3

THE STORM RAGED OUTSIDE. The women’s faces held a grayish tint from the stormy light dripping in through the one small window in the prep room. Sometimes, when the lightning flashed, their skin went white, almost transparent, and the man’s shadow appeared solid black on the table. I kept expecting one of the women to look at me in those flashes of lightning, those moments of clarity, but their eyes focused on the table, where their fingers had joined together in one big pile. They swayed with the words, and their six hands writhed in an uneven rhythm.

I wondered if those women were traveling with the fair that had recently arrived in town. My dad called them “carnies,” that rough group of travelers who brought wonder to our small community every summer, leaving behind deep tire tracks in the park outside of town and puddles filled with unredeemed ride tickets. These women could have been anything—funnel cake vendors or ticket takers outside the mirror maze or fortune-tellers. They might have been the ones who try to guess your age or spin the prize wheel. They could have been anything.

Their chanting stopped as quickly as it had started, and the world fell back into its natural order. I could hear the rain softening on the roof and the wind tapering down to random gusts through the alleyway, but the front of the storm had passed and the thunder had moved off into the distance. The woman in the middle straightened the large scarf tied around her head and pushed all those jingling bracelets and rings and necklaces back into place. She didn’t seem to realize she had been saying anything out of the ordinary. She looked up as if expecting the person in the shadows to tell them what to do next.

“Is that it?” the man’s voice rumbled. It growled with thick phlegm and the beginnings of an earthquake.

“Is what it?” the woman in the middle asked, leaning forward. She raised her stenciled eyebrows toward the ceiling. Some of her teeth were so sideways that they looked backward. There was nothing straight about her.

“I paid you good money for my fortune, the future, whatever you want to call it. Chanted words, spooky humming . . . is that it? Is that all I get?”

She looked back and forth at the women on either side of her and whispered over one shoulder as if consulting with someone. Someone who wasn’t there.

“But you didn’t tell us who you were,” she said in a polite voice that I realized carried hints of a foreign accent. “The fortunes of your kind are dark. Men are easily read, but you?”

She stared at him with a face completely at peace. His threatening tone of voice did not seem to affect her in the least. The room was quiet for a moment, and then she spoke again.

“You didn’t tell us what you were.”

The man cleared his throat.

“But you saw something?” He sounded unsettled, even a bit distracted, by her knowledge of “what” he was.

“Something to write with?” she asked.

The man grunted and threw a pen onto the table. It slid toward the women. The one in the middle grabbed the pen before it stopped moving and began scribbling on the table. I cringed—Mr. Pelle would not be happy if he saw them doing that. But she kept writing. She’d cross out what she wrote and write again. And again. She spent a solid five minutes defacing that table with more ink than I thought any pen could hold, and it looked like she crossed out and scribbled over every single word she wrote.

Finally, with the sound of fluid clothes and wind-chiming jewelry, the three women stood up.

“This is for you,” the one in the middle said, pushing the point of the pen into the table, where it stuck for a moment before falling over. “You may read it after we leave.”

The man grunted again.

“The rest of the money?” the woman asked.

At first nothing happened, and I thought they might keep arguing. But three green bills floated down onto the scribbled surface. The woman picked them up and stuffed them into the recesses of her long, flowing skirt. She was clearly impatient to leave, and when she stood up her movements seemed anxious. The other two women were a half second behind her, as if they were three marionettes all controlled by the same puppet master.

Then something strange happened.

She glanced at me.

Or at least she glanced at the crack in the door. But I thought it was more than that. I thought I felt her eyes locking onto mine, and I was sure that if the man wasn’t in the room, she would have come over and told me something. Something very important. But her sudden look scared me, and I spun around, stood with my back to the wall. I held my breath and listened, hoping no one would come that way.

The women must have left through the other door, the one that led into the front area of the antique store. Moments later I heard, far away at the front of the building, the bell ring over the entrance. They were gone.

There was a loud sound from outside the window—the last strong rumble of thunder, or a downspout leaning under so much weight—and the man left without getting a chance to spend much time looking at the table.

“Nothing,” he mumbled. “Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.”

He walked quickly toward the same door the women had gone through. I didn’t get a look at his face, but I did see him from behind. He was short and wide. There was something very powerful about his neck and shoulders. He turned sideways so that he could fit through the narrow door.

The room was empty now. I pushed the swinging door aside and approached the table. The storm seemed to have passed. Sunlight lit up the room, and for the first time I noticed the window was open. The floor had a large puddle on it that reflected the light. I could hear water still running through the gutters and downspouts, splashing into the alley.

The woman with the pen had made a complete mess of the table. Ink was everywhere, filling deep gouges in the wood. She had written many things. Many things. But everything had been scratched out so effectively that it was all impossible to read.

Everything, that is, except for one small sentence I almost missed in the middle of that black cloud of dead, crossed-out words.

Find the Tree of Life.

Voices. The sound of someone coming back from the front of the antique store. If it was Mr. Pelle, I didn’t want him to find me there with the window open, the water on the floor, and the ruined table, so I raced through the swinging door, through the storeroom, and out the side door into the alley. There wasn’t a sidewalk back there, only a six-foot strip of dirt and loose rocks separating Mr. Pelle’s store from Uncle Sal’s.

I wasn’t sure what I had just seen, but I knew I had never seen anything like it, not in my small town. I turned to walk back the way I had come, away from the main street, back toward the baseball field. I hoped my mother would be waiting there for me. But I stopped. I heard someone walking, their feet crunching slow steps over the loose gravel.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Water fell from a clogged gutter at the top of the building. I turned around. Coming toward me was the woman I had seen sitting at the table inside, the one in the middle who had written everything. She was alone, the other two women nowhere to be found. She walked unsteadily, in the trembling way of someone very old, and I froze. I stood there, staring. She was sort of hunched over, and her robe flapped every once in a while as leftover gusts of wind dashed through the alley, chasing the storm that had left them behind. The air felt cool for July, that kind of after-storm coolness that reminds you summer will not last forever.

She smiled as she walked, and her mouth opened as if she was about to say something, but then she closed it again. She stopped a few feet away, and I saw the stick she carried. It was a gnarled, barkless thing that bent this way and that. She grasped it with both hands, plunged it into the ground, and limped around me, muttering a small stream of those living words. The stick made a harsh, scratching noise in the dirt and the rocks. Her strength amazed me—the line she made was deep. A small trickle of rainwater welled up and filled it.

At that point I almost started to feel bad for her. She was obviously losing her mind. I held my breath, waiting for her to finish, trying to think of something nice to say. She made a circle in the dirt all the way around me with that stick, and I got another glimpse of those sideways teeth crowding for space in her mouth. Her eyes were kind and knowing.

I nodded at her, and she walked away. I sighed with relief and watched her turn the corner.

But I couldn’t leave the circle she had made.