Wish Club (31 page)

“When I tried to fix it, I was careful.”

“You tried to fix it?”

Mara nodded and explained the whole episode with the myrrh.

“We need to break this one, definitely,” Greta said. “Same for you as for Claudia. Since we don’t have any physical remnants from your wish, you’re going to need to visualize it as you made it. For you, no tearing it up in your head, though. I want you to see yourself jumping up and down on top of it. Can you do this?”

“I…sure,” Mara looked over at Claudia.

Claudia gave Mara a silent, open-mouthed shrug.

Greta flipped through her book again, dropping off-line in the way in which they’d now become accustomed. After making a few notes, she set the book on the table, then picked up one black and one white candle. Greta held the bottom of each one, one at a time, over a burning candle to melt a bit of wax on the bottom, using the melted wax to glue them onto two of the metallic plates. The two candles were placed on either side of a large piece of purple amethyst. She cleared her throat and began.

Seven weeks ago a spell was cast with our verse,

The results of which we must now reverse.

Greta lit a small white birthday cake candle, then used it to light first the large white candle and then the black. She pinched out the flame of the birthday candle between her fingers.

For Mara and Henry abundance was sought.

Let the spell be undone and the results it has wrought.

We lift this spell, and ask all be well,

And any harms done their negativity quell.

It is our will, it is our plea

And harm it no one, so mote it be.

“All right.” Greta picked up the stack of cards and put Mara’s card on the bottom. “That should take care of that one now.”

Mara looked up at Greta as if to say, “shouldn’t there be more?” She shifted in her chair again and tugged out on a belt loop of her pants, loosening their grip on her waist, then crossed her arms over her stomach, resting her forearms on the soft rise of her belly, as if she were trying to press it out of the way.

“And now for your second wish. The singing career.”

Mara rolled her eyes. “My voice is getting so bad now, I’m becoming afraid to use it at all. It’s almost cost me my job. Although I’m not so sure Dr. Seeley doesn’t like the new, quieter me in the examining room.”

“If you choose this new path you’ve all started down, you’re going to see changes—huge, magnificent, life-altering changes—not so easy, always, but good. Mostly good. Tonight, as we attempt to reverse these spells, we need to understand that if we’re going to have even a little success at reversing any of them, especially since Jill—”

Everyone’s questions burst out at once, interrupting her.

Lindsay: “A little success? You mean you aren’t sure?”

Mara: “
Attempt
to reverse the spells?”

Gail: “What path?”

Claudia: “We may
not
be successful?”

Greta calmly held up one hand. “I don’t remember giving out any guarantees that this was going to work. You see, you are all coming into your own power, a new kind of power, and it’s not necessarily about the witchcraft as much as it is about controlling your own destiny and taking charge of your life.
Thought, word, deed.
It’s like an unconscious use of the Witches’ Pyramid. Can’t you see the connection between your wishes and what’s been happening? And it’s not all about spells and potions.

“Lindsay, you wanted to lose weight. To obtain the
perfect body,
whatever that might be. Was it really your wish, or your belief that you’d finally found something that would work for you, that made the weight loss easier this time? How many times this time around did you sneak down to the kitchen for a midnight snack?”

Lindsay looked around nervously.

“Mara,” Greta continued. “You asked for a chance to sing again. What kind of singing did you mean?”

“I don’t know, I guess a small jazz club or something like that, once in a while. That’s sort of what I had in mind.”

“But really, wasn’t that just a wish to be heard? You wanted someone to
listen
to you—to your voice. How much does your husband—Henry, is it?—how much does he listen to you with the game on all the time? And two teenage boys? That boss of yours? Forget it. So you wanted to sing. And now you do sing—and believe me, when you do, people listen.

“Gail, you wanted time to yourself. I don’t think your wish was so nefarious that it started your sons’ school on fire, but I guess I really don’t know. But didn’t all of it make you stop and think? Did you imagine for even a second what your life would be like without your children? And what was the final result? Aren’t you an even better mother now? The fire couldn’t be all that bad if it strengthened you as a parent. Yes, your son was hurt, but he’s going to be fine. However, you ended up with a torn meniscus in your knee.

