The Flower Bowl Spell (8 page)

“She said soon.” I pause, and even though it
isn’t exactly true, I say, “And I believe her.”

He looks at his lap. “This is all just so
strange.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“I’m just not used to such…interruptions.” He
stands up and takes my hands. “We have a routine, you and I.”

“Well.” I wrap my arms around his waist.
“Maybe this is good practice.”

“Practice?”

“You know.” I look down at our abdomens, mine
tucked beneath his. “When we decide to make a little
Memphis-Cooper. A little Mooper.”

“Oh. Right.”

“It’ll give us some inspiration.”

“Inspiration can be distracting.”

“Inspiration can also be inspiring.”

“How come you never say that when Hillary
comes over?”

I grimace. It’s true: much of the time I do
find Hillary a buzz-killer of my maternal instincts. But I didn’t
know it was so obvious.

“Parenthood isn’t easy, Memphis.” He says
this in his I’m-older-than-you voice.

“Really? Because you make it look like a walk
in the park.”

He taps my nose. “Inspiration is inspiring.
You and your tautologies.” He chucks me under the chin for good
measure before heading down the hall to our room. He turns around
right away and whispers, “They’re in the study, right?”

“It’s also the guest room. Right?”

He takes a deep breath and nods. I wait,
watching him. He nods again and walks away.

I turn to the window and search the night
sky. The ritual I did the other night with Auntie Tess was for a
waning moon, getting rid of garbage. We’re heading into a new moon
phase and with a little effort I can catch some of its mojo—time
for new projects. That seems fitting.

I haven’t channeled in about two years. What
if I’ve forgotten how? Now is as good a time as any to find out. I
slip out the back door and down the stairs into the yard, making
sure to stay out of sight of windows.

I inherited this flat from a craft friend,
Faris, who practices with a Persian flavor, when he decided to move
with his boyfriend to New York City. The first time he invited me
over, when he still lived here, we sat out in the garden and drank
wine and he confided that we were sitting on a portal hot spot.
They’re everywhere, places where the veil is a bit thinner. But I
haven’t used it much, not since I got the news about Alice’s
shattered body being found in a Gabon ditch.

Before every ceremony, the high priestesses
taught us coven kids how to meditate, but I’ve always been
impatient with the counting backwards and the dropsy notes of a
lute over the stereo and the visualization. Some people claim there
are gods and goddesses they actually talk to, but I think of it
more as a conversation with a better, smarter, and older part of
myself. I call her Smarter Memphis. If there are gods, they have
yet to show themselves to me, except in the form of fairies,
animated inanimate objects, and talking animals, on occasion.

I strip off my clothes and raise my hands,
opening my eyes to let in the moon’s darkness. My breathing goes
raggedy and I wait for it to even out on its own. My mind, for a
fraction of a second, is quiet, which means the portal is opening.
The next moment, it’s like I’m falling into darkness where no words
or images or sounds exist. The night chill evaporates and the goose
bumps on my flesh calm down. I feel my arms lower. And then I land
and wait for Smarter Memphis.

When I feel her near, I close my eyes and ask
my favorite question, “What the hell is going on?”

****

Later that night, snug in bed, I wake up. All
is still. The clock reads 3:24. I wish I hadn’t looked because now
I’ll be timing myself. How long will it take to fall back to
sleep?

Cooper slumbers soundly next to me. He was
already asleep when I joined him in bed. Too late to tell him about
my Arsenic Playground assignment.

I slip out of bed and pad down the hall to
the girls’ room—already, it’s the Girls’ Room. They’re on either
side of the double bed. This room is supposed to be for Hillary,
but she hasn’t done much to make it her own. She really only sleeps
over when she gets in fights with her mother or deigns to crash
here after a night out with us. I’ve covered the bed with my
butterfly comforter from college and put up a framed Renoir poster.
Across the room are Cooper’s desk and his bookshelves and filing
cabinets. I sometimes work at an antique secretary under the window
next to my own bookcases.

Romola sleeps on her left side—her heart
side. Cleo is on her belly, her curly brown hair spread across her
damp face. I lift it away, and she puffs out a breath, like
thanks.

