Wish Club Read online

  In the same way they had the last time, Mara and Lindsay worked up a short chant. They used the novel they’d read for their October meeting, The Kitchen Witches, as a sort of template for their spell, copying the structure and phrases, changing a few words here and there to fit their specific, diabetic-cat needs.

  The plan was to psychically bathe Tippy in white protective light, then douse him with green, the color of healing, then follow up with some red, the color of blood, since they couldn’t find, in any of their books, a color that corresponded to the pancreas.

  “Now change the light to a green healing light.” Lindsay directed the group visualization as they held hands around the grotesquely morphing Christmas tree candle. “Okay, now change it to red, the color of energy and strength.”

  After a minute or so, they began the chant, hesitantly at first, then as they repeated it, gradually stronger.

  We call upon the ancient power, in this time and in this hour.

  We ask please heal the cat, Tippy.

  It is our will, so mote it be.

  Gail started popping her eyebrows up and down every time they said “Tippy” and “it be,” accentuating the ridiculousness of the rhyme. After a couple of times through, a laugh she’d apparently been trying to suppress escaped out of her nose as a snort, which caused the giggles to infect Jill, too. Both of them tried to conceal their mirth, which was only made harder by an angry terrier glare from Mara.

  They finished chanting just as they had at the last meeting, with their arms up over their heads and heat pulsing through their connected palms.

  After they dropped their arms down, Claudia bent over the table to blow out the candle.

  “Wait!” Lindsay waved her hands. “Don’t blow it out. Remember we need to let the candle burn all the way down. To help ensure the spell will work.”

  “Oops.” Claudia stood back up. “I forgot. Sorry.”

  “Thank you, everyone.” The light freckles on Mara’s translucent skin ran together, covering her nose and cheeks, and she had bright red blotches on her face and neck as well. “I really appreciate you indulging me today. I hope I didn’t embarrass you too much.” She gave a nervous giggle. “Thanks.”

  “You’ll have to let us know how Tippy does,” Lindsay said.

  “Oh, I will. At the next Book Club.”

  “Speaking of which…” Gail picked her copy of Home up off the table. “Is there anyone here that still wants to talk about the book?”

  The group let out a groan.

  “Then maybe we should pick out a book for next time,” she said. “That is, if you still want to pretend this is a book club.”

  Gail finished cleaning up in the living room after everyone left. There were a few crumbs on the carpet and on the dark green damask of one of the couches, but that would have to wait until morning. She was tired and Emily, her early riser, would be up at six.

  The blob that had been the Christmas tree candle burned alone in the center of the coffee table. She leaned over it to blow it out, then stopped herself and stood back up.

  She went to get a plate from the kitchen and returned to the living room, cautiously picking up the candle to slip it underneath. There was so much melted wax it almost sloshed out the weak flame, but the flame survived, a tiny circle of light burning courageously in the center of the darkened room.

  Chapter Two

  The thermometer beeped at Claudia, sounding exactly like her alarm clock, and she wondered if somebody had made it that way on purpose: to remind her, every morning, that her clock was ticking.

  Holding the thermometer at the end of her outstretched arm, she read her temperature through blurry eyes: 97.4°. Damn. It had been up all week, and she’d allowed herself some hope. A positive pregnancy test would have made such a nice Christmas present, a happy ending to a long year of trying. She sank her head back onto her pillow and closed her eyes.

  The ongoing effort to start a family, and its ineffectiveness, was starting to wear on her, and on Dan—and on their marriage. They seemed to be bickering more and more lately and they weren’t bickerers. Old people were bickerers. They weren’t even old people, either. At least, that’s what Claudia had thought until they started trying to get pregnant. Everything she read on the subject made it sound as if she’d be washed up in two years, at the ripe old age of thirty-five.

  She’d watched with envy as Gail and John had seemed to effortlessly pop out a new kid every few years. Probably she and Dan should have started trying sooner, but they’d been so preoccupied with their careers. Well, Dan had been preoccupied, anyway. Now that Gail and John had their third, little Emily, on the scene, Claudia was pretty sure they were finished. It was still odd, sometimes, to watch Gail being a mom, especially such a good one. Claudia never could have envisioned that when a tall, red-haired, dressed-all-in-black Gail had darkened the door to her dorm room that first time, simultaneously lighting a cigarette and striking awe, and a little fear, into Claudia’s heart.

  It was Lindsay whom Claudia had pegged to start having babies right away, with her mother-hen ways and high-school love of babysitting. After all, it wasn’t as if she needed the extra money, unlike Claudia, who looked at all the snot-nosed kids she babysat for as just a way to put herself into a new pair of Calvin Klein jeans. Claudia wondered if maybe all those years of thinking of kids as snot-nosed was karmically blocking her from having a snot-nosed one of her own now.

  But Lindsay and James didn’t have any kids yet, either. Claudia figured that was because Lindsay was too obsessed with, well, with Lindsay. All her causes and trendy activities—had Lindsay really thought she could talk her and Gail into fencing lessons?

  “What are you stewing about so early in the morning?” Dan reached an arm over Claudia’s stomach, giving her a little hug.

