Destined (41 page)

“Hey, girlfriend!” she smiled warmly,
giving me a hug.

“Hey yourself! How are you? You look
gorgeous!” I returned. Laurel looked beautiful tonight in a long flowing skirt,
with her wavy, auburn hair and her leaf green eyes. A silver crescent moon hung
at her throat, the profile of a face visible on it when she turned. “What’s for
dinner?” I demanded, starving as usual.

“Follow me!” she said mysteriously and
beckoned, leading me toward the swinging door into the kitchen. John was behind
the bar, and he waved at us with a shooing gesture as we passed by, chasing us
along.

Inside the kitchen was a loud world of
seeming chaos and heated activity. We walked past the sauté line, where flames
roared and shot up toward the ceiling as three cooks rushed around like mad,
yelling at each other as they shook handles and flipped things, tossing hot
food up into the air. Huge dripping pots steamed and fizzed, and the grill
sizzled, smoking. We threaded our way through past the busy dishwashing station
and the walk-in cooler, and eventually out a back door onto the private patio
that ran across the back of the building.

This was where Laurie and John had
their organic vegetable and herb gardens. It was a quiet, peaceful enclosed
space, an oasis, complete with a trickling water garden. Willow fencing and
fragrant boxwood hedges lined the periphery, and a stone pathway led through
the grass to the raised vegetable beds. An arbor at the far end of the yard
supported a huge climbing rose bush, where a few last red blossoms still clung
to the yellowing foliage. A table for two had been set up on the patio, and two
comfortable chairs were pulled up nearby. An ice bucket was on the table, with
a bottle of wine cooling in it. The noise from the kitchen was muted here, with
only an occasional crash or clink penetrating the quiet. I immediately relaxed
and felt relieved.

“This is great!” I said, as she picked
up the wine and cut the seal. It was a French Chablis, and looked expensive. I
started to cheer up.

“I love it back here, too,” she said,
smiling. “But we don’t have a chance to enjoy it as much as I’d like to!” She
skillfully pulled out the cork and poured us each a glass. “We got a great deal
on some live lobsters today, you’re not allergic are you?”

“No way! I’d love it,” I said.

“Good, they’re already steaming,” she
said, and after a few minutes she went inside and came back with a rolling
cart, which contained our feast. The cook had already broken out the lobsters
and drained the water, so they were easy to take apart. We both ate like pigs,
the melted butter dripping down our chins. There were baked potatoes with sour
cream, too. I was in high-cholesterol heaven! While we ate, the round white
moon slowly crept up over the rooftops and trees until it peeked down into the
garden, gilding the lush foliage with silver light. After dinner we put all the
debris onto the cart and rolled it away, wiping off the table and ourselves
with wet rags and clean towels from the kitchen. We pulled our chairs out into
the lawn and settled down with our wine glasses, to watch the moon and talk.

“Laurie, how do you know when it’s
safe to trust an intuition? How do you know when it’s real?” I asked.

“I usually ask the Tarot, if I’m
nervous. But most of the time I just go for it,” she said, sipping her wine,
one arm tucked behind her head.

“You’re so brave!” I said.

“Not really, not extraordinarily,” she
protested, looking at me curiously. “What is this about, Emily?”

“It’s about Tony. I don’t know what to
think.”

“What to think about what?” she asked.

“About whether or not to trust him.”

“Oh. What makes you think you
shouldn’t?” she said, paying closer attention now.

“It’s not just that, it’s really more
than that.”

“More than what?”

“I don’t know whether I can trust any
man. I think I’m just emotionally crippled, or something,” I burst out, jumping
up to pace back and forth on the grass. She sat and watched me, like someone at
a tennis match.

“You’d think I’d be able to give the
guy a break, but no, just the least little thing like a stupid phone call from
some glamorous freaking mystery woman and what do I do? Do I extend the benefit
of the doubt like a normal, non-paranoid person? Or do I immediately jump to
the worst possible conclusion and turn off my cell phone so he couldn’t even
call me if he wanted to? I mean, maybe they’re not having dinner at some
intimate little Greenwich Village bistro right now, playing footsie under the
table! Oh my god, Laurie, what am I going to do?”
 

I flung myself back into my chair and
clutched her arm, desperately.

“I see,” Laurie said. “You’re really
in deep with this guy, aren’t you?”

“I guess so,” I said with a pathetic
little sob, as a giant crocodile tear welled up in one eye and rolled slowly
down my cheek.

“Shall I get the cards?” she offered
gently, standing up.

I sniffed and nodded, and she went
inside for a minute, returning with her shoulder bag. She spread out a large
square scarf on the grass, then we sat across from each other and she took the
cards from their velvet bag. The light from the kitchen windows slanted across
the moonlit lawn, revealing the brightly colored pictures as she spread out the
cards.

“First of all,” I stopped her as she
began to look through them, “How do you know this works?”

“It just does,” she said. “People have
been reading the Tarot for thousands of years. It works the way any kind of
divination works. The images in the cards are archetypes that help us to access
our latent psychic abilities, they open up the third eye so we can see down the
road ahead.”

She pulled out the King of Pentacles,
and put it in the center of the scarf.

“Now that,” she pointed, “Is Tony.
Doesn’t it look like him?”

The card showed a dark handsome man
with a star inside a red disk on his chest, and a bull standing behind his
right shoulder. She pointed at the pentacle.

“This stands for money, business. When
is his birthday?”

“In May, I think. Why?”

She tapped the card. “Taurus, the
bull.”

“OK, so that is Tony. What are we
going to do with him?”

“He is at the center of the reading,
we are asking about his life, what’s really going on with him right now. Isn’t
that what you want to know?”

