As he turns to the door, I turn with him and put a hand on his wrist. I feel a spark. “Yes.”
He looks back. “Yes, what?”
“Yes. I like handcuffs.”
16
I WAKE exhausted on the day of our Grand Opening. Much of it is the worry and the frenetic pace Sebastian and I have been keeping to get things ready. But some of it is the poor sleep I’ve gotten. I haven’t dreamed of the woman since our encounter, but every time I fall asleep, I feel a strange sensation, like I’m not alone, like someone is standing over me, and it keeps waking me up. I can’t help but think about the dream, and how I’ve died in it. As a result, my sleep is fitful and broken up and I feel far from rested.
When one of Sebastian’s chocolate sculptures doesn’t turn out, I totally rag him out. The store is opening in just under an hour, so I take myself out into the alley and sink down on the stoop in the doorway and light a cigarette from the pack I bought at the CVS on the corner.
I haven’t smoked in years. It both calms me and pisses me off at the same time.
I stare at the spot where the man died, and I feel the unusual sensation of wanting to cry. But about what, I’m not sure.
Sebastian steps out moments later and sinks down, his apron an ugly ruin of smeared chocolate fingerprints.
I pass him the smoke. “Sorry. I’m being a bitch.”
He shrugs. “You are a bitch. But that’s okay. I shouldn’t have been so ambitious with the elephant,” he says, referring to the sculpture that didn’t survive the night in the deep freeze.
He’s made several sculptures for the Grand Opening and set them out on fancy pedestals, all circus animals. Only the elephant didn’t survive.
I shake my head. “Your work is amazing. Hell, you’re a better chocolatier drunk than I’m a candymaker sober.”
He grins ear to ear, wisps of smoke rising from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“And you have no idea where you got your skills?”
“None.” He scowls up at the sky as he thinks a long, hard moment. “But I think I might have worked in a circus once.”
I find that amusing and laugh. “I suck. I’ve had no sleep and I’m pretty sure it’s coming around to my time of the month.” I shrug. “It’s a girl thing.”
“I was a girl once,” he says, and then he stares hard at the ground as if the answers are there. “At least…I think so.”
I remind myself of how amazing Sebastian is, how many wild skills he has. If I can think of it, he probably knows how to do it. I wonder how many lifetimes he’s lived. But I’ll never know—and neither will he, apparently.
We go back inside and Sebastian hands me a shot of bottom-shelf gin from his secret stash. The stuff is terrible and tastes like turpentine, but it warms me up and tames my sour mood so that, by the time we’re ready to throw open the doors for the first time, I’m smiling like an idiot.
The turnout is impressive. Within an hour, we have what feels like a hundred people squeezed into the tiny space, perusing the barrels of candy, admiring Sebastian’s chocolate circus (minus an elephant), and gobbling down free samples. It’s Saturday, and there are couples, families, and a lot of kids. One little boy knocks over Sebastian’s chocolate tent and breaks the head off a chocolate horse. He starts to cry. The parents are all shame-faced and nervous, but Sebastian sweeps in and assures them it’s all right. He scoots down and talks to the little boy, then “magically” produces one of my homemade lollipops from his sleeve like he’s a magician. I know he carries those around.
The boy’s eyes light up, and the couple, as well as the whole store, is suddenly happy once more. After cleaning up the broken chocolate horse, we decide to move the chocolate circus off to one side so there are no further incidents.
Sebastian is happy and smiling.
“Not upset?” I ask after we rearrange things to accommodate the increased foot traffic.
“Nah. Poor lad. He meant well. He wanted to touch the horse, is all.”
I marvel at Sebastian’s patience with the child—something I’ve never possessed myself. And not something I expected of him. “You’re amazing,” I tell him unexpectedly.
“Yes, darling. I am,” he agrees, touching his heart.
I laugh. “Humble, too.”
“I like children,” he says, watching the little boy walk away happy with the lollipop in his mouth.
