The Secret Society of the Pink Crystal Ball (3 page)

Meanwhile, Samantha turned sixteen three months ago. But she keeps failing her driving test on purpose just so that she can continue to get rides with Aiden. Which only makes Aiden hate her that much more.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is about him. He always looks like he just rolled out of bed, even when he's trying
not
to look rumpled. And he's got to be dumb because there's no way that even a remotely smart person could tolerate his girlfriend, the aforementioned “fleabag slut,” for more than five minutes. Her name is Trance Jacobs. (Yes, really. Trance. And this just occurred to me: Maybe she should get a job at Ye Olde Metaphysical Shoppe?) I tutored her in math last year. The girl just could not understand the concept of a fraction unless I put it in terms of sale prices at Wet Seal. “You should get a voodoo doll of Trance,” Lindsay suggests. “Or else a love potion! If you can get three drops of Aiden's sweat, you can do the one that activates his pheromones. Veronica swears that after any guy has drunk her famous love potion, he will never look at another girl ever again.”

The phone rings before Lindsay has a chance to slay us with another one of her Veronica-isms, and I lunge for it.

“Hello?” I say into the receiver.

“Is this Erin?” asks an unfamiliar woman's voice on the other end.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“I'm a friend of your aunt Kate's,” the stranger informs me. “Could I please speak to your mother?”

My aunt Kate
. Now there's a name I don't hear very often. Aunt Kate is my mom's younger sister, and they have what my mom describes as “a complicated relationship.” Complicated as in they haven't spoken to each other in over a year.

According to my parents, when I was a baby I couldn't say the word Kate, so I called her Kiki instead, and that's what I've called her ever since. Even today, I would never refer to her as my aunt Kate. She will always be Kiki. Although my dad calls her my aunt Kooky, because she's always doing weird things like running off to live in an ashram or becoming a vegan or joining a Native American tribe and changing her name to She Who Communes with Water.

Still, she's fun to hang out with. Or at least, she used to be, back when she and my mom were still on speaking terms. In the summers, I used to go to her house in the afternoons, and we'd spend hours on the porch, working on the
New York Times
crossword puzzle together. She's the one who taught me how to do them in the first place. She used to say that I'm a lot like her, even though everyone else says that I'm exactly like my mom. Smart. Rational. Black and white. Stubborn as hell. Actually, come to think of it, my aunt Kiki is stubborn as hell too. I guess it runs in the family.

“Yeah, hold on a second,” I say to the woman on the phone. I open the door to my room. “Mom,” I yell. “Phone's for you.” I deliberately leave out the part about Kiki because I don't want to get into a whole explanation when I have none.

“I'll be right there,” my mom yells back.

When she picks up the phone, I hang up and stand at the top of the stairs, hoping to eavesdrop a little on the conversation.

“Yes?” I hear her say. And then she says it again, but this time her voice is tight and tense. “Is something wrong?” she asks.

By this time, Lindsay and Samantha have come out to join me in the hallway and they nod as I put a finger to my lips.

“What?” Her voice is filled with alarm. Suddenly, I'm nervous. Lindsay looks at me and I shrug. I can only imagine what Kiki did this time. I just hope she didn't get busted for smoking peyote again, because the judge warned her that he wouldn't be so lenient if he ever saw her in his courtroom again.

Then my mom starts to cry.

Now I'm officially freaked out. Mom never cries. Ever. She's a pediatrician. She sees sad, sick kids every single day, so she's trained herself not to get emotional about anything.

Example: when I graduated from preschool, our class sang “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell. If you don't know the song, the chorus goes like this:
The seasons they go round and round
/something, something,
up and down/We're
something, something, something,
time
/
We can't return, we can only look behind
. Okay, so maybe I don't remember all of the words, but my point is, imagine a group of five year-olds singing some sentimental song to their sappy parents while wearing tiny little mortar board hats. I'm telling you: Mom had the only dry eye in the house.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Thank you.” I hear a beeping noise as she hangs up the phone, and then a heavy thud.

When I get downstairs, I find my mom lying in a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor.

“Mom! Mom, are you okay?” I check to see if she's breathing, which she is, and just as I shout for someone to call 9-1-1, she lifts up her hand.

“No, don't. I'm fine. I mean, I'm not fine, I'm just…you don't need to call an ambulance.” I'm not sure if she hit her head when she fell, so I check for signs of a concussion, just the way she taught me.

“What's your name?” I ask her. “Are you nauseous?”

She pushes herself into a sitting position, then waves me away. “I didn't hit my head. I just, I just, oh my God! Kate!” She starts to sob, right there on the floor.

