by Skylar Finn
“My, my,” she said. “Aren’t we a sight for sore eyes?”
I covered myself with my hands, using the wall of the bathtub to shield the rest of myself from Stella’s view. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, please. I’m dead. What is modesty?”
“Of vital importance when you only have a shred of it left,” I barked back. “Turn around.”
Even sitting on a toilet, she managed to look regal as she twisted around to give me some privacy. I stepped out of the tub, pulled on a White Oak robe, and squeezed the excess water out of my hair. Then I wobbled and nearly fell over as the headache hit me again. I plopped down on the edge of the bathtub.
“God, I feel like I got hammered last night,” I said. The pattern of teal tiles swam below me. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
Stella swept the train of her dress to the opposite side. “Many things, I’d imagine, but let’s start with the obvious. You reek of despair. Why the stench? The majority of your problems have been, well, extinguished.”
I rolled my eyes at the awful pun. “You were the one who told me my problems followed me to White Oak. Then again, right now, it feels like you are the problem.”
Stella tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Your problem is your past, which both Odette and I have been trying to tell you since you first shared blood with us.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m screwed up. I get it.”
“Put out the self-pity,” she sneered. “It tastes like cheap champagne. All of this post-traumatic crap is nonsense. Pull yourself together, woman. You have a mission here.”
“So you keep saying. What do you want me to do, Stella?” I asked. “Oliver Watson died in that fire. He won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”
“I’m not talking about Oliver Watson.”
“Then what? Give me something to go on.”
Stella’s heels clicked as she strolled across the tile floor. The tip of her finger lifted my chin. Not physically. She wasn’t that powerful, but her shimmering energy coaxed my face up to look at her.
“Do something,” Stella said. “I don’t care what, but don’t sit here and fulfill the prophecy your mother made for you. Make yourself a real woman.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
She pursed her cherry-colored lips. “Then I can’t help you.”
She vanished, one second there and gone the next. I shuddered. The temperature in the bathroom had dropped with her there. Ghosts seemed to suck all the warmth out of the air, with their attitudes and energies.
It was always the same crap. A spirit comes along and demands results without specifically stating what those results are meant to be. Odette was the same way, but at least she had a reason for being coy. If she revealed too much to me, the other spirits at King and Queens—the less innocent ones—punished her by making her feel the pain of her death over and over. Stella, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be likewise afflicted. If she wanted, she could hand me the answers to whatever supposed trouble was heading our way. Instead, she expected me to figure it out all by myself, and I sure wasn’t in the mood to do so. However, I had to do something other than lie about in the hotel room all day, waiting for the cops to tell us how to proceed. So I called Earl.
Earl was less conspicuous in a worn, forest-green sweater and tan pants than he had been the day before in his suit. He waited for me in the lobby, peering out at the mountain-goers through the lookout. I watched him from a distance, trying to get a read on what it might be like to sit across from him and tell him about my problems. I noticed his hair was not actually white, but rather the fairest of blond. He had a good head of it for his age, and his limber figure spoke of regular exercise. He noticed me long before I expected him to, as if he sensed me approaching him, and turned to greet me.
“Good morning.” He checked his watch. “Actually, good afternoon. I’m glad you called. I didn’t think you would.”
“Neither did I,” I said. “To be clear, I don’t think I need a psychiatrist. I don’t want any medication or anything like that. My dad was worse when they made him take pills.”
“Let’s not talk about that just yet.” Earl plucked white dog fur from the front of his sweater and grimaced. “Hazards of keeping a big ol’ beast at home, but what can I say? My son convinced me. Shall we go somewhere private?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Right. Then how about a coffee?”
We ended up at the Slopes Café. Earl insisted on paying for my latte and blueberry scone even though my stay at White Oak was entirely complimentary. I didn’t argue with him. He came off as the type of person who could win a courtesy war with nothing more than a smile. We snatched up a free table in the center of the room, right next to where the café line formed. People continually brushed against our shoulders as they came in from the snow and stood around wondering what to order. It was a welcome distraction from the conversation at hand.
Earl drank Earl Gray tea. Go figure.
“What’s your last name?” I asked him.
“Is that important to you?”
“I just find it odd that the police officers only referred to you as Earl yesterday,” I mentioned as I broke the scone into chunks and dropped them one by one into my coffee to marinate. “It’s a casual question of legitimacy.”
“I use my first name only because it helps my clients feel more at ease,” he said. “It’s a question of familiarity rather than legitimacy, and it helps foster a less stressful association with the notion of therapy. Most people—even the ones who admit they need help— aren’t keen on sharing their darkest secrets with anyone, let alone a perfect stranger. For instance, how long did it take you to pick up the phone and call me?”
Instead of replying, I fished a lump of soggy scone out of my coffee and jammed it into my mouth. Earl smiled knowingly.
“Why don’t we cut the crap?” he said, crossing one leg over the other and cupping his knee with intertwined fingers. “Both of us know you didn’t call me up to have coffee, so let’s get right to it. What’s bothering you? Other than the obvious.”
