“We might have to tear up your credit cards,” Mitsy says.
“Ouch.”
“Just so you won’t be tempted.” Mitsy picks at the croissant. “Anyway, who owns the other horses?”
“Huh?”
“You said Jonah owns half. Who owns the other half?”
“I do,” Hannah says. “Well, that is as long as I don’t have to sell them, which I probably do.” She hunches back up in her chair with her coffee, knees to chin. “But I don’t really want to since they include the brood mares, and that’s my only real source of income. The foals, I mean.” She glances out the window. “I could sell the foals, though. I practically have to even if the rest of the debt is met. I have ongoing costs, too, you know. The farm is outrageously expensive.”
“I’m sure it is, but it’s not exactly been managed well either.”
Hannah stares up and back. “Doc says Ireland is really healthy, a perfect specimen. She’ll pull in…”
“We’re not selling Ireland,” Mitsy says abruptly. “Forget about it.”
“We?” says Hannah in a high thin voice. Her eyes tear instantly.
Mitsy nods. “Yes, ‘we’.” She sips her coffee. “How many horses are there altogether not counting the foals? And how many does Jonah own?”
“He owns three stallions altogether. Two thoroughbreds and a quarter horse—ages 3, 4 and 7. Excellent riders.”
“So there are three left?
Hannah nods. “Daizee, Jolie, and Dorenia.”
Mitsy’s heart stops. “What was the last one?”
“Dorenia. The gypsy.”
“What do you mean?”
Hannah’s face lights up. “Gypsy Vanner—a newer breed, basically. Although it was under our noses all along. Remember the caravan horses? Well, they’ve finally been refined into a spectacularly beautiful breed with credentials.” She leans forward. “I had to have her, Mits. Prettiest show horse ever. The popularity of the breed is supersonic. She’s black and white, feathered. Pricey, so…” She shrugs. “Jonah was pissed at that, too. But honestly, when I breed her next year, her foals will be worth the most.”
Mitsy mines her brain for information. Dorenia…where has she heard that name before? “Her name sounds eerily familiar,” she says.
“It’s a gypsy name,” Hannah says. “Roma. She’s a pistol. Smart as hell, with a mind of her own. But Jonah says they’re making steady progress with her training.”
Mitsy leans forward. “I’ll pay you the full $250,000 for Dorenia and Ireland,” she says.
Hannah’s chin quivers. “You will?”
“Yes, I will. You’ll title Dorenia to me and Ireland to Sydney.”
“But…”
“That’s the deal.”
“Can I have Dorenia’s foal?”
“Only if you can pay market price.” Mitsy raises her chin. “It’s a business decision, Hannah. You have to have a reason to save money…or at least to stop spending it.” She looks Hannah squarely in the eye. “If I could ride all the way down here with a teenage boy in the condition I was in…”
“And agree to a makeover!” Hannah adds.
“Exactly. If I could force myself out of that hole, you can do the same.”
Hannah sips her coffee, gazing out absently into the café. “Fine,” she says. “Deal.” But before they can shake hands, she frowns, squinting at something across the room. “What the hell is that?” she says.
Mitsy turns as a statuesque woman with bronze skin, wild white hair, a colorful silk skirt, red wool cape, and cowboy boots stands at the entry, looking around. Her eyes search the room and come to rest on their table in the corner. She moves gracefully toward them.
“Are you Mitsy Michaels?” she says in a rich, melodic voice.
Hannah points to Mitsy, stupefied.
The woman steps toward Mitsy, offering her hand. “I’m Pandora Madigan,” she says.
Mitsy can’t believe what she’s looking at. It could be an Egyptian queen, an Amazon empress—the nexus of so many genes—the elegant stature, the topaz eyes, yet nothing at all like Syd. “But you don’t…”
“No, I don’t,” she says. “I look nothing like anyone who could possibly share DNA with your daughter. I already know that.” She nods her magnificently exotic head firmly. “But evidently I do.”
Mitsy pushes back her chair, jumps up and hugs her. “Oh my God, you’re really here,” she says, as if just now comprehending how long she’s waited for this moment. “You’re really here!”
