“That means . . . Does that mean? . . . Is he dead? Is he going to die?” She screamed the last question, causing Mindi to peek behind my curtain. I mouthed to her, It’s fine, and she shrugged and dropped the fabric.
“No, no,” I quickly assured Evelyn. “Many times, what this card actually means is that it’s time to walk away. Perhaps your son . . . Harry? Maybe he’s ready to give up what’s harmful in his life? To take steps and move from what’s keeping him trapped.”
As usual, I was just riffing. I knew from reading the manual and from using the cards over and over, the standard meaning for each card. I was just hoping to find some fragment of truth in what I was saying relative to the card’s interpretation and Evelyn’s question. To maybe see that spark of recognition in the client’s face meaning I’d hit or at least gotten close to the target I was fumbling for or, more important, what the client was hoping for.
Nothing. Evelyn was looking down at her palms, which were pressed together at her chest. She was muttering something I couldn’t understand but assumed was some kind of a chant or prayer.
“Would you like me to go on?” I asked.
She didn’t answer immediately but then looked up and said, “Yes, please do.”
The third card, the one signifying what could happen in the future, was the King of Autumn.
I said, “What this card often symbolizes is the end of a very tough time, where you’ve had to face what seemed like insurmountable obstacles. But your hard work will end in victory, although it may not be in the way you expect.”
Evelyn said nothing, and I suspected she was thinking this reading had been no help at all, that what I’d told her was pure bunk. She opened her mouth, I was certain, to say I couldn’t be more wrong, and that the psychics in Sedona were highly overrated. But then she started to smile, a wide toothy grin.
She said, “You are brilliant. Straight on the mark.”
Seeing my surprise, she explained, “Everything you’ve said—bull’s-eye. Excellent. Truly excellent.”
She lifted the first card and said, “Harry is being held prisoner by those awful drugs. I hate it. But it was his choice, and for a long while, my husband and I were pulled into the prison as well. He’d beg us for money, say it was for tuition, and then it would be gone. Obviously, for drugs. He even promised to go to hospital for treatment and asked for money to do that and then, of course, never showed on the day of admittance.”
“That sounds very upsetting,” I said, happy she was happy, that I’d hit most of the balloons in the shooting gallery. I glanced at the clock on the wall behind her and noted the session was up in three minutes.
“And this card, Death, I know exactly what it means now,” she said, holding the card gingerly between her index finger and thumb. “This isn’t about Harry’s decision at all. It’s about ours, Alfred’s and mine. We’ve talked and talked about it, but now I know what we must do.”
“What’s that?” Two minutes left. I had an urgent need to use the bathroom before my next client.
“We must stop helping him hurt himself. As awful as it will be . . . and it will be terrible . . . we must no longer give him any support—other than our love—that will allow him to purchase the drugs or engage in the type of life he’s been living. We will not help him kill himself. He might remain captive but we must not.”
I said, “I’m so glad this was helpful,” and started to collect the rest of the cards, but she placed a hand over mine and then picked up the final card in her spread.
She said, “And now I know it will all turn out fine. Do you know why?”
“No, why?”
“Because of this card,” she said, pointing to the King of Autumn. “Now I know if Alfred and I can make this very tough decision, we will be rewarded eventually. Harry will come to see the light. He will return to us, whole again, our son once more. A victorious ending.”
She was beaming, delighted with the reading and her insight, and filled with the relief of her resolution.
I was about to wish her the best of luck, tell her to have safe travels, and that I hoped all would work out as she anticipated, but something stopped me.
It was like a series of snapshots flashing one after the other through my brain. I could see the ring, a gold band with a tiny red stone in the center. It was under a couch of some sort or perhaps a chair, it was difficult to tell, but whatever the piece of furniture was, it was covered in light blue fabric with birds on it. The ring was on a carpeted floor toward the back, next to a wooden piece I assumed was the leg of the couch or chair.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the images, but they wouldn’t leave. Evelyn stood, reached into her purse, and handed me a hundred-dollar bill.