Their bags are on the floor. Just clothes,
schoolbooks, and toys inside. I tiptoe out and go to the kitchen.
Viv’s envelope is where I left it on the counter. In the living
room, I turn on a reading lamp and settle in on the couch with a
throw blanket. I pour the contents of the envelope onto my lap and
a pile of fifty-dollar bills cascades out. I count them quickly.
There’s over two thousand dollars there. I don’t claim to know how
much little girls cost to keep, but really, how long does Viveka
intend to be gone?

There’s also a binder labeled
For the
Babysitter
, with the medical records she promised. The girls
have their mother’s maiden name, Murray, which Viv has kept too. No
birth certificates, no indication of who their father is. No
sicknesses either. They appear to be healthy, although there’s one
note from a doctor on Cleo’s complaint about ghosts, which he has
chalked up to nightmares.

I put everything back in the envelope and go
back to the bedroom, where I stick it in a drawer of my bedside
table. The clock reads 4:13. I am about to fall asleep when a
thought reels me back into wakefulness. Why did Viveka bother to
include the note about Cleo’s ghosts?

Chapter Eight

In the morning, I call Auntie Tess and give
her a quick
we need to talk
. She agrees to meet at the
aquarium. This is Romola’s request—she’s working on a marine life
home-school project.

The girls sleep in. Over breakfast, I tell
Cooper about the Arsenic Playground gig. He doesn’t hug me or give
me congratulations the way I expected him to when Ned first told me
about the assignment. It’s obvious what’s bugging him.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m taking the girls
with me.”

He raises his eyebrows over his reading
glasses. “You are?”

“Their mom knows.” I put my hand over his.
“It’s okay. We’ll only be gone a few days.” Then I see the look on
his face is not one of concern, but subdued relief. “And we’ll try
not to drive off a cliff and perish in a fireball of gasoline and
tire rubber.”

He ignores this. “Where are you going?”

“Santa Barbara, then San Diego.”

“I take it you aren’t flying.”

I give him a look. He knows very well that
I’m suspicious of airplanes and avoid them at all costs. Since I
reached adulthood, if I can’t drive or take a train, I don’t go. He
also knows that I don’t like to be teased about it.

“We’ll drive. They’ll pay for the gas.”

“Well, if you can get a sitter tonight, I’ll
take you out to dinner. That French place you’ve been wanting to
try.”

“You mean
you’ve
been wanting to
try.”

“Any excuse to eat good food.” He squeezes my
hand.

I promise him I’ll see what I can do. The
girls wake up after he leaves, so there’s breakfast to get and hair
to brush. When I catch a free moment, I call my dog-walking boss
Justine and tell her I’ll be out of town. I also ask, since she’s a
mom, if she has any babysitting leads, but she pretty much just
laughs and laughs. “Oh, Memphis. You’re so cute. A sitter for
tonight
? Last minute? Ha ha ha!” I say good-bye and hang
up.

I still have my hand on the phone, the echo
of Justine’s disbelieving hoots echoing in my ears, as Viveka’s
girls come clambering up the outside stairs from the backyard. Our
flat is on the top floor and the downstairs neighbor has two little
kids. We share the back, which consists of a scraggly lawn and a
sycamore tree. Though it’s a portal hot spot, I haven’t exactly put
up a sign advertising it. The grass is often strewn with various
plastic toys and someone has tied a tire with rope to one of the
tree’s branches.

I wonder if now is a good time to ask the
girls what they know about their pit stop with me, a total
stranger, but I hold back. I need them to trust me, and I have
sensed their guard is up, especially Romola’s. Cleo is more open,
but there’s a challenge there. A challenge, I’m sure, that she’s
waiting with good-natured mischief for me to take up.

“That’s a nice garden,” Romola says.

“Oh, good. I’m glad you think so.” I take my
hand off the phone. “What did you do back there?”

She shrugs. “Mostly we looked for birds.”

“Portents,” Cleo chirrups.

I laugh. “That’s a pretty big word for a
three-year-old.”

“Portents of doom and promise.” She giggles
and tucks her cheek against her shoulder in a show of shyness. “The
air is all wiggly in your garden.”

Hm. That’s an apt description of portal
vibrations.

“She always talks like that,” Romola says
airily. “Could we have a snack, please?”