His straightforward approach worked for me. No beating around the bush. No senseless reassurance that felt empty and useless anyway. He asked a question and expected an answer. That was it.
“Everything,” I said truthfully. “Even before I came to King and Queens, everything was all screwed up.”
“Start at the beginning,” Earl said.
I wasn’t paying Earl for his time—this session was “off the books” as he put it—but he listened to me yammer on and on about my family and my life and my lack of professional employment for a good hour before he checked his watch again.
“Do you have to go?” I said, catching him in the act. All that was left of my latte and scone combo were a few soggy blueberries at the bottom of the mug. “I’m boring you, aren’t I?”
“Not at all,” Earl said. “I have another client to get to, but I think you and I have made excellent progress. I know a little more about you now, and we can keep going from here.” He extricated a business card from his pocket. “If you’d like to keep going, that is.”
I examined the card. “No way. Earl Gray is not your real name, is it?”
“Why do you think I ordered the tea?” He smirked as he pulled on his long, gray overcoat. “Listen to me, Lucia. You are not broken. No one is. You are the way that you are because you learned to be that way from other people. When you look at yourself, you see the negative traits you inherited from your mother and father, but you ignore the positive characteristics that you picked up from other people, like your best friend and Riley. Because of that, I have homework for you.”
“Psychiatrists assign homework?”
“We do indeed.”
“Fine, hit me with it.”
Earl buttoned his coat. “I want you to look at yourself from someone else’s perspective. Someone who knows and loves you well. My suggestion is to pick Jazmin. It seems you and her hav
e quite the bond, and she likely knows your attributes as well as your flaws. Ask her to describe you and see what she says. You might be surprised by what you hear.”
“Jazmin’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s obligated to say nice things about me.”
“Miss Star, if you believe the key to friendship is obstructing honesty, then I fear for all of your personal relationships,” Earl replied.
“That doesn’t seem very therapeutic of you.”
“I’m more than my profession,” he said. “And I won’t pussyfoot around a subject that clearly needs to be addressed. Until next time, Miss Star?”
“I suppose so.”
He waved goodbye and left, ducking underneath the door frame to avoid banging the top of his head. I wondered what kind of life his son had. I wondered about fathers in general because mine had been such a screw-up. I imagined Earl tossing a football around with a miniature version of himself. It was a pleasant thought, so I ordered another coffee and entertained myself by making up an entire life story for the psychiatrist. Whether it was accurate or not, I never intended to find out. As I muddled my mushy blueberries, a pair of purple heeled booties, totally inappropriate for the weather, approached my table.
“What on earth were you doing with that man?”
The voice was too familiar. I’d grown up with that drawn-out screech, faint Latin accent, and tone of immediate disapproval. With growing terror, I followed the boots up to the face.
“Mom?” I uttered in disbelief.
There she was, Eliana Star, in all her horrifying glory. Even wearing heels, she barely topped five feet, but the sheer volume of her blonde hair—which took hours in a salon chair to achieve—gave her a couple extra inches. My mother had a nose like a rat, pointed toward whatever business wasn’t hers, a trait I thankfully had not inherited from her. We hadn’t seen each other in a number of years. We weren’t exactly on non-speaking terms, but I wasn’t interested in her life and she wasn’t interested in mine. There wasn’t much of a point in pretending otherwise.
She swooped down on me, taking my cheeks in both of her hands and squeezing them together until my lips pursed like a fish. Her fingers were freezing, and her purple polished nails raked across my skin like tiny daggers. I wrenched myself out of her grasp and leaned as far back as the tiny chair would allow. The chair’s front legs separated from the floor.
“What on earth are you doing here?” I demanded as my mother dropped her oversized designer purse in the middle of the table and took Earl’s recently vacated chair.
She swept her massive hair over one shoulder and spat out a long string of rapid Spanish.
“You know I don’t understand you,” I said.
“That’s because you renounced your heritage,” she spat, pointing an accusatory index finger at me with each emphatic word.
“I didn’t renounce anything,” I said. “You stopped speaking to me at all, remember? How was I supposed to keep learning Spanish?”
“If your grandmother could see you now, what would she say?” She snagged the passing busser, who was busy clearing tables, by the sleeve. “Excuse me, I’d like a cup of your darkest roast.”
“Oh, I’m not a server, ma’am. You’ll have to order at the counter.”
My mother’s brown eyes turned rock hard as she glared at the employee.
The busser looked away. “I’ll put that in for you right away, ma’am.”
As the employee ran away as fast as he could with a tray full of dirty coffee cups and silverware, my mother relaxed in her chair, noticed the one behind her was too close for comfort, and shoved it away. She bumped another customer in the process but didn’t bother with an apology.
“What would your grandmother say if she saw you now?” she demanded. “Purple hair—”
“It’s faded.”
“—this mohawk business—”
“It’s literally just a braid.”
“And the things you wear. Dios mío. What are you even thinking?”
“I’m thinking that I’m a grown woman,” I said through clenched teeth, “and that my clothes, my hair, and everything else about me are a direct result of my own choices.”
