The Book of Daniel (18 page)

I wished I still had a manual car because getting up as good a rant without one has so much less
oompah
, and right about there I might have gone a little faster or a little longer than necessary before shifting into second, and my old car would have growled,
grrrrr
and then shot off like a rocket.

“
Thank you
for reminding me why I don’t do wide-eyed, corn-fed, delusional-cat-walking cowboys who think things can be all idyllic and shit.”

Grrrrr
… A little grinding and then third, and the power, well… I wanted to hear that
vroom vroom
… How childish is that?

“
Thank you
for putting a little perspective on what turned out to be a great weekend of hot sex. I want you to be the first to know: tomorrow, I start looking for hot men who don’t
mind
me leading with my wallet,
at all
. It’s a shallow pool, but somebody’s gotta swim in it.”

Note to self: buy chlorine.

I don’t know how big St. Nacho’s actually is, but I hadn’t even shifted into fourth before I arrived at Nacho’s Bar, where I decided to get out and have a drink or three. After that, I took a little walk to clear my head. I must have gone up and down all the little beach access streets at least twice. The interesting thing about that slightly inebriated stroll around town was that for the first time ever, I didn’t see anyone I knew. Everyone seemed like a total stranger, from the dog-walkers to the beachgoers, to the soccer moms herding their kids into Bêtise for ice cream.

I passed my gym without going in, which was a shame because I’d missed another appointment with Jordan. I blew off apologizing in favor of wandering, unhappy and alone, and chain-smoking, which was gradually making me feel sick and gray and dirty. The
third
time I passed Rune Nation, I finally stopped.

I wasn’t thinking anything more profound—or less desperate—than
why the fuck not
? Let’s see what the oft-quoted Minerva from Rune Nation has to say to me.

Bring it. The fuck. On.

There was a light chiming sound when I pushed open the door, and I was immediately overpowered by the smell of incense. It wasn’t unpleasant, I guess. It had light overtones of sandalwood and maybe jasmine. The scent wasn’t refreshing in the way walking along the boardwalk had been, but it offered something vaguely weighty to the moment, like putting words in bold type, that made my initial meeting with Minerva feel portentous.

I’d seen Minerva, but only out of the corner of my eye—brief flashes of the colorful fabric of her clothes when I’d glimpsed her dodging me. Now that I was to meet her in person, I was nervous and self-conscious—aware I smelled of sweat and cigarettes and probably the alcohol I’d drunk only a little while before.

When she came through the beaded curtain, I knew we were equally surprised. I don’t know what I imagined, but it was possible I’d prepared myself to face down Medusa.

In reality, Minerva was nothing more than a middle-aged, slightly dumpy lady with dark curly hair and brown eyes in a benign, moon-shaped face. She didn’t walk, she sailed, yachtlike, from behind glass cases that held a myriad of crystals and jewelry, glass bottles and books, and when she took my hand in hers to shake it, she frowned at me as though I were the biggest disappointment she’d had in a long, long time.

“Daniel Livingston, I presume?”

I smiled tightly.
Because that never gets old.

I looked into her eyes, which were expectant and maybe a little frightened, and said, “I’m not the Antichrist.”

As an icebreaker, it didn’t do much good. She drew her hand back and frowned at me like a teacher who had just discovered a dead frog in her desk.

“What brings you here, Mr. Livingston?”

“I don’t know, really.” I glanced back through the tinted windows of her shop, which were covered in great billows of gauzy fabric. “What exactly do you do here?”

She folded her arms across her ample bosom. “As you can see we sell jewelry, incense, charms, books, crafts by local artisans, and I do psychic readings.”

“I want
that
.” There would never be a better day for me to take a swan dive into the occult. “I want one of those. A psychic reading.”

“Are you a believer?”

No
. “Yes.”

“Is there something special that’s troubling you?”

Yes, everything
. “No. Not particularly.”

“Do you have something in particular that you want to change?”

“No.”
Yes.

