Three Witches

by Paula Jolin

  “Miya-chan? I’m at the Gallery, and they have the sweetest little black dresses. I mean, perfect. I’m going to get one for me; do you want one too? What do you think?”

  Just what she needed. Her mom over at the Gallery, not three blocks away, ever-ready for that bonding moment.

  “Miya?”

  “Well, I’m sort of in the middle of something, Mom.” She reached the plastic chairs at Starbucks, dodged the line that was already out the door. A swift glance at the sidewalk behind her showed that Aliya and Gillian had definitely been left behind. “I think I’ve lost them.”

  “Lost what?” Mom’s voice came a little breathless, as though she was squirming her way into a dress even as she spoke. “Where are you?”

  “No, just these two crazy girls, following me. They were telling me lies about someone who can’t defend himself. Anymore.” Trevor wouldn’t have made a date with Aliya, wouldn’t have promised her soon, if he was planning anything drastic. “I’m just trying to get them to leave me alone.”

  She waited for Mom to start babbling about Alone in the Dark, that new nightclub in Boston. But her mother surprised her. “Is it Perry’s son?”

  Perry. She hated that her mother called Mr. Sanders that, as though they were still friends, after everything he’d done. “Why would you think that?”

  “If it is, your friends should be careful. Sometimes a restless spirit can chase after people who tormented him when he was alive.”

  A sharp wind whipped past Miya’s ears. Ridiculous, to think that last part was directed at her. She’d never tormented anyone. But she remembered that look on Trevor’s face, heard her own words—Why blame everyone else for what happened? Your mom’s fault, my mom’s fault, everyone conspired to drive off your dad. Now you’re saying it was my fault because . . . But she’d never finished that sentence.

  “Maybe you should pray for him,” said Mom. Prayer? Mom? But she was going on. “I don’t mean in a church, those scary cult prayers. Proper prayers, to help him rid himself of the jealousy and anger, so he’ll leave your friends alone.”

  Not my friends, Miya wanted to say. She didn’t get the chance. Mom launched into some story about her grandfather, Ojii-san, and how he had bad luck for seven years, until he went to see a kitoshi. The kitoshi explained that it was a cousin who died abroad, and no one had ever said the necessary prayers for him. Buddhist prayers to help the dead rest easy, she gathered.

  She stopped gathering, tuned Mom out. Twisted her head to view empty sidewalks. Why were Aliya and Gillian chasing her anyway? The sorry-I-missed-you e-mail was hardly revelatory. That menacing look of Gillian’s, that desperate plea of Aliya’s . . . their behavior shifted, began to seem bizarre again.

  Mom twittered away. “That’s what your friends should do, find a kitoshi,” she finished.

  Yeah, right. Gillian and Aliya were modern girls, American girls. They’d be no more interested in kitoshi foolishness than she was.

  Miya passed Ye Olde Furniture. “I’ll be home soon,” she told Mom, and she meant it. A little wave of guilt, for blowing her mother off, hit her. She’d make her vegetable curry for dinner, with those skinny Chinese eggplants that Mom loved.

  A glass door swung open and almost hit Miya in the face. Funny, she’d always thought this door was a second entrance to the antique shop, but no, it seemed to lead someplace else. No sign, but a thick, musky incense wafted into the street. Inside, crystals glittered and bells tinkled; a stack of dusty old books rose up from the floor. Someone had opened the one on top and flattened it against the window. The Tale of Genji, how funny. And opened to the story of Aoi . . . Miya swallowed hard. Aoi, the neglected wife who killed herself, then came back and haunted Genji. Poor Genji. He grew so sick and drawn and pale, he almost died himself.

  Miya found herself drawn into the shop, her boots clicking on the tiles. Japanese people believed in omens—wasn’t Mom always telling her that? But Miya was only half Japanese. She’d probably remembered the story all wrong anyway; she’d just take a look at the book, refresh her memory, and be done with it.

  A whoosh of air, some heavy panting—the door slammed shut behind her. Miya whirled around.

  Gillian and Aliya.

  NINE

  THE STORE, piled with dusty junk and heavily scented, so reminded Aliya of Damascus, she looked around for a kettle, a sugar pot, half-filled cups of tea. But the counters, crammed with little glass baubles in boxes and revolving jewelry cases, had no room for kettle or canister.

