Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

“Fine,” Doyle replies. “I’ve gotta walk. I need to walk.” He twitches his hand in the air and heads up the street.

I touch the cards, these things that were my mother’s. I try to feel her, but there is nothing except soft paper, fibers decayed beyond repair. I cut the deck deep. A thought takes root. It couldn’t be. They can’t be the cards.

“Three piles,” she says. She watches intently, as if expecting something to happen, then moves fast, shuffling, flying through paper and setting cards on the hood.

It’s a spread I haven’t seen before, not the Cross or the Six Rows; it’s seven cards in a V shape. Enola coughs and takes the cards before I can get a good look at them. “No good. Cut again.” She shuffles and spreads the cards faster. Before she clears the spread away I glimpse swords, a sea of them, and what might have once been a woman. Enola sweeps up the cards, taps the deck. She twitches. “Again.” I cut; she shuffles, spreads, then snatches the cards back. This time I catch a card that might have once been black. The Devil or the Tower, maybe. “It’s always the same,” she says and shuffles again, then sets the cards down to cut. I tell her to stop. She grabs my hand and forces me to cut the deck. When she tries to take the cards away again I catch her wrist.

I say, “Don’t.”

“Fuck,” she says. A perfect V of seven cards. The Devil, the Tower, the Queen of Swords, Three of Swords, a Hanged Man, and a card too worn to read. She tells me it’s the King of Swords. When I ask what it means she shakes her head and picks each card up, returning it to the deck and finally to her skirt. She flops back on the car, flat like a dead man. “They’re our cards,” she says, almost too quiet to hear.

“What?”

“It’s the same stuff over and over again.” She digs her index finger hard into her forehead. “They keep coming up in places they have no reason to be. Like if I’m reading some woman about having kids — bang, there they are. Tower. Devil. Death. And water. Shit, there’s water everywhere.”

A sick feeling comes, followed by a shadow. Yes, these cards are very old. This is what Churchwarry and I missed, the cards themselves.

“What did Frank tell you about the cards?”

“They were Mom’s and had been her mother’s before. I don’t know. It’s been more than six years. I don’t remember stuff like you do.”

The satisfaction in solving a riddle is the flash of insight that triggers a tiny burst of dopamine. This does not happen. This is cold sweat. The pictures in the book were Madame Ryzhkova’s cards, Amos’s, Evangeline’s. Enola tore them out because she’d seen them in her deck, Mom’s deck. The book found Churchwarry, a Ryzhkova, as if leading her back to Amos. Bringing us together to undo it. And I burned it. “You tore pictures of these cards out of my book. These cards. Why?”

“I had to, okay?”

I ask why, but she stays silent. “Enola, put the cards away.”

She won’t look at me. “No.”

“Give them to me.”

“No.” She gets to her feet. Enola with sea, sand, and shore. She’s tight and fierce, with no excess to her sinew and muscle, bones and bright burning like Blake’s tyger. She knows. Part of her believes she’s going to die.

A dresser drawer slides down the cliff, smashing into a bulkhead. That one had Dad’s watch that he wound long past the days when everyone else had switched to batteries. “I’ll fix it. I’m fixing it,” I say.

“There’s nothing to fix. This is just what happens.” Sick. Sick. Sick. A sour taste.

I hug her. She’s too old to piggyback, but I want to take us both away. “We’re going to leave. I’ll go with you. Anywhere you want. I don’t care. Let’s go. Wherever. You, me, Doyle, and Alice.”

“Brother mine, I love you some, but you’re a very bad liar.”

“I promise.” Mom must have been trying to get rid of the cards and Frank didn’t understand. A bookshelf careens down the bluff.

Enola looks out at the water. “It’s pretty here. I forgot that.”

“Can I see the cards?”

“Nope.”

“We don’t all die,” I tell her. “There’s me, and you don’t swim anymore.” I tell her we’ll go somewhere else, anywhere she thinks is pretty. I tell her there are libraries all over. I can work anywhere. We’ll be good again, she and I. I won’t parent her, I promise. I say I can teach her about books and she laughs.

Somewhere a part of us does this, leaves and gets right. We climb into her car and let the tires roll, counting one-eyed cars. We toss the cards in a river and it’s like Enola said, oysters up the sides like ruffles on panties. We rent a house, freshly painted and new. We start again.

This is not what happens.

There is a roaring sound when the foundation under the hallway breaks, followed by the kitchen, the refrigerator, cabinets, all toppling down. Frank runs out of his house, shouting. Shingles spring down the bluff. It is done. The house is destroyed.

Doyle jogs toward us from up the street. When he reaches us he picks up Enola in a hard, rocking squeeze. He puts her down when she smacks his side.

Frank has walked to the bluff. His hat lies behind him, discarded. He’s smaller, empty.

I walk toward him.

“She did love this house,” he says when I approach, as though it’s his life spilling down the cliff, not mine. Creaking gives way to a sharp snap and Frank shoves me back. Enola’s bed scrapes down the broken boards, coming to rest on a partially collapsed wall. “It’s all my fault.”

“I need to know about the cards you gave my sister. Did my mother tell you anything about them?”

“Your dad was going to move you. I told her it would kill me if she left. I couldn’t help it. Then she gave me her cards and told me to hang on to them. They were her mother’s and grandmother’s. I figured if she gave me something like that she’d be back.” He looks away from the rubble, back to me. Eyes bloodshot like beets, like my father’s dead eyes. “They passed those things down like they were jewelry.”

My skin feels too tight, like I might rupture. My mother must have read the end, the cards Enola keeps reading, the same thing Verona Bonn read, all the way back to Ryzhkova. They passed the cards to each other creating history, fingers touching paper, imbuing it with hope and fears, fear like a curse. Of course they wouldn’t clear their cards, they were talking to their mothers, and isn’t that part of why I’ve stayed here? The book noted a falling out between Ryzhkova and her apprentice, a falling out over the mermaid. Enola said that cards build history — what a perfect way to wound someone. The cards were hers, Ryzhkova’s, then Amos and Evangeline’s on down the line, each leaving themselves in the ink, each pulling from the deck, pulling in fears that work like poison.

The wind blows a sheet of paper across a split board. The only paper of consequence was never in my possession — it was in Enola’s.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He waits for me to answer.

“I’m sorry about the house,” I tell him. I’m not.

I leave him at the bluff, grieving the house. I hear him shuffling through bits and pieces, looking for her in the rubble. He’s lost her twice now. I only lost her once.

I see Enola dig her hand deep into her pocket, each shuffle working a hex into her skin. Doyle watches me, craning over the top of Enola’s head. He asks after Frank and looks at me with wariness, too alert. He’s touched the cards, Doyle who my sister lies to because she’s scared, because she loves him.

Alice emerges from the McAvoy house and trudges toward her father. It hurts to watch her put a hand on his shoulder when she’d rather do anything but. But that’s who she is — a daughter, a practical woman, the responsible kind. It hurts to see her pull him away from what was my house, toward the place I once wished I’d lived.