Still Life with Tornado(52)

“A home is more than a roof over your head.”

“Can you see marriage and kids and love and stuff?”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You have talent,” she says. “You already know with great talent comes great pain. Something happened in the winter that changed you. Spring, maybe. It was cold. It changed you. For the worse.”

“Yes.”

“You’re surrounded by negative energy. Black magic. I could cleanse this from you.”

I find myself wondering if I want to be cleansed from black magic. After five seconds, Tiffany realizes that I’m not the one with the money.

“I’ll do your mother next,” she says. “Just send her in.”

“That’s it?”

“Send your mother in,” she says.

I feel like I was only in the room for about two minutes.

“Why can’t I draw anymore?” I ask her.

“It’s the black magic. I can cleanse that for you. Just pick three cards.”

I try not to laugh. This must be how fortune-tellers make their money. I’m sixteen, not stupid.

“I’ll get my mom.” I get up, nod, and say thank you, and go to the door to tell Mom it’s her turn.

As I sit in the waiting room, I try to remember what Tiffany said to me. I don’t have a home. I’m unhappy. I saw something when it was cold and it changed me. With talent comes pain. Black magic. Negative energy. She never answered my question about love.

I try to remember the positive things she said. Long life. No illnesses. Talent. That’s all I remember. I take her ignoring my question about love to mean that I won’t ever find it. This isn’t a positive, but it feels like one. I don’t know why.

Mom stays in the room for about the same amount of time. A little longer, maybe. Four minutes, tops. I hear them laughing at the end before the door opens. Then I see it’s just Mom laughing and Tiffany still looks like a drill sergeant. Mom hands her some money and says thank you. She has tears in her eyes.

“Come back one day,” Tiffany says. “You both need a cleansing.”

We say we will and we walk through the chaos of little children and an old man toward the staircase and leave the place and walk south to Pine Street.

“Holy shit,” Mom says.

“Yeah.”

“What did she tell you?”

“A bunch of stuff. But then at the end she said I had to get cleansed of the black magic.”

“Me too,” Mom says. “I told her that the black magic was working for me, so I didn’t want her to cleanse it. What a shyster.”

“She said some good stuff, though,” I say. “She read me.”

“Me too,” Mom answers, and her face is a block behind us. Far away. Somewhere else.

I didn’t want to tell Mom that I would never find love. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d never been looking, either. I didn’t know why this idea was so new to me. I knew I’d never cared. Since second grade when kids got married at recess, I never got married at recess. Kids had passed me will-you-be-my-girlfriend? notes in fourth and fifth grade and I always checked the NO box. No one ever even assumed I was gay, which is saying a lot because everyone is assumed gay at some point if they never say yes to those notes. All anyone knew about me was that I drew pictures. All the time. Got in trouble in class for it, won primary school competitions for it, was the middle school art teacher’s pet for it. No one ever expected me to be anyone’s girlfriend.

Not even me.

And I don’t know why. Tiffany knew why. The answer is on Mom’s face, now two blocks away.

“I’m hungry,” she says. “Those crepes were small.”

“Yeah,” I say.

We are a scribble—two people stuck in a dark scribble of black magic—walking home to eat a snack. We are not ourselves. Tiffany just changed us. We don’t know what to do with this.

? ? ?

When we get home, Dad is in the kitchen making a snack of queso and tortilla chips. He says, “Want some?” He’s dipping the chips right into the jar. He’s double dipping. He double dips right in front of us so we’ll say something. This is called bait. What he’s doing is fishing. I watch Mom watching him. He’s a complicated man.





HELEN’S LYING



I lie. I lie. I lie. I lie.

I lie. I lie. I lie. I lie.

All I want is a quiet place. Six days in a quiet place. I need some sort of head space so I can figure myself out.

My parents died before I was twenty-five. I’ve been alone in the world from long before that, though. I’ve been busy. Too busy to listen to my own heartbeat. Too busy to look at my own hands. Too busy to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m doing a lot wrong.

I just want to listen for a while. Stop lying. Stop talking. Stop pretending. I just want to listen for a while and see if I can hear my heart beating.

Chet provides the noise. Even when he’s not here, his noise is in my head. Sometimes it’s so loud I scream and when I sleep I can’t escape it and I clench my jaw and bite my cheeks until they bleed.

I never get to listen. I never get to stop and figure out this puzzle. I don’t have a table big enough to fit the puzzle.