Smoke and Mirrors (11 page)

“What about west?” I asked.

Lydia turned my wallet over in her hand.

“Montague wants to know why you are holding back.”

“Because I need to know something. And if I reveal too much, I may not get the answer I need.”

“Chess.”

“What?”

“You play chess, right?”

“Sure.”

“Montague says you should never sacrifice your queen.”

“I don't understand.”

“Pawns, rooks, knights, bishops even. But to win by sacrificing the queen is not the thing for a gentleman to do.”

“I'll remember that,” I said, although I did not fully understand the reference.

“Who rescued you when you were feeling lost?”

“I don't know.”

“She did,” Lydia answered. “Montague said it was her. West.”

“I don't understand what west is.”

“West is the setting sun. West is where the day goes.
Time moves in that direction. West is night. Completion. West is death.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. I looked into the mirror now behind Lydia and stared at my own face. I am not a mirror person and hardly ever took a look at myself in a mirror. There he was. Me. Seventeen years old today.

“I want you to tell me if she is real,” I said. “I need it to come from someone who does not know what I know. Someone who hasn't seen what I've seen.”

“Why do you need this so badly?”

“Because this is important to me.”

“Montague is feeling annoyed. He wants to know why you are testing him, testing us both.”

“It's not you. I'm testing me. I'm testing what I believed to be real. Tell me one thing you know about her. About West.”

Lydia frowned. “Montague says you are just a boy. You aren't ready for this. You aren't prepared. He thinks you should just back away from it all. Stay on the path you are on.”

“Okay. Is that it?”

“There is no
it
, Montague says. No easy answer. He says, if you are so poorly prepared, maybe you
should
just sacrifice your queen and win your little game and you won't have to worry yourself anymore.”

I was feeling frustrated and angry now. At Lydia or Montague or this whole crazy afternoon. I felt a
little dizzy. Maybe it was all the marijuana smoke in the room. I was feeling confused and light-headed. I looked at my reflection. Smoke and mirrors. A crazy woman playing tricks with my mind. A dope-smoking, unemployed nutcase entertaining herself. When I took my wallet back, would I find its contents, a single twenty-dollar bill, missing?

Lydia opened her eyes suddenly. “We're through,” she said, sliding my wallet back to me. “Montague's gone. I'm feeling tired.” She had changed entirely. “I don't think you were fair about this,” she said accusingly.

“Maybe I expected too much.”

“You wanted answers. You wanted someone to tell you what to do. This is what people want when they come here. They want easy answers, and it usually doesn't work out that way. You have a problem on your hands. You need to decide what to do. You can walk away from it. That's what Montague was telling you, but that's only because you pissed him off. I don't think you can walk away from it.”

I sat silently for a minute. Lydia opened a window and began to put dirty cups and saucers into the dishwater in the sink. She squirted in some dish detergent.

Looking out the window now she said this: “It isn't really
her
trying to save you. It's the other way around. You have to save her.”

“But I don't even know where she is.”

“Then you better find her. Does she have a name?”

“Andrea,” I said.

“Well. That wasn't so hard, was it?”

My parents were never good at birthday parties, and this one was no exception. Ice cream. Cake. I blew out the candles. They gave me a bunch of presents I didn't particularly need or want.

My present to myself was flushing my pills down the toilet. I don't know what results I was expecting, but I was becoming more confused over who I liked best. The old me, the new me, or just me.

Tanya called while I was out for a walk but I didn't call her back. I wasn't quite prepared for it if she had bad news for me — the spell had worn off, maybe. I had turned back into a pumpkin. She had been totally freaked out by Lydia. Did I really want such a straitlaced girl?

Or maybe she just wanted to apologize. It seemed that I had to choose allegiance, loyalty to one of two girls. Tanya was the prettier of the two, but was I that
shallow? Maybe. But then Tanya was real and Andrea was ... exactly what?