Pandora hugs her loosely. “They won’t let Guru inside the hospital,” she says. “And I need to find a place for him fast.”
“Who’s Guru?” says Hannah stiffly.
“Who are you?” says Pandora, her deep-set, heavily lidded eyes sweeping Hannah’s hunched figure.
“Shouldn’t you know my name? Aren’t you psychic?”
“Oh, right, the belligerent skeptic,” Pandora says, not so much with disdain as a degree of interest.
“Oh right, the heretic fraud,” Hannah retorts.
Mitsy steps back and shoots Hannah a warning glance.
Hannah throws up her hands. “Sorry.” She looks reluctantly at Pandora, waves her white paper napkin saying, “Truce?”
Pandora raises her chin elegantly. “No need for a truce,” she says. “I never engage in war in the first place. Make peace with yourself.”
Mitsy gazes at Pandora, stunned into her old dependent self and trying hard to resist the fall. It isn’t easy—just the strength of the woman’s presence is intoxicating. “Please,” she says, “have my seat. I’ll pull up another chair.”
Pandora lowers herself, straight-backed, into the seat then throws her head back and sighs. “Those red-eye flights throw me completely off balance,” she says. “They should be banned.”
“You took the red-eye!” Mitsy says. “You must be exhausted!” She drags a wooden café chair from the adjacent table. “Can I get you a cup of green tea?”
Pandora shakes her head. “No, no. This day calls for coffee,” she says. “Some days just demand it.”
Hannah raises her eyebrows. “Coffee, eh?”
Mitsy glares at her. “How do you take it?” she asks. She has to admit that she’s a bit relieved the coffee ban has been lifted. Mitsy doesn’t know how she’d fare without any herself, and there was a time Pandora forbade her to have any.
“Black,” she says. “In a to-go cup. We have to deal with Guru. He’s in some kind of holding tank upstairs by the lobby door.” She nods at Hannah. “He’s my Persian.”
“Oh?” Hannah says. “You keep your Persian in a cage?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Pandora replies drily.
“I should get something for Guru to eat then, too,” says Mitsy. She scans the counters. “Some tuna maybe?”
Pandora rocks her head back and forth, considering. “Perhaps.”
“Hold the mayo,” says Hannah.
To Mitsy’s surprise, Pandora purses her lips, amused. “Yes, no tuna salad,” she says with a glint in her eye. “You see, Hannah, I do have a sense of humor.”
“I suppose you’d have to in your line of work,” Hannah says.
Pandora sighs, pulling on a lock of her thick white hair and placing it behind her ear. “I do run into some kooks,” she says. “Not naming names.”
Mitsy can see that Pandora and Hannah, though deeply engaged in a battle of subtext, are amused by their repartee. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell, the way they eyeball each other suspiciously between punch lines. Even so, for the first time, Mitsy sees that whether or not they like each other doesn’t matter. They’re well-matched on some insane level, as if they’re competing with each other for the same thing. But what would that be? She leaves them to their own devices. Whatever their fight is, it isn’t hers. She walks off for the coffee and tuna, wondering what she’ll find when she returns.
After some inquiries at the deli bar, Mitsy scores a small bowl of plain tuna and a black
coffee to-go. When she gets back to the table, she finds both Pandora and Hannah sitting limply in their chairs, their heads lobbed to the side, asleep, Hannah snoring softly. Mitsy nudges Pandora’s shoulder, startling her.
“Wha-wha,” she stutters, followed by, “Oh. Oh. Thank you. I forgot where I was.”
The outburst wakes up Hannah, who places her head in her hands, deeply rubbing her forehead with her thumbs. “Mitsy, do you have any more of those aspirin? My head is bucket of cement. Oooph.”
Mitsy isn’t sure whether or not Pandora would approve of the aspirin. But she’s having coffee, so maybe. She hands Pandora the coffee cup and tuna bowl and says, “Maybe Pandora can come up with a safer medication?”
Hannah leans in, her eyes half-closed with what Mitsy can see is pressure. She feels it herself as she did in the elevator, even though she’s already taken aspirin. It softened the edges, but that’s about it.
“What do you suggest for a headache, oh mighty healer?” Hannah says.
