The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  “Except for the birthmark,” I say.

  “What birthmark?”

  “She had a strawberry-colored birthmark down the side of her face.” I pass my hand down my face from temple to chin.

  Rafferty and Ann exchange looks.

  “What?” I say.

  “Was the girl you saw pregnant?” Rafferty asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Quite.”

  “It’s got to be her,” Ann says. “Looking for Eva.”

  I watch Rafferty consider.

  “Is it possible she didn’t know that Eva was missing?” Ann asks.

  “Anything’s possible,” Rafferty says. He is formal. Professional. His face is stone.

  “Maybe she was trying to give Eva the key,” Ann suggests. “Or looking for help.”

  “Okay,” Rafferty says. “Thanks.”

  He turns to leave. It startles me.

  “Wait,” I say, putting down the basket. I walk him to the gate. “How’s your head?” I ask.

  “Fine,” he says. “How’s yours?” His voice is clipped, the tone sarcastic. “I’ve gotta go,” he says, and walks away from me.

  I go back to where Ann is working.

  She sees the look on my face. “Lovers’ quarrel?” she asks.

  “What? No…. I don’t know.”

  “Call me old-fashioned, but even when alcohol is involved, I believe it’s customary for the new boyfriend to get upset when you spend the night with the old one.”

  I stare at her.

  “It’s a small town,” Ann says. “News travels fast.”

  “It’s not true,” I say. “Jack was here, but I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Hey, it’s not my business.” Ann goes on deadheading.

  I put my hands over my eyes, but the world spins and leans. I throw up for the second time, in the middle of the deadhead basket.

  Ann leaves me on Eva’s couch. I have a fever.

  “Probably the heat,” she says. “Or maybe from the surgery.”

  I tell her about the surgery. In case it is important. Also to explain why I couldn’t have slept with Jack LaLibertie. Or anyone else for that matter. I want her to know.

  “I’ll come by after work,” Ann says. “I have some herbs that will fix you right up.”

  I nod. All I want to do is sleep.

  The fever dreams take hold. I dream about the climb. The one Lyndley made the day she jumped and the one I kept attempting later, when May was trying to keep me alive.

  I had taken Lyndley’s death hard; I had almost died myself. Even Eva thought I should be in a hospital. But May had said no. This was our business. Even the first day she caught me up on the rocks, she still thought she could handle it. She was wrong, of course. The same way she was wrong about a lot of things.

  Her reaction was pure May logic. She called the locksmith to come put locks on all the escape routes from our house. And then she had him board up the Boyntons’ house. The front door was locked, double dead-bolted. The locksmith had no problem installing a double lock on Auntie Emma’s door (their house was deserted and boarded up), but he balked at installing one on ours. Double locks were illegal in Massachusetts, because they kept you from getting out in an emergency. He pointed that out to her, but he’d already put locks on all the first-floor windows and some other places, and May refused to pay him if he didn’t finish the job the way she wanted it done. So in the end he gave in.

  The locks weren’t meant to keep anyone out; they were meant to keep me in. They had me on suicide watch. Even then, people knew that suicide runs in families, and May wasn’t taking any chances with me.

  But May was no match for me when it came to locks. I didn’t even bother with the dead bolt. I had the window locks disabled within about thirty seconds. All it took was a paper clip from the drawer of her desk.

  The moon was full, its pull strong. They were wrong about the suicide thing. I wasn’t seeking peace, or not eternal peace anyway. What I was looking for was perspective. To see things through her eyes. Everyone blamed the abuse. They talked about what Cal had done to her. Everyone said we should have seen it coming. But I knew it was more than that. It was my fault as much as hers. Cal might have abused her. But I had taken away her only hope of escape.

  And so I made the climb again. To try to see things as she saw them. It was something I had to do.

