Page 14 of Kiwi Gold
She nodded slowly, then turned in my direction and said, her voice musical and nearly hypnotic, “Give me your right hand, and I will tell you what you were, and what you may become.”
She sounded deadly serious, and my heart failed me once more, because it was as if I were hearing my mother’s voice.
A silly thing,I thought,for a silly night.I held out my right hand, and the fortune-teller took it.
Her hand was dry and warm, and it all felt much too intimate.
The man asked, “All right?” Quietly. He didn’t touch me, though. Unlike my mother, I hadn’t found a set of boundaries that worked for me in this in-between world, and I didn’t know whether I wanted him to touch me or not. His hand would feel strong around mine, I knew, but how could I know it would stop there?
I nodded, and he sat beside me, close but not too close, the same way he had when we were sitting by the back door. He wasn’t a bulky fella, but he was a solid presence all the same.
I have sisters,he’d said. He didn’t feel like a brother, though.
The woman’s voice, when she spoke again, was low and powerful, sending a dark thrill through me as if she were the necromancer she was pretending to be. “A Water hand. A hand of sensitivity, the palm square, the fingers long. The heart line cuts deepest of all in you. The waves roll toward you and break against you, always, from everyone around you, so many and so often that it’s hard for you even to realize all you are taking in. It can be a heavy burden to know so much. Intuition, they call it, as if it’s magic.Yourmagic, maybe, because you hear more than the words a person says. You listen to the tone of a voice and hear the strain in it. You see the set of a shoulder and feel the pain it carries. You touch the innocent, and your touch gives comfort. You understand the pain of others, but I think you take care, these days, that it doesn’t become your pain, hmm? Too much care, maybe. You build walls around your too-tender heart, but you are alone behind them.”
This wasn’t real insight. It was pleasing the customer. Most people would think those words applied to them. Who didn’t want to be told that they had a tender heart?
You touch the innocent, and give comfort.When my hands were on a newborn’s body, when I was slowing my heartbeat and feeling the softness in that tiny form as she relaxed … Or when one of the girls woke with a bad dream, and I held her in my arms and tried to give her the message that my mother’s arms, my father’s arms had always given me, that she was safe. Even when, especially when, the world didn’t feel safe to me.
I wasn’t a bloody NICU nurse! I was a newborn photographer and a mother, that was all. Of course I could tell how babies were feeling. Babiestoldyou, if you knew how to listen at all.
The woman was talking about the life line now, the head line. I was intelligent and strong. Right. More customer service. Not so strong when I was quaking with three A.M. fears, was I?
“The heart line again,” she said. “The spikes here, crossing it, under the smallest finger.” She touched them with a curved nail, and I saw the faint cross-hatching. Which, again, everybody probably had. “More walls,” she told me. “More protection. Yet the Mound of Venus is well rounded, and the heart line itself is long and curved as well as deep. You were not born to be alone. You ache for the pleasure a man offers, and the comfort, too, and wonder if it’s truly possible. If it’s even real. You long for the sensuality he might release and the peace he could bring, yet you turn away from the chance. You fear that his love will not be enough to keep him holding you, so although you want to open, you keep yourself closed. I see an early loss, and a later one, too, confirming your fears. That love hurts too much when it leaves, and trust can be broken. I see the pain when love is not given in equal measure, when you feel you cannot have what others do, and you fear you don’t deserve it.”
My hand jerked in hers.
I said, “I can’t.” Realizing in the same moment that I should have said, “That’s enough.” Or, “Thank you.” Or something strong, if I had those walls. But I didn’t.
She let go of my hand and looked me in the face again. Her eyes were infinitely liquid, impossibly wise. “The ones you’ve lost,” she said. “They can only be truly gone if you shut the door on them. And the ones yet to come … they will knock. Will you answer?”
Party trick,I told myself.Intuition, like she said. Body language. Tone of voice.I said, getting some steadiness back with a major effort, “Now do him.” And stood up. I tried to smile, like it was just for fun, like I’d told my mum, not like a cloud of smoke was circling me. Warm and pink and comforting, or billowing up from the fires of Hell, I once again couldn’t tell, and that was an unsteady place to be.
The man said, “After that? Not sure I want my palm read.” It should have sounded amused. It didn’t, quite.
“Well, I did it,” I said. “I’ll tell myself it was brave.” I couldn’t think how to say,If you did it, too, it’d make it easier for me to brush it off, and I need to brush it off.
He stood up and said, “Then I will, too.” After that, he sat in the chair, waited for me to sit down beside him, then put his hand out, palm up, and told the woman, “Right, then. Do your worst.”
7
NOT QUITE CINDERELLA
Lachlan
The palm-reading had shaken her. I didn’t know why—just seemed like normal fortune-teller generalities to me—but it had definitely happened. I’d give her a few minutes to collect herself, and then we’d go out and have some champagne and, if I had my way, more than a few dances. The band had softened the tone a bit, finally. Which was good, because I was ready for a bit of romance, the kind where you take a woman in your arms and whirl her around the floor, making her feel taken care of for that window of time you spend in fantasyland, and maybe a little carried away, too. Not an easy thing to find, not in modern-day New Zealand, but they’d be doing it here. Only good thing about going to a ball, I’d have said.
That makes me sound like a romantic, which I just exactly wasn’t. I liked that kind of dancing, is all. Playacting. Roleplaying, you could say. It was fun, and it tended to lead to more fun, in my experience. And possibly more roleplaying, of the come-down-over-you-like-darkness variety.
If I wanted a chance at romance tonight, though, dancing-wise or otherwise, I needed to do this first. Lucky guesses or not, the fortune-teller’s arrows had struck home. All of that about protection and loss, and then there’d been, “You long for the sensuality he might release and the peace he could bring, yet you turn away from the chance.” That touch-me-not quality she had, and then the moment when I’d been holding her, shielding her from the street and the calling voices, and she’d forgotten to keep her shields up and had melted into me. Until she’d remembered to be guarded again.
The push and pull of her was only having one effect on me. It was drawing me closer like she’d woven a net. Or a spell. And I wanted to dance with her.
Just now, though, the fortuneteller was still peering at my hand. I wasn’t sure there was much to see there. Just a hand, not particularly clever. Stronger than some, maybe, used to doing a day’s work. Her voice was the kind of thrillingly low thing that should have caused the lanterns to flicker when she said, “A complicated hand. A contradictory hand. A Fire hand, large and broad, the creases distinct and the mounds defined. You will never suffer from lack of desire, or of will. But what is it that you want? In some things, it is clear. The head line is both long and deep. Your mind ranges far, and it explores deeply, and with passion. The heart line? Also deep, but broken. Those you love are lucky in your commitment, and they give you their trust. But how many have you loved, or not loved? That, I don’t see so clearly. The life line, too, is deep, showing that you experience widely, and richly, too, but it is short.”
Beside me, my nightdress-wearer—I needed to learn her name—went rigid. It was almost … fear. Why? I told her, “Not married, is why. You should be glad the heart line’s broken, I reckon. I should ask you about yours, all that ‘deep and curved’ business.” Trying to make a joke of it, even though it didn’t feel like a joke.
She said, “Never mind.” Her eyes had a golden gleam to them, up close like this, which must be the lamplight, and her voice was warm and a little husky. A woman who kept her secrets, which was exactly what the fortuneteller had said.
