CHAPTER 19
“ALL RIGHT, GRAN. It’s a quarter after. Can we go now?”
“Jane,” my grandmother said, and I could hear annoyance in her voice. I wasn’t sure, though, if that emotion was directed at me, or at Clara, or at the small children who were dodging around us, intent on seeing every square inch of the stuffed elephant in the center of the Natural History Museum’s rotunda.
I looked toward the front doors of the museum, wondering if I could have missed Clara in the crush of people. By arriving right at opening time, at 10:00, Gran and I had been caught up in the melee of families, the mothers and fathers and screaming, anxious children, all eager to get a glimpse of the museum’s fossils and skeletons and other exotic displays of the natural world.
I’d never understood why families start at the Natural History Museum. Most kids were fascinated by the collection. Didn’t that make the museum a more likely target for the afternoon, then? Drag the kids to the art museum in the morning, make them study the delicate application of paint by the Dutch masters, or the effects of atmosphere in Impressionist paintings.
Then, reward them in the afternoon, by taking them to see the suspended blue whale, or the rampaging tyrannosaurus rex, or the live insect zoo. (A live insect zoo, by the way, sponsored by Orkin. No one could say that our government didn’t have a sense of humor.)
Instead, I was willing to bet that half these children would be weepy and/or hyperactive by the afternoon, and their one real chance at learning art history while still in elementary school would be ruined. But who was I to say anything? No one had asked me my opinion.
“There she is!” Gran said, and her relief was as loud as the horde of rampaging kids who had just discovered the elephant’s tusks and were debating whether the pachyderm could throw them up to the balcony with one toss of its head.
Clara swept up to us, as breathless as she had been in Cake Walk. She was wearing the same movie star sunglasses, and she raised the same hackles on the back of my neck. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to read my runes before I came over here this morning. The spread took longer to interpret than I’d planned.”
I slung my purse over my shoulder and started to head toward the door. Runes. Clara’s runes were more important to her than I was.
“Jane!” my grandmother called.
I stopped. This wasn’t fair. Gran shouldn’t have come. If Gran hadn’t been here, I could have been as rude as I wanted to Clara. As rude as she’d been to us, leaving us waiting for her. Waiting for fifteen minutes. For twenty-five years. But with Gran standing at the base of the giant elephant, I couldn’t very well turn around and walk away. I’d be offending the one woman who had loved me unconditionally, who had nurtured me and raised me, even when my own mother abandoned me.
I took a deep breath and turned back around. When a troop of Cub Scouts started to shriek their excitement over the dinosaur exhibit, I moved back toward Gran and Clara, so that we wouldn’t have to shout to make ourselves heard.
I set my teeth and tried to keep my voice civil as I asked, “And what did the runes have to say?”
I must not have succeeded in the civility department, because Gran gave me a sharp look. Clara, though, seemed thrilled by my interest. “I used my jade runes,” she gushed. “They’re often the best at depicting matters of emotion, Jeanette, family, love, relationships.”
“Of course,” I said, icily ignoring the oversight about my name.
Gran glared at my super-polite tone, but Clara went on, oblivious. “I drew a fork spread, because we seem to have reached a critical point in our relationship. Decisions have to be made.”
Oh, don’t they.
No, I didn’t say it out loud. But I thought it very, very clearly. Clara chattered on, utterly unaware of my scorn. “The first rune of a fork represents the first possible outcome. I ended up with Ken.”
Ken. Like Barbie and? I had no idea what Clara was talking about. Even Gran seemed a bit put out, and she started to look at the banners over the different museum galleries. I sensed that she was trying to find something to distract Clara, to rein in her rampant enthusiasm over bits of green stone.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling some bizarre need to fill the silence as Clara paused for breath. “I don’t know what Ken means.”
Clara swept off her oversized sunglasses for the first time, and she blinked at me. Once again, I was struck by the color of her eyes. My eyes. And when I glanced at Gran, a shiver crept down my spine, for I realized they were her eyes as well. Any stranger looking at us would know that we were three generations of the same family. Three women in a long line.
I thought again about what David had said, about how witchcraft typically descended through the mother. Could there be some truth to that? Was it possible that I came by my powers legitimately? Did my mother’s use of runes have the same magical base as my working spells?
