“I can imagine,” she said. “I haven’t been down to her basement in years, but even then it was jam-packed. I think Eleanor saved every sock and paperclip she every bought.”
A bored-looking guy came to the table to take our order; French toast for me, fruit and egg whites for my mom. I waited for the server to walk away, trying to decide what I’d say next.
“Mom, have you ever seen any pictures of grandma from when she was a kid, or like from her wedding or anything?”
“No,” my mom said. “Come to think of it I can’t remember seeing any of her childhood pictures. But then again, she never was the sort of woman to sit and reminisce about the past. She’s probably got her old pictures stashed away in a closet somewhere. Why do you ask?”
“It’s kind of weird. Like I said, I was cleaning up the basement and I just realized that I really didn’t know that much about grandma’s life. So I started looking for old pictures and there aren’t any. I mean, there are a lot of old pics of me as a baby and stuff, but nothing older than that. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“Maybe, Lucy, but maybe not. Your grandma went through some hard times and it’s possible she didn’t want to dwell on them. Being such a young widow had to have been tough. And,” she said wryly, winking at me over the top of her coffee mug, “I can personally attest that raising a child on your own is no cake-walk.”
The server brought our breakfasts and slumped away. I drowned my French toast in a pool of syrup and began cutting it into delicious sticky bites, hearing my mom mutter something to herself about teenage metabolisms.
“So,” I asked between syrupy mouthfuls, “Was grandma’s marriage happy or what?”
“Yes, I always got that impression. Of course, they weren’t married for very long at all before Richard was shot in Vietnam. She once told me she never even had had a chance to tell him she was pregnant.”
Richard. I had forgotten my grandfather’s first name. But if his name was Richard who was this M. from the letter, then?
“What was Richard’s middle name?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t have any idea. If your grandmother ever told me, I’ve forgotten it. I’m sure we could find out if you’re really curious.”
“Yeah, there’s plenty I’m curious about. Even about the inheritance and stuff,” I wiped a drip of syrup from my chin. “How did grandma get so much money?”
My mom shivered and pulled a green cardigan on over her blouse. “I’ve wondered about that, too. I’d always assumed she got a life insurance settlement when her husband died, or maybe money from her parents, I don’t know. She must have managed it well; as long as I knew her she didn’t have a job, well, other than—“ My mom shook her head slightly and stopped.
“Other than what?” I prodded.
“Other than being a full-time mom and grandma, which is a pretty big job.” My mom looked down at her breakfast and stabbed a strawberry on the end of her fork.
I chewed my last bites of French toast quietly. My mom had been about to say something else; I was certain of it. Something about a job that my grandma had held. Hmm. It was something to mentally add to my quickly-expanding list of questions.
We finished our breakfast and paid the ticket, my mom saying with a grin that it was my turn to pick up the tab next time. She asked what I planned to do with the rest of the day, and suddenly I had an idea. I lied, telling my mom I was going to head home to study for finals. She waved goodbye and we headed to our cars.
I got home and raced to my bedroom, where I’d left the quilt in an untidy heap at the foot of my bed. What if there were more notes inside? I realized that I’d assumed there was only one note inside because I’d only heard the one crackle. I was reluctant to damage the quilt any further, but I had to know.
I spread the quilt out across the bed and headed back to the bathroom to retrieve the seam ripper. I went to work ripping out the stitching and then cutting off the entire back panel from the quilt. I lifted the layer of batting, and there, along the outside edges of the quilt, I found what I was looking for.
There were three more notes tucked inside the quilt. None was very long, and they were all in the same handwriting. I pushed the quilt aside hurriedly and sat on the bed. I shuffled the letters into chronological order and began to read the first note.
January 30, 1969
Success! We found him. I haven’t made contact but I won’t need to. He’s already grown cautious. I’m convinced he’ll move forward with the news, though even he doesn’t know it yet. My readings back it up.
I’m leaving in a few days, coming back to you. I know you’ll have a thousand questions, and I’ve got a few of my own, mostly about Nathaniel. But really the only important question is this: Will you marry me?
I’ll propose the right way when I get there, but I couldn’t wait to say it. I love you and I always will. I’ll see you very soon.
The letter was neither addressed nor signed, but since the writing was the same, I had to assume its author was the same as the first letter and that this letter, too, was meant for my grandmother. I moved on to the second letter.
February 25, 1969
My beautiful wife,
I know you understand why we can’t tell Nat--or really anyone from Guild—but please, never forget that no matter how distant or casual I might act when we cross paths, it isn’t real. Never doubt that I love you or that anything has ever brought me greater happiness than having you as my wife. We’ll be out of here soon. I love you.
My confusion grew. My grandmother had obviously married this guy M. So how did my grandfather Richard fit in? Had she been married twice? I knew my dad had been born November 28, 1969. I counted backwards, and calculated that my grandma must have gotten pregnant in early March, which would make sense given her wedding date with M. Which would all make perfect sense if my grandfather’s name had been M-something and not Richard. The pieces wouldn’t quite fit together. I exhaled in frustration and moved to the last letter. The letters were less tidy on this note, as if they’d been scrawled in a hurry.
