by C. K. Brooke
This is supposed to tune you out, not turn you on, I scold myself silently. I try to refocus on my breathing as Mason brings me back to a memory from last week, then last month.
“And now,” he breathes, and there’s a slight squeak in his chair as I sense him leaning forward. “I want you to remember an event from last year. It can be any memory. Something that happened last year. Don’t force it; let it flow.” He pauses for a moment, and for some reason, the memory that comes to mind is the night Henry opened his letter of acceptance into medical school.
“Be there,” commands Mason. “Remember what it felt like, where you were. What you were wearing. Who you were with…”
I’m sitting on the kitchen counter in my sweatpants, my hand halfway into a bag of freeze-dried strawberries, as Henry slowly drags the letter opener through the envelope. Our parents sit together at the kitchen table, watching.
“Remember it,” comes Mason’s voice. “Be there.”
My stepbrother’s eyes dart across the page. The instant his brow untightens and a smile relieves his features, I know the verdict. I pop a freeze-dried strawberry into my mouth, just as he gives a whoop and wraps me in an unexpected hug, causing me to nearly choke on my food. I’m swatting his back, laughing through a mouthful of half-chewed fruit as Mom and Greg get to their feet, congratulating him.
“Good,” whispers Mason. “Now, I want you to go farther back, to a time when you were ten years old.”
He takes me through three more memories, one at age ten, the next at five, until he has me recall my earliest memory, the furthest back I can go. It’s a fleeting memory of watching ducks in a pond when my mom and dad were still together. I remember the grass seemed to stand so tall around me.
“Now, I want you to imagine you’re in your mother’s womb. It’s dark and peaceful. You’re safe.” I hear paper rustling, but it doesn’t bother me. “And you hear your mother’s heartbeat: ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom… And go even further back,” he commands gently. “Before that. Before you were Willow. Before you were even conceived. Relax, and let it come to you. Just breathe, and go…back.”
All I see is the same thing I saw in my dream earlier. It looks like a dairy farm, surrounded by fields. It’s whirring by, as if I’m watching through the window of a moving car. There’s a gas station or a convenience store along the road.
This isn’t working. That’s just the dream I had.
“Breathe in.” Mason inhales, demonstrating. “And out.” He exhales.
I copy his breaths. The scenery speeds past, too fast to really get a good look at. I wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me.
“What do you see?”
“There’s a barn…some horses,” I answer, my voice sounding far away.
“Good. What else?”
I’m trying to uncover more, but nothing else surfaces. Inky darkness seeps in and blankets everything, until there’s nothing left to see. “It’s all gone black.” I can hear the disappointment in my own voice.
“It’s okay,” Mason assures me. “We don’t have to see anything more today. Don’t push yourself.”
“Wait.” The word is out of my mouth in a wisp of air before I fully comprehend what’s happening. It’s like the images I just saw are shrinking, and I’m zooming out until I’m hovering at a bird’s-eye level above the farmland and greenery below.
A red car sails down the road. It looks like an old model from the fifties or sixties, but the car itself doesn’t look old. It looks shiny and new.
I know that car.
And I know what’s going to happen.
I don’t want to watch, but I don’t have a choice. “There’s a car…going too fast.” My mouth feels heavy as I try to get the words out. “It can’t stop.”
I know I can’t change what I’m about to witness yet again. Because I’ve been in that car, been that driver, so many times in my dreams before.
It happens so quickly. The car descends a bumpy incline where the road needs paving, past the warning signs, never slowing. It gathers momentum until it swerves left to dodge a pothole, launches onto the bridge, and busts through the guardrail. It plummets into the reservoir at least thirty feet below, soundless, as though I’m watching a movie on mute.
“The car just went off the bridge. The driver’s dead.” I know it for a fact. I just saw someone die.
“Where are you?” asks Mason, his voice suddenly laced with concern.
“Watching…from the sky?” Even I’m not certain.
“I’m going to bring you back now,” he says.
