The Cloisters(88)

Rachel and I repeated this—swim, nap, squeeze together under the bit of shade the umbrella afforded us—until late afternoon, until the sky began to darken and the clouds shifted from white to gray, dwarfing the skyline with their height. The wind, too, had kicked up, ruffling the edges of our books and pulling at the umbrella. But as the sun dipped lower, it became clear we had waited too long. At the end of the lake, a dark band of rain was making its way toward us, the downdrafts forming whitecaps on the water. Daytime had given way to darkness—that surreal experience that only seems to happen on the hottest summer days—and while no lightning had cracked the sky, a sudden chill told me it couldn’t be far away. And then, directly above us, thunder. A gust of wind knocked over our umbrella, throwing it end over end across the lawn, the towels and books tumbling after. We chased them down, the rain falling hard on our shoulders and bare legs, corralling the items as they danced in the wind before running for the veranda and the safety of the house. Already, I could hear the rain’s deafening staccato hitting the roof, the boathouse, the windows.

“I don’t think we’ll lose power,” Rachel said as soon as we were inside.

I hadn’t imagined that it could become darker, but when the wind hit the broad side of the house, I took an involuntary step back. In only a matter of minutes, the afternoon had changed—irrevocably—and in that moment, I longed for the only thing that seemed to be able to hold me in place when everything else around me spun and spun—the cards. I left Rachel in the living room, watching the storm, for the bedroom where I had been sleeping; I felt around in my bag until I found it: the leather box with green ribbon that contained the cards.

Wanting to read with a complete deck, I slipped the Devil card into the center of the stack and arranged myself, cross-legged on the old woven rug facing the bank of windows, streaked with rain. I began the process of gently shuffling and laying out a spread, placing the cards with intention, arranging them in a complicated grid of ten. Five would signify what had come before, five what was still ahead. And as I laid them out, I couldn’t help but be gripped by what I saw in my past. There was the Two of Cups, reversed—a card that spoke of distrust, an imbalance. Next to it was Saturn, a card we had associated with the World in a traditional deck—the father figure. But also, in ancient Rome, Saturn had been conflated with the Greek god Cronus, a Titan who had usurped his own father and devoured his young. The Ten of Coins, reversed, focused the reading even more squarely on family, and there, too, was the Moon. That most fickle of cards, which shined a light on the error of our ways. I had to look away from the truth that the cards were trying to make clear.

“What do they tell you?” Rachel asked. She had followed me upstairs and now leaned against the doorjamb. And then so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her over the rain, “What do they tell you that I can’t?”

“It’s not like that. It’s a feeling.” I looked up. “An unlocking.” But I knew it could be more than that, too. The document we had translated said that the cards were prescriptive—they told the future, perhaps even made it.

She refused to come in the room, but stood on its threshold, watching me.

“Come on, Ann,” she said. “You don’t really believe that the cards can tell the future. Nothing can. Only we can make our futures.”

But her voice was frail, and I remembered the story she had told me about her mother and the tea leaves, the way the reading had filled her with a fear that never fully left her.

“We all want to believe in something greater than ourselves,” I said, holding the remaining cards in my hand and studying the spread. “Isn’t that what Patrick always said?”

“Why would you even want to know?” Rachel said, now walking into the room and arranging herself across from me on the floor, legs crossed. “If what you’re saying is true, that there’s something out there waiting for us, something we might be able to see, why would you want to know that?”

It was then that I realized Rachel was actually afraid. Where I had leaned into my intuition, she had pulled away. I wondered, then, if she had actually found the tea leaves reader her mother had visited. And for a brief moment, I allowed myself to imagine her, walking into the shop, only to be cast out; the fortune-teller, pointing at her accusatorially. But the truth was, we were both right in our own ways. I did believe we were destined for certain things, the way I believed my father was destined to be on the side of the road that day and that nothing I could have done would have stopped his death. Because what was it like to live with the alternative? Wondering always if I could have saved him by making a different choice.

Rachel reached across the space between us, breaking my concentration, and placed a hand on my arm.

“Ann. Believing can be fun. But that’s all it is—fun. It’s not the work. The work is here.” She pointed at the cards, a finger hovering above the illustrations. “Let’s focus on that.”

I looked up at her, sitting across from me, pleading. I imagined that she had once said the same to Patrick.

“Just let me read for you then,” I said.

It was a dare, but also a test of how far Rachel would let me push her. It struck me, then, the distance I had put between myself and the version of who I was in those first weeks, when I tried so hard to measure up, when I tried so hard to meet her on her level. She searched my face, and for the first time, I knew we were on equal footing. She was now as uncertain as I had once been. As the sound of the rain on the windowpanes surged, she nodded.