I opened my mouth to tell her Mindi collected all payments at the front register, but what came out was “I know where the ring is.”
“Pardon?”
“A ring? Are you missing a ring? A small gold ring with a red stone in it?”
Collapsing back into the chair, she said, “Yes. It’s the ring Alfred bought for me when Harry was born. It’s his birthstone, Harry’s, a ruby. He was born on July the thirteenth.” I noticed the bill was shaking in her hand.
“That ring is under a chair or a couch,” I said. “I’m not sure which it is, but something that’s covered with fabric that has birds on it.”
“My Lord,” she gasped. “That must be the love seat in the room we have here. It’s upholstered in some kind of blue brocade, and yes, it does have birds on it. Doves, I think. I wondered where that ring had gone to. I had it two days ago when we checked into the lodge, but then I wanted to wear it this morning because, you see, I thought it would help me connect with my son. And it did, didn’t it?” Her eyes sparkling, she looked at me and said, “He’s coming through you, right at this moment.”
I couldn’t respond because my brain was still churning. Those visions of the ring and its location, the clarity of what I saw—it was all too bizarre. It had to be some kind of coincidence. But I couldn’t deny what I’d felt, that it was important I tell Evelyn what I saw, that I knew what I saw belonged to her, and that I had the responsibility to share this information with her.
26
Rena
“Thanks a lot for watching her today, Mrs. Lupito. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
After living in Phoenix for almost two months, I really had to get out and do something. Come on, how much can you be with a four-year-old in a one-bedroom shithole without losing your mind? I know where the grocery store is now, but it has almost nothing as far as organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, or whole-grain stuff. I complained to the manager, and he gave me this look like I asked him for kangaroo tits or monkey balls. He said there was another store in Tempe that maybe had what I was looking for. I’m absolutely convinced the only food people eat out here is tortillas. They fill them with chicken or beans or cheese or pork, but it’s still all tortillas, all the damn time. I checked the maps feature on my phone and found out the store the guy recommended was at least ten miles away, so I would have to take a cab. Maybe Mrs. Lupito would let me use her car, but I seriously doubt that. Last week she gave me a dirty look when I asked her for a plunger. Stephanie had clogged the toilet up even after I told her a thousand times to use no more than five sheets of toilet paper.
Besides, I need the money. Gary’s punier-than-shit alimony and child-support checks get deposited in a bank that, luckily, has a branch not too far away from me. I never use checks or credit cards. As soon as his checks clear, I take cash out and pay everything that way—rent, groceries, whatever. But what he sends me barely covers what we need.
During our first weeks here, besides going to the Mommy Loves Baby classes, Stephanie and me went to a couple of local playgrounds. I was thinking maybe I could meet some other moms there. Except for a few smelly homeless people, the playgrounds were totally empty. And I think I know why. Stephanie actually got a burn on her ass, a real burn, from going down one of t
he slides. Forget about even touching the chains on the swings. I guess those are things kids around here only do, like, maybe November through March.
Mostly, we stay inside, but no matter how many times I spray Lysol or wipe the walls with Clorox and water, it still smells like mold and dirty feet.
So I finally made the decision to get a job, something easy and part-time. Mrs. Lupito said she’d watch Stephanie while I looked.
Luckily, the second place I went to hired me. Bert’s Pharmacy is a drugstore, and it’s only two blocks from my place. There was a HELP WANTED sign in the window, but you could hardly see it since it was behind a bunch of stuff on a shelf there. Next to a pile of Beanie Babies (who even collects those anymore?), there was this dusty do-it-yourself blood pressure machine, a set of crutches, and for the back-to-school crowd, a plastic bucket holding markers, pens, and pencils leaning against a pile of spiral notebooks.