“Ladies, the Universe even has a sense of humor, it’s a witty wordsmith.
Pay attention to your own knee—your own needs.
You’ve been ignoring them for years, Gail, and now as soon as you pay them some attention the Universe hands you not only a pun, but a pun that forces you to slow down for a change. How can you care for others when you aren’t even caring for yourself? It’s the old
put on your own oxygen mask first.
These other wishes are just the same: you wrote them down and gave them credence, and before too long they started happening.

“And the creativity wishes—Claudia’s wish to write, and Jill’s wish for inspiration. I think you must understand those are in a league of their own. That’s why they backfired with results in complete opposition to their intention. You see, magic is really just another form of creativity, and
creativity is life.
Think about it: what is
creation?
It’s making something, producing something, up to and including your own reality. How we live our lives, what we do with the gift of life is, essentially, our own personal magic. Claudia, you couldn’t honestly expect the Universe to grant you a novel if you never sat down in a chair to write one. And so when you tried to ask, and even when you chickened out, the Universe gave you the
what for.
As far as Jill is concerned, if you look at the way she’s lived, the way she’s treated her gift, the gift of life…” Greta stopped there. She didn’t need to explain Jill’s history of self-destructive behavior to them.

The women sat in stunned silence.

“It’s all just so complicated,” Lindsay spoke first. “I don’t understand how—I mean, how come all of our first wishes—for the candle and the rain, for Tippy—how come they went so well and most of the rest of them went so wrong? Well, all of them except one: Jill’s wish for the perfect man.”

“Those first wishes weren’t quite so selfish,” Greta answered. “Or maybe it was just beginner’s luck. I don’t have a definitive answer other than to say the Universe works in mysterious ways.”

Greta stopped talking suddenly and tilted her head, a puzzled expression on her face. Again she stayed frozen that way, thinking, for a length of time most would consider inappropriate to take while holding the floor without talking.

When she finally looked up again, her eyebrows were furrowed together. “I’m starting to think Jill’s first wish may have backfired, too. Maybe worst of all.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“I
need you. Please come over.” Marc’s voice had cracked when he’d pleaded with her on the phone, and Jill finally had relented, driving over to his apartment to be with him. He hadn’t sounded like himself. He’d sounded, well, desperate. “I don’t know what’s wrong, I…I just want to be with you tonight. Will you come? I miss you.”

I miss you?
She’d seen him just yesterday, Sunday. They’d returned from New York around noon. He’d dropped her off at her building and had been angling to get invited up, but she’d shut him down. “I’m tired. And I have a lot to catch up on around the house. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Which meant today.

Jill didn’t really want to see him today, either, but she’d been unable to come up with a good enough excuse. He’d changed. Something about him was different, and she couldn’t put her finger on what.

He’d started acting weird on the flight out to New York. For one thing, he’d just sat there. He hadn’t read. He hadn’t watched the short video segment. He hadn’t scanned the in-flight shopping magazine. He sat. Looking straight ahead. Sometimes he shut his eyes, but mostly he just sat. And he had seemed very content to be doing it. He hadn’t wanted to talk. At all. She’d thought it was the queerest behavior.

Oka-a-ay, maybe he’s a nervous flier,
she’d rationalized. A lot of people still got nervous on airplanes—as hard as that was for her to believe. It probably led to all sorts of strange behavior. She should be grateful all he was doing was staring straight ahead.

But during the entire trip she was troubled by a low-grade sense of something irretrievably wrong. She felt she was irritating him somehow, but not in the leaving-the-cap-off-the-toothpaste way; in a much more dangerous way. There was a darkness to his irritation, a sense of imminent rage.

Jill feared the reason for his irritation might be that her feelings toward him had changed, deepened, and that somehow he’d sensed it. On Saturday morning, the day after she and Marc had arrived in New York, they were walking in Central Park and had stopped on a bridge to admire the view. While spending several moments in comfortable silence, Jill was close to bringing up mutual exclusivity for their relationship. She was just about to tell him she thought she was falling in love with him, but right before she was ready to speak the words, he abruptly reached down and picked up a handful of gravel and began pelting the water below with small rocks.

“People talk too much,” he said. “They just talk, talk, talk.” He punctuated his words with harshly thrown pebbles. “I like that you’re not like that, Jilly girl.” Jill smiled and nodded silently, relieved that she hadn’t spoken. Marc threw the remaining rocks down into the water with a violent snap of his arm. “I like that you’re not like that,” he repeated.