“What happened? What did that woman say?” But my mom just shakes her head. Now
I'm
the one who's starting to feel nauseous. I've never seen my mother act this way. “Mom, come on. Tell me what happened.”

“She's gone.” The words stick in her throat.

“What?” My heart is pounding, working overtime as my brain tries to comprehend what she's telling me.

“They found her outside in a field, with a metal umbrella. The lightning…” she lets her sentence trail off, but I don't need for her to finish it. I get it. My aunt was struck by lightning, and now she's dead.

In freshman science we learned that in just the few milliseconds that a lightning strike lasts, it delivers four hundred kilovolts of electricity. In other words, if it hits you, nine times out of ten, your heart is going to stop immediately. And if you do somehow manage to survive, you'll have deep burns at the point of contact, as well as a host of medical problems ranging from respiratory distress to brain damage.

I picture my aunt's body being electrified. I wonder if she was afraid. I wonder if she even had time to think about being afraid.

“What was she doing in a field?” I hear myself ask. Aside from a swimming pool, the dumbest place to be during a thunderstorm is in an open field. And the dumbest thing you can do while in an open field during a thunderstorm is carry a metal object. Everybody knows that.

Mom just shakes her head. “I don't know. Her friend didn't tell me much. She just said that they found her about an hour ago, and that the EMT declared her dead when the ambulance arrived. She wanted to be cremated, and there's going to be a memorial service on Wednesday.”

Lindsay and Samantha clear their throats uncomfortably and I spin around. I had completely forgotten that they were there.

“Dr. Channing, I'm so sorry,” Samantha says.

“Um, Erin, I think maybe we should go,” Lindsay adds.

“No,” I shout, not really meaning to raise my voice. “You can't ride your bikes home in this. Especially not after what just happened. Please, my dad will be home any minute. He can drive you. Just wait for him.”

Lindsay and Samantha look at each other, and Lindsay bites her lower lip, just like she always does when she's about to agree to something she doesn't want to do. My eyes are welling up with tears and I open my mouth to say something, but I don't know what to say. All I can think is,
How is this happening?
How can Kiki be gone?

The garage door opens with a low rumble.

“There,” I say, feeling relieved that I have something else to focus on for a minute. “See? He's home. Come on, let's go upstairs and get your stuff.”

We trudge up the steps in silence, the three of us wincing as we hear my dad opening the door, and then my mom telling him what happened. She's crying again.

“This is so crazy,” Samantha whispers, putting her arm around my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

I nod, even though I'm not. It all feels surreal, like it's happening to someone else. Someone in a movie that I'm watching. A bad movie.

“I…it's just, I haven't even seen my aunt in almost a year,” I stammer. My throat is clogged. “It's just weird, though. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, Kiki was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Why would she go out into an open field, with a metal umbrella, when there's been thunder and lightning going on for days?”

Lindsay starts to say something, but then hesitates.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “It's totally inappropriate under the circumstances.”

“What?” I ask again. “Just say it. It's me.”

“Okay, well, I was just thinking that it's kind of a coincidence, how you were just saying how boring your life is and that nothing ever happens to you, and now, you know, just out of the blue, this happens.”

I tilt my head, unclear as to where she's going with this. I notice that Samantha does the same thing.

“So what's your point?” I ask.

“I don't know. I'm just saying, like…maybe you conjured this,” Lindsay mumbles. “It's all very strange and mysterious. Maybe you conjured the whole thing. Like…maybe this happened so that your life could become more interesting.”

I glare at her. I know she meant for that to come out differently, but still. I try to swallow, but the golf-ball-sized lump in my throat makes it difficult.

“So, you're saying that I'm responsible for my aunt's death just because I happened to mention that I think my life is boring and that I can't come up with a good reason for why I want to go to Italy this summer?”

She opens her mouth and closes it.

“You're right,” I snap, and I can feel my eyes stinging. “That was totally inappropriate. Do me a favor? When you're in the car, don't say anything like that to my father, okay?”

Lindsay nods apologetically. “I got it,” she says. She pulls her fingers across her lips as if to zip them, then throws away the imaginary key. “Not a problem. I'm sorry.”

I know that she really
is
sorry, and when she reaches out to hug me, I hug her back, holding on for longer than I mean to. I sniffle into Lindsay's shoulder, and she pats me gently on the back.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers. “I know you really loved her.”

I wipe my eyes as I finally pull away from her. I notice that Samantha is looking at me now, in the same hesitating way that Lindsay did.

“Now what?” I ask.

“Well, um, do you think it would also be inappropriate if I asked your dad not to play his Barry Manilow CD in the car?”