  Gillian sidled right up to Miya, fists clenched as though she were going to punch her in that belly-button nose. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked. “Why did you take off like that?”

  Miya crumpled the paper she held into a little ball and threw it at Gillian. “Here’s your pointless e-mail,” she said. The ball bounced off Gillian’s chest and hit the floor. “The way you were acting, I thought it was a confession to murder—and it’s nothing but a pack of excuses for standing someone up.”

  Aliya drew her breath in quick. To someone not drunk on love and death, her otherworld, last-touch-of-Trevor experience was nothing more than lame excuses. She reached her foot out and kicked the paper ball hard, rolling it to oblivion under the counter.

  Miya edged away from them, making her way toward a window crowded with a precarious stack of books. Gillian followed, so close behind she scuffed the back of Miya’s boot. “Could you just leave me alone?” asked Miya.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Aliya heard herself saying. The small rush of excitement she’d felt all afternoon, confronting Gillian, following Miya, drained away, leaving a raw, howling spot in her chest. “This is crazy.”

  Gillian turned on her. “You’re the one who thinks Trevor is some kind of ghost.”

  “You’re the one who believes in obeah.”

  “Obeah is nothing to mess with, girl.”

  A crash from the corner, and they both swung around to see the books on the floor. “Ghost?” said a shiny-faced Miya. “Obeah?” She had a book in her hand—Aliya squinted and made out the title, The Tale of Genji. First novel ever written, by Murasaki Shikibu, in eleventh-century Japan. She’d never read it, but during the College Bowl Miya had drilled them on trivia, all those Wednesdays after school.

  That glitter in Miya’s eyes; how annoying. “I thought you weren’t interested,” Aliya said. “You told us—”

  “You really think Trevor’s a ghost?” Miya’s voice dripped with scorn.

  Aliya felt more like a fool every second that Miya stared at her. She tried to explain—the midnight ceremony, the e-mail, the direction to find Gillian, the obeah man. She’d reached the part about Gillian and Trevor’s business plan when a young woman with a tight mouth, hair falling out of her ponytail, pushed open the door at the back of the store. “What’s going on out here?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” said Miya. “I knocked the books over, I’ll pick them up.” But she made no move. Her raised eyebrows turned on Gillian instead. “You believe this magic stuff, too?” she asked.

  “Obeah isn’t magic, not exactly. It’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah, kind of like voodoo, but in the Englishspeaking Caribbean.”

  “If you’ve come for magic stuff, you’re in the wrong place,” said the woman, now behind the cash register. “We sell crystals and candles and silver jewelry, things like that.” She shot them a suspicious glance.

  Aliya found herself migrating to Miya’s corner. It was worth one last try, wasn’t it? “Tell us what happened at the party,” she said to Miya in her lowest voice. “And then we’ll leave you alone.”

  “Nothing happened!” Miya was still holding that book, one finger tracing the raised title. Cha-ching came from behind them, as the cashier opened the register. Miya fell to a crouch, started picking up the books, and Aliya dropped down beside her. The Iliad. The Odyssey. The Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Witchcraft in the Azores. Aliya snatched up the last, while Miya stacked one, tw
o, three books. She was picking up a fourth when Gillian swooped down and pulled it from her. “Ya man,” she said, sitting next to Miya. “What’s this?”

  Not a book at all, but a letter-sized box an inch thick, layered in dust. Gillian swept the cover with her palm, which set the dust flying. Tarot Cards, it read. Had Old Aunt said anything about Tarot Cards? Aliya remembered that wrinkled face pressed close to her own, breath smelling like cloves. She’d described the jinn—creatures made of smokeless fire who could fly, fit themselves into any space, bend the laws of time and physics. She’d gone on about how to contact them: fire and blood and pentagrams on the floor. But no, not a word about Tarot Cards. Aliya reached for them anyway.

  “Are you girls finished over there?” called out the clerk.

  “Just a minute,” said Gillian. “We spilled a box of cards, we’re picking them up.”

  The box was in Aliya’s hands now. She opened it, lifted out the cards. “One for me,” she said, laying the top card on the floor. It played nicely, a girl in a black fringed shawl, crying. “Grief. And one for you.” She handed card number two, a dark-haired woman with a sword over her head, to Gillian. “Revenge.”

