Now that the kids were off to school, it was time for phase two of my morning ritual. This involved acquiring a few tools first: a nail file, a flashlight, a pair of gloves and a plastic bag. The file was to jimmy my way into Ariel’s desk drawers. The flashlight was to look under the bed and other dark corners. And the gloves and bag were to remove anything repulsive that I might find. The week before, it had been a dead squirrel.
And, no, I’m not kidding.
The top of Ari’s desk looked fairly clean. Amid the bottles of nail polish and scattered earrings, lay a forgotten math book, but otherwise there was nothing terribly wrong. Next, I used the file to open the top drawer. It isn’t that Ariel locks the drawer, there’s no lock on it after all, but she’d figured out how to artfully jam it shut by stacking too many things inside. So I carefully slid the file through the crack, and in a moment,
violà
! I’d gotten pretty good at this over the past few months.
Now I could begin checking. For what, you ask? Well, I could never be sure. Matches, of course. But also, tiny bottles of liquor and other small bottles that she stores liquor in, packets of condoms she’d taken from Jasmine’s purse, mail that she’d stolen from other people’s mailboxes. Mail that she’d stolen from
my
mailbox. Candy and gum and eye shadows that she’d palmed from the store. Once, inexplicably, a teething rattle.
If you’re thinking that taking care of Ariel is a lot of work, you don’t know the half of it. Some of her habits are only mildly irritating, for example, the way she removes the labels from every single canned good I buy. While others, like cutting diamond-shaped holes in my drapes, make me so angry that my vision fogs. But there are a few – like the time she used my credit card to buy a dozen Marie Osmond collectable dolls from the Home Shopping Network – that really push me to the limit. Every night I lay awake, terrified that she might slip out of the house while I’m sleeping. I’m like her stalker, making sure that I know where she is every moment of the day.
And why do I do it? Why don’t I simply kick her to the curb? Or back to her mother, which would basically be the same thing. Or even back to Ted since, after all, she’s technically not my niece; she’s his.
Well, on the day Ted’s sister, Tanya, showed up on my door, standing next to her was this frail-looking little kid wearing black eye shadow practically up to her bangs, and a black raincoat six sizes too big for her. And when I heard that she and her mother had been sleeping in their car for the past three months, my heart melted.
“I need a place to stow her for a few days,” Tanya had told me.
Now, mind you, I had only seen my sister-in-law a half a dozen times over the past twelve years, and most of those meetings had ended in disaster. She showed up at my wedding long enough to steal some of my gifts. She convinced me to bail her out of jail and then skipped town. And she once called me ‘fat’. Ted and his mother had written Tanya off long before I arrived on the scene, and they both refused to speak her name. But despite all of that, when I looked into Ariel’s large brown eyes, I couldn’t say no.
“What do you think, Ari,” I asked. I was aware that Tanya had a daughter, but I’d had never laid eyes on her before. Seeing the waifish-looking child made me feel like the magnanimous Mr. Brownlow taking in the grateful urchin, Oliver Twist. “Do you want to come stay with me for a while?”
Ariel is tiny for her age, but already her eyes were sharpened with adult disdain. “Hell, no.”
It was like she’d tried to slap the smile off my face, but I hung onto it for all I was worth.
Tanya was outraged. “You haul your ass in that house and be nice to the lady,” she demanded.
Ariel stood her ground a minute longer, then mumbled, “Whatever,” and came inside. And thus, life with my niece began.
So on the morning after my mother’s funeral, as I was digging through her desk drawers and finding nothing, I once more wondered if maybe – despite what the little boy had told me – Ariel was beginning to turn around after all. But then I began to check the rest of the room, and that’s when I saw the voodoo doll lying on her pillow.
I knew right away what kind of doll it was because it was studded with pins. Also, it was lying on top of a few pages that had been printed from the Internet. Pages entitled, “How to Make a Voodoo Doll”.
A little more history.
That fire Ariel started in my old house? Despite what the insurance company claimed, that was an accident. Yes, Ariel started it, but not in order to burn the place down. No, she’d started it because she’d been using candles for a séance and hadn’t bothered to extinguish them before walking away. My little Ari, named for the heroine of her mother’s favorite movie, Disney’s The Little Mermaid, was already deep into the occult before she ever started shacking up with me.
Anyway, the sight of the nearly formless little poppet sickened me. A red-headed pin pierced each of the crudely sewn X’s that marked its eyes, and a black-headed pin had been jabbed into its sexless crotch. For one horrifying moment, I thought the doll might be me, but then I noticed that she’d used white yarn to make its hair. White hair? That left out pretty much everyone I knew. Even my dad, who was letting his hair gray naturally, only had a dash of silver at his temples. Ariel’s mother was an overly dyed redhead. Grace was a brunette.
So who was this, I wondered. A teacher? One of her mother’s old boyfriends? Tied around the doll’s lumpy neck was a scrap of red fabric cut from a bandana. It’s torso was naked, but the legs were squeezed into a pair of pants stolen from one of Grace’s Ken dolls.
The thing gave me such a case of the heebie-jeebies that I used the gloves to pick it up and put it into the plastic bag along with the pages of printed instructions. I tied the bag tightly shut by its handles and stuck the whole mess in the trash and took the trash outside. I’d have to talk to Ari about this, of course, but I certainly didn’t want to do it with that thing in the house with me.
