Chapter 23

Chapter 23 of 48 · 9-minute read

Transiting Mars Leaving Lauren’s Twelfth House of Hidden Fears

A bubble pops, and I open my eyes. I’m not sure where I am. It’s as if I’ve been traveling through time and fell through a wormhole. The room is dark, but by the glint of a nightlight in the hall, I can tell from the ceiling that I’m in Sonnet’s room. I pull myself into the present, but lag behind somewhere else.

I’m still caught in the past, sometime after my divorce from Quent. I’m staring at a hole in the ground, water rushing out of it, the dirt becoming soggy and tumbling back into the small pit of water.

Dread in my stomach. Fear.

I blink at the dark ceiling above with the glow-in-the-dark stickers shaped like stars. I can’t quite pull myself to the present. This bubble memory happened not in my waking moments but in my dreams.

I remember that waking moment, my blistered palms, me staring down at the gushing water in the muddy hole. I haven’t thought about it in years. Even though it wasn’t that long ago, I’ve done my best to bury any thought of that event because it felt so awful at the time.

I had broken free finally of Quent and years of emotional and verbal abuse. I had my own home, a beautiful new life with my daughters, a job that allowed me to be independent, and a brand-new love who wanted to marry me and to whom I had said yes. Everything in life seemed absolutely perfect, and then one little mistake in my garden, and I lost my shit.

As soon as the sun rose that April morning, before the Florida morning became too hot, I headed outside with my gardening tools and a wheelbarrow full of red begonias. In another two weeks, as soon as we were married and Quent couldn’t stir up trouble about Jesse’s presence, or so I thought, Jesse would move in with us. I wanted my house, including the gardens, to be welcoming and full of springtime for our new life together. That meant not planting begonias from a carton of twelve that were each the size of my middle finger and waiting for them to grow over the next few months. Instead, I had bought the largest I could find at the nursery—the ones that already looked like basketballs covered in red blooms.

I decided to make fast work of it, so instead of using a small hand trowel, I grabbed the hole diggers from the garage wall. I raked back the old pine bark that had been used as a ground cover to discourage weeds and slammed the hole diggers into the ground in a semicircle around the most prominent window near the front door. I had been happy with each thrust of the blades, all the while thinking about what a beautiful home I was manifesting and suddenly thought of how different it would be from my life with Quent. Each hole took three tries with the hole diggers. On the fourth hole, I removed two large scoops of dirt before slamming the blades back into the hole a third time.

Crack! I hit something. Immediately, water spurted into my eyes and nose. Until then, I had no idea of the PVC pipe and sprinkler system that ran underneath the lawn to the semicircular flower bed.

In the end, the fix cost me less than five bucks, including the gas to drive to the hardware store to get the parts. For another fifty bucks, I could have hired someone to fix it for me. I could have coaxed Jesse or even Steve into helping me out.

But at the moment I heard that crack and immediately knew what I had done, I wasn’t thinking of easy solutions. No, I was instantly expecting Quent to materialize in front of me, yell at me when I told him what I had accidentally done, call me stupid, call me useless.

The sense of unsettlement lasted all day, as if to predict the terrible fight Jan and I had later that week over Jesse. Her meddling in my life felt just as emotionally triggering as the busted pipe.

My trauma response to breaking the pipe had surprised me. How could I be in such a good place in my life and still fall to pieces over something so small and mundane? I had left all my abusers behind, and yet the abuse was still something I carried with me, no matter how much healing I had done. Jan’s telling me for the umpteenth time that I was making a mistake marrying Jesse hit that sore spot at exactly the moment I became fed up with long-time friends trying to tell me what to do. I’d said some awful things, and so had Jan.

My grandfather’s spirit had stayed close to me in those days, reassuring me. Not long after I married again and Jesse moved in with the girls and me, I stopped seeing him hanging around the premises and protecting us. He moved on after that, and I like to think he is enjoying a new incarnation somewhere and that we will meet again in my lifetime. I could have used his sweetly protective spirit through recent events.

“Another memory bubble?” Jan asks from where she perches at the foot of my bed. “I can tell by the look in your eyes. What I can see of them, anyway.”

My eyes adjust to the dimness. I can see her, but just barely. I’m glad she’s here, though I hope she’s done with urging me to move on from Jesse. It’s tiresome sometimes.

“What am I doing in Sonnet’s room?” I push myself up on one elbow and try to sit up.

“Careful, careful. You’ve overdone it. You were supposed to stay off your feet today and rest, but you didn’t. I bet you haven’t eaten much either. And you’re probably dehydrated.”

I want to remind her that I already have a mother who worries too much about me, but a tiny bit of me is grateful for the nurturing Jan offers. Usually, I am the one who is nurturing everyone else, so it feels good to be on the receiving end.

