The Catalain Book of Secrets

by Jessica Lourey

  As these words are spoken,

  This curse is forever broken.

  John’s body exploded, a wet rain of oil and filth that turned to gas before it hit anything solid. Henry’s molasses laugh echoed, quickly replaced by a scream. Katrine wiped her eyes. Ursula stared forward. Jasmine appeared to be in shock, as were most people in the room.

  Time stopped, packing each person inside the shell of their minds.

  Then, with a roar, a reformed John was dropped from the ceiling, naked as the day he was born. He landed in the middle of the salt circle, whole, unscarred, shivering and crying.

  It was done. The curse was broken. Henry would not be back.

  The weight of this knowledge quilted the air. Time began moving. People looked at each other, their glances confused, hopeful.

  Juni, owner of Faith Falls’ most popular beauty parlor, stepped forward. She’d come to Ursula two weeks earlier for a weight loss potion and was still uncertain what had called her here tonight. “I’ve always wanted to own a bakery but I bought a hair salon instead because fat people aren’t supposed to like food.” Before she was even done speaking, she clapped both hands over her mouth, horrified, unsure why she’d revealed such a personal, random thing.

  But it wasn’t her. When the curse broke, so did the secrets inside of every person in the room, secrets that had kept them small their whole lives. The woman who wanted to swim the English Channel but had visited Ursula last January because she was afraid of water spoke next. She was still surprised that she’d turned off on Hazel and walked into this house when she’d intended to visit the all-night grocery store instead. “I don’t feel like love songs are written for me anymore.”

  The woman with the dreadlocks was so shocked she couldn’t blink her wild tiger eyes. “I’ve never felt like that.”

  “I’m afraid to sing!” Diane was embarrassed to discover that she’d pushed herself to the front of the gathering, almost stepping on the salt circle, and that her voice was too loud.

  The air smelled like firecrackers. The floor started to rumble. Heather, who’d been taught from a young age that it was her duty to keep secrets, felt the effluvium roll out of her, a gas of words that she had no chance of stopping with her lips. “I love my mom, but I don’t like her. I think I’m turning into her. First, I acted mean because I was scared, but it became a habit. I judge everyone, but no one as harshly as I judge myself.” She raised a hair’s breadth off the ground but felt more stable than she had her entire life.

  John twitched on the ground as the secrets continued to drop like frogs from the mouths of those gathered.

  “I was raped,” Jasmine said, pointing at John. When she had discovered her daughter on the other side of that wall, in the grace of the silence that followed, she’d realized that Tara wanted magic in her life even more than Jasmine wanted it out of hers. Jasmine would make sure her daughter learned it on her terms, but she would no longer be a barrier. And she would no longer be the keeper of rotten secrets.

  “I was ten. My family would have helped me, but I was too ashamed. I used my magic to cook a meal that would make them blind to my pain, and that would send my sister away, and then I never used my magic again.”

  Heads snapped toward her. The air crackled. They all bore witness to her pain. Tara slipped her warm hand into her mother’s. Jasmine felt the shame pulse through her, not nearly as strong as the first time she’d confessed and nowhere near as strong as the day it’d happened, but still there, gliding up, and out, but sticking, expanding, crowding her throat. Just when she thought she would choke on the girth of it, she felt another warm grip slide into her other hand. It was Katrine’s. Grateful tears coursed down Jasmine’s face. They tasted like sage.

  “I let John have sex with me when I didn’t want him to,” Katrine said. She was still holding her sister’s hand. “I was too ashamed to ask him to stop. Also, my husband cheated on me and I convinced myself that I didn’t know about it, but really, I’d known from the beginning that he wasn’t the man for me. Oh, and my sister recently informed me that I was wrong about my gift.” She squeezed Jasmine’s hand. “I’m not a spotty mind reader, like I’ve thought my whole life, or at least that’s not all I am. I’m also an empath who makes people better at whatever they want to be better at.”

  People nodded, lost in their own birthing secrets.

