Chapter 50
Less than an hour later, after picking up my car from my mom’s house, I knock on Virgil’s front door. I stare into the distance as I wait. The deputy’s car passes on the main road, then pulls onto the grassy roadside.
Ugh! Why is he still following me?
The case is closed with Bobby, and I may have at last found the closure I’ve needed for my entire adult life.
Can’t Everett just leave me alone?
The door opens, and Virgil smiles at me. His house looks nothing on the inside like it did when I was a kid and occasionally visited our nearest neighbors with my mom. Back then, the house had been decorated in mid-century modern furniture long before it was called that: we knew it only as slightly out-of-date furniture. Since the Caine family bought the property, I’ve been over a few times to visit Dixon, but Dix has never seemed really comfortable here, not in the way that Virgil is.
The house is still full of antiques, but different antiques—at least the parts I’ve seen. The old parlor room is still a sitting room, but infinitely more comfortable than the settees with doilies and upholstery that resembled tapestries. All of my visits with Dix have been relegated to the sitting room, and in particular to the super-comfy modular sofa where many of our kisses took place. Nothing ever evolved to his bedroom and now never will.
“You can stay here as long as you like,” Virgil offers. “Take Dixon’s room. It’s clean. I just changed the linens for you. His suite smells of his cologne if you don’t mind that, but there’s a private porch and bathroom. He won’t mind you staying here as long as you need to. I think we both know he won’t be back for a while.”
I shrug at his last sentence. Dix left a voice mail for me, just checking on me to make sure I’m okay, but I’ve not been in a rush to answer the message. We’re still friends, and I understand what he needs psychologically isn’t what’s true to me or to what I need. Our time together has been about what-ifs and trying on the match my mom had made. I do miss his company, but no hard feelings. It doesn’t hurt like it did with Jesse.
Still, it’ll be weird being here as Virgil’s guest but sleeping in Dixon’s bed. Maybe if I air out the cologne—the same cologne he wore at eighteen—I can make it work until I can get my mom’s house in order. My car still has a couple of packing cubes of clean clothes and underwear, definitely an advantage of never having fully unpacked my car and just using it as a personal storage unit while taking care of my mom and not wanting to think beyond her absence in my life.
“I’ll see if I can get pest control in there in a couple of days,” I tell Virgil. “Then some professional cleaners. Hopefully, I’ll be out of your hair in a week.”
Virgil laughs. “You sure do have a lot of faith in finding either of those in a few days. Dottie’s had some work done around her and Niecie’s place recently. I’ll ask her for recommendations. But no need for you to rush or add more stress right now.”
“Thank you.”
He holds up a key and then places it on the coffee table in the sitting room. “Key to the front door. Stay as long as you like. You can come and go as you please. I’ve got plenty of groceries, and if you like low-carb, you’re welcome to any of the meal prep containers in the fridge. When things calm down, if you’d like to meal prep with me, you’re welcome to, but until you leave, you’re my guest.”
My heart swells. I see the same sweetness in his eyes that I saw when we were kids. The same personality I adored in him then has only grown. My affection for him is genuine. Not in the same way as for his brother but based on something deeper than teen lust.
“For now, Laurie, after the night we had with your mom and your day with the deputies tearing up Miss Emma’s home, I know we’re both exhausted. I’ll go nap in my room for a couple of hours before I head back to the nursing home, and you can hang out here or nap in Dixon’s room. I—”
A sheepishness creeps over his face. He stands there, gazing at me with what I can only describe as tenderness, and it’s something I really need right now. The lines on his forehead and around his eyes are more pronounced now after a hard night, but he is still a handsome man with his silver hair in a ponytail that matches his close-cropped beard. Blue eyes shining. He holds his breath as if he’s forgotten how to exhale.
“Virgil? What’s wrong?”
Smiling, he shakes his head. “I know you’re going through a tough time right now, and that it’ll get worse these next few days before it gets better, but I will be there for you every step of the way. Friends for life, right? That’s what you used to say to me when we were kids. And then pinky-swear. I don’t know if this is the right time, but there’s something we need to talk about, and I don’t think it can wait.”
Now I’m the one holding my breath. This is usually the part where a man in my life—whether a romantic or platonic partner—confesses that he’s involved in a serious relationship with someone else but doesn’t want my attention on him to change. Or that he’s courted my time and resources to help him fulfill a dream that has nothing to do with me. Or that he’s taking a job far away and has already made that decision without even hinting to me.
“Laurie, you’ve been so open with me today about what happened to you and what you’ve lived with all your life. The least I can do is to be open with you.”
