Valley of Ashes (5 page)

“Yea,” I said, “verily.”

She threw her arm across my shoulder. “Why couldn’t God have made us dykes, instead of this bullshit?”

“Because he’s a vindictive asshole, remember?”

We were standing in the entryway of the local psychic academy, which resembled the cheapest available Holiday Inn banquet room somewhere outside Indianapolis: bad “fruitwood” paneling, wagon-wheel ceiling fixtures, and giant versions of those plastic chairs we’d had in California grade school—the kind with splayed aluminum Jetson legs
and three parallel slots cut down the middle of their injection-molded backs.

“Are we
sure
we want to do this?” asked Ellis.

I shrugged. “It’s Boulder. You can’t really escape: Every fucking day’s the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
ad aeternum
.”

“I’d prefer the Age of Scorpio,” she replied. “Suckbags and all.”

There were pairs of people scattered around the room, seated to face each other.

A woman with a mass of Pre-Raphaelite red-blond curls approached, wearing a tie-dyed caftan.

“Five bucks she’s wearing pentacle earrings,” whispered Ellis.

“We are
so
evil. And I have nothing against Wiccans, per se.”

“Not even that bitch in your dorm senior year?” whispered Ellis. “The one who kept leaving bloody feathers outside your room, after you snaked the hot Irish dude right out from under her at the Spinning Wheel on kamikaze night?”

“Not my fault. You’re the one who pulled him over to the table and told me, ‘I brought you a present.’ ”

“Welcome, ladies,” said She-of-the-Caftan, raising her slender arms as she drew nigh. “Blessed be.”

“Back atcha,” said Ellis.

“I’m Becca Tay.” The Caftan Lady smiled. “Are you here for readings?”

Ellis shot me a
“psychic” my ass
eyebrow.

I kicked her in the ankle. Discreetly.

Not like I didn’t think it was complete horseshit, too, but just for courtesy.

“We are indeed, Becca,” I told the woman. “Thank you.”

She turned to survey the room. “Anthony and Willow are just finishing up. Let me get you squared away,” she said, turning to lead us toward the cashier.

I wanted to make fun of it all, but there was something calming about this lady’s presence. Plus she had amazing hair.

Okay, I really
didn’t
want to make fun of it. I wanted it to work—all of it.

I was so tired, so bereft, so hungry for comfort that I wanted to believe: in the New Age, in wheatgrass, in
something
. Pick a card, any card… Kali, Vishnu, Batman-and-Robin.

Was there anything that could relax me enough so I could let go of the wheel for thirty seconds?

No. Of course not. I had long since become utterly fucking incapable of trusting anything beyond the confines of my own tiny black heart.

Too much risk out there. Too much downside. Too much certainty of pain.

I pulled Mom’s twenty from my pocket and fell in line behind Becca Tay as she started across the room, dragging Ellis by the wrist in my wake.

Ellis was placed with Anthony, well across the room from me.

Willow turned out to be a guy—young, with black curly hair and a twitchy Adam’s apple. I sat down on my highly inorganic chair and surveyed the fields and pastures of wrinkled hemp in which he was arrayed.

He lifted his wrists toward me, palms up. “
Your
hands atop mine, please.”

German. Which explains the black socks and sandals. Which are not really helping me with the whole willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing here.

I laid my palms lightly across his, and he closed his eyes.

Let me just say here that I don’t dismiss all fortune-telling out of hand.

A very kind old man once did a reading of my face, peering into my future and reporting back some deeply scary auguries, all of which proved true in the end. But he’d been taught the knack for it by an old Gypsy woman in the cattle car bearing them both toward Auschwitz—her dying gift, as it shortly turned out.

I’d always figured you couldn’t tap into this stuff without having survived a plunge so deep into the magma of the world’s black depths that everything else was burned away.

But young Herr Willow, no doubt named Helmut or Rolf at birth and now holding my hands in his, looked pretty damn unscathed. Like maybe the worst tragedy he’d ever endured was discovering that his midmorning soy latte had been tainted with an actual dairy product.

I glanced over at Ellis.

Anthony was checking out her tits and she was trying not to smirk. Well,
sort
of trying.

Willow swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork in winter surf.

I felt a wave of compassion for him. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and no one would ever mistake him for a well-endowed pool boy.

He yanked his hands out from under mine and shot to his feet, knocking his chair backward to the floor.

“I need
grounding
! I need
grounding
!” he screamed, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around each iris.

With that he sprinted for the door, sandals flapping.

Becca the Caftan Lady blocked his egress and gathered him in her arms, pillowing his head against her shoulder.

“Shhh, Willow… shhhhh… it’s all right,” she said, leading him from the room. “Let’s get you some water. You’ve had a long day.”

Jesus, now he was
crying
. I guess I still had enough Manhattan snark to short out a psychic. Or maybe he’d just sensed my inborn fondness for bacon cheeseburgers.

Oh fucking well.

A tall, thinly bearded brunette guy came in moments later, heading directly for me.

“I’m Jesse,” he said, sitting down in the vacated chair. “I’ll be finishing up for Willow.”

“Okay.”

No hand-holding this time. Jesse let his eyes go unfocused, then
muttered a few adenoidal niceties about how my life was like a rose, and the earth was our mother, and blah-blah-tofu-flaxseed-blah that I basically tuned out, being still not-a-little freaked by the shrill bedside manner of Karnak Numero Uno, frankly. Other than that, it was stultifying.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, when he’d finally droned to a close. “That was very, um, helpful.”

Jesse nodded, smug. “Go in peace, sister.”

“Jesus,” said Ellis, once we’d escaped the building. “What were you thinking about, the Spanish Inquisition?”

“Pool boys, actually.”

Ellis’s hand popped up for a high-five slap.

