The Fortune Teller's Daughter (3 page)

She could
have been a Romani princess, tough and sly and beautiful enough to enchant
Gods. Fairy tale beautiful. That’s what I remembered so well, waist length
raven hair so thick and soft it would take her an hour to braid it into
submission. Those days she left it long and loose and wild she could have been
twenty years younger, mad and passionate. When she painted her lips rich red
and costumed herself in gypsy colors and layers that hugged her narrow body,
she could have been Scheherazade of legend. When I was young, I believed she
was.

Cora Moreau.
The
Corazon.
Seer of Fortunes. Knower of Men’s Hearts. She carried many
titles, each more fantastical than the last. To me, she was just
mom
,
the woman who could use my middle name as a weapon of terror and who taught me
to sew no matter how very awful I was at it.

No one
called her a fake even if she plied her trade in street markets, our red and
purple tent sandwiched between a man selling organic cabbage and a woman who
made jewelry from thrift store cutlery. In my mother’s eyes, we lent legitimacy
to the market, not the other way around.

Mystical?
Maybe. A bit of a con artist? Absolutely. And my hero, even when I couldn’t
admit it.

Whatever it
was that she did, however she did it, made even the most cynical trade up their
pricy therapists for a weekly confessional with the fortune teller.

She was the
real deal.

When she
died, there was only me.

At best, I
was little more than a pretender. At worst…

Well. I
certainly inherited none of her magic.

__________________

For a
fortune teller, my mother built her life on secrets. Secrets about my father.
Secrets about why we moved around, how she knew when it was time to pack it in,
and how she knew where we’d end up. Secrets about her family and her childhood.
Secrets about her gifts. “
Is it real mom?
” I’d ask. “
Do you want it
to be?
” she’d answer. This went on until I was old enough to know better.
Of course it wasn’t real.

Except when
it was.

And now it
seemed she had another secret. Alistair Rook and his marvelous carnival.
Come
home
, he’d begged. We’d never had a home in my whole 22 years. Our
apartments were paid by the month, sometimes by the week. I remembered being a
little girl throwing myself to her feet, clutching her ankles, sobbing that I
didn’t want to move again. Sobbing that I had no friends and that I hated her
for it.

Seven years
old I knew how to hate my mother but not how to play hopscotch.

The idea
that she had a home somewhere out there that she never told me about made me
sick to my stomach and bitterly angry because she was dead and couldn’t tell me
why she’d kept it a secret. The woman who was my hero and my warden. She
couldn’t answer my questions, the ones that kept me from sleeping most nights.
She’d taken all her secrets with her when she left.

But…maybe
not
all
her secrets. The carnival was a real place and Alistair Rook, I
suspected, was a real person who could answer questions. Who could tell me
things she never had.

If I could
find him.

Despite my
fridge being empty and the very real possibility of my electricity being shut
off looming over my head, I skipped working the market and went carnival
hunting instead. Putting in hours making up card readings for desperate women
wanting news of tall, dark, and handsomes wandering into their future seemed
like a torture I couldn’t stomach. Not today.

I changed
into boots, black pants, and a black short-sleeved shirt. Autumn had come when
we weren’t looking, muscling in on the last days of summer to chill the wind
and force the city into its warm clothes prematurely. I knotted my red hair out
of my eyes, grabbed my lime green pea coat, and before I left the apartment, I
paused at the desk by the door where I kept the red box that held her ashes and
the few odd objects that reminded me of her.

One of them,
a gold coin, sat in an ashtray with a few loose coins, a thumb tack, and a
safety pin. It looked banal sitting there amongst her discarded objects I
hadn’t bothered to throw out. It was the size of a quarter, a little thicker,
with a heavily worn stamp on both sides. If I twisted it into the light a certain
way, I could just make out the letter
C
.

I’d found
the coin curled in my mother’s hand the day she died. It was the last thing
she’d picked up, the last object she’d touched. I’d never seen it before and
the police didn’t think it was significant. A fortune teller trinket and
nothing more.

