Wish Club (3 page)

It wasn’t that she was a terribly religious person, she wasn’t, at least not anymore, but the whole idea of witchcraft made her very uneasy. It must play upon the part of her the Catholic church had inculcated at an early age—the part deep inside that, although she
said
she didn’t fear fire and brimstone, still did. It was too bad she was hosting the next meeting or she could just refuse to go. Well, with any luck, Mara’s cat was already dead and that would be the end of that.

She took off her coat and put on her painting smock, a Northwestern Hospital lab coat she had borrowed from a med-student boyfriend years ago and never returned. She took an elastic pony-tail holder out of the pocket and pulled back her glossy black hair.

Jill sat on her table and rubbed her hands together, looking around the room, trying to decide which painting she would work on today. She shook with a small chill.
Why isn’t this room warming up?
She sipped the coffee she’d brought with her. It was cold now, too.

She removed one of her paintings from its easel and leaned it against the wall, then carried the empty easel over closer to the north windows. Today, she was going to start something new. It was time for a change.

The bright white of the fresh canvas contrasted with the paint-splattered frame of the easel as she tightened it into place. She opened her jar of gesso after a brief struggle with the lid and stirred it patiently. With her three-inch brush, she applied the white gesso to the virgin white of the canvas and began to think about what she would paint there.

She worked for hours, not even stopping for a cigarette. Jill purposefully concentrated on using only the cool color palette, putting big globs of blue and green on her mahogany board, and only tiny dabs of red and yellow, to remind herself to use them sparingly. She was painting with the knife today, something she hadn’t done in a while. It seemed somehow right. It shouldn’t get too detailed, too small. It was going to be an abstract, of course, and for right now it was okay that it was aimless. She could make a point later. Right now, the most important thing was to get back into it. To have fun—something that, she had noticed lately, seemed to be missing.

She and Michael had broken up recently, but that wasn’t it. No, she was fairly certain
that
was a good thing. And she’d been dating plenty in the few months since then, but God, where had the fun gone? It seemed like all these guys were out wife shopping. Wasn’t it supposed to be women over thirty who were desperate? To his credit, at least Michael had started out fun.

Jill stepped back from her painting. Something about the sea, that’s where this was going. Waves washing on the shore, retreating, pushing forward again, the endless give and take. The irregular rhythm of it seemed to her an enigma. Shouldn’t the uneven beat of the waves make you uneasy? Shouldn’t they be annoying, the way they unpredictably crash and pause, then crash again? Yet it was one of the most sought-after sounds in the world. Machines were made that tried to duplicate it.

Her painting was starting to capture both the calm of the ocean and the struggle of the waves. The blues and greens and tans and browns smoothed into each other, blending first one way then back, changing with each stroke of the knife, not unlike the sand on a beach each time a wave passed over it. She stepped back once again to assess her work and was happy with what she saw. It was cool and calming. Cleansing. She let out a deep sigh. Finally. She had conquered some demons today.

Jill looked up at the clock; it was after five. She stretched and arched her back. With a craving for a cigarette welling up in her chest, she turned to look out the window and was startled to see, instead of dreary train tracks and snow-filled skies, that it was now nighttime. She couldn’t see past the glass. She only saw her reflection staring back at her, closer than she had realized and darker than the rest of the room, the light from which surrounded her like a bright white halo.

Sweat
trickled steadily into Lindsay’s right eye while she knelt on the ground with her butt in the air and her hands gripping her ankles. Bikram yoga had seemed so much more invigorating when she’d read about it on the Web site.

With Christmas behind her and less than a week left of the old year, Lindsay wasn’t about to wait around to start her New Year’s resolutions. Then again, when it came to starting new things, Lindsay wasn’t much of one for waiting around, ever. She couldn’t believe all of the other Book Club members wanted to wait until January for their next meeting. She’d tried to talk them into forsaking tradition this year by having a meeting in December, but when she spoke with Claudia, she knew it would be impossible. “We just met, Linds, and everyone’s so busy with the holidays. Let’s just wait.” She probably shouldn’t have called Claudia—the member of Book Club with the greatest aversion to new things—first.

Savasana. That was rapidly becoming Lindsay’s favorite new thing about Bikram yoga. She lay in dead-body pose, rest position, her “kind” eyes unfocused on the ceiling.

The spells, the chants, and all the possibilities they implied—it was all so exciting. That first night, when they had put that candle out, she’d felt so empowered. Like nothing she’d ever felt before. How could these women not want to keep feeling that? Gail was still convinced the candle had gone out of its own accord, but Lindsay had been watching it. The flame had collapsed straight down the wick and disappeared, just a thin wisp of black smoke drifting up after it had gone out. No breeze, no sloshing of wax had done that. They had.