“It’s okay.” There’s a tightness behind my eyes, as if tears might come. “I’m safe here.”
“Willow.” There’s a firmness in his tone I wasn’t expecting. “It’s time to leave the past and return to the present. Return to your mother’s womb, return to your identity as Willow Solomon.”
He takes me through an exercise where I’m riding up an elevator, revisiting the same memories I’d recalled before, but this time in chronological order, until bringing my focus to the present.
When he tells me to open my eyes, I do, only to find them wet. Startled, I wipe them.
Mason rises out of his chair, leaving the script behind on his desk. He comes to kneel at my side, placing a hand over mine on the arm of the recliner. His forehead glistens in the low light as though he’s been sweating, and I notice how warm it’s gotten in his office.
“Are you okay?” He searches my eyes.
I press the button to raise the chair into an upright position. “That was…”
“Intense?”
“No. Yes.” I’m still disoriented. I lift a hand to sweep my hair out of my face. “I mean, I’m not sure if any of it was real.” It had felt so real while I was watching it, just like it always did when I dreamed it. But could it be just that? A memory of my own dream?
“We don’t have to worry about true versus false right now. Let’s just trust that you saw whatever you were meant to see, whatever your subconscious needed to bring to the forefront.”
“But it’s brought the same vision to the forefront before. Albeit, not from that particular vantage point. The bird’s-eye view was something new. Usually, I’m the driver.”
“Wait. You’ve experienced this memory before?”
“In my dreams, yeah.”
Mason runs his free hand over his goatee. The other one remains over mine. Butter soft, warm… “Well, try not to dwell on it. And promise me you’ll take it easy tonight.”
Thinking of my upcoming engagement, I suppress a groan. “I can’t promise you that.”
“Listen, we don’t know what else might come up as a result of opening these doors. We may have only just scratched the surface. I don’t want you to find yourself emotionally overwhelmed. So, just lay low tonight and let yourself process everything, okay?”
“I can’t. I have to be somewhere this evening.”
He finally straightens to his feet. “Can it wait?”
“No. It’s my sister’s birthday.”
“Oh.” He blinks. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Yup.” My sigh must be so heavy, he quirks an eyebrow.
“Bad blood?”
I release a puff of humorless laughter, lowering the footrest. “Let’s just say, we have our differences.”
He walks to the other end of the room to raise the lights. “I admit, you’ve awoken my curiosity.”
I massage the feeling back into my legs as I lower them. The last person I want to talk to Mason about is Heather, but, since he asked…
“Ten years ago, my sister moved out and basically disowned my mother and me. It broke my mom’s heart. We tried to reconcile, but,” I shake my head, “Heather refuses to even be in the same room as her.”
“Whoa. I mean, it’s totally none of my business, but can I ask—?”
“When she was in high school, Heather started going with this holy roller Evangelical dude whose dad was the head pastor at Piney M
eadow.”
“The megachurch?”
I nod darkly. “They got her going to their youth groups and whatever. Next thing we knew, my sister was baptized and converted. They told her she needed to cut all ties with anyone who ‘wasn’t on the path to righteousness.’ Soon as she turned eighteen, she shunned us. To this day, she won’t have a relationship with our mom until she ‘repents.’”
“Damn.”
Thinking about it makes my blood boil. I know that to continue at this point would just be venting, but Mason’s listening, and I see no reason not to go on. After all, if anyone understands, it’s him.
“It’s ludicrous. She can’t just demand that someone abandon their beliefs and who they are. We never asked that of her. Mom was perfectly fine with Heather becoming a Christian—which is a hell of a lot more than most Christian parents can say when their children want to become Wiccan.”
“Besides, that’s conditional love,” he points out.
“Right?” I wave a hand, then smack it down against the armrest. “Totally not what Jesus taught, anyway.”
“So your sister hasn’t spoken to your mom in ten years?”
