by Amber Foxx
It wouldn’t be right to use the bracelet, though. Mae put it on the box with the roses. Psychic work with this would pry into Jamie’s broken love story rather than bring up the artist’s life. The dead didn’t leave energy trails anyway—not unless they were ghosts.
Could Kandyce Kahee be a ghost? If Jill had trained her as a witch, she could be a scary ghost, but she was a good candidate for being one. The silversmith had died unexpectedly and might have some unfinished business with her shaman teacher. That could keep her around.
Mae picked up the rings from where they had tumbled on the floor. The jeweler’s mark inside them was tiny and hard to read but it was there. Unlike the bracelet, the rings wouldn’t have been worn. Jamie and Lisa would have tried them on once and put them away. Only the artist’s energy should come through.
Would Jamie be upset if Mae used one of the rings for her work? He’d been too close to the relationship with Lisa when he’d packed to think of selling them, but that was probably what he would do now. He wouldn’t save them for a future marriage, not the same rings.
Mae put the man’s ring on the box with the bracelet, and held the woman’s ring, the one that would have the least trace of Jamie in it. It wasn’t as if she’d be looking into his life, and yet she still felt a ripple of unease. Unpacking was supposed to be a favor, not an intrusion, and now that she’d found these it already felt like one. Was there some other way she could get at Jill and Kandyce Kahee’s past? Through something of Jill’s, perhaps?
No. If Jill was a witch, she would guard her belongings and her energy. Even if she didn’t, Mae wouldn’t meet her until after her appointments with Azure, Mary Kay, and Hilda, and she needed the information in advance. Healing the victims of the plague wouldn’t be much use if Jill and Dahlia could just keep spreading it. A journey now should be the best way to learn how Jill worked.
Mae turned the ring in her fingers. If she picked up something about Jamie’s relationship with Lisa instead of Kandyce Kahee’s story, she would break the trance.
When Mae brought her crystals in from their sun bath in the garden, Gasser surprised her by making a lunge for the door. She stopped him and he yowled. Should she let him out? She couldn’t picture Jamie turning his pet loose in the middle of the city. Then she remembered a harness and a leash in the coat closet. Crouching to pet the cat, she promised him a walk in a few minutes. He ignored her and slumped into a soft spreading heap, nose to the crack under the door. Looks like he’s sulking.
She left him to it, and lay on the living room floor with the crystals and the ring. Already it was easier to quiet her mind and focus on her breath without the boxes all around her. She set the intention for the journey.
I need to see what Jill did to Kandyce Kahee. What did she teach her? The grid of crystals charged with energy, and the tunnel took her suddenly and without effort on her part. It opened to a large institutional cafeteria. A chubby, brown-skinned young woman with straight black hair sat alone at a table, hunched over a slice of pepperoni pizza. No taller than a twelve-year-old, she had a round face with high cheekbones, a short nose, and deep brown eyes. This was probably Kandyce.
A tall, heavy-set young black man took the place across from her, setting down a tray loaded with mushroom and onion pizza, salad, soda, and a large bowl of ice cream. Though Mae had seen images of Jamie in his late teens or early twenties before, she still didn’t recognize him until his smile showed the gold tooth. His hair was cut short and dyed dark, and he far exceeded his present weight. He started his meal with ice cream.
Jamie had known Kandyce Kahee? They must have been in college together. It might explain why he’d chosen her to make the rings, but it was startling enough that Mae almost lost her trance. She refocused. This wasn’t Jamie and Lisa’s story, it was the artist’s.
“Giving this up when I graduate, y’know?” Jamie said, wiping ice cream off his mouth with his hand, which he then cleaned with a napkin. “Think maybe it’s what’s making me depressed.”
The girl across from him frowned. “Ice cream?”
“Nah, the cows. Vejjo’s not enough. Need to go vegan.” He fidgeted, ate pizza. “Jeezus. Fucking hate being fat, and look what I’m doing. Sorry, group’s over. Still yabbering about my crap. But I got two words out of you. You said ‘ice cream.’ ” He tossed a cucumber slice onto her plate. “You eat worse than I do. You don’t have any vegetables.”