“Oh,” I said, “I guess so. Yes, I do
want to know. I want to know the truth.”

“Now we shuffle the question into the
cards,” she said, beginning to mix the cards, closing her eyes.

She stopped after a minute and tapped
them together neatly, then blew a long, deep breath into them, as I had seen
her do before. She shuffled a few more times, and then handed the deck to me.

“Now you do it,” she said, her moon
pendant swaying in the silver moonlight.

I shuffled solemnly, trying to picture
Tony’s face. It wasn’t hard. His eyes popped right into my mind, hovering a few
inches from mine, in my imagination. I thought of the way he looked at me when
we made love, how his eyes narrowed and flickered when he moaned. I shuffled it
all into the cards, stopping when the vision faded to cut the deck into three
piles, as Laurel instructed. She picked them up in reverse, the last third now
on top. She laid the cards out slowly, one by one, in a different pattern than
I had seen her use before. This time she dealt just three cards, and laid them
out in a row from left to right underneath the card that stood for Tony.

“Past, present and future,” she said,
tapping the three cards.

The first was the Queen of Pentacles,
an attractive brunette wearing a stylish white fur hat and cloak. She held a
pentacle identical to the one in Tony’s card.

“There she is,” I yelled excitedly,
pointing. “She speaks French, she’s rich, and look at those clothes! How can I
compete with that?”

“You are here too, Emily, this is you,”
Laurie said, pointing at the second card. “She is in the past, but you are in
the present.”

The middle card was the Queen of
Wands, a woman with long braided light brown hair who held a flowering rod,
like a walking staff, with a giant sunflower behind her.

“How do you know that’s me?” I asked,
squinting at the card. “She looks like the country cousin, the Daisy Mae type.
Well, I guess it is me.”

Laurie laughed and then sobered,
tapping the last card. It was the ten of pentacles, and showed a couple with a
small child standing before an archway, looking through it at a beautiful
castle on a hill.

“The future,” she said. “It means
family, home, prosperity.”

“Ohmigod,” I said, “He’s going to
marry her! She’s pregnant! Look at that!”

We both stared at the cards. My heart
sank.

“Well, it is another pentacle card,
which is not very good since that seems to be a quality they share,” Laurie
said, “But it doesn’t necessarily…”

“Yes it does,” I said flatly, “Look at
that! I am right between them and their home, their family. I’m the only thing
standing between them and happiness!”

Laurie shook her head and pursed her
lips thoughtfully.

“Is that what you really think, Em? Is
that what your intuition tells you?”

“The hell with my intuition, what
about the cards?” I demanded, pointing at them.

“The hell with the cards, what about
your intuition?” she said, grinning at me. “That’s what the Tarot is all about,
Emily, intuition! I know you’ve got it. Use it!”

I stopped ranting for a moment to
think.

“I love Tony, Laurie,” I said quietly.
“I fell in love with him because of who he is, not because of how he looks, or
how many pentacles he has in the bank. He’s the only man I’ve met in a long
time who cares about the same things that are important to me.”

She nodded encouragingly. “And, how
about loyalty? Does he care about that?”

“I thought so,” I said. “Henry told me
so. And he’s known Tony for a long time.”

“Well,” she said, “It seems fairly
likely that you are both right about him.”

“OK,” I said, looking up at the moon
and rubbing the top of my head, which was tingling. “I guess I’ll just have to
wait and see.”

She nodded and began to collect her
cards.

“And, turn your cell phone back on,
Emily,” she said.

“OK,” I said, looking for my purse,
which was still on the patio. I crawled over to it on my hands and knees and
reached inside, finding the phone and hitting the ON button with my thumb. A
tone rang out, indicating I had a message waiting. I hit the voicemail button
and waited. It was Tony, naturally.

“Hello, darling Emily! Where are you,
I wonder? I was thinking about coming home tonight…but, it’s late, and anyhow
I’ll be back tomorrow, with a surprise for you! See you then, about four
o’clock I think. Call me when you get this, if you can, I won’t be sleeping.”

I played it again for Laurie to hear.
When the recording finished, she pushed the END button and handed me back my
phone.

“I don’t know, Emily, he sounds like a
man in love,” she smiled at me.

“Yes, but which queen does he really
want?” I asked.

For that was truly the heart of the
question, after all. That night, under the full moon in the garden of life,
with the most magical person I knew, I sent out a call into the universe. I
called myself. I called my future self, I told her to stop, turn around for a
moment, to tell me the answer. Just think it at me, I said, and I’ll know.

I closed my eyes and joined hands with
Laurie, feeling her energy surge through me, in one hand and out the other, in
a spinning circle. I tried to open some kind of receiver inside my head, but I
wasn’t sure where to look for it. Then I remembered the third eye, and focused
my awareness on the spot behind the middle of my forehead.

Immediately I was swept away into a
crystal clear vision. Tony was walking down the sidewalk on Market Street with
a tall, slender woman with short stylishly cut dark-brown hair. He had his arm
casually draped around her neck. They were smiling, laughing. And when I saw
her face, it looked familiar to me. She was very pretty, dark and gamine.
Actually, she looked a lot like Tony. When they both smiled, it was the same
expression, the same features. Like, family members…like brother and sister. I
abruptly dropped Laurie’s hands and crashed back into reality.

“Ohmigosh, it’s his sister from
Montreal!” I cried, grabbing my head, which felt like it was about to fly off.

“It is?”

“Of course it is! That’s the surprise,
he’s bringing her here tomorrow! What an asshole I am!”

Laurie burst into laughter, and I
joined her. It felt great. We lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky
for a few minutes.

“What do you think your customers
would say if they looked back here and saw their proprietor lying on the ground
staring at the moon?” I asked.