The Book of Living and Dying (16 page)

“A fortune teller.”

Donna nodded. “She’s supposed to be good,” she whispered.

When did Donna ever whisper? “Have you been here before?”

“She comes highly recommended,” Donna said evasively.
She produced her cigarettes, reconsidered and slipped them back into her purse to fiddle with her Zippo instead.

Just then, the curtain was pulled back and a man appeared, looking embarrassed. He smiled nervously at Sarah, glanced at Donna and hurried out the door. A moment later a woman stood at the curtain. She looked at Sarah, her almond-shaped eyes black as coal. Like Michael’s. She wore an old sweater and jeans. Her face was round and dispassionate, worn with abuse. Hardly the image of the all-seeing mystic, Sarah thought.

The woman motioned for her to come in and disappeared behind the curtain. Donna sat expectantly in her chair. What was that look she had on her face? Conniving? Delight? Sarah wasn’t sure. She rose, hesitating at the sound of the woman’s grating cough. Pulling the curtain back, she could hear Donna snapping her Zippo open and shut behind her. Open and shut.

The woman hunched at a tired orange melamine table, a deck of cards to one side, a cigarette burning in a nicotine-stained ashtray. A thin lamp leaned in one corner, the shade faded, ripped, strands of beads hanging from its craned neck. The smell of alcohol was overpowering. Gin? Rubbing alcohol? A metal chair with a wooden seat and back, the kind used in grade-school gynasiums, stood in front of the table. The woman motioned soundlessly to the chair. Sarah stepped into the room, letting the curtain fall closed. She could see the scuffmarks of a million encounters on the linoleum floor as she pulled the chair out and sat down.

The woman didn’t speak. No small talk, no questions about why Sarah was there. Her wide, puffy hands were remarkably nimble as she began shuffling the cards. Tarot cards, Sarah could tell, now that she was closer. The woman
began to cough again; the smell of alcohol and smoke made Sarah feel faint. There was barely enough room for the table and two chairs in the room, let alone the fumes radiating from the woman. Sarah covered her nose and mouth with one hand to keep the nausea down. The woman sucked her cough back with a long pull on her cigarette and continued to shuffle the cards, her face taking on a glazed, hypnotized appearance. Snapping cards on the table in the pattern of a cross, she studied them briefly. The name of each card was printed clearly across the bottom: ten of Swords, two of Cups, the Emperor, the Magician. She looked up at Sarah, looked through her, actually, her dark eyes focused on a spot far beyond the young girl in front of her. When she spoke, her speech was slow and thick with accent, her tongue clicking heavily in her mouth like a beetle.

“You are looking for the girl,” she said.

Sarah shook her head, no.

“You are looking for the girl,” the woman said again, then touched the card marked “The Emperor.” “There is a man. He is of the world. He no longer serves you. You must leave him behind.”

“Peter …” Sarah murmured.

The woman’s eyes did not register acknowledgment. Her face remained vacant. “You are searching for an answer. A clue. The pieces are in front of you. They always have been.” She held one hand lightly over the cards. “There is another man.” She pressed a thick finger on “The Magician,” the familiar lemniscate floating just above his head.

“Michael …”

“He has a message for you,” the woman said, tapping repeatedly on the card.
“Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité.”

Sarah waited for her to explain. “I’m sorry … I don’t speak French.”

The woman responded by flipping a card off the top of the deck and placing it into the middle of the cross: the Lovers. An edge of urgency tinged her voice. “Trust him,” she said. She plucked another card off the deck, laid it across the Lovers: the Fool. It showed a man walking with a sack tied to a stick carried over one shoulder and a little dog running at his feet. He walked toward the edge of a cliff, his gaze turned heavenward, unaware of the danger before him. Raising her head slowly, the woman looked directly at Sarah, her eyes glittering in the dusky light of the lamp. Sarah stared back, unable to resist the impenetrable void in the woman’s eyes as the final card was revealed: a black-armoured skeleton riding a white horse. Death. The woman leaned across the table, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes surrounding her like an aura.
“Bury your dead,”
she hissed.

The words scalded Sarah like steam from a burst pipe. In an instant, John was there, sitting across the table in the woman’s place. Stomach lurching, Sarah hunched forward, the acid rushing into her throat. She covered her mouth with her hand as her head began to spin and she thought for sure she would be sick.