  It was a long climb. Far more difficult than it looked. Some of the dogs came out of their caves to watch me. The birds circled and screeched. Halfway to the top, I cut my foot on a shell the gulls must have dropped. It slid in between my first and second toes, slicing them apart, making the space between them widen. It wasn’t bleeding that hard, considering, but it was continuous, and I couldn’t stop it, so I stopped trying. Instead I just kept climbing, leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of blood drops behind me in case I couldn’t find my way back home.

  It took me what seemed like forever to get to the top, partly because of the shadows cast by the full moon, partly because of my foot.

  I stood for a long time at the precipice where the rocks jut forward. The very spot she jumped from. I stared down at the black ocean below. Then I saw that my dress had changed. I was no longer wearing the cutoffs and T-shirt I’d left the house in, but the white nightgown Lyndley was wearing the day she died.

  The dream shifts perspective again, and I am no longer on the cliff, but in Eva’s parlor on Christmas morning, wearing the white lace nightgown that Eva had given us, one to Lyndley and one to me. And though the view of the water is the same, it is not real, but is the painting Lyndley made for me the last Christmas she was alive. The one she titled Swimming to the Moon.

  I have just undone the wrapping, and I am standing over it, staring at the texture of the water and the figure of my sister, her hair wild and trailing behind, one arm extended, reaching for the path that stretches endlessly in front of her, narrowing as it disappears into the full moon just above the horizon. I am fascinated by the painting, more fascinated than by any other she has done. I am aware of the voices around me, Eva’s and Beezer’s voices commenting on the painting, telling me how beautiful it is. And I ask them how they were able to surprise me like this. I was notorious for discovering my presents before Christmas Day. How had they possibly kept this big package out of sight until Christmas morning?

  The room goes dead quiet. The dream shape-shifts again. The people are gone. Even Lyndley’s arm is gone now as my eyes move in close-up on the painting, examining the detail of the brushstrokes, the amazing colors that you can see only when you get close to the water. Every color is reflected, if you get near enough to see it. I lean in too far, the same way Lyndley did just before she fell from the rocks, and I lose balance, the way she did that night. I am aware then that it is a great distance down. And that I’m not where I think I am at all, not on the rocks Lyndley jumped from, and not in Eva’s living room, but on the Golden Gate Bridge. I am watching my own death, a suicide cliché told in dream terms. Fingers of fog reach up and over the bridge, trying to grab me, to pull me in. But I am already tumbling end over end, and I’m aware that I can’t possibly survive. I feel myself falling into the colors of the paint, but it is rock-hard dried paint, and I realize that it’s too far to fall even if the paint were not already dry, that falling into plain water from this height is like hitting concrete. Unless you fall perfectly straight, you couldn’t live through the impact. But even as I have this thought, the colors below me start to move and turn liquid again, and the perspective shifts once more, and I slide between the colors into the cool of the water.

  I don’t go under it the way Lyndley did. I am not in the water, but in the painting itself, and I’m swimming on its surface through a mist of colors. Swimming to the moon. I am trying to catch up to Lyndley, who is there ahead of me, her red-blond hair trailing behind her. She is swimming away from me, moving fast, and I am trying to catch her, but I’m not as strong a swimmer as she is, and the distance between us keeps widening. Off
to the left is Children’s Island, and dead ahead the moon path is replaced by fog.

  Cold and exhausted, I call her name. The fog is everywhere now. I turn in each direction, but the colors have disappeared. The ocean is dark and empty. I am out of breath, but I keep swimming in the direction I saw her go, ignoring every sense that tells me not to.

  I call to her again. “Lyndley!” And my voice cuts through the fog. I see the hair again, or just a glimpse of it, and some images it holds—a shell, a sea horse. I call her name again. She hears me, turns. But it is not Lyndley’s face I am looking into. It is Eva’s. Her expression is loving and kind. She is trying to say something. I stop swimming for just a stroke. I listen.

  “Run for your life!” she yells.

  Once again I am on the rocks. I scramble down them, aware of the blood. It is everywhere now, covering things. The rocks are slippery with it. It takes a while to get to the base.

