Chapter 47
Transiting Moon Sextile Lauren’s Ascendant
As I pull into the parking space outside the heavy, black, iron gates, I steady the tall vase of yellow roses strapped into the passenger seat with both the seatbelt and shoulder belt. I’ve managed to transport the bouquet from the florist to the cemetery without spilling water and petals all over the seat. After many spills during many weeks, I finally figured out to ask the florist to fill the vase only half-full of water and give me the rest in a tall cup so the flowers would last a week until my next visit.
I leave my car running in the hot afternoon sun as I sit and gather my things for my weekly walk among the oaks and gravestones. Before I can reach for the cup of water, my phone rings.
Sondra’s clinic.
My stomach flops. Today’s the day I should have the results back from my second surgery. I’ll know in five minutes if I need more surgery or if I’m facing cervical cancer or if I’ve been granted a miracle. Will my past catch up with me or can I keep outpacing it? I know how these phone calls with lab reports go: if it’s routine, a nurse calls to deliver the news, but if it’s bad, the physician makes the call to answer any questions.
I hold my breath and finally answer a second before it would go to voice mail. “H-hello?”
“Lauren?” Sondra’s voice.
My heart sinks. I am Schrödinger’s patient, both sick and cured and neither sick nor cured as I wait for the answer.
“Yes?” My voice trembles.
“Hi, it’s Sondra. I have your lab results back. Are you sitting down?”
I brace myself for the bad news. “Um, yeah. I am.” I clutch the phone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other.
“Your margins were clear.”
“Wait. What?”
“Your margins were clear,” she repeats. “It looks like we got all the bad cells, so all you need is a follow-up to see how you’re healing from your surgery, okay?” When I don’t respond, she adds, “Lauren? You there?”
“Uh, yeah. You called me instead of your nurse.”
Sondra laughs. “I know what a hard time you’ve had recently, so I wanted to deliver the good news personally. Plus, I wanted to tell you that I heard this morning from a cop friend of mine about the arrest last night. Honey, I’m really sorry about Jesse. I know he always quietly struggled and everyone thought he was so happy-go-lucky and had no idea how hard it was for him, especially after he lost the twins, and then your miscarriage. I honestly thought he was past the hard times. I won’t pretend to understand what happened to him this year, but I’m glad they caught his partner in crime, and I hope everything gets sorted with the bank. If not for his sake, certainly for yours. But honey? The lab reports are good news. Make a little room in your life, if you can, to celebrate.”
I thank her and promise to make a follow-up appointment when I get back home and can look at my calendar. Adjusting the vent, I let the air conditioner cool my cheeks and flutter my hair. A prayer of gratitude escapes my lips. I sniff back tears. I’ve been given a second chance.
Maybe without this scare, I wouldn’t have realized how precious life is. Maybe I would have been focused today on my losses rather than appreciating everything I still have, including my health.
Somewhere deep in Circle Lake are two gold bands, concentric circles nestled inside each other, with a little help from my magick, within the greater perfect circle of a meteor-formed lake. It feels surreal, but I’m somehow okay with it.
Maybe it’s been the depth of mourning a man when he wasn’t dead and there was still a chance of reclaiming what I’d lost. I couldn’t process my grief as long as he withheld closure. Now there’s a finality I can begin to deal with, but I won’t rush the process.
Getting through grief takes as long as it takes. Like real forgiveness.
I watch a lavender-haired older woman in a hot-pink caftan, bedazzled matching pants, and a wide-brimmed sunhat make her way along the outer stone wall of the cemetery toward the gate. Jan waves when she sees me in my car and backs up into the wall’s cooler shadow to wait for me. I kill the engine and scoop up the bouquet.
“Hey, sweet pea! Are you doing okay today?”
“Better.”
“Good. I was worried about you last night when I left you. You sure you’re okay?”
“Positive. My lab results came back fine. I still can’t believe it.”
Jan adjusts her hat as she nods. “I knew they would. I know you don’t like when I look into the future for you, but after your second surgery, I didn’t see anything dire like I did with the first.”
I start to ask why she wasn’t more insistent about sharing this news with me, but I already know. She spent months warning me about Jesse, and I hadn’t believed her. Afterward, I didn’t trust her prognostications.
“And the girls? They’re right as rain?”
“Rhiannon comes home from college tonight so we’re all having dinner together at my house. My famous ‘secret ingredient’ spaghetti, but without the secret ingredient now that I’m watching my sugar intake. Sonnet’s less anxious, but I’m getting her in with a good therapist to work out her daddy issues. Christabel’s staying with us through the summer. Not sure about the future or if she’ll go back to her uncle’s, but I did agree to start hosting healing circles at my house again. I’ll Initiate her later this year and guide her magickal studies.”
“I’m glad to hear it. She and I have talked often at your place, and I know how excited she is to learn from you. She’s an exceedingly talented young lady with the gift of sight, and I know you’ll help her figure out how to use her supernatural gifts.”
“I’m proud to be her guide.”
“Say, those are pretty!” Jan skims the tip of her finger across one of the yellow roses in my arms. “You know what you should do? Instead of leaving them on one grave, take the arrangement apart and leave one rose on each of twelve abandoned graves. There are some in there where no one remembers them or they didn’t have any family.”
I smile. “Next time I’m here, I’ll do that.”
“Good, good. It’s a way of bestowing immortality on those who have passed. As long as someone is remembered, they live on.”
