Twilight

  “What?” Then I laughed. “Oh. No, Pete didn’t run me down this time. I have had the wind knocked out of me, though. They turned us down for the insurance, Cleo.”

  “No!” She squatted, her dress falling down around her to the floor. “I don’t believe it!”

  “So much for the pendulum’s prediction, huh?”

  “Well.” She smiled sympathetically. There was something about her, some depth of emotional perception, that seemed older than her chronological age. “I only promised it would tell you what you wanted at an unconscious level. Anyway, the future isn’t set in stone. We always have choice, things can always change.”

  “Oh.” I sighed and gave some more thought to getting up, maybe even getting dressed. “That would be nice.”

  “What’d they say, Jenny?”

  “They said no. I don’t know the details or their reasons.” I laughed a little. “I think I’d better pack up and leave town, Cleo, before they find a rail to ride me out on.”

  She bit her lower lip, then said, “Perspective.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What you need in this situation—what we all need in a crisis—is some perspective. Got a mountain we could climb this afternoon?”

  “Nope, no mountains round here.”

  “That’s okay.” She grunted and let herself down to sit cross-legged on the floor with me. “I’ve got something that’ll do just as well.” She reached into the big brown suede purse she had carried in with her and pulled out of it a much smaller gray pouch that was tied with a satiny ribbon. She also brought out a small, thin gray book with gold lettering on it. Something clattered inside the pouch when she put it on the floor. I couldn’t read the book’s title upside down.

  “How’d you find us out here, Cleo?”

  “I spend my days searching for addresses, Jen. If there’s anything I’m getting good at, it’s finding somebody. I suppose you’re thinking, what am I doing here, bothering you at home and on a Sunday? I realize it’s not as if I’m one of your real friends, I’m just the girl who delivers the spiders.” Her lavender-blue eyes had a mischievous laugh in them. “I don’t really know anybody in town yet, except my customers. I just moved here last summer, you know—”

  Her eyes were exceptionally expressive, I thought, and I could have sworn what they were expressing at that moment was loneliness.

  “No, I didn’t. From where, Cleo?”

  “Vermont.” She shrugged, causing one of the straps on her sundress to fall off her shoulder. With a casual hand, she pushed it back up again. “I guess I haven’t had time to make friends. I’ve been so obsessed with my job. But after the fire last night … were you there?”

  “Yes, I saw you.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “In the street. You didn’t see me, you were just walking around.”

  “Yeah, I do that a lot. But last night, I felt like such an outsider. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and to care about each other. And nobody knew me.”

  “Or cared about you?”

  She made a face, as if to disparage her own words. “Feeling sorry for myself, I guess. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know I was lonely. Not until the fire.”

  I listened, keeping quiet.

  “So, this morning I thought, nobody really needs you, Cleo, kid, ’cause they’ve already got their own established lives and friends. So don’t be expecting any invitations to tea anytime soon. If you want to have friends, you’re going to have to take the first step, kid.”

  She blushed, which made me smile.

  “I’ll bet you don’t have time for a new friend,” she ventured.

  “Why, Cleo, we’ve been becoming friends for the last few months, didn’t you know? In fact, you probably know more about my bad habits and peculiarities than many people who’ve known me all my life, just because you see me twice a day five days a week. Usually when I’m pissed, too.” I offered her a lopsided grin. A chagrined grin, you might say. Building friendships took time? Well, I had lots of time now. “What’ve you got in the bag?”

  “Runes.”

  She dumped it out. A bunch of whitish oval stones with strange markings on them clattered down.

  “Scandinavian,” she explained to me. “Another form of oracle, like the pendulum, only more talkative. Really ancient, often used by women. I use them to explain the past, reveal the underlying issues of the present, and connect it all to the future. It’s more than just yes or no this time. You bring up an issue, a situation, a hope, a dream, a problem, a relationship, whatever, and you ask the runes to give you some wisdom about it, which you can choose to use—or not—to guide your actions. Like the pendulum, it puts you in touch with your higher self, the one that knows more than you think you do.”

  I looked at the stones with their mysterious brown marks and said, “Help.”

  “That’s good enough” Cleo said, and she began to gather the runes and put them back into the gray pouch. “We can work with that.”

  “Just, help?”

  “Um.” She held the bag out to me. “I think we’ll do a one-rune reading, since you’re a beginner. Some other time, we could do a more elaborate spread, up to six runes at a time, for a more complete picture of your question. But for now … just pick one. Reach in, don’t look, and let one of them stick to your fingers.”

  I didn’t much like the chalky texture of them. But I let them slip through my fingers, like rough pebbles on a beach, and then it did feel as if there was one left that wanted to stick to my palm.

  “I’ve got it,” I told her.

  “Bring it out, and lay it down, vertically.”

  I did. We both stared at it. It was blank.

  “Turn it over,” she instructed.

  It showed an odd marking that looked like a straight line with a triangle sticking out from the right side of it.

  “Gateway,” said Cleo immediately, and then she began to page through the little gray book with the gold lettering.

  “What did you say?”

