Audition (North Security 4)

Maybe he’s thinking about that too. I don’t ask him.

The porch creaks under our feet. I feel a flash of anxiety that Josh’s solid weight might cause the whole thing to collapse. But no. It’ll take more than one man to put an end to Mamere’s house. It survived Katrina and it’ll survive six feet of pure muscle, so long as he doesn’t jump up and down on the old boards. He stands close enough behind me that I can feel where his body shapes the breeze. I’ve never thought of the porch as particularly large, but with him taking up all the available space, it’s tiny.

Josh wouldn’t let me come here alone. He let me get almost to the front door of his mansion before he detached himself from the shadows, spinning his car keys around one finger and whistling. Whistling. “I don’t need a ride,” I’d told him, drawing my bag in tight to my body. What I needed was five minutes without having to breathe him in. The most basic act of life is filled with him now. Every day. Every night. It’s going to give me a heart attack.

Of course he gave me a withering look and told me to get in the car, sweetheart. I felt the space he kept between us like the sharp point of a knife. I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss what Marlena said.

The red front door creaks open with the tinkle of the little shopkeeper’s bell before I can knock. A wrinkled grin splits Mamere’s face. “I knew it was you, child. Come in, come in.” Her eyes are almost completely white with cataracts. She shouldn’t be able to see that it’s me. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe she has some othe

r sight. Especially when the smile falls away. Not quite a frown. “Ah,” she says, lifting her chin in Josh’s direction. “It’s you. You’re the one she dreams about.” She presses her lips together, and I hold my breath. Heat crawls across my cheeks. I feel, rather than see, the smirk on Josh’s face.

I should deny it, but the truth would be even more painfully obvious than it already is. Mamere isn’t wrong. “Hi, Mamere.” I step into the entryway of her house and let the burnt sage and incense engulf me. Her bones feel light beneath my arms. Smaller than I remember from the last time I saw her. But not frail. Still strong.

“Come sit. Both of you.” She shuffles into the front parlor. I can’t let myself relax—not with Josh standing here. Inside. How many times did I climb out to sneak away with him while Mamere snored down the hall? I force my thoughts away from those memories. I don’t think Mamere can read my mind, even if she thinks she can. But why take the chance?

We settle into the antique chairs at the round table, and Mamere takes her seat across from us. Josh seizes the opportunity to re-introduce himself. “Mrs. Lewis, I’m Joshua North.” His voice heats up the air around us. I know he’s not a good man, not some kind of golden boy you bring home to meet your parents, but the illusion is strong. “Bethany probably dreams about me because I’m an old friend of your grandson’s.”

I shoot him a look that has to be unmistakable disgust. What is he doing? I didn’t bring him here to act like the two of them went to Yale together.

Mamere says nothing. She merely shuffles the worn cards of her tarot deck in her hands. This is our ritual. First, the cards. Then, the kitchen. The part that isn’t going according to script is Joshua North sitting next to me on a chair that looks like it could crack under his solid muscles. It doesn’t crack. The chair holds. I sink into the whirr and snap of her shuffling. We’ve entered into a sacred space, like the moment before the music starts in a performance. Mamere spreads the deck out in the center of the table, a wide fan. “Choose.”

Joshua’s smirk falters, but he doesn’t look in my direction. “Me?”

“You.” Mamere’s lips form the word and settle back into a placid expression.

Josh hovers a hand over the deck. I read his palm once. Now I read the rough skin on the backs of his knuckles. The scar where his index finger meets his hand, so faded it’s almost invisible. Guys like that—they always self-destruct. I wonder how quickly it can happen. Josh’s hesitation is the barest moment, and then his finger comes down on a card. He tugs it out from the line. Mamere darts out a hand and turns it faceup.

We all stare down at it.

“Your granddaughter read my palm,” Josh says into the silence, sounding almost cocky. “Does this card say the same thing?” The question is half addressed to me, half addressed to no one.

But I don’t say a word. The backs of my hands tingle with a strange energy.

Mamere frowns at the card. The illustration is of a tower standing tall against a black, starless sky. A yellow bolt of lightning crashes into the top of the structure, sparks flying away from the point of impact. The Tower means danger. It means upheaval. It means destruction. My heart beats faster than the lightning strike depicted on the card, hitting its mark again and again in rapid succession. Mamere shifts in her seat. The doctors have said her vision is as good as gone, but she meets Josh’s eyes anyway. “You’ve been living in this space a long time, haven’t you?” She raps a knuckle on the center of the card. “Very much alone.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dancer Raven Wilkinson was one of the first African American ballerinas permitted to join a ballet company. During the 1950s, she danced with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under the condition that she pose as a white woman by painting her face.

Josh, present time

“No, no, no, Mamere. Let me make the tea.” Bethany disengages the older woman’s hand from the worn handle of the teapot with extreme gentleness and a laugh in her voice. “I came to visit you. I’ll make the tea.” In her grandmother’s kitchen the rusty edge of her voice falls away. Afternoon sunlight spills over tea towels embroidered with the outline of a crystal ball. I can still smell the spices of dinners past. On any other day, it would make me want to take a seat at the table and eat until I was sated. I can’t remember the last time I felt satisfied like that. Maybe never.

But today I want to get the hell out of here. That old woman’s knuckle on the tarot card stopped my heart between beats. I’m not the kind of man who holds with cards and crystal balls, but she didn’t need to tell me what that tower means. I felt the cold whisper at the pit of my gut. Same as when our dear old dad used to come home. You develop superhuman hearing when you live with a monster. A quarter-turn of the front doorknob was all it ever took to fill my veins with ice. One knock against that card, splayed on the table, had my defenses up. Bethany saw it—I know she did. Her eyebrows drew together. Her hand twitched as if to take mine. Unbelievable, that she would try to hold my hand when the truth was so evident, spoken aloud by Mamere.

Very much alone. Very much alone, crouched in the corner of my own closet. I give Liam shit about the baby bird. I use it as my own shield between me and what happened all those years ago. What’s still happening inside my head. It didn’t surprise me when Bethany’s grandmother named her dreams. Bethany is an open book, with all her defiance and sadness and fight right there under the surface. But when she flipped that tower card to the table—Jesus. Gives me chills. And the only thing I hate more than being at the mercy of some old woman with a deck of cards is being at the mercy of surprises.

But leaning against the doorway in the kitchen, watching Bethany, I can’t tear myself away.

I’ve never seen her in precisely this situation before. Her dark eyes are open, relaxed. She knows this choreography. It’s worn into her very bones by years and years of focused practice. The set pieces, I can tell at a glance, always remain in the same position. It was like this when I’d come throw pebbles at the window. Mamere must have been losing her vision even then. Keeping the house this way let her hide it for longer. She never seems to hesitate. Even now she throws her hands up and laughs. “Why not let me make the tea? You’re the one with places to go and the weight of the world on your shoulders, child.”

Bethany shrugs off that metaphorical weight with a toss of her head. “I’m light as a bird.”

A wizened hand drops onto her shoulder. “For a person so light, you’re holding tight to that teapot. Is it keeping you on the ground?”

Bethany stops filling it in the sink and holds it daintily by her fingertips, raising her left hand to give the movement a playful flourish. “Better?” Her teasing is an arrow through the heart. A shock. A lightning bolt. Her laugh is a familiar soprano that fits in with the melody of this house. With her grandmother’s low, echoing rumble of pleasure. It’s so fucking domestic I could die.

This is what she’d be like as a wife. As a mother.