The Flower Bowl Spell (9 page)

I smack my lips in agreement. “Let’s get
going, Cleo,” I say. “Your sister’s been really patient.”

As we make our way through the darkened
rooms, I speak to Tess.

“So, Auntie.” I keep my voice low, which
isn’t hard with the relentless murmur of school kids on field
trips. “Isn’t it ironic that Viv’s married to a guy named Jesus
Christ?” I have told her all that I know. I googled the Holy
Revival Redeemer church last night and what the girls told me is
true. Their father’s name really is Jesus Christ. No last name
(although I think Superstar would be kind of catchy). He was born
in Jamaica to a Nigerian father and American mother, who founded
the church and gave their only son a whopper of a name, as well as
no-brainer career plans. On the church’s website, there’s a picture
of Romola and Cleo’s dad preaching to a crowd of hundreds in a
field as it rains. And no one holds an umbrella.

“Why is that ironic?” Auntie Tess asks in all
seriousness.

“Hm,” I say. “Because she was born and raised
a witch?”

“Oh. That.”

“Yeah, that. What do you think is going on?
Why did she leave the kids with me?”

“I have no idea. You should ask Gru.”

“I know,” I say with a Romola-like grumble.
“Wouldn’t she be surprised to hear from me?” Then I think:
Would
she really?
I wonder if Gru already knows where her
granddaughters are. But I can’t ask her—I don’t think Viveka wants
me to talk to her. I could simply email her a casual hello, except
she only occasionally checks her account at the Mendocino public
library.

To be honest, I have been half-expecting Gru
to show up on my doorstep. She also sees fairies and animals
talking to each other, and she helped me interpret auras. Gru is
the real deal, as far as being magickal goes. She has shown me
charms and spells of true power, not just the usual touchy-feely,
window-dressing rituals that were fun and thrilling when I was a
child, but became tedious and empty after I’d grown up. She made a
flower wilt and dry up in the middle of a rain shower. She caused a
cat to fly from her rooftop into the branches of a tree over thirty
feet away. I bet if she really cut loose, her display of powers
would put mine to shame. Unlike most witches I know, she has the
light.

“Viveka asked me not to tell Gru about
this.”

“But why?” Auntie Tess asks.

“Still don’t know. She wouldn’t explain. Or
couldn’t. She was kind of…terse.”

We have arrived at the seahorses, and Romola
is sitting in front of them, writing carefully in her spiral-bound
notebook.

“What do you know about Viv?” I ask Auntie
Tess.

“Not much.” She shrugs. “Something happened
between Sadie and Gru. A falling out. So Sadie moved up north and
took Viveka. Sadie left her husband, although they were never
legally bound. It was a straight handfasting.”

I’ve been to a few of these pagan wedding
ceremonies. Lots of bare feet and flowers. Awesome. Monogamy is not
high up on the list of to-dos for witches. Generally speaking, of
course.

“What was his name again?” I ask. “Viveka’s
father.”

“Tucker Murray. Gru handpicked him for Sadie.
Found him living in a yurt near the Humboldt college campus when
she did some lecturing there.” Tess frowns up at the information
panel for the seahorses. “I think he came from money down in
Southern California.” She turns to me. “Memphis, I need to ask you
a favor.”

“Sure, and I need to ask you one too.”

“You go first.”

I take a deep breath. “Can the girls stay
with you while I’m on the Arsenic Playground tour? Please, please,
please.”

“Oh, lamb, I would but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, this is my favor.” She is beaming.
“I’m doing it. Screw Gil and screw Ana & Co.! I’m going to the
Mellora Islands.”

“What?”

“I’m going on vacation! The Mellora Islands.
There’re very small, very unexplored, off the coast of Mexico.
Well. There’s one spa resort. That’s where I’ll be.”

I take her hand. “That’s fantastic!”

“Thank you. I think so too. And that brings
me to my favor.” She smiles. “Would you do a protection spell for
me?”

Without thinking, I take a step back. “I
can’t.”

“But…why not?” There is hurt in her voice.
“Memphis, you know what it means for me to ask you.” I do know.
Tess is very prideful when it comes to magick. She doesn’t like to
appear powerless. She would do the spell herself if she didn’t
doubt her abilities. Of course, I’ve doubted myself for a while
now—and because of the very spell she wants me to do.