April 15, 1969
Read this and destroy it. We can’t let him get his hands on the whole Guild set. The fire will be tomorrow, take nothing but essentials. Be fast. You know where to meet me. Everything we need is there. I love you so much. We’ll be together very soon.
I set the letters on the bed. What had happened in those first few months of 1969? The fire will be tomorrow, the man had said. For him to know that, he would have had to have been involved in the fire himself. The fire was an escape plan, but an escape from what? Who had trapped them? This Nathaniel guy?
I suddenly remembered what my mom had said earlier, that my grandmother had never had a chance to tell her husband that they were expecting a child. With a jolt, I realized that this could mean that there had indeed been a fire--and that my grandmother had escaped but her husband had not. Despite the problem of the initials not matching up, I was convinced my flash of intuition was correct. My grandfather had not died in Vietnam, but in a fire, trying to escape someone or something.
I stretched out my legs and reached for an elastic to pull back my hair. How could I find out more? Why had my grandmother told my mom the wrong story about how her husband had died? Or had she?
I looked back at the letters. The writer had mentioned Savannah and a group called the Guild. A starting place, I figured, so I opened my laptop and searched for guilds in Savannah. My search turned up pages of results, but most seemed unlikely. The letter had almost a fearful tone toward the Guild, which eliminated a lot of the art and community organizations listed. Was this Guild still around? Had my grandma been in the Guild, too? And if so, what on earth was it?
I then entered a search for “Richard Auburn,” and then for “M. Auburn.” Maybe there’d be information regarding his death, either in the fire or in Vietnam. Not single relevant link appeared, to my exasperation. Why hadn’t I ever just asked my grandma for her stories? I realized I’d always j
ust assumed that she’d lived in Boulder forever. She’d never even mentioned Savannah, but she’d obviously spent some time there. Frustrated, I flipped laptop shut. I needed to study for finals anyway.
Chapter 6. Watermark.
I DIDN’T REALLY NEED THE MONEY ANYMORE, but I found myself reluctant to quit my job at Flatiron Hardware; instead, I mixed can after can of paint, giving myself over to the routine tasks of the department, the banal familiarity of small talk with the customers and my boss, Max.
Still, it was a relief to take of my paint-spattered smock at three o’clock so I could head home, glad that I’d worked a morning shift and would have Saturday afternoon to myself. I was eager to clear the master bedroom and decide what color to paint it; my bag was stuffed full of square little paint samples to tape to the wall so I could pick a shade. Blue, maybe, or purple, I thought as I walked toward my car.
“Hey Lucy, come here a minute!” someone yelled toward me. Doris was waving at me from across the parking lot. I forced myself to smile as I approached her; Doris wasn’t my favorite co-worker. An older woman with a bitter attitude, she complained when work was busy, complained when it was slow and was perpetually leaving me single-handed while she took marathon smoke breaks.
“How’s it going, Doris?”
“It’s typical,” she said, hacking out a coarse cough. She gestured at her car, “I got out here to this piece of junk and of course I’m locked out.”
I peeked through her window and saw her keys lying on the seat. “Did you call a locksmith?”
“Oh, yeah, right, I got that kind of money,” she said. “Like I’m gonna pay some joker to come dink around with my car lock. Arm and a leg for five minutes of work.” She shot me a look that clearly showed how stupid she thought my suggestion was.
I was getting impatient. “So did you need my help with something here?”
“Well seeing as how,” she stopped to hack loudly again, “Seeing as how we’re both off I was thinking you could just swing me by my place so’s I could get my spare and then bring me back.”
Ugh. Doris lived at least fifteen minutes from the store, meaning by the time I took her home, waited for her to dig for a spare key and then brought her back, I would have killed nearly an hour of my afternoon. I scrambled for a quick excuse, but I was too slow. Doris was already thanking me and walking back toward my car. She opened my car door, moved my school bag from the seat to the floor and plopped herself down, settling her shoes on top on my bag. Nice.
We drove to Doris’s house, Doris complaining about her adult daughter while I wondered if it would be rude to open a window. Her stale smoke smell was pretty strong. I was relieved when we reached her house and hoped it wouldn’t take too long for her to find the key.
“I’ll be back in a few,” she said as opened her car door. She stood to leave the car and her shoe caught on the shoulder strap of my bag, yanking the bag to the ground and scattering my stuff. “Dang it,” she said, pulling her foot free. “Why are you carting around so much darn junk?”
“Actually, that’s not junk. It’s all stuff I need,” I said. I cut the engine and got out of the car to pick up my things as she stared at me. “I’ll get this stuff, just hurry and go in and find your key, ok?”
Doris huffed inside, leaving me to gather my belongings. I stuffed books and pencils and several tubes of lip gloss back inside my bag. The stack of my grandma’s letters had fallen loose and one of the letters had landed in a drippy spot on the driveway. I held up the dirty letter, brushing away as much of the mess as I could. Good, it was still readable. I turned to place the letter back inside my bag, but something caught my eye.
In the bottom center of the page was a faint design I hadn’t noticed before. I held the paper to the sun to inspect it more closely. Yes, there at the bottom of the page was a barely visible watermark. I couldn’t quite tell what it was. Four small figures: a trophy or a cup, two sticks, a circle. I held the paper closer to my face. The two sticks weren’t the same; one of them looked like a sword.