But when she looked up again, it was only the woman sitting across from her, gathering the cards and straightening the deck into a neat pile. Whatever spirit had possessed her was gone, her face dispassionate and empty once again. Sarah staggered back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping loudly against the floor. She stumbled, groping for the curtain, and was relieved to see Donna still waiting as she appeared from the back room, dazed.

Donna rose up and pressed something (a business card?)
into Sarah’s hand before disappearing behind the curtain herself. Stuffing the card into her coat pocket, Sarah lunged for the door and pulled it open, the bell jangling as she stepped into the fresh air, the shadowed alley bright in comparison to the fortune teller’s den. She breathed frantically in and out, felt the fumes of alcohol and smoke leaving her lungs, then heaved forward and retched, the vomit splashing loudly, astonishingly, against the bricks in the alley. Hands shaking, she searched her purse for a tissue and wiped her mouth, dropping the soiled tissue to the ground with disgust. She made her way down the alley, shivering uncontrollably.
Stupid old woman.
She exhaled forcibly, throwing her head back until she could see the robin’s-egg-blue strip of sky. In a moment she heard the door close and Donna’s footsteps tapping quickly behind her.

“Hey, wait up!”

Sarah walked faster.

“Hey,” Donna said breathlessly. “What’d she say?”

“Did you pay her?” Sarah asked bitterly.

“Yeah, of course. What did she say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Sarah.”

Sarah’s voice rose with acrimony and confusion. “I mean it! I don’t know. She didn’t make any sense. She was speaking French, Donna.” Sarah spat on the ground. “She’s just a crazy old drunk. You wasted your money.”

Donna nodded. “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter what she said.”

“What?”

She lit a cigarette nonchalantly and offered one to Sarah.

Sarah turned away, running her hands over her face and through her hair. “Can we get out of here please?”

At least Donna knew enough to leave her alone on the trip home. Sarah pretended to sleep while Donna occupied her time fiddling with the radio, changing stations furiously whenever a song came on that she didn’t like. From time to time, Sarah could feel her staring, desperate to talk but thankfully resisting the urge. She wanted to forget about the afternoon, the children in the graveyard, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes, the taste of vomit still lingering in her mouth, the woman’s voice. Sarah tried to shut her mind to the words and the feeling of terror they sparked in her. But the woman’s pronouncement hammered over and over in her head.
Bury your dead.
What had she meant by that? The look on her face, the conviction in her eyes. Those eyes. Sarah moaned lightly and swallowed. She squinched up her face, trying to block the images from playing out in her mind. But the dead weren’t easily fooled, were they? Oh, no. The dead were tricky. Restless. First sign of rain and they were popping up like mushrooms, fingers and toes poking out of the mud like rotting carrots, desperate relatives sneaking around at night to cover them up again, hide the bodies, preserve the family name. And what was it that she had said in French? Something about a message?

Sarah started awake as the car rolled up to her house. She had managed to sleep after all. Donna was looking at her, her face half lit in the glow from the street lamp, the other half in shadow. Like Two-Face, Harvey Dent from
Batman,
Sarah thought. She laughed to herself. Michael had said that once about Donna.

“We can go somewhere for a drink,” Donna offered. “If you don’t want to go home right away.”

“No, I’m so tired,” Sarah said. She thought she saw something in Donna’s face. An apology, maybe? Whatever it was, it was too late. She opened the door and stepped from the car.

Donna drove away as Sarah struggled with the key in the lock. The deadbolt resisted. The door wouldn’t open. For one frantic moment she was convinced that it was John, holding the door handle from the other side.
“Don’t freak yourself out,”
she told herself as she walked around to her bedroom window. Inching the frame up with her fingers, she squeezed her hands in the opening and pushed the window up. She tossed her bag onto the bed, stuck her head through for surveillance and crawled into her room. Once inside, she walked as bravely as she could to the bedroom door, opened it and looked out into the living room.

“Mom?”

The house was dark, except for the light from the street lamps casting ghostly trapezoids over the living-room floor. There was the familiar musty smell from the basement. It seemed stronger than usual. Sarah clicked on the light, banishing the trapezoids to the street. She sighed. The house was so small. Barely enough room for her and her mother, let alone any errant ghosts. Moving from the living room to the kitchen, she began turning lights on, calling out for her mother as she went. She even turned the light on in the bathroom.