She’s right, but it’s also a teaching among witches, whether Jan realizes it or not. What is remembered, lives.
“Are you sure you’re okay, doodlebug? I know the police hauled off Bianca after you went back home.”
Jan and I walk through the heavy iron gate, and I follow the familiar path through the granite markers as if I’m mindlessly walking a labyrinth. The trail leads me through century-old oaks dripping with Spanish moss, their roots enveloping graves as old as they are. We pass the forgotten graves Jan worries about on our way to the new section on the far side of the walled-in acres of stone and faded silk flowers.
“Yes. I talked to Patrick at the bank this morning. They arrested her for illegal drugs, and fraud charges are imminent. He said they recovered all the cash from the RV and then some, so probably the proceeds from the fraudulent loan plus money Jesse had given her.”
On the periphery of my psychic vision, I see Bianca in a jail cell, tormented by the servitor she created. She made the mirage to wreck me when I was at my weakest, after what she had seen as a beautiful vision of life for herself turned out to be a mirage itself. I shake off the vision.
“And your hubby?” Jan is careful in how she asks. She won’t even say his name.
I sigh. “I don’t know. Patrick said there was no sign of him. Since Jesse participated in the fraud, the bank is going after him, too. If they can find him. Patrick said his boss was in meetings with the FBI first thing this morning. I don’t know that it’ll do any good to go after Jesse. Even if they do find him. He’s just not… present anymore.”
Jan stares into the distance. “He’s not dead. More like, he’s lost. But not coming back. I see him in a semi as a passenger, gabbing that funny way that only he could. He’s heading far away. You may have some problems untangling from him legally because he’s not going to be available to answer.”
“I’m okay, Jan. I’ve got this. Whatever comes, I can handle it now. I’ve got my house and my kids, and my confidence and faith, and my intentions and my belief. In no particular order. Whatever comes, I can figure it out—”
I break off because there’s more I want to say, yet I don’t know how. Jan knows it, too.
“But?”
“But I really thought for a moment last night when I broke Bianca’s spell, that I could have Jesse back. I thought we’d have a lot to work through together, but that he’d be his old self. Not mentally scrambled.”
“Aw, honey.”
We walk together in silence toward the newer monuments with fresher flowers from more recent tragedies.
“You know, Lauren, you and I don’t always agree when it comes to your witchcraft and your powers, and that’s okay. I guess I could say, based on my beliefs, that if you pray hard enough, you might get him back like he used to be, but I know that’s magical thinking. And not your kind of magickal with a ‘k.’ I don’t want you to beat yourself up about him not being the Jesse you knew because you can’t be powerful enough to make it happen. No matter how much you love him, you can’t love away the damage he’s done to his body and his mind, and you can’t undo it with your rituals and spells. I don’t believe I could pray away the damage either.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Silently, I thank her for not telling me my own beliefs are not powerful enough and that hers are better.
“When you do start to beat yourself up about it—and I know you well enough to know that you will, at least a couple of times—I want you to remember that whatever Bianca wrought with her magick, you were able to break. Not everything troublesome to you was due to magick, though. Remember what you’ve told me about not ‘magicking’ every solution. You said it’s perfectly acceptable to use a mundane solution to fix a problem and sometimes the mundane solution is even better. Well, not every bad thing you’re dealing with is the result of magick, so breaking the spell doesn’t change anything. Your gynecology issues have been scary, but they’re not the result of magick. Not every bad thing is. That’s sexual history and age and biology and a couple of doctors who told you not to worry about pap smears after menopause. But not magick. Breaking a spell won’t fix it. Having a good gynecologist, a good health regimen, drinking your mushroom tea, enduring those surgical procedures? Those may not fix it either, but they get you a whole lot closer than waiting for a spell to be broken that was never cast to begin with.”
This, I already know. I’ve never really considered my health issues to be tied to Bianca or her magick.
“Take it from me, being a few years older than you, sweet pea. Some of these things are just shit you have to face as you get older. No hexes, no curses, no bad juju required.”
Jan takes the lead on our path under the shady oaks, pausing to glance back at me from under her sunhat. “The same with your hubby. Bianca’s actions may have set him on a certain path, but his mental state isn’t the result of magick to muddle his thinking. It’s the result of drugs and him trying to fly away from his problems. It’s the saddest thing in the world to lose someone you love to drugs because there’s no spell for you to break. There’s no magickal answer. Same with my brother I lost when we were young. He became a person I didn’t even know and did things the man I knew never would have. You understand that the Jesse you knew is gone, right?”
I nod and breathe through the pain in my heart.
“I see another man in your future, though. You’ll open your heart again. You will. When you’re ready.”
That will be a long, long time, I muse.
Jan hears my thoughts. “Maybe not that long. Someone new in your life but with a connection to the past. Somebody you’ve never thought of before as a partner. He won’t be Jesse, but you’ll be happy again. I don’t know if you’ll be legally married. Maybe just married to each other in your hearts. I see him—hot guy when he was younger but still a handsome man. He’ll be exactly right for this next phase of your life. Someone who’ll bring you not only love but peace.”
Peace. Like Zephyr said years ago in my life reading. Of all the things I’ve yearned for, I never expected peace to be as important to my well-being as it feels now.
Especially in this very spot in this cemetery. I swallow the lump in my throat. I know what’s coming next.
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