She looked at the cucumber and picked it up with a little shrug. As she bit into it, he said with surge of mischievous energy, “I licked it.”
Her shoulders moved in a breathy giggle as she chewed.
“Right then, made you laugh, got two words out of you, and you ate a vegetable. Am I your savior?”
She studied him, then shook her head with a smile. “You’re kind of crazy.” Mae recognized the clipped yet lilting accent of someone who grew up on an Indian reservation. Not quite like Bernadette’s speech, yet similar.
“Bloody oath. You already knew that.” Jamie drank soda and belched. “Sorry. D’you want me to go away?”
The girl nibbled on her pizza, looking down at her plate. “No.”
“Why don’t you talk? You waste your fucking time in group. Dunno anything about you except your first name. What’s the rest of it?”
“Kahee. Kandyce Rainbow Kahee.” She spelled out the unusual version of her first name. “So it’s Kandy with a K.”
“Kandy Rainbow.” He sang a line of Somewhere Over the Rainbow with a theatrical sweep of his arms that knocked his drink over. “Bloody hell. I even fuck up a joke.”
The plastic glass left a hissing spill of soda on the table and rattled to the floor. Jamie grabbed it, swiped at the puddle with a napkin, and gave up, throwing the sodden wad on the table and propping his head in his hands. “Jeezus. I’m so fucking sick of myself.”
Kandy watched and waited. Jamie made a few distressed noises and huddled more deeply. She forked a piece of broccoli from his salad and ate it. He looked up, blinking and sniffling.
“See, you’re not so bad.” She smiled shyly. “You got me to eat my vegetables.”
“Yeah.” With an unsteady laugh, he took a napkin from the dispenser, blew his nose in it and crammed it under the edge of his tray. “Sorry. Snot while you’re eating. Doc’s trying new meds. Kind of wobbly. Cry at anything. I cried at a fucking commercial yesterday.” He resumed eating. “So now you know even more about me. Still dunno about you. Share something.”
“I’m sharing your salad.”
“Come on. Three things about yourself.”
“You first.”
“Like you haven’t heard my bloody soul search already.”
She ducked her head and stole another cucumber slice.
“All right. I’ll start. My dad’s American, my mum’s Australian, and I used to think I’d be an opera singer but I won’t be.”
“My dad’s Cochiti, my mom’s Filipino, and they split up and I go back and forth.”
“Philippines and the pueblo?”
“No, silly. Mom’s in Albuquerque. Dad lives on the reservation. He’s a silversmith. My grandpa was, too and so’s my grandma. She’s teaching me.” She sipped her cola “When they’ll let me stay.”
“They kick you out?”
“Sometimes. I stay with Mom ’til they let me come back.”
“Can’t you get your own place?”
“No money. It goes for school.” She lowered her gaze, cut off a bite of pizza with her fork and ate. “I’ll be okay. Double major, fine arts and business. I’ll make a good living.” Kandy held out her hand, displaying two inlaid rings and a carved silver bracelet. Jamie murmured admiration with his mouth full. She curled her fingers around her fork again and poked her pizza. “I just have to put up with some stuff to get there.”
“The back and forth?”
Kandy pulled her lips in and nodded.
Jamie slurped a spoonful of melting ice cream. “I’m so bloody scared about what I’ll e
nd up doing. Now it’s a big hole. Think I’ll have to teach.” More ice cream. He wiped his mouth with his hand again. “Scares the piss out of me. Dunno what else to do, though. Blew the opera thing.”
“How?”
“Dunno. Just—fucked up. It’s like I’m broken for no reason. Hate that. Some people, something awful happened, y’know? Like a pot that got dropped. I’m the one that cracked in the kiln.”
“Can you talk about something else?”
“Sorry. Crack pot, y’know? Supposed to be funny.”
“It’s not. I’m the one that got dropped.”
“Fuck.” He looked at her with wide, worried eyes, took a drink of her soda without appearing to realize it wasn’t his, and said softly, “You can talk to me, y’know. I mean, if you want to. You heard all my crap in group. Can’t exactly be ashamed of anything around a wreck like me.”
“Maybe I can.”
