Girl's Guide to Witchcraft (19 page)

Before I could return to my desk, another patron approached the coffee counter. “Mr. Potter!” I said, recognizing Uncle George’s friend from the opera guild.

“Good morning,” he said, tipping an invisible hat. “And how is the Peabridge’s grant-writing phenom?”

I tried not to make a face. “Not the best, Mr. Potter.”

“What’s wrong?”

I gave him the sanitized version of the story—the funding just wasn’t going to come through this year, but we had high hopes for the future—and then I asked if I could make him a coffee. “A small mocha would be wonderful, dear.”

“Whipped cream?”

“What’s a mocha without whipped cream?”

I laughed and agreed and got to work making the chocolate-and-coffee mixture. Mr. Potter took advantage of the time to look around the Peabridge lobby. “You’ve got a beautiful building here, don’t you?”

“It was converted from a residence nearly fifty years ago. The architects did a wonderful job at bringing in light.”

“My Lucinda would have loved this place. She always said that her spirits rose, just by standing near books.”

I smiled. “I know what she meant. How’s her dog?”

“Oh, Beijing is doing fine.”

I passed him his mocha, and he took a tentative sip, relying on the generous serving of whipped cream to keep from burning his mouth. “Ah,” he sighed. “As perfect a mocha as I’ve ever had.”

“We aim to please,” I said.

“I never would have expected to find a coffee bar in a library.”

“Well, you know. We try to make up budget shortfalls wherever we can.”

“How much revenue can coffee possibly generate?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Besides, our budgetary needs are relatively modest. A thousand here, a thousand there, and we might be able to get started on cataloging our colonial recipe books.”

A smile crinkled the corners of Mr. Potter’s eyes. “I’d better stop in for a mocha more often, then.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing you.”

Then he was gone, off to his widower’s life, with Beijing and whatever else he had for company. I turned my attention to wiping down the milk-steaming nozzle. When I looked up, I was astonished to find Jason Templeton standing at the counter.

Jason Templeton. Flashing the perfect Imaginary Boyfriend grin.

“Good morning.”

“It’s nine o’clock!”

He looked confused, but then he said, “And it can’t be a good morning at nine o’clock?”

“You don’t come in until nine-thirty.”

“My morning class was canceled today. Founder’s Day. The students are supposed to attend other lectures on the deep inner meaning of higher education in our country. Most of them are still sleeping off the weekend, though.”

I was hearing the words, but I wasn’t truly processing them. Jason was here. In the Peabridge. Talking to me as if I hadn’t incinerated dinner in front of him the week before. As if I hadn’t worked magic.

“I brought you something,” he said, and he handed me a white plastic bag.

Jason was here in the Peabridge
and
he’d brought me a present.

“What is it?” It was light, whatever it was. And it squished when I clutched the bag close.

“Open up and see.”

Marshmallows. A bag of giant marshmallows.

“I—” I started to say, but I couldn’t imagine how I’d complete the sentence.

“I thought that you could use them, if your oven catches fire again. I should have brought graham crackers and chocolate bars, as well.” I laughed, and he shook his head. “No! I should have brought you another blanket to replace the one that burned. That was really quick thinking, to smother the flames.”

There we were. He’d decided to completely ignore the magic spell. Well, wasn’t that what I’d told him to do? Hadn’t I insisted that the strange sights had been misconstrued in the panic of the moment? I felt a strange mixture of disappointment and relief. I wanted him to press me for information about my witchcraft and yet, I was thrilled that he was willing to make light of the Great Lamb Chop Debacle.

“Well,” I said. “Once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout.” I gestured with the bag of marshmallows. “And I can use these to bake banana boats over an open campfire.” Quick. Think of something else to say. Before he walked away. “I’m sorry that you had to leave so quickly Thursday night.”

He looked uncomfortable, as if I’d chastised him for bad behavior. “I didn’t want you to go to any more trouble on my behalf. And things
were
getting sort of strange with your tenants appearing out of nowhere and your ex showing up and all.”

