by Rumer Haven
She’d been writing back and forth with Sylvie pretty regularly, though, to firm up plans for Sylvie’s visit next month. Refreshing her screen, Margot was surprised to instantly receive a message back from her.
Hey! So, I looked at tickets to Paris from London. That’s doable. Think we’d be too rushed if I only come for 5 days in August? Turns out I need to be back to run the back-to-school workshop, too. Bummer to cut my trip short, but I’m excited about this year’s activity—Cinderella stories!
In her mind, Margot could hear Sylvie clapping.
Every culture has one—Egyptian, Native American, Persian, etc. She goes by different names, and there’s usually not a glass slipper, but the gist of it’s the same even if some civilizations had no way to communicate with others. Carl Jung called it “collective unconscious.” Doing quick research now to get materials organized and thought it might relate to your ad studies. :)
Anyway, just let me know your thoughts on Paris and whatnot. Miss you, girlie. I want to put on muumuus and open that vintage shop with you in London.
Margot smiled, even at that damn remark about the vintage shop. Whatever her annoyance with it, this was good. This was distraction. Hoping to catch Sylvie still on the computer, she played along.
Sylvia! *squawks w/ menthol cigarette hanging out of mouth* Where’s my martini?! And what are we chargin’ for the fox muffs?!
Sylvie instantly messaged back:
Fox muffs on special for 15, Marge! *hacks on self-rolled cigarette stuck to end of long, bedazzled cigarette holder* Christ Almighty, burned another hole in the kidskin!
Margot giggled out loud, happy to have returned the game to its original form—not a pretend plan for the future but an idea that filled her imagination now with netted hats and musty stoles with monogrammed linings. Just another way to touch the past, as if treasuring people’s old stuff kept their experiences alive. Just as it had been with Grandma Grace’s kitschy jewelry collection. Just as it was with the brooch.
Oh, btw, Sylvie wrote before Margot could reply, hear from our ghost friend lately? LOL! Don’t know why I just thought of that. :) k, bye!
When Sylvie abbreviated her words in email, Margot took the cue that her friend was in a rush and needed to go back to work. So she sent her off with Miss you, too. Stupid ocean :( But see you soon! and set the computer mode to standby.
Sylvie’s shining presence would surely be welcome when she came to visit, and Margot did miss her. But only in this instant did she feel less enthused about it, as though it would throw off the balance she’d been trying so hard to find in her London life.
And why in hell did she have to bring up the Ouija? Seriously.
Out of curiosity, Margot stirred the computer from its brief nap to open a browser and look up collective unconscious. From a cursory search, she gathered its basic premise was that people innately shared awareness, across each other and over space and time.
Huh. She did remember something like that from college.
Margot then got serious and searched for ocular migraine to self-diagnose her warped vision. This led into related links that she clicked again and again to spelunk into a cyber-labyrinth of medical knowledge: blurred vision, double vision, jumbled vision.
Her next search string—scrambled vision—generated ads on the side for online vision tests and word scrambles. Looking at one of her books resting on the desk corner, she contemplated the rumpled sheet of paper tucked in its pages. Her packing list—or, when flipped over, the Ouija transcript—had been flippantly shoved into her copy of Charlotte Sometimes months ago as a riddle to reason out another day in the event the “words” they’d received were actually anagrams. But her interest in deciphering the transcript had faded into the forgotten, and she’d only brought the book to London to reread it in its country of origin.
But now she couldn’t bypass the coincidence of reading word scramble on the same screen that Sylvie’s ghost comment had just appeared. And to have that book with that transcript within arm’s reach at the moment felt nothing less than providence.
Letting curiosity get the better of her, Margot plucked the notes from her novel. The paper gave a soft emulation of thunder as she unfolded it to see Sylvie’s large capital letters. Wondering what clarity time might bring, she scanned the messages she, Sylvie, and Derek had “divined.”