“Promise me, Lauren, that you’ll take it easier. Sonnet and Christabel moved you off the floor and into Sonnet’s bed. You’ve been asleep for seven hours. But you needed it.”

“Seven hours?” I swing my feet onto the floor and start to stand up, but Jan waves her hands frantically in front of my face to remind me of the promise I haven’t yet made. “Okay. Okay, I’ll take it a little slower, but I have things to do.”

“There’s nothing else you have to do today except rest. You have a gazillion voicemails and messages on your phone, but you can answer those tomorrow. It’s too late tonight, anyway. The kids had sandwiches and chips for dinner and left a ham and cheese croissant bagged up in the fridge for when you are ready for it. Oh, and you’ll love this: Quent drove over to see you.”

“What?”

“It was the weirdest thing, darlin’. I was standing at the front window watching when he tried to turn into your driveway, and his car cut out on him. He got out of the car, and it looked like he was going to walk up the driveway to the house, but then it looked like he was having heart palpitations or something, so he went back to his car and sat there until a tow truck came and hauled him off. I guess the work we did last night is doing its job.”

We. I smile to myself. Jan wants to think that her prayers have something to do with my wards holding, and maybe they do. It’s always better to have more than one powerful woman working together to the same purpose.

I doubt any of the voicemails or messages waiting for me are from Quent. He has my number blocked and has insisted on all our correspondence going through our lawyers. Maybe he discovered at last that Sonnet isn’t in her room at his house any longer. Or maybe he hasn’t been successful yet in taking the hinges off her door and wants me to come over and patch things up between them like I used to when we were married. Maybe he ordered Candy to play peacemaker.

If marrying somebody a few years older than Sonnet—okay, eight years older but still a child herself—was supposed to have helped bridge the gaps in his father-daughter relationship, it’s had the opposite effect. Candy was the girl on the other end of the webcam when Sonnet had stumbled into her dad’s porn stash under his negligent supervision and couldn’t turn off the proliferation of pop-ups. Sure, Candy had been kind to my daughter and had helped her calm down and then shut down images that gave her night terrors for the next few years, but Candy as a stepmom is nothing more than a reminder of the trauma done to a ten-year-old. Sonnet wants nothing to do with her dad or with Candy. To Candy’s credit, she knows better than to call me or pass along messages from Quent.

Jan is wrong about my schedule for the evening. There’s one more thing I have to do tonight. I have to discover whether the Elders sent the servitor that’s been hounding me. And that means I have a connection to break. Confrontation in the air.

I rise to my feet, slowly this time, steady. In the living room, I gather into a bundle all the things I’ll need to cut ties with the Elders tonight just as I gathered them last night to sever any remaining ties with Dragon. I can barely hold them all: a comfortable blanket to sit on, a couple thin sticks of firewood, herbs from my witch’s pantry, and the box of souvenirs from the Elders.

It’s not the first time I’ve done these rituals for my old covens, but hopefully this will be the last time. Energetic connections can grow back or be reasserted by the other party, and that may be what’s happened. I hadn’t realized that Dragon’s cat’s-cradle net of stringy attachments had caught me again until I saw them in the releasing ritual. What will I unearth in a ritual with Donna and the Elders? I already feel more energetic after releasing Dragon. If the Elders are anywhere near as fixated, I’ll have the physical energy of a preschooler!

“Do you want me to come with you?” Jan stands next to my main altar, waiting. “Those bitches need to know that you’re not alone.”

“But I am alone. I appreciate your support in this, Jan, but this is a ritual I have to do by myself. It’s between them and me. And hopefully when I’m done, no more thought-forms will be following us around.”

She looks disappointed but shrugs it off. “I’ll stay here and watch the girls then.”

“You can go home if you like. I don’t want to keep you here if you have other things to do and want to spend time with your hubby.”

“Nothing else to do but watch over my best friend and her babies.” She smiles across the room at me. “You should look in on the girls. They’re cuddled up in your bed, reading, just like they did when they were little ’uns.”

I tiptoe to my bedroom door and peer inside, unnoticed. Sonnet and Christabel are curled up together, each with a hand on a heavy Harry Potter hardcover and taking turns reading paragraphs aloud. It’s silly and sweet, and I’m thankful they are both distracted.

Barefoot, I step gingerly through the wet grass, blades of the taller Bahia grass catching between my toes and stinging my blisters. I shake off the sense of déjà vu. When I reach out empathically, I can feel the servitor pacing in circles oh-so-slowly around the perimeter of my property.

Widdershins. Counterclockwise.

It’s trying to tear down my wards, trying to get inside.

It’s going to be a long night.

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