He considers the table filled with objects trying to decide what to take and pauses to catalogue what he already has:
One sword with scabbard.
One small owl companion currently tearing apart a silk cushion with its talons.
A chain around his neck with a compass, its needle currently spinning in circles. Two keys: his room key and the narrow key that had fallen out of Fortunes and Fables that he somehow never managed to ask Dorian about, and a small silver sword. Zachary moves on to examining the contents of his bag to think about someone, something, anything else.
There is Sweet Sorrows, comforting in its familiarity. A cigarette lighter. A fountain pen he doesn’t remember putting in the bag at all, and a very squished gluten-free lemon poppy seed muffin wrapped in a cloth napkin.
Zachary discards the muffin on the table with the rest of the food. He pulls apart the Cornish game hen that is somehow still hot. Why didn’t Mirabel stick around if she was here so recently? Maybe he has found himself in a pocket outside of time where food stays perpetually warm. He puts more of it on a silver plate and pulls a cushion closer to the fire and sits. The owl hops over and perches nearby.
Zachary looks at the choices set before him, chewing thoughtfully on the wing of a roasted hen, wondering idly if it is rude to eat a bird in the presence of another bird and then remembering a story Kat told him once about witnessing a seagull murder a pigeon and coming to the conclusion that it probably isn’t.
He drinks his wine while he weighs his options and his future and his past and his story. How far he’s come. The unknowable distance left to go.
Zachary takes the folded-paper star from his pocket. He turns it over in his hand, letting it dance over his fingers.
He hasn’t read it.
Not yet.
The owl hoots at him.
The son of the fortune-teller tosses the paper star with his future inscribed upon it into the campfire.
The flames consume it, charring and curling the paper until it is no longer a star, the words it once contained lost and gone forever.
Zachary stands and picks up the rolled parchment from the inventory table. It is a map, a roughly drawn one containing a circle of trees and two squares that might be buildings. A path is marked moving from the building to a spot in the surrounding forest. It doesn’t seem helpful.
Zachary puts it back and instead takes the penknife, the cigarette lighter to have a spare, the rope, and the gloves and puts them in his bag. After considering the rest of the objects he takes the twine as well.
“Are you ready?” he asks his owl.
The owl responds by flying out past the campfire and into the shadows.
Zachary takes the torch and follows it to the wall of doors.
The doors are large and carved from a darker stone than the crystal surrounding them. The symbols on them are painted in gold.
There are so many doors.
Zachary is sick of doors.
He takes his torch and explores the shadows, away from the doors and the tent, among jagged crystal and forgotten architecture. He carries the light into places long unfamiliar with illumination that accept it like a half-remembered dream.
Eventually he finds what he is looking for.
On the wall there is the faintest trace of a line. An arm’s reach away there is another.
Someone has scratched the idea of a door upon the face of the cavern.
Zachary brings the torch closer. The crystal drinks in the light, enough for him to see the shape of the etched doorknob.
The son of the fortune-teller stands in front of another door drawn on another wall.
A man this far into a story has his path to follow. There were many paths, once, in a time that is past, lost many miles and pages ago. Now there is only one path for Zachary Ezra Rawlins to choose.
The path that leads to the end.
Hudson River Valley, New York, two years from now
The car looks older than it is, painted and repainted in less than professional manners, currently sky blue and wearing a number of bumper stickers (a rainbow flag, an equal sign, a fish with legs, the word Resist). It approaches the winding drive tentatively, unsure if it has found the right address as its GPS has been confusing its driver, unable to locate satellites and losing signals and being the target of a great many creative profanities.
The car pulls up to the house and stops. It waits, observing the white farmhouse and the barn behind it wearing a rich indigo shade rather than the more traditional red.
The driver’s door opens and a young woman steps out. She wears a bright orange trench coat, too heavy for the almost summer weather. Her hair is cut pixie short and bleached a colorless shade that has not fully committed to being blond. She removes her round sunglasses and looks around, not entirely certain she has reached her destination.
The sky is car-matching blue, dotted by puffy clouds. Flowers bloom along the drive and the front walkway, splotches of yellow and pink marking the path from the car to the porch that is festooned with chimes and prisms dangling from strings, casting rainbows over the monochrome house.
The front door is open but the screen door is closed and latched. A sign hangs next to the door, a fading, hand-painted sign with stars and letters formed from steam rising in curls from a tiny coffee cup: Spiritual Adviser. There is no doorbell. The young woman knocks on the doorframe.
“Hello?” she calls. “Hello? Mrs. Rawlins? It’s Kat Hawkins, you said I could come by today?”
Kat takes a step back and looks around. It must be the right house. There can’t be many Spiritual Adviser farms. She looks out toward the barn and spots a rabbit’s tail as it hops away through the flowers. She is wondering if she should try around the back when the door opens.