Double-exhale and sit up. Lindsay watched the man next to her expel two forceful breaths to her two meager ones. He had to be almost seventy. More than twice her age. How come he wasn’t suffering? Lindsay turned around for a second set of Rabbit Pose.

If only Mara would call, tell them Tippy was better, then they would see, then they would know what it was they’d stumbled into. A way to make everyone’s life better. They could heal their friends, heal themselves, make all their dreams come true. Well, most of their dreams anyway.

The next Savasana seemed to end before it had started. Lindsay forced herself up. Only two more poses, the instructor promised, but throughout the class Lindsay had begun to question his mathematical abilities, the way his five-second counts seemed to stretch for fifteen.

The next Book Club meeting was in less than two weeks. Lindsay would have to wait until then to try to convince them of the worthiness of this pursuit. Which brought her mind back into the room, where it belonged, but where it began to question the pursuit of Bikram Yoga. Maybe this wasn’t for her after all. Drenched from head to toe, with rivulets of sweat dripping from both elbows, she looked around the room at her classmates of every shape, size, age, and gender. How could anyone ever come to love something as painful as this?

Lindsay brought her head down for the final Head to Knee Pose, but instead of keeping her eyes open as the instructor directed, she crunched them closed. Saltwater filled both eyes anyway. Maybe someday she’d figure out what it was she was supposed to be doing. Maybe someday she’d find a place to belong.

Tippy
jumped on Mara’s stomach and let out a beseeching yowl.
Play with me!
it said. Mara, not fully awake, turned and looked at the clock. It was 3:42 a.m.

“Tippy, get down.” Mara turned over on her side, her mind already descending back into sleep. She’d been having that dream again, the one with the yacht, the one in which she wore a sequined ball gown and sang “My Way” for a crowd of her champagne-drinking friends. She loved that dream. It was so far from her reality.

Tippy kneaded into Mara with his paws, his claws snagging the blanket with a snap, snap, snap. “Tippy, it’s not time to play.” She pulled the blanket in more tightly around her shoulders, trying to hide.

Then Mara rolled abruptly onto her back again.

“Tippy?” she whispered.

Tippy hadn’t jumped onto her bed in months. He hadn’t jumped on anything in months. “How did you get up here? Did you jump up here? All by yourself?”

He looked at her, his green eyes glowing while he purred, kneading his paws into her stomach as she scratched behind his ear.

Her husband Henry’s deep snorky breathing meant he was still asleep—Tippy hadn’t gotten any help onto the bed from him.

It
must
be the spell from Book Club. What other explanation could there be? Mara stared at the ceiling in the dim light, absently petting her purring cat, ruminating on all the many possibilities, all the things this could mean, long after Tippy had fallen asleep.

Chapter Three

The
veterinarian’s waiting room always had the same smell: antiseptic, cedar chips, and cat piss. Mara sat on a bench near the window and waited. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was going to be her year, a year with the power of witchcraft behind it. And yet, less than two weeks into it—with Book Club meeting tonight—all indications were that now, like her baseball team, she’d once again have to wait till next year.

Tippy had been doing so much better since they’d chanted for him—ever since that night he’d first jumped onto her bed. Mara had been beside herself. She couldn’t wait to get to tonight’s meeting to tell everyone, especially Jill, that their spell had helped. That was, until last Friday.

Mara had come home from work in the afternoon and found Tippy lethargic, his food from the morning still in his bowl. He’d looked up at her with sad green eyes. No hopping up today. She’d brought him straight to the vet in a panic and they had started him on IV fluids right away, just to keep him alive. It had been a terrible relapse. Mara had been stunned to realize that her poor cat might not make it—and what did that say about the chanting?

The veterinarian, Dr. Effingham, had kept Tippy over the weekend. Now, as she sat in his waiting room, after being told he wanted to speak with her, Mara figured this was not good. He might even recommend she put Tippy to sleep, as if it were really only a nap she would be considering.

“He’s had a good life,” she could imagine him saying, “but there comes a point where keeping him alive is going to cause more suffering than putting him down.” She didn’t want Tippy to suffer, and if the vet told her it was the best thing, she would listen to him. Mara felt the beginnings of a sob climb up her throat. She turned to look out the window behind her in the waiting room, not really wanting to think about it.

Dr. Seeley, her boss, had seemed displeased that Mara was going to be late to work today because she had to go to the veterinarian’s. But then, Dr. Seeley always seemed displeased.