  She rolled sideways to face him, his arm now encircling her waist. He slid his other arm underneath her and pulled her closer.

  “We’re just having…it’s just taking us so long to have a baby,” Claudia spoke into the warm curve of his shoulder. “It makes me wonder, sometimes…” She let her voice trail off.

  He brushed the hair off the side of her face. “I wonder too, sometimes, why it’s not happening for us yet, but we haven’t even talked about scientific intervention. I know conceiving a baby in a petri dish isn’t very romantic, but—”

  “It’s not really that. It’s the fact that it’s not happening that makes me wonder why, if it’s not some kind of…I don’t know, sign. That we’re not supposed to have kids. Or that we’re not ready to.”

  “It’s pretty natural, don’t you think? To not feel ready?” Dan rolled onto his back, his arm still pinned underneath her. “But we’ve talked about this. Why we want kids—why we should start a family now.”

  It occurred to her then, as she studied the side of his face, the way he held his eyes on the ceiling when he spoke, that maybe he wasn’t as on-board with the whole baby idea as she’d previously thought.

  He turned to look at her. “You’re just discouraged because you don’t like it when things don’t go your way.”

  Claudia propped herself up on her elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s true, though. You get very…” He paused, as if he wanted to choose the perfect word. “Pouty, when things don’t go your way.”

  “Pouty?”

  “Uh-huh. See? You’re doing it now.”

  Claudia took a breath in, ready to deny it, when she realized her lower lip had already jutted out.

  “Can’t argue with the truth, huh? You’re just lucky your little pout drives me mad, mad, mad.” He rolled over on top of her, wrestling with her, gently crushing her with his weight.

  Tears popped into her eyes. The back of her throat ached with them. She remembered when sex used to be like this—impulsive and fun. Not goal-oriented. She loved Dan so much and she wanted to have his children. Their children. She wanted to watch him be a father and she knew he’d be great at it
, the way kids always seemed to seek him out, to watch him make his funny faces and let him pull quarters out from behind their ears.

  More than anything, Claudia wanted Dan to want to be a father himself.

  He slid back down onto the bed and faced her. “Don’t worry so much.” He said it with a lightness in his voice that, had she wanted to look for trouble, could have been mistaken for indifference. She pressed her forehead against his chest to hide her tear-filled eyes and he hugged her close again, patting her back, rhythmically, absently, the way one might burp a baby.

  Snow fell in clumps from the sky. The flakes joined together in the air as if through togetherness their fall to the earth would be easier to bear. The grass was already coated with them, and the sidewalks and streets were starting to lose their battle, changing over from wet to lightly frosted with snow. Gail could not believe her luck.

  For the past six weeks, ever since the October Book Club meeting and their first witchy spell, there hadn’t been a single drop of moisture from the sky, but today—with just ten shopping days left until Christmas—it looked like a damned blizzard outside her window.

  The rosebush next to the garage still had leaves on it, and it was now blanketed with snow, which seemed odd, somehow. Wrong. She looked over into the neighbor’s yard, where all the rosebushes had been lovingly mulched and covered with Styrofoam protectors months earlier.

  Gail’s eyes returned to her poor, miserable rosebush. Oh well, too late now. It had survived plenty of other winters without her interference, and it looked like it was going to have to survive at least one more.

  Emily was banging something in the other room. Gail wished the babysitter, Ellen, would get her to stop. Gail had been counting the minutes until Ellen’s arrival and now that she was finally here, all Gail wanted to do was go back into the other room and continue taking care of Emily. But she needed to do her shopping and she couldn’t be Santa with Emily around. What is Emily hitting?

  Gail wondered if maybe she were sometimes being unfair to Emily, if all her patience for dealing with two-year-olds had been used up on Will and Andrew. The previous week, when Gail had run into the living room and caught Emily banging a potato against the window, she’d screamed, “No banging potatoes on the window!”

  Gail was not a yeller, but she’d been so ferociously mad. Now she had a hard time deciding what was more ridiculous: what she’d yelled, or how angry she’d been when she’d yelled it.

  For the better part of her life, Gail hadn’t been able to imagine herself yelling at all—except for maybe lines on a stage. But the safer choice had been business school and a degree in advertising, not drama and a degree in the fine arts. Besides, advertising appealed to her creative and avant-garde side. And she did it her way, as unconventionally as she could, choosing to study abroad for a year in Argentina, which was, ironically, where she met John, the beginning of the end of her unconventional ways.

  She loved her life now, she really did. But still, there were days when she wished she were back in her brief advertising career, when she still had the chrome desk at Foote, Cone, an admin at her disposal, great suits she could wear. At the very least, she’d settle for being addressed with a little respect—and maybe, just once in a while, a few hours to herself.

  The snow was coming down even harder now. Gail couldn’t get over it. The boys had been playing in their sandbox up until yesterday, and now it was nearly buried under a carpet of white. The highway was going to be a mess because of it, and she didn’t dare drive downtown in this. Maybe she should take the El, she thought, but she hadn’t started her shopping yet and she knew she wouldn’t be able to carry everything back on the train, especially not the barrage of large plastic things from China she needed to buy at Toys Us. She held her coffee mug up to her chin and curled her lip at the inconvenience descending outside her window.