The inside of the place was just as bad. Half of the fluorescent ceiling lights were out, so it was pretty gloomy, and the aisles were really close together. Unless you kept your arms right by your sides, you would definitely knock things off the shelves. And good luck finding what you needed. The aspirin was next to the dog shampoo, and the Band-Aids were in aisle five in back of a display of picnic supplies. Maybe because people get scratched or bitten when they eat outside? Fuck if I know.
The job was for an assistant in the pharmacy. This involved putting prescriptions in bags, stuffing those bags into deep drawers labeled with letters of the alphabet, getting those bags for customers, and then taking the money. Basically, idiot work. But I still had to spend almost thirty minutes convincing Joe Wolbit, the day supervisor, that I could probably manage to alphabetize paper bags and ring up sales on a register that did all the math for you. He put me on the ten-to-two shift, three days a week. And the best news was he agreed to pay me in cash.
Now I just had to figure out what the hell to do with Stephanie.
I thought about asking one of the women from the Mommy Loves Baby class, but they would probably expect me to trade off and sit for one of their kids. I wasn’t up for that.
My only other option was right next door.
After agreeing with my new boss on a start date, I walk home and knock on Mrs. Lupito’s door.
I can hear the TV blasting in the background. Some kind of annoying kids’ program, maybe SpongeBob?
Mrs. Lupito yells, “Stephanie, must be your mama.”
When Mrs. Lupito lets me in, Stephanie doesn’t even look at me. Just stares at that damn cartoon.
“Hope she didn’t give you any trouble,” I say. I take the remote from the coffee table and turn off the noise.
“No, no. She was very good. Such a quiet little thing. No problem at all. So well behaved.”
“Great. That’s really great because I wanted to ask . . . Well, I did find a job . . . at Bert’s, on the corner? I wondered whether you would maybe watch her on a regular basis, if that’s at all possible? It would be ten to two, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. I could pay you, not much, maybe like forty dollars a week.”
I can’t tell if she’s pissed off at being asked or upset at the amount I offered her. After staring at me for a while, she looks at Stephanie and asks, “Want to spend a little more time with me, niña?”
Stephanie jumps up and puts her arms around Mrs. Lupito’s waist. They only make it halfway there. She shouts, “Yes, yes, yes.”
I tell Mrs. Lupito I’ll bring all the food for Stephanie’s lunches and snacks since she has her special diet. We start on Monday.
“Don’t be late picking her up, okay? I got my own stuff to do too, you know,” Mrs. Lupito says to my back as we leave.
27
Claire
I hear Evelyn chirping at the register as she’s paying for her reading, extolling my virtues and telling everyone about how “gobsmackingly accurate” my reading was, how it helped her make a decision she’d been struggling with for months, and how, “quite fantastically,” I’d told her where to find her ring, a piece of jewelry “as dear to my heart as my own precious son.”
To escape the adulation I’m still certain I don’t deserve, I make a mug of tea and honey and go out the back door. Even standing under the sweltering midday sun, I can’t stop shaking.
“There you are. Your next client is . . .”
I jump as if Mindi had attacked me with a hatchet and spill most of the tea on my sandals. The warm liquid seeps between my toes, and I can feel them getting sticky from the honey.
“Geez, Claire, I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine,” I say, bending down to take off the sandals.
“Hey, you do not look well. What’s going on? Maybe you came back too soon? Of course, I didn’t help by giving you such a big workload on your first day. Go home. I can handle it, really.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine. Probably just a little jet lag,” I say, escaping her scrutiny by going back inside and into the bathroom. I tear off some paper towels and wet them to wash my feet. The leather sandals, spotted with tea stains, are likely a lost cause. Examining my face in the mirror, I have to agree with Mindi’s assessment. I do look terrible. My cheeks are blotchy, and my eyes are red-rimmed. I rinse out my mouth with tepid sink water and splash some on my face.
