Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1)

by J. Morgan Michaels

  It’s Mom, Hat. She’s dead.

  The soundtrack was still on repeat. For the first time since I heard those words, a few tears escaped the fortress of my face, but I wouldn’t let go completely. I couldn’t be sure they’d ever stop if I did. The tears dripped off my cheeks and into Cat’s fur as I let his light breathing, with just a hint of a purr, sing me to sleep with its peaceful rhythm.

  A few hours later, light from one of my few windows started to tease my eyes open. Cat was a real trooper in my time of need and hadn’t moved at all. There was a moment, the briefest of moments, where I looked around and everything seemed normal. Before the memories could attack me, my mind fantasized that I’d just woken up from a bad, twisted dream and everything was actually okay. But it wasn’t.

  I opened my phone to see ten missed calls and a few text messages, all from Walkers. I closed it without responding to anyone; there was nothing I could say. No words could answer their questions of how I was without making the whole situation a lot more real than I was ready to let it be.

  One of the text messages was from Charley telling me I was already late to meet everyone at the funeral home. I changed into the first clothes I saw, splashed mouthwash on my face instead of water by accident, and rushed out the door.

  Okay. Funeral home. That’s normal, right? That’s where people go when someone dies.

  It’s Mom, Hat. She’s dead.

  Fuck.

  The funeral home was bright and cheerful, which I found morbidly oxymoronic. If I was in a better place, maybe I could have understood why a business like that would need to have artificial cheerfulness to combat the unhappiness and loss that fueled their revenue. If so, maybe then I might have appreciated the sun-filled windows, the stuffed flower boxes, and the bright shades of canary yellow on the walls outside.

  I entered through thick, wooden double doors which made too much noise when they opened to try to slip in. Sydney was in the corner talking to a tall man in a dapper blue suit. Charley and Finn sat on a church-like bench nearby watching them, averting their eyes to the showroom full of caskets. The man in the blue suit was addressing someone else, too, someone I couldn’t fully see from the door.

  “I love it,” that someone said in an uncomfortably high squeal and I saw Charley roll her eyes. Then I realized who it was. It was her mother, my mother’s younger sister Camille. You know, the one that had dumped Charley on my mother’s doorstep and never came back.

  “Manhattan, is that you?” Camille barked from around the corner. “You’re late.”

  I didn’t bother responding. Camille wasn’t a bad person, per se, she was just a lot to handle. If you didn’t know her well, you’d think she was vivacious and adventurous. Well, she was those things, but if you had to spend as much time around her as I had, you’d know she was also selfish, aloof, and an all-around pain in the ass. My mother had never, and would have never, said she didn’t like Camille . . . but my mother didn’t like Camille either.

  I was introduced to the funeral director, the man in the blue suit, whose name I forgot immediately. Nothing in his world was real to me yet, including him. “Ms. Walker and I were just discussing the casket with your sister,” he said.

  I rested my chin on Sydney’s shoulder from behind, wrapping my arms around her and looking over her at the flip-book of caskets. The funeral director had a small notepad next to it and at the top, my mother’s name written. Amelia Walker.

  I can’t believe this. Are we seriously shopping for a big box to bury our mother in? Wait.

  “Camille, Mom wanted to be cremated.” I came out of my fog long enough to form and communicate a full thought. What were we even doing there? My mother has explicitly told me, told all of us, that she never wanted to be buried in a big box.

  “It serves no purpose,” she’d said on many occasions. “Why should you kids go through all the hassle of staging me in an expensive box and then dropping me into a big hole? I’ll already be dead; I promise I won’t care.”

  “Oh, Hat. I don’t think anyone really wants to be cremated. It’s just sort of something you say, like ‘you look pretty today,’ or ‘sure, I’d love to babysit.’ I think she just didn’t want to be a bother. No, it will be better if we buried her next to our dad.” She reached out and cupped her hand around my face and patted me like I was a small child. Maybe it was meant to reassure me. But, reassure me it did not.

  Sydney shifted her eyes away from mine, confirming my suspicion that Camille had already bullied her into this decision before I had gotten there. She was the big sister. It was her job to take care of this, to do what Mom wanted. Not mine. I made pleading eyes at the younger two, Finn and Charley, but they strained themselves to keep from noticing.

  In an unprecedented act, I decided to enter the arena against my narcissistic aunt. I put my hand over the book of caskets and started, “Camille . . .”

  “Now, listen. Auntie will take care of everything.” She turned her back to me and said to the funeral director, “We’ll have the wake here on Monday, followed by the funeral at St. Albert’s cemetery on Tuesday morning. Oh, Mia wasn’t really Catholic, though. But who is these days? The boys went to school there, I’m sure that’s enough. It’ll be fine.”

  There was a foreign taste in my mouth, blood maybe, as I clamped my tooth down on my lower lip. I was screaming inside my head, and the growing ulcer in my stomach was slowly bubbling up, taunting me for my habitual complacency and my seemingly genetic inability to stand up for myself or anyone else.

  My mother wasn’t Catholic, and she wouldn’t have wanted any of what they were planning. I may not have had the nerve to stand up to Camille any further, but I knew who would.