“Hello, Miss Kitty Kat,” the woman at the door says. Kat has pictured Zachary’s mother a number of times but never properly conjured the person standing in the doorway: a small curvy woman in overalls, her hair an inordinate amount of tight curls tied up in a paisley scarf. Her face is wrinkled yet young and round with large eyes lined with glittering green eyeliner. A tattoo of a sun is partially visible on one forearm, a triple moon on the other.
She swoops Kat into a bigger hug than she expected from such a small person.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Rawlins,” Kat says but Madame Love Rawlins shakes her head.
“That’s Ms., and not to you, honeychild,” she corrects. “You call me Love or Madame or Momma or whatever else you please.”
“I brought cookies,” Kat says, holding up a box and Madame Love Rawlins laughs and leads her into the house. The front hall is lined with art and photographs and Kat pauses at a photo of a young boy with dark curls wearing a serious expression and too-big eyeglasses. The following rooms are painted in Technicolor and stuffed with mismatched furniture. Crystals of every color are arranged in patterns on tables and walls. They pass under a sign that reads as above, so below and through a beaded curtain into a kitchen with an antique stove and a sleeping borzoi who is introduced as Horatio.
Madame Love Rawlins settles Kat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and transfers the honeybee-shaped lemon cookies from their box to a floral-patterned china plate.
“Aren’t you…” Kat stops, not certain whether the question is appropriate or not but since she’s already started she might as well say it. “Aren’t you worried?”
Madame Love Rawlins takes a sip of her coffee and looks at Kat over the rim of her mug. It is a pointed look, a look that means more than the words that she says after. Kat can read it. It’s a warning. Apparently it’s still not safe to talk about, not really. Kat wonders if anyone told Madame Love Rawlins that it was all over and if it sounded like a lie when she heard it, too.
“Whatever happens will happen whether I worry about it or not,�
�� Madame Love Rawlins says once she puts her mug down again. “It will happen whether or not you worry about it, too.”
Kat does worry, though. Of course she worries. She wears her worry like a coat she never takes off. She worries about Zachary and she worries about other things that clearly cannot be discussed even here, tucked away in the hills amongst the trees surrounded by protection spells and crystals and an inattentive guard dog. Kat picks up a honeybee cookie from the plate and looks at it, wondering if Madame Love Rawlins knows about the bees as she chews on a honey-lemon wing. Then she tells her something she has not yet admitted to anyone.
“I wrote a game for him,” Kat says. “For my thesis. You know how sometimes authors say they write a book for a single reader? It was like I wrote a game for a single player. A lot of people have played it now but I don’t think anyone gets it, not like he would.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “I started writing it like a choose-your-own-adventure thing in a notebook, all these mini-myths and stories within stories with multiple endings. Then I turned it into a text game, so it’s more complicated and has more options, that’s where it is now but the company that hired me wants me to maybe develop it further, do a full-blown version of it.”
Kat stops, gazing into the depths of her coffee cup and thinking about choices and movement and fate.
“You don’t think he’s ever going to get to play it,” Madame Love Rawlins says.
Kat shrugs.
“He’ll want to play it when he comes back.”
“I was going to ask how you know he’ll be back but then I remembered what your job is,” Kat says, and Madame Love Rawlins laughs.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel. It’s not the same. I could be wrong, but we’ll have to wait and see. Last time I talked to Zachary I could tell he was going somewhere to clear his head. It’s been longer than I thought it would be.” She looks out the window, thoughtful, for so long Kat wonders if she’s forgotten that she has company, but then she continues. “A long time ago I had my cards read by a very good reader. I didn’t think much of it at first, I was young and more concerned with the immediate future than the long-term, but as time went on I realized she was spot-on. Everything she told me that day has come to pass except one thing, and I have no reason to believe there would be one thing she was wrong about when she was right about everything else.”
“What was the thing?” Kat asks.
“She said I’d have two sons. I had Zachary and for years afterward I thought maybe she was just bad at math, or maybe he was twins for a moment before he was born and then not, but then I figured it out and I should have figured it out sooner. I know he’ll be back because I haven’t met my son-in-law yet.”
Kat grins. The sentiment makes her happy, so matter-of-fact and simple, so accepting when everything with her own parents is a constant struggle. But she’s not sure she believes it. It would be nice to believe.
Madame Love Rawlins asks about her plans and Kat tells her about the job she’s accepted in Canada, how she’s going to drive to Toronto to visit friends for a few days before continuing on. The friends are a fiction invented to sound less like the truth of exploring an unfamiliar city solo but Madame Love Rawlins withholds comment. Kat mentions virtual reality and once she gets to the subject of scent Madame Love Rawlins brings out her collection of hand-blended perfume oils and they sniff bottles while discussing memory and aromatherapy.
They unload Zachary’s belongings from the sky-blue car together, taking several trips up to one of the spare bedrooms.
Alone in the room after the last trip, Kat takes a folded striped scarf from her bag. In the time since she knit this particular scarf her feelings have changed regarding the sorting of personalities into overly simplified, color-coded house categories but she is still fond of stripes. Next to the scarf she leaves a key-chain flash drive with <3 k. written on it in metallic-silver Sharpie.