“I see.” Minerva took my arm and led me to a table set up on the far side of the shop. It was dainty and small—covered with a couple of pretty tablecloths and topped with a round of glass. It looked like it had been designed with a little girl’s ideal tea party in mind—or a teddy bears’ picnic. There were stones and crystals scattered across the tabletop, mostly different types of quartz, from smoky to amethyst to some pretty milky rose quartz shards.

At that point, I didn’t feel like I had a lot left to lose, so consulting Minerva made as much sense to me as anything else I’d done. It was like discovering the flaws in a business plan or educating myself about my opposition before going into a tough negotiation. At best it was an excellent practice and at worst it couldn’t hurt.

“Do you use tarot cards?” I asked, because it seemed to me that most people in her line of business used cards or some such thing. From what I’d read—and it wasn’t much—modern day fortune-tellers read palms, cast runes, or laid out cards. They called themselves seers or psychics.

“I have used cards, yes.” She eyed me as she placed an incense stick into a holder on a small tray of fresh flowers and fruit I thought might be an offering and lit it. “I don’t need them.”

“I see.”

Her lips thinned into a tight smile. I guessed the joke was on me. “Using things like runes or cards or coins works best when you have a specific question in mind.”

“Mother nature only answers when we know what the question is?” I asked. If that was the case, I was shit out of luck.

“I should say not. In those cases casting or divining objects help the subject answer his or her own questions better than I ever could. With you, though… You don’t even know the problem.”

“How can you tell that?”

“You’re a blank slate.”

“I get that a lot, actually.”

She folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. I have to say that the sickly sweet fragrance was killing me up this close. Anyone who bitched to me about secondhand smoke was going to get an earful about incense the next time they did it.

“So what do I do?”

“Just relax, Mr. Livingston. This won’t hurt a bit.” She put her hands over mine as she closed her eyes. “Probably.”

I don’t know much about psychics, but she was doing a credible job of acting like one, I guess. She sort of hummed deep in her throat and swayed a little. She seemed to hear something from far away. She paused, poised like she was listening, and nodded as though being instructed by an unseen entity. I rolled my eyes.

She wasn’t really selling it. I’d seen better psychics at a school carnival—neighborhood moms dressed up like gypsies with painted-on beauty marks and designer knockoff scarves…

When at last she spoke I gathered my patience for the harangue I felt coming, and she didn’t let me down.

“Dan Livingston, I have foreseen many things. You’ve come to St. Nacho’s for a member of your family, but it is you, most of all, who needs what St. Nacho’s has to offer. You are to be pitied. You are empty of all but dross.”

Okay,
dross
? I didn’t even know what dross was, but I resented the implication.

Her voice was positively stentorian when she spoke again. “Heed this warning for it comes not from me but from
the Mother herself
: you are on the precipice of change. You can be humble and teachable, or you can stay your course and destroy St. Nacho’s forever. Stop what you’re doing before you rend asunder the fabric of the very town that will
save your life
.”

I pulled my hands out. “You are certifiably insane.”

When I got up to leave, she stopped me.

“Here, all right.
Okay
. Wait.” Maybe she was done—finally—doing her shtick. “I have something for you.”

“What?” I was still wary.

“I keep seeing this.” She took out a pad of paper with some cartoon kittens on it, and a black felt marker. She worked on a drawing for a minute like a little kid, the tip of her pink tongue stuck out at an odd angle as she turned the paper this way and that to get it right. She sighed and dropped all pretense, and in that moment she looked a lot like a teacher I liked in high school, someone for whom I’d caused a lot of trouble. I’d been extremely competent with numbers and science—really I excelled in every subject—but my persuasive writing skills were poor, and it consistently dragged my grades down. Mrs. McCall worked with me privately, time and again, until I could write an essay that was good enough not only to pass her class but to win a local essay contest and be reprinted in the newspaper.

The words
humble
and
teachable
brought the memory back so clearly that tears stung my eyes for a second. I
was
humbled back then. I learned to admit there were things I had to struggle with, even though I was considered to be highly intelligent. I believed at the time that I’d never forget the lesson—that even the best and brightest have areas in life where the work is really hard and the outcome uncertain.