Since Jas and Tommy had taken off with some friends the night before and still hadn’t returned, I was now blissfully alone in the quiet apartment. Although my main business for the day was to once more pester the insurance company, I decided a little ‘me time’ was in order. So after pouring a cup of coffee, I sat down with the daily crossword puzzle. I had just filled in the six-lettered word for “mine’s entrance”, when someone behind me cleared his throat.
I shrieked and started up from my chair, knocking over my coffee. Behind me stood Mr. Clerk, Miss Spry’s assistant. Once again, he was dressed in white, but this time it was a polo shirt with a sweater knotted under his chin. He looked as if he was about to step onto the tennis court at the country club where Ted and I used to be members. He was completely out of place in my kitchen with its sink full of dirty dishes, overflowing garbage can, and books and Barbie dolls scattered over the floor. With an arched eyebrow, he watched Drinking Tea leap onto the table and begin lapping lukewarm milk from Grace’s cereal bowl. “You should consider hiring a maid.”
“Certainly. Right after I make the final payment on my Lamborghini.” The newspaper had soaked up the spilled coffee like a blotter. Swearing, I tossed the entire soggy mess into the trash. “Can’t you people
knock
for crying out loud?”
“You need to learn how to listen for us.”
“And how, pray tell, do I do that?”
He ignored the question. “Go get dressed. Miss Spry has asked me to take you on an excursion.”
Suddenly, my perfect morning was ruined. “Is this like an assignment? Because the last one didn’t go so well.”
“You butchered it,” he said bluntly.
“But I got that man to take the pills,” I argued.
“No, he took them because of his previous addiction. What you nearly did was convince him to call his sponsor.”
Mr. Clerk looked at me expectantly, but I refused to apologize. Giving drugs to an addict was wrong, plain and simple. The only thing I regretted was that I hadn’t been able to talk that man out of it. In fact, that regret had kept me up most of the night.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Face it. I’m not cut out for this succubus thing.”
He brushed crumbs off of one of the chairs before sitting down. “Ms. Straight, you’re looking at all of this the wrong way. You’re not forcing people down the path to hell. You’re simply reminding them that they have a choice. You see,
He
has made certain that every human is born with a conscious that constantly reminds them of what
He
wants from them.” He cast a sour look upwards, as if he could see God through my kitchen ceiling. “But what you do is balance the equation. You keep humans from becoming his slaves by giving them an alternate way to act.”
To me, this sounded a lot like company propaganda, and I wasn’t buying it. “If God doesn’t want a drug addict to take drugs, then I’m fine with that.” It was strange to align myself with God since, over the years, I pretty much ignored him. But the meth thing had struck a nerve with me. After all, I couldn’t erase the memory of Ariel’s mother doing her jittery drug-dance on my front steps.
Mr. Clerk crossed his legs and pinched the crease of his slacks. “Well, that is a shame. Because I had a special treat planned for you today.”
“Like what? Pushing an old lady down the stairs? Feeding strychnine to a baby?”
He sighed. “Must you always be so dramatic? No, I was going to take you shopping.”
Shopping. My credit card kryptonite. I grit my teeth and clenched my fists from the effort to resist.
“Your wardrobe seems a little lacking, and I’d thought you could use some new clothes.”
My bedroom hadn’t been touched by the fire, but most of my clothing had been so smoke damaged that it couldn’t be saved. I’d been wearing the same four outfits over and over again for the past three months.
“Being a succubus can be fun, Lilith,” Mr. Clerk said. “It’s a lifestyle that offers a lot of rewards.” He stood up. “So what do you think, my dear? How about a little jaunt to Rodeo Drive?”
If he’d said we were going to the local mall, I probably could have resisted. But I couldn’t refuse visiting designer Mecca. I’m only human, after all. “Are you sure you’re not a tempter yourself,” I asked. “Because you’re awfully good at it.”
Mr. Clerk smiled. “I’ve trained a lot of seducers in my day. Including William Darcy and your mother.” He held out his hand. “Ready?”
I most certainly was.
Moments later, we were standing beneath the warm California sun. We stood on a length of bleached sidewalk punctuated with the pencil-straight trunks of palm trees, and in front of us was an enormous line of shops. I’d visited here many times before with Ted, and standing there was like coming home.
Mr. Clerk pressed his fingertips together against his lower lip as he surveyed the stores. “Where to begin?”
I read each of the designer names I saw, savoring the sound of them in my mouth. How I’d missed them! But one look in a display window was enough to bring me back to reality. “You are paying for this, right?”
“Let’s not be vulgar and talk about money, shall we?”
“That’s all well and good for you, but I’m broke.”
He heaved a sigh. “You needn’t worry about it.”
With that assurance, I took Mr. Clerk by the elbow and steered him inside the nearest boutique which had begun unlocking its doors.
The best part of shopping that morning was not the warmth of the California sun that came as such a relief after the slushy, mid-winter day back home. Nor was it the break away from the dim reality of my life. No, it was the priceless look of surprise on Mr. Clerk’s face when I came out of the dressing room wearing something that I had picked out myself.