“You know why,” I say.

“Lamb.” She takes my hand. “You’re the best
practitioner I know.”

I laugh. “But Auntie, I’m not doing it
anymore.”

She appears to be choosing her words
carefully. “I’m asking you to do this for me. That makes it
different. It
will
work.”

“Different than Alice, you mean?”

She doesn’t say anything. We haven’t talked
about Alice since right after I got the news she was dead. Which
is, of course, how I found out my protection spell had not been
successful in keeping Alice safe, even as she worked to keep the
women and children of Gabon safe. My failure as a practitioner was
not just bad—it was catastrophic.

The room has emptied, and is quiet. Cleo is
standing rapt in front of one of the aquariums a few feet away from
Romola, who is still grinding away at her notebook. I kneel down
beside Cleo. The tank she’s studying is a large, circular tube
about six feet across and reaching from floor to ceiling. Inside,
free-floating plants drift amongst kelp rooted in the watery,
sand-covered floor.

I look more closely and I can’t help but
exclaim in surprise and delight. The floating plants aren’t plants
at all but large seahorses, about the size of squirrels. They look
like brownish-green seaweed, the kind with pods that wash up on the
beach and pop when you squeeze them. The information panel says
they’re called sea dragons and they live in the waters of
Australia.

Cleo glances at me. “I like them too,” she
says, and I realize I am grinning.

She walks over to Auntie Tess, who still
looks crestfallen, and they begin to chat. I feel grateful, and
turn back to the sea dragons. I do like them. I could stay here for
hours watching them drift back and forth, up and down. They’re even
cooler than the jellyfish.

One floats near the glass, and I lean closer.
It’s shaped differently, and I see that’s because a small mermaid
the size of a fairy sits sidesaddle on the sea dragon’s back.
Instead of wings she has fins growing underneath her arms. Her hair
is black and swirls around her face like squid ink. An eye patch
covers one of her eyes. Her other eye, the same violet as the
interior of an abalone shell, stares straight at me. Her sea
dragon’s nostrils blow steam onto the glass, and the mermaid leans
forward with a crop that looks fashioned from the needle of a sea
urchin.

In the steam, she writes a message so small
that I have to lean in even closer to read it:
Do it for
her.
I look up and my eyes meet the mermaid’s. She winks—or,
since she has a patch, maybe it’s just a blink. The sea dragon
tosses its head and drifts off into the kelp forest.

****

I’m surprised at how quickly Hillary agrees
to babysit, although my up-front offer of fifty bucks probably did
some fast swaying.

Cooper arrives home later than usual, having
played a round of golf at a municipal course after school. I
introduce him for the first time to Viveka’s girls.

He turns on the charm. “And how are you
liking San Francisco? Do any sightseeing yet?” He hangs up his golf
cap and jacket in the closet.

“Not yet,” Romola says. She studies his bag
of irons and grassy cleats. “We’ve been doing our homework.”

Cleo doesn’t really have homework. She has
picture books and is already reading on her own. I have watched
carefully, and she hasn’t just memorized
Alice in
Wonderland
. She really knows it. I sort of tested her by
lending her one of my childhood favorites,
In the Night
Kitchen
, which is like an eerie, urban re-creation of Gru’s
backwoods home in Mendocino. Cleo sounds out the words to herself
under her breath. She goes through it once, then reads it out loud
for me, slowly but accurately, with hardly a mispronounced
word.

“Well, you should have—” Cooper stops and
looks at me. He seems puzzled. It’s because, I realize, he’s not
sure what they call me.

“Memphis,” I say.

“You should have Memphis take you—or
we
should take you—to Pier Thirty-nine. Or how about the
carousel?”

“We already went to the aquarium.” I point
out the polished seashells I bought for them at the aquarium gift
shop. Romola says she’ll use them in her school project, and Cleo
has named hers Mani and Pedi after I said I needed one.

I send the girls back into the living room,
where Romola has her papers and books spread out on the coffee
table. I’ve been correcting her multiplication tables exercises.
She’s struggling with the sevens. Cooper heads down to our room and
I follow. He sniffs the incense that lingers in the air from the
protection spell I did for Auntie Tess. I sit on the bed and watch
as he starts to take off his clothes, but he stops with a glance at
the open door. I jump up and close it for him. On the floor behind
it I find a jumble of dust bunnies and an earring I lost months
ago. We rarely have to shut this thing.