“Poor choices.”
“Mother—”
“And this psychic business.” She looked skyward, to God. “We are good Catholics, Lucia! This goes against God.”
“It’s fake!”
Or so my mother thought.
“It’s blasphemous,” she replied.
“It’s business,” I snapped back. “I don’t know if you’ve bothered to keep up with my career, but I happen to have a pretty healthy social media following. Madame Lucia’s YouTube channel paid for my apartment.”
The truth was that if Madame Lucia didn’t exist, I never would have been in this mess in the first place, but I wasn’t going to give my mother the satisfaction of knowing that. After I left home, she made no attempt at keeping up with me, which was why her presence at White Oak was so confusing.
“You didn’t answer my first question,” I said, raising my voice before she could get in another pointed insult. “What are you doing here? How did you even know I was in Crimson Basin?”
The barista delivered my mother’s espresso to our table, despite the café’s lack of servers. I guessed the busser informed her of my mother’s attitude. She was the type of woman who demanded and expected to be served, no matter the situation.
“There’s no sugar on the table,” Mother chided the barista.
“I’ll bring you some, ma’am.”
The barista hurried off.
“Mother,” I said again.
“I heard you the first ten times, Lucia,” she replied. “A lovely man named Nick Porter phoned me early this morning. He actually owns this entire resort. Anyway, he heard what was happening at the awful place you were staying at—”
“Nick called you?”
“Oh, the two of you know each other?” Her furry coat ruffled as she bristled with pride. “I was under the impression he was quite the big man on campus.”
“He is,” I said. “But he was trapped with me and the others at King and Queens.”
“How did that happen?”
“He wanted to buy the resort from the previous owner.” I waved my hand. “Forget about it. It’s a long story. What did Nick tell you anyway? How did he even get your number?”
The barista returned with the sugar. My mother took it without thanking her. “Aren’t I your emergency contact?”
“No, Jazmin is.”
She sneered. “Jazmin’s still around, is she?”
“She’s my best friend.”
Mother stirred in her sugar then clinked her teaspoon against the side of the mug. “She’s a bad influence on you. If it weren’t for Jazmin, I wouldn’t have lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me because of Jazmin,” I snapped. “You lost me because of you.”
She sipped her espresso. “Lucia, that is absolute nonsense.”
“Mom, you have no idea—”
“I have always done my best to take care of you,” she interrupted. Her voice ventured into high-pitched hysteria like a whistling teapot, drawing the stares of other customers. “And now I find you speaking to a psychiatrist? It’s shameful!”
“Earl’s a psychologist,” I said. “And it’s not shameful to ask for help. You know what, Mother? I can’t do this right now.” I pushed away from the table, and my mother lunged forward to rescue her espresso before it tipped over. “You should go.”
“Go? Nick offered me a week’s stay.”
“A week?” I repeated, aghast.
“Yes, he said there’s another bedroom in your suite.”
My knuckles clenched my recently vacated chair. “Nick said you could stay in our suite?”
She pulled a key card from her purse and waved it around like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. “He thought I’d want to be close to you.”
What I wanted to do was snatch the key card o
ut of her grasp and throw it into the panini press behind the counter. Instead, I tucked the chair under the table and left, doing my best not to stomp past the customers who were actually enjoying their stay at White Oak. Outside, the frigid air cleared my head enough for me to examine the facts. My mother was here. Nick had invited her without my consent. Nick deserved a piece of my mind.
“Hey!”
The spectacled assistant who worked at a desk outside Nick’s private office jumped at the harsh sound of my voice. Her glasses slid down to the tip of her nose and almost fell off, but she pushed them into place at the last second with a well-practiced tap of her middle finger.
“Miss, this is a private office,” she said. “I’m afraid guests aren’t allowed in this area of the resort. Can I direct you elsewhere?”
“No, I know where I am,” I said. “I need to talk to Nick.”
“Mr. Porter is very busy.”
“What’s your name?”
She patted the left side of her chest where most employees had a White Oak nametag, but instead of the standard uniform, she wore a pencil skirt and a collared shirt, the fabric of which was too stiff to attach a pin to. My guess was that she’d recently been promoted from a lesser position to Nick’s assistant. She was tall and pretty, and the waiting area in front of Nick’s office had a huge glass window so that everyone passing by could see her. That included members of the press for whatever reason they might be visiting White Oak. Nick had a public image to maintain, which meant that all his closest staff members needed to be appealing to look at.
“Krishna,” she replied.
“Krishna,” I said. “I’m assuming you know who I am. Everyone knows Mr. Porter was trapped at King and Queens with me. Right?”
She adjusted her glasses and squinted. “There have been a few rumors.”
“The rumors are true,” I said. “Nick told me that I would be able to contact him whenever necessary, and it’s necessary. Where is he? I know you have his schedule somewhere. Did he have another meeting with the police?”
She checked her computer, clicking around a color-coded spreadsheet. “No, Miss Star. He’s actually at the spa right now.”
