Chapter
She hadn't gotten back on the computer after Cate left, after all. By the time she was in the house alone, still a little tipsy from the wine and exhausted from crying, she had fallen into bed and collapsed into sleep within minutes. It was a relief to escape her grief, even for the brief periods of time that sleep afforded her. She knew that the insomnia was probably partly guilt--somewhere inside she believed that she didn't deserve to escape her grief. The therapist she saw for awhile in Chicago had said that before she could recover from it, she had to be ready to let it go.
She knew that was true, and she wasn't ready. She still somehow felt that to let go of the grief would mean letting go of the memories, and while she knew it wasn't healthy, she just couldn't do that yet. The memories were all she had left of them. She kept them inside her like a stone in her heart, and to even contemplate removing that stone made her palms sweat in panic.
If the memories were gone, if she let them go, what would take their place? What would be left of her?
* * *
Sarah was working in her office when she looked up to see Cate standing in the doorway. "Hey, boss?" she said. "When did we get these in?" She held out a box of cards the size and shape of tarot cards. The box was dark blue, with an image on the front of a kneeling woman with hair the color of spun gold, holding her arms around what looked like a pregnant belly.
"I don't know," Sarah answered. "I don't remember seeing them before. What are they?"
"Soul Cards. They're really cool. I just hadn't seen them before, and wondered if they were new."
Sarah shrugged. "Maybe Jason got them in one day when we weren't here. I don't remember ordering them, but I may have."
Cate wandered back out to wait on someone, and Sarah turned back to her work. By the time she looked up again, it was getting close to closing time.
She put her books away and walked out into the main room. Cate was sitting behind the counter reading a paperback--a Carl Hiaasen, it looked like--and yawning. "Ready to close up, kiddo?" Sarah asked.
"Yeah." Cate yawned again. She had put her short red hair up in little clumps on top of her head, and was wearing heavy black-framed glasses that Sarah suspected she didn't really need, but just wore for effect.
"Late night last night?"
"I was painting. I got on a roll and didn't want to stop. You know. You take the inspiration when it comes . . ."
"What are you working on?"
"Well, it's funny. Angels, mostly. I'm not normally an angel kind of gal, but they just sort of showed up and wouldn't go home. So I painted them." She grinned. "Of course, knowing me, they're not your usual kind of angels."
Sarah grinned back at her. "I can imagine. So when can I see them?"
"I don't know. Awhile yet. They're pretty embryonic."
"Okay. I'll wait."
Sarah started counting the money in the cash register while Cate walked around the store straightening the books on the shelves and running a feather duster over the spines. They worked quietly and efficiently; they'd done this too many nights to count. Cate was a painter in, as she liked to say, her "real life," who liked to sleep in and stay up late, so she generally tried to schedule her hours at the bookshop for the evenings. Jason was more of a morning person, and he usually opened up in the mornings, worked a few hours, then took off for afternoon classes. They occasionally overlapped, but Sarah couldn't afford, and didn't really need, to have both of them work at the same time except on rare occasions like special sales and the pre-Christmas period.
Speaking of which: "Hey, Cate?" Sarah called.
"Yeah?"
"Will you remind me tomorrow that I need to figure out the schedule for the next couple of weeks? I'll need both of you guys here for some extra hours, I think. It's getting close to Christmas, we're going to get busier soon."
"Sure. I can use the extra hours. I'm going to have to buy some of my Christmas presents this year. I wasn't nearly as productive as I had hoped. I didn't even have time to make Christmas cards this year. My mom and dad are getting a painting, but that's it."
"Okay. Good. Thank you. I mean, good that you can work, not good that you didn't get your Christmas stuff done . . ."
"It's okay," Cate said.
Cate was actually fairly famous in their small corner of the world, selling her paintings in several small galleries, and taking commissions for portraits when she had time. She also made small sculptures and collages--Sarah didn't know how Cate found the time, but suspected that Cate survived on very little sleep most nights. Oh well. Sarah knew how that was, and knew that lack of sleep wouldn't kill you. It just sometimes made you feel like you wanted to die . . .
As they finished tidying up the shop for the next day, Sarah slipped the box of Soul Cards into her skirt pocket. She didn't remember ordering them, but they looked intriguing, and she wanted a chance to look at them a little closer.
"Nite, Sarah," Cate called, as she slipped out the door. Then stopped and turned back. "Want me to wait for you?"
"No, that's okay," Sarah said. "You go on, I won't be long. Good night!" She took one last look around the store, then went back into the office to pick up her bag and say goodnight to the cat. She squatted down in front of Sophie's chair and took the cat's face in her hands. "You be a good girl tonight, Sophie. Catch a mouse or something." She turned out the light, locked the door, and walked silently home.
* * *
She sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, her grandmother's quilt draped over her shoulders. Music was playing softly on the stereo, and she had turned off the lamps and brought every candle in the house into the bedroom and lit them, so that the whole room glowed.
She had opened the box of Soul Cards and spread them around her on the floor. According to the booklet included in the box, the cards were meant to be used as a focus for meditation or journaling, or as altar cards. The pictures were all stylized, and many of them were pretty obscure; there were no interpretations offered, apparently you were supposed to decide what you thought they meant. Sarah generally preferred her divination tools to be a little more cut-and-dried, more concrete; she liked picking a card and having something tell her exactly what it meant, exactly what she was supposed to expect. She realized that was a little silly, but she didn't like trusting her intuition too much. Where had it gotten her so far?
She gathered up the cards and straightened them, then spread them out again, facedown this time. She sat and thought. Please give me some guidance here. Tell me what I need to do. Help me figure out what to do. She picked up a card and turned it over. It was mostly beige and pink, like the inside of a seashell. It showed a woman sitting in the middle of a swirl of what might be a seashell, or might be sand. The edges of the swirl were blurred, like the tide had just gone out.
She sat and looked at it. What did it mean? She was surrounded by sand, by water--she lived at the beach! So that wasn't terribly deep, although she supposed it was pretty strange that she would pick this card out of all of them. Surely it meant more than a woman who lived at the beach.
She looked at it again. The figure in the center looked hunched, closed. It (she?) really looked surrounded. Or maybe she was being swept out to sea. Maybe it was a whirlpool, with the figure in the center.
She was getting sleepy. She put the rest of the cards back in the box and set them on her dresser, then propped the card that she had picked against the wall at the back of the little altar. She'd leave it there for a while, think about it. The colors were nice and soft. She ran her fingers across the card, then the seashell--a cowry shell--on the altar, touched a little statue of the elephant God, Ganesha's, then, as she did every time she passed the altar, touched her fingers to her lips, then brushed them across the silver frame.
"Good night, dear heart," she said softly, and went to bed.
© 2002 Willa G. Cline