The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Renee isn’t even Mexican,” Josephina says. “She’s from New Jersey.”

  “If she’s a diablera, she may just be telling you that to keep you off guard.”

  Josephina looks doubtful. “But . . . she has big hair.”

  I start to get up. “If you don’t want my help . . .”

  “No! I do. Really.”

  “All right. Take a tablespoon of graveyard dirt and a tablespoon of olive oil and mix the ingredients with the index finger of your left hand. Sprinkle this with black pepper. Then spread it on the picture of Renee in your college freshman face book and bury it in a cemetery.”

  Josephina looks up at me, wide-eyed. “What’ll happen to her?”

  “As the photo disintegrates, your roommate will feel more and more out of sorts. By the next full moon, she’ll apologize for saying anything bad about you and she’ll transfer to a college in a different state.”

  A bright smile breaks over Josephina’s face. She digs my fee—ten dollars—out of the front pocket of her jeans. “Thank you, Doña,” she gushes, just as Victor pokes his head in.

  He has never approved of my side career, no matter how many times I have tried to explain to him that this is not a job but a calling. After a while, I began to keep the practice hidden. It was not that I was trying to lie to my husband, it was simply easier for both of us to pretend that I wasn’t doing this anymore, even if we both knew better.

  “This is Josephina,” I say, introducing the girl to Victor. “She volunteers with me at the Science Museum.”

  Josephina thanks me again, and says she’s going to be late for a class if she doesn’t leave now. When Victor and I are alone, he puts his hands on my shoulders and kneads a bit. “How are you doing today?”

  After your second visit yesterday, when I cried for hours, he was the one who sat across from me, rationing Kleenex. It was partly for moral support, partly because he loves me, and partly to remind me that no matter what, I shouldn’t swallow my sorrow down with alcohol. “I’m okay,” I tell him. “For now.”

  “She’ll come around, Elise,” Victor assures me.

  You haven’t been in my life for twenty-eight years; why, then, after only an hour in your company, do I feel the absence so much more acutely?

  Victor strokes his hand over my hair. Sometimes I think that when I am hurt, he is the one who bears the pain. If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have done both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.

  * * *

  The very first time I met your father, he tried to rescue me. I was working in the middle of nowhere, at a bar frequented by bikers—not clean-cut college boys with axle grease on their hands who wandered in, dazed, after their cars broke down. He saw me pinned against a wall by two Hell’s Angels while a third threw darts at me, and he launched himself at the big man.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t in trouble; the bikers were all regulars and we did this little dog-and-pony show every now and then. But I fell in love with Charlie at that moment. It wasn’t his golden good looks, or his attempt at heroism that sent my head spinning; it was the fact that he believed I was worth saving.

  I was one of the ghosthood of Mexican-Americans who lurked in the background of other people’s lives—as chambermaids and busboys and gardeners. The only reason I was a bartender was because I could not sew a straight seam, so taking in piecework was not an option. Besides, I liked bartending. The yeasty smell of beer rising from the catch below the tap made me think of places where wheat grew, places I’d never been. Every time one of my customers got up and walked out the door, I let a little piece of me go with him. I thought that at this rate, sooner or later, I could vanish completely.

  I gave your father a free drink, to thank him for trying to save me. I don’t think he noticed that my hands were shaking, spilling beer all over the bar. Charlie pointed to my jeans, which were covered with couplets from poetry that I’d read. I collected words the way some people collected shells or butterfly specimens. “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing,” he read aloud, but the rest of the e.e. cummings phrase snaked under my thigh, hidden.

  “Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance,” I finished.

  “Why is that written on your leg?”

  “Because,” I said, “I ran out of room on my jacket.”

  “You must be an English major.”

  “English majors smoke clove cigarettes and say things like deconstruction and onomatopoeia just to hear the sound of their voices.”

  He started to laugh. “You’re right. I used to date an English major. She was always looking at things like laundry in a dryer, or toast, and trying to relate them to the subtext of Paradise Lost.”

  I knew men. My mother had taught me how to read the sentences they did not say out loud, how to wear a red cord tied around my left wrist to keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination. I could tell by the bitter almond smell that rose off a man’s skin whether he had cheated on his partners in the past. But the men I had known were like me—boys who had grown up dreaming in Spanish, boys who believed you could light a red candle for a dose of luck, boys who knew that a man who spoke ill of his girlfriend might find his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when he awakened. Men like Charlie, on the other hand, went to universities and wrestled with mathematical theorems and combined chemicals to watch them rise in lovely clouds of invisible gas. Men like Charlie were not meant for girls like me.

  “If you’re not an English major,” he asked, “then what do you do?”

  I looked at him as if he were crazy—did he not see the four walls of this squat building around me? Did he think I was here because I liked the view? But I wanted him to know that there was more to me than just this job. I wanted him to think I was mysterious and different and anyone except the person I really was: a Mexican girl who did not live in the same world as people like him. So I took my deck of cards out from beneath the counter. “I read los naipes.”

  “Tarot?” he said. “I don’t buy that stuff.”

  “Then you have nothing to lose.” I opened the wooden box that held my deck and removed them, as usual, with my left hand. Then I said an Ave, and looked up at him. “Don’t you want to know if you’ll get your wish?”

  “What wish?”

  “That,” I told him, “is up to you.”

  He smiled so slowly that I had to look down. “All right then. Tell me my future.”

  I had him cut the deck three times, for the Holy Trinity, and hand them back to me. Then I laid out nine cards: four in the shape of the Cross, five and six balanced below the arms of it, seven at the base, eight tipped on its side at the very bottom, and the last card smack in the center of them all. “The first card,” I said, turning it over, “shows your state of mind.” It was the Seven of Wands.

  “God, I hope it means money. Especially if it’s my engine that’s dead.”

  “It’s a message,” I told him. “It says that the truth can’t stay hidden forever. These next three cards will tell you who’s going to help you figure it out.”

  I flipped them over. “This is interesting. The Lovers, well, that’s just what you’d think—a happy couple. Some sort of romantic relationship is going to be instrumental in helping you get what you want. The Strength card isn’t as good as it sounds—it tells you not to take on more than you can handle. But I think that the Chariot cancels that out, because it’s powerful, and means you’re going to ultimately have good luck.”

  I turned over cards five and six. “The Eight of Wands is a warning against ugly actions that might destroy you . . . and this card, the Hanged Man . . . have you been committing any crimes lately? Because that’s usually what this represents—someone who better mend his ways, or God will get him even if the law doesn’t.”

  “I jaywalked