Shall I send in the rabid hordes?” Hudson asked, leaning on the office door, his hand on the doorknob. Ingrid knew he found the whole enterprise on the droll side—he insisted on calling her the White Witch of the Library, and had threatened to market T-shirts, or worse, start a Web site.
“Don’t make fun.” Ingrid frowned as she put away her files and cleared her desk in anticipation. She liked the office to look generic when her clients entered and not messy and stacked with blueprints and archival material.
Hudson looked hurt. “I’m not. I find it all sweet, really.”
“Do you believe what they say about me?” she asked. They had never really talked about what she was doing; everything had happened so quickly that they hadn’t had a second to themselves to chat. They used to spend lunch hours together, but Ingrid had little time for office camaraderie lately.
“The magic thing?” Hudson asked. “The spells and charms?” He put a finger against his cheek. “Not sure I believe in anything, really. I think you just tell them what they want to hear. Isn’t that how so-called ‘psychics’ work? Like that bearded quack on the cable network who speaks to the dead?”
“Hudson! You think I’m a fraud!” Ingrid barked a laugh, trying not to feel too offended. She had expected to hear that he was skeptical or doubtful, but not that he assumed she was merely playing parlor tricks.
“You’re not?” Hudson asked, a face of innocence. “I thought it was all a ruse to get people to come to the library and read books, and donate to the cause. Very clever, really. You’re always trying to figure out how to make the library more popular—I assumed you’d finally figured out how.”
When he put it that way, it sounded so reasonable, but Ingrid itched to show him just how much she could do. She gave him a look.
“Wait a minute, so you’re not just making it up?” Hudson asked.
“Try me,” Ingrid said. “Surely there’s something you want that you can’t get otherwise.”
“You can’t help me.” Hudson shrugged. He fished in his back pocket and showed her a worn brochure. Ingrid unfolded it slowly and read the headline. gay? you don’t have to be! heterosexuality is just 12 steps away!
“Mother is insisting I consult this . . . ‘therapist.’ One of those people who can, you know, cure me of my disease.”
“Oh, dear.” Ingrid put a hand on her mouth.
“I suppose it is amusing.” Hudson sighed, rolling his eyes in agreement.
“Of course not. It’s just . . . Hudson, this is ridiculous.” She returned the brochure to him and held his hand for a beat longer than necessary. “Hudson?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Come to the back with me, let me read your lifeline.”
“No thanks. I don’t like knowing the future. I don’t even know where I’ll be tomorrow.”
“You’ll be here. Working at the library until the wrecking ball hits. Come on. I insist,” Ingrid said, leading him to the storage room. She placed him in the middle of the room and drew a pentagram around his feet.
Hudson tried not to giggle. “Spooky!” he said.
“Shush!” Ingrid said, trying to peer into his lifeline. With the witch sight from the pentagram, it should have been clear, but there was something blocking her view—a hazy gray darkness, a blankness right where the vision should be. She lit another candle and murmured a few words, and the gray haze dissipated somewhat and she was able to see a little more clearly.
She switched on the lights and faced her friend. “For what it’s worth, your mother will come around one day,” she told him. She had seen it in his lifeline, the slow thawing of his mother’s stubborn heart, the ingrained homophobia (it was all right for her hairdresser, her interior decorator, her personal chef to be gay—just not her son!) battling with the fierce love she felt for her handsome boy. Missing him during every lonely Christmas. The slow, tentative steps toward reconciliation and forgiveness. A mother, son, and son-in-law trip to Paris. “She loves you, Hudson. Don’t give up on her.”
“Hmm” was all Hudson would say, but she knew he was moved. Later he left a bouquet of her favorite flowers on her desk.
Over the next hour Ingrid helped a variety of women with their concerns: more headaches, more bizarre skin infections, a pet or two who had died suddenly. Ingrid was not sure what they thought she could do about their dead animals, but she made a note of it, thinking of the dead birds her mother had seen earlier that summer. Emily Foster, the artist who had been blocked in her work, walked in at the end of the hour.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she told Ingrid, looking pale and wan in an Indian tunic and silk pants stained with paint.
“It’s not a bother, Em. Blocked again?”
“No, no, the work is going well. It’s Lionel,” Emily said, her voice cracking. “I don’t know if you heard, but he’s in bad shape.”
“I hadn’t heard, what happened?”
“He was out in the water the day of the accident—you know, that big explosion off the coast. He always takes his sunfish out in the mornings. The waves knocked him out cold and he swallowed a lot of water.” Emily wiped the corners of her eyes with her fluttering hands and took a deep breath. “He would have died—he would have drowned—but luckily a couple of surfers found him and brought him to shore.”
“Oh my god.”
“I know.” Emily nodded. “They knew CPR, so they got his heart to start beating again and they took him to a hospital.”
Ingrid looked relieved. “So he’s alive?”
“Barely. He’s on a respirator. The doctors say he’s brain dead.” Emily began to weep openly.
“I’m so so sorry,” Ingrid said, taking Emily’s hand across the table and squeezing it in sympathy. Lionel was a good friend to their family; he was the one to whom the Beauchamps turned to replace hard-to-reach lightbulbs or perform small carpentry and handyman tasks around the house.
“I just can’t believe it. I mean, he was fine that morning and now . . . he’s brain-dead?” Emily began to cry. “And on top of that, his mother hates me. She’s kicking me out.”
“Pardon?”
“See, technically, it’s Lionel’s house. We never got married,” Emily said. “We didn’t plan on having kids so we didn’t see the point. God, I wish I hadn’t been so stubborn back then! Me and my idealistic bohemian ideals! Now they want the house back. They’re giving me until the end of the month to pack my things. They’re moving in so they can be closer to Lionel, and good riddance to me. They never liked me anyway, thought I was never good enough for their family.
“We’ve lived in that house since we first met. It’s my house. My studio is there. I don’t know where I’ll go. If only he would wake up. The doctors said there’s no hope. That he’s a vegetable.”
“What do you want from me?” Ingrid asked.
Emily looked up from her wet handkerchief and balled up tissues. “I know he’s in there. He can’t leave me. He’s got to wake up. He’s got to. Could you wake him up, Ingrid? Please?”
“I wish I could, I really do,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. “But my magic—I mean, what I can do, it doesn’t work that way.”
The grieving woman nodded. “I understand. I just thought I’d ask.” She began to gather her things, and seeing her friend looking lost and defeated stirred something in Ingrid’s heart. It was the same impulse that led her to help Tabitha get pregnant and throw off the bounds of their restriction.
“Hold on. I can’t help him,” Ingrid said, getting up from her chair. “But I know someone who can.”