The Cloisters(35)

“Ann,” Patrick said again, sliding his hand up my arm toward my shoulder. “I’m sorry. We should have invited you.”

I don’t know what I thought he would say, perhaps that I shouldn’t be there. That I was fired. But I hadn’t expected to be invited in, and although I should have been frustrated that, yes, I had been left out, my heart swelled with appreciation at his words.

He motioned me to follow him to where the deck of cards we had picked up at Ketch Antiques was laid out in a complicated grid.

“With a new deck, Patrick likes to”—Rachel paused as if searching for the right way to phrase it—“break them in here.”

“Atmosphere,” he said, “helps one fully tap into one’s intuition.”

I knew not to ask if we could turn on the lights but joined Rachel on the far side of the table, where she reassuringly took my hand and squeezed it. Whose decision it had been to leave me out of the evening crossed my mind, and I wondered if Rachel had played the protector or the gatekeeper. As much as they had welcomed me in, there was a relationship, a connection between Rachel and Patrick, I would never be able to access.

The reading was set up for Patrick. He had dealt the cards and was untangling the meaning of the spread, running a finger below each card, pausing only to touch the corners of the cards themselves. After several minutes had gone by, he gathered them in a pile, taking care that they didn’t rub up against one another, and handed them, the entire stack, across the table to me.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Rachel observe the gesture. Something flashed—as if she were pulling away—and then she softened, took a step closer.

“Start by holding them in your hand,” Patrick said, “and think about the question you want answered, then lay out three cards in a row.”

I did as I was told, keeping my eyes closed through the entire process. Not shuffling, of course, for fear of damaging the oil paint and gold leaf. I was beginning to dare to hope that they might show me the shape of my future—the days still ahead at The Cloisters and those beyond.

It was impossible not to be struck by the beauty of the cards as I laid them out, not to be captivated by their brilliance and unusual symbols, not to read into what they might be saying. In front of me were the Moon, the Hanged Man, and the Two of Cups. I knew that the Moon, facing me as it did, square and upright, meant deception or obscurity, trickery. The Two of Cups, though, spoke of love or friendship, of new relationships, of cooperation and attraction. The Hanged Man was a symbol of transition and change, but also, traditionally a sign of Judas—the traitor. Together, they told me of a shifting landscape, of newness and danger. And there was something more, something prickling at the edges of my vision that felt like an older warning I couldn’t quite pin down. An energy coming off the cards that made my pulse beat faster and my eyes swim and burn as if I were underwater.

Because Rachel already knew the symbolism of the deck inside and out, I had begun to study the meanings of individual cards on my own, the way I had once studied Latin flashcards. I had learned the way the suits spoke of different tendencies—the cups of intuition; the swords of diversity of direction; the wands of primal energy. I had discovered that the Major Arcana could be interpreted differently depending on the orientation of the card, whether they were upside down or right side up. But mostly, I had learned that there wasn’t a one-to-one correlation between the cards and events; it was more a feeling, a sensation that they gave.

“What do you see?” Patrick asked, his eyes meeting mine. And then again, he asked, this time with an edge, “What do you see, Ann?”

In them, I could see my future, even echoes of my recent past, but what I saw was private, for me alone—they were a semaphore that things were shifting, beginning to shake loose, even if I couldn’t see exactly how they would come back together for me. I resisted the urge to mess them back into a pile and pretend I hadn’t laid them out at all.

“I’m still new to all of this,” I said, gently setting the cards aside. “Why don’t you read, Rachel?”

“I can’t,” Rachel said. “I don’t do readings.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t. I study them, but no, I don’t do readings. I won’t.”

“You’ve never had a reading?” I asked.

She looked across the table, pinning her gaze on Patrick. “I have. In the past. It’s complicated. Unlike Patrick, I don’t want to see the future. I’d rather be surprised.”

At that, Patrick pushed himself away from the table, and the heavy wooden chair he had been occupying fell backward, clattering against the stone floor. He did not bother to right it. Rather, he walked out of the library, leaving both of us standing there, alone, in the candlelight.





CHAPTER ELEVEN


Three days after I thought I saw it in the cards, Leo invited me to a gig in the Bronx.

“I play bass,” he explained, chewing a toothpick and leaning against one of the columns that ringed the Trie Cloister. “You can take the subway. Just one stop past Yankee Stadium. I’ll meet you.”

There had been no small talk, no explanation of what happened that day at the greenmarket or after. He simply stopped me and asked. It was less an invitation and more an inevitability. At least that was how I felt about it, even though I didn’t have his phone number—and he wasn’t offering it now, either. Just a promise to meet me.