  I feel Cal’s presence before I see him. His hand grabs my wrist.

  Then the dogs start to appear, watching, waiting. Waiting for me to give them permission.

  They are on him. Quickly. Tearing him apart. I could stop them; I know I have that power. But I don’t. I want Cal to die.

  The blast of a gunshot wakes me from my fever dreams. No…not gunfire. Thunder.

  I am cold with sweat. But better. The heat has broken. Rain slaps the panes, then rolls in over the sills as if the house were a huge ship that’s taking on water. I run around closing windows. Then I see the clock. I’ve slept for an hour and a half. Only ten minutes and the Realtor will be back with another client. I grab Eva’s yellow mackintosh and rush outside into the rain.

  The air is cooling. Not just because of the downpour. I can feel the cold front moving in. I cross the common, not fully awake yet, having no idea where I’m going, but heading out into the storm. I stop at the corner to let the Duck Tour pass. AMPHIBIOUS VEHICLE, it says on the side. The front of it looks more like an army tank than a tour bus. A miked voice identifies landmarks as they pass, asking if anyone knows who the statue is. Everyone guesses it’s a witch. The tour guide tells them they’re totally wrong but that they’re in good company. The statue is of Salem’s founding father, she says, but tells them not to feel bad if they didn’t guess right, because a national magazine got it wrong, too. When their article on Salem came out, she says, it pictured the statue of Roger Conant with a caption that labeled our founding father as “a determined sorceress.”

  It’s surreal. I’m still half dreaming, maybe. Tourists lean out the windows snapping photos as they turn, shape-shifting into tree limbs with waving arms, reaching out the windows to touch me as they pass. Or maybe it’s the trees that are moving behind them, another trick of perspective.

  The rain brings me back to life. I find myself down at Pickering Wharf, outside Ann’s shop, looking at the window display. My eyes focus through the glass, the world behind the world. In the corner Ann’s assistant sits at a round table, tarot cards spread out in front of her. A customer focuses attention on the cards, telling more with just her body language than the cards do, making them unnecessary. I could read the woman even from here: lost love, a sad slump of shoulders. This is a woman whose dreams have died. She has come here looking for hope. Let’s see, a traveler, she will travel. Maybe I’m not really reading, because the traveling part is obvious; the woman is clearly a tourist, so she has at least traveled here. Still, I see more travel in her future. Tell her that, I’m thinking. Give her something to hold on to. “Make voyages, attempt them, there is nothing else.” Eva’s voice, quoting. I don’t know why anyone would want to do this for a living, telling people’s fortunes. It would make me so sad.

  Tourists bustle by. One very round man, who has forgotten his raincoat, wears a black garbage bag with armholes cut out. Tour buses park two across. I don’t remember the wharf ever being this busy. People linger in doorways, under the overhangs, waiting for new weather. If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute. Six witch shops line this little alleyway. I see tourists inside, buying soaps, oils, little bags of potions before they get back on their buses bound for Nebraska and Ohio. Making the buses wait for them. “Oh, please, please wait. I need something for my granddaughter. I don’t know when I’ll get back this way again. Next year we’re going to Atlantic City.”

  Ann’s assistant is ringing up the customer she was reading. The deck of tarot cards sits next to the register. She looks up at me.

  “Is Ann here?” I ask.

  “She’s in the storeroom,” the assistant says. “She’ll be right out.”

  The woman who just paid steps back, and I try to move to the side and out of her way, but I catch the tarot cards, spilling them onto the floor.

  “Sorry,” I say, stooping to retrieve them.

  “Don’t touch them!” the salesgirl says. She kneels down and picks up the cards. The deck is intact except for one card that has landed faceup at my feet.

  The salesgirl looks up dramatically. “The death card.” She lifts the card by the edges, as if it were hot or somehow contaminated. She places it on the counter. Then she walks slowly to a bin of crystals, pulls out an amethyst on a chain.

