Wish Club (6 page)

The poor girl had very few friends, and even though the reasons for that seemed obvious, Claudia thought if any student was worthy of some pity and a little sympathy from a teacher, it was probably April Sibley. Then again, like Aldo, maybe her deservedness was deceptive.

Claudia walked into the bookstore and sighed: instant relief. She just loved it here. All these books. She ran her hand lovingly along the covers of the books on the front table as she made her way over to the escalator. As she rose up to the second floor, Claudia scanned the tables of bargain books, stacks of fiction on sale for more than half off. It was scary to think of all these writers, writing all these novels, working so hard, finally getting published, getting their books in print, only to have them end up here, in obscurity, their titles and names never heard of or forgotten, lost in a sea of bargain books. She mourned for them. It took a lot to write a book, a lot of time, a lot of courage, things she had always thought she had. Or would have. She’d envisioned herself writing her novels over the summer breaks and then editing and refining at night during the school year.

Claudia got off the escalator and stood in front of another display. She picked up a copy of a best-selling hardcover book and looked at the cover. She ran a hand over the jacket, creaked it open. God, how she had wanted this. How many books had she started? Three? Four? It didn’t matter. It was an idea she had given up on.

She’d abandoned it shortly after buying a
Writer’s Market
guide. “Over 4.3 Million Sold,” it boasted on the cover. Four-point-three million. That was a lot of people writing, and they were all probably working on their novels, the pinnacle of prose, what the marathon was to runners. The look on the clerk’s face when he’d rung up her purchase was what had stopped her writing cold, had given her a writer’s block that to date had lasted for two years. In one brief glance, his look had mocked her. It was as if he’d said,
Oh yeah, sweetie, you too. Isn’t everyone writing their novel?
Of course, she realized, everyone was. Four-point-three million copies sold.

Now, Claudia resigned herself to just reading books. It was much less frustrating for her, and she felt free to criticize and critique without fear of any future karmic repercussions. It also made her feel a little less like a character in someone else’s novel—the English-teacher/aspiring writer.

Claudia turned the corner and arrived at the New Age section and began scanning for
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way.
She could have called ahead to see if they had it, but then they always ask if they can hold a copy for you. Claudia could visualize the book behind the counter with “Dubois” emblazoned on the spine, right there in front of the main check-out counter. Ms. Dubois, teacher at the prestigious Strawn Academy of Arts and Sciences, a heathen. Blatant paganism right there for all to see. She couldn’t take the chance, even if this store was out of the way, even if her school was always professing its desire to “embrace individualism.”

If only she could be more bold. Yeah, well. Claudia always managed to find a way to stop herself when it came to acting more bold. She couldn’t even shoo away one of her students without worrying about getting fired.

Claudia started looking for the book. The New Age Wicca section wasn’t too big, which was a good thing, since Lindsay had never gotten back to her with the author’s name.

A woman came around the corner and stood next to her, pulling a book off the shelf and flipping through it slowly.
Bell’s Complete Astrologer and Ephemeris.
She had long gray hair and was wearing a long skirt, down to her ankles, and sandals with socks—an edgy, bohemian look but, judging from the skirt, the sandals and the jewelry, one that didn’t come cheap. The woman smelled vaguely of sandalwood incense.

Great,
Claudia thought.
That’s how I’m going to end up. A crazy old New Age woman browsing astrology books and looking all eccentric. I’ll bet she has twenty cats at home.

Claudia glanced from the shoes to the shelf and found herself staring directly at the store’s only copy of
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way.
She crouched down and began flipping through it. It seemed to be everything Lindsay had said it would be. It was big, but it wasn’t terribly expensive. Claudia’s knees started to ache. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and flicked through the book, resting it on her lap. The woman reached for another book, this time pulling out a copy of
Past Lives, Past Loves,
skimming it, then putting it quickly back on the shelf.

The woman ran her hands slowly along a row of books on crystals, and the motion was so fluid it gave Claudia a chill to watch her do it, the little hairs on her scalp tingling every time the woman’s hands switched direction. She found the woman’s presence so calming. Claudia felt herself relaxing, turning the pages of her book more slowly, becoming completely intrigued with the woman standing next to her. Claudia watched her covertly until she bent down to reach for a book on the shelf in front of where Claudia was sitting, a book on the tarot.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Claudia hated to break the quiet. “Am I in your way?”

“No, dear. You’re fine.” Even her voice was calming, ethereal, and the familiar way she had called Claudia “dear.” It gave Claudia the most pleasant goose bumps.

“Don’t apologize, either,” she spoke again. “Women do way too much apologizing.” She smiled down at Claudia.

