Chapter 4

Chapter 4 of 56 · 11-minute read

Mid-May

Saturday – Full Moon in Scorpio, Newly Waning

To my surprise, the dentist’s office is a refurbished bungalow from a century ago when this small Georgia town had been a sawmill, probably the last time it flourished at anything. I recognize the young dentist’s surname as the same as my childhood dentist and vaguely recall a baby boy born to the household after I left home and married. Neil-Junior is my mom’s dentist, too, but she obviously thinks the son is the father since, on their website, they bear the same name and aquiline nose.

My jaw throbs, and I can feel my toothache in my skull and spine. I didn’t sleep well last night in my childhood bed on the mattress that hasn’t been replaced since I slept on it as a child, but not only because of my broken tooth or because the bed that sags in the middle.

The Caine brothers had hung out with us, watching old movies and devouring pizzas until almost midnight when their attention had turned to fixing several broken appliances on the spot and reaping the praise from an old woman. They’d spent another hour unloading much of my car before Virgil glanced at the moon overhead and insisted it was time to go home.

I’d been partly terrified of Mama’s decision to delve into Bobby’s disappearance and, at the same time, fighting the beast of an old anger I’d refused to let myself feel for the last four decades. Virgil’s red car had been the trigger for Mama’s long-forgotten questions. Suddenly being forced to talk about something no one had wanted to talk about when I’d been a kid begging the adults around me for help, I’d found a trigger of my own. Thankfully, my mom, having men in the house, had become distracted enough to forget about Bobby and how she’d failed me.

I wish she’d “let well enough alone,” as she calls it. I can’t express to her what thoughts of Bobby do to me, even after all these years, even at this age. I’m quiet, but I cannot shake the rage just below my surface. They say the human brain experiences the past as the present and locks into moments of trauma as if they were happening now. All I know is that it’s been years since I’ve been this angry, and it’s all because I remember my helplessness as if it happened yesterday when I was too young to know to be angry. The only thing that’s worse is the growing rawness of emotion toward my feeble mother for something she did—or didn’t do—forty years ago.

I take a deep breath as I approach my dentist’s bungalow. Like all houses on this street, this neighborhood has been rezoned for attorneys and doctors while the rest of the town is a hodge-podge of some restoration and mostly collapse. As I approach the door, two enormous potted plants catch my attention. The way they are placed symmetrically in front of the entrance is striking, particularly when considering how crowded this street must have been when it housed people instead of businesses.

The minute I step through the front door, the loud chatter inside the waiting room goes silent. I can feel all eyes on me as I make my way to the reception desk. I don’t even have to announce myself. Everyone in town knows I’m back, and everyone imagines a second head that I can’t. The side-eyes. The murmuring.

This is what I left behind when I fled to college at eighteen. I’ve never felt I belonged here, and every whisperer confirms to me that absolutely nothing has changed in this town.

At least none of them know I’m a witch!

“Lauren.” One of the two women behind the desk hands me a clipboard with a cheap pen advertising a local insurance agency and half an inch of paperwork for me to fill out. She glares at me. Her jaw is tight, as if the sight of me makes her grind her teeth.

The woman behind her looks up and says something under her breath. I don’t think she said, “Witch,” but maybe I’m mistaken.

I find a chair so flimsy I’m afraid it will cave under my weight, despite my having grown thin over the last decade. The patient nearest me moves to the other side of the room, even though I showered and used a strawberry-scented body wash I found in the back of Mama’s linen closet. The two women behind the reception counter continue to whisper to each other through barely moving lips as they glower across the room at me. I can’t hear a thing they’re saying, except for my name.

Just like high school.

Well, of course! That’s the last time I spent much time around either of them.

