Matchmaking for Beginners

by Dawson, Maddie

  “Do you even know what I’m talking about? That level of boringness? He can go on and on about the way the cleaning service shampooed his office rug and how long it took them and how many guys they sent to do it and what the first guy said and then what the second guy said. And he can also talk until the sun comes up about highway routes! Highway routes, Patrick! And I’m supposed to love him, and I probably do, but he loves me so much more than I love him, and what’s so really terrible is that I broke his heart back in high school so I can’t do it again, even if it turns out that I can’t love him. Do you see? There’s a special kind of hell for people who break nice people’s hearts twice, don’t you think? And I know I don’t deserve him, and that just makes it worse somehow! Oh God, please stop looking at me! I don’t even know why I’m telling you this! I am not a good person, Patrick. I came here to Brooklyn scared out of my mind, but now I see that way deep down I was just hiding from my real life and hoping Brooklyn would show me an answer, and instead I’m stupider than ever—sleeping with my ex, who doesn’t love me and never loved me! Like that’s going to lead to anything good! Some experiment, he called it, in behavior for exes. We’re going to have closure.”

  My voice breaks, and I make myself stop talking. I carefully set my napkin down on the table in the heavy silence that follows and put my head in my hands. What will he do when I start to sob? I can feel the tears, all right there—a big cry is organizing itself and is going to break all over both of us soon.

  “Well,” he says at last. “Well. My goodness. I’m wondering if this night doesn’t call for whiskey instead of wine. This may be a Chivas Regal situation.” He gets up and goes over to the cabinet and brings down a bottle and two glasses. On his way back to the table, he grabs a box of tissues and puts it in front of me.

  He hands me a glass of whiskey, and I stare at it because I don’t drink whiskey. But I take a sip anyway, and God, it’s the most terrible taste in the world, burning all the way down, but also warming me up, inch by inch. Who can drink this stuff? I take another sip and set my glass down. He’s downed all of his.

  “You know what? I thought—when I came here—I thought Blix left me the house because maybe she wanted me to be with Noah. That she set this all up. That’s how crazy I am. Right after he left me, when I was desperately unhappy, I asked her once for a spell to get him back, and I thought maybe that was why she gave me the house, and why he was here. The spell.”

  He clears his throat. “I have to say that I don’t think she wanted you to be with Noah.”

  “I’m getting that idea. But why not? Why did she not really like him? You know the whole story, don’t you?”

  He hesitates, pours himself another glass. “Really? Are we going to do this?” Then he sees my face. “We are. Okay, she saw him as something of an opportunist, I think. Somebody who would take advantage. He wasn’t . . . so wonderful when she was at the end of her life and needed him to step up.”

  “Please tell me what happened. I need to know everything. He told me he was the one who took care of her.”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “I think I need to know, don’t you?”

  “All right.” He stretches out his legs and cracks his knuckles. “Well, he showed up one day when it was right near the end for her. We were all taking care of her—all her people, you know. Coming and keeping her company, fixing meals, straightening, that sort of thing. Mostly sitting and talking to her. And he comes along one day with no idea what’s going on, doesn’t even know that she’s sick, much less dying. And he was shocked, of course. We all tried to help him with that, because it can be upsetting to see a loved one dying, but we started getting uncomfortable because of the way he just kept badgering her to go to the hospital. He thought she should have had surgery for the tumor. Get some chemotherapy, whatever. We kept trying to talk to him, to explain to him that the time for all that had passed, and that we were there helping her make her transition, but he wasn’t having it. He kept insisting that professionals needed to be called, that only they know how to take care of people who are dying.”

  “Oh, Patrick! How did she stand it? What did she do?”

  “See, that’s just it. The essence of Blix is to try to solve things. To love what’s there. She was sad, but I think at the end she thought that she could use love to help him. She wanted to fill him up with love. The way she did. You know how she was.”