“Did you try to kill yourself, too?”
She cut off another tiny bite of pizza and nodded. “With my father’s gun.”
“Fuck. How’d you survive?”
“I was so drunk I missed my own head.”
“Jeezus.” Jamie snort-laughed. “Sorry, but—”
“No, that part is funny. It’s the reason I did it that’s not. And don’t ask. Eat your vegetables.”
Kandy was a drinker, and suicidal. It was enough information. Jill and witchcraft probably had nothing to do with her death. Mae could stop here.
She tried to, but to her bewilderment the journey kept going. What was happening? She could always break a trance unless she drifted into a psychic state half-asleep, yet here she was wide awake and unable to emerge.
The tunnel moved Mae’s vision to a messy apartment. Jamie and Kandy sat on the floor on opposite sides of a low table, drawing pictures. He set his pencil down and looked at her work. “Jeezus, yours is good—if I wasn’t so fucking ugly.”
“I don’t think you’re ugly.”
“Fat and ugly. Make me look better, will you?”
She glanced up at him and then worked on the picture, sketching some changes as he watched. She trimmed his girth, lengthened his hair, and added a little goatee beard.
Jamie half-frowned, half-smiled. “Made me look like a rock star.”
“Why not?” She framed him with a big star. “You could be.”
“Y’know my hair’s really blond?” He bent down and she peered at the top of his head. “A lot of Aboriginal kids start out blond. Turns dark when you grow up but mine didn’t. See the roots?”
“That’s funny. You’re like a butterscotch brownie.”
He straightened up. “What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what I thought.”
She used her eraser to lighten his hair in her sketch, retouched some details, and handed him the finished drawing. “See, I gave you the beard because you have such a sweet baby face. But it’s a little bitty beard so it won’t hide you. And you just seem like a long-haired kind of guy. You should let it go blond. And then since you feel bad about being so big and cuddly, I made you in really good shape.” She smiled. “I bet you can do that, Big Buddy.”
“Get in shape? Fuck. Round is a shape.” He drew a circle and pecked it with the pencil. “I hate gyms and running and all that crap.”
“You have to like something.”
“Had to take dance for my old major. Looked like a bloody pig on wheels, but I liked it. Even used to do gymnastics as a kid. Little pudge flipping around like a frog. Liked that. S’pose I could do something.” He fingered the edge of the sketch, his eyes taking her in like a hug. “Thank you, love.”
He slid his picture of her toward her.
It was one of his heart cartoons, a valentine candy conversation heart with words on it, My Best Friend, and rainbow arms reaching out to hug someone. “That’s what I see. Your sweet, sweet heart—”
“Stop it.” She began to cry.
Half-kneeling, half-walking, he rushed to the other side of the table, landed beside her, and wrapped his arms around her. “Kandy, Kandy, love. It’ll be all right. We’ll take care of each other. I’m scared to death, too, scared out of my fucking mind, and I’ve still got another year before I face the bloody real world. But we’ve got our promise. We’re going to live.”
She let go into him like a child with a human teddy bear, her head on his chest, her arm resting on his belly. He patted her hand and squeezed her closer. The matching rings met.
Could Jamie have been married to Kandy?
No. There was nothing sexual in their touch, no kisses or caresses, and if Mae had understood what they’d said, Kandy’s graduation would separate them. They’d been soul mates, in that deep way of youthful friendships, but not lovers. Still, the moment was so intimate Mae felt that she’d trespassed. She tried to close the vision. Again, she couldn’t.
The tunnel pulled her, rushing through fog and darkness and a rapid shift of scenes. Each took place in a restaurant, Jamie and Kandy talking. For a while he stayed the same—heavy, dejected and lacking energy—while she tried to cheer him up, showing him boxes of jewelry she took from her purse, displaying a bracelet on her wrist, or pulling her hair back to show the earrings she wore.
As more scenes flew by, he gradually became the man in her sketch and did most of the talking, animated and intense, while Kandy listened. In one brief image, when she did finally talk, he grew serious and concerned. She shook her head. Reaching into her purse she brought out a small zip-lock bag with an object inside it wrapped in white paper, and handed it to Jamie. He opened it. The bracelet. With tears in his eyes he gazed at it, and then at her. He began to protest, but she silenced him. He put it on and walked around the table to lift her into a long, hard hug.