Here it comes, I tell myself. Not that this sinking feeling has anything at all to do with Virgil. Just an old trigger. The kind of thing that I don’t live with daily, so I think I’ve made peace with another shadow from my past.
“Let’s sit down,” he adds suddenly.
Losing Dixon as a close friend was sudden… but not. I knew our relationship had stalled, which is why I had pushed him to think about where it was headed. But if I’m about to lose Virgil as a close friend, I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Not now.
I sink down on the sofa. I’m too short and my feet dangle if I sit all the way back. Virgil perches on the edge and stares at the key on the cocktail table as he tries to find his words.
“There are things you may not remember from when my mom hired you as my babysitter. I knew you were head-over-heels for Dix. All the girls were. Some of them even promised to babysit me for free just to get close to Dix, but my mom wasn’t having any of it. She wanted someone older than you, but you didn’t disgrace yourself begging for a chance to be close to Dix. My mom didn’t pick you because you were old enough or had enough experience, but because we were close in age and whenever I was around, you always paid more attention to me than to Dix. I wasn’t just a means to an end. I was an awkward fat kid, and you seemed to understand me. I remember Dix trying to coax you to leave me with a kids’ TV show while you hung out with him in the kitchen, but you said no because you had promised to watch it with me, and you kept your promises. After that, I had the biggest crush on you, even if you had the biggest crush on my studly big brother.”
I smile at the memory. I’d been so delighted at Dixon’s invitation to spend time with him before he headed off to football practice, but I couldn’t break either Virgil’s little heart or my promise to his mom to take care of him. Virgil and I had been buddies ever since.
“Virgil, you may think that’s some kind of big confession, but it’s not like I didn’t know. You were always special to me. Remember that journal I gave you for your birthday to write your dreams in?”
Immediately, he blushes. He retrieves his outdoor pack from across the room, the one he’d had on the four-wheeler the day he’d collected the stump-water for medicinal purposes. He’d been wary of me seeing inside the pack then. Now, he unbuckles and unzips it to hold up a worn hardcover notebook that’s smaller than I remember.
“I didn’t want you to know I still carry it with me when I’m outdoors. It’s a touchstone to my past when I was first awakening to the beauty in the world. Back when you taught me to plant zinnias in the spring and collected acorns with me in the fall. I wrote poems in my journal about Nature and things you showed me, and now I incorporate a lot of that youthful energy into my rituals when I’m alone outside. Or think I’m alone. You sorta snuck up on me that day in the field when I was pruning the oaks, and I was afraid of what you’d think if you knew I had it with me.”
Try as I might, I can’t keep from smiling. “Really? I think it’s sweet. I didn’t realize I had such an influence on your life. I’m sorry we lost touch after your family moved. I was embarrassed over your mom catching Dix kissing me on the porch that last night after you’d gone to bed. You left town like two days later.”
He shakes his head as he tucks the notebook back into his pack and re-zips and re-buckles it. “Please don’t blame yourself. There was a lot of stuff going on in my family that you didn’t know—just as in every family—and my mom moved us to chase a dream that she eventually caught and became somewhat famous for. Your Sonnet and her music remind me a lot of Mom. I got into therapy young and made peace with my own childhood shadows when I was still young. Not that things don’t pop up or trigger me, but I’ve lived a joyful life where I’ve been able to deal with problems as they arise. Dixon never did. I’ve watched you working through your own shadows to find peace. It’s something most people either don’t have the help to do or don’t have the courage to do. It’s hard, and you may have a little work left to do, but you’re done with all the big stuff. You have an amazing life ahead of you.”
Is he just saying this to make me feel better? Or, as I always wonder with magickal people, is he forecasting the future?
He seems to read my mind, and I have to wonder exactly how many supernatural talents he possesses, either through his DNA or through his priesthood.
“I was recruited in the Daeganean priesthood years ago by a pilot I met when I was still active-duty in the Air Force. As you probably know from your own past covens, the Old Gods do tend to attract warriors, defenders, and protectors, and this particular pilot had a special gift for finding us and sending us on our path to Initiation. Like I told you before, the Daeganean priests and priestesses are granted the gift of omnipresence, or temporal clairvoyance—being able to see across their timeline and sometimes the timelines of others they divine for. Not everyone can handle that kind of knowledge. If you’re not well-trained and well-grounded, you can end up with major psychological issues. I chose not to accept the gift of omnipresence, or ‘all time is now,’ when I was Initiated, and I’ve had a great life with my normal divination powers. Well, normal for a witch. I had both a wonderful marriage with Kimber and a wonderful career with the excitement of not knowing what was next. But this pilot friend of mine, my fellow Daeganean priestess, had the gift before she joined the priesthood and became one of their recruiters. She’d been a witch all her life and had belonged to several covens before the Daeganeans found her and claimed her as their own.”