Scott? What did Scott have to do with anything? Scott was in England with his new lady-love.

“Oh!” I said, finally understanding. “David!”

He nodded. “I know that you called him your mentor, and I understand how that works. It’s always strange when professors start seeing their students, isn’t it?” Just how much did he know about
that,
I wondered? But first, I had to make him understand that David wasn’t my ex.

“I imagine that
is
pretty strange, but David and I have really never been romantically involved.” Our one kiss didn’t count. He and I had agreed on that.

Jason looked unconvinced. “You can’t tell me there wasn’t
something
going on there. I got definite possessive vibes from that guy.”

I remembered David’s insistence that he and I needed to talk, that we needed to discuss the fire spell. “He can be pretty pushy, but it’s just that he takes his study seriously. And he thinks that I should, too.”

Jason shrugged. “If you say so.”

“So.”

Okay, that was stupid. I know that it was stupid. I don’t know what possessed me to say it. But it just popped out, before I could stop it. Throwing good impressions after bad, I said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that you’d come over for dinner again?”

That
surprised him. What was I thinking? I trapped the guy in a corner of my kitchen and nearly burned the house down around him, then I asked him back for dinner? Right. He might be willing to forgive me one disaster, but what idiot would put himself on the line for a second attempt on his life?

“Actually, dinners are sort of hard for me. You know, as the term gets going at school…”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. My stomach swooped down to my toes, and I tried to remember to keep a smile on my lips, to pretend that I couldn’t feel my heart shattering inside my chest.

“But if you were free for lunch? My treat?”

“No! I mean, no to your treat. But yes to lunch. Of course. Yes.”

He wasn’t rejecting me! He wasn’t trying to avoid me! He wanted to eat lunch with me!

He took out a slender black calendar from his briefcase. “Hmm,” he said. “This week is crazy, with Founder’s Day changing courses around. How about next week, though?”

“Next week’s fine. Name the day.” If I had anything on my calendar, I’d move it.

“How about Wednesday? We could meet at, say, noon? At La Perla?” Italian. That would make Melissa-approved first-date ordering a challenge, but I’d manage it. For my Imaginary Boyfriend, I’d manage anything.

“La Perla,” I said brightly. “Noon on Wednesday.”

“It’s a date, then.”

A date. He actually said the word
date.
He started to turn away and walk toward his usual research table. “Jason!” I called, unable to let him go quite yet.

He came back to the coffee counter, a smile quirking his lips. “Jane.”

“Um, what if I need to phone you? You know, if Evelyn calls a meeting or something and I’m going to be late. Can I get your number?”

“Oh. Sure.” He dug a pen out of his briefcase and looked around for something to write on. I started to tell him that I’d grab a pad of paper from my desk, but he picked up one of the cocktail napkins from the counter. “Here you go. It’s my cell. I’m never home, so it’s useless to try to reach me there.”

He smiled and handed me the number. Ten digits. Ten consecutive steps toward making my dream come true. A kiss that I scarcely remembered, a silly gift of marshmallows, a lunch date for next week and now a phone number. That was clearly progress, anyone would have to agree.

As I watched him settle in at his worktable, I resisted the urge to call Melissa. I would never have been able to keep the teenage squeal out of my voice as I told her that I was ready to drop the Imaginary category.

Jason Templeton had asked me out on a date and then he’d given me his phone number. He’d taken the first step over the border into the delicious, terrifying, exciting, breathtaking territory of Boyfriend-land.

“All right, Gran. It’s a quarter after. Can we go now?”

“Jane,” my grandmother said, and I could hear annoyance in her voice. I wasn’t sure, though, if that emotion was directed at me, or at Clara, or at the small children who were dodging around us, intent on seeing every square inch of the stuffed elephant in the center of the Natural History Museum’s rotunda.

