Posey had noticed right away.
Now Charlie’s sister sat on the worn gray shag rug, squinting at a grainy moving image on her laptop, a spread of cards in front of her. She had on the same pajamas that she’d been in when Charlie left, the cuffs scuffed and dirty. No bra. Her light brown hair twisted into a messy bun on top of her head. The only adornment she wore was an onyx-and-gold septum ring, which she never removed. Posey took all her Zoom calls with the camera on her end off, at least partially so she didn’t have to dress up for them.
She sounded entirely professional, her voice soothing as she continued her tarot reading, barely seeming to notice Charlie. “Nine of Wands, reversed. You’re exhausted. You want to give a lot of yourself, but lately you feel as though there’s nothing left to give—”
The person on the other end must have started spilling their guts, because Posey cut herself off and just listened.
When they were kids, their mother had dragged them to lots of psychics. Charlie remembered staring at dusty velvet pillows and beaded curtains in the front room of a house off the highway, Posey’s head on her lap, listening to their mom getting lied to about her future.
But even if it was a scam, their mother had needed someone to talk with, and it wasn’t like she was going to open up to anyone else. Psychics were therapists for people who couldn’t admit they needed therapy. They were magic for people who desperately needed a little magic, back before magic was real.
And while Charlie didn’t believe Posey had powers, she did think that her clients got someone who treated their problems as important, who wanted to help. That seemed worth a fifty-dollar donation and a subscription to her Patreon.
Charlie went back out to the kitchen and uncovered the plate. Vince had cooked egg tacos, with sliced avocado on the side and twin splashes of Tabasco and sriracha. From the plates in the sink, it looked like he’d even made some for Posey. Charlie ate hers at the rusty folding table in the kitchen while she listened to her sister talk.
“King of Cups, also reversed. You’re a smart woman, but sometimes you make decisions you know aren’t the best.”
A shiver of leftover adrenaline made her put down her fork for a moment and take a few ragged breaths. She tried to focus on her sister’s voice, on the familiarity of the story Posey was telling.
The majority of people who called for readings had problems to do with love. Maybe they wanted to know if they had a chance with somebody in particular. Or maybe they were lonely and wanted someone to tell them it wasn’t their fault they hadn’t found the right person. But most often it was because they were in a relationship that had gone bad, and part of them wanted to be told that it would be worth all the suffering, while another part of them wanted permission to get out.
Most of their mother’s visits to psychics had been about relationships. The Hall women fell in love like they were falling off a cliff. They were terrible at picking men, as though there were some kind of ancestral curse that started with Nana’s marriage to a guy so awful that she was still in prison for shooting him in the back of the head while he was in his BarcaLounger, watching TV. It lasted through Mom making Charlie and Posey sit quietly in the back seat of a Kia while she drove around trying to catch their father cheating, through a stepdad who broke Posey’s wrist and an ex-boyfriend of Charlie’s so desperate for money to pay a gambling debt that he convinced her to file tax returns for dead people and give him the cash from the refunds. Posey said that a guy had to have a hole in his head, his heart, or his pocket for one of the Hall women to go head-over-heels for him.
Maybe that was true. Maybe there needed to be something missing in a man, so that Charlie felt she could pour herself into that absence and heal him like an elixir. Or maybe it was only that Charlie felt as though she’d lost something too, and loss sings to loss.
Vince was a dependable guy. Tough, hardworking. The halting quality to the way he told stories about his family made it clear he was uncomfortable sharing much about his past, but she’d been sizing up marks for long enough to make some good guesses. The calluses on his hands were new, and he had the kind of straight teeth that were the result of braces. Knew the kind of stuff you learned in college but didn’t have any debt. He’d come from money.
Charlie wondered if they’d turned their backs on him after he lost his shadow. She’d tried to ask, but his answers were evasive. And she hadn’t tried hard, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear about that better life, and how far he’d fallen from it.
After all, he was willing to look the other way when the real Charlie Hall emerged, the one attracted to trouble, prone to bleak jags where she barely got out of bed. The one who’d spent years trying to blot out the ouroboros of her thoughts with too much alcohol, too many men, and a string of heists. People said that a person without a shadow didn’t experience emotion as fully or deeply as other people. Maybe that’s why it didn’t bother Vince, what she was and what she’d done.
At home with Vince, she tried to be both fabulist and fabulist’s creation, a woman whose past as a con artist was long over and who wasn’t fighting down the urge to go off the rails again.
And if he was slightly too good a listener, if she sometimes suspected that he could hear the hurt, feral part of her yearning to lash out, at least he didn’t push her away.
“Come on,” Charlie said, poking Vince’s leg with her foot. She wanted him to come to bed with her, needed his breath in her hair and the weight of his arm across her to protect her from thinking about white bone or drying gore or men with shadows for hands.
Vince opened his eyes. Stretched. Turned off the television. He had that tall man’s habit of hunching a little when he stood, like he was trying to be less intimidating.
“Did you find the food?” he asked, passing her on the way to the bedroom, his fingertips sliding across her back. She shivered greedily, inhaling the perfume of bleach that still clung to his skin from work.
“You’re a good guy,” she told him.
He smiled in answer, confused but pleased.
Vince paid his bills. He took out the trash. He was kind to the cat. And if he longed for another life, he was with Charlie now. It didn’t matter what was in his heart any more than it mattered what was in hers.
3
THE PAST
When Charlie was thirteen, she told her mother she’d had a visitation. Mom had gotten deeply into crystals and divination after her divorce and had a friend who got “messages from angels,” so it wasn’t like the idea came from nowhere. Charlie claimed that the spirit of a witch who had died during the Inquisition had started speaking to her, and then through her.
It wasn’t a good plan, in retrospect. But Mom wouldn’t listen to her any other way. And Charlie was desperate.
Enter Elvira de Granada—a character half based on an anime seen late at night and half on bullshit from grocery-store horror novels. But Elvira could say all the things that Charlie Hall couldn’t. Elvira could spit out all the pent-up rage that filled an already-scarred heart.
The problem was that Mom really, really, really needed to be convinced that her new husband was a bad guy—and fast. Travis was mean and hated Charlie and Posey.
But he wasn’t stupid. When he smacked Posey—for nothing, for just jumping around and annoying him and refusing to go to bed on time—he did it when Mom wasn’t there to see, and instead of acting like nothing happened, he claimed Charlie hit her sister and that Posey was covering.