“I guess I thought you . . .”
“I’m not.” I started heading for the door.
“Don’t leave,” he stuttered a bit again. “I guess I got carried away. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, really. I have plans, so I need to get going anyway.”
“Oh.” There was a hint of disappointment in his voice. “So maybe we can try this again sometime?”
The kissing or the balance lesson?
“Yeah. Sure,” I said.
Before he could say anything else, I was gone.
Chapter 10
Liv and I made plans to meet up on Sunday morning, and I knew I had no idea what I was in for. Her house was nestled in a quiet corner of Pawtucket, just north of the city. As you’d expect, the inside was beautifully decorated with bright tones of blue cascading across the walls and heavy tan drapes framing the sunny windows. There was at least one life-like, panoramic painting in each room; the living room’s being a huge wood-framed portrait of a barren birch forest in winter. Nothing looked out of place, even if its place was intentionally askew, and the whole house was naturally lit and warm like Christmas morning.
We sat around eating Chinese food and watching bad reality TV for a while. My distaste for the manufactured drama of the program made it hard to focus, so I kept lazily eyeing everything in her house. Pictures tilted in every direction sat atop one of her side tables in diverse, artistic frames. One of them, a picture of her and Cooper, sat openly in front of the others, enclosed in thick glass and a brown frame. Studying the picture, I tried to figure out how long ago it was taken, and how long they had been (not) a couple. The more I focused on it, the more everything else around me just started to drift away, until only that picture was left.
Shit.
I could feel it happening again. The cold sweat, the churning in my stomach, the harsh lights and noises. I struggled, hoping that if I fought it hard enough, it would just go away and leave me be. But as everything decayed into a blur, I knew it was once again out of my control.
“It was an accident,” Cooper said to Liv in an otherwise empty room above his club. He was using a damp cloth to wipe down what looked like an already clean table.
“No, Cooper,” Liv snapped. Her forceful words were laced with anger. “An accident is unintentional, this . . . you had a choice, and you did it.”
“Love, it just happens sometimes, you know that. I can’t always control it, so isn’t that the same thing?” He reached out to touch her arm and she pulled away.
“I don’t think I can ever trust you again,” Liv said, walking toward the door.
“Don’t leave, not like this. Don’t let one stupid mistake throw everything we have away.”
“I’m not,” she said over her shoulder, shrugging. “You are.”
“Damn it,” I said. That hallucination made me dizzy. As I stood, I tried to steady myself on the table, only to knock into it. The picture I was looking at fell off and broke. “I’m so sorry. I’ll clean it up.”
Liv let out a little laugh. “Don’t be. And leave it. I’ll clean it up later,” she said. “It just happened again, didn’t it?”
“What?”
“Whatever happened at Graham’s too. Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. I’m actually kind of worried that there might be something wrong with me.”
“Just tell me about it.”
“It’s sort of like a hallucination, I guess. I lose control and start to see things. They’re like memories, but they aren’t my memories. I don’t know.”
“So, like a vision?”
“Hallucination. Vision. Is there a difference?” I asked
“Sure. Hallucinations aren’t normal, but visions are, at least to people like us.”
“Do you get them too?”
“No, that’s all you,” Liv said with a laugh. “Your visions are what my dad would call an innate gift. It’s like magic that’s just sort of always there, without casting a spell or anything. We all have them, and wish we didn’t sometimes, but it’s all part of being a Caster, I guess. I think the Universe gives us our own specific talents to help us focus. It makes sense, right? There are so many things to do with magic that it would take us a thousand lifetimes to learn everything.”
She moved to the ottoman in front of my seat and forced her face in mine so there was nowhere to look except each other’s eyes. “I think it’s time we work on this. I’m going to help, but to be honest I’m not a great teacher. I’m actually kinda surprised you even need to be taught—you’re the first person I’ve ever known to be this old and just figuring out they had powers. It’s weird.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what’s weird here.”
“Whatever. I guess I was lucky. I had my mom and dad around to show me how to do all this stuff, so maybe you learn earlier that way. I don’t know.”
“What if you have it all wrong with me? I could just be losing my mind. Or it could be a sequence of coincidences.”
“Meh. I don’t believe in coincidences. But for arguments sake, let’s say that you weren’t like me, or like everyone else you met at Equinox the other night . . . even if you weren’t like us, just the fact that you’ve already started to see what we’re capable of means it’s real. So, knowing that, shouldn’t you be able to trust that I’m right about you, and that this is part of who you are?” When I hesitated, she smiled and jumped up off the couch, throwing her half-eaten egg roll in an empty container on the coffee table. “Exactly. Come on, help me move this.”
We moved her coffee table to the side of the room and she shut off the TV, directing me to sit on the floor with my legs crossed. She placed incense in burners around the room and lit them, closing each shade as she passed by. Then she handed me a tall white candle on a small plate with a flowery pattern on it. “Light it,” she said, handing me a lighter.
