But she understood people.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is going to upset Andy and the boys so much.”
“The boys? What about me? It’s upsetting the hell out of me.”
My mother sighed again in a weary way. “Suzie, really, do I have to keep telling you? If you expect to be taken seriously at your job, you have got to clean up your language—”
“Sweet crippling Christ, Mom,” I said. “I’m not at work right now. And I keep telling you, it’s not a job, it’s an internship. They’re not even paying me.”
“Well, I’m sure there are a lot more paying jobs for school counselors here in LA than there are up there. Forget the house. Why don’t you move down here? You can live with Andy and me. Jesse can join you when he’s done with his residency, and if you two are really set on getting married, you could buy a nice little condo. It would be so much easier for me to visit my future grandbabies if they were right here in town than—”
It was going to be interesting to see what kind of grandbabies she’d have—if any—if I didn’t meet Paul and he really did bulldoze 99 Pine Crest Road.
“Look, Mom,” I interrupted her. “We can talk about all that later. I have to go now.”
“All right, Suzie. I’m sorry about the house. But honestly, we had to sell. Andy and I were never there, and neither were any of you. And that place was too big to maintain as a vacation home. And so drafty. You’re going to laugh, but you know, sometimes I could have sworn it was haunted.”
This almost made me choke on my own saliva.
I never thought I’d be thankful for an interruption from CeeCee’s crazy aunt Pru. “Suze? Is that you?”
“Oh, hi, Pru,” I said to the long-haired woman dressed all in purple who’d wafted up. “Yes, it’s me.”
“Is that CeeCee’s aunt?” my mother asked in my ear, sounding nostalgic. “Please tell her hello from me.”
“Uh, my mom says hi, Prudence,” I said, lamely waving the cell phone in CeeCee’s aunt’s direction so she’d understand my mother was on the phone.
“Wonderful. Do tell your mother how much I enjoyed the latest episode of Andy’s show,” Pru said. As usual, she had on an enormous floppy hat, as well as long silk gloves, in order to protect her skin from damaging UV rays, even though the sun had long since slipped behind the trees. Like CeeCee, Pru, suffered from albinism. Unlike Cee, Pru fancied herself in touch with the psychic world. “He’s really doing wonders with that new house.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll tell her.” CeeCee’s aunt was endlessly kind, but a bit of a whack job. True to form, she had a prediction for me.
“Oh, Suze,” she called from the doorway of the coffee shop.
“Yes?”
“The child,” she said.
I glanced around the outside of the shop, which was as whimsically decorated as the inside, festooned with twinkling fairy lights and wrought-iron café tables and potted shrubs.
“What child?” I asked her. There were no children in sight. It was twilight, and getting a little chilly. Only an extremely bad parent would allow their kids to run around outside the Happy Medium in the semidarkness. “There’s no child here, Prudence.”
“No, not here,” Pru said. “The one you know from school.”
What the hell was she talking about?
“That child is lost, and very frightened, and in so much pain,” she went on. “And lost children in pain can sometimes be very cruel. Like wild animals, you know? They lash out and hurt others, sometimes without meaning to. But sometimes on purpose, too.”
Then she smiled her happy, dazed smile and went inside the shop.
I stared after her, remembering too late that occasionally Aunt Pru’s predictions actually came true.
“What was that all about?” my mother asked.
“Nothing.”
I hoped.
ocho
It had grown fully dark by the time I got home, but I told myself I wasn’t worried about Aunt Pru’s warning. Despite the impressive amount of psychic power Lucia had shown back at the mission, she’d seemed primarily concerned with focusing it on Becca, not me.
“Lost children in pain can sometimes be very cruel.” That could easily sum up Paul, and the way he was lashing out at Jesse . . . and at me.
My mother had also used the word lost to refer to him. He was no child, though.
Still, even if Lucia had chosen to attack me again, the Carmel Valley Mountain View Apartment Complex—as the management company of the building in which I lived had somewhat misleadingly named it—would have made an unlikely place to do so. The so-called “mountain view” was actually only of the winery-dotted foothills of what eventually turned into the Santa Lucia mountain range, the breathtaking peaks against which the massive waves of the Pacific crashed at Big Sur, much farther down the coastal highway.