Kat takes a bright teal notebook from her bag. She puts it down on the desk but then picks it up again. She looks back toward the stairs, listening to Madame Love Rawlins move from room to room, the rain-like sound of the beaded curtain.
Kat puts the notebook back in her bag. She is not ready to part with it. Not yet.
Downstairs on the porch Madame Love Rawlins gives Kat a vial of citrusy oil (for mental clarity) and another hug.
Kat turns to leave but Madame Love Rawlins takes Kat’s face in her hands and looks her in the eyes.
“Be brave,” she says. “Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel. On that Tuesday in September when you think you have no one to talk to you call me, okay? I’ll be waiting by the phone. And drive the speed limit around Buffalo.”
Kat nods and Madame Love Rawlins stands on tiptoe to kiss her on her forehead and Kat tries very hard not to cry and succeeds until she is informed that she is welcome for Thanksgiving or Canadian Thanksgiving and whatever her winter holidays of choice are because there is always, always a winter solstice party.
“You think you don’t have a house to go home to but you do now, understand?”
Kat can’t stop the few tears that manage to escape but she coughs and inhales the bright spring air and nods wordlessly and she feels different than she did when she arrived. For a moment as she walks back to her car Kat believes, truly believes that this woman sees more than most, sees far and sees deep and if she believes Zachary is alive then Kat believes that, too.
Kat puts her sunglasses on and starts the car.
Madame Love Rawlins waves from the front porch as the car drives away. She goes back inside, kissing her fingertips and pressing them against the photo of the curly-haired boy before returning to the kitchen to pour herself another cup of coffee. The borzoi yawns.
The sky-blue car heads out the winding drive and into its future.
excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
Okay, we’re going to do this longhand because I don’t trust the Internet anymore.
Not that I ever trusted the Internet.
But this has gotten weird.
Not that it wasn’t weird before.
But whatever.
I’m going to put all the stuff I’ve learned so far in here so I don’t lose it again. I took my notes off my laptop, I deleted the files but I’ll transcribe them here before I shred the printed copies.
They wiped my phone somehow, so those notes are lost and gone and probably partially forgotten. I’ll try to re-create what I remember here, in as close to chronological order as I can.
I got a burner phone for emergencies.
I want to keep as much as I can all in one portable place that I can have with me at all times.
Just you and me now, notebook.
I hope I can read my handwriting later.
I hope wherever this all leads it’s worth it.
Whenever that happens.
* * *
—
Funny thing: When grown-ass people up and vanish and there’s no obvious evidence of foul play no one goes all full-blown detective step-retracing or anything.
So I did.
Partially because I was annoyed at how “people disappear all the time” it got and partially because I think I saw Z more than anyone those last few days.
The police wanted to know why Z was in NYC and I knew it was that costume party (I told the police that, they said they’d look into it but I don’t know if they did, they looked at me like I was making things up when I said Z borrowed my mask) but it all seemed last-minute and unplanned so I tried to do some extra step-retracing from the couple of days before.
He seemed…I don’t know. Like himself but more extreme. Like he wa
s more and less there. I keep thinking of that conversation we had out in the snow when I asked him to co-teach and how it felt…something. He was distracted by something and I meant to ask him what but then when we went out after that Lexi was there the whole time and I know he doesn’t know L well enough for that sort of convo and then he was gone.
The police don’t like “he seemed distracted” when you don’t know what it was that was distracting.
It sounds so empty. Isn’t everyone distracted, like, all the time?
They also didn’t like that my answer to “What were you texting him about?” was “The Harry Potter scarf I knit for him.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” one of them asked me in that you are far too old for that you entitled millennial overgrown child tone.
I shrugged.
I hate that I shrugged.
* * *
—
“How well do you know him?” they asked me, over lukewarm police-station tea in an environmentally unfriendly disposable cup with the teabag in it, trying to be more than leaf-flavored water and failing.
How well does anyone know anyone? We had a handful of overlapping classes and all the game people know each other more or less. We hung out sometimes at bars or by the crappy coffee machine in the media building lounge. We talked about games and cocktails and books and being only children and not minding being only children even though people seemed to think we should.
I wanted to tell them that I knew Z well enough to ask him for a favor and to return it. I knew which cocktails on a bar menu he would order and how if there wasn’t anything interesting he’d get a sidecar. I knew we had similar views on how games can be so much more than just shooting things, that games can be anything, including shooting things. Sometimes he would go dancing with me on Tuesday nights because we both liked it better when the clubs weren’t so crowded and I knew he was a really good dancer but he had to have at least two drinks before you could get him out on the floor. I knew he read a lot of novels and he was a feminist and if I saw him around campus before 8 a.m. it was probably because he hadn’t slept yet. I knew I felt like we were right at that place where you go from being regular friends to help-you-move-dead-bodies friends but we weren’t quite there yet, like we needed to do one more side quest together and earn a few more mutual approval points and then it would be something a little more comfortable, but we hadn’t figured out our friendship dynamic entirely.
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