  She looked up. “The rune is called Gateway.”

  I stared at her. “Well, that’s kind of funny. You’ll love this. I had a dream just before I woke up, where I was standing under a gate, right in the middle of it.”

  “You’re right, I love it.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “Pretty simple, really. It suggests you are at some sort of gateway, Jenny, but it’s an important one, merely the gate between heaven and earth, that’s all.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “Um. It’s a point in your life at which you can begin to join your earthly and spiritual natures. It might take the form of a spiritual crisis, I don’t know exactly how this will happen. But it suggests you are standing at a place where you can’t, and shouldn’t try to, do anything. It’s a lesson in nonaction. You’re supposed to contemplate, meditate on everything in your life so far that has brought you to this fix, and then … let it all go.”

  “Let it go?” My heart sank beneath the kitchen floor.

  “Yes. Then you will find your power. Which you must share! That’s important, too. Reflect. Release. Accept your good fortune. Share it. Okay?”

  Four easy steps to inner peace. Right.

  “What good fortune?” I asked bitterly. “I can let it all go, all right, because I have no choice. But then there will be nothing to share anymore. Good-bye festival.”

  She cocked her head, so one of her earrings brushed her violet shoulder. The pendulum hid in its silver chain, inside the T-shirt. “No, not that way. You have to really let go. Emotionally. Without resentment.”

  “Oh, sure!”

  “I’m telling you, nothing else works, Jenny. You’ve got to empty your heart, before it can fill up again.”

  I grabbed hold of the edge of the counter and began to hoist myself to my feet. “Bah, humbug,” I grumbled.

  Cleo never seemed to take offense at my skeptical reactions; once again, she just laughed
and then said a cheerful “yes” to my offer of a cup of tea.

  We talked about her job. My job. The festival and everything I’d have to do to shut it down. Her previous life in Vermont, although she seemed shy about talking too much about herself. And when she left, an hour later, I didn’t really know much more about her, but I liked her even more than I had before.

  At the door, she turned back and said, “That gateway you saw in your dream? What did it look like?”

  I laughed. “Like McDonald’s golden arches.”

  Her eyebrows lifted, and then she fumbled through her brown suede purse, looking for the gray rune book again. This time, she showed me a page with a picture of a rune that looked exactly like a capital M, rather like my dream.

  “It’s the rune that means Movement, Jen. It means that things are going to get better, and it specifically refers to business. It says that as you change yourself, inside, everything on the outside must change around you. And, Jenny … it says you’re safe.” Her eyes searched mine. “I think everything’s going to turn out all right for you.”

  “I hope you’re right, Cleo.”

  But as I waved good-bye to her, I thought, “Yeah, and maybe it means I’m going to drive into town for a quarter pounder with fries and a large Coke.”

  She drove away in a little blue Honda Civic.

  At that moment, I did have an insight, but it wasn’t into my own future. I thought maybe I knew why Nellie Kennedy had called me last night, instead of her closer friends. What my visit with Cleo had reminded me was that when things were closing in too tight, sometimes you didn’t want around you the people who knew you best, because their powerful desire to help you could make you feel claustrophobic and, ironically, helpless. Sometimes it was easier to pick yourself up and dust yourself off in the presence of people who didn’t know you so well.

  I’d already picked myself up—off the floor—thanks to Cleo.

  Now I moved into the house to “dust myself off,” by showering, and by putting on real clothes. It was six o’clock when I finished putting on lipstick, and I felt ready to go …

  … to bed again.

  18

  PERSPECTIVE, HUH?

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. Some awful restlessness inside of me was driving me, so I took that as a (Cleo) sign, and got in the Miata and drove.

  Into town. Past the Dime Store—a smoldering hulk. Then past the common, where the volunteer builders were packing up for the night. It was a skeleton town of flimsy booths and phony facades and homemade signs.

  Soon it would be a ghost town.

  Then torn down.

  I kept driving, and ended up parked back near the Dime Store. There was a line of sightseers in cars, though soon it would be too dark for them to see anything. Two fire trucks were still on hand, a few cops, the usual yellow crime scene ribbons, whether or not there’d actually been, a crime.

  I parked, not because of all the traffic, but because of a little band of people who weren’t in their cars. They stood in their familiar ragged circle, carrying their familiar signs, moving slowly. Only, this time their signs had different messages:

  God Bless God’s Martyrs

  Martyr to the Devil

  Not Even the Fires of Hell Can Burn the Cross!

  It wasn’t just the sight of them that drew me. It was also the fact that standing right there with them was my husband.

  Geof looked renewed, when I had expected to see exhaustion etched upon his face in lines as dark as those on Cleo’s runes. As I walked slowly toward him, I saw him notice me, but he didn’t signal any other recognition. I took that as my signal to proceed tactfully, as he was probably engaged right at that moment in police business. Rather than march up to him and say “Hi, Honey,” I angled my approach away from him and the protestors, as if I were there to see the fire damage. In that way, I drew near, while seeming to move closer only to the yellow tape.