  I ran outside and took my phone out. Dismissing four new missed calls, I scrolled to find and dial a familiar number.

  “Hello?” a warm voice asked from the other side, “Hat?”

  “Yes, Auntie. Hi.”

  “How are you?” my Aunt Gloria asked. If she was upset, she wasn’t going to let me hear it.

  “Um . . . I’m okay, but . . . do you think you could come down to the funeral home?”

  “Sure, honey. What’s going on?”

  “Well, Camille is here, and she’s . . . ,” being an intrusive, controlling bitch, “. . . well, she’s kind of making all these plans, and they aren’t what Mom wanted. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’m getting in the car now. I’ll be there in seven minutes.”

  Gloria was my mother’s oldest sister and being the matriarch of our family was no easy task, I’m sure. But she was good at being in charge, and she was good at handling people, most especially her sisters. She may have been the tiniest of us, but she was irrefutably the strongest of us and everyone in the family relied on her to lead them because of it.

  When she arrived, she bypassed the parking lot completely and drove up on the lawn in front of the funeral home doors, taking out a stone cherub by the walkway’s gate. She stopped long enough to kiss me on the cheek and say: “I’ll take care of it,” before storming through the doors like a four-foot-five, fifty-something-year-old knight without her sword. But anyone that knew her also knew she didn’t need a sword to get what she wanted.

  A few minutes passed and the voices inside the funeral home got louder. Charley and Finn escaped to join me, and the angry voices flowed behind them as the doors shut. It wasn’t the first time any of us had seen Gloria and Camille go head-to-head. Gloria always won, but at the cost of much civility.

  The voices stopped, and the doors swung open again. Camille fled past us without a word and slammed the door to her car as she got in. She paused only to check her makeup and hair in the rearview mirror before speeding off.

  Gloria followed with a sobbing Sydney attached to her arm. “I figure we’ll have a small get-together tomorrow at your mom’s house so that everyone has a chance to have a proper
goodbye,” she said. “We’ll say a few nice things, maybe me and one of you kids, and then everyone can just hang out and enjoy each other’s company. How does that sound?”

  The relief of not having to make any decisions was welcomed by all of us. With the next gust of wind, Gloria was in her car with her Bluetooth headset over her ear as she activated the family phone tree again.

  “You kids make sure to get the house ready. I’ll take care of the rest,” she said over her phone conversation. She backed off the lawn without looking, running back over the fallen cherub she’d hit on her way in and smashing it into a thousand pieces.

  Chapter 5

  It was not uncommon for the Walkers to host services that close to a loved one’s death, despite what others had to say about it. We were not known for convention or conformity anyway. But when it was my mother we were pushing so fast to say goodbye to, it was the most unwelcome of customs. Soon, everyone in my life was going to be in front of me asking me how I was doing. I couldn’t answer that because it was only just starting to feel real.

  Our home was in the historic and beautiful Blackstone section of Providence, a neighborhood with roots in working-class families like ours. Our mother decided to stay there, wrapped in the memories of our childhood, long after we had all moved on. But without her there it felt hollow, even though it was still full of her belongings. I guess that’s what she meant when she said that material things were just that—things.

  “You can always replace things,” she used to tell us, “but you can’t replace people.”

  Her house usually had a warmth about it; this rich, embracing warmth that just kind of hugged you when you walked in. Entering it without her there made me realize that the warmth had disappeared with her, and her house had become nothing more than a large wooden box full of things.

  Commander Sydney, who had packed up her tears temporarily to take out her bullhorn and whip, assigned me our mother’s bedroom. I wasn’t sure I could stand to move any of her things. It would make the situation all too real. That child deep inside me was clinging to the idea that she was still alive and all this talk of her being gone was a prank, or some misunderstanding that had gotten out of control. I wished that kid was right.

  Our mother was a habitually clean person, so it didn’t surprise me when I found the room immaculate. The only thing in it that appeared out of place was a small, leather-bound book that sat atop her perfectly made bed. I picked it up and the deep, musty leather smell filled my nose. It wasn’t much larger than my hand and looked much older than my hand. From inside the leather on the back were four darker leather straps that pulled around each side of the book and shut it tight with a lock. The odd thing was the lock had no keyhole.

  That’s weird. I’ll have to remember to ask her about that. Wait, she’s dead. I can’t ask her anything.

  There I was, looking through her things and it was all getting to be a little too real. Her room—she’d never be in it again. That book—she’d never open it again. She was dead, and I had to accept it.

  I slowly sank to the floor, sitting with my back against the bed. I had to let a few tears slip out before the building pressure of them crushed my insides. It was just a few though. Just enough so I wouldn’t burst, but not so many that I wouldn’t be able to close the flood gates again.

  Sydney appeared in the doorway a while later. “You okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My eyes were sagging low on my wet cheeks as I looked up at her. “I know it’s dumb to think like this, but I just keep hoping if I don’t believe she’s dead it won’t be true, and everything will go back to the way it was before.”

  Sydney gave a sympathetic head tilt and then lowered herself to sit next to me on the floor. “It’s not dumb, Hattie. It just is. We’ll get through this,” she said, pulling my hand into hers and intertwining our fingers.