It hits me that, considering Sebastian’s multiple lifetimes, it’s very much a possibility that he was a parent at least once—maybe even more than once. Not that he would remember. He probably has family out there somewhere that he doesn’t even remember exists. I find that sad.
We sell out on chocolate boxes and about half the hard candy, including the honey-flavored Sweet Stix. The crunchy-natural hipsters seem to like those. The kids, of course, are fascinated by the beecosystem, though some of the parents are horrified by the sight of it until I show them there is no way the bees can escape.
Around noon, Sebastian and I don our aprons and do a chocolate-sculpture and candy-making demonstration. While we’re working, an older, well-dressed woman with grey hair interrupts and asks us about the hex symbol on the wall behind our worktable.
She looks ultra-conservative and I stumble on a response.
“It’s for good luck,” Sebastian pipes up when he sees I don’t know how to explain it. “Like the Pennsylvania Dutch hexes you see on barns?”
That satisfies her. Suddenly, it’s not odd at all. Barns out in the country have them all the time.
A news crew arrives soon after, wanting to interview us for the evening edition. I leave Sebastian to do most of the talking. He’s already a big hit with the ladies and he’s eating up the attention. I retreat to where the grey-haired woman from earlier is standing alone, studying the hex.
I touch her shoulder gently and she turns. There are deep concern lines in her face. “Maybe I can help you find something?” I offer. Her interest in the hex is starting to worry me.
“No, dear, I’m fine,” she says kindly and reaches out to touch my arm. I feel a slight spark. I don’t think she’s a witch, but she has a touch of the Otherkind in her. She nods at the mural. “The glyphs in this symbol are interesting. Did you paint them?”
I’m hesitant to respond. I don’t know why she’s so interested, but after a few seconds of awkward silence, I say, “You know what they are, don’t you?”
She shakes her head. “Not really. My grandmother had books with similar glyphs. She was touched with the craft. Me…” She laughs sadly. “I’m just a retired schoolteacher and mother and wife.”
We stand side by side for a long moment. I have a feeling I can trust her, so I say, “All women have a touch of the craft in them, you know.”
“Including you, dear?”
“Yeah. I’m a witch.”
She doesn’t even blink. “I thought as much. Do you make talismans?”
I don’t really know what she means, so I say, “Is that like…a charm or something? For good luck and love and such?”
“Something like that. My grandma could make them. I wish she was here.”
I feel nervous asking it, but I do anyway. “Is there something I can make for you?”
She’s even smaller than I am and has to look up at me. She’s not as old as I first thought; her face is simply ravaged by pain and years. “Not me. My son.” She reaches into her purse and withdraws the picture of a young man in Army fatigues. She shows it to me. “His name is Connor. My only child. He served two tours of duty in Afghanistan.”
I take the picture. Connor’s in full desert combat gear, kneeling with his platoon beside a helicopter. I don’t recognize Connor, but I know that guarded smile. Josh wore the same expression when he sent me pictures from his outposts.
“After Connor was discharged, he came home to live with me. But he hasn’t left the house in almost a year.” The woman swallows so hard I can hear the click. “Most days, he stays in his room. Doe
sn’t even get out of bed.”
I look up. “Have you tried talking to a doctor about him?”
She nods. “He’s seen a doctor. A therapist, too. But they can’t seem to get through to him.”
“Have you—?”
She interrupts me. “I’ve talked to him. His friends have talked to him, too. It doesn’t help.” I see her swallow against breaking out in tears. “I think he’s given up. I’m afr…” She looks to the floor and has to take a moment to compose herself before she looks up again. Her eyes are wet. “I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself one night. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to turn to anymore.”
Her story tears at me—and not for the obvious reason that Josh went through something similar. She looks desperate and lonely and beyond frustrated. A mother who can’t protect her only child. I know what it feels like to be at your wit’s end, with no one to turn to who can help you—who can even understand.
I look down at the picture again, then up at Connor’s mother. They look a lot alike. “Can I keep this picture?”
“Of course!”
