Page 25 of All Saints Day
“Had one of my dreams again,” his voice drops almost to a whisper, making my heartbeat pick up.
“About Abigail?” Rosie soothes as my eyes fall on the tapestry of my Mother’s namesake Saint; a woman with milk-white skin draped in blue robes tending a busy beehive.
“No, about…” my father’s voice trails off.
I don’t need to see him to know he’s made some kind of silent gesture toward me.
Rosie doesn’t have a tapestry of Saint Francis with his birds on her wall—but I imagine the friar just as he is in the windows ofSaint Brigid’s—where Dad and I attend mass when he has the wherewithal to take me.
Unable to help myself, I squirm until I’m laid almost horizontal across the couch—careful to keep up a steady, rhythmic clicking of Gameboy buttons so that neither Dad nor Rosie catch wise to my peering over the top of the cushions of the couch to watch as Rosie pulls the first of her long, thin tarot cards from the fanned spread before her.
“Anything in particular?” Rosie fishes for details as Dad shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
I duck down just in time to catch my Father dart a glance at the couch through the narrow space between two of the back cushions.
“It’s going to sound absolutely crazy if I say it,” he lets out a worried laugh, turning his attention back to Rosie, her hooded eyes patient.
“Alright, straight to it then,” she sighs as she flips over the first card; a young knight in shining onyx plate armor with dark hair just like mine leaping forward on a white horse—his sword raised high in the air.
The knight’s sword bears a pommel that looks like the castle-shaped chess piece–the rook, the affectionate nickname my father has used for me, ‘the littlest castle in castle security.’
When the cards are upright, I struggle to read the small black lettering—but when the cards are upside down for Rosie at the table—they’re right-side up for me peeking from the couch. I squint to make out the tiny script letters: Knight of Swords.
The two of them look up at one another, and I only have a fraction of a second to hit the deck before their two heads snap toward the couch.
Both let out an anxious laugh before Rosie breaches the silence.
“Well, alright—moving right along,” she scoffs as I press my eye to the space between the cushions, peering cautiously at her next selection.
Rosie pulls a card printed with a man and a woman in the nude standing in high grass—a small mountain range in the background against the blue sky; a host of five angels with wings in the clouds above sounding their golden trumpets as the rays of the sun shine over all.
I can’t read the text this time, but I’ve seen this card many times before; the man with his dark hair and the woman with her long, snarling red curls reminiscent of my own parents: The Lovers.
My father grips the kitchen table so hard that Rosie’s china teacup rattles in its saucer.
“It’s a long way off yet,” Rosie chuckles, clearly taken aback by my father’s stricken, ashen features. “Is this somethin’ you’ve really been worrying about, Paddy?” she tries to make light of the situation, but my father looks as if he’s seen a ghost.
“Turn the third card for us, Rosie,” he says slowly and calmly—even though Rosie can tell he’s anything but.
I sit holding my breath—my video game music is the only haunting sound for a moment that seems to stretch into eternity.
Both Rosie and my father make tiny, sharp intakes of breath—not quite a gasp.
A black stone turret rises into a stormy sky—golden lightning bolts striking the dark tower; flames pouring from every open window, two men in red and blue robes—plummeting to their deaths in the unseen below.
The memory—beginning to burn like celluloid burning away on a too-hot projector—shows the faces of the men on the tower card rendered in impossible detail, miniature portraits of Michael and myself screaming silently as they plummet to their doom.
Suddenly it’s the summer before my sixteenth birthday—the middle of July and hot as hell.
I was supposed to be at summer school, crammed into a desk in a classroom without air conditioning in the 90-degree heat with nothing but a box fan and a middle-aged man droning on aboutpre-calculus. Instead, I was at home in the swishy condo unit Dad upgraded us to once his contracts started picking up big time a few years ago.
After Tommy Doyle almost got hit by the Genovese’s—Castle Security became synonymous with quality amongst the white-collar criminals of the city. Dad started doing big business—and we moved into this place with the tall windows, fancy marble and chrome fittings, and our own heated one-car garage.
My father had yelled at me to get out of bed and get a move on as he rushed out the door, but that was it. No one was there to make sure I actually did as I was told. It was too hot, and I had stayed up too late reading the latest Andy Pendragon’s Magic Academy book the night before. I decided to sleep the day off in my air-conditioned room and deal with the consequences when and if my father came home that night.
In the hazy memory—I hear the muffled sounds of men shouting just before the gunshots; two loud staccato blasts that have me up and out of my bed in the blink of an eye.
Through the adrenal wash of panic, I barely register the heavy sound of the front door to our condo slamming shut—horrible moans echoing from the den beneath my bedroom.