So Andrea was west. She was death. She was my queen. All metaphorically speaking. I knew that whatever Lydia was up to with her weirdness and her so-called spirit guides, it was up to me to interpret what she told me. But if it was all a chess game, then who was my opponent? And how was I doing? Winning or losing?

I looked at the pile of newspapers sitting by my desk. Maybe it was time to put all that behind me. If I wanted to research anything, I could use the Internet. Did I really want to spend more evenings alone in my room with a pair of scissors? I moved the pile of newspapers over towards the door. I'd haul them down later and put them with the recycling.

In doing so, I knocked over my research box and a folder spilled its contents on the floor. Witchcraft. I hadn't thought about witchcraft for quite a while, although it had once been up there in my top ten most important subjects of interest. Ozzie was convinced witches were real and had always wanted to meet one. We had theories about who they were. Certainly our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dexter. She could paralyze you with her stare or make you feel ten feet tall with her smile.

Ozzie and I assumed that witchcraft was an honourable undertaking for the most part but there were probably a few nasty witches around too. The only test
we had heard of was one we could obviously never use. It was the ancient one of throwing a suspected witch into a pond. If she floated, she was a witch. If she sank, then not. Probably many non-witches had drowned over the years in such ponds and the floaters mostly were stoned or hanged or burned to death. Our ancestors were not particularly tolerant of women with unusual abilities.

If a woman could cure your wart, for example, you might be thankful and give her a loaf of homemade pumpernickel bread, but then if a neighbour heard about this, he might accuse her of being a witch. And then the dirty work began.

My witchcraft file contained mostly stuff I'd photocopied from books since there was not a lot of news about witches in any of the local papers. I reread an article I had about an accused witch during the reign of King James I in England. Poor Gilly Duncan, a servant girl from North Berwick, had a gift for healing and, as a reward for her kind deeds, the local authorities accused her of being a witch and having sex with the devil. She was tortured and “confessed,” leading to her being burned to death. Such stories were repeated for centuries.

The death penalty for witches remained until 1736 in England, but it remained illegal to call yourself a witch in that country until 1951. In another time, Lydia
certainly would have been considered a witch. She was an avowed pagan and believed in her herbs and spirits.

I put the folder away in my “research box” right between werewolves and wormholes. And I walked out into the night. I needed some exercise. I wanted to clear my head and figure out what I was going to do about Andrea — if I was going to do anything at all. I walked west into the night.

It was a clear night, and the sky was full of stars. I saw one shooting star and could locate at least two satellites. Venus was low on the horizon, and I think I could see Mars. I would stop near streetlights and peer into the shadows behind trees and parked cars. I think I expected Andrea to appear, to walk out of the darkness and come back into my life. But she did nothing of the sort.

When I arrived back home, I heard my parents arguing again. So much for the truce. I listened long enough to determine that they were arguing about money this time, not about me. I wondered if I could find a modern-day witch to cast a spell and make them stop arguing, make them like each other a little more. I wondered if Andrea could use those influences she had used on Tanya to help my parents. And so I continued to ponder this problem of Andrea. Did she exist, and was she in trouble? What kind of trouble could it be? And how could I possibly help?

I was right about Tanya. She was mad at me. I found her in the hallway at school. “That Lydia lady made my skin crawl. Why did you take me there?”

“I thought you would find it interesting.”

“You don't believe any of her crap, do you?”

“I like to keep an open mind,” I said.

“Why didn't you call me back last night?”

And then I said something that I would quickly regret. “I don't know. I guess I didn't think it was important.”

Early on in life you figure out that some very ordinary words can mean many different things to different people. What I had meant was I didn't think it was important to call her back right then, when my head was filled with other things, when I was confused. What she heard me say (reading between the lines and drawing her own conclusions) was that I was saying she wasn't important, that I didn't care, that I was totally uncaring and insensitive.

She gave me a look that shocked me. I saw hurt first but it quickly morphed into anger. “Don't worry,” she said. “You won't have to talk to me again.” And she walked away.