  At least her kids would be thrilled. They might get a white Christmas after all, something they’d been worried about this whole flakeless season: If there isn’t any snow, how will Santa land his sleigh?

  Yeah, Gail thought, but now, thanks to the snow, Santa’s sleigh might be empty. She set her mug on the counter and took out her shopping list again to decide on her next move. Gail laughed at herself; she’d made a list and was checking it twice.

  “Okay, Mrs. Claus,” she said to herself, stuffing the list back into her purse, “just get into your car and go to the mall like all the rest of the poor Santas out there.” This was shopping. Since when had she ever let a little bad weather stand between herself and that?

  Jill unlocked the door to her studio and turned on the lights. The overhead fluorescents flickered, then came on, brightening slowly. It was a frigid December day inside as well as out, and she hugged herself as she walked across the room to turn up the heat. The silver globe of the thermostat felt icy against her fingers. Everything felt cold-soaked. She hadn’t been there in a few days.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows lined her studio on two sides. One set looked out to the west, the other to the north, and from those she could see the self-storage facility across the street and also, just to the east, the Metra train tracks—raised on a berm of earth, rocks, and garbage, all of which was now buried under an inch of snow.

  Jill leaned against the window’s brick frame and looked out, her arms still crossed on her chest, and watched a Metra train glide by, making far less noise than the El, almost silent in comparison. The El tracks, raised on a stout metal trestle, passed right next to the west windows. The gray paint on the El’s bridge peeled back in more places than it clung, revealing rusted swaths of metal.

  There’s beauty in those ugly train tracks, she thought. She admired their strength, the way they gave an industrial feel to the neighborhood—a reminder that this was still the City of Big Shoulders, and not just a yuppie-filled City of Little Cubicles. The sound of the train hurtling by, rhythmically, every ten minutes, soothed her when she worked, gave her comfort to know that the outside world was still carrying on around her, even as she felt time stand still.

  Jill turned back to the inside of her studio. She’d been avoiding this place, trying not to think of the dark turn her paintings had taken lately. She’d found herself mixing darker and darker colors, straying farther and farther from the cool color palette until, at the end of the day, she would step back and look at the two or three paintings she’d been working on, only to see how angrily the tarry, black-red colors had been swirled together.

  She’d been feeling more lost in her work than ever before. She would get so caught up, so into flow, that the hours would fly by like the trains outside, almost without notice. Yet when she looked at her recent works, she was depressed by the results. They weren’t meant to be happy paintings, but they weren’t meant to be so dark or full of angst, either. That wasn’t her thing. And with her opening coming up in March, she didn’t want to give the impression that it was.

  It had something to do with all that witchy nonsense going on at Book Club, of that she was certain. Casting spells. Of all the crazy things for Lindsay to drag her into, this one took the cake, even worse than her insane freshman-year plan to start the first sorority at the School of the Art Institute. Still, she had to admire Lindsay’s chutzpah. But witchcraft?

  It wasn’t that she was a terribly religious person, she wasn’t, at least not anymore, but the whole idea of witchcraft made her very uneasy. It must play upon the part of her the Catholic church had inculcated at an early age—the part deep inside that, although she said she didn’t fear fire and brimstone, still did. It was too bad she was hosting the next meeting or she could just refuse to go. Well, with any luck, Mara’s cat was already dead and that would be the end of that.

  She took off her coat and put on her painting smock, a Northwestern Hospital lab coat she had borrowed from a med-student boyfriend years ago and never returned. She took an elastic pony-tail holder out of the pocket and pulled back her glossy black hair.

  Jill sat on he
r table and rubbed her hands together, looking around the room, trying to decide which painting she would work on today. She shook with a small chill. Why isn’t this room warming up? She sipped the coffee she’d brought with her. It was cold now, too.

  She removed one of her paintings from its easel and leaned it against the wall, then carried the empty easel over closer to the north windows. Today, she was going to start something new. It was time for a change.

  The bright white of the fresh canvas contrasted with the paint-splattered frame of the easel as she tightened it into place. She opened her jar of gesso after a brief struggle with the lid and stirred it patiently. With her three-inch brush, she applied the white gesso to the virgin white of the canvas and began to think about what she would paint there.

  She worked for hours, not even stopping for a cigarette. Jill purposefully concentrated on using only the cool color palette, putting big globs of blue and green on her mahogany board, and only tiny dabs of red and yellow, to remind herself to use them sparingly. She was painting with the knife today, something she hadn’t done in a while. It seemed somehow right. It shouldn’t get too detailed, too small. It was going to be an abstract, of course, and for right now it was okay that it was aimless. She could make a point later. Right now, the most important thing was to get back into it. To have fun—something that, she had noticed lately, seemed to be missing.

  She and Michael had broken up recently, but that wasn’t it. No, she was fairly certain that was a good thing. And she’d been dating plenty in the few months since then, but God, where had the fun gone? It seemed like all these guys were out wife shopping. Wasn’t it supposed to be women over thirty who were desperate? To his credit, at least Michael had started out fun.