Claudia had read something to that effect, a study that said women were apologizing too much—at least way more than men were—saying they were sorry for all sorts of little things, things that weren’t even their fault: “Sorry about the rain”; “I’m sorry traffic was so bad.” Right after she’d read it, Claudia had started noticing how often she did say “sorry.”
I’m sorry you had a bad day. I’m sorry I didn’t grade your paper. I’m sorry I irritated you by wanting to be a writer.
At the time she’d made a conscious effort to stop saying “sorry,” but somewhere along the line she’d forgotten all about it. She should try again. She was sorry she had stopped.

“That’s a wonderful book,” the woman next to her said, gesturing to
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way
in Claudia’s lap. “I read it many years ago. Excellent.”

“Oh, this, I—” Claudia stammered. “I’m just browsing through it. I’m not…I guess…it looks okay.”

The woman smiled back at her and then returned to her tarot book. Claudia was sorry the conversation was over.
Why am I always such a dork?

The woman grabbed another book from the shelf and, without looking at it, stacked it on top of the tarot book and the astrology book she had chosen. She started to leave, then turned back around before she walked away. “I really don’t much care for cats. I think I might be allergic.” She smiled very kindly when she said this.

Cats? I didn’t say anything about cats,
Claudia thought. What an odd thing to say. She sat there a moment, shaking her head.
There sure are a lot of nuts in this world.

Then Claudia jolted up, remembering her thought about the house full of cats. Had she said it out loud? No. She was certain she hadn’t. Claudia walked out into the main aisle, expecting to see the back of the woman strolling slowly away, but she was nowhere in sight. She walked over to the railing and looked down at the empty escalators. She even crouched down and looked at the cash register line, but the woman was gone.

How could she have heard her thought? Claudia asked herself, breathing hard as she walked back to where she had been sitting. Or was it just a lucky guess? Maybe when you hang around the New Age section looking as eccentric as she did, a lot of people assumed you had twenty cats at home. Maybe the woman was finally taking the offensive, boldly pronouncing her dislike of cats to anyone who would listen.

The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way
still lay open on the floor, and Claudia’s huge purse, likewise wide open, was still sitting next to it.
Oh good grief. How could I have left my purse here?
She looked into its gaping top and took a quick inventory; everything was there. She sighed
. I need to quit the caffeine. I need to chill out. Maybe some form of New Age meditation
would
be in order.
She reached down to pick up her book and saw a small crystal that lay on the ground near where the woman had been standing.

Claudia picked it up and turned it in her hand. A thin piece of quartz, icicle shaped, about two inches long. It must have belonged to the woman; she must have dropped it. Although anyone visiting this section could have dropped it. Claudia hadn’t noticed it earlier, though. She grabbed her purse and the copy of
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way.
Maybe the woman was still on the first floor, and Claudia had missed her when she’d looked. She hurried to the escalator and walked down, doubling her pace. She scanned the large room as she descended, but the woman wasn’t there.

Two people stood in line ahead of Claudia at the register. On the sale table next to her, she saw, under a sign that declared, “Buy This Book!,” the stack of three books the woman had been carrying when she’d walked away. Claudia picked them up, then looked at the door.

“Next please.” The annoyed tone in the cashier’s voice indicated to her that it wasn’t the first time he had called to her.

“I just—” Claudia walked over, carrying the stack of books with her. “Did you see the woman who put these here? She was…I think I found something of hers and—”

The clerk was the same man who had intimidated her into two years of writer’s block.

“I think she left this.” Claudia held up the crystal.

“Do you want those or not?” He nodded at the pile of books in her arms.

Claudia looked down at her stack, now made up of four books. “Yes,” she said.

Chapter Six

Claudia
walked into her kitchen and put the bag of books on the counter.
What was I thinking?
She put both hands on top of the bag and blew out through her lips, letting the air flutter through them with a sound of flatulent disgust. One hundred and thirty-two dollars. What had possessed her to buy all of these books? Dan was going to kill her.

The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way
was on top,
Bell’s Complete Astrologer and Ephemeris
was in there, as was a book called
The Modern Witches’ Grimoire
and then last, a small, hardcover book called
A Beginner’s Guide to the Tarot.

Claudia pulled out the tarot book and scanned the cover. Three cards were fanned out on it, number VIII, the Strength card, on top. The woman on the card stared back at her with fierce black eyes, her image drawn in several shades of dark ink, cross-hatched in a manner that made it look very old and somewhat childish. Claudia flipped through the pages, the color templates of the cards flashing past. They looked mysterious, complicated, and scary.

“The Suit of Cups, Hearts in a conventional card deck, represents water and emotions,” she read. “It is a feminine suit, with the properties of the water signs Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.”
Water signs? There are water signs? What am I getting myself into?

Claudia set the tarot book down on her kitchen countertop. Their coffee cups from this morning were still sitting out, hers with an imprint of her lipstick on the rim, his with an inch of cold coffee still in the bottom.