“Oh, they’ve spoken. It just never ends well. Like the Christmas when Heather’s husband forced her to visit us, and Heather started freaking out over a painting of Aphrodite in the living room and praying to cast out the ‘demons’ from our house.”
I think Mason’s hiding a smirk. “Yikes.”
“So, yeah. Her husband’s still trying to bridge us, because I think he can’t stand the dysfunction, to be honest. Heather at best tolerates me, only because she knows I never officially initiated myself into the craft. So she thinks I still have a shot at being ‘saved.’”
“What do you need to be saved from?” Oh, his smirk is definitely showing now. “Land mines? Flying shrapnel?”
My own lips twist into a smile as I stretch into a stand. “Unfortunately, that’s where I’ve got to be tonight. With my born-again sister, at her husband’s request.”
“Is her husband the holly roller?”
“Oh, no. That’s the funny thing. She dumped that guy shortly after graduation.” But she kept the faith, all right. “She married Brad four years ago. He’s pretty cool. I mean, for a banker.”
“‘Pretty cool for a banker’?” Mason chuckles. “What’s that, an Offspring song?”
I snort, taking up my handbag. “He’s your run-of-the-mill businessman. But he respects my mom and puts up with my sister, so I appreciate that. Even still, tonight’s going to be awkward as all get-out.”
Mason seems to deliberate before asking. “And…is your stepbrother going with you again, for moral support?”
I scrutinize his profile. What the frick is that supposed to mean?
He’s angled his face away as he rearranges some items on his desk, although as a result, it looks even messier than before.
“No,” I answer slowly. “I don’t have any ‘moral support’ this evening.”
“Do you, um—need someone to drive you?”
“I was planning on taking a Lyft…”
“Gotcha,” he says immediately. “It’s cool.”
Oh, my Goddess. Was he trying to offer me a ride and I just completely shut him down? “I mean…I’d love if you could drive me. But I’d never ask that of you.”
He looks up. “Maybe I want to.”
Right, he just said that.
“Okay.” I swallow. “But I still don’t want to ask you to be my chauffer. That doesn’t feel right. I’d rather you come to the restaurant with me, as my—”
“Date?” he suggests, at the same time I say, “Friend.”
“Or friend.” Oh gods, he’s blushing. “Friend works too.”
“I—date is fine,” I stammer, making my way to the door. I slip my phone out of my purse and switch it off of silent mode, knowing I need to text Mom that we’re done, but I’m not sure if I can remember how to type at the moment.
He meets me in the doorway. “Let me know when to pick you up, then. You have my number, right?”
“It’s in your email.”
“Well, seeing as you haven’t made use of it yet, allow me to make it easier for you.” He plucks the phone out of my hand and adds his number to my list of contacts. “There.” He gives it back to me. “Now you don’t have an excuse not to call or text.”
An embarrassingly shaky laugh escapes me, and I clear my throat to cover it. “I was never avoiding you, Mason. I just thought guys liked their space.”
He leans in as he utters, “Space is overrated.”
My phone chooses that precise moment to issue a high-pitched ding, startling us apart. The sound still rings in my ears as I glance down to see a message. “My mom’s in the parking lot,” I report.
“Okay. See you at…?”
“Dinner’s at seven. Come at six thirty?”
“Will do.”
I dig into my wallet and try to shove a wad of twenties at him for the session, but he pushes my hand away. “Don’t even try.”
“You’re the best.” Unable to help my ear-to-ear grin, I leave his office and practically float down the stairwell. What had started out as an evening I was dreading has transformed into something I can hardly wait for.
I’ve only been on one date before, and that was to the movies three years ago. Technically it didn’t even count, because on the way home from the theater, the guy told me he already had a girlfriend.
“You look like you won the lottery,” observes Mom when I hoist myself into her Yukon. “Did you two make out?”
“Mom!” I stretch the seatbelt across my chest.
Her cheeks rise beneath her extra-large sunglasses. “He asked you out, didn’t he?”