Henry kept telling her she should just quit, that he hated to see her so unhappy, but with their son Alan starting college next year and Marty only a couple of years behind, she didn’t see how they would manage. Henry called it the “work force,” the invisible force that pulled a person to a job she hated day after day, making her forget it could be any different. She supposed she could start looking for another job
before
she quit, but when was she supposed to find time for that? And it wasn’t as if any new job she would find was going to put her in that sequined dress singing “My Way” on a yacht. It was just easier for her to stay where she was than to go off trying to make any big changes.

Suddenly an assistant called Mara’s name and ushered her into one of the veterinary examining rooms, but Dr. Effingham wasn’t there yet and neither was Tippy.

Oh my God, Mara thought, what if Tippy’s already dead? What if he died over the weekend and they didn’t want to tell me over the phone? I didn’t even get to say good-bye. She imagined him alone in his cage, afraid and lonely, missing her, all those cold metal wires and no one to comfort him. Oh, what had she done?

“Meeowow.” Mara’s heart lifted as she heard Tippy’s howl of protest coming from down the hall, getting louder as the assistant brought him into the room. He set Tippy’s kennel on the stainless-steel examining table.

“Here you go,” he said. “Dr. Effingham will be right in.”

Mara stood up and crossed the room, saying “Thank you,” without even looking at him. Her hands hurried to unlock the door to Tippy’s cage and she scooped him up into her arms. He felt smaller. She sat down in the chair holding him to her chest, and Tippy rested his head on her shoulder, snuggling her. He started purring loudly.

“Well, well, well.” Dr. Effingham entered the room, taking Tippy’s file from the mailbox on the door. “I just don’t know what’s going on with your cat.”

“He’s lost weight.”

“Mmm…hmm.” Dr. Effingham looked down at the file, “Yes, he has,” he paused, silently calculating the weight loss, “eight ounces. But the strange thing is, we had to stop giving him the insulin, because he wasn’t eating, and it was making him lethargic. Now his blood sugar is back to normal, and he’s resumed a normal diet.”

Mara stared back at him.

“I’ve heard about these cases, where the diabetes just spontaneously disappears for no apparent reason. I just have never seen an actual case of it.” He gave her a perplexed smile.

Mara didn’t say anything. She stared straight ahead, patting Tippy and stroking his fur over and over, not really feeling it.

When Mara didn’t respond, Dr. Effingham’s smile faded and he became immediately more clinical. “At any rate,” he said, “I guess what I’m telling you is, the diabetes is gone.”

January
was supposed to denote a fresh start, a new beginning, a clean slate. But it was a mere one and a half weeks into the new year, and all of Jill’s resolutions had already been thrown to the wayside in the same way the laundry she was now picking up had been cast to the floor. She’d tried to cut back on the drinking, but had given that up after she’d been invited to two great parties the first weekend of the new year. She’d thought she might like to try being a warmer, more compassionate person, but when she’d tried smiling at a little girl in line in front of her at Barney’s, it had made her teeth ache. And the girl hadn’t seemed to appreciate it anyway; her eyes hadn’t followed Jill with the wide stare that her good looks usually evoked. So forget that. As for the smoking, she hadn’t even made an attempt to quit. She still liked it too much.

Walking around her condo, Jill picked up shoes and magazines and mail and socks. Book Club was just plain bad timing. They always met on a Monday night, but her cleaning lady came on Tuesdays, and that always meant her apartment would be in its worst possible shape. She dumped her ashtrays into the kitchen garbage, then threw the rather large armful of clothes she’d picked up into the laundry room hamper, filling it.

Jill looked into her bedroom. Her bed was unmade, the blanket and comforter kicked all the way down to the floor, where they had been since last Wednesday morning. Clothes sat in mountainous piles on the floor. Her nightstand held another overflowing ashtray and an assortment of glassware representing all of her many bedtime moods of the previous week: martini in a martini glass, martini in a juice glass, coffee cup, juice in a juice glass, and one nearly empty bottle of Evian water. Jill cringed. Maybe she could just keep the door to her bedroom closed. These were her friends, after all. Surely they would understand a little mess. Although Lindsay’s standard for cleanliness was off the charts: they’d shared a Printer’s Row apartment during their last year at the Art Institute and it had almost ended their friendship.

When she’d first met Lindsay, during the second week of classes, Jill had been walking through the lobby of the Sharp Building and Lindsay had stopped her, saying that since they were in the same Research Studio section they would probably end up friends. Jill’s immediate reaction had been to think,
probably not.
Lindsay had been so intense. But she’d had an earnestness about her, too, a kind of innocence, really, and a way of looking at you—as if she could see down to the core. In spite of Jill’s initial aversion, Lindsay had been right. They had ended up friends.