Before I could
change my mind, I grabbed the coin and headed blindly into the city with it and
the invitation in my back pocket.

Coincidences
didn’t exist. Neither did accidents or serendipity or happenstance. Things
happened for a reason and the only reason they didn’t happen when they were
supposed to was because people were exceptionally good at getting in their own
way. It wasn’t a coincidence that my mother’s death so paralyzed me from moving
on to the point that I was unable to let go of our last apartment or her tent
at the market. If I’d gone any day over the last two years when I’d thought it
was time, when I didn’t think I could stand this accursed city a day longer,
the dwarf would never have found me. The invitation would never have come to
me.

I had to
believe it was supposed to be mine. My lifeline. Which was also the reason I
believed that even though I did not know where to find Alistair Rook’s
carnival, I
would
find it.

At the
bottom of my stairs, in front of the mailboxes, I found my first clue.

“Oh,
Serafine!”

Ms. Elma
Totenheim stood sentry beside the front doors, watching the people outside move
along with their lives while minding the rest of us on the inside. She was
almost a shut in except that she was too nosy to actually stay in her
apartment. Elma made it as far as the mailboxes every day, collecting the
ephemera of our lives with her hawk eyes and herculean patience. She knew all
our arguments, sexual partners, and bad behaviors. She collected junk mail
dropped on the ground or in the trash and ferreted it away when she didn’t
think we were watching. She was an odd duck, but no more so than the rest of
us.

My hand was
on the door knob, half turned, so close to getting away without being sucked
into a conversation I didn’t have time for. I turned towards her with a
strained smile.

“Ms.
Totenheim. Is today a good day?”

“It is a
very good day.” She cleared her throat again and thrust her chest towards me.
Her eyes darted to her left breast pocket.

I don’t know
how I missed it when I ran past her, but pinned to her shirt was a blue orchid.

“Where did
you get that?” I breathed. I knew the answer, of course. The petals seemed so
unbelievably blue, galaxy blue, like star dust. An overwhelming need to run my
fingers across their velvet tips had me gripping the handle of the door with
all my strength.

Elma preened
as if it were a diamond ring and not just a flower.

“A little
man gave it to me. He was dressed so nice, like a real gentleman he was.
Foreign, too. Nobility I think.”

“That was
very kind of him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did he say where it came
from?”

“Oh, no. He
did say he’d never seen a lady with prettier eyes than me when he insisted on
giving me his flower.” She swayed her shoulders back and forth, unable to take
her eyes away from her gift. “Sweet man. I was a catch once up on a time, a
real beauty they used to say about me. When I was your age.”

“Did he say
anything else? Anything at all?”

She thought
about it. “No. He seemed to be in a hurry. Had a bunch of flyers to hang up.”

Flyers.

“Here? Did
he hang one up here? Elma, think please. Did you grab it perhaps?”

“I am no
thief!”

“No, you’re
right.” I took a step towards her. She took a step back. “I didn’t mean that
you were. I just thought, perhaps he gave you one special.”

Elma’s eyes
stayed narrowed on me for a long time, as if perhaps I intended to steal her
flower. Her hand fluttered along its edges, fully prepared to crush it in her
fist before letting me make off with it.

Her vanity
overpowered her suspicion. “Well, I suppose maybe he gave me one special. Stay
here. You can’t come in.”

She
disappeared back to her apartment and was gone for only a few minutes before
returning with a postcard sized flyer clutched in her hands.

“This is it.
Don’t know if it’ll do you any good.”

The postcard
was a blue so dark it was almost black, the paper soft to the touch, like
moleskin. Stars dotted the background, raining down around the imprint at the
center - a silver crescent moon with a raven perched inside the bottom curve.

I turned it
over and recognized the strong, cursive handwriting in silver this time.
Alistair
Rook’s Carnival Imaginaire
.
At the edge of the city, along the horizon,
within your dreams. No children allowed after dark.

