Wish Club

by Kim Strickland

  The women sat in stunned silence.

  “It’s all just so complicated,” Lindsay spoke first. “I don’t understand how—I mean, how come all of our first wishes—for the candle and the rain, for Tippy—how come they went so well and most of the rest of them went so wrong? Well, all of them except one: Jill’s wish for the perfect man.”

  “Those first wishes weren’t quite so selfish,” Greta answered. “Or maybe it was just beginner’s luck. I don’t have a definitive answer other than to say the Universe works in mysterious ways.”

  Greta stopped talking suddenly and tilted her head, a puzzled expression on her face. Again she stayed frozen that way, thinking, for a length of time most would consider inappropriate to take while holding the floor without talking.

  When she finally looked up again, her eyebrows were furrowed together. “I’m starting to think Jill’s first wish may have backfired, too. Maybe worst of all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “I need you. Please come over.” Marc’s voice had cracked when he’d pleaded with her on the phone, and Jill finally had relented, driving over to his apartment to be with him. He hadn’t sounded like himself. He’d sounded, well, desperate. “I don’t know what’s wrong, I…I just want to be with you tonight. Will you come? I miss you.”

  I miss you? She’d seen him just yesterday, Sunday. They’d returned from New York around noon. He’d dropped her off at her building and had been angling to get invited up, but she’d shut him down. “I’m tired. And I have a lot to catch up on around the house. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Which meant today.

  Jill didn’t really want to see him today, either, but she’d been unable to come up with a good enough excuse. He’d changed. Something about him was different, and she couldn’t put her finger on what.

  He’d started acting weird on the flight out to New York. For one thing, he’d just sat there. He hadn’t read. He hadn’t watched the short video segment. He hadn’t scanned the in-flight shopping magazine. He sat. Looking straight ahead. Sometimes he shut his eyes, but mostly he just sat. And he had seemed very content to be doing it. He hadn’t wanted to talk. At all. She’d thought it was the queerest behavior.

  Oka-a-ay, maybe he’s a nervous flier, she’d rationalized. A lot of people still got nervous on airplanes—as hard as that was for her to believe. It probably led to all sorts of strange behavior. She should be grateful all he was doing was staring straight ahead.

  But during the entire trip she was troubled by a low-grade sense of something irretrievably wrong. She felt she was irritating him somehow, but not in the leaving-the-cap-off-the-toothpaste way; in a much more dangerous way. There was a darkness to his irritation, a sense of imminent rage.

  Jill feared the reason for his irritation might be that her feelings toward him had changed, deepened, and that somehow he’d sensed it. On Saturday morning, the day after she and Marc had arrived in New York, they were walking in Central Park and had stopped on a bridge to admire the view. While spending several moments in comfortable silence, Jill was close to bringing up mutual exclusivity for their relationship. She was just about to tell him she thought she was falling in love with him, but right before she was ready to speak the words, he abruptly reached down and picked up a handful of gravel and began pelting the water below with small rocks.

  “People talk too much,” he said. “They just talk, talk, talk.” He punctuated his words with harshly thrown pebbles. “I like that you’re not like that, Jilly girl.” Jill smiled and nodded silently, relieved that she hadn’t spoken. Marc threw the remaining rocks down into the water with a violent snap of his arm. “I like that you’re not like that,” he repeated.

  And just as these strange snapshots of Marc would suddenly appear—on the airplane, in the park—they would disappear, and Marc would return to his normal charming self. Jill tried to explain it away: maybe he just doesn’t travel well.

  On the flight back, he’d started talking with one of the flight attendants. The cute brunette one. With blue eyes. The one who looked like Jill. During the conversation he once again seemed to be back to his old self, the one she was falling in love with. But Jill hadn’t known if she should be relieved he was getting over whatever it was that had been disturbing him, or if she should be bothered even more. And then she started feeling like she didn’t really want to see him so much anymore, maybe take a break for a while. A complete turn-around from her previous line of thought about him—from her line of thought the previous day, even.

  Tonight, Jill dragged herself up the front steps to his building. She held her finger on the buzzer for a moment before pressing it down.

  Marc greeted her at the door, and the minute she saw his face she knew she’d made a mistake coming there. Something had tipped. It felt as if she were looking at a completely different person. She sensed she was looking at the strange Marc, the one with the odd behavior, the one who whipped small rocks down into black water. Only now, she didn’t get the impression this latent anger would suddenly dissipate.

  She sat down on the couch, nervous now. She wanted to leave even though she’d just arrived. But she tried to appear normal, to act normal—and not like she wanted to bolt for the door.

  “What’s up, hon?” she asked, taking a seat on the couch. “What’s bothering you that couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “I’m glad you’re here…” He started walking back and forth in front of her, simultaneously pulling his hands through his hair. It was fluffed up in front and on the right side from the abuse. “I’m glad you came…I…”

  It was like watching a big cat pacing back and forth at the zoo. Gorgeous. Regal. The word crazy came to mind.

