Midnight Rain Read online

  Phoebe took another step toward the window, and Alan wondered if the window was going to change, and if he was going to see Chick again. No matter what Phoebe said, he would jump through that window if he ever got a second shot at it. What was a broken leg if he got to be with his kid again — no matter where she was?

  But the verticals stayed the same. Everything stayed the same, except that the temperature kept getting colder and colder and colder. Phoebe shivered again, took another step forward, and cocked her head. She opened her eyes and looked at him, then walked the rest of the way to the window and put her hands on the sill.

  “I can’t find anything here,” she said. “I mean, it’s obvious to me that something happened here. And from the sudden cold I felt when I moved towards the window, this seems to be a contact point. But your daughter didn’t leave any tracks that I can read — not where she was, not how she opened the doorway between there and here.”

  “I still feel the cold,” Alan said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before. Is she here now?” he asked.

  “The cold is related to her, but it isn’t... her. It’s just...” Phoebe sighed. “It’s like — the contrail of a jet.”

  “She’s been here, but she’s gone?”

  “She’s close, and this is blowback,” Phoebe said. “If I can sit at your desk for a few minutes, I can throw a few cards... maybe see if I can shake something loose. Maybe I can help her bridge the gap.”

  Alan nodded and cleared a space on the desk where Phoebe could work. The computer was easy enough to pick up and move. Notes and other things he just gathered up and deposited on the floor.

  Phoebe sat, closed her eyes for a moment, then pulled cards out of a dark blue drawstring bag and began shuffling them. These weren’t the round ones he’d seen her scoop up from her table and drop into a silk-and-wool card bag. These were big and rectangular and had tiny gold stars on a navy blue background. She shuffled them competently, her hands flashing. When she stopped, she cut the deck into three piles with her left hand, picked one of the piles, and started laying the cards out on the desk, placing them in an odd pattern that made no sense to him. She didn’t do any oohing or ahhing, nor did she suddenly look up at him, stab a card with one finger, and say, “This portends financial ruin unless you pay me to put a spell on your enemies.” Some still-wary part of him had been expecting both responses.

  Instead, she sat looking at the spread for a moment, counted the cards on the table, said, “Ick. Five majors,” and went back to looking at the spread again.

  Finally she looked up at him. “This first reading tells me about you,” she said. “I always use the Universal Waite when I read men.” He tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but logically, he couldn’t see where the cards could have any real relevance to his life, and illogically, he kept imagining Phoebe naked and in interesting positions on the desk, and the chair, and the floor. She pointed to the card in the center of the spread and said, “The reversed Page of Swords represents you. You’re facing a challenge right now where your instinct is to approach with all your analytical skills front and center, but that’s truly not a good idea. You’re going to have to close your eyes and trust your gut to find your way through the current problems.”

  This comment caught his attention, since it told him both what he’d been thinking and why he shouldn’t think that way. Damn.

  Phoebe continued, “Your atmosphere — basically what’s going on right now — is Strength, a major. It represents courage, compassion, patience, and strength — all of which you have, all of which you’ll need. Your obstacle is that what you face may be too much for you — the Ten of Wands upright.” She turned to him. “I have some unpleasant feelings related to this card, too, but I’d like to do my second layout over the top of this one before I say anything specific.”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Fine.” Like he had any opinions on this bizarre process.

  “Beneath your feet,” she said, “is your Ground — the Hierophant — a major arcana card that indicates a tendency to conformity, strong personal beliefs, and occasionally an unwillingness to bend. It isn’t a bad Ground card when you’re in trouble, though. Over your head hangs the Nine of Swords. Nightmares. If you open your eyes and face them, you can deal with them, but so far the reversal of this card indicates that you have been letting the nightmares control you.”

  He stopped her. “This is really strange. What you’re saying makes sense, but is it making sense because you know a little bit about me and the situation I face, or is it making sense because this thing you’re doing works — and if it works, how does it work, because, really, I only had the one nightmare?”

  Phoebe looked bewildered for all of half a second as she parsed that tangle of a sentence. Then she laughed, and he discovered that he loved her laugh. It was warm and rich and throaty, and he found himself right back with the Phoebe-naked-on-a-desk images, and revisited, as well, by too-tight jeans.

  “It works. As for why it works, I can tell you what I think, but you’re welcome to your own interpretation. I think we’re all linked. That we are beings of light that wear these mortal forms for some reason we can only guess at while we wear them. That beneath these shells of flesh, we’re part of a... a river of energy that fills the universe and moves through us and binds everything.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s either religion or quantum physics.”

  “I’m not convinced that religion and quantum physics aren’t both aspects of the same thing.”

  “Actually, I’m not, either,” he said. “I’m just at a place in my life where neither one of them seems to make sense.”

  Phoebe laughed a little and nodded. “Both seem to defy logic at the best of times. But that doesn’t make them irrelevant. They both speak to how we affect each other. We touch each other, all of us, for good or bad. We never know what we do that matters, or whose life we change with a simple, unthinking action — but our touch spreads out infinitely far, altering and mutating and affecting even more people as it goes. I know you’ve heard this before, but all of existence is so closely bound that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it rains in Iowa.”

