Page 19

Emily Bond

Sort of Seeing Someone

Per request, I bypass my usual headquarters, the coach house, and reluctantly slink through Nora’s front door in search of my sisters.

“Hello?” I say as I shut the cherry-red painted door behind me.

“We’re in here.”

Nora’s voice is coming from the dining room. I head that way, hoping my boots don’t scuff her freshly-maintained floors as I shuffle over there.

“Whoa,” I say when I see them. “What the hell are you guys doing?”

Liv and Nora are sitting across from each other at Nora’s sprawling farm table.

They’re both dressed in a color I never see them in—black—from head to toe.

Liv in a long sleeve dress, Nora in a crewneck and leggings.

Between them on the distressed wood table is a five-pointed star made from the stems of roses.

At each corner of the star is the head of the rose, chopped off and facing upward.

In the very middle is a large crystal, clear in color.

I’m not sure what kind it is, but I’d guessselenite from what I’ve seen in my book.

The entire star is encircled in tea light candles.

“We’re showing you our solidarity,” Liv says, as if she’s rehearsed that line one too many times. For her sake, I hope it turned out exactly how she imagined.

“By doing some sort of satanic ritual?” I ask.

“Quite the opposite,” Nora says. Her voice is calmer in tone than usual. “This is a pentacle. And as such a spiritual woman, you should know that.”

“Yeah, this is like, Woo-Woo 101, Moonie. A star with circle around it is meant to honor the elements and directions,” says Liv.

At that, I fully expect my two Type-A sisters to levitate into the air.

“Okay, hold up a sec,” I say, bringing my hands to my forehead, closing my eyes, and shaking my head like I’m trying to get a fly out of my hair.

When I open my eyes, my hope is that this mirage dissipates and I see Nora thumbing through the pages of Better Homes & Gardens while Liv whips up a marble cake at the kitchen island.

Alas, neither is the case, as my sisters are still just sitting there looking like a goth Barbie and Midge waiting for me to connect the dots.

“I’m sorry,” I concede. “But I’m just not following. ”

“Sit down and let’s talk things out,” Nora suggests.

She’s my oldest sister and I have never had a reason not to trust her.

In fact, after my parents divorced, it was silently agreed on that Nora was going to serve as “the dad” in our new dynamic.

In other words, I’ve been letting her boss me around the majority of my life.

But right now, when she wants me to sit down, I find it frankly scary.

“I’m good standing,” I say, shifting my stance so that I’m closer to Liv. Something tells me that a lady who perpetually smells like spun sugar is less likely to harm me than a seemingly possessed soccer mom. “What’s up?”

“We obviously saw your interview on Windy City Today. First of all, I had no idea that’s what you’ve been doing up in the coach house.

Why didn’t you tell us about your little business venture, which is really not so little .

A half million visits since you launched your site? That’s insane, Moonie.”

Nora’s right to call me out on being hush about how I’ve been passing the time I spend when off the clockfrom her kids. But the truth is, neither of them would understand how I arrived at this juncture and certainly wouldn’t agree with it as a viable career path.

“I don’t even really know what I’m doing,” I say, attempting to downplay this whole thing.

“I shopped your whole website. You know exactly what you’re doing,”Liv contests.

“Yeah, I’m calling bullshit, too,” Nora chimes in. “Charging crystals with the moon? Making your own smudge sticks? Pouring handmade moon-synced candles? Who frantically gets a website up to sell very nuanced things that ‘you don’t really know about’?”

I guess there will be no downplaying anything after all.

“I don’t know what you guys want me to say.

Nora, if this is about the fact I’m starting to make income and haven’t offered to pay any rent, I’m sorry.

But I swear I’ve only used my profits so far to order more supplies.

As soon as I start bringing actual money in, I’ll chip in toward the coach house. ”

“It’s not about rent , Moonie. It’s about the fact that we’re your sisters and we want to know what you’re doing with your life.”

“Why do you care so much? So you can tell me this is dumb, and remind me I have a fully-baked education degree burning a hole in my back pocket while living in a city with a serious teacher shortage? This is all a joke to you, isn’t it?