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw that one of the protestors, a man I did not recognize, had stepped out of the moving circle to talk to Geof. I walked sideways again, imitating a crab, until I could hear them talking. Geof had his hands in his pockets, no notebook in sight, which told me these people were edgy, unwilling to talk to him if he came on too much like a cop.

  The man was speaking, and Geof was looking bland.

  “We are all willing to die for the Lord, officer. Brother Anthony only did what any of us must be willing at any time to do.”

  Anthony. Was that the first or last name of the El Greco man?

  “I was under the impression,” Geof said, “that you folks wouldn’t enter any place you felt was contaminated by Satan’s work. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Then why did Mr. Phillips go into the Dime Store last night?”

  His name: Anthony Phillips.

  The answer was prompt, perhaps too prompt. “He went on a rescue mission. He dove into the flames of hell to try to save the sinners from the doom they had brought down upon themselves.”

  After a quiet moment, Geof’s matter-of-fact questioning continued. “Are you saying the fire was already burning when Mr. Phillips went into the Dime Store?”

  “Brother Anthony said he saw flames in the rear of the store, Officer. Or, maybe he said smoke.”

  “Where were you, and he, and the others at that time?”

  “In front of the building next door.” He pointed to the west, to one of the two other stores that had been destroyed.

  “Then how did he see flames in the back?”

  I sneaked a look. The man appeared embarrassed. “Officer, nature calls, even when one is doing the Lord’s work.”

  “You mean he had to take a leak?”

  I turned my face away, so I could smile unseen.

  “Yes.” The man sounded offended, as if the Lord had slipped up, somehow. “We are as sadly human as you are, Officer.”

  I grinned, unobserved, and wondered if Geof would be able to resist that opening.

  “I’m pretty happily human,” he said, and I had my answer. “So Mr. Phillips went down the alley between the stores to piss, and he—what? Came back and said he saw fire?”

  “Or smoke. I can’t remember. And he said he was going to check on it. And we never saw Brother Anthony after that.”

  “What did you think, when he didn’t come back?”

  “I, myself, didn’t think much about it, not until the fire all of a sudden burst out in a big way. Then we moved across the street, and we kept thinking he would come back at any moment. When he didn’t, we prayed for his safe return.”

  “Didn’t any of you run down the alley to check on him?”

  There was a—possibly shamed—silence. Then the man said, “We knew he was safe in the hands of the Lord. We do not interfere. We merely try to influence by our presence. We advertise, so to speak, the word of the Lord. But we do not take actions which might interfere with the Lord’s will.”

  “Do you know anything else about this fire?” Geof inquired.

  “No.”

  “About his death?”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  “We will want to talk to each of you who were present last night. Will you agree to be interviewed down at the station?”

  “Do we have any choice, Officer?”

  “Do you believe in free will?”

  “No, we believe in predestination.”

  “Well,” Geof drawled, “then I guess you don’t have a choice, do you?”

  I listened as he told the man that another officer would be setting up appointments for them. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry about the death of your friend.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” the man said crisply. “He is alive in the Lord forever, and we celebrate his freedom and his everlasting joy today.”

  “Ah,” Geof said.

  I glanced over and saw the man slip back into the circle. He had anything but a joyful expression on his face; his mouth was s
et in a grim, straight line. As one of the women in the circle approached the point closest to me, I saw tears flowing steadily from her wide open eyes. She looked young enough to be Anthony Phillip’s daughter, and her handsome face had a bit of that long, soulful, Spanish look to it. Whatever their faith said they were supposed to be feeling, what she was apparently really feeling was profound grief.

  I angled back to my car, from where I watched Geof speak to a uniformed officer, who then walked toward the moving circle of fundamentalists.

  Geof looked over at me.

  Then he got in his Jeep, did U-turn in the traffic, and slowed down as he pulled alongside me and then in front of me. I took the hint—I was getting good at reading signs—and pulled out behind him. I followed him to his destination, which turned out to be: home.

  “Have you eaten dinner?” he asked me.

  “No, but I’m not hungry. What about you?”

  “The same.”

  “You must be ready to drop.”

  “I am. Did you get some sleep?”

  “I did. I got a call—sort of a sabateur one—from the secretary of the insurer’s office, Geof. They’re turning us down.”

  The look on his face said it all: shock, dismay, sympathy, anger, helplessness.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I said.

  So he said the right thing: “How are you?”

  “Paralyzed.”

  “Have you told—”

  “Only you.” And Cleo.

  He did the right thing then, too. Didn’t condemn me for failing to notify everybody, didn’t offer suggestions, didn’t press. Just stared at me, with his eyes saying exactly what I was thinking: One disaster too many. Don’t anybody ask me to cope, not anymore today.

  I said, “Are you going to bed now?”

  It was not quite eight o’clock.

  “I’d like to, but I need to unwind before I can sleep. Where’s Dave?”

  I shrugged.

  “On his bike? How can he drive, with that shoulder?”

  Another shrug from me.

  “Would you come upstairs with me, Jenny? I think I need to talk. You want to hear what’s been going on?”