“Ken,” Clara said, obviously unaware of my introspection. “It looks like an arrow, a less than sign. It stands for light. For knowledge.” She pursed her lips in a rueful pout that almost made me smile. “I don’t draw Ken very often.”
I wanted to tell her that I knew the word then. Shakespeare had used it in his long poem, The Rape of Lucrece: “‘Tis double death to drown in ken of shore.”
I suspected that I knew what he’d meant. You can see salvation, but you know that you’re never going to reach it. Just as I could see the family that I’d never really known, I could see the mother who had abandoned me when I was a child, but I was never going to find comfort in her arms.
Grudgingly, I asked, “What other ones did you draw?”
Gran looked at me in surprise, as if she suspected that I was mocking Clara. I was able to turn an honest smile to her, though, and I was rewarded by her glance of relief. Clara answered, not at all aware of the silent conversation that had passed between Gran and me. “Gebo was the next one, the second possible outcome.”
Gebo. Okay, Shakespeare never used that word. “Um, I don’t know that rune,” I said, but I was curious enough that I forgot to sound snotty.
“It looks like the letter X. It stands for a gift. It’s a positive sign, because the giving of a gift enriches both the person who gives and the person who receives. But it’s a complicated one, because additional bonds are built with gifts. Debts are created.”
“Or paid.” I said the words without thinking, but I knew that they were true. Clara looked at me directly for the first time since she’d arrived in the museum.
“Or paid,” she repeated, and she nodded slowly. I could almost see the wheels spinning inside her head, and I wondered what connections she was making, what lines she was drawing between what she’d said and what she thought.
Maybe—just maybe—there was something to these runes. After all, two months ago, I would have said that the notion of witchcraft was ridiculous. If anyone had told me that there truly were familiars or magic wands made of rowan wood or fires that could be extinguished by chanting some words, I would have laughed and asked them what book they were reading. Or what they were smoking.
But witchcraft was real. And maybe Clara’s jade tiles were too. “What was your third rune?” I asked.
She flashed me a huge smile. “With the fork spread, the third rune is the critical factor. The one that determines which possibility will come to pass.” She looked from me to Gran, then back at me. “My third rune was Berkana. It looks like a B, but the loops are triangles.” She looked down at her short, stubby hands, suddenly—amazingly—shy. “It stands for household. For family.”
And there it was. I could hear something in her words, something that I hadn’t heard before. Not in her rush of exuberance here by the elephant. Not in the crazy words she’d spouted at Cake Walk.
Clara wanted this to work. She wanted to build a relationship with me, to strengthen the one she had with Gran. She wanted to find the family that she’d walked away from, that she’d abandoned so many years ago.
This couldn?
??t be easy for her. Every time she looked at me, she must see opportunities that she’d lost. I must remind her of my father, of her youth, of all her mistakes.
“So, that’s why I was late. You can see why I needed to finish the reading.” She sighed and looked around expectantly. “Now, where are the crystals in this place?”
Okay. Well, I might have a glimpse of understanding into Clara’s soul, but she was still weird. I mean, I was coming to believe in witchcraft, and I might ascribe some form of power to her strange jade stones, but I certainly wasn’t about to embrace every form of New Age hocus pocus that crossed my path.
Gran shook her head, but there was a hint of fondness at the corners of her lips. “They’re upstairs, dear.”
Dear. That’s what Gran called me. I felt the scrabble of a green-eyed monster at the edge of my thoughts.
I was adult enough to know that Gran could love two of us at once. She could call two people dear. Hell, she called Uncle George “dear” half the time. But it was different when she directed the word to Clara. It felt as if Gran was taking something away from me.
“Let’s go, then!” Clara started to soldier off to the nearest flight of stairs.
“Clara!” I called, and needed to repeat myself to be heard above the noise in the rotunda. “I think we should take the elevator.”
“Oh.” She turned back and gave me a curious glance. “If you really need to.”
I looked at Gran, but Clara didn’t seem to get my point. Gran did, though. And she took exception to my trying to protect her. “I’m fine, Jane. I can walk up a silly flight of stairs.”
But they were long flights. Two of them. And Gran was breathing heavily by the time we got to the top. “Let’s just look out at the crowd from up here,” she said. She didn’t fool me, though. I knew that she wanted to catch her breath.