“Did you get the Chez Remy reservation?”

He shakes the dust off his bathrobe—also
rarely used—and puts it on. “
Mais oui
.” He pauses and then
looks at me, leans down, and gives me a kiss. I smell the dampness
of the fairway on his skin along with a musky scent, faint and
familiar. Not entirely his—I’m mixed in there too.

****

Hillary eyes one girl and then the other.
This will be easy for her. Already, I gave them dinner, bathed
them, and got them in their PJs. All she has to do is feed them
snacks, watch TV with them, and get them to brush their teeth and
into bed by—I’ve said—ten o’clock, although Romola has informed me
they never go to bed after nine, not even on the weekends.

The girls say hello to Hil in their
pixie-light voices. They both jump up from the living room floor,
where I have installed them with pillows, blankets, and a bowl of
peeled oranges.

“What are their names again?” Hil asks.

“Romola and Cleo.”

Cooper’s daughter wrinkles her nose with
perfected tweener aplomb. “What kinds of names are those?”

“What kind of name is Hillary?” Cleo
pipes.

Hillary stares at her then turns to me. “Is
she back-talking?”

“Cleo,” I say. “Are you back-talking?”

“What’s that?”

I look at Hillary. “She can’t be doing
something if she doesn’t know what it is.”

“She could poop and not know what to call
it.”

“Now, that’s back-talking.”

“I know what poop is,” Cleo offers. “We call
it caca.”

The girls are fascinated by Hillary, and she
is a fascinating being, the ideal American girl—blond, slender,
fine-featured, with braces and just a touch of acne to make it all
real. They follow her around the room and into the kitchen where
she helps herself to a soda. They trail her back to the pillows.
She finds
Shrek
on TV, already in progress, and watches it
as the girls watch her.

Cooper gets his sports coat on and gives
Hillary a kiss on the top of her head. I notice she hangs on to him
longer than she usually does. Her half-closed eyes shift to the
girls. I want to reassure her, but with girls and their daddy
issues—what can you do?

****

Marisol told me about Chez Remy before the
buzz hit the streets. As the
Planet
’s
politics/sex/restaurant columnist, she’s a foodie, obsessed with
restaurant lists, Yelp, and
Zagat
surveys. She’s my polar
opposite, constantly jamming, canning, and cooking in her tiny
apartment kitchen.

“Chez Remy is not just about the food,” she
has said on more than one occasion, after writing up a review of
the place a couple of months ago. Each time she gives me a
significant wink, which could mean either there’s (a) a really foxy
host, (b) a really foxy bartender, or (c) a truly outstanding warm
chocolate pudding cake.

It soon becomes clear to me that choice (a)
is the reason Marisol’s eye twitches. The blond host, dressed in a
button-up shirt the color of oxblood and jeans similar to Tyson
Belmonte’s expensive designer pair, dazzles us with his crookedly
white smile. His face is etched with laugh lines. He’s about
Cooper’s height, slightly smaller in the shoulders, and carries
himself around the small, overstuffed, din-filled room with a
lithe, puckish grace.

“Your server will bring you water,” he says,
his rich, French accent filled with
z
’s and
e
’s. “It
will not have ice. I hope that is satisfactory?”

“Wonderful,” I say.

“Fine, fine,” says Cooper, exuding
Francophile satisfaction.

“
Bon
.” Our host looks into our eyes.
His are so blue. “Can I get anything else for you at this moment in
time?”

“Champagne,” I say quickly.

“Fantastic!” His eyes light up with approval.
“A brut,
non
?”

“Just two glasses,” Cooper says. “I have to
drive.”

So responsible. That’s why I love him.

“Not a problem.” Our host’s smile shines down
on Cooper. “I will return very shortly.”

I put my napkin in my lap—it’s a warm poppy
color. Everything in the restaurant is warm—the heavy velvet
curtain encircling the door, keeping out the draft; the mahogany
chairs and tables; the copper-accented zinc bar, muzzily reflecting
the wine bottles stacked in the wall on its burnished surface.
Scents of cooked food load the air: slow-braised lamb, simmering
beef stew, spicy persimmon salads. I could crawl into the
fragrances, and search the corners for magickal creatures. I would
almost welcome them, tell them to pull up some saltshakers and stay
a while.