He’d had to leave a little earlier than usual this morning—some big meeting about a new project at his firm. Dan tended to keep irregular hours at the architectural offices of Taylor, Glickman, Bleeker and Associates. When he told her he would be home at the regular time tonight, she’d had to ask, “And what time would that be?”

“Six”—he’d pulled up one side of his mouth—“ish?”

Claudia had smiled at him doubtfully.
Really?

Dan had ignored her skeptical look. “Hey, how about I make my famous stir-fried beef and broccoli for dinner? What do you think? I’ll pick up everything on the way home. You won’t have to lift a finger.” He picked her hand up off the counter and kissed the back of it, raising his eyebrows up into the boyish brown hair that curled over them.

She had smiled. “Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.”

Claudia walked the coffee cups over to the sink. Dan would be home in less than an hour. She could start getting things ready for him. Get the wok out, slice some onions.

The light went on in her neighbor’s kitchen across the gangway and Claudia turned in time to catch a glimpse of him walking out of the room. Their third-floor windows were less than ten feet apart and at night they wouldn’t make eye contact before closing their blinds, a city dweller’s way of showing respect for each other’s privacy.

Claudia twisted her mini-blinds shut. A city dweller. How weird was that now, to have that thought about herself? When Dan had suggested they move to the north side after school, Claudia hadn’t been too thrilled by the idea.

“Don’t people get mugged in the city?”

“People get mugged in the suburbs, too. The difference is, in the city they just take your money and run. In the suburbs, they chop you into little bits and hide you in a Hefty bag in their crawlspace.”

“Is that meant to be comforting?”

The first time she’d come to the apartment alone, a few days before they had moved in, everything had tested her nerves: the parking, the creepy people on the street, all the keys and locks. It had irritated her thoroughly. It wasn’t until she’d been cleaning the bathtub and had heard the singing that she’d known Dan had been right.

The bathroom window had been cracked open and she’d heard someone singing opera—not playing it, but
singing
opera. She sat back on her heels and listened, her yellow rubber gloves resting over the side of the tub. The woman’s voice was incredible. She’d never heard anything like it before, at least not
live,
and definitely not in her bathroom.

Claudia sat there for several minutes listening, amazed.
This is what he meant.
This is what he’d wanted, for himself
and
for her. The city burbled with creative inspiration, creative people and places. Its own muse. A place that, in spite of its constrictions on space, ironically offered its occupants more privacy—and more freedom.

Claudia had slowly returned to scrubbing the tub, her shoulders a little less tense, her jaw a little less clenched, the cleanser on the sponge quietly scouring away. Hearing live opera while scrubbing your bathtub was, she presumed, an experience unique to the city, and the intimacy of it made her feel all at once at home.

Now, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She loved it here—the activity, the energy, the
life.
Dan had a way of ending up being right about things.

Claudia turned from the window and once again faced the pile of books on her counter.
Good grief.
She imagined the activity, the energy, the
danger
to her life that would occur when Dan came home and saw them. They’d just had a big talk about saving money.
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to hide them for a while, pull them out one at a time later, over the course of the next few—

“Hi. I’m home,” Dan called from the living room.

“In here.”
Shit.

Claudia put the books in a stack. The front door thumped closed. She picked up the books, then put them back down. She put the plastic shopping bag they’d been inside over the top of them; then, thinking that looked too obvious, she rested it against the pile, trying to disguise the height of the stack. Claudia came around the other side of the counter and stood in front of them.

“What, no martini waiting?” Dan was coming down the hall. “No cocktail dress or one-heel-kicked-in-the-air hug?” He put the grocery bags he was carrying on the counter next to her.

“Didn’t want you to think you’d walked into the wrong apartment.” Claudia reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. She kicked a heel up behind her, but it wasn’t her sarcasm he noticed.

“Do a little shopping today?”

“Umm.”

Dan pulled back, crossed his arms in front of him, and arched his eyebrows.

“I bought a few books for Book Club.”

“Book Club? Since when does Book Club read four books in a month?”

Claudia made no comment, busying herself with folding the bag and taking it over to the recycling bin.

“How much were they?”

“I kind of got carried away, but there was this woman there who—”

“How much was it, Claude?”

“—and she left this stack, so when I got to the register and the guy asked me, I—”

“How much was it, Claude?” Dan paused ever so briefly between each word, the way she often did with her students when they failed to respond to a question.

“A hundred and thirty-two.”

“A hun—” he ran his hand through his hair, “a hundred and thirty-two? Claudia, I thought we talked about this.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

“We
just
talked about this. We’ve got to start saving more money. I thought we were agreed. Until I can get a business off the ground, we’ve got to really cut back. A hundred—” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. “And you want to have a baby? You can’t even be responsible with a credit card and you want to—”

Claudia could feel the ache in the back of her throat that always preceded her tears. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I—”

“Sorry isn’t going to pay the bills. Jesus Christ. A hundred and thirty bucks is not cutting back.” Dan turned around and walked back down the hall to his office.

