“Could you pour me some?”
She does, slides it across the table slowly, shrewdly. “Something on your mind?”
“Am I that transparent?”
“As a ghost.”
I could tell her about Julian, I reason. She would listen to me. But it would break the spell of joyful anticipation that has come over her. She would slide into the place that constantly tries to tug her back down, back to drinking heavily in dark rooms.
And if she doesn’t believe me—if she tells me I cannot be seeing someone who hasn’t been born yet—what will that mean?
How will she look at me then?
I take a large ungraceful gulp and put down the fragile glass rather too indelicately. “All right, mind reader: mind read.”
She closes her eyes and presses fingers to her temples in exaggerated concentration; then she takes my hands, turns them palm upward, frowns at the lines, lets them go. She is only playing. A moment later she looks into my face and says, “Frustrated with your sister?”
“Good guess.” I choose my words carefully. “She won’t listen to me.”
“Listening was never her strong suit.”
The glasses swirl with red. The corkscrew, an abysmally old thing with a nasty spiraled spike, sits open on the countertop, pointing at us. Evidence of carelessness, or frequent use. I am looking for a black feather sweeping across the floor, or a muddy footprint the size of a child’s bringing the swampsmell, that odor of rotting vegetation, into the house. For totems of proof that what I have seen is real.
You cannot know how maddening it is to be so sure of what you have seen but to have no evidence of its existence, and no way of verifying that it ever happened, because it hasn’t happened—not yet, at least. But that it hasn’t yet happened does not mean it didn’t happen. Does that make sense? Am I crazy anyway? The images leak away in sips of wine and grow fuzzy, unreal. Did I see the boy after all, or have I really imagined him, like the Nothing Man, like the old woman with Xs for eyes?
You do believe me, don’t you?
Instead of a feather, I see a bottle of prenatal vitamins left on the counter, promising healthfulness.
I am always looking for good omens, meaningful artifacts. That must sound silly and childish, this desire for small magical enchantments in ordinary things. Perhaps I am foolish to believe that the house is cursed or the swamp is under a dreamy spell of dark vegetal magic, but if I did not believe these things, then nothing would make sense to me. Everything would be so hard and cruel. Please do not think me whimsical, though.
I do not think it is whimsy that makes me ask my mother to give me a reading. It is something else.
She looks pleasantly taken off guard by the request, and I remember how wonderful it is to please her. It has been ages since she’s given me a reading. When I was a teenager, she would pull me aside every so often, tell me in no uncertain terms that I was in need of a reading, sit me down, and give me one against my will, with frequent interruptions of, “Samantha, are you paying attention?” Sometimes I thought she might be making up the meanings of the cards to fit whatever narrative she’d invented about my life—reasons I was struggling in chemistry, for instance. Yet looking back, I realize all those unwanted readings veered, at least in the end, toward the optimistic; and against my will I left them with a sense of hope for the future, a feeling that things might turn around, that the friends who had abandoned me would return, or that I would eventually find a boyfriend—which was true, although it turned out later I didn’t want one after all.
Maybe it is because teenagers always think they can find their own answers to life’s questions, even though our parents have been around longer than us and likely know more than we do about life. We still think, when we are young, that they are old and out of touch, that we do not need their antiquated guidance even if we do need their approval, that what we really need is to figure things out on our own. And then, when we are older, we return to that childish desire for parental wisdom, but we must request it in oblique ways that play into that grand game of pretend in which all adults participate, pretending that we have any clue what we’re about. It is not so much the reading I want but my mother’s reassurance.
On the second floor, adjacent to the dreadful Rose Room, tucked into the haphazard floor plan, is my mother’s reading room—not for reading books, mind you, but for reading tarot cards. It is a small, oppressive room, bundled tight in its thick tapestries like a cocoon. In the middle sits a circular table with S-shaped legs, covered in a purple cloth. An old curio cabinet looms against the wall, filled with uncanny items: an owl skull, vials of lavender oil, incense, stray books on the occult, and mismatched religious ephemera including a small brass Buddha, a wooden crucifix, and a steel pentagram. A rusted horseshoe is nailed upright to one wall; on another hangs a copy of the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
Before we begin, Mother lights a white candle and some sage, the scents of which mingle intoxicatingly. She waves the flame off the match as smoke curls inquisitively from the candle, then takes out the cards and begins to shuffle the deck. “I suppose I’ll do the five-card horseshoe spread. Good for working out problems.”
A certain calm comes over the room, a nearly stifling calm, or the room is too warm, thick and humid like the swamp. The rain outside becomes white noise.
“I want you to think about what’s been bothering you,” she says as wind berates the shuttered window. “The first card represents your present position.” She flips it over.
The moon gazes somnolently down at a dog, a wolf, and a lobster between two towers.
“The Moon,” she says, “is a card of intuition, alienation, and the unconscious. There are two sides to this card: on one side insight and clarity, and on the other confusion and anxiety. I suspect you’re somewhere in the middle, searching for answers.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Hush. The next card represents your present desires.” The card that appears displays six golden cups of white flowers and two children before a medieval castle, all bathed in a happy yellow glow. Agnes smiles. “The Six of Cups. Nostalgia, memories. You have a desire to return to happy times from the past.”
Unfortunately, I lack my mother’s rose-colored glasses. What the house shows me often destroys even my tempered memories with the harsh light of truth, of how things really occurred. I’m not sure I can believe this card’s assumption of the endless supply of happiness that the past delivers. The past is no different from the present, as dark or as light.
Is it my desire that the past be granted that happy glow? Or that my experience of the past be like everyone else’s—that softly filtered recollection afforded by memory, and memory’s ability to alter perception, to smooth out the rough spots? Do I wish, perhaps, that I did not have to live with actual recreations of the past wandering through the house, ruining the perfect nostalgia that comes with no longer having to experience it firsthand?
In any case, I wish it were a seven instead of a six. Seven is a much better number, round and whole. Six is too symmetrical.
“The next card represents the unexpected.” She flips the card and frowns. Landing upside down, it depicts a man on a gray throne in the middle of a crashing sea. “Typically the King of Cups represents balance and control.” She taps the card with her finger. “But when it’s reversed like this, you see, it embodies emotional manipulation and volatility. While many of the cards relate to your inner life, the Court cards usually indicate someone else’s involvement—in this case, a man in a position of power, most likely.”