Iris-Ann Majors, the one who handed me the clipboard, graduated from high school with me and for at least five years before that, she was queen of the mean girls. I recognize her not because of any specific physical feature from her youth, but because she looks identical to how her mother looked when we were in school—resting bitch face included–except older. Her hair is probably as gray as mine, but I cover my gray with a color that’s only slightly warmer than my color in my thirties. Iris-Ann, on the other hand, has opted for an unnatural black that looks harsh against her finely drawn, equally black eyebrows. She was just as cold to me in our youth as she is now.

My relationship with the gossip next to her hits closer to home. Chelsie is my cousin on my dad’s side of the family and sister to the two career criminals who stole my mom’s petty cash and painkillers and tried to convince her to let them move in with her before I secured a restraining order against them both. I’m sure Walker and Fallon haven’t forgiven me, but truth be told, I wouldn’t recognize them if I ran into them on Main Street. Chelsie is older than her siblings, closer to my age, and easier to recognize, mainly because the last time I saw her was only twenty years ago. I’d brought my kids to see my parents for a week and caught Chelsie red-handed, sliding the edge of her car key all the way down my brand new car in the grocery store parking lot.

The next hour is a blur of dental x-rays and waiting. Someone in the area outside the exam room complains loudly about having to work me in between other patients as a favor to the dentist’s friend, Virgil.

It’s weird how everyone in town seems to be a reincarnation of their parents. Neil-Junior looks exactly as his father had as he adjusts the light above the pale mauve dental chair and smells like every dentist since I was a kid. Neil-Junior’s white lab coat and blue scrubs glow in the bright light of the x-ray viewer. A dental tray hides him from view as thick glasses hide his eyes.

“Relax,” Neil-Junior tells me, examining my x-rays one last time. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a patient as stiff as you are.”

I take several deep breaths but can’t stop clenching the arms of the chair. His assistant, a perky blonde who can’t be over twenty-five and is probably either the daughter or daughter-in-law of someone else I went to high school with, has the audacity to roll her eyes at me.

“Good grief, Miss Hartford! I’ve seen kindergartners come in here less nervous than you are.”

I’m almost to the point of hyperventilating. I miss Dr. Patel, my previous dentist, who was female with small hands. And her patience. No matter how talented Neil-Junior might be, one of the ghosts from my past is rearing its ugly head again. I want to explain why I hate going to the dentist because I’ll be caged in a chair with someone sticking daunting instruments into my mouth and possibly hurting me. It’s an old feeling, an old memory. Dr. Patel had been a colleague of my beloved second husband and they had even worked at the same clinic for a while. Jesse had done me the great favor of explaining my childhood trauma to her, and she’d taken great care to soothe me. This dental chair, by comparison, feels like I’m being weak and helpless and held down. Just thinking about it, I can almost feel Bobby’s hands inside my training bra and my mouth full of⁠—

I shudder, and the assistant sighs loudly.

“With a patient as nervous as you are, this is normally when I turn on the TV and tell you to watch cartoons to calm you down. Would you like me to do that?”

She’s saying all the right things, but her saccharine tone is infuriating. Neil-Junior’s attention is elsewhere, and he doesn’t seem to hear. The assistant takes a step forward and looms over me.

I’m not a homicidal maniac, but her attitude makes me want to do violence to her. I pump my hand, skewing the heart rate monitor on my fingertip to one side. The increasingly fast beeping from the machine behind me is my pulse, and though I have the blood pressure of an athlete, I’m sure it’s approaching stroke level.

“All right, all right. I’ll tell you a secret. This anxiety that you’re feeling? It’s not real. It’s only an illusion. All in your head.”

“It’s all in my head because a dick was all down my throat!” The words pop out of my mouth without warning, and I immediately regret them. “I was—when I was a child—this man⁠—”

“I’m sorry,” she squeaks. Her voice is extremely high-pitched, as if she has just been given a helium balloon to suck on. “No wonder you’re so sensitive. I am so, so, so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Exactly, I think.