“I can return the—”

He shut the door hard and Claudia could feel the pressure change, a tangible thump that took the warmth out of the room and sucked the air from her chest.

The
apartment smelled of onions. On the living room couch, Claudia kept her head down grading essay tests, even though she could sense Dan’s presence at the end of the hall. He’d been in the kitchen for the past hour, silently preparing dinner.

“We lost the Atkinson bid,” he said finally. He walked over, taking a seat on the arm of the couch. “That’s what the big meeting was all about.”

Claudia sucked in a breath, her hands crinkling an essay test on her lap. She should have figured it was something like that. It was pretty rare that Dan acted like such an asshole, but when he did, it usually had something to do with money. It seemed to her they had plenty saved up, but she wondered what it was going to take for him to feel secure and not worry about every nickel.

“Oh, Dan. I’m sorry. What happened?”

“They said they wanted a bigger firm, one with
more depth
is how they put it. I guess our bid was okay. They said it wasn’t
out of line.
” He exhaled a short laugh. “We were all counting on this. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

Taylor, Glickman, Bleeker and Associates had hired Dan right after his internship there. He knew he had to pay his dues, but he was getting tired of designing restrooms for schools and hospitals. He’d been a project architect for three years now, but it wasn’t what he had in mind for himself. The Atkinson bid, on a Loop mixed-use commercial and residential mid-rise building, had given the more junior people at Taylor, Glickman, Bleeker and Associates hope. Hope that they’d get to do some meatier projects, which was just the kind of experience Dan wanted before leaving to hang outhis own shingle. With most of the nine-part licensing exam behind him, except for the dreaded structures sections, he’d planned to start up his own firm as soon as the following year. Now those plans would most likely be put on hold.

“Wasn’t Atkinson kind of a jerk anyway?”

“A jerk with deep pockets.”

“It’s probably just as well. Maybe he could have turned out to be such a tyrant, he could have ruined the firm’s reputation. He could have set your own plans back even farther.”

Dan gave her a look.

“Well, maybe that wouldn’t have happened but…”

He was still giving her the look.

“Oh, come on. You know you’re a great architect. The best one I’ve ever been married to.” Some of the essays slid off the couch onto the floor as she moved closer to Dan, putting her arms around him.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. “Just fine. You’ll see. Everything happens for a reason. Maybe the reason this happened is because tomorrow something better is going to come along and now they’ll be able to—”

“—that’s my Claudia. The glass is always half-full and everything happens for a reason.” Dan disentangled himself from her and patted her thigh, then stood up and walked into the kitchen.

Claudia sank back into the couch. She stared down at her thigh where he’d patted it. It practically stung.
Jeez.
She’d only been trying to make him feel better.

The door to their liquor cabinet creaked open and she heard a bottle being set down on the kitchen counter. What sounded like one of their Scotch glasses clunked down next.

Claudia heard Dan’s footsteps come down the hall. “Will you be joining me?”

“For dinner or Scotch?” She leaned over and picked up the essay tests off the floor.

“Right now, Scotch.”

“Not on a school night.” Claudia smoothed out a wrinkled essay, running her hand over it a couple of times, maybe a little too loudly. A car hissed by on the street.

“Hey, about earlier…”

The test rustled as she flipped a page. Dan waited in the doorway.

“Forget it.” Her voice was quiet. “It’s no big deal.” She didn’t look up at him, even though she was already starting to forgive him.

“Well, how about some dinner, then. Should be ready in about ten.” He paused. “Hey, I saw some Merlot in there.”

Claudia flipped another page. More gently this time. “Okay,” she said, but when she looked over at him, he was already back in the kitchen.

When she heard the wine bottle thud onto the counter, Claudia closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. By the time she heard the dull pop of the cork, she was already crying. It didn’t seem right, that the making-up could sometimes hurt more than the fighting.

The
weather was perfect: crisp and cold, but not too cold, in the mid-forties, mild for mid-January in Chicago. Jill tugged down the sleeves of her jacket and looked out at the skyline from her perch in the Ferris wheel basket, then down at Darrin far below her on the walkway, eating popcorn from a box and looking out over the water. She groaned out loud. The basket of the Ferris wheel was on its way down but its movement was so slow as to be barely detectible. The problem was, it wasn’t slow enough.

He’d been too afraid to go up with her. She hadn’t even wanted to go up in the first place—too touristy, not her type of thing—but he’d been so insistent that she’d finally just gone along, figuring it would be easier than trying to talk him out of it. At that point, she would have done anything to accelerate this date to its conclusion.