Jill sighed and got to work making the bed. There might be no pleasing Lindsay, but she would make an attempt for the rest of them. She wanted to please them. Go figure. It was weird, this closeness she felt for these Book Club women. Jill still couldn’t understand it even after five years of being in Book Club. They were so not like her. Mara and Claudia were practically borderline nerds.

It was no surprise that Claudia had been the one to bring Mara, the wife of one of her schoolteacher friends, into the group. Jill had always thought Mara was a strange addition. Initially, she had tried to explain it away as a result of Mara joining Book Club after they’d already been meeting for a year. But that wasn’t it. Now, Jill suspected it was because even though Mara was only a couple years older than the rest of them, she
seemed
so much older. It was as if she reveled in her dowdiness.

Then there was Gail, who always seemed to have such potential. She was far from dowdy, and Jill suspected underneath it all Gail was a kindred soul. Regardless, when Lindsay had introduced them, Gail’s acceptance of her—and Claudia’s for that matter—had been instant. And warm, like
Any friend of Lindsay’s is a friend of ours.
Which Jill found even more weird.

She finished making the bed and cleared off the nightstand, then removed the laundry mountains from the floor. The place was actually starting to look better.

And all she had to do in the bathroom was make it
look
clean. Actually
getting
it clean, that was Loma’s job. She thought of canceling Loma for the next day. She was going to do the whole place tonight; why should she pay Loma to do it all over again tomorrow? And how could she be sure that Loma
really
cleaned anything in the first place? Instead of using the heavy-duty stuff, like Ajax or Soft Scrub and some elbow grease, Loma could very well be pouring measured amounts of cleaning products down the drain each week and running through the house with paper towels and spray cleaners, like Jill was doing now, just making it
look
clean.

She looked down at the toilet next to her. No, she would continue to put her faith in Loma. It was going to be bad enough having to clean the outside of the bowl herself; she would be damned if she actually got in there and
cleaned
the inside as well.

After she finished, Jill washed up, changed out of her cleaning clothes, and freshened her makeup. They would arrive in less than thirty minutes and she still had to get the food set up. She paused with her hand on the door to the refrigerator for a moment before changing her mind and opening the freezer. She pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and set it on the counter, her fingertips leaving five melted imprints on the frosted glass. She blew off using a shaker and mixed her martini right in the glass, scooping out the ice cubes with a fork.

Jill sucked on an olive while she put all the veggie and finger-sandwich platters out. The caterer had delivered almost everything ready to go; all she had to do was pull off the shrink-wrap. One tray of hot hors d’oeuvres needed to go in the oven, which she started preheating.

She scanned the apartment from the kitchen. If she said so herself, it looked pretty damned good. The food was sitting on the dining room table and she had a little mini-bar set up on the small granite-topped island, which had high glass-fronted cabinets overhead that divided the kitchen from the living and dining room. Scented candles burned here and there, which, she hoped, would cover up some of the cigarette smell.
Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.

Jill took her drink and her cigarettes and went out to the balcony for a quick smoke. The cold air seemed to give the lights an extra sparkle—or maybe it was just the icy chill watering her eyes. The lights spread out below her. It was why she had bought this condo: the view and this balcony. It was a rare kind of city balcony. Private. High up and enclosed on three sides. It didn’t stick out precariously from the side of the building like an afterthought. From here, the city looked like a much better place. The altitude had a cleansing effect; no visible dirt or crime or homeless people—just tiny lights in all the windows spread out for miles. Beautiful.

At least tonight it wasn’t snowing or raining. No precipitation for them to chant about. God, she hoped this witchcraft thing would just go away. That first night they’d tried it, she’d thought she’d made it pretty clear she didn’t want to participate. But Lindsay could be so pushy, and Mara, too. The only choice they had given her had been between going along or leaving in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Everyone had stayed late because of the rain. Making the best of the situation, they drank more wine. And then the power had gone out.

After they had lit several candles, their conversation turned to ghost stories and Halloween and, coincidentally enough, the book they’d read for the meeting. It was Mara who’d suggested they try a spell from
The Kitchen Witches
to stop the rain, and Lindsay had jumped all over the idea. Gail sarcastically said they should probably begin their first foray into the occult by trying to tackle something a little smaller, like using their brain waves to put out a candle. She’d rubbed her temples and closed her eyes when she said it, making fun of the whole idea. But Gail’s scorn had only seemed to motivate Lindsay.

Jill had hoped the chanting was over for good when Gail told them it was obvious a draft had blown out the candle—not their crazy chanting. But Lindsay, of course, would have none of it. “It just went out. Didn’t you see? It didn’t bend beforehand like it would have if it had been blown out by a draft.” Lindsay had tipped to one side, with her hands on her hips, to demonstrate what the candle should have looked like had it succumbed to a breeze. She’d insisted they try it again.