I L I U V (?) / B O O I N G / P A L E R / O R C H I D /
I M / O P E N D I G / H E A R T C L O T
She remembered Sylvie’s idea that ILIV could’ve meant I LIVE and felt satisfied with that, but when she read the other “words” over and over, she found it impossible to conclude anything other than the rubbish they already had.
Anagram theory it is, then. Grabbing a pencil from Rand’s desk drawer, she jotted her brainstorm on the piece of paper.
BOOING
BOO GIN
BINGO (O)
BIG NO (O)
ION GOB
ION BOG
GOO NIB
OBI NOG
PALER
ALE (PR
ALP (ER)
APE (LR)
LAP (ER)
LEAP (R)
PEA (LR)
PLEA (R)
PARE (L)
PEAR (L)
PEARL
EARL (P)
RAPE (L)
REAP (L)
ORCHID
OR HID (C)
CHOIR (D)
CHORD (I)
CORD HI
HI DOC (R)
HI COD (R)
HI ROD (C)
DO RICH
Few of her results used all the letters. Of those that did, the ones for BOOING and ORCHID made no sense. PEARL used all the letters of PALER in a single word, which charmed her. But otherwise unsatisfied with how any of these iterations could fit together, she gave another term a try.
OPENDIG
DIG NOPE
DOG PINE
GOD PINE
GO PINED
GONE DIP
DOPE GIN
PIG DONE
PIGEON (D)
Aw, I like that last one. But it doesn’t use the D. Again, the message was meaningless.
Her last resort was to combine the words for a mass unscrambling. For that scope, she typed online descrambler into her browser. Clicking on an appropriate link, she started to input letters into its search field, only to discover she couldn’t enter more than fifteen at a time. So, she paired each of the first three words in the three possible ways: BOOING and PALER, PALER and ORCHID, and BOOING and ORCHID.
Starting with BOOING and PALER, Margot snickered at the results: BOLOGNA PIER, GOBLIN OPERA, PIGEON LABOR, and POOR BELGIAN, among others. She noted one, though, that was more serious: GONE BIPOLAR.
No shit I have…
The next combination, PALER and ORCHID, likewise produced a bunch of nonsense: CHIRP ORDEAL, CHORAL PRIDE, CLIP HOARDER, HARDCORE LIP, RICH LEOPARD, and so on. There also seemed to be a lot of men’s names: ADOLPH CRIER, CHARLIE DROP, HAROLD PRICE, and RICHARD LOPE.
If the spirit was supposed to be a woman, could this have been a husband, boyfriend, brother, father? Murderer?
Each result led her to speculate a larger storyline, much like she did with the gravestones at the cemetery.
Maybe a man in her life lost his temper and attacked her? she wondered on seeing RAPID CHOLER next. Or her own rage drove her to suicide?
The following result ushered in a more natural, yet no less horrible, cause of death: CHOLERA DRIP. With a gag reflex, Margot could almost hear bodily fluids dripping into a rusted bedpan, filtered through a saturated mattress from a death by dehydration.
Her next word groupings could have been clues to the setting where this death occurred: ORCHARD PILE or RAILED PORCH. Her imagination drifted to a rural house with a wraparound porch. Two rockers and a swing bench swayed in the apple-scented wind swept off acres of branches bowing with the weight of their bulbous, ruby crop.
An inky bla
ck cloud bled over the tranquility of the scene, though, as she read the next iteration—HORRID PLACE—and tensed at what that could mean.
Horrid place. In life or afterlife? Is that where she is now? Horrid place.
“Oooh gawd, let’s move awn, shall we?” she said aloud in her worst British accent. She hoped the next search would return to the silliness of her first results, just to send her to sleep with a smile. “Right. Booing orchid, let’s have at it!”
But BOOING ORCHID only gave choices of either BINGO CHOROID or BROOCH INDIGO.
“Well, since I don’t know what the bloody hell a choroid is, let’s go with brooch indigo. Indigo brooch.”