I looked toward the front doors of the museum, wondering if I could have missed Clara in the crush of people. By arriving right at opening time, at 10:00 a.m., Gran and I had been caught up in the melee of families, the mothers and fathers and screaming, anxious children, all eager to get a glimpse of the museum’s fossils and skeletons and other exotic displays of the natural world.

I’d never understood why families
start
at the Natural History Museum. Most kids were fascinated by the collection. Didn’t that make the museum a more likely target for the afternoon, then? Drag the kids to the art museum in the morning, make them study the delicate application of paint by the Dutch masters, or the effects of atmosphere in Impressionist paintings.

Then, reward them in the afternoon, by taking them to see the suspended blue whale or the rampaging tyrannosaurus rex or the live insect zoo. (A live insect zoo, by the way, sponsored by Orkin. No one could say that our government didn’t have a sense of humor.)

Instead, I was willing to bet that half these children would be weepy and/or hyperactive by the afternoon, and their one real chance at learning art history while still in elementary school would be ruined. But who was I to say anything? No one had asked me
my
opinion.

“There she is!” Gran said, and her relief was as loud as the horde of rampaging kids who had just discovered the elephant’s tusks and were debating whether the pachyderm could throw them up to the balcony with one toss of its head.

Clara swept up to us, as breathless as she had been in Cake Walk. She was wearing the same movie-star sunglasses, and she raised the same hackles on the back of my neck. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to read my runes before I came over here this morning. The spread took longer to interpret than I’d planned.”

I slung my purse over my shoulder and started to head toward the door. Runes. Clara’s runes were more important to her than I was.

“Jane!” my grandmother called.

I stopped. This wasn’t fair. Gran shouldn’t have come. If Gran hadn’t been here, I could have been as rude as I wanted to Clara. As rude as she’d been to us, leaving us waiting for her. Waiting for fifteen minutes. For twenty-five years. But with Gran standing at the base of the giant elephant, I couldn’t very well turn around and walk away. I’d be offending the one woman who had loved me unconditionally, who had nurtured me and raised me, even when my own mother abandoned me.

I took a deep breath and turned back around. When a troop of Cub Scouts started to shriek their excitement over the dinosaur exhibit, I moved back toward Gran and Clara, so that we wouldn’t have to shout to make ourselves heard.

I set my teeth and tried to keep my voice civil as I asked, “And what did the runes have to say?”

I must not have succeeded in the civility department, because Gran gave me a sharp look. Clara, though, seemed thrilled by my interest. “I used my jade runes,” she gushed. “They’re often the best at depicting matters of emotion, Jeanette, family, love, relationships.”

“Of course,” I said, icily ignoring the oversight about my name.

Gran glared at my superpolite tone, but Clara went on, oblivious. “I drew a fork spread, because we seem to have reached a critical point in our relationship. Decisions have to be made.”

Oh, don’t they.

No, I didn’t say it out loud. But I thought it very, very clearly. Clara chattered on, utterly unaware of my scorn. “The first rune of a fork represents the first possible outcome. I ended up with Ken.”

Ken. Like Barbie and? I had no idea what Clara was talking about. Even Gran seemed a bit put out, and she started to look at the banners over the different museum galleries. I sensed that she was trying to find something to distract Clara, to rein in her rampant enthusiasm over bits of green stone.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling some bizarre need to fill the silence as Clara paused for breath. “I don’t know what Ken means.”

Clara swept off her oversized sunglasses for the first time, and she blinked at me. Once again, I was struck by the color of her eyes. My eyes. And when I glanced at Gran, a shiver crept down my spine, for I realized they were her eyes, as well. Any stranger looking at us would know that we were three generations of the same family. Three women in a long line.

I thought again about what David had said, about how witchcraft typically descended through the mother. Could there be some truth to that? Was it possible that I came by my powers legitimately? Did my mother’s use of runes have the same magical base as my working spells?

