Save My Soul (3 page)

Crystal seemed to take the rejection in stride, dropping her hands to a tangle of beads and thread littering her lap. “You're stressing, Magpie, and that's not a good way to embark on a journey. What's worrying you?”

Where to start? Every sunrise brought with it another contradiction in Maggie that didn't make sense. How could she explain that everything was worrying her? She looked at her mother and smiled. “I'm fine. I'm just trying to decide what to pack. Can you pass me my jewelry pouch?”

Crystal turned her attention from threading a green bead to the tightly wound tapestry pouch. “Is the travel amulet in here? You should have it on.”

Maggie pulled a long silver chain from the scoop neck of her peasant blouse. She dangled an oversized pewter circle carved with alchemical and zodiac symbols in front of Crystal.

“Good girl. Safe passage can't be taken for granted. When you get there, wear the fourth pentacle of Mercury. You can never have too much knowledge and understanding of a new situation.”

Maggie nestled the necklace between her bumps for breasts and the jewelry bag next to the dead cow's skin. She sighed, wanting to believe in knowledge and understanding she might gain from a piece of metal, but doubt was all around her. This was one of those times when she wished for someone to rub her back, smooth her hair, and say, “Everything will be okay.”

Crystal wasn't that kind of mother.

“You're shutting me out.” Crystal trained shiny green eyes on Maggie's face as if she could read her mind. “Why?”

“I'm not shutting you out,” Maggie said, looking away.

“You've been distant for days.”

“I've been preoccupied with work.” It was the truth. Mostly.

As Maggie folded a pair of True Religion jeans across the top of the suitcase, Crystal gathered her beads.

“If space is what you want, Magpie, I'll give you space. Goddess knows I don't want your bad juju affecting me.” Crystal hummed her way out of the room.

There would be plenty of space with Maggie in North Carolina. And there'd be even more space once Maggie moved out of her mother's home. Maybe then, when Maggie was finally, fully independent, she would know peace.

With a huff, Maggie zipped the suitcase and pulled it to the floor. Living here seemed like the answer to Maggie's student-loan-riddled prayers, and at first, the arrangement wasn't bad, especially when Crystal traveled. But the first time one of Crystal's trips turned into a disappearance, Maggie was thrust into the maternal role, searching, worrying, praying for Crystal to keep safe. After years of enduring Crystal's randomness, Maggie should've been immune, but she wasn't, and a piece of paper declaring Maggie a mental health professional didn't help her come to terms with her mother's extremes.

A distorted image bounced back at Maggie from the suitcase's shiny surface. One look and she was struck by how little she resembled Crystal. Maggie was long and straight, while Crystal was small and rounded. So many dominant genes raced through Maggie's body that over the years she thought about searching for her father. She imagined him being a giant, because her size nine feet and nearly six foot frame couldn't be a random joke of nature. But Crystal wasn't receptive to sharing information with Maggie, and a search would span continents.

Like it or not, sometimes it was best to leave the past alone.

Tucking an envelope with her ticket and itinerary into the front pocket, Maggie zipped her suitcase. The flight to Charlotte departed just after eight in the morning, and following a stop in Chicago, arrived before five. Jordon said a car would be waiting at the airport to drive her forty-five minutes north to Lake Norman.

She was packed. Her bank account was fattened with a partial, upfront payment. And her future waited. So why couldn't Maggie shake the worry?

“Magpie, you have visitors.”

• • •

Paul stood in the foyer hand in hand with a woman who looked like the stereotypical librarian, complete with thick-rimmed glasses and mousy brown hair pulled into a bun. An oversized T-shirt strained across fleshy breasts and fell over the waistband of a pair of khaki pants.

“Love and goodness, friends. Please, come in.”

Maggie watched Paul and the woman she assumed to be his wife follow Crystal into the cottage kitchen.

“This is a surprise,” Maggie said, clearing the dry shock from her throat.

Paul lifted the woman's hand and patted. “I'm sorry for barging in, but I wanted to introduce you to Katherine. We were hoping that if you spent some time with both of us, your feelings would be less negative.”

