Mostly in Crixus’s bed.
Some of the time we even talked.
The call from the assisted living center in Connecticut where my mother had been staying came hours after I had awoken from our first passionate tangle. Phrases like ‘disappeared without a trace,’ and ‘never happened in our thirty-year history,’ and ‘utilizing every available resource,’ were used.
I thanked them and hung up. While the news still gnawed a hollow ache in my gut, I found it somehow easier to bear after my tenth orgasm of the day.
“So do you want the good news, or the bad news?” A pale Julie asked, twisting her hands.
“I guess we might as well have the good news,” I sighed, resigning myself to my return to the real world.
“So…Byron Alexander Davenport is cured and called in to cancel his appointment. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Cured? But I only had one session with him. How is another client canceling on me good news? What exactly is the bad news?”
Julie grimaced, slowly tugging down the collar of her hot pink turtleneck. Two neat puncture marks marred the skin over her jugular vein.
“Julie!” I gasped. “You didn’t! You’re not a—”
“A little,” she said. Her brown eyes stayed fixed in her lap.
“Julie, this isn’t like getting your belly button pierced or being a vegan. This isn’t something you can just up and decide to try!”
“I know,” she insisted.
“Do you?” I questioned. “Do you really? Julie.” I came around the desk and took her cold hands in mine. “This changes everything.”
“I understand that, Dr. Schmidt.” Her eyes were clear, her expression earnest. “I’m ready for everything to change. I’ve loved working for you, I really have. In fact, working here is what made me realize what I really wanted. Being around all the leprechauns, and werewolves, and vampires…it just felt right. Byron has a house in London. We want to travel for a while.” She paused and scooted her rolling chair closer to me. “I’m giving my two-week’s notice.”
Unexpected tears welled up in my eyes as I looked into hers. “You’re really sure about this. Aren’t you?”
She nodded. “I am.”
“Well, then I’m happy for you.”
“Oh, Doctor Schmidt!” She launched herself out of her chair and wrapped me in a rib-cracking hug.
“Julie,” I wheezed. “You’re hurting me.”
“Oops! Sorry. The whole super-strength thing is kinda new to me still.” She grinned at me.
“Holy God!” I leapt backward, tripping over my laptop bag to land ass-first on the carpeted floor.
“Oh, sorry. Again.” She giggled, running a thumb across one of her newly-acquired fangs. “Cute, huh?”
“Adorable.” I got back to my feet and swung my laptop bag over my shoulder.
“Liam called,” Julie announced. “Like, a lot.”
“I’m sure he did.” The mention of his name after the weeks spent in every position known to man—and a few even the Kama Sutra hadn’t yet discovered—in Crixus’s bed brought an instant pang of guilt. A powerful irritation followed on its heels. What did I have to feel guilty about? It was Liam, after all, who had decided to become a naked nymph sandwich, leaving me to get snagged by the Scarecrow.
“That ambrosia was powerful stuff.” Julie looked at me from beneath her heavily mascaraed lashes. “In fact, I’m pretty sure having it in my bloodstream is what helped Byron overcome his fear. You shouldn’t be too hard on Liam.”
“What do you say we spend the next couple weeks drumming up some new business?” I suggested, ham-handedly changing the subject.
“I would love that!” Julie bounced up and down in her chair. “I know just the client! Byron was telling me about this witch named Gertie. She’s super-nice but she sort of accidentally burned down Chicago and was frozen for forty years! And then there was that whole Titanic thing in 1912. There’s got to be some mental scars from something like that, right?”
“Very likely,” I said. “Get her on the schedule.” I paused in front of my door, looking back at the glittery pink mecca of Julie’s desk. “I’m really going to miss you.”
Julie’s chin wobbled as she snagged a tissue from the box shaped like a purse. “I’m really going to miss you too.”
I managed to get my office door closed behind me before the first tears fell. A sudden tidal wave of emotion swept me out to sea, and I stayed there, my forehead pressed to the other side of the door while my glasses smudged over.
“What’s the matter, baby?”
I nearly inspected the ground with my buttocks for the second time in ten minutes when I spun and saw the figure standing behind me. I backed away, my hand to my mouth, blinking in shock. “It can’t…it can’t be.”
Her smile was a time machine, peeling years away from me like rose petals. It was my twenty-eight year-old mother’s smile. The smile I saw when I was eight, years before she had started hiding in closets and scrawling obscure messages and posting them around the house.
The silver had disappeared from her hair, restoring it to its warm amber hue. The color of English breakfast tea. No purple shadows lived beneath her eyes, the exact shade of hazel as mine. Her fingernails were unbitten, her face free of the tracks obsessive paranoia had once dug there.
“But…how?” I asked.
She walked over to my leather couch and patted the cushion next to her. Autumn light from the open windows shot gold into her complexion.
I followed.
“This world wasn’t working for me anymore,” she began. “Or I wasn’t working for it. So when Crixus came to me, I knew. I knew this time, I had to take the offer. I knew, I’ve known for a long time that he would keep you safe.”
“This time? You mean this has happened before?”
She smiled. “I knew what I was by the time I was old enough to talk. I also knew I wanted to use my abilities to help, if I could. I actively reached out to spirits. I invited them into my head and my life. I was too young and naïve to understand that not all of them wanted help.”
Her expression darkened.
“I understand,” I said.
