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“I do have friends actually.” I glowered at her. She was right. There were only two girls I could possibly call friends And I only ever saw them at Luca’s, a restaurant where I still worked occasional shifts. They were fellow waitresses and last time I had seen them was three weeks ago when I had worked my last shift there.
Roopa saw that my mood had soured and she looked a tad contrite. But only the tiniest bit. It didn’t matter. My annoyance had already passed as quickly as it had come.
“Theo is a good man,” she conceded. “He told me he would pay me money for my magic and he did. Astaghfirullah! Magic, he called it. I told him is was God’s gift. He said other people needed the gift God had given me. People who could pay a lot. And what choice did I have? If I didn’t have this house my family would have found a way to get rid of me. And at least now I have something to leave to my children. And I give more zakat than I ever gave before and I can only pray God will forgive me.”
“If you believe God gave you your magic then how could it be bad to use the gift that God gave you to help other people?”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe you are not such an embryo after all. Now out with a secret! We agreed on a vision, and you have five minutes left before I decide not to sign this paper.”
I rolled my eyes heaven-wards. I had thought she might have forgotten her little ultimatum in the middle of her tirade.
“Fine,” I muttered, wracking my mind to find something appropriate.
I really didn’t want to have to go into any of my past visions about murder because that would open up various cans of worms. I didn’t want to talk to her about my biological mother Magda’s death, the real reason that Storm had wanted me to see a therapist in the first place. Why dwell on the past when I could look forward to a future of happily delivering vengeance on the evil bastard that killed her in the first place? I didn’t want to tell her about the dream that I’d had just this morning of the handsome yet cruel-faced man shackled to his prison of a chair. Half naked as he had been, Roopa in her current mood would no doubt have many choice words to say about that.
I sighed, staring at a rose on Roopa’s coffee table. It was a single yellow rose. I wondered where it had come from because I had never seen flowers here before, and Roopa was definitely was not the sort to buy them for herself. Was the rose why she was in a mood today? Was that why I was seeing the rose change? It went from yellow to orange a deep dark scarlet that was so full of a density of red that it was almost black. And then it was black. A deep dark, the color of ink. I shuddered. A whispering hissing music was coming from it. The sound was a taunt, as jarring as the sound of unkind laughter. Its cruelty made me grind my teeth.
Suddenly I was filled with anger. I want to tear the goddamn thing to shreds. I was going to crush it to smithereens. I was going to vent my desire for the dark and the deadly on it. My navelstone was vibrating, sending quivers deep into my stomach. Its movement was violent. That had not happened in a long time. It wanted something. It wanted me to do something. It wanted me to tear the rose apart. It wanted me to find the source of that laughter and cut it to pieces.
I had to force myself to breathe deeply and steadily. I had to force myself to believe that the rose was just a rose. But the laughing taunting whispering music of the rose grew louder. It had no words and yet I could almost decipher a meaning, as if I was hearing foreign language that I did not quite understand. The goddamn rose was taunting me. What the fuck? I reached out with great control and I forced myself to pick it up, to feel it and know that it was only a rose. But the moment that my fingers met the stem, the rose crumbled into ash.
There was a sharp pain in my thumb. I blinked in pain, and then the rose was there again and yellow again, Its green thorny stem between my finger and thumb had pricked me.
The vibration in my navelstone had stopped, but I was shaking.
“Well?” Roopa said impatiently.
“I saw a rose,” I told her. My voice came out croaky. My throat had gone painfully dry. I swallowed hard to ease the soreness but it didn’t work. For the first time in three weeks that sunshiny buoyant feeling inside me had fully dried up. I resorted to taking a sip of water from the glass that Roopa always brought me.
“A rose?” she said looking skeptical.
“A rose,” I repeated. My hand, which was still holding Roopa’s rose, was trembling.
She took her rose as if irritated that I had touched it. She placed it carefully back in its slim vase. “My son got it for me,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice that she could not hide.
“A rose isn’t enough to make me sign the paper,” she said.
“It was taunting me,” I said. “It was laughing at me.”
“In your dream? What does it mean?” she asked.
My fists were clenched so tightly that my nails were cutting into my palms. I opened them up and stared at the little crescent shapes left by my nails. “I don’t know. Someone was laughing at me.”
I was certain of it. Someone was out there laughing at me. I knew it in the way that I have that made the small things seem like the most important things in the world. As if they were signs that something bad was coming. No wonder Roopa thought I was mad. She had never had to experience one of my visions and how real they felt. It was like how dreams seemed to make total sense when you were in them but when you awoke and tried to tell it to someone you realized all of the gaps in the logic. That was what my visions and psychic dreams were like. That was what this new music was like. They were so real, but as soon as I reached out to touch them they disintegrated and made no sense.
I had been still staring at the rose. I looked up to Roopa and found her studying my face with a frown. She took pity on me. She reached over to take the piec
e of paper that I had put onto the coffee table and signed it. “Next time you will tell me more about this dream,” she insisted.
By the time I was ready to leave my memory of the incident with the rose felt foolish. It was just a stupid rose after all. How bad could it be? As I put on my jacket, Roopa disappeared in through the door that I was not allowed to go through, and came back out with two plastic carrier bags. Inside each I could make out the outline of a stack of tupperware boxes which I knew from experience would all be filled with various home-cooked curries. The sight made my mouth water. Roopa’s home cooking had left me stunned the first time I had eaten it. It tasted like love poured into a dish.
“One for Theo, one for you,” she said as she ushered me impatiently towards the door.
“Thank you Roopa.” I gave her a big hug, squeezing her until she protested.
“You know you love it,” I said.
She needed my hugs even if she didn’t know it. I bet that prickly son of hers never bothered to hug her when he came over. Sometimes I got the feeling that in between each of my visits nobody had visited her at all.