  She presses it into my hand. “Wear this around your neck,” she says. “Don’t take it off, even when you shower.”

  “What?”

  “You need protection,” she says.

  Ann comes back in then and must see the look on my face.

  “What’s going on?” Ann asks. She regards me doubtfully. “Are you all right?”

  The salesgirl turns to her. “She drew the death card.”

  “You came in for a reading?” Ann finds it hard to believe.

  “No,” I say. “I knocked over the cards.”

  “The death card landed right at her feet. She needs protection.”

  Ann grabs my head and pulls it down, running her hands all over it, feeling and squeezing as she goes. “She’s fine,” she pronounces. She hands the girl the crystal. “Put this back.”

  “Sorry about the head thing,” she says. “It was the only way I could get her to leave you alone.” She looks concerned. “You okay?”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Come on,” she says, leading me to her office. “The death card means nothing,” she says. “Well, it doesn’t mean nothing, but what it usually means is transformation. One way of life ending, another beginning. It’s usually a good thing,” she says. “Plus, it has to be read in combination with other cards.” Ann looks disgusted. “I shouldn’t let her do any readings,” she says. “Remind me to fire her.”

  I try to smile.

  “You look better,” she says, trying to be positive. “A little.”

  I sit on her futon for a long time. She feeds me warm tea with valerian root.

  “It’s natural Valium,” she says. “I drink it all the time.”

  “I need to ask you a question,” I say finally. It’s what I came here for.

  “You want a reading?” She seems surprised.

  “Not that kind of question. Something about Eva.”

  “Okay.” She looks at me.

  “Do you think it’s possible that Eva killed herself?” It’s the question that keeps coming to me. The one I can’t let go.

  “You mean suicide?”

  The word seems wrong. “I’m not sure what I mean.”

  Ann shakes her head. “Eva was the happiest person I’ve ever met. She wasn’t the type to kill herself.”

  I nod.

  “Why would you even ask?”

  I don’t want to tell her about the voices.

  “She knew I was coming,” I say. “I’m pretty sure.”

  Ann considers. “Well,” she says, “Eva was a reader. She knew a lot of things, didn’t she?”

  “She sent me her pillow. The one she used to make the lace. Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe she just wanted you to have it,” Ann suggests. It’s supposed to make me feel b
etter, but it doesn’t. “You didn’t find a note or anything.” It was more a question than a statement.

  “No.”

  “I don’t think it was suicide,” Ann says. “That wouldn’t make sense.” She wants to say something else but thinks better of it.

  I sip the tea.

  I stay at Ann’s office for a long time. I camp out on the futon. She brings in dinner. She feeds me more herbal teas. At eight o’clock she takes my temperature.

  “It’s not as bad as it was,” she says. “But you still have a fever.”

  “I think I’ll go home,” I say, gathering my things.

  “I’ll give you a ride if you can a wait a little while,” she says.

  I look up at the house. I can see it from here.

  “I’m okay to walk.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Ann says, hugging me good-bye. “Feel better.”

  The truth is, I feel better already. Much better than I felt earlier. Ann has seen to that. A little rest, I’ll be okay.

  I walk up the wharf, cutting diagonally across the common, crossing the street and going through the back gate into the garden. It is still light enough to see, and I notice a few blossoms that I missed right next to the back door. I lean over and pluck the first blossom, then, realizing that Ann must have done something with the basket after I got sick, I put the blossom in my pocket.

  I bend to reach for a second one. My hand misses, and I grab stem instead of blossom, pulling it down low, then watching as it springs back like a tiny catapult, flinging something into the air.

  I hear the sound of twanging as it falls on the bricks. The sound is metallic, a recognizable sense memory. Inevitable. I lean over to see what it is. I pick up…a key.

  The key.

  I stare at it. It is old, not one of the copies made by the police but Eva’s key, the one she used to leave for me in a peony blossom when she knew I was coming.

  I was right. She knew. She knew what was about to happen to her, and she knew it meant that I would come.