  “I thought you’d be more of a challenge.” He sighed. “It’s weird, you know what I mean, when it doesn’t work out the way you think. I usually have a better instinct for these kinds of things. But I was wa-a-a-y wrong with you.”

  He continued pacing up and down the living room and pulling his hand through his hair over and over. “It’s just not that fun,” he said, “you know, when it’s too easy. I really thought you’d be tougher. As soon as I started the portrait, I knew you would be too easy. I wanted a challenge. I was ready for a challenge.

  “When you looked at it, that’s when I knew. I really thought you wouldn’t—I thought, not Jill, she’s too cool for that—but I was wrong again.” He shook his head, his mouth in a line, his expression extremely confused, as if to say, how could I have been so wrong? “You know how I could tell that you looked?”

  What is he talking about? He’s acting nuts. Jill smiled silently, nervously, from her seat on the couch.

  “I could tell because of your hands,” Marc continued. “Did you ever notice that? When people lie, they never know where to put their hands. Sometimes they look at you too hard—try to maintain too much eye contact. Other times they don’t look at you at all. That’s another way to tell. But the hands—that’s the key. Yours were flailing all over the place.”

  Jill tried to remember the day of the first portrait sitting, if her hands had been flailing all over the place. She did remember peeking at the portrait. It hadn’t been very good, she recalled. Her first impression was “outsider,” and not the university background he’d claimed.

  She’d peeked. So what? He’d had sex with her right afterward. How upset could he have been? That day she’d explained away his Outsider Art technique as just that, technique; but today she wasn’t so sure. Had he not studied at the University of Nebraska like he told me?

  Jill continued to sit silently on the couch, watching Marc pace up and down his apartment. It figures that just when she got to the point in a relationship where she thought everything was damned close to perfect, where she was the one ready for a commitment, the other person turned into someone else.

  On the flight back from New York, she’d started to entertain the idea it might be best if they just took a break. A little time apart might be what they needed to re
capture the way they’d felt before. Kind of like the break she was taking from Wish Club. Which now got her thinking some more.

  She’d only been dating him for two months, but in such a short time, she’d isolated herself from all of her friends. She hardly saw anyone else anymore, didn’t even talk to them on the phone. Her painting had gone down the shitter. She’d blown off her own gallery opening at his suggestion. Now that she thought about it, he didn’t have any friends of his own, at least none that she’d met. And wasn’t that strange? His rationale had been that he’d just moved to Chicago from Nebraska, where he’d kept a studio in Lincoln, but she never heard him talk much about Lincoln or the art community there. She really didn’t know anything about him or his past, not even where he grew up. Nothing about his family. They’d never talked about it. She’d liked that, at first, how he didn’t need to know what kind of cereal she used to eat for breakfast when she was in the second grade or what the name of her first boyfriend was. He was just letting the relationship unfold. But, by now, shouldn’t she at least know where he was from?

  Suddenly the course of their relationship seemed to be littered with red flags she’d failed to see earlier, like a slalom course in the middle of a straight run that she’d somehow managed to miss. She really didn’t know this man. And now he was acting very strange.

  Jill realized she was watching her wish for the perfect man unravel right before her eyes. Lindsay had been right. Something was very wrong with him.

  And Jill wanted out of his apartment. Now.

  “Maybe you’re just tired, honey,” she said. “I know I am—the trip and all. I think if you just get a good night’s sleep then maybe everything will seem better in the morning.”

  “Who the fuck are you? My mother?” His face had turned dark. No more fun sexy boy. His look was menacing.

  Jill’s heart started to race, but she tried to keep her face calm. Why did I come here? I should have listened to that little voice.

  “No, I…” Jill stammered. “I just don’t understand what you’re talking about, hon, and I thought maybe that if you…”

  She looked past him at the door. He caught her glance.

  He smiled at her now. The old smile. The sexy one. “I’m sorry, Jilly. I’m sorry. I don’t know what gets into me. I…I’m. Maybe I am tired.” He shook his head, flustered. Then he flashed a smile at her, the kind of smile an adult gives a child when they don’t mean it, before the adult starts screaming.

  And then he burst out laughing. A laugh so loud Jill jumped in place on the couch.

  “Portraits? Why portraits?” He imitated her voice with a mock falsetto. “Oh, God. That was…that was funny.” He looked down at her on the couch. “I’ll tell you why portraits. Because the portraits are my souvenirs.”

  Fear chilled her blood, made the palms of her hands grow cold with sweat. She forced a smile, still trying to pretend everything was normal. She stood up. “It’s okay. I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “No, you should stay. I think I’d like it very much for you to stay.”

  “I really think I should go.” Her voice cracked.

  He blocked her path to the door.

  Jill tried to laugh it off, even though she knew he wasn’t playing. “Come on, Marc. I want to leave.”

  She tried to brush past him, and again he moved to block her. The door was only a couple of feet behind him, but he stood in her way.

  Jill held a fake smile on her face while she contemplated her options. After many nights in his apartment, she knew how poor the soundproofing was. Some mornings she could actually hear the guy upstairs peeing. She should try to bolt for the door—and yell.

