.”
“You’ve learned, though.”
Helen sloshed coffee into her travel mug and topped it with almond milk. “Too late, though.”
“No, not too late. Come by my house. Bring everything relevant.”
Was that hope she heard in Nerissa’s voice? One way to find out. She gathered up the crystals and book, shoved them into her bag, and hustled out the door.
Clinging to the words “not too late,” thin as dental floss but nonetheless material, she ran a red light on her way to the witch’s home.
A cat, scraggly with mismatched eyes, jumped into Helen’s lap. As she petted its matted coat, it occurred to her that she and Nerissa sat in the exact same spots as they had during their first meeting. Though now, with Helen on the saggy sofa and Nerissa in the recliner across the coffee table, Helen was overcome with an acute sense of how she faced the witch as a different person.
She was humbled before magic, stripped bare. She’d done fantastical things, sure, proven her might to herself.
Helen fought for her home and won it—L&E was solvent. But the sacrifice had been mighty and come at a price.
She fell in love. Not desperation, grasping, clinging, or begging. Not what she’d felt when wheedling foster families. No, she’d felt true love. A bond with another person that touched the goodness she spoke of in her closing class meditation, the best of her seeing the best of him and vice versa. She’d felt it and lost it.
Not too late. Not too late. Helen fiddled with a stubby dreadlock on the cat’s coat, a hard stump of hair rolling between her thumb and forefinger. “I’m sorry, Nerissa.”
The elder looked on with gentle eyes. “For?”
“For not listening to you. For getting carried away.”
A knowing grunt slipped from Nerissa’s closed lips. “Lay all of your supplies between us.”
Helen eased the cat off her and hauled her bag up from the floor. She set the grimoire on the surface of Nerissa’s coffee table, followed by her stones. Crystals clattered onto scuffed wood stained a dramatic shade of ebony.
Chanting and muttering, Nerissa waved her hands over the assortment. “It’s here.”
Helen flinched and gulped a swig of java. Caffeine was required to deal with curses.
The old witch laughed. “Not that. Look at your talismans.”
She scanned the cluttered table top, mouth opening as she spotted both clear crystals side by side. “Someone returned the other one to me on the sly.”
“No, no. It made its way back to you.”
Flush with a strange sense of gratitude, Helen picked up the see-through hunk and looked at it like an old friend. The crystal seemed to wink at her, self-aware and jaunty. “Why?”
Nerissa leaned back in her recliner, a faraway look crossing her lined face. “Crystals are sentient, dear. You know this. You’ve been in communication since the very beginning. So don’t ask me. Tune in and query the stone yourself.”
Helen clutched the piece of mineral in her palm, warming it with her body heat. Subtle vibrations traveled from the rock and into the creases underneath her knuckles. And yes, it communicated with her, through a subtle language that registered as imperceptible emotional adjustments in her body.
Like a slow, chill counterpoint to a wake-up call, the crystal talked in an intuitive pre-language a bit like telepathy. Not wanting to live in Joe’s shrine, the stone came back to her in a series of tiny motions, drops and rolls and slips from a pocket.
“I’m thankful, but I’m not sure I understand.”
“You understand your chakras, how they move up from the lowest levels to the seat of enlightenment. You’ve mastered the first six, so the seventh is ready for you.”
“Thanks, but—”
“Is your beau safe? Yes, I saw him in my visions.” Nerissa licked her lips. “Quite the looker.”
“No, he isn’t safe.”
&
nbsp; “Are you permitted to cast any more Left Hand spells?”
Helen stared at her lap. “No. No I am not.”
“So you have your answers. Go.” Nerissa made a shooing motion at the door.
“I don’t think I have answers, actually. What am I supposed to do?”
A wistful expression from Nerissa. She stroked her braid. “Congratulations, you have just about mastered the craft of color magic, and the clear crystals are prepared to work in your service and do your bidding for the remainder of your days. I’m proud of you, coven daughter.”
Helen managed a confused laugh. “I haven’t done jack.”
Nerissa shrugged. “Not while you sit here stalling.”
“Message received.” Helen scooped up her stuff. She had one more shot, and she’d take it. Sure, she might fail, but nothing beat a fail like a try. And while she was at it, she would try to convince Brian to give her one more chance.
Scratch try. Do or do not. Time to nix that “try” crap once and for all.
“Good girl. Before you go, know this. These morons will use every trick in the book, literally. They are messing with the sixth circle when they know not its caprice. But their hubris shall mold your advantage. None can harness the power of Sister Folly, and their appeal to chaos will spell their undoing. Especially when you counter with your Right Hand power. Show up and face them from a place of authenticity. Bring your purest self.”
“Thank you. And speaking of, what’s up with all of that? Folly and the sixth circle and all of the stuff they were saying about chaos born?”
Nerissa’s eyes hardened. Helen shuddered. The mage in front of her had seen some shit.
“Never you mind, spirit born. And you must make me one final promise. Never, ever touch the energies of the sixth circle again. You are never to etch one or to utter the name of Folly or to evoke the chaos born. Never, ever.”
Helen swallowed a dose of guilt along with the excess saliva in her mouth. “That why all of this happened to me and Brian in the first place, isn’t it? Because I brought this Fo—you know who and her chaos into the mix without realizing it.”