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five

Astoria

I learned early on, the burden of the Tempest curse.

I often wore it like a coat; a warm place to hide. Other times, it was a stone strapped to my back, bending me beneath its weight. Mostly, it haunted me, the way grief clings to sorrow, and I found myself shouting at the heavens, trying to pick a fight I had already lost.

My heart would clench as I watched my grandmother grow weary around strangers.

We could be in a shop and they would ask for her name.

She would pause, her face pinched in concern as she tried to remember what her mother called her.

She gave fake names, a different one each time, because if she tried to use the same one, that too would disappear…

From our memory and hers.

Magicked away by some overbearing force that cast a gray cloud over our heads. Fake names offered no acceptance or stability, and she grew to become a recluse, barely leaving our cottage by the sea in Rhode Island.

It didn’t matter to me that she couldn’t remember her name. There was more to a name than just a sound to call your own.

My mother on the other hand was a different story. My grandmother would tell me stories of my mother's youth, of how she had a sparkling personality and made friends with anyone she met.

She named her Lucy and often called her 'my little light' because joy followed her, trailing behind like scattered sunlight through trees. It was that same light my father fell in love with.

My mother was seven months pregnant with me when she turned twenty-two and the curse changed everything for her.

Lucy was cursed to a life of bitterness and anger. Voicing foul and unkind thoughts, her words sunk deep into one’s mind, ripping it apart until nothing but regret and woe were left. It tormented her at first and she often covered her mouth, eyes growing wide in shame.

One could only spit venom so long until their hearts decayed to match their thoughts.

To everyone's surprise, my father, although not married to my mother, stuck around the longest. Until, even he could not bear her cruelty.

When I was born, Lucy named me Devlin, a name she handpicked because of its meaning— bad omen. In her words, why give false hope to a child with a name of promise? Like the one her mother had given her . My father, who had grown tired of my mother's apathy, gave me a second name: Astoria.

The way my grandmother tells it, the argument was long and violent, leaving my mother in a fit of rage and my father with a black eye. In the end, I was left with two pieces of him: his mother's name and a sealed letter with it scrawled across the front.

I often wondered what my life would have been like if my mother was not so difficult to love, but then again, now that enough time had passed I realized…

It was never really her fault. It was the curse, and her anger was all that was left of her in the wake of its destruction.

Still, it left me fatherless and shut away in a cottage by the sea with a women cursed to live without a name and another I was to call mother, but only knew as Lucy.

The woman who gave me my name and nothing else.

It’d been ten days since I’d last seen Death.

Having finally worked up the courage to go home and rest, I sat on my worn-in leather sofa sorting through my bags.

You think it would be hard to fit your entire life into two bags, but it wasn’t.

When it came down to it, there wasn’t much you couldn’t live without.

Trust me, I would know.

I filled one duffel with clothes and toiletries, and the other with important documents and tokens of my past. I didn’t need much. This was the longest I had stayed in one place in decades, and even so, I glanced around at an empty apartment.

The only things of importance to me were my father's letter and my mother's book. For someone who had lived as long as I had, there wasn’t much to show for it.

I had made a nasty habit of walking estate sales, looking at people’s rooms filled with stuff.

My eyes burning as if I walked my own empty halls, mourning the memories left behind.

It was just stuff, but the extensive china collection packaged and marked for a granddaughter, or the weird paintings piled in the attic, made me sob.

It was the mundane. The tokens of their life.

It was pathetic, honestly.

Nobody needs enough christmas ornaments for three trees, or seasonal salt and pepper shakers. But I bet their children would tell stories of those seemingly meaningless items one day. It made me appreciate the book I kept, even if it was from someone I had a strained relationship with.

My phone rang as I counted the stack of cash on the coffee table, stuffing it in my bag as I gathered the documents I would need to destroy.

“Did you find it?” I asked, not bothering with pleasantries.

The man’s voice was the same as it always was, robotic and terse. “Lobby of the Fairmont, six o’clock tonight.”

I hung up. Nemo was no help when it came to looking into my curse. Ishani was the only reason I searched for answers, as her questions prompted me to wonder if Death’s words held any merit. Could I break my curse?

It was only recently that I became curious with figuring out how.

The continuation of the curse died with my daughter in 1938.

Tragically, and not by accident, I think, my sons never married nor had children.

Perhaps the curse wove itself through them, too, silent and cruel.

There were no other Tempest women, and if it hadn’t been for my immortality, its malevolence would have died with Beatrice.

Piper’s name flashed across the screen with a text notification. When she sent me out of the hospital this morning, she told me to stay home for a few days. “Go out with friends, get a drink, get laid—I don’t know!” she yelled, as I backed out of the room.

In her mind, I was an overachieving twenty-nine-year-old doctoral student who needed a few hobbies and a boyfriend.

The Kapoors had enough money to continue to pay me even through their daughter's treatments, and they said they still enjoyed the help.

But I was certain at this point that they only kept me around because we had all grown dependent on one another.

Piper would on occasion pull herself out of her bubble to remember that I was young and could be off having “grand adventures” such as skydiving, doing tequila shots with some hottie in Mexico, or eating pasta in Italy. All, of course, her ideas.