Lady Zephyr? Can’t be. Can it?
“Not long ago, she and I met again at a priesthood event to dedicate a new library. I was having a lot of doubts about my decision. If I’d accepted my gift, I would’ve known about Kimber’s cancer, and I could’ve chosen to be there with her when she died. But she didn’t want me to remember her that way, just like your mom wants you to remember her when she was whole and not how she is now.”
Holding my breath, I shift on the sofa. Sometimes, in all my own stress with the end of Mama’s journey and with Virgil’s gentle competence, I forget that he’s endured awful times, too. He’s faced crushing challenges and been dragged down by them, only to rise like a phoenix. But quietly, gently, as if refusing to bother anyone else with the reforming of his life.
“My friend—Veronica—had this mirror she used for scrying. I asked her to read for me because I was afraid I’d make the wrong decisions about big things in my future. Call it a crisis of confidence in myself or a crisis of faith, but Kimber’s death had that effect, among many others, on me. I knew I’d use whatever I took away from my experience to share and help others, but I didn’t know how. I felt that I might be missing out by not receiving the gift of omnipresence.”
Sinking onto the sofa beside me, he fixes his gaze on the quaint fireplace on the opposite wall and the two picture frames that anchor each end of the mantle. One is a photo of Dixon and Virgil as boys with their mom, young and beautiful as I remember her, but not yet a famous singer in Nashville. The other is a photo of Virgil, young but fully grown and at a stage of life I never knew him. Beside him in the photo is a dark-haired woman I don’t know but can only guess by the broad grin on his face and the laughter in her eyes in front of a waterfall that the woman is Kimber, probably early in their marriage.
“Anyway,” Virgil continues, “my friend told me I didn’t need it, and she could tell me the only three things that I really needed to know. One: she told me my mom was ill and would die, too, but that I would retire from my military career and take care of her as my way of making peace with not being there to take care of Kimber. Two: she said I must return afterward to my hometown and that I’d volunteer my deathwalking skills to townspeople who remembered me only as a rich man and a hippie-but-country-singer’s pudgy little boy—and a war hero.”
All I can do is listen and nod. He’s done the first two. He wouldn’t be here now if he hadn’t.
“And three: I was to watch over my neighbor, an elderly woman named Emma.”
I frown at him. “I don’t understand. You’ve certainly fulfilled all three tasks, but why watch over my mom?”
“I was to watch over my neighbor because her daughter would save me. And you have, Laurie. I was in despair before you came home. I’d lost my wife, and then immediately after, I became my mom’s caregiver for three years. After I walked her home—something I didn’t get to do with my wife—I was lost for a little while. Coming back here helped to ground me again. To regain perspective. I’ve been a deathwalker for the priesthood ever since my Initiation, but I found purpose back here where it all began by working with end-of-life situations in the local hospital system, but I had no one to practice my craft with or share my journey. Not Dix! We have very different tastes. He wants to party and cut real estate deals. I want to walk in the woods and dance around a bonfire and collect weird books. I used to check in on your mom, usually daily, and she still had most of her memory then, and she raised my spirits talking about you and your brother and old times. And I raised her spirits by visiting.”
My heart is heavy at the thought of my mom and the visits I missed out on while wrapping up my Jesse problems and selling my house, but at the same time, I am grateful—so grateful—that he was there for her. And that Virgil found some solace in their talks.
“So,” he continues, “in a way, Zephyr was right. You did save me.”
“Z-Zephyr?” My Zephyr?
“Oh, yeah. My pilot buddy and fellow priestess. Her name is Veronica Winzler, but ‘Zephyr’ was her call sign as a pilot.”
“I know her! I mean, I met her over a decade ago the night I was Initiated into my coven and the same night that she left, and she gave me a reading, but I can’t remember most of it.”
He raises one eyebrow. “If you don’t remember, then she told you things you couldn’t handle.”
“But she sent you to me?”
“Yes. To your mom, so her daughter could save me. I thought at first that she was teasing me because I’ve always been the one to save others. She told me I had to treat my neighbors as family and to look after your mom or else I wouldn’t outlive her.”
His phone buzzes, interrupting him. He fishes it out of his pocket and reads a message silently. “Pamela says your mom is resting comfortably. I’ll set an alarm for an hour and head back to check on her status. It won’t be long now. Very likely tonight, so keep your phone on so I can call you.”
He says it so kindly, so softly.
I burst into tears.
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