I set the letter down and grabbed the other letters from my bag, squinting at each of them as I held them to the sunlight. Yes, each letter had the same faint watermark. It was a design I’d never seen before. I wondered if it was from a hotel, or maybe some sort of business. Maybe it would help me decipher the letters and learn more about my history.
I dropped Doris back at her car and drove home quickly, excited to have a new clue to add to my research. I parked and ran inside with the letters, grabbing a note pad to write down everything I’d observed on the watermark. Sword. Stick. Cup. Circle. I brought my laptop to the kitchen table and opened a new search page. I searched for guilds again, but this time added the words “sword” and “cup.” Random links appearing, none appeared to have any connection to another, aside from a few links about sporting events.
I went back to the search page, this time deleting “guild” to search for only sites containing sword and cup. I wasn’t expecting much, given that both were pretty common words, but I was surprised by the results. Tons of links appeared, and many had a shared theme: they were all about Tarot cards.
Tarot cards? I didn’t know anything about that kind of stuff. Intrigued, I read several sites and quickly learned that tarot cards had four suits, similar to regular playing cards. Cups, which were sometimes represented as Hearts, were the suit basically about love. Swords seemed more complicated, and were tied in with conflict, communication and illness. They sounded pretty negative actually. The third suit was Pentacles, also known as Coins or Rings, and these tended to concern study, work or money. Lastly was the suit of Wands, for energy and creativity, it seemed.
I held one of the letters to the light once more, scrutinizing the watermark. What I had assumed to be two sticks could actually be a sword and a wand, I supposed. That would cover all four suits of the tarot. But why would someone have tarot symbols on their letterhead? Did tarot readers get together for a union or something? A social group to read cards? What that what the Guild was? If so, my grandparents must have been involved, but my grandma had never mentioned tarot cards, had she?
My memory flashed, my brain was trying to make connections. Something about a comet, my mind insisted. A comet. I’d seen one once with my grandma when I’d been a little girl. It was a formless recollection and I couldn’t quite grasp the link. It danced on the tip of my memory, but I couldn’t force it, nor could I figure out what it might have to do with the tarot.
The tarot. It was vague but it was a lead, another clue to my past, and I knew what I had to do next. I would learn to read tarot cards. It was the only key I had to begin unlocking the mysteries of my grandmother’s history. And my own.
Chapter 7. The Mystic Wave.
I WASN’T SURE WHERE TO BUY TAROT CARDS, but figured I knew a good place to start. There was a small shop a few streets over from my mom’s office that displayed stuff like inspirational wind chimes and feathered dreamcatchers. I’d never been in there but if any place in this area of town was likely to sell tarot cards, it would be that little shop.
I drove to the shop and parked out front, hoping they were still open. The purple lettering on the door read, “The Mystic Wave: Emporium of Insight.” Oh brother, more like Emporium of New Age Cheesiness, I thought, but swung the door open, causing the sweep of little bells hanging from it to tinkle loudly.
The shop was overly warm and smelled heavily of spicy incense, with jewelry draped over every surface. Shelves of books, candles and more incense lined the room, and a spinning rack advertised feng shui crystals at thirty percent off. I approached the tall slender woman at the register, which was behind a low display case filled with medallions in the shapes of hearts and what I now knew to be pentacles.
The woman at the register turned to face me. “Welcome,” she said. “What can I help you with today?”
I was startled by the woman’s appearance. Her waist-length hair was blond and silver and slightly curled. Her eyes were enorm
ous and a bright blue-green with long thick lashes. She wore glitter on her eyelids, which may have looked silly on some fifty-year-old women but was oddly cool on her. “Um, hi,” I said, feeling suddenly very short and dowdy. “I was wondering if you carried tarot cards?”
“Certainly,” she smiled widely and gestured to the corner of the room. “Did you want a standard deck or a specialized?”
“Standard, I guess.” I fidgeted with the strap of my bag. “Actually maybe you could recommend something. I don’t know anything about them really.”
“Oh a newcomer to the cards!” The woman clapped her hands, seeming more pleased than was warranted. “You’ll love it. Such insight.” She swished out from behind the counter. “Follow me.”
She showed me to wood shelf lined with different boxes and books. “Now,” she said, “Decks usually have seventy-eight cards, and that’s what I use, though there are certainly other specialty or novelty decks that have a beauty all their own. If you’re just starting, though, I’d steer you toward a standard deck. You can learn the imagery and themes and then…branch out.” She made a weird sort of branching out gesture with her hands.
“Ok then,” I said. “Just give me one of the standard decks and some sort of instruction book if you’ve got it.”
“We don’t want just any cards. We want the deck that most inspires you. You’ll never get good readings from an unfriendly deck. We need the deck that extends from your soul.”
Ok, this woman was starting to seem a little dippy. “So how do I know if a deck is, uh…friendly?”
“What is your inspiration color, your color of peace?”
“My favorite color is purple, but I guess I like red a lot, too. Actually, most of my clothes are probably more black, but”
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