And then she started coughing.
It was the same cough that she’d had at her apartment, but now it seemed worse. Much worse. Her face flushed crimson as she fought for breath. I started to put an arm around her shoulders, intending to help, but she shrugged me away. Frantic, I looked around for a bench. Without touching her, I directed her toward the stone surface. Still coughing, she collapsed onto the seat.
“Mom!” Clara said, sitting beside her. “Are you all right?”
“She’ll be fine,” I said, but I didn’t really believe myself. “She was coughing like this the other night.”
After what seemed like a lifetime, my grandmother finally got her breathing under control. By then, the color had drained from her face, and her lips were thin grey lines. Clara hovered next to her. “Mom, you look terrible.”
I was torn between snapping at Clara for her lack of tact and agreeing with her assessment. Gran gave a wan smile. “Just what a mother loves to hear from her daughter.”
Again, that green-eyed weasel burrowed beneath my heart. Gran should be directing words about love to me. I was the one who’d been there for her, for years. I was the one who’d helped her at the party the other night, who had listened to her coughing then. Which reminded me…. “Gran, did you call Dr. Wilson?”
She patted my sleeve, as if I were the person who needed to be comforted. “There was no need, dear. I’m fine.”
“Mom, you didn’t sound fine just now,” Clara said. Again, I pushed down my frustration with her. After all, she was on my side in this. I knew that. It was hard for me to admit, but I knew it.
“I’m feeling better already,” Gran said, forcing a ghastly grin. She insisted on getting to her feet. “Now, where are those crystals?”
Shrugging and exchanging worried looks with Clara, I followed my grandmother into the minerals display.
I had been to the National Museum of Natural History approximately five thousand three hundred and forty seven times, counting school field trips. Every single time, I visited the minerals and gem stones. Every single time, I was bored out of my skull with the display, except for the Hope Diamond.
And it wasn’t even the Hope itself that interested me. It was the myth that surrounded it—legend said that disaster would befall every one of the stone’s owners. The Hope was the largest blue diamond in the world. A billion years old, it was the size of a baby’s fist, and it glinted balefully on its velvet display. It was sheltered behind bulletproof glass, set inside vault doors. Rumor said that the treasure was lowered into the ground each night, stored in a secure safe dozens of feet below ground level. A line stretched around the viewing gallery as scores of museum visitors waited for their chance to ooh and aah over the cut stone.
But Clara could not have been less interested. Instead of waiting to see the Hope, along with the Star of Asia, jade carvings, and other valuable pieces of jewelry, Clara was immediately drawn to the minerals. Not the gemstones. The boring, ordinary, workaday minerals.
She stopped in front of a display case and stood transfixed, as if she were reading all the secrets of the universe. I stepped up beside her and saw a bunch of rocks.
“Pink kunzite,” she breathed.
“What?”
“That one. The dark pink one. With the black streaks going through it.”
I saw the stone that she was talking about. It was pretty enough, but nothing special. I might have seen rocks like it in the cheap jewelry stores along Wisconsin Avenue, in Georgetown.
“The pink of the stone reflects the heart. Unconditional love. Mother love.”
She hesitated for a moment before she looked at me, but I wouldn’t meet her gaze. Instead, I looked behind us for Gran. She was sitting on one of the benches, across the gallery. She caught my concerned glance but when I started to take a step toward her, she waved me back to the display. Her expression was clear: she did not want me drawing attention to her. She wanted me to stay with Clara.
Who seemed not to have noticed my distraction. “But there’s violet in there too,” she was saying. “Violet is the sign of the higher mind, Je –, Jane. Of wisdom.”
I rolled my eyes. Runes, I was able to accept. They were a way of working human experience into the world around us, sort of like my spells. But crystals were just bizarre. They were a bad joke, and I was the butt of the story.
Again, Clara was oblivious to my skepticism. She pointed at the rock. “And see those striations? They’re a sign of rapid transmission of energy. When things change, after having stayed the same for years.”
Come on. Was she making all of this up? Would she have said the same thing about the chunk of fool’s gold in the next case? Or the—I craned my neck to read the label—elongated tetrahexahedral copper crystals next to them?