I didn’t disappoint her.

But I sure as hell should’ve kept my fingers crossed for a very long time afterward, because the universe was about to chuck a veritable barge-load of shit, sidelong, into the whirling blur of a rather enormous fan.

The blades of which were angled directly toward still-oblivious me.

M
y front porch pillars were still twined with spiraling green Christmas garlands and strings of unlit-by-day white lights.

“You know,” said Ellis, “it being March, you might want to think about taking down the holiday crap.”

I shook my head. “Fuck that. I’d only have to put it all up again come Thanksgiving.”

“You guys’re going to be here that long?”

“Probably,” I said, kicking a small rock down the sidewalk. “It’s not like I exactly have a choice.”

“Well, it looks like you’re in mourning for Martha Stewart.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” I kicked the little rock again, sending it skittering into the snowy grass of my lawn.

A pair of fire engines caterwauled south along Twentieth, belching low plumes of diesel exhaust.

Ellis shook her head. “I can’t believe Dean isn’t here for the girls’ birthday.”

“
But Bunny, it’s Pittcon
,” I said, quoting my absent spouse, “
the premier annual sales event of the global scientific-instrument industry
.”

“Sounds like a giant fucking drag.”

“No doubt,” I said, “But they have it this time every year so he’s probably going to miss all our birthdays forever, barring employment catastrophe.”

I peeked into the living room window before we mounted the front porch—no sign of children. “They’re not up yet. Want to sit out here for a while?”

We settled back into the bouncy old metal chairs that had come with the house.

“When should we open the girls’ presents?” asked Ellis.

“After dinner, probably. Once we bring out the cake.”

“When do you want to open
your
presents?”

“I don’t officially turn thirty-two until Sunday—trying not to think about it.”

“So Dean’s going to miss that, too?”

I stretched out my legs, crossing them at the ankle. “Reply hazy. Ask again later.”

“Shitheel,” she said. “He better come home with a deeply excellent present.”

“T-shirt from the airport, probably. New Orleans if I’m lucky, Denver if I’m not.”

“What’d he get you last year?”

“Sushi delivery and a gold bangle from Tiffany. But I was just back from the hospital, having successfully whelped dual offspring.”

Ellis nodded at that. “Raw fish and good jewelry… commendable.”

“Except for the part about me having called in both orders myself with Dean’s Amex. Which started out as a subsidiary card to mine, by the way.”

“And did you ask his permission first?”

“Of course.”

She shook her head, smirking. “Amateur.”

“
Dude
. I am acquisitive, not floridly delusional.”

A high, thin screech rattled the upstairs windows.

“Hadley,” we sighed in unison, rising slow and weary from our chairs.

Mom produced the candle that had graced my own first-birthday cake: a ladybug-strewn white stub she’d kept in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box for nigh on thirty-one years.

She sank it into a yellow-frosting rosette on Parrish and India’s cake, added a tiny pink grocery-store taper “to grow on,” then lit both wicks with a stout kitchen match while I doused the living room lights.

I looked at my mother’s face in the flickering glow, and pictured the old white-edged snapshot of myself in a high chair with a paper hat on my head as she leaned forward into the frame, slender-armed and laughing, touching another match flame to that ladybug candle’s wick for the first time.

The eighth of March, 1964: my mother not yet turned twenty-five and me in a little blue smocked dress with a white Peter Pan collar, my swinging feet in tiny red socks. The colors have faded long since, but on that square of glossy paper I gaze upward with awe, drinking her in.

And now I watched Mom lift up my daughters’ cake and start walking toward the living room, the door frame briefly illuminated as she stepped through it.

Ellis started snapping pictures, the two of us singing “Happy
birth
-day Parrish and India” along with Mom before we grown-ups blew out the little teardrops of flame in their honor.

I’d made party hats the week before, tall medieval princess cones of gem-toned poster board.

This was the type of project I got up to during the girls’ naps, basically
stuff I do when I have enough energy not to fall asleep on my feet, drooling, but am still goddamned if I’m going to waste a single rare moment of clarity on cleaning the fucking house
. Ditto the extensive front-porch Christmas decor.

These things weren’t earth-shattering, by any means, but even the tiniest modicum of creativity made me feel like a human being again. Albeit briefly.

Maybe that’s why I’d left all the crap up on the porch: as testament to even my smallest actual accomplishment in the world above and beyond pushing a vacuum hose back and forth across the orange shag on my hands and knees. Again.

I mean, you vacuum the rug, and it looks like shit again by the next
morning. But first-birthday pictures stick around, and I wanted my kids to know full well that they had been adored when they were little.

Parrish’s birthday hat was emerald green with a fat striped bee glued on, its waxed-paper wings glitter-veined. Perry’s was dark sapphire with tinfoil stars, comets, and moons. Ellis’s read G
LAMOUR
B
UNNY
in tiny pearls on lavender, Mom’s E
MPRESS OF
A
LL
S
HE
S
URVEYS
in rhinestones across a faux-ermine-trimmed field of scarlet. Hadley’s was hot pink with leafy vines of lemon-lime sequins, India’s saffron with a jade-colored Buddha seated atop a garnet lotus, the words
OM MANE PADME HUM
written beneath him in Sanskrit.

After the cake, the girls started opening their presents, a project that required heavy guidance from the rest of us. Parrish kept sticking the bows in her mouth, Perry wept when he tipped his ice cream and cake onto the floor and stepped in it, and Hadley and India pretty much shellacked each other’s hair with frosting while the grown-ups were scraping Perry’s sticky mess out of the shag fronds.

At that point, of course, the phone rang.

“Go ahead, we’ve got this,” said Ellis, shooing me toward the kitchen. “If it’s Dean tell him everything’s under control.”