spell jar

*NOTE: these characters emerge from my short story, Capturable, which would be Ch.1 in this thread of vignettes*

//

She couldn't help but feel bad for that blue-eyed freckled kid. Marshall's son, that is. He looked like he hadn't worn a suit since his senior prom. And not really a kid anymore, truth be told. He was college-aged. Tall. Slightly effeminate with the remaining dregs of his fidgety boyish charm.

Ever since she started her impending descent toward forty, everyone in their twenties seemed only a child. It was not a denigrating outlook promulgated with a sense of superiority and middle-aged wisdom but a byproduct of this burrowing sense of helplessness toward the nauseating arcs of life.

Some wistful Sylvia Plath quote had followed her since she landed her first real job in the art world (wherein she met Marshall Tollis) - something about being full of promise, "well-educated," and still "fading out into an indifferent middle age."

Sadie Aubert was a migraine sufferer, a matter of inheritance it seemed. Genetics. As a child, she spent many hours in her mother's dark room, lulled by the hum of the air purifier, staring at the delicate twinkling dints and caverns of crystals and geodes displayed on floating shelves.

Her mother, always swaddled in satin and velvet and smelling of sweat and eucalyptus would keep her eyes closed for however many hours the body demanded. Her mother, with a pulsing vein at her temple and a knot fixed between her shoulder blades from doleful days spent slumped against feather pillows.

What else was Sadie to do but stare at her mother's hands like a resentful palm reader, scared to grow to fruition?

After all, inheritance was a very one-sided question for Sadie, as she came from a long line of father-absent pairings. Her own father was a mystery, a sperm donor whose genetic contribution did little to stop her from becoming the carbon copy of her mother, Autumn.

Autumn Aubert was the daughter of an established energy healer and spiritual guru in Northern California, who, after scaling Mount Shasta in the 70s, dropped her surname and went only by 'Seraphine.'

"It's a celestial name I gained when I visited Telos. I had never experienced love like that. It made me glow, it made me into a flame of light," she had recited. She didn't permit being called by any other moniker, including that as universally endearing as "Mama" or "Grammy."

Shortly before Sadie started middle school, Seraphine trekked into the wilderness to die. Neither her daughter nor her ex-husband, not even her oldest friend, Ada, knew she was sick. The posthumous discovery of her medical records, of an inoperable well-burrowed brain tumor, quickly deescalated Seraphine's disappearance from a foreboding mountain mystery to simply her 'last journey,' made eagerly and gratefully by a soul unafraid.

At first, Autumn was furious. Her mother hadn't said goodbye. Then, eventually, she burst out of her room, took Sadie by the hand, and dragged them both to Pluto's Cave on the outskirts of Mount Shasta.

To 11-year-old Sadie, it was a terrible gaping open mouth in the earth. Haunting. The nearly 200,000-year-old lava tube seemed to threaten to cave in completely at any moment, bent on swallowing her and her mother whole.

She can remember her mother's hands hooked under her armpits, helping lift her down the jagged terrain toward the cave opening. Braiding her hair on a rock as she complained (more out of fear than discomfiture or exhaustion). Above all, the slight chime from her mother's dangling mass of bracelets is forever imprinted in Sadie's mind, as she walked right down to the point where the light begins to wane. The point of no return.

Just shy of twelve, Sadie was at the age where one begins to acquire the kind of memory, living memory, unconstrained by time, that would hover above, crawl beneath, and overlay itself upon countless moments to come. The kind of memory by which one terrifying links their life.

In the last remaining beacon of grasping sunlight, feet frozen to the ancient exposed earth, Sadie watched as her mother approached the pitch dark. Her sense of childhood terror remained purblind to her mother's straggling grief.

For a minute, she considered her mother possessed, lured in by spirits, following in Seraphine's footsteps.

Autumn Aubert moved in a slow, lethargic shuffle, veering off to the right, intuitively wandering up to the sloping cave wall. Her hand traced the surface lightly as if brushing a hair out of place. Then, her daughter watched her appear to kiss the rockface once. There were teardrops at the bottom of her chin, ready to fall.

Then, before Sadie could utter a word of inquiry, Autumn turned back to the light, looking so much like her late mother in the half-dark.