I let out a shaky breath.”I can’t promise it will work. I haven’t been doing this very long.”
“But you will try?” She takes the picture back and quickly scribbles her phone number on the back. “Please try.” She pressed the picture back into my hand. “I’ll pay any price you ask.”
After that unusual—and sobering—encounter, I spend some time talking to a stringer from the paper about the shop while a cameraman films the interview. I awkwardly go on about why I’m launching the shop, stumbling all over myself. After a few seconds, Sebastian, a true showman, steps in and diverts the attention to himself, which I really appreciate. I’ve suddenly recognized a man coming into the shop.
I push through the crows and race toward him. “Josh!” I call and see him turn toward him.
His sad, familiar grin fills me with a bolt of giddy happiness as I jump into his arms.
“You made it!”
“Of course I made it! Did you think I wouldn’t be here to see my little sis conquer the world?”
I laugh and kiss his scruffy cheek. “I knew you would. I looked into my crystal ball, you know.”
He laughs.
Josh hangs out in the shop until closing time, which is pretty late—around one o’clock, which is how long it takes for us to clean up. Upstairs, I collapse into a chair around the cheap Walmart dinette set we sprang for a few days ago and Sebastian picks up the old rotary phone on the floor to call for a pizza from the shop down the street.
“How is everyone?” I ask Josh while we crack open some celebratory beers.
He waggles his hand. “It’s Blackwater. It’s either super quiet or super fucked up. At the moment, it’s super quiet, which is either cool or boring, depending on your disposition.”
Our conversation segues into the school shooting that occurred last summer. The town is still recovering from that. Like Blackwater needs any more crap to make it dark and depressing.
Sebastian perches on a stool and keeps making low-key lascivious gestures toward my big brother. I make a shooing motion. He rolls his eyes. Moments later, there’s a knock on the door downstairs and he jumps down. “Pizza!” he proclaims. “One of the few American specialties I can abide!”
After he’s gone, I ask Josh in a low tone, “Have you talked to Nick of late?”
“I only ran into him once while I was in Dollar General. He was behind me, eating something. Swedish Fish, I think. But we didn’t talk.”
I roll my eyes. “He evaded you?”
“I think he was preoccupied.” He stops and thinks a moment. “He’s been hanging out with this coven that has a house up on Lake Ariel.”
I know enough about my ex to know he’s fallen into a little coven of Satanists that just love the hell out of him. He’s like their very own personal Elvis. These days, they’re all cozy up in their little painted Victorian, engaging in rituals and orgies or whatever it is modern day Satanists do.
“I didn’t tell him about anything you’re doing,” Josh assured me, sipping from his Yuengling bottle. “I don’t gossip about you. You know that.”
I take a sip too and swallow hard. “Don’t care. You can tell him anything you want about me.”
His eyebrows bounce up. “Thought you’d be angry if I told him about the shop.”
“Nick doesn’t care about me or the shop,” I say bitterly, knowing that’s not true. “And, anyway, he’s pissed me off.”
“What did he do this time?”
“Well, for starters, he never gave me back my athame after he borrowed it from me forever. So, yeah. I’m pissed about that.”
Josh laughs. He doesn’t buy into the craft, I know. “Good ol’ Saint Nick,” he says, saluting him. “God forbid he should consider the consequences of what he’s doing.”
I don’t want to sound so bitter and angry. I’m not actually angry with Nick any longer. I’ve since accepted that this is just who he is. Selfish, a liar, a bad guy wrapped in pretty wrapping paper. I’m not judging, mind you. He’d say the same thing about me and he’d be right.
Josh says nothing about my outburst, and as soon as Sebastian pounds through the door with the pizzas, the whole mood of the place changes and gets much lighter.
“Took you long enough!” I scold.
Sebastian grins evilly. “Pizza delivery boy was pretty as fuck.”
“Dear god. Wash your hands!”