“Riddle
nonsense,” I grumbled and handed the card back to her. She snatched it, worry
furrowing her old, narrow face, clearly worried the devil girl from upstairs
would steal her object. “That figures. I don’t suppose he told you where you
could find his carnival.”

“His
carnival?” She blinked. “There’s a carnival?”

“Nevermind.
Look, if you see Maurie, you never saw me, okay?”

Her worry
lines disappeared behind a smile full of crooked teeth. “That man is a louse. I
wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire.”

I decided
Elma Totenheim wasn’t so bad after all.

She watched
me leave, noted the time and the direction I turned. I could feel her eyes on
me, nose pressed to the glass of our building’s front door, too afraid to come
in contact with the rest of the world and too afraid to let it pass by without
her.

Besides,
before that morning when the dwarf woke me from my sleep, I’d spent the last
two years not all that different from Elma Totenheim. Static. Waiting.

__________________

In front of
my building I found a second flyer taped to a stop sign. I turned right, made
it half a block, and found the crescent moon and raven drawn messily in the
dirty back window of a taxi cab idling at the curb. I picked up my pace.

A set of
stars drawn in chalk on the sidewalk at the corner pointed me to cross the
street and I followed the signs, even the weird ones that might not have been
anything except for the fact that I was looking for them. A moon sticker on a
mailbox. A set of ravens stenciled on the side of a building. By then I was
running from one to the next, touching them to make sure they were real and not
some hallucination as proof I’d finally gone completely crazy. My heart skipped
beats as I ran to catch up with the dwarf, chasing the symbols I knew had to be
for me.

Breadcrumbs.

When I
caught sight of a boy with a crescent moon stitched to his backpack heading for
the el station, I darted out in the middle of traffic without looking first. A
horn screamed when I skidded to a stop before a bus had a chance to smear me
irreparably across the intersection.

There was no
time to scream. I held up my hands, as if that could protect me from the bus
rushing towards me, and froze.

An arm
grabbed me around the waist and yanked me out from its inevitable end.

“Girl,” the
man with the vice grip boomed above me, vibrating through me. “You’re going to
get hurt.”

I twisted
around and stared into the midsection of the tallest man I had ever seen. His
size was monstrous, both tall and very wide. I stood dumb until my eyes finally
made their way into the clouds from where his face peered down at me. First the
smallest man I’d ever spoken to, and now the biggest. I rocked onto my heels.

“Wow. You’re
a giant.”

“A
colossus,” he corrected, a single eyebrow raised. Then he released me.

When he
turned and started back into the crowd, I caught a tattoo of stars peeking out
at his wrist.

Breadcrumbs.

Unfortunately
his stride length made it impossible for my little legs to keep up. Naturally
everyone got out of his way as he clomped towards the el, but crashed back into
an impossible swarm behind him. By the time I made it onto the platform, he was
gone and so was his train.

At least I
knew what line he was on, which meant I only had to search the south half of
the city. No problem.

It was only
when I was crammed on a bench waiting for the next train did I stop to consider
how ridiculous I was behaving. It was unreasonable to believe that the dwarf
had left me a trail to follow. He hadn’t spray painted those ravens or arranged
for that taxi to be there right when I needed it.

Weird things
like that didn’t happen. Usually.

I remembered
being young, standing in front of a shop window staring at a mannequin wearing
a pink scarf and mittens I wanted very badly, but my mother had ignored my
begging. And as I stared at them, willing them to be mine, a girl passed behind
us wearing the very same pink scarf and mittens. I’d placed my hand on top of
her reflection and said, “
Oh, déjà vu
.” I have no idea where I learned
the word, but I remembered my mother dropped her grocery bag, knelt in front of
me and started shaking me, over and over, yelling, “
There’s no such thing!
What did you see? Tell me what you saw!”

Reason
suggested I was looking for signs and therefore finding them. Rationally I
understood that. As much as I wanted to believe someone had sent me star chalk
drawings, ravens, and giants, it was madness to go wandering around in strange
neighborhoods in hopes of finding a piece of my mother.