Clara could go from display to display and make every single thing we saw be about family and love and hope and renewal. That still didn’t explain the fact that she’d ignored me for a quarter of a century.
Yet, even as I started to work myself into my abandoned-by my-mother rant, I realized that twenty-five years was not actually all that long. Sure, it was most of the time that I’d been alive. But it was nothing compared to the timeline of the rocks around us. Hell, it wasn’t even all that much compared to Gran’s life.
My grandmother had been abandoned by Clara and still found room in her heart to love.
Shouldn’t I be able to do the same? Wouldn’t Gran want me to show off the lessons that I’d learned from her?
As if she knew that I was thinking about her, Gran began to cough again.
I could tell that something was different this time. Something was worse. The coughs sounded like they were coming from the bottom of her lungs, as if her entire body was seizing up each time her throat constricted. Staring across the gallery, I watched a handful of people look in Gran’s direction, then look away, as if they were embarrassed by her infirmity.
I ran toward her bench, falling to my knees in front of her. I grabbed her hands in mine, but then I tumbled backward. Her palms were burning. Her fingers were powdery and dry, and I knew that she had a dangerous fever.
The
coughing continued, soggy, threatening. It hurt my ears to hear her laboring so hard, and I scrambled in my purse for a Kleenex. Gran took my linty offering and pressed it to her lips. When she took it away, she wasn’t quick enough to fold it over, and I saw that it was flecked with crimson.
“Clara!” I cried. She looked up from her precious kunzite. “Call 911.” She looked at me without understanding. “It’s Gran,” I screamed. “She needs a doctor now!”
Gran would have protested, but she couldn’t get enough air. By that point, a crowd had gathered around us. A balding man, his brow creased with worry lines, was digging in his pocket, flipping open a cell phone. I saw him press three digits, and I nodded, turning back to Gran. “You’re going to be okay,” I said.
Then, everything spiraled out of control.
I was vaguely aware of the museum guards, appearing in their blue uniforms. They moved the curious onlookers away, redirected the crowd’s attention to the glinting treasures in the display cases. My cell phone Samaritan hovered nearby, looking at his watch, and then his phone, and his watch again. One of the guards spoke into her walkie-talkie, enunciating our location clearly and professionally.
There was a gurney, and two uniformed paramedics. They helped Gran onto the platform and eased her back. They elevated her head, to help her breathe. They slipped plastic tubing over her head, issuing instructions loudly, firmly. Gran tried to explain that she was fine, that she didn’t need their assistance, but they ignored her. They started the flow of oxygen, adjusted it, adjusted it again. They put a blanket over her, tucking it in beside her arms, her legs. She was smaller than I’d ever imagined she could be.
The EMTs raised up the gurney and started rolling it toward the elevator. I trotted beside Gran, babbling words that I meant to be soothing. She looked at me over the oxygen mask, and her eyes—my eyes—were wild and frightened. As the elevator door closed, I saw that Cell Phone Samaritan was hovering outside. I called out thanks, and he nodded. The doors closed.
I turned back to Gran, and I realized that Clara was beside me, closer to Gran’s head. The paramedics were going about their business, checking the flow of oxygen, taking Gran’s pulse, being professional.
An ambulance waited in the half-circle of driveway at the back of the museum. A crowd of tourists had gathered around, staring as if we were some sort of special historical re-enactment designed for their viewing pleasure.
The EMTs brought the gurney up to the back door of the ambulance. Like clockwork, the legs collapsed against the ambulance floor, and the crew eased the rolling surface into place. The nearest paramedic said, “Only one of you can come with us.” I looked at Clara. She looked at me.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at Gran, whose eyes were shut.
“Go,” Clara said, and she put her hand in the small of my back. Tears exploded down my cheeks. Clara looked at the EMT. “Where are you taking her?”
“George Washington. 23rd and I.”
“I’ll meet you there.” Clara stepped back, already turning toward the street to hail one of D.C.’s ubiquitous cabs.
“Wait!” I cried, and the paramedic hesitated as he reached for the heavy ambulance door. “Do you have money?” I called out.
She nodded. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’ll see you at the hospital.”
The door closed, and the ambulance started, and the siren sang out, and the EMTs chanted to my grandmother that she would be fine, that she shouldn’t worry, that everything was going to be all right.