Maggie's throat closed. She looked at the quiet woman who neither smiled nor frowned, her thin lips forming a noncommittal line and her eyes glazing over, like she waited for commands from a universal remote. The subservient image sent a shiver up Maggie's spine.

“I don't feel anything negative toward either of you,” Maggie stammered. “I simply can't partake in a relationship based on a fundamental principal I don't agree with.”

Crystal smacked her lips and pressed her palms together at chest level. “What's the fundamental principal you're at odds with, darling?”

“Polygamy.” Maggie's tongue tripped over the word.

“Ah, polygyny. Technically, that's the term you should be using. It's been practiced throughout history. In some parts of the world it still is, to great benefit of the people, especially where the male population is in decline.”

Maggie looked at Paul, who was smiling with admiration in Crystal's direction. She released a dejected breath. “I don't care what you call it. It's not for me.”

Crystal's tongue clucked as she moved closer to Paul and Katherine. “You'll have to excuse this beautiful spirit. As free-minded as I've raised her to be, she resists.”

Gripping the travel amulet through her cotton shirt, Maggie dreamed of escape, but she didn't expect the piece of jewelry to do any more than give her someplace to put her hands other than yanking out the hair on her head.

“I'm sorry you wasted the trip, Paul.” Maggie stepped between her mother and the unexpected guests. “Katherine, it was nice meeting you. I wish you both the sincerest blessings on your search for another wife, but please, stop considering me. I'm not an option.”

Crystal patted Maggie on the back. “Maybe Maggie's not the soul you're searching for.” She moved into the center of the circle. “Perhaps you'd consider me.”

Maggie fainted.

• • •

The landing was bumpy, but the bumps in the air couldn't compare to the bump on Maggie's forehead. She reached with soft fingers and gently pressed the half-dollar-sized lump above her left eye. No stitches were required, but even after hours of ice, the wound still rose an inch off the surface of her skin. A bright purple line ran diagonally through the red circle where her head met the edge of a twelve-hundred-pound railroad tie table.

She snorted in pain and looked at the time on her phone. She could take more medicine in three hours. Until then, she'd remain as still as possible and breathe through the hurting.

“Whaddya do to your head?”

Maggie eased her gaze to the driver's bright green eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. “I fell against a table.”

“Ouch.” The large man named Bernie chuckled. His shoulders shook above the black leather seat of an expensive Lincoln town car.

Maggie knew Jordon represented baseball's best, but she never imagined him rich enough to employ a driver. At the airport she expected to ride in a taxi, not Lincoln's lap of luxury. Then again, maybe this was a car service Jordon paid on the side.

“Do you drive for Mr. Kemmons often?”

“Full-time in the off-season, part-time the rest of the year. He has players down here November through February. I get them where they're going.”

Players. Plural. She was under the impression the house held one player, Carlos Nunez.

She sighed. What if there were more? A veritable dormitory of testosterone-drunk young men, who lived on alcohol and foul language while they scratched themselves in inappropriate places and left dirty laundry lying around. She couldn't work in conditions like that.

“How many people are staying at Jordon's house right now?”

Bernie laughed again. “One, but he's plenty.”

Maggie's back straightened. “How so?”

“Carlos is a handful. He cries a lot. He never leaves the house, and he's got Jordon at the end of his rope. But I bet you already knew that.”

Maggie didn't know that, and knowing didn't help foster a successful first meeting. From the moment she walked into Jordon's pristine house to the moment she caught sight of Carlos Nunez slumping on a hammock strung between two palm trees, she felt overwhelmed, defeated and far from home.

Tears flooded the young man's face when she introduced herself, and they continued to fall as she walked away. Jordon was lucky he lived in New York City. If he was in North Carolina, she would've dragged him to the end of the pier and pushed him off, despite the wrath of karma.

With the phone pressed to her ear and her gaze glued on Carlos's drooping back, Maggie bounced her head off the glass sliding door in frustration. The injured spot exploded with pain and she hollered to release the flow of energy at the precise moment that Jordon answered his phone.