“It’s about to get all kinds of supernatural up in here,” I said, lighting the candle and putting it down in front of me.
She dimmed the lights and sat down on the couch behind me. Her voice had changed from its usual playfulness to one of seriousness. “I wouldn’t call magic supernatural; it’s as natural as the sun, or the trees that the sun beats down on. Casting magic is nothing more than connecting with the Universe’s energy. It’s a force that’s everywhere. It’s woven into everything and everyone. To me, there’s nothing more natural than that.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet, yet slightly overpowering, smell of the incense.
“The only difference between us and everyone else is that we have the ability to tap into that power. If you’re going to be able to do that, you have to give yourself up to the Universe’s energy—believe in it and let it become part of you.” Her voice started flowing in a hypnotic tone. “Now, stare at the flame of the candle while I talk. Relax and don’t fight your thoughts. Let them enter your mind and exit without causing you to pause.”
“What if I have to pee?”
“Shhh.” She threw a fortune cookie at my back and tried to keep herself from laughing. “Just relax, Hat, and listen to me while I read this to you.” She turned on a small sound machine from the side table and subtle sounds of a rain storm trickled out.
Speaking softly, she said, “Feel the ground beneath you, the rock of the Earth, holding you so steady that you know you could never fall. Hear the sounds of the rain, and picture it falling down around you, your constant connection with the Universe in its most illustrious form. Smell the incense as it’s carried by the wind past you, a breeze so much like love; it’s always there, but rarely able to be seen. And know the fire in front of you, an everlasting flame and symbol of your power, the power of a Caster, to affect the things around you with your will alone. Earth, water, air and fire—these elements combine into the fabric of desire. They are ultimate and
unwavering, and a gentle reminder that few things are out of your reach.”
“Could I use it to bring my mother back?” I asked sadly, breaking the hypnotic vibe she’d cast into the room.
Liv joined me on the floor, pulled me into a hug, and kissed me softly on the cheek. “If Casters had the ability to cheat death, the world would be filled with people we just couldn’t let go because we loved them too much. It’s intentional, I think, that we don’t have the power to alter everything.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” I said, trying to push the thoughts of my mother out of my head.
“Sure you can. It’s in your blood,” she said simply. “Just don’t force it. Relax. Just be. The connection will come easily if you let it.” She stood up and returned to her seat behind me.
The smell of incense started to give me a headache, and the more I focused on just the candle, the less relaxed I felt. Liv started talking again, telling me more about magic in her soothing tone, and bringing the hypnotic waves back into the room.
Then, for a moment, I let myself just be. I started to ponder each flicker of the candle, letting its gradient light dominate my focus. Its flame would sway, and my body would sway with it. As it burned, the wick let off little sparks into the wax, getting louder until it eventually drowned out the sound machine, Liv, and my own breathing. The room around me was insignificant, and any thought I had that wasn’t about that candle floated through my mind untouched.
A warm energy washed over me, pouring down from above and touching me at my core. It was in my veins, pumping life through me like it pumped life through the Universe itself. It was pain and it was beauty. It was infinitely mysterious, yet immediately familiar. I was at peace, accepting the Universe for being both chaotic and orderly; kind and equally cruel, just as it accepted me for everything I was, and more importantly, everything I wasn’t.
A familiar cold sweat returned, like someone was melting an ice cube on my neck and letting it run down my back. It was just a little easier that time, maybe because of the meditative state that Liv had put me in. I was aware and connected to my body, the vessel that contained my power, in ways that I never thought possible and at the same time, comfortable letting the vision pull me away from it.
My stomach still churned as I was bombarded with all the lights and noises, but the less I fought it, and the more I realized that it was real, the less I worried it might actually tear me apart. I let it toss me, turn me, and ripple through me until I reached that moment of weightlessness and serenity.
“Shit, this hurts,” Gloria said to my mother, sitting down next to her and pointing to a cut on her hand. Her light blond hair and freckles glowed in the sun of the day. It was summer and they were relaxing on Gloria’s deck—probably their favorite place to be together. My mother looked beautiful in her sunflower-patterned dress, and sipped on a large cup of coffee, feeding an addiction she and I shared.
“Let me see it.” My mother took Gloria’s hand in hers and examined the cut. “And this is why you shouldn’t put small razor blades in your junk drawer, Gloria.”
“Ouch,” Gloria yelled as my mother pinched her cut closed and cupped her hand around Gloria’s. My mother closed her eyes and a light smile washed over her lips. When she pulled her hand back, the cut was gone.
“Nice,” Gloria said, examining her hand where the cut once was. My mother just smiled and shrugged, modest and serene as always.
From the other side of the deck, I appeared. I vaguely remembered that day, or at least I remembered my mother in that dress. The only way I can describe how it feels to watch yourself, in third person, move around in a vision is that it’s like watching a home movie.
“Hey, there,” I said, kissing both of them on the cheek as they swung lightly on the deck’s swing.