I swiped the text open to see a photo of Ishani asleep. Sanjay’s feet were kicked up on the hospital bed, his arms crossed and his head back against the chair. He was asleep too, and Piper’s next text complained that she was bored.

I know I said find a hot date, but Jay won’t stop snoring…

Wanna play chess?

I’ll order some Thai food.

Her texts came in a rapid-fire succession, per usual, and ended with a selfie she’d taken with her bottom lip pouted. I chuckled, sending her a reply.

Spring rolls please! be there soon :)

Tossing my phone to the side, I zipped up the last few things I would need and did a last glance at the apartment I had rented for the last ten years.

Seattle was rainy, gray, and cold, but I enjoyed it.

Far more than I ever thought I would. It echoed of home, but I think the Kapoors were a big part of that.

When I moved here, it was in the middle of the night, on a whim after another run-in with Death. Phoenix was hot, the air stifling, and when I made it to my seat on the plane, I was a sweaty-out-of-breath mess.

There was a period where I successfully avoided bringing anyone from the dead. I suppose it wasn’t that difficult, considering I’d spent the years alone traveling, moving about. It wasn’t as if I stumbled across the dead very often…

Until Phoenix. It felt as if I had only arrived, having lived there for only four months.

A woman at the grocery store had a stroke in the middle of the aisle.

The box of cereal she was holding went flying and her cart almost tipped over as she collapsed.

I’d turned my cart down the aisle, in search of coffee, when I saw her. Besides her, the aisle was empty.

It wasn’t that I was hesitant to save her, it was that I was beginning to dread the repercussions.

But when nobody else came down the aisle, I ran to her side and laid hands on her.

It worked the way it always did, one moment she wasn’t breathing and the next she was.

My eyes were closed, and my fists were clenched as I waited for a harrowing scream to go up.

After a few minutes, I thought somehow I was in the clear, that perhaps the other person had to be close by to the person I saved, for them to catch the rebound.

Until I turned around to a middle-aged man, lying on the ground, blood pooling from the back of his head.

Then, the blanketed silence was pierced by the old woman's scream.

Others came rushing, and someone dialed for the police.

A child cried somewhere in the background as I left my cart full of groceries in the middle of the aisle, running to the exit.

The incident worked out fine, if you didn’t consider the dead guy and the fact they ruled it an unsolved homicide.

Yet I was numb to it all. While I was unable to bring myself to cry over James, I cried when our neighbor lost one of her twins, knowing I held some semblance of blame.

I cried when a boy, around Leo’s age, drowned in the Thames.

I cried when that woman forty years ago was found in a back alley, with a knife wound to her gut.

It showed that I was not entirely inhuman, that I held some remnant of empathy. Every death broke me, and my heart slowly turned to stone. So when the man died in place of the old woman, I panicked and fled.

Seattle wasn’t my top pick, but it was the first flight out of Phoenix and that was good enough for me.

The apartment was a stroke of luck—only two blocks away from the water, and three from a coffee shop where I first met Piper.

I had been working there for a few weeks when we made a connection.

She was a regular, always popping in before court or heading into the office.

She complained about finding childcare as she was pregnant and due in a month and I’d made a comment about how much I loved caring for children.

Piper has this unique ability to twist anything into her desired outcome; a trait I'm certain makes her a successful attorney. It only took a few more early morning coffee runs for her to convince me to interview to become their nanny.

When Ishani was born, I wished she was my own. It had been years since I had held a newborn baby, and admittedly my children were cared for by their nannies, something I wish I pushed harder against James about.

She was everything I was not. Pure, innocent, perfect, beautiful… but most of all she wasn’t mine, and would not fall prey to my curse one day.

I had no plans when I took the job. No direction, outside steering clear of Death and not placing down any roots. That is, until I first beheld the twinkle of light in Ishani’s eyes. It was mesmerizing and as she grew; it only pained me more that it was something I would never have again.

The Kapoors had become my family, even if I had broken every rule there was just to stay with them. Honestly, it was a miracle they believed any of my lies…

I pulled Ishani’s artwork down off the fridge, tucking it away with my other mementos. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, but I couldn’t bear the thought of killing someone again, which is why I’d just have to make sure no one comes around.

Dropping the duffels by the door, I grabbed my coat, pulling it on with my Converse as I took one last look at my little home.

The space was bare, but my memories filled the room.

Ishani, twirling in front of the windows overlooking the busy city street.

Her favorite red dress ballooned around her legs and the bright smile she flashed me every time she passed.

Or the thousands of sheets of paper she’d tossed around the empty living room while I was busy making dinner one evening.

The apartment was empty of furnishings, but her energy was everywhere. Preserved.

It was the end to what felt like an era. One where happiness was tangible. Heaving a sigh, I turned the lights off and locked the door, headed to meet a stranger in the night for an updated passport, a disgusting amount of cash, and a new fake identity like some sort of criminal.

Then I’d head back to the hospital to kick Piper’s ass in chess. She had no idea that with over a century under my belt, I was good enough to be a chess Grandmaster. That is, if I wasn’t so scared to be recognized and carted off to a lab to be studied. Still… I was damn good.