“Dr. Collins, I presume. Let me guess. Another spider?” He sounded unusually gruff, which may have had something to do with her yelling in his ear again.

“No. Sorry. I bumped my head, which is irrelevant.” Maggie covered the wound with a soft palm and filled her nose with air. “What is relevant is that Carlos speaks Spanish.”

“Of course he speaks Spanish. He's from the Dominican Republic.”

“Didn't you think that was an important detail? I don't speak Spanish.” Her head throbbed.

“He understands and speaks English.”

“Nothing in there sounds remotely like English. I need a translator.”

“Oh for God's sake, Maggie, are you really that incompetent?”

Maggie.
Something swelled inside of her when he said her name. Other men said her name, sort of pushed it from their lips and lingered on the long E sound, like a whine. But not Jordon. He breathed her name. She thought he put the emphasis on the M, like the sound people made when something tasted particularly yummy. She wasn't sure, though. She wished he would say it again — for clarification.

“If you're gearing up to scream at me, please don't. This airport is a nightmare, and I can't be held responsible for my actions if one more thing goes wrong today.”

Maggie watched Carlos slip off the hammock and walk down the sloping yard to the water's edge. “I don't know what to do if I can't communicate with him.”

“Then consider yourself one hell of a high-priced babysitter.”

Carlos jumped into the lake fully clothed.

Maggie screamed and dropped her phone.

Carlos's head never broke the surface as she rushed down the three-tiered deck to the spot where he plunged off the rock wall and into the gloomy lake. She stood on the same edge, eyes darting over the blackened sheet of glass.

“Mother Goddess, hear my prayer.”

Maggie jumped into the water, too.

The chilly water stole her breath and burned her eyes, but still she managed to tangle a hand in the hood of Carlos's sweatshirt, yanking him to the surface where she could wrap an arm around his body.

Up ahead, the wooden pier sat lower to the water than the rock wall, and although he was conscious, he wasn't much help. Maggie blinked the lake from her eyes and figured her best chance of getting him out of the water without hurting either one of them was to swim with him to the pier and force him up the ladder.

With her arms locked underneath his armpits, she craned her head above the water and kicked like someone yelled, “Shark!”

Several exhausted minutes later, Maggie gripped the ladder as every muscle in her body shrieked. Despite the pain, she pushed and prodded until he climbed the metal steps and she dragged her beaten body onto the pier, where she collapsed — lungs burning and chest heaving — soaking wet on the planks, chilled to her weary core.

Shoving her arms and hands underneath her body for warmth, Maggie studied the man beside her. His left cheek rested against the pier like her right cheek did. His eyes hid behind earth-brown skin. Water dripped off the edge of his wide nose. And although he'd plunged into bottomless water fully clothed, prompting a chaotic rescue, he looked peaceful.

Her heart pounded against the timber.

“Carlos?” Maggie laid a hand on his wet cheek. “Let me help you.”

He remained still, and she locked eyes on his shoulders, checking for movement. She rubbed his face and in a nervous panic, looked for his aura. Nothing. She didn't feel anything either. Maybe that was the projection. Emptiness.

Crystal preached emptiness as a euphoric state sans desire, where a person could achieve true joy and happiness without attachment. Carlos's emptiness looked nothing like euphoria.

Maggie sucked a shaky breath and tried to break through again. “Listen. I don't know baseball. I'm not here to talk about baseball. I'm here to talk about you, but I don't speak Spanish. Wait,
si
… that's yes, right? Oh, and
hola
. I know that too. I'm sure there are other words that'll come to me, but not enough to carry on a conversation, and I want to talk to you, to learn why you're hurting.”

He opened his eyes. Bright gold circles flanked by dripping black lashes stared at her through rapid blinks. She waited for him to speak, giving him as much time as he needed.

When his sharply angled lips made no movement, Maggie forged ahead. “Are you mad that I pulled you out?”

“No.”