The images slowed again. Jamie and Kandy met on a city street in front of a restaurant. He was fit, vital, and graceful, with jaw-length blond hair and a tuft of dark beard accenting his chin. She beamed up at him. “Look at you, handsome. I missed you.”
“Missed you, too.” The solar system bracelet gleamed on his wrist as he embraced her. “Sorry it’s been so long. Jesus, so much going on, dunno where to start.”
“The hair’s good on you.”
“Thanks. Finally learning to like it.”
“And you’re so skinny.”
“Nah—still got this inch.” He made her feel his belly. “See? But I am in shape. Taking ballroom dance. And I’m rock climbing. Can you picture that? Me? Rock climbing?”
“Yes.” With a smile, Kandy let out a patient little sigh. “That’s part of your therapy.”
“Fuck. Already told you that, didn’t I? Sorry. Been a while. Dunno what I said or didn’t. Winding down with Dr. G and I feel like I never even told you about him.”
“You’re done already?”
“Probably should keep going but I don’t want Lisa to think I’m fucked up.” Kandy gave him a questioning look. Jamie frowned. “What? Is that fucked up?”
“Kind of.”
He snort-laughed and put his arm around her shoulders as they walked into the restaurant. “Feel bad for not making it down to see you enough. Bloody yakka sucking up all my time.”
She elbowed him playfully. “And love.”
They sat, and a waiter brought the menus.
“Well, yeah, that.” Jamie grinned. “Spare you the details, but when you wait till you’re a fucking ancient to finally do it, it’s like taking the top off a champagne bottle.” He gestured an explosion, and leaned back with a loud whew of breath. “Learned fast. Think I’m actually good at it.”
Kandy lowered her head and gripped the edges of the menu. “My step-dad tried it again.”
“Jeezus.” Jamie smacked the table with both hands, his eyes blazing. “Did you kick his balls? Tell your mum? Call the police?”
“I can’t. Dad and Grandma won’t let me come back. I got drunk. At their house.”
“I’m sorry you relapsed, love. But that’s once, in what—three years
?”
“Two years. Last time, they said if I drank again, I’d be out for good.”
The waiter took their order, and silence fell. Jamie fidgeted with his utensils. “What about your cousins? Aunts and uncles? I mean, you’re always happier at the pueblo, aren’t you?”
“There’s no point. Grandma won’t teach me anymore.”
“Jesus. So you got drunk. I mean, people get drunk. It’s not a crime.”
“It is if I do it. They won’t let me use the workshop or their tools. I have to save up and get my own.”
“Fuck. D’you have enough money to get your own place, start your own business? I wish I had some. D’you need anything? I could ask Mum and Dad—”
“No. Don’t tell them. I have to stay with Mom.”
“And your stepfather? Fuck. Lock your door. Sleep with a fucking knife.”
“I’ll be okay. I need to be in Albuquerque for now. I’m going to this—these workshops.”
“For what? Like, making jewelry? You’re already brilliant.”
The waiter brought bread, olive oil, and salads.
Kandy waved a cucumber slice at Jamie before she bit into it. “No, the workshops are for empowering. It’s sort of like ... I can’t explain it well. Like, I never got to be in the dances and ceremonies at Cochiti, I wasn’t there enough, always back and forth. So these workshops are like a community thing, and sort of like ceremonies. It’s supposed to help me be stronger.”
“You have health insurance, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’m on Indian Health Service. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Because finally getting a good therapist—after five fucking years with a bad one, Jesus, it was like I woke up from the dead. Is this workshop helping you?” He dipped a breadstick into a puddle of olive oil and bit into it, talking through chewing. “Or do you need therapy? Sorry.” He swallowed. “Lisa always gives me an earbashing about my manners.”
“I don’t mind. It’s part of you.” Kandy’s smile warmed her face. She drank her soda and grew thoughtful again. “It’s funny. You know how I failed at group because I wouldn’t talk about my feelings?”