Chapter 8

Chapter 8 of 48 · 8-minute read

Servitor’s Sun Conjunct Lauren’s Sixth House of Health

Without a single ring, my daughter’s voicemail answers. “Hey, there! You’ve reached Sonnet. You know what to do.”

This time, Christabel speaks. “Hey, girlie! Give me a call as soon as you get this. It’s important.”

She plops down on one side of me, and Jan takes a seat on the other side. The two of them sandwich me in a safety net of reliable friends.

Christabel leans her head against my shoulder, then weaves her fingers through mine. “She’s okay. I can see her. She’s sitting cross-legged on a bed in a room with bright pink curtains. Her arms are crossed, too. Wow, she’s really mad.”

Pink curtains. That’s her room at Quent’s house, although she’s never spent more than half a dozen nights there in the last six years. Even with a court-ordered visitation schedule, Quent rarely sees the girls, or when he does, he dumps their care on his perky young wife who is all of eight years older than Sonnet. Candy—not her real name—cooks and cleans for him and tries to be Sonnet’s bestie, but that game has gotten old for both my daughters. They’ve each confided just one thing in their young stepmother, only to have her run straight to their dad with their secrets because that’s what he’s told Candy she’s obligated to do.

Sonnet should not have been surprised. Her stepmother may want to be a safe person for her, but she isn’t and never will be. Candy helped her that time when Sonnet had still been a child left unsupervised with her dad’s computer and had opened a webcam where barely legal Candy waited on a pay site to undress for Quent. Candy had been the one to talk a child through a proliferation of horrifying pop-up screens. Although no one else in town has any idea, Quent married Candy a couple of years later, probably because it was cheaper than paying her website fees or keeping his promise to send her to college. Now, he never fails to demonstrate to me how she gets all the perks I could have had if only I hadn’t divorced him.

If I think about it much, I feel bad for Candy because after watching him date around for a couple years to create a so-called respectable new life that would please his family, I’ve witnessed enough of his patterns early in relationships. I know now that the same narcissistic techniques and pretty promises that drew me to him a couple of decades ago are the same that he used to ensnare another woman who was only slightly older than I was when I’d become ensnared. In time—if not already—Candy will have the same disdain from him that I lived with because my upbringing had taught me not to be a quitter, especially when it came to marriage.

A tiny part of me acknowledges what Quent has struggled with in not being able to be himself. If he had been born in our daughters’ generation, his bisexuality would have been far more acceptable, and he might have lived a more joyful life. Instead, he had been born into a decade, a family, and a community that insisted he live a lie, and that lie had extended to me as well. His lies to himself have cost him the happiness he should have had with someone he could have loved in a way he could never love me, but those same lies have also cheated me out of several decades of being with a man who might’ve loved me the way I wanted to be loved. Then again, if I had had everything I ever wanted from Quent, I never would have left him, and I never would have found Jesse.

Jesse.

I press my face into my palms and run my fingers through my hair.

“Miss Lauren? I don’t get the feeling that she has her phone with her. It feels like it’s locked away. Like she’s locked away, too. Have you tried calling Rhiannon?”

I shake my head. “Rio has exams in the morning. If there’s any way possible of handling this without doing anything to keep her up all night, I will. I’ll take both my lawyer’s word for it and your intuition as reason enough to believe Sonnet’s not in immediate danger.”

A memory bubbles up from somewhere deep inside my subconscious. Unbidden. A memory not related to anything in this moment.

I’m driving, and the woman in the passenger seat—her name is Caroline—is smiling at me, but sneering from underneath. I remember this moment. I remember what happened before, and I remember what happened after, but I remember this moment especially, and the droplets of rain in her curly hair and the way she looks at me from where she is buckled into the passenger seat.

It’s the old car I had, the first one, for two years before Quent and I could afford a better one. It’s a convertible, an old one with a canopy that doesn’t lock onto the front windshield tightly anymore. In bad thunderstorms and heavy rain, the roof sometimes leaks. Not badly. Just a droplet or two. No bigger than the raindrops in Caroline’s hair.

I’m in college, and she’s my boss’s wife. I work at an arcade just off campus. Caroline works in the student services department on campus, maybe a five-minute walk away.

She and my boss have only one car, so they share rides to their respective workplaces. They’ve just bought a new car though, and she’s been driving it to work for almost three weeks, every day, while he takes the old car. Today, she couldn’t find her keys, so they shared the drive with the understanding that he would pick her up when he left work.