We all laugh. We eat and drink and chat, and even though we offer Josh a place to crash, he tells us he has to get an Uber back to Blackwater and pack his things. He’s talking to a record producer in L.A. about some high-end gig and he’ll be gone for a couple of weeks.
At the door, I hug him and cry. It’s stupid, but I feel like I might not see him again. “You’ll call?” I know how bad he can be about staying in touch. Sometimes he goes weeks without answering his phone or calling me, and then I worry he’s gone into his dark place again.
I think about the young soldier, Connor.
“I’ll call. Promise.” He kisses my forehead and slips out the door and into the night.
I walk to the end of the alley to wave to the Uber whisking him away.
It’s nearly two in the morning before I crash onto the air mattress. I can still smell the pizza and chocolate on my clothes—and Josh’s scent, his cologne. I should be really happy. In less than six months, I have a new life, and, now, a new man. I have Josh. And Sebastian.
But I can’t stop thinking about the woman who is going to kill me.
17
THE REVIEW we get in the Sunday edition of the paper isn’t what we expect. Turns out, the critic who visited us has a long list of complaints we never saw coming. The shop is too small, the chocolate sub-par, and she’s stupidly freaked out about the bees.
Sebastian is enraged—and he almost never gets angry. The kitchen table literally starts to vibrate until I put a hand over his and tell him to calm down.
I read over the review a second time, telling myself the critic is an idiot, but I know some of it is at least partly true. We did an okay job, but there’s probably more we could have done. More prizes, more giveaways, more fanfare. It sticks in my craw, but I can’t just crawl back into bed and cry over my hurt feelings. So I shower and change, put my hair up in a bun and tie on my apron as I step into the prep room. We have things to do.
We prep from five to eight, and then open Confessions for its first official day as a working store. Traffic is light at first but picks up significantly around noon. Late afternoon there is a small rush. We don’t do the business we did the day before, but our take isn’t bad.
The following day, traffic is a little slower, but I chalk that up to it being a workday and to regular ol’ Monday blues. But in the week that follows, things don’t really pick up. I don’t want to say it’s the review, but I figure it’s probably not helping much.
By Wednesday, I’m starting to fr
et and I notice that Sebastian is going out drinking every night and isn’t his best in the morning. He’s hung over and seems perpetually grumpy. That hurts more than anything—the realization that I’m letting him down.
By Friday morning, we haven’t sold enough to even warrant much prep and Sebastian decides to sleep in, which I translate as him wanting to run off and day drink in some godforsaken armpit dive. I’m scared he’s starting to spiral. Still, I dutifully go downstairs and tie on my apron and open the shop.
With nothing much to do and no customers to serve, I step into the prep room and take the picture of Connor out of my pocket. I’ve been carrying it around with me all week. I set the picture down on a prep table and look down at it for several seconds. He’s a young, handsome, sandy-haired boy with blue-grey eyes, but I can see the shadow of the sadness in the lines around his eyes and his strained smile.
I walk to the sliding partition that separates the prep room from the rest of the shop (useful when we have to carefully control the temperature of the room while making hard candy) and slide it closed and lock it. No one is coming into the shop, so who fucking cares, right? I then go to the door that leads upstairs to the loft and lock that one, as well.
I’m now completely isolated. The room feels small, and, with no windows and only the fluorescent lights above, darker and colder. There is only the hum of the refrigeration unit and the din of the bees in their hive. I walk to it and unlock the drop window, sliding the panel up so the bees are free to fly into the room.
There is no chaos, as you might expect. My bees are extremely well behaved. I scoot down to address the queen while her thousands of servants—my familiars—hover over me like a protective cloud. “Looks like I’m going to need your help, sister.”
I don’t feel silly talking to her—and, by extension, the hive—because I can feel their response like a low hum in the back of my brain. There is great enthusiasm among the members of the hive. They will do as I ask. In fact, they will die—or kill—if it ensures my will is fulfilled. They will go into the fire for me. It’s a scary kind of loyalty and not something I’m used to experiencing.
To the Devil a Daughter Page 8