  There’s a silence. Roy climbs up on my lap and I pet him. Patrick is looking at us with a serious look on his face.

  “On the last day, he was panicking at the idea of having her die in front of him, and I get that. It’s scary, watching somebody die. But she had planned it all out, and she wanted to die at home in a peaceful state, and he was determined to have medical authorities. So Lola took him next door and fed him something, just to keep him away. And . . . well, I sat with Blix while her breaths just kept getting farther and farther apart, and I held her hand. I told her I’d stay with her for as long as she needed, and for her to take her time, to go only when she was ready. And—well, that’s it.”

  “Oh, Patrick.”

  I want so badly to get up and go over to him and hug him—the air is practically demanding that we hug—but I know better. The air may want us to hug, but he’s not inviting that kind of attention. Instead, he gets up and walks to the sink with our plates.

  I lean down and give Roy my last little piece of chicken, and he takes it and jumps down from my lap and eats it next to my foot.

  “Hey, congratulations. You’re now Roy’s best friend,” Patrick says. He picks up the cat, and Roy rubs his head along Patrick’s chin, along the place where the skin is pulled tight.

  Maybe it’s because I’m possibly drunk, or maybe it’s because Blix is right now in the room with us, but I suddenly get an amazing idea. It feels like the very best idea anybody in the history of the world ever had, and I stand up to deliver the news of it, so it will have the fullest possible impact.

  “What if—what if I threw a big dinner party? Or—I know—Thanksgiving! I’ll put on a Thanksgiving dinner upstairs and invite everybody who loved her, and we’ll all celebrate her life. It can be my good-bye to her. And my thank-you. Both at the same time.”

  Patrick is smiling. “Look at you,” he says. “Glowing like this. This is a big plan.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Well—no. But I think it’s a good idea for you.”

  “Patrick!”

  He leans across the table and speaks in a husky voice. “Look at me, Marnie. Look at my face. You and Blix . . . you are the only people I’ve let into my life. Don’t you know that by now? The only people who see me on purpose. I’ll send up some cookies, some pumpkin pies, and I’ll cheer for you from down here. But I can’t go up there. The hideous factor kicks in.”

  “But you are the furthest thing there is from hideous,” I say. “You’re luminous.”

  “My tolerance for absorbing sympathetic remarks has reached the breaking point,” he says. “So I think it’s time to call this evening quits.”

  I say, “Patrick,” and then I look at him and set my mouth a certain way, and then I give him my most exasperated expression and roll my eyes, and then I say, “Patrick, you and I both know—”

  And then I just leave because there’s no point. Patrick’s heart is closed for business. He’s told me every way he knows how.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MARNIE

  “I’m afraid you’re not going to like late November up here,” Sammy tells me. He’s waiting in my kitchen for his dad to come pick him up for their weekend together. “I don’t know if you realize it, but November is when everybody’s teeth start to hurt.”

  “Really!” I say. “I’d heard about all the leaves falling off the trees and possible early snowfalls. But I didn’t know that about the teeth.”

  “Well, my mom works for a dentist, and she says it’s because of the cold weather. That when you’re outside
and you breathe in the cold air, your teeth get sensitive. And then everybody goes to the dentist. That’s what she said.” He starts beating on the table like it’s a drum, and then gets up and does an effortless cartwheel across the kitchen floor. Then he stops and looks at me. “Also, can I tell you something else? Did you know everybody has a superpower? You know what my superpower is? I have the magic power to notice when the clock says 11:11 or 1:11. I always, always look up then. It’s kind of amazing.”

  “Wow. Well, that’s a good one to have.”

  “Sometimes I see 2:22 or 4:44, also. Not so many of the other ones, though.”

  I concentrate very hard on trying not to laugh. “You are clearly on your way to superhero status.”