“Ken,” Clara said, obviously unaware of my introspection. “It looks like an arrow, a less-than sign. It stands for light. For knowledge.” She pursed her lips in a rueful pout that almost made me smile. “I don’t draw Ken very often.”

I wanted to tell her that I knew the word then. Shakespeare had used it in his long poem,
The Rape of Lucrece:
“’Tis double death to drown in ken of shore.”

I suspected that I knew what he’d meant. You can see salvation, but you know that you’re never going to reach it. Just as I could see the family that I’d never really known, I could see the mother who had abandoned me when I was a child, but I was never going to find comfort in her arms.

Grudgingly, I asked, “What other ones did you draw?”

Gran looked at me in surprise, as if she suspected that I was mocking Clara. I was able to turn an honest smile to her, though, and I was rewarded by her glance of relief. Clara answered, not at all aware of the silent conversation that had passed between Gran and me. “Gebo was the next one, the second possible outcome.”

Gebo.
Okay, Shakespeare never used that word. “Um, I don’t know that rune,” I said, but I was curious enough that I forgot to sound snotty.

“It looks like the letter
X.
It stands for a gift. It’s a positive sign, because the giving of a gift enriches both the person who gives and the person who receives. But it’s a complicated one, because additional bonds are built with gifts. Debts are created.”

“Or paid.” I said the words without thinking, but I knew that they were true. Clara looked at me directly for the first time since she’d arrived in the museum.

“Or paid,” she repeated, and she nodded slowly. I could almost see the wheels spinning inside her head, and I wondered what connections she was making, what lines she was drawing between what she’d said and what she thought.

Maybe—just maybe—there
was
something to these runes. After all, two months ago, I would have said that the notion of witchcraft was ridiculous. If anyone had told me that there truly were familiars or magic wands made of rowan wood or fires that could be extinguished by chanting some words, I would have laughed and asked them what book they were reading. Or what they were smoking.

But witchcraft was real. And maybe Clara’s jade tiles were, too. “What was your third rune?” I asked.

She flashed me a huge smile. “With the fork spread, the third rune is the critical factor. The one that determines which possibility will come to pass.” She looked from me to Gran, then back at me. “My third rune was Berkana. It looks like a
B,
but the loops are triangles.” She looked down at her short, stubby hands, suddenly—amazingly—shy. “It stands for household. For family.”

And there it was. I could hear something in her words, something that I hadn’t heard before. Not in her rush of exuberance here by the elephant. Not in the crazy words she’d spouted at Cake Walk.

Clara wanted this to work. She wanted to build a relationship with me, to strengthen the one she had with Gran. She wanted to find the family that she’d walked away from, that she’d abandoned so many years ago.

This couldn’t be easy for her. Every time she looked at me, she must see opportunities that she’d lost. I must remind her of my father, of her youth, of all her mistakes.

“So, that’s why I was late. You can see why I needed to finish the reading.” She sighed and looked around expectantly. “Now, where are the crystals in this place?”

Okay. Well, I might have a glimpse of understanding into Clara’s soul, but she was still weird. I mean, I was coming to believe in witchcraft, and I might ascribe some form of power to her strange jade stones, but I certainly wasn’t about to embrace every form of New Age hocus-pocus that crossed my path.

Gran shook her head, but there was a hint of fondness at the corners of her lips. “They’re upstairs, dear.”

Dear. That’s what Gran called
me.
I felt the scrabble of a green-eyed monster at the edge of my thoughts.

I was adult enough to know that Gran could love two of us at once. She could call two people
dear.
Hell, she called Uncle George dear half the time. But it was different when she directed the word to Clara. It felt as if Gran was taking something away from me.

“Let’s go, then!” Clara started to soldier off to the nearest flight of stairs.

“Clara!” I called, and needed to repeat myself to be heard above the noise in the rotunda. “I think we should take the elevator.”

“Oh.” She turned back and gave me a curious glance. “If you really need to.”