She pulls Neil-Junior into the hallway, and when they return, he decides that nitrous oxide is the way to go. Normally, I’d say no to that, to anesthesia, to anything that might alter my consciousness. Even after nearly a decade, I’m still smarting from the loss of my best friend, Jan, after multiple surgeries disturbed her psychic gifts.

Each surgery and each round of anesthesia put her a little more off her psychic game until she began prophesying things that I couldn’t handle and that she wouldn’t keep silent about. Most of what she’d said had come true, but years later, and would have robbed me of happiness if I had listened to her then. Our friendship had not recovered, and I lost probably the person I was closest to in my entire life, before Jesse.

Normally, I would say no to any type of anesthesia at all now. I’ve had several minor surgeries in the last decade that I managed to get through by gritting my teeth and bearing it rather than alter my mental state. But I really have no choice now. My jaw is throbbing and I’m desperate to get this tooth fixed.

It’s the rage welling up inside of me that shocks me. I’ve never dealt with what happened to me as a kid—I’ve always buried those memories of Bobby’s weekly visits, right next to where his body still lies. It’s something I’ve never let myself deal with, and now it’s in my face, forcing me to look at it. Maybe coming back to visit my mom for three months wasn’t such a good idea, but I hadn’t realized that of all the traumas I’ve worked through in my life, this shadow not only still remains but still matters so much.

Neil-Junior’s assistant excuses herself to set up the laughing gas, then returns with what looks like an oversized kitten’s nose.

She shrugs. “I could only find the child’s version.”

Before she can press the nose piece to my face, I wave her off. There’s another reason I try not to use anesthesia whenever I can help it, and it has nothing to do with how it affected Jan’s psychic gift.

She ignores my hand and tries to maneuver around me, but I grab her wrist to make sure I’m heard. “If I get lost, just tell me to come back to the fountain.”

She freezes, frowns at me, and then shoots a knowing look at Neil-Junior as he places his instruments on the tray beside my chair.

Neil-Junior raises an eyebrow so high it disappears beneath his bangs. His face twists to one side in a grimace that seems both concerned and hesitant.

“Oh, Miss Hartford, you won’t get lost. I promise.” The assistant sounds like a kindergarten teacher talking to a frightened child. “We’ve never had anybody get lost. We’ll stop the laughing gas, and very shortly after that you’ll feel completely fine and awake.” Before she says anything else, she presses the nose piece to my face and I can no longer protest.

One talent I’ve never been comfortable with as a witch is astral projection, or bi-location. Some people refer to it as “walking between the worlds.” The problem is, I’ve never been able to do it intentionally, and leaving my body without proper preparation can be deadly. I almost did it by accident once while driving. The first time I’d succeeded, I’d found myself in a ritual in my backyard and, at the same time, in my friend Lisa’s backyard ritual space where we had held open circles many times. I’d wandered inside her house, past where Lisa and her little girl slept in her bed, past the sofa where her husband slept, and to the saltwater aquarium. I’d stood there for what had seemed to be forever, watching the bright blues and vivid pinks inside the fish tank.

After that, I instead focused on visualizations of an enchanted forest with a large fountain in the center. I use this location to find my way back should I become lost while journeying away from the conscious world and into my body.

I blink at the assistant as she counts backwards. No doubt, within the hour she’ll be chatting with everyone in the hallways about another weird Lauren Hartford quirk and how I’m just as bizarre as people say. Before I leave the building, she’ll be on her phone, calling all of her gossipy friends in town and telling them that I was either drunk or already high or just downright loony when I came in to get a tooth fixed. She may even tell them what I said about my childhood sexual assault.

My whole body relaxes in a way it hasn’t relaxed in a long time. I feel my frown smoothing out on my forehead. It’s too late now. I’m vaguely aware of Neil-Junior gently tapping my chin and urging me to open my mouth, but then everything is gone.

I’m floating.

Not just across space, but across time.

The last thing I’m aware of in my body is the clip on the end of my left index finger that measures my pulse. It buzzes and vibrates crazily on my finger, but I ignore it as I float away.

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