  “I had my daughter mix a potion that I used to murder my husband,” Velda said, drawing all attention to her with a snap. She hadn’t meant to confess. Ursula orchestrating this curse breaking had released her of that burden. She’d been so goddamned pleased that her daughter had shown some spine that it had cut the guilt out of her like a surgeon’s blade, as quick and painless as such an operation could. “I’m sorry, Ursula.”

  Ursula considered her mother. “Sorry you killed him?”

  Velda shook her head. “I’m sorry I brought you into it. It’s my greatest regret. But sorry I killed your father? Not for a second. He was an absolute bastard. I miss him, though, every day of my life.” She stepped into the circle and prodded John with her toe. He moaned pitifully. “Or, at least I used to. Also, I know what you think of me, Ursula mostly, but Helena and Xenia, too.”

  Her eyes landed on each of her daughters, a sad smile on her face. “You think I’m vain, and useless. Now stop it,” she said, putting her hand out toward Helena, who was beginning to step forward. “You don’t need to comfort me. I know it’s true. Why do you think I fell in love with your father? He saw right through my flattery and manipulation.

  And I tell you what, I’ve never regretted killing him, not for a second, because I needed to survive. So you can say that I’m selfish, on that you’re right. But you can’t say that I don’t love my girls, because I do, loved them so much that I killed the one man with enough power to see the real me.”

  The constriction fell away from Ursula’s throat and the glass jar encasing her heart shattered into a glorious blue rain. She gasped as she took her first clean breath in forty-two years. It was guilt, not the curse of her father or the promise to her mother, that had kept her silent all these years.

  The air was simmering. When Xenia spoke, a burner on the stove flashed into life, sending glowing orange sparks to her feet. She stomped them out without glancing down. “I’m afraid Helena will die before me.”

  The warm tears burbling up in Helena’s eyes doubled, and she grabbed her sister’s hand. “I’m afraid of that, too. Who will take care of you?”

  “My power lets me read your loose thoughts and see the pain in each of you,” Tara said, smiling shyly at Leo. She paused before continuing. “It lets me see what you all look like naked, too.”

  A few legs were discreetly crossed. Jasmine’s cheeks burned bright red. It was Katrine who caught the lightness in her niece. She started laughing. This was the vision she’d had when she’d shook Ren’s hand at the bead store, secrets shaped like frogs raining down from the sky, each one of them a vivid emerald green, women laughing as the frogs turned into butterflies just before they hit the ground, and air so clean that it smelled like water. The secrets were free, and they were as beautiful and weird as the people who’d held them.

  “Just kidding,” Tara said. “About the naked part.”

  “I-steal-nylons-from-Walgreens,” Diane said, the syllables spilling out of her mouth so fast they exited as a single word. “I can’t stop, and I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even like to wear pantyhose. They make my vagina look like it’s holding up a bank.”

  A bark of laughter erupted from the south side of the kitchen, but when asked later, no one knew who had lit the spark. The cleansing, cool jetstream air grew wider. They weren’t alone in their shame or secrets, never had been. Soon, the room was awash in belly laughs and helpless cackles, doubled-over, bunched-up, tear-filled laughing fits that colored the room dashing bits of blue and gold and tossed the oblivious, roaring men and women—a fraction of whom’d had a chance to share their secrets—off the g
round as if they were popcorn, then held them in the air for as long as they laughed. From the outside, the house glowed like a firefly, and as far away as Battle Lake, people forgot why they were fighting or remembered why they’d fallen in love. When Jasmine floated into her mom, she had one question for her, something that was deviling her despite the laughter she could not contain.

  “Mom,” Jasmine asked as they hovered above the kitchen island. “John wished for you to be poisoned when he ate the pie. What was your greatest wish while eating it?”

  Ursula was smiling so wide that her jaw hurt. She was slowly turning upside down, her dress falling into her face. She held it around her knees. “I wished for you all to forgive me. Because of your pie, it meant I got to forgive myself.”