Mitsy’s face tightens. She gives Hannah the evil eye, but this time, Hannah ignores her.
After a long sip of coffee, Pandora says, “You can try the aspirin, but it probably won’t do much good.”
“Why?” Hannah says.
“You don’t want to know.” She takes another sip.
Mitsy doesn’t like the sound of that. “Why?” she says quietly. “Does it have something to do with Sydney?”
“All of us,” Pandora tells Mitsy gently. “It has to do with all of us.” She pats Mitsy’s hand comfortingly.
Hannah leans forward. “You people just love innuendo, don’t you? You just love to tease and then withhold. Makes you feel so goddamn important to make everyone else so goddamn dependent.”
Mitsy’s heart rate quickens.
“You couldn’t handle the information I have,” Pandora says evenly. Her amazing blue eyes, so startling against her bronze skin and white hair, stare Hannah down.
“Try me,” Hannah says. Then after a long pause, “I’ll tell you what information you have—nothing. No information whatsoever in your crackpot crystal ball.”
Pandora raises herself from the chair, wearily pushing against the arms. “Believe what you want,” she says. “This is not about you, anyway. It’s about Sydney. That’s why I’m here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take care of Guru and see Dr. Blanca.” She turns to Mitsy. “Shall we go?”
Hannah points to Mitsy. “Stay,” she says. “I want to know what this kook has to say before she donates her whacked-out DNA to a member of our family.”
“Hannah,” Mitsy warns.
Pandora sighs. “It’s okay, Mitsy,” she says. “I knew this was coming.”
“Of course you did,” says Hannah.
Pandora gathers her breath, looks directly at Hannah and says, “If you insist, which you clearly do, the pressure is caused by a mounting geomagnetic storm around the 39th parallel in the stratosphere roughly above Baltimore. Satisfied?”
“Well, what does that mean exactly?” asks Mitsy earnestly. “A magnetic storm? What will happen? When will it end?”
“Soon our bodies will feel heavy,” Pandora says wearily, “if they don’t already. After that, lights will flicker, electricity will be spotty, and the tech equipment will experience a degree of failure—can’t tell how much. It depends on how close it gets.”
“Equipment failure?” Mitsy says. “But doesn’t Sydney’s procedure depend on some of that equipment? At least during the transplant?”
“Sydney depends on us,” Pandora says. “Equipment was never more than that…equipment. Electronic gadgets are external expressions of the faculties we ourselves possess intrinsically but are too asleep to engage.” She shakes her head. “It’s just so much easier to stay asleep and pretend to be useless. To let the machines do our job.”
Pandora backs up a step to offer Hannah her hand. “Enough?” she says.
Hannah’s red-lined, sleep-deprived once bright eyes dart back and forth searching for a way out. Finding none, apparently, she summons up the humility to shake Pandora’s hand. Mitsy is relieved at this gesture until she sees Hannah’s hand jerk back as if receiving an electrical jolt.
“What the hell?” Hannah says. “Do you have a buzzer in your hand?”
“Oh, so you can’t handle the energy, eh?” Pandora says. She shakes her head as she turns toward the door. “You never could.” To Mitsy, Pandora says, “If you think your sister will deter me from helping your daughter, fear not. She’ll figure it out at some point.” She waves her long, elegant hand dismissively. Her fingers are exquisite. “It doesn’t matter to me a lick when that happens.”
Mitsy hands a baffled Hannah two aspirin as they shuffle behind Pandora. Hannah is silent.
“What will we do about the uh…the magnetic storm?” Mitsy says to Pandora.
“Do?” Pandora says then shrugs. “There’s nothing we can do but hope we’ll adjust to the frequency and pressure. But I can’t promise that. Now, let’s get on with things. I need to feed Guru and consult with Dr. Blanca.” She smiles. “Blanca—the white knight. Her name is perfect.”
“The white knight?” Mitsy says.
Pandora turns to look at Mitsy behind her. “We’re in archetypal times, my friend. In archetypal times, absolutes rise to the top. If her name were Dr. Negra, we might worry a tad. But her name bears light.”