  “I’ve heard that,” he agreed.

  “I think that’s why tarot works. I think the energy that is us and that moves through us responds to our will — whether we call that prayer or magic or simple action. And that because we are all connected pieces of the animating force of the universe as a whole — holograms or fractals, maybe — the fall of a piece of painted cardboard on a table echoes the movement of intelligence through the galaxy.”

  Alan laughed, then caught the expression of hurt on her face. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s simply — well — the last person I would have expected to blow me away with quantum physics was a woman who reads tarot cards for a living.”

  “People are never just one thing,” she said, and her smile was almost devilish.

  “No, we aren’t.” He shook his head again. “But why did you put so much thought into this?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “It’s the science teacher in me. I’ve always preferred to understand the ‘why’ of things. Tarot gave me results that I couldn’t explain. So I tried to figure out why.”

  “Not happy with the ‘it’s magic’ explanation?”

  “I don’t believe in magic,” she said.

  Neither did I, he thought. Until I touched you.

  She returned her attention to the cards.

  “In your recent past I see hiding away from opportunities, refusing to explore new horizons: the Three of Wands reversed.”

  And he thought, That pretty much defines my last five years.

  “In your near future, the Wheel of Fortune. Another of the major arcana cards. Chance, the roll of the dice, opportunities for a big win or an equally big loss.”

  “Major arcana cards. What are those, and why do you keep mentioning them?”

  Phoebe said, “The tarot deck is divided into major an
d minor arcana — ‘arcana’ means secrets. So think of them as big secrets and little secrets, more or less. We read minor arcana differently than major arcana. Minors are transient, changeable cards — you get them and you say ‘Okay, those are things I have to work on and then they won’t be an issue.’ Majors...” She shook her head. “Major arcana tell of — well — the movement of the finger of God, or a shift in the energy of the River of Life. However you want to think of it. The majors depict events and qualities that are fixed — that you cannot change. That you can only deal with.”

  “And I got five of those.”

  “Yes.”

  “Five is... a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s neither good nor bad. It suggests, however, that you have stepped into a place in your life where events you cannot control will move you in ways you do not expect, cannot escape, and may not welcome, and that for a while your challenge will simply be to get through them.”

  Alan didn’t care for the sound of that.

  Phoebe rested her chin on one hand and said, “Death, also a major, sits in your House, which is someone or something that is not you but that is related to you closely — and though in most cases I would give the card the traditional interpretation and say that someone who matters to you faces change and letting go of the painful past to move into the new future, I think in this instance Death has to do with your daughter. I’m not sure. This one feels muddled to me, as if other things are also suggested, but I’ll find out more about the connection when I lay out your daughter’s cards in a minute.” Phoebe glanced up at him. “Some of these cards are trivial, simply noting the woman who is currently in your life and your wishes to have both financial stability and some sort of freedom very different than what your current work permits. You want to do something wild and irresponsible, which is interesting, considering your Ground.”

  I don’t have a woman in my life, Alan thought, and looked at Phoebe and knew as the words were forming in his mind that they were a lie, and that at least from his perspective, he suddenly did.

  Alan was getting tangled up in the cards, where everything seemed to make sense, but always in a vague way. That comment about doing something wild, though, cut straight to the bone.

  He wanted to write. He’d always wanted to write. But he’d made a deal with God that he would give up writing and trying to be the next Jack Kerouac to become a doctor if his father would survive the heart attack Alan witnessed but couldn’t stop. God had seemed to listen. Alan’s father had lived, and in gratitude — mixed with a bit of resignation — Alan had become a doctor. And then God, the bastard, had let Alan’s kid die alongside his wife, and Alan was left with ashes, and a career he’d never wanted.

  Phoebe was still reading. “...but the core of the reading, and the part that I find most interesting, comes in the outcome. It’s quite fascinating, really.”

  She pointed to three cards descending from the left side of the circular layout at a forty-five-degree angle. Alan looked over her shoulder at the cards; they looked like all the rest of the cards to him. Colorful, weird, alien.

  “Tell me the first thing you notice about these two,” she said, pointing to the two cards closest to the circle.

  “They’re upside down,” Alan said. When she didn’t say anything in response to that, he looked closer and noticed an odd mirroring of the body positions of the lone figures on each of the first two cards. “They’re both sitting in the same position, with their knees and feet out and their arms crossed.”

  Phoebe nodded. “The Two of Swords and the Nine of Cups. In a way they’re polar opposites, too. She’s cut off from everything, guarding herself with swords, blindfolded only to bring her other senses to sharper awareness. She sits small and alone in the center of a vast world, in the dark, outdoors, beneath a moon, before a sea. She is uncertain and afraid, wary and armed. But, because the card is reversed, no matter how hard she tries to prepare herself, she’s not ready for the challenge she faces. He, on the other hand, has his eyes wide open, but is also cut off from events happening before his eyes — both by comforts and wealth and by the fact that he sits in a sheltered location indoors, where everything seems bright and safe. His confidence that all will be well with him is his blindness. The reversal of the card lets us know that he, too, is unprepared for the challenge he faces.”