  She leaned to the right and then quickly went left and tried to pass him. Her left hand touched the doorknob as she fell. She didn’t know what he’d used to hit her, maybe just his fist. She didn’t get a chance to yell.

  Claudia had never met Marc. She didn’t know what he looked like or much of anything about him, except that he was fabulous, according to Jill. And gorgeous, according to Lindsay. But it had occurred to her before that maybe he really wasn’t any of that. If all of their wishes had backfired so stupidly, then certainly there was the possibility that this Marc guy wasn’t who they thought he was.

  From the center of Lindsay’s living room, Greta was continuing with her spell-reversing, wish-cleansing ritual. After finishing up a guilt-washing and privacy spell for Gail, she was now working on Lindsay, who was still insisting that most of her weight loss had been due to the success of her first wish and not due to any change in her eating or exercising habits.

  Duct tape. An image of a roll of duct tape came into Claudia’s head, like a movie, running past her eyes even though they were open. An odd thing to occur to anybody—well, maybe not anybody who was listening to Lindsay—but the way it had just floated into her head. She saw Jill now, too. Jill and duct tape. She got the feeling something was wrong with Jill and that it involved duct tape. The thought was so vivid, Claudia couldn’t shake it, as much as she wanted to clear it out of her head. It was all so—dumb. Who gets visions of duct tape?

  Greta was leaning over, lighting a red candle on the coffee table. Suddenly she snapped her back up straight. “Lindsay, you saw Jill last Thursday? At home?”

  Lindsay nodded. Claudia could practically hear her thought, What does this have to do with fixing my wish?

  “And Marc wasn’t there?” Greta asked.

  “No.”

  Greta nodded, silently thinking in that way she had. “Did you…I don’t know how much of their, well, private life you knew about, but did you happen to know if they liked to use,” Greta swallowed, appearing uncomfortable for the first time ever, “duct tape?”

  Claudia’s leg knocked the underside of the table. Everything on top of it was sent straight up a fraction of an inch, before landing back down in disarray, herbs spilled, crystals tumbled to the floor. Wax sloshed.

  “Did you say duct tape?” Claudia said.

  “Yes, dear.” Greta looked at her calmly, as if she weren’t wondering, like everybody else in the room surely was, why Claudia had just spazzed out for no apparent reason. “What is it?”

  “Because I just saw duct tape, too. Like a vision, kind of. I saw a roll of duct tape, and I saw Jill and I…I got the impression something was wrong, but I didn’t want to say anything. Because you were working on Lindsay’s butt—I mean, her weight spell…and I thought I would wait to say something…because it seemed nuts, you know. Until you said something.”

  Greta continued to watch her calmly. She closed her eyes and held very still. She sniffed. “I think Jill might be in some trouble.”

  “Did you see something? Did you have a vision?” Lindsay asked.

  “What’s the matter with Jill?” Gail asked.

  “You saw duct tape, too?” Claudia asked her. Maybe her vision hadn’t been so dumb after all.

  Greta shook her head. “Yes, and I sensed danger, too. It’s not clear,” she said, “but we need to close our circle and find her. Especially since two of us received the message. And the sooner the better.”

  The women started to stand up before Greta motioned them back into their seats. “Wait, wait. I need to close up the circle. It’ll only take a moment.”

  They sat back down and Greta picked up the athame, this time without any adverse reaction from the women. She held it out in front of her the same way she had when she had drawn the circle, only now she walked in the opposite, counterclockwise direction. She didn’t say, chant, or whisper anything as she walked. When she arrived at the place she’d started, Greta loudly stomped her foot, startling them. “The circle unbroken, even as it is opened. So mote it be.” And then, quite unceremoniously, Greta put the knife back in the large bag and began collecting the rest of her things.

  The lake sped by on the right, a black abyss, the light from the highway soaked up by the water in the first few yards before darkness prevailed. Black sky and b
lack water met at some imperceptible horizon, one continuous flow of unending night.

  Gail raced her minivan toward the exit ramp at Belmont and headed for the inner drive. A few moments later, all of them—Gail, Claudia, Mara, Lindsay, and Greta—pulled into the circular driveway of Jill’s building. Claudia jumped out and hurried inside.

  Breathing hard, she huffed up to the doorman, the same arrogant doorman who’d made her wait before. “I’m here to see Jill Trebelmeier.”

  “One moment please, I’ll try her.” He eyed Claudia closely and ran his finger over his mustache as he held the phone to his ear.

  Claudia eyed him back.

  After about twenty seconds had passed, he said, “I’m sorry, she’s not answering.”

  “Could you keep trying—just a while longer?”

  He nodded and said “sure,” politely enough, but the corners of his mouth had turned down into a frown.

  “I’m sorry, still no answer.”

  “Do you know if she’s here? I’m a little worried about her.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “Has she had any other visitors tonight? Do you know if Marc is here? Or was here?”

  The doorman frowned at her again. “You know I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

  Claudia glared at him for a moment before saying “thank you,” politely enough.

  “No luck,” she said as she opened the door to the van and sat down.

  “Had he seen her tonight? Did he think she was out?” Gail said.