  He nods seriously, then sits cross-legged on the floor for a moment, looking at me so directly that my heart stops. He swallows hard before he speaks. “So, I have a plan for getting my mom and dad together.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, so there’s a concert at school, and I’m performing at it—and I think they should both come, and then I’ll get up and play my flute or sing or read a poem or something, and after we’ll all go out for ice cream and you can do a little spell or something on them, and I think they’ll decide to get back together.”

  “Really.”

  “But you have to do the spell. All we need is a little bit of magic to get them to both come to the concert and be nice to each other. So far all they do is fight about it.”

  “They do?”

  He sits down at the table next to me and rests his head on his elbow. “My mom yells at my dad that he won’t remember to come on time. And that he won’t be wearing the right clothes. And then she said that I had to tell him no girlfriends allowed because she will walk out if she sees him there with some woman.”

  “But you said he doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

  “He doesn’t. But my mom is worried anyway. Maybe she thinks he’ll get one.” He starts drawing on the table again with his finger, outlining the same star that I love to outline with my finger. Then he gives me a little smile. “So we need to look at the book of spells and find a good spell you could use on them.”

  I think about it. “I think we should let the concert do the magic. Play your flute and that will be magic enough. All that beautiful music curling out over the audience . . .”

  “No,” he says very firmly. “We need more than that.”

  “And if it doesn’t work,” I continue, “then it’s just not the right time. Because if it’s meant to happen, it will. But things have to develop. We can’t force it to happen.”

  “Would you please even look at the book of spells? I know you could find something in there to help us. This girl at my school said she knows this psychic lady and she rubs people’s heads and tells them what’s going to happen. So I know you could just read some words. I’d do it myself except you and Blix are the ones with the magic.”

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  He shrugs. “I dunno. I just know it.”

  I glance over at the bookshelf, where the book of spells sits, bulging with papers. Its cover looks torn. Funny how some days I don’t even see it there, and some days it’s the focal point of the whole kitchen.

  Like now.

  Andrew, with his usual hangdog countenance (what I assume is the result of a perpetual, lifelong guilty conscience) arrives then, and Sammy leaves with his dad, trailing his overnight bag and holding on to his soccer ball, giving me backward looks and wagging his eyebrows at me. He mouths, “DO IT” as they leave. I sit there drinking my tea for a long while, listening to the way the house settles and creaks. The windows need washing. Everything needs washing around here.

  I should call a real estate agent, find out what I have to do to put the place on the market. Why don’t I ever seem able to set all this in motion?

  Bedford, lying at my feet, turns over in his sleep and thumps his tail. Tap tap tap.

  I wash the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor, then go outside to get some fresh air. The wind is whipping up the trees. Patrick has put the recycling out by the curb and it’s full of cardboard boxes and containers. I look longingly at his apartment; the windows with the wrought-iron bars are a perfect metaphor for everything about Patrick.

  Lola’s shades are up, I’m pleased to see. She got a pacemaker last week, and it’s made her feel worlds better, she says, filled with energy she hasn’t felt in years.

  I pull the dead leaves off the rosebush and then traipse up the stairs and straighten the Tibetan prayer flags on my way inside. Maybe I should call my sister—but then I find myself standing in front of the book of spells.

  It would not hurt to look at this book.

  I could open it up and see how ridiculous it is—probably just a book of parlor games. Somebody probably gave it to Blix as a joke, a nod to her interest in unconventional things.

  I open the front cover. There are a whole bunch of papers shoved between the pages, so I take them out very carefully and set them aside. They are grocery lists, little doodles, a note Blix evidently wrote to Houndy reminding him to bring home four extra lobsters because Lola and Patrick were both coming over for dinner. (Patrick came up for dinner? Really?) All the stuff of life that you shove away somewhere when company is coming over and you aren’t ready to sort through the papers cluttering the table.