And just as these strange snapshots of Marc would suddenly appear—on the airplane, in the park—they would disappear, and Marc would return to his normal charming self. Jill tried to explain it away:
maybe he just doesn’t travel well.

On the flight back, he’d started talking with one of the flight attendants. The cute brunette one. With blue eyes. The one who looked like Jill. During the conversation he once again seemed to be back to his old self, the one she was falling in love with. But Jill hadn’t known if she should be relieved he was getting over whatever it was that had been disturbing him, or if she should be bothered even more. And then she started feeling like she didn’t really want to see him so much anymore, maybe take a break for a while. A complete turn-around from her previous line of thought about him—from her line of thought the previous day, even.

Tonight, Jill dragged herself up the front steps to his building. She held her finger on the buzzer for a moment before pressing it down.

Marc greeted her at the door, and the minute she saw his face she knew she’d made a mistake coming there. Something had tipped. It felt as if she were looking at a completely different person. She sensed she was looking at the strange Marc, the one with the odd behavior, the one who whipped small rocks down into black water. Only now, she didn’t get the impression this latent anger would suddenly dissipate.

She sat down on the couch, nervous now. She wanted to leave even though she’d just arrived. But she tried to appear normal, to act normal—and not like she wanted to bolt for the door.

“What’s up, hon?” she asked, taking a seat on the couch. “What’s bothering you that couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

“I’m glad you’re here…” He started walking back and forth in front of her, simultaneously pulling his hands through his hair. It was fluffed up in front and on the right side from the abuse. “I’m glad you came…I…”

It was like watching a big cat pacing back and forth at the zoo. Gorgeous. Regal. The word
crazy
came to mind.

“I thought you’d be more of a challenge.” He sighed. “It’s weird, you know what I mean, when it doesn’t work out the way you think. I usually have a better instinct for these kinds of things. But I was wa-a-a-y wrong with you.”

He continued pacing up and down the living room and pulling his hand through his hair over and over. “It’s just not that fun,” he said, “you know, when it’s
too
easy. I really thought you’d be tougher. As soon as I started the portrait, I knew you would be too easy. I wanted a challenge. I was ready for a challenge.

“When you looked at it, that’s when I knew. I really thought you wouldn’t—I thought, not Jill, she’s too cool for that—but I was wrong again.” He shook his head, his mouth in a line, his expression extremely confused, as if to say,
how could I have been so wrong?
“You know how I could tell that you looked?”

What is he talking about? He’s acting nuts.
Jill smiled silently, nervously, from her seat on the couch.

“I could tell because of your hands,” Marc continued. “Did you ever notice that? When people lie, they never know where to put their hands. Sometimes they look at you too hard—try to maintain too much eye contact. Other times they don’t look at you at all. That’s another way to tell. But the hands—that’s the key. Yours were flailing all over the place.”

Jill tried to remember the day of the first portrait sitting, if her hands had been
flailing all over the place.
She did remember peeking at the portrait. It hadn’t been very good, she recalled. Her first impression was “outsider,” and not the university background he’d claimed.

She’d peeked.
So what?
He’d had sex with her right afterward. How upset could he have been? That day she’d explained away his Outsider Art technique as just that, technique; but today she wasn’t so sure.
Had he not studied at the University of Nebraska like he told me?

Jill continued to sit silently on the couch, watching Marc pace up and down his apartment. It figures that just when she got to the point in a relationship where she thought everything was damned close to perfect, where
she
was the one ready for a commitment, the other person turned into someone else.

On the flight back from New York, she’d started to entertain the idea it might be best if they just took a break. A little time apart might be what they needed to recapture the way they’d felt before. Kind of like the break she was taking from Wish Club. Which now got her thinking some more.

She’d only been dating him for two months, but in such a short time, she’d isolated herself from all of her friends. She hardly saw anyone else anymore, didn’t even talk to them on the phone. Her painting had gone down the shitter. She’d blown off her own gallery opening at his suggestion. Now that she thought about it, he didn’t have any friends of his own, at least none that she’d met. And wasn’t that strange? His rationale had been that he’d just moved to Chicago from Nebraska, where he’d kept a studio in Lincoln, but she never heard him talk much about Lincoln or the art community there. She really didn’t know anything about him or his past, not even where he grew up. Nothing about his family. They’d never talked about it. She’d liked that, at first, how he didn’t need to know what kind of cereal she used to eat for breakfast when she was in the second grade or what the name of her first boyfriend was. He was just letting the relationship unfold. But, by now, shouldn’t she at least know where he was
from
?