As they rise in the elevator, each one of them gasps for breath, including Hannah, who Mitsy knows would rather die than show any further weakness to Pandora. It’s not the pressure that bothers Mitsy, or the encroaching headache. It’s the fact that there’s a storm out there that could bring them all down. But even with the pressure of the many unknowns before them, she is inexplicably comforted by Pandora’s presence. The woman inspires as much confidence in Mitsy as she does suspicion in Hannah. She’s not sure why. Maybe it’s her stature or the velvety richness of her voice. Maybe it’s the mystery of all she claims to know that others don’t. Or maybe it’s the pungent fragrance that emanates from her skin, jasmine with overtones of spicy orange, like a fine tea from a foreign port. Alien, yet somehow familiar.
Sydney
This time when Syd hears the name “Alicia!” released in a strangled screech, she knows the voice does not call out for someone else; it calls for her. In this place, Syd and Alicia are the same, soaring high above checkered vineyards, deer and wild boar foraging beneath them from a terrifying distance, the size of ants. The eagles clutch her by the back of her robe, but the robe is oversized and she is slipping, shifting, choking, and praying that they land her safely and soon.
Alicia knows the winged pair has saved her from the wreckage, but she doesn’t know where they came from, where they’re taking her, or why. She can only hope that when they finally deliver her, they return to the cottage for her sisters. Her sisters are herbalists, she remembers. This practice pays their livelihood. They grow the herbs themselves, mix them, and administer them when called upon. When confronted with obscure and stubborn ailments, however, they use Alicia, or rather Alicia’s energy, to heal.
The discovery of Alicia’s healing energy was an accident. At the age of five, she reached out for the hand of a madman and he instantly came to peace. If anyone were to ask Alicia now, she would say the only miracle that occurred that day was a simple act of kindness. She would say that kindness and compassion heal. But ever since that day, their lives have been interrupted by a continuous stream of pilgrims from Rome, Naples, and Venice. Candles burn interminably in their cottage. So is that what started the fire? Or was it burned in protest over what the arsonists might have perceived to be heretical practice?
The eagles glide low over a camp of disreputable gypsies. She knows of them. Her sisters disapprove of their dark practices and errant lifestyle. Helaina calls them frauds; says she’ll pick up the axe and swing at the next one who wanders into their community. Community of what, though, Alicia is momentarily uncertain. She has to better attune her
signal from another lifetime to the hills of medieval Tuscany. She’s not quite there yet, not to mention the discomfort of the eagles’ sharp, scaly talons against her back.
She forces herself to focus, to seek and find. Soon she remembers they are a community of maiden women called Beguines. Although they are outwardly dedicated to a holy life, they are not religious clerics. In her household at least, sacred practices tend to be unorthodox and unsupervised, as they would most certainly not be in a convent. None of them wishes to be a sister of the cloth.
Alicia remembers that Helaina is not as committed to the Beguine lifestyle as their older sister, Marguerite, but since their parents were killed, Marguerite is in control of the household. Helaina and Alicia have no choice but to obey Marguerite or she will promise them in betrothal to strangers, separating them for life. In this society maiden women must be married or committed to a chaste community. This is the opposite of the reckless gypsy life, bearing children of any sire, kicking sand in the face of common dignity. Helaina, especially, resents the foreigners’ freedom to live as they choose. Alicia knows that if Helaina could, she would happily lead a gypsy life. At heart, she is an undisciplined spirit that eschews discipline and authority. She is a renegade without outlets for her abundant desires. Any issue she has with the gypsies is based on envy.
Hanging just above the camp now, Alicia is released into the long reach of two gypsy girls. They encircle her and place her gently on the ground, covering her singed robe with a brilliant red scarf. The eagles rise up, flap their massive wings, and soar into the night sky.
“Will they return for my sisters?”Alicia asks, terrified.
“Your sisters are not our concern,” says the older girl. “You are.”
“But my sisters will be wondering where I am!” Alicia cries.
Ignoring her plea, the girls strap her to a cart and pull her across the cluttered camp into the tent of an elderly woman seated atop a crystal-encrusted cypress throne. Her face is a raisin, her steel gray hair pulled tightly back into a long braid. Spangles, fringe, colorful rose and emerald silks adorn her emaciated body. Alicia has seen gypsies before, but none as brash as this.
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