A pile of dishes greeted her from the kitchen sink, a carafe of coffee cold on the element, the ashtrays—several of them—littered with cigarette butts. Sarah looked through the window in the kitchen door to the yard, expecting to see John staring back at her. But there was only the tangled
silhouette of the locust tree near her side of the house. On the patio stones, an overturned lawn chair sprawled wantonly, several forgotten plastic tumblers littering the ground at its feet. Gathering her resolve, Sarah drew the curtain shut. She was spooked, that was for sure. She had even called out for her mother.

In the bathroom, she took the bottle of codeine and extracted two pills again, pushing the bottle to the back of the shelf afterwards. She held the tablets in her hand as she crouched in the kitchen, surveying the fridge. It stood under the counter, an old bar fridge her mother had scored at a second-hand store when their regular fridge went on the fritz. Sarah checked the contents. An open can of ginger ale, flat. Some margarine tubs containing mystery leftovers. Old celery wilting in the cracked plastic drawer of the vegetable crisper that magically turned everything to limp spaghetti. A few puckered tomatoes. It was worse than hospital food.

The lifeless vegetables, obviously frozen from a bag, the puréed mush in the morning posing as oatmeal, pale toast soggy with margarine. There were runs made to the deli and even McDonald’s to compensate. It wasn’t long, though, before food was no longer an option, the orderly stopping outside the door three times a day to check the charts at first, only to roll the food cart past the door and over to the next room. Within days the routine was established. There was to be no food of any kind delivered to 319. This was most difficult for the visitors, who had been used to arriving with cans of soda and bags of chips. It made the days seem even longer for everyone.

“Ugh,” Sarah grunted, slamming the fridge door shut. The thought of food made her sick anyway. She took an etched whisky glass from the cupboard, the last vestige of her father, and turned the tap in the sink. After waiting several minutes for the water to run clear, she filled the glass. No ice. The bar fridge freezer didn’t work. “Straight up,” she said as she threw the codeine tablets back with a gulp of water. A wave of nausea swelled then receded. She refilled the glass and carried it to her room, the precise click of the door latch sharp against the quiet of the house.

Placing the glass on the milk crate, she lay down on the bed, listening. She was sure she could hear something. She strained her ears. It was the woman, crying faintly from somewhere in the house. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Sarah sat up and toed the corner of the rug that covered the trap door to the basement. She listened for a moment longer before getting up from the bed and inching the rug back slightly, then mustering her courage and throwing it to one side, exposing the plywood door.

The door was heavy. Her fingertips could barely pry it open and when they did, she could only lift it enough to stick her head into the dark hole. “Anybody down there?” The smell of damp and mould greeted her. With a whoosh of musty air, the door dropped back into its frame. Snapping the rug neatly like a bed sheet, Sarah replaced it over the plywood and lay back down on the bed. The picture of the skeleton on horseback glinted in her mind as she rubbed her forehead, praying for the codeine to kick in.

Outside, a low rumble rattled the window, followed by the erratic strobe of distant lightning. The tentative prelude of raindrops began, thrumming lightly against the glass, its
ceaseless little hands searching endlessly. Fingers and toes sprouted spontaneously in Sarah’s mind. She covered her eyes with the heels of her hands and held them there. Who can fathom the needs of the dead? The old woman’s voice filtered through her thoughts.
You are searching for an answer. A clue. The pieces are in front of you. They always have been.
Sarah repeated the words, softly. She said them several times over, emphasizing a different word each time. What did it all mean?

The rain drummed harder, threatening to wash everything away. The way it had once at the hospital.

Pounding down with a force too great for the antiquated sewer system, causing the streets to flood. The bowels of the hospital eventually swelling with a brown soup, the rooms transformed, water cresting over gurneys and wheelchairs. Plastic bedpans floating with transparent snakes of medical tubing, boxes of wayward syringes bobbing along the surface like schools of skinny blue-nosed fish. An orderly, stripped down to his shorts, wading in to rescue a crate of bandages, despite the tears of one of the nurses who cried out in fear that he would be electrocuted. And the doctor, singing to all the patients about living in the belly of a whale.