  “Don’t make me a white girl,” said Gillian.

  Aliya ignored her and turned over card number three. A girl with yellow hair—pink would have been better, but who knew what Miya would do next?—and a black heart. “A girl with a secret,” she said. “You won’t find peace until you tell your story.”

  “That’s not a girl with a secret,” said that oh-so-irritating Gillian. “That’s guilt. Look at the bad eye she giving me,” she added. Aliya couldn’t help it, her face froze into anger all by itself. “But it’s not my fault,” Gillian protested. “There it is, written on the bottom of the card.”

  Miya sat flat on the floor, let the book fall in her lap. “I’m not guilty of anything,” she said, her lips barely moving.

  “How can we know that?” asked Gillian. “If you won’t tell us what happened . . .”

  Miya pressed her lips together. Aliya felt a fleeting bit sorry for her. She didn’t hate Miya, who’d never fit in at school. Too smart for her own good and when she toned that down, too sexy. But then Miya said, “What, do you think I’m some kind of fortune teller?” and Aliya flinched, because there was that day, the rain pounding so hard the curtains inside the basement shuddered, that Trevor ordered Chinese food. With fortune cookies that he broke open and read out loud, ridiculous things like, You will fall in love with a man with dark hair and two silver earrings and you will encourage him to tattoo your name on his wrist—Really? he’d interrupted himself. You want me to get a tattoo? And then she tickled him until he gave up the tiny slip, and she found he’d been making them up himself.

  “All I want to know is what went on between you guys.”

  “Nothing.” Miya flipped through the book in her lap. “Trevor blamed me for his parents’ divorce.”

  “Blamed you?” Gillian tugged on the gold hoop in her ear. “I mean, I can see him calling out your mother—” She broke off, looked embarrassed. “Shut up, Gillian,” she muttered to herself. “Just shut the fuck up.”

  Miya ran her tongue over her lips, smudged her lipstick. Finally, she said, “You know Trevor.”

  “You’re saying he spent the party complaining about his parents? That doesn’t sound like Trevor.” Aliya drummed her fingers on the Tarot box in her lap.

  “Look, we got into a fight, okay? Trevor said some stupid things and I said even stupider things right back.” Was Miya tearing up? A trick of the light, had to be. “I’d give anything to tell Trevor I didn’t mean it now.”

  “Maybe you can,” said Gillian. Aliya and Miya turned to her in surprise, but it was a fourth voice that spoke, interrupting them. “Can I help you girls with anything?” asked the clerk, hovering behind them. They got the message.

  The three girls rose to their feet and squeezed their way back to the main part of the store. Aliya wanted to ask Gillian to explain her cryptic comment, but first: “Is that it?” she asked Miya. “Just a fight?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Bells jingled. Footsteps came inside, a middle-aged voice mumbled a question, the clerk answered, “Six o’clock.” Aliya didn’t take her eyes off Miya’s flushed face.

  “I said some pretty nasty things. I just think . . . Believe me, you don’t want that to be the last thing you ever say to someone. And, well, I just keep thinking, you know how it gets when you’re mad about something and you can’t get it out of your head?” Miya’s voice faded; she almost sounded like she was talking to herself. “What if he was driving up there and he kept getting madder and madder and not paying attention. And then . . .”

  Aliya pictured it: car driving up the road, radio blaring, Trevor cursing, slope getting ever steeper. Blink, blink. Don’t think about it.

  “Stop worrying your chupidee self over it,” said Gillian. “Trevor was too much in love with himself to obsess over a stupid fight.”

  He was supposed to be too much in love with me.

  “Never in this life,” Gillian went on, forgetting, perhaps, that Trevor was no longer in this life. “You smoking, girl, you think this is about you.”

  But she did. Aliya could see it in Miya’s dark oval eyes, in the flicker of—yes, they were wet—her eyelashes. Miya turned her head away, buried her face in a rack of multicolored scarves. “There, I’ve told you everything,” said her muffled voice. “Satisfied?”

  Of course she wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t suppose he told you anything about me?” The scarves went completely still. Aliya pounced. “There was something about me.”