  “Who are they?” Alan asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

  “Good question. They could be two facets of you. They could be you and your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Alan finally said.

  “Some woman you know or are attracted to, then,” Phoebe told him, and Alan felt his heart thud in his chest and did not let himself look at Phoebe or think of Phoebe, and said, “Oh. Her.”

  “And the final card is big. It’s the World, a major, which, along with the presence of the other four majors in this reading, indicates that Fate is playing fast and loose with your life right now. What’s the first thing you think when you look at it?”

  “That my World is upside down.”

  ”Since this is an outcome, it isn’t yet,” Phoebe said quietly, ”but it sure looks like it’s gonna be.“

  Chapter Ten

  Phoebe got ready to do the second layout — the one for Alan’s daughter — over the top of the reading she’d done on Alan.

  But Alan put a hand over hers before she could shuffle or deal the cards, and her nerves gave a little skitter.

  “No more cards,” he said. “I don’t think I can stand to find out the rest of this. I thought I could, but she’s my kid, and...” He shook his head, and Phoebe saw that he had grown pale.

  “We can do it another time if you want,” she said, and started to scoop the cards into a pile.

  Ice air slammed into Phoebe like a gut punch and drove right through her, straight into her bones and her blood, so hard and fierce that for just a second she couldn’t breathe. Her skin crawled, and a voice whispered in her ear, close and urgent. A child’s voice.

  Phoebe swallowed hard and gripped the edge of the desk.

  Alan shivered, staring into her eyes. “What is it?”

  And Phoebe found the breath to say, “She’s here.”

  “My daughter?”

  “She says you call her Chick. She can’t stay long. She says she’s tired from yesterday — that just getting here is hard for her, and making me hear her is almost impossible.”

  Phoebe stood, unsteady, heart racing, hanging on to the desk for support. “She says this can’t wait. That you can’t not listen to her. If you don’t listen, one of us will be dead before a birthday. Either yours or mine — either I’m having a hard time hearing her or she’s being intentionally vague.”

  Alan leaned against the desk, and Phoebe could see sweat beading on his upper lip. “I never told you her nickname,” he said.

  “She did,” Phoebe said. “She’s showing me pictures now — those are easier for her, I think.” Phoebe relaxed and let the words and the images she was getting tumble out without censorship. “A tall, golden blonde woman. Green dress. A silver sports car. Convertible. The top down. Camaro? No. More expensive. I suck at identifying cars. Foreign, though, I think. Smarmy young man, good-looking, has that sort of tennis-pro country-club ooze about him. Alcohol — a lot of it. And your little girl, in the backseat, no seat belt. She says she’s sorry she sneaked out.”

  “Chick sneaked out?”

  Phoebe sat still for a moment, trying to read the images and catch the words and impressions that flowed over her. “She didn’t want her mother to leave. She saw the suitcase and thought if she hid in the back of the car, she could find a way to make her mother stay — to make her come home and be a good mommy.”

  Alan had tears running down his cheeks; his eyes were tightly closed. “That sounds just like her,” he said, and his voice was tight. “All this time, I thought Janet was just being irresponsible again for not having
anything packed for Chick. That she was stealing her... but not because she wanted her. Just because she... knew... I... wanted her.”

  Phoebe touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry. I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a child.”

  She didn’t say anything about losing a spouse — especially not a spouse who had turned out to be a nightmare. She didn’t offer any sympathies for the loss of Janet, either. She had the powerful impression that, at the end, the loss of his wife had not been a loss Alan regretted much.

  Alan’s body was rigid, his arms tight at his sides, his fists clenched. “This isn’t happening,” he said.

  Phoebe looked at him and said, “Your daughter says she had her lucky stone in her pocket at the time of the accident. That you have it in your wallet now.”

  “She told you about her lucky stone?” He shook his head. “She can’t have told you that.”

  “She says it’s in your pocket. That you have to believe, so she told me. Because you’re in danger. We’re both in danger, and you have to believe.”

  Alan pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. It had a lump in one side where the leather had stretched and worn over a long period of time. He hooked a finger into the billfold and came out with a flat white stone about the size of an old silver half-dollar. On one side Phoebe saw a flower in bright blue with a yellow center, done in paint — lopsided, smeared, and worn away by time and much handling. “Forget-me-not, she said,” Alan whispered. “She made it when she was four.”

  He stared at the stone lying in the palm of his hand, frozen. Then he slid bonelessly to the floor, to his knees, and his shoulders started shaking, and he began to sob. His fingers wrapped tighter and tighter around the stone until his knuckles went bone white and the veins at his wrist popped up. His head dropped to the carpet.

  Chick was gone. The cold drained away, and Phoebe cautiously knelt beside Alan on the floor and put an arm around his shoulder. “Hey,” she whispered, and stroked his hair. “Hey. She showed you she’s okay. She showed you that she still loves you. She’s watching out for you.”