  Jasmine giggled like she used to when she was a child. Ursula matched it, their girl finding its way back to both of them. The laugh grew and held everyone in the state of Minnesota.

  Artemis, who had been the first to arrive after Velda, loved the mood at the heart of the storm in the Catalain kitchen and he would forever carry it in his heart, but he saw there was still work to be done. While the people in the kitchen bubbled and giggled near the ceiling, bouncing off each other like gentle balls and laughing even harder, he led John out to his car, then drove him to his place. You don’t beat up a naked man, was his reasoning. Even so, John was a man who needed to be beaten up.

  And so, once he had a confused but healthy, clothed John on his feet, he engaged him in an old-fashioned fistfight. John didn’t know what he was fighting for, couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the past year in fact, but he’d lured enough teenage girls and married women backstage after concerts to assume he had this coming. Still, he fought back. Too bad for him Artemis was the 1948 Otter Tail County bantam weight champion and hadn’t forgotten what he knew back then. He beat all the fight right out of John.

  While John was on the ground, flirting with consciousness, Artemis leaned over to whisper something into the vast ketchup of his brain. No one will ever know what he said, but the fact is that John gave up music that very night and took up telemarketing three states over, forever honing his communication skills.

  Summer

  Chapter 50

  Katrine

  In April, a drought had been declared in all of Otter Tail County, including Faith Falls. May blew in on the back of a hot, dust-bearing wind, and they’d yet to see rain. People had to blink to see where they were going, and the soil turned bone dry. Fires were forbidden. Moods were tight. The generosity that had accompanied the unusual spring warmth was replaced with a peevishness, as if people could hear the screech of parched electrons rubbing up against one another.

  “Watch where you’re going!” snapped Michael Baum, his fist in the air before he saw it was Bradley Willmar who had bumped into him on the corner of Lake and Elm streets. In other parts of town, the fights were impossible to stop. The grit in their eyes combined with the unrelenting nature of the wind drove the townspeople to the edge, and then past.

  Heather was the only one who seemed unaffected by the wind’s nagging bite, though she sometimes worried it would blow her away. She’d confided in Katrine that she felt new purpose in the six weeks since they’d broken the curse. Speaking her greatest fear had declawed the lion that was her mother and released her to create a life of her own choosing. She didn’t know what that would look like yet, just that she could do it.

  Katrine waited at a corner booth of the Great Hunan, feeling better than she had in years, and a little nervous. She didn’t know what was causing the tumbling in her stomach. She saw Heather at least three days a week, and they’d gone out a number of times since last fall. They’d grown warmer over the months, culminating in Heather’s spontaneous confession in the Queen Anne kitchen.

  Katrine had begun to wonder if maybe Heather felt just like she did inside: inadequate, never quite belonging. She’d felt a growing kinship with the woman, one that she’d let wither when she’d spotted Ren and Heather’s embrace inside Immanuel Lutheran. But now, unburdened of secrets, she wanted to build this friendship, to confess that she’d harbored a crush on Ren but that she’d come to realize her friendship with Heather was more important to her.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Heather slid into the naugahyde booth. Her red hair was a flawless helmet, her make-up thick enough to remove with a smack to the back of her head. “Are you getting the buffet?”

  Katrine had believed, before she’d learned of her true power, that her gift had never been as useful as her sister’s or Ursula’s, or even Xenia or Helena’s. It was unreliable, for one, as her reads often got muddied by her preconceptions. In fact, she was better at reading someone she didn’t know at all than a person she was close to, and even then, their thoughts came to her sporadically. For another, if her gift revealed what she didn’t want to discover, she was liable to override it, and nothing retaliates like a gift that’s been ignored. Thanks to Jasmine’s revelation about her true power, she’d been seeing who the person could be, not who they were.

  Despite all this, she could still lift random thoughts from a person, and since the Equinox, that magic had become more reliable. Plus, Heather was easy to read. She was as nervous as Katrine, her extra make-up a shield. She was also lonesome, tired of raising two kids by herself, and hungry since five days ago she’d begun a low-carb diet that included skipping breakfast.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Heather asked. “Having another Kat Attack?”

