Page 30 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

“Does the motor home get cold in winter, too?”

A nod. “I can help you get your stove to work more efficiently. If you want.”

She did want. “Yes, please.” Something about Reno—she wanted this woman around.

Reno tilted her head back to look at the sky, and Beatrice followed her gaze to the first star glimmering overhead.

Or was it a planet? She couldn’t remember how to tell the difference, but it didn’t matter.

The glint of light was pretty. Knowing what it was wouldn’t make any difference in the way it looked. “Can I ask you something?”

Reno kept her gaze up. “Yep.”

“How did your wife die?”

Reno’s profile remained the same, but something shifted in her posture.

Crap, she’d screwed up. “Sorry. Forget I asked.”

“No. I like to talk about her. I do. I try not to think of that day very often, that’s all.

But Scarlett was…” Reno pointed upward. “She was like Venus. Glowed. Didn’t twinkle.

Solid. She could hold up the weight of the world and also laugh about all the hard stuff.

She was little. Not even five feet tall.

People underestimated her. Men especially.

Then she’d come out swinging and could knock them all down with a couple of words. ”

“How did you meet?”

“Teaching. High school. She taught English.”

It surprised Beatrice to think of Reno standing in front of a classroom. “What did you teach?”

“History.”

This quiet woman had talked to students all day? “You’re kidding.”

“I just… like knowing what came before.”

“Why did you stop teaching?”

Reno turned her head and met her eyes. Slowly. Deliberately. “After Scarlett died, I drank every day.”

Was it a test to see if Beatrice would act like an asshole about it? She stayed silent. Waiting.

“After a year or two, I couldn’t stop. Got so I couldn’t trust myself to do anything right, but I didn’t care, either.

Went to class. Taught that way. Blacked out in front of my AP class.

Twice. I was teaching, still talking. My eyes were open, but I wasn’t in the driver’s seat of my brain.

Second time, they gave me a warning. Did it again, got filmed by one of the kids, who put it on YouTube.

Drunk History but not funny, just slurring about Watergate and then I passed out, splitting my head open on a desk as I went down.

” She spread out her hands and looked at them as if her fingers held answers.

“Bled all over the homecoming queen. I heard she used the trauma of it as her college-entrance essay. Good for her, honestly. Lost my job. Lost respect. And lost friends.”

Beatrice just nodded.

“People in this town, they have long memories. There’s a lot of people who don’t trust me in this town, and a lot of days, I’m one of them.

But I got sober. Stayed sober with the help of some good folks.

Not the long-memory kind. They were there for me.

So was Cordelia, who drove me to every one of my first twenty or so meetings.

I owe her my life.” Reno took a choppy breath.

“I’ll never be able to repay that debt.”

“How long were you and Scarlett together?”

Reno closed her eyes tightly, her mouth drawing into a slim line. She rubbed her chest with a closed fist.

“Are you okay?”

“Just a sec.” Her voice was low and ragged.

Was she ill? Should Beatrice call someone?

But instead of moving, she waited, and in another moment, Reno opened her eyes with a gasp.

“I’m fine. Sorry. What did you ask? Oh, yeah.

Twelve years.” Her words were slow but becoming more even.

“Couple of rough ones in there. But the rest? Never perfect, never dull, and everything I ever wanted.”

Beatrice let the pause lie open between them.

Eventually, with her chin still tilted to Venus and the stars joining it, Reno said, “We went on a hike. She got bit by a rattlesnake.”

“Oh, my god.”

“Seemed like it was going to be fine—they got a helicopter to pull us out, they had antivenom on board, and they got her to the hospital pretty quick. But she was allergic to the antivenom, and even though serum sickness usually passes, hers didn’t. She died of shock two days later.”

Beatrice reached for words—any words—but could only come up with the worse-than-useless “I’m so sorry.”

Reno nodded. She took another sip of her tea. “Cordelia was there at the end. Scarlett was with me one minute. The next, she was with Cordelia.”

Beatrice blinked. “Sorry?”

“You know. How she talks to people after they pass?”

“Um. No. I do not know.”

Shuffling her boots, Reno said, “Crap. I shouldn’t have—”

Jesus, if this was true, why hadn’t Cordelia told her? Of course, with the death doula work—that would fit. Beatrice made a keep-going motion with her hand. “You can’t stop now.”

“It’s why she does what she does. So she can be with them on both sides, helping them over. She can hear them, talk to them for a while. They’re not alone.”

“Wow.”

“All three of them do that. Talk to the other side in some way. Minna gets images.”

“Her guides. Right. Clairvoyant, she said.”

“Yeah. And Astrid, she can hear them in her mind, and I think she can do even more, but I try to stay out of her way so I’m not sure exactly what other skills she has. And you, you’ve got the writing. Right?”

Holy crap. Presumably, she did. “Wait, so is that, like, their special flavor of magic? Talking to dead people? Or is that something that all, um, witchy people can do?”

“No clue,” Reno said. “I didn’t know what Cordelia could do, either, until about ten minutes after Scarlett died. I’m sitting on the bed with my wife, not even able to cry, and Cordelia’s holding both our hands. She tells me that Scarlett’s fine where she is.”

But anyone would say that, right? It was what everyone needed to hear. If someone had said that to her when Naya’s hand was still cooling in Beatrice’s own, she would have done anything to believe it.

Reno apparently saw the look pass over her face. “No, it was more than that. Cordelia gave me Scarlett’s words. I love you, Popper. I’m fine. I’ll be with you whenever you need me. ”

“Popper?”

“Jalapeno popper—she was half-Mexican and teased me for being unable to handle even Tex-Mex spice.” She held out her arms. “I’m darker-skinned than she was, but my heritage is mostly Italian. Northern Italian, at that. I don’t do heat.”

“So Cordelia must have heard you call each other that.”

She shook her head. “We’d only known Cordelia for about a year then.

And Scarlett hadn’t called me that in years.

I’d totally forgotten it until that moment.

Scarlett was telling me she was still there.

” Reno looked up at another star so bright and still, it must have been a planet. “That she’s still here.”

“You believe that.”

Reno put her hand on her chest, as if she was rubbing away heartburn. “I do.”

“But how ?” She was unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. “How does it work? If it actually does.”

“You still don’t believe?”

Beatrice wiggled her jaw to unclench it. “I do believe. I’m choosing to believe. I mean, I’m trying like hell. But I need to learn so much more. Why my family? What are we supposed to do with it? What’s behind it, and how do we affect it?”

Reno only shrugged. “I don’t understand how electricity works, not really. But I know enough to respect it. I don’t need to know much to be able to flip the light switch.”

Funny that she put it that way. In the darkness, each word Reno spoke seemed to spark a tiny flame inside Beatrice. Was it desire? Simple curiosity? Sudden loneliness?

Whatever it was, though, the feeling wouldn’t help her understand magic.

“Yeah, well.” Beatrice wrapped her arms around herself as a chill crept over her. “I want to be a master electrician.”