He hadn’t.

He had wished me a goodnight and left me to close up the arcade after I swept and scrubbed and wiped down the vintage pinball machines. Caroline had walked in, soaked through all her layers of clothes, hair bedraggled, and cursing under her breath that her husband had left without her and she couldn’t reach him. He had forgotten about his promise to pick her up, and she had walked a quarter mile in a thunderstorm with a broken umbrella. She begged me to give her a ride home and promised to put in a good word for me with my boss. Even though she was already wet, I gave her my umbrella while I ran to retrieve my car so she could hop into the passenger seat from the covered porch.

In this moment in time, I see her in my passenger seat, my umbrella wet and loosely folded under her feet.

At first, she is thankful. It takes me nearly an hour in an unrelenting thunderstorm to drive the twenty miles to their home. For most of the time, I can barely see ten feet in front of me. My hands are on the steering wheel, tight and white-knuckled. She is chattering endlessly about their new car and what a smooth ride it is when a single droplet of water emerges from underneath the canopy where the seal isn’t tight enough and falls into her open palm. She frowns up at the raindrops gathered on the inside of the canopy, all of them lying in wait for gravity to pull them down to her already soaked lap. She smiles and laughs, and I don’t see the snarl beneath the surface.

Not then. I can see it now in hindsight.

The next day, my boss will tell me how much trouble I got him into with his wife. She hadn’t blamed him at all for forgetting to pick her up—they were still newlyweds after all—but she had told him all about how wet she had gotten as a passenger in my car. Even though I had driven forty miles out of my way, spent my gas money, spent two hours of my time, and accumulated a months’ worth of knots in my stomach from driving in such awful weather, I was the one who was blamed. My good deed, all with good intentions, had not gone unpunished. Anything but.

“Woah!” Christabel shakes me. She is kneeling in front of me now, trying to get a better look into my eyes. “What just happened, Miss Lauren?”

I shake off the memory. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like you left your body. Were you trying to astral project to see where Sonnet is?”

“I’m not very good at that. No, I was just remembering something.”

Christabel laughs pensively. “Well, whatever it was that you were remembering, it’s important.”

I screw up one side of my face. “I… don’t think so.” How would some random memory from almost thirty years ago have anything to do with Sonnet or the thought-form or all of my recent ill luck?

Jan leans in to stare into my face. “No, I saw it too. Whatever you were just thinking about, it was like you were time traveling.”

I shrug. “I guess I was. But it has nothing to do with… with anything that’s happened today or the last few months. It was just something from a long time ago. I don’t know. I’m tired, and I’m hurting, and I really need to get inside and get my painkillers.”

Jan pats my arm. “You should rest. You promised your doctor you would take it easy after your surgery.”

“Surgery!” Alarm rises in Christabel’s voice. She frowns down at my sandaled feet, where both dried and fresh blood lead in rivulets across my ankles and up my leg. “We should get you to a doctor.” She looks around as if she just remembered that neither of us has a working car.

“I’m okay,” I lie to her. “All I need is to get off my feet for a little while.”

She exhales slowly. “Have you been sleeping well?”

“Not in months.”

“And Sonnet?”

“Not in months.” I could attribute our restless nights to Jesse’s absence, but Christabel is right.

She stands and stretches her hands in front of her, palms away from her and toward me. She shakes her head slightly and moves to one side, palms still raised, fingers splayed, feeling for something unseen. Frowning, she moves to my other side, then ascends the steps, hands out wide. I taught her this technique, yet I haven’t been able to feel what she does. Not that I’ve even tried. Either I’m blocked from feeling it or I’ve lost the ability.

“Anything?” Jan asks.

“No. It’s faint, but it gets stronger when I’m closer to the front door. I think the source is inside. Whatever unwelcome energy is giving you insomnia was intentionally planted here. You probably feel anxious and antsy all the time.”

I’m too tired to laugh. I’ve been on edge for a couple of months, but I had thought it was reasonable to feel that way, given the drama with Jesse and the fact that I’ve been grieving his absence and worried about finances.

Christabel kneels in front of me again and takes my hands in hers, which are freakishly hot from her sensing skills. “I’ll check inside your house to see if I can find where it’s coming from. May I have permission to do that?”

Something moves in the distance behind her, something in the shadows.

Something large and equine and laughing with a snarl underneath.

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