I hide my burning face, eliciting a hoot of triumph from her. “Dude, seriously. Can you stop?” I beg. “There’s someone in French Polynesia who might not have heard you just now.”
“Where is he taking you?”
“Mom.”
She lowers her sunglasses to reveal her piercing hazel gaze. “I’m highly psychic, Willow. There’s no use in hiding anything from me.”
I click my seatbelt into place. If she was so psychic, she’d know I’m going to her daughter’s birthday dinner, to which she wasn’t invited. And I don’t have the heart to tell her.
7
I push my waves over my shoulders and apply one last, generous squirt of hairspray. Stay, I urge my hair. It’s perfect right here, the glistening raven ringlets cascading down the neck of my red velveteen overcoat. I found the piece a few years ago at an antique shop. I think it’s from the sixties. It has a badass collar and two silver buttons that fasten at the waist, and goes great over my black lace peasant top and plain black leggings.
I flick off the bathroom light and head up the hall to the coat closet. My knee-high boots await on the shoe rack inside, probably resenting me for never wearing them. They look hot as hell, but they pinch my toes and are deadly uncomfortable after about an hour. Yet I’m trying to dress like a real, functioning adult lately. What was the saying? ‘Beauty is pain’?
As I finish zipping up the sides of my boots, Henry appears at the top of the stairs, laptop and charger in his arms, half a bagel dangling from his mouth. He takes hold of the bagel with his hand. “Where are you going?”
“To see Heather.”
“Oh.” He seems not to care that he’s getting cream cheese on his fingers. “Send her my best.”
“Sure.” I smooth the bottom of my overcoat over the tops of my boots.
“You got a ride?” asks Henry. “If not, I’m free tonight.”
You’re free every night. But I indicate his laptop. “You look busy. And thanks, but a friend is driving me.”
On cue, the flash of headlights in the driveway announces Mason’s arrival. I swing my handbag across my chest. “That’s them. Gotta go.”
“Well, uh…don’t have too much fun.” Henry half-smiles.
“It’s Heather. Tru
st me, I won’t.”
I leave through the front door and greet the evening. The crisp smell of a firepit and burning leaves bends my lips into a smile. I love that smell. It reminds me of Samhain and candlelit rituals with Mom.
I slide into the low passenger’s seat of Mason’s sedan. An MP3 player is plugged into the stereo, and I instantly recognize the song playing. “Sisters of Mercy? Sweet.”
“It’s my goth rock playlist.” Mason smiles behind the wheel, glancing over at me. “I figured I’d put it on, since I know you like H.I.M.”
That was thoughtful. Stupidly, I tuck my hair behind my ear, only to remember I’ve just sprayed it into place and have likely messed it up. Defeated, I drop my hand. “Do you know how to get to Savory?”
“The steakhouse? Yeah, I know where that is.” He watches the rear-view mirror as he slowly reverses the sedan down the driveway. Just then, a neighbor’s car zooms past, headlights blaring, and Mason hits the brake. I jerk forward with an entirely overreactive gasp. Automatically, Mason’s hand finds my knee.
There’s a long silence between us, the only sound Andrew Eldritch’s voice gurgling through the speakers about buh-lack planets, black worlds.
Mason’s hand remains on my knee, making it tingle beneath my leggings. At last, he speaks. “You okay?”
“I’m—ridiculous. Sorry.”
He replaces has hand upon the steering wheel. “I was a little concerned about this, after your regression today. Things could be coming back more strongly for you. That’s why I wanted you to lay low tonight.” He backs out of the driveway without interruption this time. As he navigates through the shadowy neighborhood, I breathe to calm my racing heart. “But, family comes first. I understand.”
We don’t say anything more for the next couple of minutes. When the song ends, the MP3 player shuffles to a new one, and Peter Steele’s sexy voice begins to croon as if straight from the underworld.
“Type O Negative,” Mason laughs. “I haven’t listened to this in forever.”
“What do you usually listen to?” I ask.
“I’ve been more into electronica lately.”