“Tanya, wait,” were the words that came out of my mouth, but they didn't do any good at all.

And it was while I was watching her walk away down the school hallway that I suddenly realized what I was losing. I knew I would not get her back. I had
been dreaming about Tanya for a long time. She had allowed me into her life, and I had walked in. She liked me. She was maybe falling in love with me. I think she really was. It had been the most amazing thing.

And now she was walking out of my life, and I had let it happen. I knew instinctively there was no way to repair the damage. And then I was leaning against someone's locker, my head down, and I was sobbing. Something powerful and terrible was sweeping over me. I had not felt anything like this before. I didn't understand it and I couldn't control it. I knew I had to get out of there, so I ran down the hall and outside. I ran long and hard down the school driveway and down the road until I came to the old railway tracks that led into the woods. My chest was heaving and my eyes burned. I thought I heard a voice calling to me, but when I turned there was no one there.

I sat down by the river and watched the water, studied the patterns of light and dark, the ripple effect on the surface. I remembered being here with Andrea. I remembered walking here with Tanya. How different they were. Now they had both come into my life and both disappeared. And I wished that I had never known either one. There was a cold hollow place inside me, and it was growing larger. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on being calm, but I began to feel a throbbing pain in my head.

I wished for a kind and healing witch to walk out of those woods and comfort me. But I had no such luck. And I was feeling terribly, horribly alone. Isolated. I did not want to go home. I couldn't bring myself to go back to school. I thought I heard someone call my name again, a nickname I hadn't heard for a long while. “Slime-on.”

No one there. Trees. Vines. Wind moving things around a little. I looked back at the water, at the reflection of me shifting and rippling on the dark surface. And then in the reflection, someone standing behind me. A kid. Ozzie.

The image came into sudden clarity and it was perfectly clear. He was standing there, smiling. And he still had a skateboard in his hand. And he still looked to be twelve years old.

“Ozzie,” I said out loud, but when I turned around no one was there.

One of my science teachers had told us once about the principle of Occam's razor, which stated that, usually, the best explanation for any unusual phenomena is the simplest one. If ever there was a time to put Occam's razor to the task of cutting through the complexity of things to look for the simplest explanation, it was now. Ozzie was the same age as me and living a two-hour
drive away in a home near the ocean. While we had not kept in touch, it was not possible that he still looked like the wiry little rat that he had been back during our reckless skateboard days.

Stress can cause both visual and auditory hallucinations, the experts say. And I had sure experienced plenty of stress, worrying about my parents and now getting dumped by Tanya. I had also flushed the pills that were intended in part to “keep me in balance.” I believed then that the combination of the two factors must have sent me off the deep end. I suddenly realized that I could remember everything about Ozzie from before my accident and nothing about him after it.

I walked home, both frazzled and uncertain as to what I might see next or do next. I went to my room, and inside I tripped over the pile of newspapers I had failed to get rid of. I did not look in the mirror. In fact, I put a shirt over it. I drank a large glass of water and searched my desk drawer for some leftover pills, but I had been thorough. I was chemical free and stuck with that fact. I could not tell my parents about the missing pills. They would know I had chucked them. I'd done that before. To them, it would be a sign that I was still in trouble. (And I was, but I didn't want them to know.)

I could feel all of my energy draining out of my body, seeping out of the soles of my feet and into the floor. I lay down on my bed and I faded into a deep sleep.

In my dream, Tanya came back to me and I apologized. But Tanya had changed. She was both Andrea and Tanya — fused. Well, dreams are not meant to be logical. But she seemed one and the same and I seemed to accept that just fine. We were standing on a grassy island in the middle of a four-lane highway. It was noisy from the traffic and I could smell exhaust. And I kept saying that we should get to the other side. On one side was a city and on the other side of the highway was the sea. There was a boardwalk there and beyond it the blue, perfect ocean. I assumed we were trying to get to the beach even though we didn't look like we were dressed for it.