I looked at Gran, but Clara didn’t seem to get my point. Gran did, though. And she took exception to my trying to protect her. “I’m
fine
, Jane. I can walk up a silly flight of stairs.”

But they were long flights. Two of them. And Gran was breathing heavily by the time we got to the top. “Let’s just look out at the crowd from up here,” she said. She didn’t fool me. I knew that she wanted to catch her breath.

And then she started coughing.

It was the same cough that she’d had at her apartment, but now it seemed worse. Much worse. Her face flushed crimson as she fought for breath. I started to put an arm around her shoulders, intending to help, but she shrugged me away. Frantic, I looked around for a bench. Without touching her, I directed her toward the stone surface. Still coughing, she collapsed onto the seat.

“Mom!” Clara said, sitting beside her. “Are you all right?”

“She’ll be fine,” I said, but I didn’t really believe myself. “She was coughing like this the other night.”

After what seemed like a lifetime, my grandmother finally got her breathing under control. By then, the color had drained from her face, and her lips were thin gray lines. Clara hovered next to her. “Mom, you look terrible.”

I was torn between snapping at Clara for her lack of tact and agreeing with her assessment. Gran gave a wan smile. “Just what a mother loves to hear from her daughter.”

Again, that green-eyed weasel burrowed beneath my heart. Gran should be directing words about love to me. I was the one who’d been there for her, for years. I was the one who’d helped her at the party the other night, who had listened to her coughing then. Which reminded me…“Gran, did you call Dr. Wilson?”

She patted my sleeve, as if I were the person who needed to be comforted. “There was no need, dear. I’m fine.”

“Mom, you didn’t sound fine just now,” Clara said. Again, I pushed down my frustration with her. After all, she was on my side in this. I knew that. It was hard for me to admit, but I knew it.

“I’m feeling better already,” Gran said, forcing a ghastly grin. She insisted on getting to her feet. “Now, where are those crystals?”

Shrugging and exchanging worried looks with Clara, I followed my grandmother into the minerals display.

I had been to the National Museum of Natural History approximately 5, 347 times, counting school field trips. Every single time, I visited the minerals and gemstones. Every single time, I was bored out of my skull with the display, except for the Hope Diamond.

And it wasn’t even the Hope itself that interested me. It was the myth that surrounded it—legend said that disaster would befall every one of the stone’s owners. The Hope was the largest blue diamond in the world. A billion years old, it was the size of a baby’s fist, and it glinted balefully on its velvet display. It was sheltered behind bulletproof glass, set inside vault doors. Rumor said that the treasure was lowered into the ground each night, stored in a secure safe dozens of feet below ground level. A line stretched around the viewing gallery as scores of museum visitors waited for their chance to ooh and aah over the cut stone.

But Clara could not have been less interested. Instead of waiting to see the Hope, along with the Star of Asia, jade carvings and other valuable pieces of jewelry, Clara was immediately drawn to the minerals. Not the gemstones. The boring, ordinary, workaday minerals.

She stopped in front of a display case and stood transfixed, as if she were reading all the secrets of the universe. I stepped up beside her and saw a bunch of rocks.

“Pink kunzite,” she breathed.

“What?”

“That one. The dark pink one. With the black streaks going through it.”

I saw the stone that she was talking about. It was pretty enough, but nothing special. I might have seen rocks like it in the cheap jewelry stores along Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown.

“The pink of the stone reflects the heart. Unconditional love. Mother love.”

She hesitated for a moment before she looked at me, but I wouldn’t meet her gaze. Instead, I looked behind us for Gran. She was sitting on one of the benches, across the gallery. She caught my concerned glance, but when I started to take a step toward her, she waved me back to the display. Her expression was clear: she did not want me drawing attention to her. She wanted me to stay with Clara.

Who seemed not to have noticed my distraction. “But there’s violet in there, too,” she was saying. “Violet is the sign of the higher mind, Je—Jane. Of wisdom.”