“Hey, son. How are you?” my mother asked. I missed hearing her voice every day so much.
“Eh. Good. Going to get some coffee. Want any?” They shook their heads and I made my way into the house, but my vision stayed with them.
Avoiding my mother’s glance, Gloria said, “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything,” my mother said.
“But I know what you’re thinking, and we aren’t having this conversation again.”
“You’re right, I know. Just sometimes I wonder if all we did was postpone the inevitable,” my mother said. The knuckle from her free hand’s pointer finger was grazing over her eyebrow, her classic tell of inner turmoil.
“Is that part of the conversation we aren’t having?”
My mother sighed as she watched me through the window as I made coffee, oblivious to a world that was paralleling my own in secret.
“Mia, stop torturing yourself. We did what we had to do for our family. They’re safer this way.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they would have been safer if we just let them become whomever the Universe decided they would be, not what we decided we wanted them to be.”
My aunt crossed her arms and lowered her voice. “I can’t believe it’s been almost thirty years and you’re still questioning this. Do you really want that life for our kids? All the sacrifice. The hiding. The pain. No, it’s enough already. That’s why we took their powers. It ends with us, that’s what we all said.”
The flame of the candle in front of me had died out on its own by the time I came back from that vision. I looked around sensitively, still sunken in a deep fog, and rubbed my temples. The lights and noises that carried me to and from those visions had lingering aftereffects I still wasn’t used to.
Was that real? I wondered. Could my mother have been a Caster too? I closed my eyes tight, desperately trying to hold onto the image of her. But the woman I was looking at, the one I thought I knew so well, had just shown me how little I really knew.
Chapter 11
That afternoon, I passed my street without even considering going home, and aimlessly tried to make sense of my new world. I drove around the city in circles and thought about all the wild things that had happened to me in the past few days. I couldn’t stop wondering if when my mother and Gloria took that piece of my life, an important piece, it had forever made me feel fragmented and unsure of who I was. It was as if nothing I experienced before I met Liv was real, like everything in my life before was a lie, or the least fulfilling part of the truth.
For the first time, not feeling normal felt like the most natural thing in the world to me. Could that mean that Liv was right and being a Caster was part of who I was, or who I was supposed to be? In the nonsense, things were starting to make sense. I felt different, like a part of me that was empty had been filled, and I liked it.
At one point, I passed St. Albert’s, a large Catholic church with a small private school extending off the back. I knew both places well; I had attended that school through the sixth grade.
I hated that place.
I tried closing my eyes as I passed it, but only succeeded in nearly hitting the mail truck parked on the street in front of the church.
Good one, Hat.
Eventually, my drive took me out of the city. I was far enough out that the houses had space for lush trees around them and bigger backyards behind them. The air had turned crisp and the year’s first light frost was glazing over the green grass of the neighborhood lawns.
Gloria had a modest home there, and I circled her block four or five times before finally parking. Her perfectly manicured lawn rolled up and down the sides of the cobblestone pathway that wrapped around the house. When I rounded the corner, I found her sitting there on her deck, wrapped in a large fleece blanket and reading a book.
“Coffee?” she asked without looking up at me.
“Sure,” I said with a happy nod. For a brief moment, it felt like nothing was different. It was like my mother hadn’t died, there were no secrets dwelling in the air between us, and she was the matriarch of our fami
ly whom I trusted implicitly. But none of that was true anymore.
Two of her well-groomed cats scampered past my feet as I sat down at her kitchen table, poured some sugar into my coffee, and leaned back against the glass picture window that encased the nook. A picture of my mother and my aunt, one I’d never seen before, was sitting on the edge of her table. I picked it up and smiled. They looked so happy.
Gloria sat down next to me with her own overflowing coffee mug. “I miss her, too,” she said.
“I know.”
Gloria let out a long sigh. “Do you think there is any chance I can convince you to forget what you know so far and go back to your life before?” she asked.
“How could you even know what I came here to talk to you about?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter how I know.” Gloria reached out and gently touched my face. “But I know.”
“Did you really think you were going to be able to keep this from me forever?” I asked.
“Well . . . we have for over twenty years, so yes. That was the plan at least. I’m sorry you had to find out this way, or at all. It shouldn’t have happened like this,” Gloria said, before sipping her coffee.
I rubbed my eyes as the contacts in them had dried out from too many hours of wear and said, “And what was your plan for when I found out I had powers?”
“You don’t understand, you shouldn’t have ever gotten powers. We cast a spell when you all were young, this sort of suppression spell, that should have meant you never had to deal with this. We were trying to remove magic and all the problems that come with it from our family entirely.”
“What changed?”
“I wish I knew, Hat. I really do. We didn’t want this life for you.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted that life for myself either, but if she’d had it her way, I wouldn’t have even gotten the choice.
Gloria’s eyes were heavy as she filled her mug with more coffee. “I’m sorry you’re upset, but nothing about this is as simple as you’re making it sound. This is the way it had to be to keep you safe.”
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