  But the book itself. The book is trying very hard—too hard—to be serious. It has a whole section about the history of spells, blah blah blah, an explanation of how humans have always thought they needed to claim some influence over the vagaries of life. And then, getting down to business, there are some five thousand actual spells for everything: cleansing energy, winning court cases, ensuring protection, finding lost objects, healing disease, getting money—and, of course, a huge section on love and sex.

  In the love section, there are mentions of ingredients for a proper spell: rosemary, roses, chamomile. Some vanilla beans wouldn’t hurt.

  A piece of paper falls out onto the floor.

  On it, I see that someone has written in a scratchy light scrawl: “Lola open heart love brave dream. You know the man now. The man who will love you.”

  At the very back of the book, there’s a thin green leather journal wedged between a couple of pages, wrapped up with a brown cord with a star charm attached.

  I shouldn’t open this. Blix’s secrets are there, I’m sure of it.

  But maybe—maybe she wanted me to see it. This isn’t exactly hidden away, after all. She could have destroyed all the things she didn’t want found. It wasn’t like her death surprised her; she knew for ages she was going to die. No, I am certain she put everything exactly where she wanted it, and for a purpose.

  My hand touches the leather cord, and I take a deep breath, and then I’m pulling on it slightly and opening the journal. I’ll read a little bit, I tell myself. See if she mentioned me. I have a right to know if I was mentioned in her journal, don’t I? After all, she left me her house—maybe there are instructions here on what else I should be doing.

  And there it is, the thing that breaks my heart.

  She has listed the spells she was using for healing, and the date she employed each one, and the results. The Acorn Good Health Spell, for instance, that she used the previous fall. “I threw the acorns in the air. They scattered over the ground.”

  On another page of her journal: “I’m frightened sometimes in the morning. I look at Houndy and I feel the fear. But it’s not like I’m desperate,” she wrote in a beautiful, looping scrawl with curlicues and little stars. “Everyone thinks medical science can cure this cancer. Why don’t they see what I see? That death is not the enemy.” Here she drew a starburst. “I know that my tumor is a living entity and that the tumor and I together can heal ourselves if it is meant to be that way.”

  I turn the page and see, “I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of life. These days are full of passion and love and richness, now that I know the
end is coming. I carry the ocean in my blood. I float out into the night, knowing that when the time comes, I will leave on the luminous huge milky moon. I am disappearing by degrees, yet I want to stay longer, look back at my whole glorious life. Where did you go?”

  Later, she invoked Obatala, whoever that is, and said she’d gone out at night, offering him milk and coconut, for healing. She summoned the Dark Moon Spirit and the Ancient Egyptian Fumigation for Expelling Disease Demons.

  My heart is beating hard.

  Oh my goodness, she did use spells.

  “I am wearing the special blessing crystals and the amber beads,” she wrote. “But Cassandra is strong. I am making myself ready, but sometimes I am filled with a longing to stay. Is that so bad, to want to stay a bit longer, to see my projects through?”

  There’s a buzzing in my ears. I run my fingers over her printing. Where she wrote Cassandra’s name the handwriting is jazzy, almost childlike, with lowercase letters all in different colors. She dug into the paper so hard that when I run my fingers over the name, the writing feels almost three-dimensional.

  A few more pages in: “Houndy calling to me from the other side. Last night I saw my mother and my grandmother and sat with them in an orchard. My mother told me that I know what I need to do. I had a conversation with Houndy, and he reached over and touched my arm and it left a little mark. He says Patrick will see me through. Patrick knows the way.”

  I am fingering the pages, letting my eyes drift over them—when I hear the front door slam.

  I jump up, startled and guilty. Bedford lifts his head and wags his tail.

  “Marnie! You home?” calls Noah up the stairs, and I close the book quickly, shoving the journal deep inside—except that as I do, I see my name on a tiny piece of paper lodged into the binding of the book, and I pull it out, fast.

  At the top she’s written the date, September 10, which I remember was the day before she died. The handwriting looks like it was scratched with a pencil that had hardly any lead left to it. I have to strain to see what it says.