As her eyes searched around for meaning, they fell on her paper and the third word she hadn’t included this time because of the letter limit: PALER. Going back to the unscrambling she’d performed manually, she spied the one complete anagram she’d written using all the letters: PEARL.
“Indigo brooch, pearl. Pearl, indigo—”
Margot smacked the paper off the desk and leapt to her feet.
“No-no-no-no-no,” she repeated just above a whisper while shaking her head side to side. She gasped for air as she backed into the corner and crouched between the wall and wardrobe, rocking to soothe herself and regulate her diaphragm.
“She said Charlotte has my pin,” looped through her memory.
The sheet of paper still lay within reach after air resistance had arced its flight path like a boomerang. What she desired to be so far away had instead come straight back to her.
She glanced at the transcript and scanned one of the last batches of letters to decipher: HEARTCLOT. Concentrating, Margot saw in the letters what she hadn’t before and desperately wished she couldn’t now. Her active mind separated and sorted the letters, rearranging them on the page to form another complete anagram:
C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E.
Chapter 11
Reflection
“IT COULD JUST BE COINCIDENCE.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“It’s what I believe now.”
Ill at ease sitting in a chair opposite Dr. Fitzgerald, Margot had asked if she could play it old-school and lie on the couch, facing away. The psychotherapist consented. And so Margot had kicked off her black pumps—she’d wanted to dress up for the appointment—and lay flat on her back with her hands properly folded on her stomach, playing out the scene exactly as she’d imagined it from movies and daring the good doctor to explain everything away.
Dr. Fitzgerald—or “Fitz,” as she’d invited Margot to call her—was Canadian-born but had attended university on the American east coast. She’d returned to Canada to pursue doctoral studies in psychology and began her career in Toronto but had since run her own office in England for fifteen years. Her expat background eased Margot somehow, encouraging her to speak more freely in the laidback presence of another North American.
So, Margot had started by speaking freely about Lady Grey.
Fitz found the coincidence interesting but had conjectured that Gwen had an active imagination, which she was either consciously or unconsciously using to persuade Rand to move in with her and take their relationship to the next level. And as far as what Margot thought she’d seen that first day in London, Fitz’s conclusions went the way of Derek’s—blaming reflections, tricks of light, or Margot’s jet-lagged migraine.
“Often we generate a false positive through pareidolia, which is like when we recognize images in the clouds. All it takes, really, is a circle and two dots to identify a human face.”
“Like the Man in the Moon.”
“Exactly. It’s a type of apophenia, the perception of patterns and significance in otherwise random and meaningless data.”
Fitz went so far as referencing studies that revealed a connection between caffeine consumption and seeing and hearing things. The time that had elapsed also contributed to an unreliable memory that Margot’s subsequent experiences might now be reshaping to fit the mold.
Margot had then talked about seeing the orb in the spot where Lady Grey stood by the window, and how the eye examination yielded no explanation for it. How it even less so accounted for the movement and feeling of ascension she’d had while squatting in the mews afterwards.
Fitz repeated what the optometrist had said about eye floaters and migraines and suggested that the blurring effect of the eye drops had distorted her perception even further, displacing light and shadow and causing dizziness.
And now, on speaking about the Ouija game, Fitz showed the same skepticism over Margot’s claims. “If it isn’t coincidence, what do you think might be the meaning behind this?”
“Just what I’ve told you. My grandmother’s brooch, Charlotte…”
“But what could be the connection?”
“I have no idea.”
“Margot, I’m listening to everything you say with an open mind. Please do not take it personally or get defensive if I play devil’s advocate for a while. It’s not for me to declare what is wrong or right at this point, or at any point. I just want to explore all the possibilities. Is that all right?”
“You don’t believe me. You can say it.”
“It’s not that whatsoever. I only mean that, generally, in order to distinguish truth from belief, we have to first evaluate evidence objectively. Proving a hypothesis to be true, after all, actually lies in the disproving of it.”