Suddenly the course of their relationship seemed to be littered with red flags she’d failed to see earlier, like a slalom course in the middle of a straight run that she’d somehow managed to miss. She really didn’t know this man. And now he was acting very strange.

Jill realized she was watching her wish for the perfect man unravel right before her eyes. Lindsay had been right. Something was very wrong with him.

And Jill wanted out of his apartment. Now.

“Maybe you’re just tired, honey,” she said. “I know I am—the trip and all. I think if you just get a good night’s sleep then maybe everything will seem better in the morning.”

“Who the fuck are you? My mother?” His face had turned dark. No more fun sexy boy. His look was menacing.

Jill’s heart started to race, but she tried to keep her face calm.
Why did I come here? I should have listened to that little voice.

“No, I…” Jill stammered. “I just don’t understand what you’re talking about, hon, and I thought maybe that if you…”

She looked past him at the door. He caught her glance.

He smiled at her now. The old smile. The sexy one. “I’m sorry, Jilly. I’m sorry. I don’t know what gets into me. I…I’m. Maybe I am tired.” He shook his head, flustered. Then he flashed a smile at her, the kind of smile an adult gives a child when they don’t mean it, before the adult starts screaming.

And then he burst out laughing. A laugh so loud Jill jumped in place on the couch.

“Portraits? Why portraits?” He imitated her voice with a mock falsetto. “Oh, God. That was…that was funny.” He looked down at her on the couch. “I’ll tell you
why portraits.
Because the portraits are my souvenirs.”

Fear chilled her blood, made the palms of her hands grow cold with sweat. She forced a smile, still trying to pretend everything was normal. She stood up. “It’s okay. I’ll come back tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow.”

“No, you should stay. I think I’d like it very much for you to stay.”

“I really think I should go.” Her voice cracked.

He blocked her path to the door.

Jill tried to laugh it off, even though she knew he wasn’t playing. “Come on, Marc. I want to leave.”

She tried to brush past him, and again he moved to block her. The door was only a couple of feet behind him, but he stood in her way.

Jill held a fake smile on her face while she contemplated her options. After many nights in his apartment, she knew how poor the soundproofing was. Some mornings she could actually hear the guy upstairs peeing. She should try to bolt for the door—and yell.

She leaned to the right and then quickly went left and tried to pass him. Her left hand touched the doorknob as she fell. She didn’t know what he’d used to hit her, maybe just his fist. She didn’t get a chance to yell.

Claudia
had never met Marc. She didn’t know what he looked like or much of anything about him, except that he was
fabulous,
according to Jill. And
gorgeous,
according to Lindsay. But it had occurred to her before that maybe he really wasn’t any of that. If all of their wishes had backfired so stupidly, then certainly there was the possibility that this Marc guy wasn’t who they thought he was.

From the center of Lindsay’s living room, Greta was continuing with her spell-reversing, wish-cleansing ritual. After finishing up a guilt-washing and privacy spell for Gail, she was now working on Lindsay, who was still insisting that most of her weight loss had been due to the success of her first wish and not due to any change in her eating or exercising habits.

Duct tape. An image of a roll of duct tape came into Claudia’s head, like a movie, running past her eyes even though they were open. An odd thing to occur to anybody—well, maybe not anybody who was listening to Lindsay—but the way it had just floated into her head. She saw Jill now, too. Jill
and
duct tape. She got the feeling something was wrong with Jill and that it involved duct tape. The thought was so vivid, Claudia couldn’t shake it, as much as she wanted to clear it out of her head. It was all so—dumb.
Who gets visions of duct tape?

Greta was leaning over, lighting a red candle on the coffee table. Suddenly she snapped her back up straight. “Lindsay, you saw Jill last Thursday? At home?”

Lindsay nodded. Claudia could practically hear her thought,
What does this have to do with fixing my wish?

“And Marc wasn’t there?” Greta asked.

“No.”

Greta nodded, silently thinking in that way she had. “Did you…I don’t know how much of their, well,
private
life you knew about, but did you happen to know if they liked to use,” Greta swallowed, appearing uncomfortable for the first time ever, “duct tape?”