  Katrine had forgotten the nickname they’d given her back in high school when she was reading people. Adam had told her she looked like she was power daydreaming, except that her pupils dilated. He was the only one outside her family that she’d ever told about her gift. “Nice.”

  “I’m sorry.” Heather’s cheeks flushed. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Katrine shrugged. “It was high school. Jasmine and I were a little odd. I get it. And now that you’ve been to the Queen Anne, you know why.”

  “Thank you for letting me stay,” Heather said. “It changed my life. I’ve never felt so light.”

  Diane stopped by the table. All three women smiled at one another, but they did not speak of the curse breaking. Nobody who’d been there ever would, outside of the circle of attendees. “Buffet?” she asked.

  “Just tea for me,” Katrine said. “And seaweed salad. Do you have that?”

  Diane shook her head. “No seaweed salad. That Japanese. You want the buffet?”

  Katrine grinned. “The buffet will be fine.”

  “Me too,” Heather said. “With a diet cola.”

  Katrine and Heather didn’t talk as they stacked their plates. Heather piled meat on hers, though almost all of it was breaded and fried. Katrine didn’t comment. Back at the table, they both reached for the soy sauce at the same time.

  “Can I ask?” Heather began. “Have you seen John—”

  “No.”

  Heather raised her eyebrows and cut into her breaded chicken. “I want to kill him, you know? I get why you went back to his place with him. He’s cute, and he’s not from around here. Not originally, anyway. Plus, who doesn’t like the wounded bad boy? We all think we can fix him, and then maybe he’ll return the favor. Never works that way, though. At least, it didn’t with my ex.”

  “He wasn’t a good guy?” It was an invitation rather than a question.

  Heather seemed to consider withholding the story, then she waggled her empty left hand ring finger and popped a chicken chunk into her mouth. “We’ve been divorced for a year now. He told me we grew apart. What the hell does that mean, anyhow? We were raising the girls, going bowling with the same friends, sleeping in the same bed. So what does that mean, growing apart?” She stabbed another mound of chicken and didn’t bother cutting it.

  “Probably means he’s an asshole, and you’re better off without him.”

  Heather stopped with the chicken almost inside her open mouth. Her eyebrows narrowe
d. “How long does it take to heal from heartbreak? Are you over Adam yet?” Katrine thought of her and Adam sitting on opposite ends of the couch, their legs twined together as they swapped the crossword, drank café au laits, and planned their day. She remembered how he’d come up behind her and hold her while she cooked, nuzzling her neck and laughing when she’d swat at him with a spatula. She thought of how their bodies fit together like puzzle pieces, and how in the middle of the night he’d roll over and pull her into the warmth of him without fully waking up. Then she remembered how he had lied to her when she asked him why he was spending so many nights at work, or the time she’d gotten into a fender bender and he’d been too busy to drive her home from the hospital, or how he’d pick a fight every week and slam out of the flat when he didn’t get his way. “Most days.”

  “Was he an asshole?”

  “Something like that,” Katrine said.

  Heather covered Katrine’s hand with hers. “We’re going to land okay. I know it. I believe—oh!”

  Katrine turned to face the front of the restaurant, where Heather was staring. There stood Ren with his daughters. He was tall, self-possessed, his smile easy. Katrine felt her heart skip its track for a moment, but she shut down that emotion before it went any higher or lower. She was going to respect Heather’s relationship.

  “Ren Cunningham,” Heather whispered. “He is such a doll. And don’t stare now because he’s coming over.”

  Katrine shot Heather a confused look, but she didn’t have time to ask her question because there was Ren, exuding strength and stability and smelling of fresh-washed sheets hung in the sun to dry.

  “Hello ladies.” His smile reached up to his eyes, which were locked on Katrine. “Heather, of course you know Joanie and Patty. Katrine, these are my daughters. I never got a chance to introduce you at Christmas or Sadie Hawkins.”