  “It’s nothing, nothing about you,” said Miya, raising her head. “Just that Luke mentioned something, I don’t know . . .” Behind her, Gillian stepped away, head tilted back as she scanned a tiny bulletin board covered with flyers.

  “Tell me.” Aliya would have subjected Miya to water torture if she’d had a bucket, pulled out her fingernails if she’d thought to bring the pliers.

  It must have shown in her face. “Okay, okay,” said Miya. She looked a little scared, but she was already hemmed in, scarves on one side, Gillian and the wall on the other. “Luke said Trevor was at the Crescent the night he died. With some girl—not Mal, not Glimmer. She had red hair and they were fighting. Oh God, I knew I shouldn’t tell you. Come on, Aliya, no, don’t. Don’t cry.”

  Aliya wasn’t crying. She was disintegrating. A hundred million cells in the human body, and hers were saying good-bye to each other, one by one. She’d rather he was dead than with another girl.

  Except, of course, she wouldn’t.

  Miya, recovered, talked over her. “What was she saying about you and Trevor running some kind of business, pimping girls?” she asked Gillian. “Could the redhead have been one of those girls?”

  “Not pimping, matchmaking.” Gillian sucked in her cheeks and shook her head. “And no, no redheads. We had black girls, white girls, Latinas, Asians, but I don’t remember any redheads. I didn’t know about Aliya, she didn’t know about our partnership. Maybe Trevor had a million different lives.”

  That Gillian, such a comfort. Except that then Gillian was putting her arm around Aliya’s shoulders, giving them a little go-ahead-and-cry pressure; comfort had been sarcastic, in Aliya’s head, but here it was, real. She shaded her face a little, but she let the tears come.

  Gillian took her arm away and rooted out a handkerchief, handed it to Aliya. “Any more revelations?” she asked Miya.

  Aliya blotted her eyes, avoiding Gillian’s. Her gaze went up, to the right—she was the one looking at the bulletin board now. Posessed? read the top line of a pink flyer. Indian swami and Japanese Kitoshi can ease your bad luck. Multiple pathways to The Power increases your optimal truth. And underneath: Contact Vivek Nehru at 555-7640, or Yoko Kano, upstairs, apartment 7B. The word contact seemed to stand out, brighter, more vivid than the rest.

  “Gillian,” she said, interrupt
ing some discussion about whether Trevor ever said sorry in his life. “What was that you were saying before, when you told Miya she could maybe talk to Trevor?”

  Gillian met her eyes, then looked away.

  “You were thinking obeah, right? Don’t deny it—you guys want to talk to Trevor just as much as me.”

  Gillian shrugged. “No one has it as bad as you, girl.”

  Aliya rushed on. “Here’s what I’m thinking.” She leaned past Gillian, drew in a whiff of jasmine-scented perfume, and ripped the flyer off its tack. “Did you see this?”

  Gillian’s lip curled. “Indian? Japanese? What do they know about magic? No offense,” she added, gesturing toward Miya.

  “Actually, you’re wrong,” said Miya. Her voice was a little stiff, but strong, confident, the way she used to sound in class, answering some question that wasn’t even in the book. “Japan does have magic. Not in the cities maybe, but in the villages, there’s still a lot of old knowledge. My mom was just telling me about it, actually.” She stared over their heads. “An odd coincidence, if you think about it.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Gillian.

  Aliya hardly listened. A physical force seemed to be pushing her onward. She felt it on her shoulders, pressing forward; inside her chest, clamoring to get out. “Look, something happened that night in my bedroom. I called on the jinn to contact Trevor, and the next day, I got an e-mail. Maybe I’m just not strong enough, effective enough, creative enough—something enough, to go it alone . . .” She waved the slip of paper in her hand, but she wasn’t thinking India or Japan. She was thinking Damascus. Arabic orchestra lilting in the background, the scent of jasmine wafting in the window. What was it Old Aunt said? There are Muslim jinn and Christian jinn and pagan jinn; every person in the world has their own private jinn, just waiting to tempt them into their heart’s desire. “Maybe together we’d be powerful enough to get Trevor to—to listen. To pay attention. To hear us.” She held back the last words: to speak.

  “You crazy, girl,” said Gillian. But she was picking at her manicured nails, unwilling or unable to look up.