“Okay.”
“To go back to what you said about the message you decoded. Barring the fact that you found the letters stood for other words as well, let’s get to the root of why those letters existed in the first place. Your friend who wrote them down—is she reliable?”
“Yes, very. And she wrote them as they appeared, not after the fact. Our other friend was there to witness it, too.”
“All right, so we can reasonably strike flawed memory from the list. Now, there is obviously the supernatural explanation for why those letters came about: that a spirit, perhaps by the name of Charlotte, was communicating directly to you through the board game. But belief in the supernatural is subjective. You and I both entered this room with our own belief systems, so we can’t allow this to bias our conclusions.”
“Okay, so…should we go back and start from the beginning? Figure out if I was traumatized as a kid or something? Because I only remember a happy childhood.”
Fitz chuckled, a deep-throated huh-huh-huh that shook her chunky turquoise necklace like a maraca. “We can pursue a more chronological approach, if you prefer.”
“Well, no, I just mean…you don’t really know me yet, my background. I didn’t mean to derail things with my randomness.”
“We might not follow a linear course, Margot, but wherever we meander, it’s all relevant. And I am getting to know you by talking about this, in this organic way. I suppose I’m like you and tend to jump around as well. But if you’ve ever seen a scatter-plot diagram, you know how those plotted points still follow a general trend. It’s like stepping away from a Monet to see the clear picture.”
“Uh-huh. So, ruling out the supernatural, for our purposes now—”
“Yes. I want to take the skeptical point of view again and ask if you’ve ever heard of the ideomotor effect.”
“Maybe. I forget.”
“All right, let’s begin with an example. You’ve mentioned your mood swings. So then when you’re feeling sad, what does your body do in response?”
“I guess my heart feels heavy. I might cry.”
“Yes, perfect. So sometimes when we have sad thoughts, our tear ducts automatically release a secreted liquid. This physical response is beyond our direct control, yet it is caused by our thoughts. Does this make sense?”
“Yeah.”
“So, the ideomotor effect is your body’s automatic, muscular reflex to an intellectual or emotional stimulus. So then it’s possible, just possible, that you spelled those words on the game board.”
&nb
sp; “But I didn’t even remember the brooch until after then. And regardless, I doubt I’d come up with anagrams on the spot like that.”
“But that’s just the point, Margot. It may have been subconscious. Whether or not you were aware of these thoughts at that particular moment in time, they were nonetheless there, stored in your mind, to be buried there forever, withdrawn on command, or to surface on their own in response to some event. You wrote that journal entry about the brooch, after all. Even if you were only a child and forgot it since, it’s still transcribed in the record of your mind.”
“I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t get why. It’s so random.”
“That’s how the subconscious works. It may seem random to us when these thoughts decide to surface, but they’re a purposeful response to some trigger or other.”
Margot lay silent, but Fitz seemed to wait for her to speak again.
“You know, I hadn’t thought about that pin for years. Not until this spring when it randomly came to me during the game.”
“You say ‘random’ a lot. Is this your belief—that these little events only occur autonomously and at no predetermined time?”
“No. I mean, I do believe in free will…”
“But…”
“But I guess I’ve always figured we only operate freely within a larger structure already put in place—by God or whatever you might or might not believe in.” This felt so oddly reminiscent of that conversation in the doorway with Rand. Margot wasn’t used to getting confronted on her theology so often, but she did like the chance to talk it out. “So if we do have an ultimate destiny, we at least control some of the paths we take to get there. The ‘little events’ might just happen to keep us on track now and then, like guideposts.
“I read a theory on déjà-vu once, that what we think feels so familiar is actually a sign that we’re on target. Like on some level we’ve already lived out our destiny, and what we see as déjà-vu is the playback, in brief clips, to show us that what we’re doing, at that exact point in time, is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing and where.”