You’re making fun of me with your all-black outfits, this ludicrous star-thing, the tea light candles.

You’re making fun of me like Mal and Antonio did at the end of the interview today to bully me into something more mainstream.

Have y’all called Mom and ratted me out to her yet?

‘Mom, you’ll never believe it: Moonie started some secret, half-baked businessand got called a witch on TV in front of all of Chicago. ’”

I don’t get emotional very often. But when I do, I tend to ramble and lose track of the last time I took a solid breath.

“Mom won’t care that you’ve been called a witch,” Liv says. “She’s been called one herself. And guess what? She’s special, I’m special, Nora’s special, and you are, too. Surprise! You can tell Antonio andMal that we’re basically the real-life Sabrinas of Chicago.”

I look at Liv. I look at Nora. I wait for a punch line, but there is none.

“What are you talking about? Nora, help me here. Liv’s gone mad, right?”

“What do you know about visions, Moonie?”

“Pardon?”

“You just turned twenty-six. You’ve never had an interest in anything woo-woo before. And now suddenly you’ve made the spiritual world your business. I have to believe you know a little something about visions .”

I remain silent.

“Fine. You want to play hard ball? Put your palm on mine,” Nora says, holding up her hand like she’s giving me the Scout’s honor. Still, I say nothing, and I do nothing.

“Or don’t. Because you won’t see anything anyway. Did you discover that fun-fact aboutExexveei yet?That when you touch the palms of normal people, you’ll get a vision. But when you touch the hand of another person with the same gift as you, you’ll see nothing?”

As soon as she name drops Exexveei, I know something is officially up with the Miller girls.

“Nora and I both have it, too. We inherited it from Mom,” a soft-spoken Olivia says, as if she’s explaining where we get our matching bra size from.

I haven’t nearly begun to process what I’m hearing.

But my mind flashes back once again to my session with Esther.

Live amongst those who are just like you.

I could have never imagined that when she said “just like me”, she meant some secret super power that I share with my sisters like it’s a genetic mutation.

Back to the conversation, it dawns on me that with their confession comes the realization that they absolutely never let any of this on—an impossible secret to keep, in my opinion. How did they do it? And why?

“So no courtesy heads up for me?” I ask, finally taking that seat next to my sister at her table. “No one here thought, ‘Hey, maybe someone should tell Moonie she’s going to turn into a freak when she turns 26.’?”

“By the time you were old enough to understand what could potentially happen to you on your twenty-sixth birthday, Mom had stopped practicing her gift completely and we were sworn to secrecy about it all.”

“Dad found out what she had been teaching us and he shut it down—he was so creeped out, calling it ‘black magic’ and reminding Mom what happened in Salem, Massachusetts to witches back in the day.”

“So we are witches?” I ask.

“No, we’re just…special. Anyway, by the time you were in pre-school, we never spoke about it again and they were already divorced.”

“But that didn’t stop us from both experiencing Exexveei when we turned twenty-six,” Liv adds.

“We just never did anything with our powers. Dad put the fear in us that if we were witches—or anything close to it, then we would scare away the only people who could ever love us. That’s why Dad left Mom and, well, it’s why I’m not chancing anything with Ted.

Especially not now when we’re trying to conceive. ”

By now, I have no choice but to believe them. All of this is too elaborate and too specific to be anything but an authentic display of sisterly solidarity as they intended.

Look, I don’t know much about our dad given the timeline and circumstances regarding his departure from our family.

And at twenty-six years old, that doesn’t feel good to say.

Most people my age are getting engaged and thinking about what songs they’ll dance to with their dads at their weddings.

But not me. I don’t even know his address to send a Christmas card.

And I wouldn’t even send him one if I did.

I was always under the impression my dad left my mom due to irreconcilable differences.

After all, that’s what it says on their divorce papers and it was a palatable concept as a kid to understand.

“Mommy and Daddy are fighting too much, so they both are going to take a time out.” The time out never ended, which clearly was for the better.