Eventually, my heartbeat settles, and I tell myself it was obviously a fluke with Evelyn. I’m no more psychic today than I was yesterday or last week. I just got incredibly lucky that the cards happened to so closely match the situation with her drug-addicted son. I was in the middle of trying to also rationalize the visions I had of the ruby ring and had almost decided I must have seen such a ring recently, maybe in the airport gift shop, and that’s why it popped into my mind when Mindi taps on the bathroom door. “Are you sure you’re able to work?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
I leave the bathroom and she checks me out, apparently judges me fit for duty, and says, “Your next client’s out front. She’s very excited to meet with you, especially after the glowing recommendations from your previous client. As long as you’re sure you can do this. You still look wobbly.” Mindi reaches over and rubs my arm with her hand, which feels oven warm against my goose-bumped skin.
“No, really, I’m fine.”
What I don’t say to Mindi is that this has never happened to me before. Except for today with Evelyn, I’ve never had visions of any kind during a reading. Of course, I can’t tell Mindi this because she has no idea that I’ve been bluffing my way through readings, tarot and otherwise, for the entire time I’ve been working for her. I feel like I somehow crashed into the topsy-turvy world of Wonderland without recalling having actually passed through the looking glass.
28
Rena
STEPHANIE’S BATTLE BLOG
Posted on September 15 by Stephanie’s Mommy
Sorry, but I haven’t had a single second to write. Besides the new job, I’m not sleeping because I’m up with Stephanie all night.
Saw the doctor yesterday for Steph’s test results. After we met with her in August, she had Stephanie and me get some more blood work done and even see a nurolagist.
But, get this! Dr. tells me NOTHING is wrong with her, except she’s really underweight and small for her age. No shit. Tell me something I dont know. All those tests, the money to get here, the rent on the shithole we’re living in, the time it took to even get in to see this doctor. And now she tells me Stephanie is fine?!?!
Then why is she, at this very minute, holding her stomach and screeming in pain?
I’m really, really not sure what to do. I called the doctors office this morning to beg her to PLEASE do more tests. Like a PET scan, but nobodies called me back.
SEND PRAYERS PLEASE!!!
Rena’s Way to Well: Feed Your Kid Right
Do you know that you can diagnoze your child’s health problems just by looking at her tongue?
Yup, that’s right. Here
are a couple of things to check for:
Bright Red=lack of Vitamin B12 or some other vitamin deficiency. To help, up the fruits and vegies and ONLY buy organic
White and looks like cottage cheese=yeast infection and thrush and too many of those idiot-perscribed antibiotics. Your kid’s body does a great job healing itself without all those chemicals. They only kill the good bacteria along with the bad.
Kittieseverywhere: Oh, I’m so disappointed for you and for me. I thought/hoped this doctor could cure your baby and then I would make an appointment for my Nathan and go there too. So sad.
Naturalee: Hi, I was very glad to read your post about tongue diagnosing. I am a naturopath located in California and use this method all the time. A couple of natural remedies people can try are: cinnamon (creates an anticandidal environment), unsweetened cranberry juice (acidic environment), fermented vegetables like pickles, sauerkraut and Kimchi (strengthens the immune system), and coconut oil (swish 1–2 tablespoons in your mouth but don’t swallow! because it contains bacteria and toxins). If anyone wants to contact me to get help with candida, write me at drleebhealthy@ .
KnitWit1: Rena, I’ve been trying to reach you, but the number I have for you isn’t in service? Please, please call me. I’m so concerned about Stephanie and you. Will you be coming home now? Love, Janet (P.S. Maxie’s doing great. A couple of spats with his “cousins”—some biting and scratching—but everyone is getting along fine now!)
I close down the computer and pack up the rest of Stephanie’s lunch (steamed broccoli and brown rice with organic cheese slices).
“Get a move on, will you?” I yell. She comes out of her room. She’s holding one sneaker, and her hair is shooting up in five different directions. Yogurt from breakfast is still on her chin.
But I don’t have time to deal with this shit right now. We go next door and knock. Mrs. Lupito opens up and gives me a look that’s even nastier than usual. She reaches for the lunch sack and takes Stephanie inside.
The Perfect Fraud Page 14