  I closed my eyes and rested my head on her shoulder. “I know. I just don’t want to have to.”

  I must have fallen asleep at some point because the next thing I knew, Sydney was gone and I was laying on the floor next to the bed. The colorful quilt our mother made from a collection of our baby clothes was draped over me. I unfolded my body from the tight, anxious ball I had curled into, and lightly slapped my cheeks to remind myself of where I was.

  It’s Mom, Hat. She’s dead.

  Keep breathing.

  How long would that last? Would it be my first thought every time I woke up, forever? I had to get out of that house. There was nothing for me to do there but stew in sadness. I ran down the stairs, out the door, and into my car without telling anyone where I was going.

  The house was a mile behind me before I started to even consider where I was actually going. Home? Going far away, much further than that, had an appeal to it. But I knew no matter how far I ran or for how long, my mother would still be dead at the end of it.

  A car stopping abruptly in front of me showed me how little attention I was paying to the road. I slammed on the breaks and made it to a stop just inches from its back bumper. In the narrow miss, everything in my car shifted and flew forward, including the book I had found on my mother’s bed.

  Did I take that with me?

  * * * * *

  The next day, I got to my mother’s house early by my standards, but not early enough for the sibling vote on who’d have to go up and speak in front of everyone, and it was unanimous that it would be me.

  Super. What the hell am I supposed to say to all these people? “Hello everyone. We’re here today to celebrate the life of my mother, Amelia Walker, whose life was unfairly taken from us just a few short days ago. I’m shaken, and broken, and a lot of other things that I can’t even express. And how are you?’

  While that may have been the truth, it wasn’t what people wanted to hear. They needed me to get up there, talk about what a great woman she was, how sad we all were that she was gone, and how she would have wanted us all to celebrate her life in lieu of mourning her death. And those things were all true, because that’s the kind of woman our mother was, but I didn’t care what they needed. I needed her to be alive and if I couldn’t have what I needed, why should I have cared what everyone else needed?

  People started to arrive, and I withdrew to sit in an isolated chair with my back to the door. I kept my eyes on a picture of my mother, my siblings, and me at a weekend vacation on the beach. You could see our smiling faces, but we were all holding up our hands showing a finger to the camera. No, not the finger you’re thinking of. It was our pinky finger.

  “This is how you know you’re really a Walker,” my mother said to me once when I was a child, showing me my noticeably crooked pinky finger.

  “But how come it has to be different than everyone else’s?” I asked.

  “Because you are different from them, Hattie, but you’re the same as me and the rest of the family.” She showed me her crooked pinky finger. “But who wants to be normal anyway?” she said in a reassuring voice I would never get to hear again.

  My hands were shaking at the thought of having to talk in front of everyone. Not because I was afraid of talking in public, but because I was afraid of what I had to talk about. As if my heart had hardened and fallen into my stomach, I was reminded that she was more than just my mother, she was my siblings’ mother, an aunt, a sister, and a close friend to so many. And for a moment I was sadder for them having lost her than I was for myself. I knew if she were there, she would have been the first to tell me to stop being so damn selfish and be there for my family when they needed me most.

  Damon found me a little later in a corner sitting in the raggedy rocking chair my mother refused to get rid of. “Hey,” he said, sliding onto a small table across from me.

  I didn’t look at him. “Hey D.”

  He leaned in to hug me and his crisp white dress shirt crumpled around my face. “How are you?”


  “I’m okay, I think. I’m sorry I haven’t called you back.”

  “It’s fine. But, how are you?” Damon asked again.

  Damon was like the big brother I never had, and he knew me well. Too well, probably. We had shared a bedroom for a while when we were kids, in the aftermath of intersecting divorces too complicated for us to understand at the time. We made a deal way back then and it was simple: no bullshitting each other. With our fathers suddenly absent from of our lives and our respective sibling relationships tense because of it, we just couldn’t handle any more bullshit than we were already dealt. It was a passionately serious pact, sealed with the shaking of crooked pinky fingers, and it afforded us the license to push the other when we felt they weren’t being forthright.

  “Not good,” I answered. “I’m holding it together, though.”

  “Hey boys, we’re getting ready to start,” Gloria said. She walked with me through the crowd, and past a still-indignant Camille without acknowledging her. Two of my younger cousins had just finished setting up a makeshift riser, and Damon’s purple-haired, punk-rock younger sister was plugging in one of her practice microphones and a small amp.

  “Do you want me to go first?” Gloria asked.

  “I think I should. That way, if I fuck up or don’t know what to say, you can take over,” I whispered.

  She handed me the microphone. “Okay. Let’s get goin’.”

  I got up on the riser and tried to hold the microphone steady in my shaky hands. “Hi, family,” I said meekly. No one stopped talking.

  “Hi, family,” I said again, trying to project my voice into the microphone. I only succeed in amplifying a large thud, the sound of my teeth smacking into it. At least it got their attention.

  Silence fell over the room. I tried to swallow but my throat was dry like someone had poured flour down it when I wasn’t looking. Slowly, I scanned the faces of the audience: family members, friends, friends of family and even more people who I didn’t know looked back at me.