We all laugh—even me.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Lindsay asks one more time before heading down the stairs.

“I'm fine,” I lie, trying to reassure her. Samantha cocks an eyebrow at me in disbelief. “I'm
fine
,” I say again. “Now go on, go, my dad's waiting.”

The two of them disappear down the staircase, and as soon as they're gone, I run into my room, fling myself onto the bed, and silently sob into my pillow.

I can't sleep at all. Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is my aunt: her skeleton lit up from inside her body, her hair standing on end, like something out of an old
Tom and Jerry
cartoon. I toss and turn for a few hours, listening to the rain beating down on the roof above me and watching the clock change from eleven to twelve, and then from twelve to one in the morning. All the while, my brain is racing. Why did Aunt Kiki and my mother stop talking? And why didn't she ever call me? How come I don't know more about her life, other than the bad, silly messes she always found herself in?

I sit up and throw the covers off of me. This is useless. I'm never going to be able to sleep.

The light is on in the kitchen. When I walk in, I find my mother at the counter, sipping a cup of herbal tea.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hey,” she says back. “Can't sleep?”

I shake my head.

“Me neither. Want a cup of tea? Or I could heat up some milk for you.”

I look at the floor. “Could I have some tea milk?” I ask sheepishly.

When I was little, like four or five, I used to have these crazy scary nightmares—like
Friday the 13th
kind of stuff (even though I had never seen it or watched anything like it)—and my mom would give me a drink she called tea milk to calm me down. It's half tea, half milk, and a ton of sugar. Now that I think about it, it's basically the same thing as those chai lattes that I get from the Coffee Bean. Only, a chai latte costs four bucks and sounds a lot cooler than tea milk.

“I haven't made that for you in years.” Mom reaches out her hand to smooth my hair down. “I would love to make you some tea milk.”

I watch her as she goes about the process. From the back, she looks a lot like my aunt. Same height, same build, same hair color. I can feel the tears welling up again, and I reach across the counter to pull a tissue out of the box. When I sniffle, my mom turns.

“Oh, sweetie, I know this is hard.” She hesitates. “You know…I can never decide if it's better for the family for a loved one to go suddenly or for it to be long and slow. Because when it's long and slow, you get to tell them all the things you need to say, but then you have to watch them suffer. And when it's sudden, there's no suffering, but then you don't—” Her voice breaks, and she starts to cry again before she can finish her sentence. She takes a deep breath and recovers. “There are just so many things I never got to say to her.”

“What happened between the two of you?” I ask. The question tumbles out of my mouth before I can stop it.

Mom puts my tea milk down in front of me and then sits down with a sigh.

“I'm not sure. I just always felt like she refused to grow up. She never got a real job, she never got married, never had kids. She just lived her life without any responsibility. Which is fine, but…she didn't have any regard for anyone else. And I felt like I always had to clean up her messes.”

I nod. I've heard the stories a million times before. But Mom wants to tell them again, and for once, I don't want to stop her. All I want to talk about is Aunt Kiki right now. If venting about her helps Mom to feel better too, then I'm all for it.

“When she got arrested for peyote possession, I bailed her out. When the Chinese government kicked her out of the country, I was the one who arranged for her transportation home. When she got bitten by a monkey in Costa Rica, I was the one who called the hospital and made sure that she got all of the shots she needed. But it didn't go both ways—” She pauses and manages a sad smile. “You know all this.”

“It's okay.”

“But it wasn't,” Mom counters. “Kiki never did anything to help
me
. Do you remember when grandma broke her hip a few years ago? I had to take care of her for three months, even though I have a full-time job and a family. And Kiki…she was off doing yoga at an ashram in India, and she was completely unreachable. It was infuriating.”

“But you always fought about things like that,” I remind her. “What happened to make you stop speaking to her?”

She sighs and puts her hand on top of mine. “Oh, Erin. I didn't stop speaking to her. She stopped speaking to me. One day I called her and she just never called me back. I left her message after message, and I emailed, and I sent her a letter. I even tried to go over there a few times to see her in person. But she refused to see me. And I have no idea what I did. It's like one day she just decided that she didn't want anything to do with us anymore. I never told you because I didn't want you to be hurt. I know how much you loved her.”

What?
I am horrified. I had always just assumed that it was all Mom's fault. But for Aunt Kiki to stop calling us…calling
me
? To just cut off contact like that for no reason? I can understand why she might not want to talk to Mom—God knows, I have been on the receiving end of my mother's nagging. But Kiki always told me that she loved me like I was her own daughter, and I believed her.

This changes everything, though. Now I don't know what to believe.