I watched her silently as she drew what looked to me like a plus sign on top of a bookcase over the symbol for pi. Under that she drew a curved vertical line with four horizontal slashes through it. There were odd little apostrophe marks and things, but it was basically just those two symbols, one stacked on top of the other.

“I need to know if it means anything to you. Does it?”

“Yeah,” I said without reacting, even though I was stunned. “I’ve seen that before.”

Tattooed on my back.

The only people who had ever seen it on me were the girl at the Santa Monica tattoo parlor where I’d had it done, the man I’d slept with the night I’d gotten it, and Cam. My doctor hadn’t seen it, nor had Jordan, my PT. Not even my brother had seen my tattoo yet.

I studied her face to see if there was some subterfuge there—like maybe she was in on some kind of con with Cam, or she’d seen me through the window of my house. I’m good at reading faces, and I found no subterfuge. It was entirely possible that she didn’t know anything about my tattoo.

“Okay, so what is it?” I asked.

“Hell if I know.” She glanced up from her work. “But it’s something important. Whatever this is, you have to carry it with you always. No excuses.”

“Okay.” That wouldn’t be hard. It was a damned tattoo, after all.

“When you find out what this is”—she waved the little paper at me—“you’ll have all the answers you’ll need.”

“Okay.” I said again.
Doable.

“The junior college has a Japanese language department. This looks like Kanji, at least, so you can start there.”

I thanked her and gave her a credit card to pay, then shoved the note she’d drawn for me into my pocket when she asked me to sign. Before I left, she stopped me briefly.

“Thank you, Mr. Livingston, for stopping by.”

“My pleasure,” I said, and meant it. If nothing else, it reminded me I hadn’t written to Mrs. McCall in years, and I wanted to. I remembered I could learn new things, even hard things, and become better for it. That was worth something, even if it came from a charlatan psychic in a dinky town like St. Nacho’s.

Once I’d stepped back out into the twilight, I returned to the real world. Everything that happened in Minerva’s incense-scented bubble seemed almost unreal. I’d met the famed Minerva, and she hadn’t turned me into a toad. It became harder to believe she didn’t have some sort of inside information about my tattoo.

She probably knew all about it beforehand, that was all.

I was okay. Everything was going to be fine.

My good mood fell like the Hindenburg when I passed the firehouse on the way to get back to my car. I was
afraid
to go inside—afraid to see Cam at all, in case he was still angry or in case I would do something stupid like grovel at his very attractive feet. I skittered past quietly, and headed for my car and home.

I remembered someone I knew who could—theoretically—tell me what my tattoo meant.

At least one of my problems could be solved that night.

Chapter Eighteen

Truth.

I hung up the phone after talking to Hana Ishikawa, a woman I worked with from time to time when I needed a Japanese-language translator or a cultural liaison at Livingston Properties.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of Hana when I got the damned tattoo in the first place. Maybe because I was embarrassed, or maybe because she was a good friend of Bree’s.

I worried she might hold the whole girlfriends’ pact sacred and would no longer speak to me, plus it would have been awfully hard to scan my skin. She was pleasant though, when she picked up the phone, and helpful, indicating that all was not lost from that quarter.

I used a wand scanner on Minerva’s little drawing and then e-mailed the image to Hana, and it turned out the symbol I’d let some hot girl half my age inscribe permanently on my skin was
shinjitsu
. Truth.

Which was ironic, really.

I’d carried a lot of things around with me, but truth wasn’t known to be one of them.

After I found that out, every time I thought about my tattoo, it burned like a brand, searing me with guilt and anxiety and plain old shame.

I walked to the liquor store, acutely aware that I had nothing to do that night—or for that matter, in St. Nacho’s at all—but get hammered and live up to everyone’s worst expectations of me. Which is how I came to be passed out on the couch in my underwear when the phone rang at some ungodly, brightly lit hour the next morning.