“When Hades made his offer the first time,” she continued, “I’ll admit, I was tempted. I was already starting to feel the effects of fighting the spirits I had welcomed into my life.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
She reached out and put a hand on my cheek. “I had you. And I thought, if I could just try harder. If I could just…” She broke off, looking down at her billowy gypsy skirt. “I knew I couldn’t go, so I made him a counter offer.
My heartbeat accelerated at the mere mention of these words. “What?”
“You have to understand, Matilda, you were still just a baby then, but I could tell. I knew the signs. I knew that I had passed this…this gift, this curse, whatever you want to call it, on to you.
“So I asked him to take it away from you. At least until you were ready to handle it. I didn’t want it to do to you what it had done to me.”
“You did that…for me?” Tears welled up and over my eyelids as the heavy and tragic irony pressed in on me. All my life, I had desperately wished not to be like the woman who had loved me enough to make that wish possible.
She nodded.
“And what did you offer him in exchange?” I asked, thinking of my recent conversation with Crixus.
“Me,” she said. “After I died, I would stay with him instead of moving on to what came next. I would help him. So when I heard that the time had come, and he had you—I made the decision to activate our contract early. I hope I did the right thing.”
“You made the best decision you could with the information you had,” I assured her. “We all do.”
“Matilda, I wanted to give you such a good life. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.”
I took her hand in mine. “There is nothing to be sorry for. I turned out okay. For the most part.”
&
nbsp; “Baby,” she said, dropping her arm around me, “you turned out beautifully.”
At first, it was a weight, a strange sensation across my shoulders. By degrees, she gathered me into her. All my jutting angles, my odd and awkward body and all its need for copious personal space sank into her soft embrace. In some ways, she was still a stranger to me. The mother I had never had sharing the same body with the troubled woman I had cared for when she could no longer care for me.
“I have so many questions,” I said.
She stroked my hair. “We have some time.” Implied in her statement were tasks I couldn’t guess at, not knowing the terms of her agreement with Hades and what it might entail. I added this to the growing list in my mind.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to cause you any pain, and I know sometimes rehashing these details isn’t always helpful.”
“My daughter, the psychologist.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “If it’s helpful to you, I’ll answer anything you have to ask.”
“The numbers. You always talked about the numbers.”
“There were so many spirits, that after a while, I just assigned numbers to the ones who came most often. In the beginning, I tried to write down the messages they wanted to give me. After a while, even those started getting garbled. And trying to find the people those messages were intended for…” She shook her head. “Oddly enough, people don’t always leap for joy when a bedraggled, twitchy stranger accosts them in a parking lot to share a missive from the beyond.”
To hear her describe herself in this manner was both heartbreaking and comforting. Self-critical joking required a certain distance from a traumatic situation that only healing could achieve, in my experience.
Encouraged by her answer to this question, I decided to attempt another one. “You never talked about family growing up. Your mother, father, sisters, brothers…”
She was silent for a moment, and I feared I might be pushing too far too fast. “I never knew them. My mother gave me up for adoption, but I must have been hard to place. I grew up in a state home before they tried fostering me out. That didn’t last long either.”
An unbidden image of my mother as a toddler with haunted hazel eyes came to me unbidden. What must life have been like for one so young and so heavily burdened? Did she cry too often, frightened by people only she could see? Did she wake in the night screaming, to the irritation of her caregivers?
How alike our lives had been, though we had been apart for so much of them. After having been removed from her care at the age of twelve, I had made my way through the foster home circuits for six years before being set adrift on my own.
“What did you do when you turned eighteen?” I asked.
“Worked odd jobs, mostly. I never lasted anywhere too long.”
The reasons for this were already well known to me, as the situation had been similar throughout the short years of my childhood with her.
“Do you know who my father is? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to,” I immediately amended.
Her sigh was heavy. “I’m so sorry, baby. I don’t.”
How could you not know? A cynical part of me still wasn’t satisfied with this answer, even now. Of all the indictments I had leveled at her over the years, this was the most frequent. I simply couldn’t make myself understand how you could bring another human being into existence as casually as you selected a pump at the gas station.
“Oh, baby.” She squeezed my arm. “You’re going to be such a good mom.”
“Someday,” I laughed.
Her gentle swaying motion halted abruptly. “Oh lord,” she whispered. “You didn’t know.”
I sat up, prying myself out of her grip. “Didn’t know what?”
She looked at my face, then glanced down at my belly. “Honey, you’re pregnant.”
<<<>>>
To be continued…
Don’t miss Matilda Schmidt in Unexpecting, coming December 2014!
About the author:
Cynthia St. Aubin wrote her first play at age eight and made her brothers perform it for the admission price of gum wrappers. A steal, considering she provided the wrappers in advance. Though her early work debuted to mixed reviews, she never quite gave up on the writing thing, even while earning a mostly useless master's degree in art history and taking her turn as a cube monkey in the corporate warren.
Because the voices in her head kept talking to her, and they discourage drinking at work, she started writing instead. When she's not standing in front of the fridge eating cheese, she's hard at work figuring out which mythological, art historical, or paranormal friends to play with next. She lives in Colorado with the love of her life and three surly cats.
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Table of Contents
Other Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Novellas:
Dedication
UNdeadly
About the author:
Undeadly: The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist (The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Book 6) Page 9