“Sure thing.” I jump up from my chair. Of
course, they did just eat breakfast, but I suppose children have to
nosh constantly. They’re growing, after all.

I pull out some newly purchased crackers and
peanut butter from the cupboard and set them up with a cutting
board and butter knife.

“Who were you calling?” Romola asks. “Our
mom?”

This question, naturally, pains me. “No,
sorry. Cooper and I have dinner plans tonight. I’m trying to get
someone to stay with you for a little while this evening. You don’t
mind, do you?”

She licks peanut butter off her fingers and
shakes her head.

“I’m sure your mother got you babysitters now
and then.”

Romola nods. “Mostly people from our
church.”

Their church. Does she mean a real church or
is this code for a coven? I lean my hip against the counter and
cross my arms. “What church is that?”

“Holy Revival Redeemer.”

Sounds evangelical, I hope in a good way. I
try to keep an open mind about these things. “How long have you and
your mommy gone to church?”

Romola makes a face. “Like, forever. We were
baptized.”

“You remember that?”

“No. I was a baby. But we’re going to do it
again when we’re fourteen. So we know that we really want Jesus
Christ in our hearts.”

Don’t get me wrong. I like Jesus Christ. We
could have rolled. As a kid, I asked Auntie Tess about him, and she
said he was very cool (my words, not hers). But I think of all the
dastardly deeds that have been done in his name through the
centuries—particularly to ladies of my ilk—and I get a little
itchy.

“What about your dad?” I ask. “Does he go to
your church too?”

Romola looks at me sharply with her eyes just
like her mother’s. She continues to chew her cracker. Cleo, who all
this time has been concentrating on making and consuming little
square sandwiches, looks up at me. “Our daddy is Jesus.”

Exsqueeze me? “Your daddy—he’s—his name is
Jesus, you mean? Like, in Spanish?
Hey Zeus
?”

Romola swallows her bite. “No. Our father is
Jesus Christ. He’s our only father.”

Surely she must be joking. But she isn’t
laughing. I consider that I have in my care the daughters of Jesus
Christ—who, I’ve read, probably looked more African or Arabian than
all those European artists would have had us believe for the past
800 years. More Sephardic than Ashkenazi. “Have you ever seen your
father?”

“Duh,” Romola says, but not in a mean way.
“He’s the holy father. He lives with us.”

“Is he married to your mom?”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah! He’s the
preacher.”

Wow. Viveka has left the building. And by the
building, I mean the craft.

Cleo hops down from her barstool and belches.
She looks at me with widening eyes and giggles in that coquettish
way. “Could I have some cold fresh juice, please?”

I open the fridge and pull out the chilled
grape juice the girls chose at Trader Joe’s yesterday. She receives
the glass I pour for her with a polite thank you.

I have much to mull.

Cleo studies the magnet-cluttered
refrigerator door as she sips her drink—bills to be paid, opera
tickets, take-out menus. I always get magnets as gifts, mostly sent
to me by my parents. There are butterflies, flowers, and seashells,
and various tourist destinations— Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo, Marrakech,
São Paulo. Cleo stands on tiptoe and slaps at a photo of Hillary.
It’s her latest school portrait and she is looking like the
blossoming blond California girl that she is.

“She can babysit us,” Cleo says. She licks
her lips, sighs a wet, rattling sigh, and smiles up at me sweetly.
Portents of doom and promise.

Chapter Nine

Cleo can’t tear herself away from the
jellyfish. They’re in a room, dim and peaceful, lit with black
lights that turn their glowing white flesh a phosphorescent violet.
I don’t mind hanging out in here. It’s more peaceful than any other
place I’ve been in ages, but Romola is eager to move on. She needs
to see the seahorses because that’s what her report is about.

Auntie Tess is just as fascinated with the
jellies as I am. She stands with her mouth open in a child-like
O
, nose almost touching the glass already smeared with the
prints of dozens of other aquarium-goers. Cleo presses her hands on
the carpeted bumper underneath the window. Her eyes hardly
blink.

I slide my hand under Tess’s arm and gently
lead her away from the glass. She breaks her gaze on the gelatinous
creatures, but her eyes are still full of wonder. “To think, such
beautiful animals taste so good.”