"Let's head back," she pinched between her eyebrows. "I'm going to need to lie down for a bit when we get home."

//

Halfway to Portland, Sadie weaves to the side of the interstate to puke unceremoniously on the side of the road, smearing the remains of her lipstick into a defeated clown smile. She almost calls John in a panic but decides against it. She is, after all, returning from the funeral of an old flame, a married one at that. She doesn't trust herself not to confess the moment he picks up the phone.

The taste of bile in her throat is a bitter reminder of her lopsided 20s. The first half was marked by a college eating disorder that just about short-circuited her grad school trajectory. The second half swept up in the technicolor world of the great Marshall Tollis, who she largely owed her career to.

The fine art sphere in California was decisively hard to break into and no one was quick to take Sadie Aubert seriously at 24 and a half, her loose braid and red lipstick still giving off the air of a girl playing dress-up.

However, the second Marshall Tollis took a liking to her, singled her out, insisting that she be photographed beside him at the gallery, her signature red lip was suddenly seen as tasteful and elevated. Alluring.

At last, she had found her footing for a true paying job in art curation but only because Marshall built a platform for her to stand on. Marshall, with his unkempt eyebrows and emerging jowls, was not the conventional cut-and-paste 'silver fox' worshiped on TV but he had a certain magnetism to him that he knew how to wield accordingly.

Everything Marshall initiated, everything he infused himself into felt free-flowing and honest-hearted. Perhaps that's why Sadie agreed to the nude portrait in Montréal, a trip he had set up to celebrate her 27th birthday. She inherently trusted that the portrait would never be used against her, would be for his eyes only.

So, of course, it was gut-twisting to hear that the kid knew about it. That he'd seen. Though, he didn't seem angry or ill-intentioned. His eyes would have revealed a malicious agenda. He had his father's eyes, she'd thought. That fact was driven home by the portrait he'd handed her. Marshall's likeness, in death. It clearly made her sick to her stomach.

Or so she believed. She was also three weeks late. A reality that wouldn't kick in until she got home and sat before her now husband, who would serve her a coconut water with ice in bed, secretly hoping that this was emerging proof that her childbearing years were far from over.

"I should have driven you down there," John seeks to coddle.

"I've spent plenty of time pulled over in my car with a migraine. This is no different. It's really not a big deal," Sadie looks to spend the rest of the day dour, deflecting.

"You want to be alone for a bit?" he stands before she can nod in agreement.

In the nine years Sadie had spent on and off in Marshall's intimate company, he always gave her the privacy she needed to pass through a migraine flare by default. He understood the emotional strain, the psychological undercurrents of the unruly body. Some loops of pain and the self-inquiry they impose must be endured without an audience.

Marshall knew she'd emerge from the bedroom eventually, half-dressed for dinner. They'd eat take-out on the floor, speaking in broken French (neither of them was fluent but they tried to learn the language together).

"Mon grand-père était français mais je ne l'ai jamais connu. J'ai son nom de famille," Sadie often found her own voice unfamiliar. "J'ai l'impression... d'être connecté à des fantômes."

"Des fantômes," Marshall echoed her, one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

Sadie's vision now fluctuates as John draws the blackout curtains. He closes the bedroom door so slowly that it feels like a guilt trip, not a kindness. She thinks of Marshall's son's teary eyes as her own begin to sting. The pressure in her head is so severe now she can hardly see straight.

She tries thinking in French to take her mind out of her pain, to detach herself from the claustrophobic panic rising in her chest.

"Le fils de Marshall," she whispers.

"Marshall est mort." Her face is wet.

She thought these tears would come when she pulled into the driveway almost two hours ago. John was still at the office (he works a half-day on Saturdays). Sadie sat in the car for at least 15 minutes, white knuckles at 10 and 2, feeling her empty stomach twist and turn uncomfortably, surveying the ring on her finger.

At one point, Sadie was sure that she wanted this. When she and John got together in the throes of the pandemic, there was something about living through a major historical event that made her long to check all the boxes, the milestones tied to adulthood: husband, house, child.

But now she realized it was more out of spite that she prematurely clung to John. She wanted to prove to her mother that the family cycle of withdrawn, isolated parents and sullen, angry daughters had ended. That she could 'settle down' peaceably, even happily.

After they eloped, a reception for family and friends was held - a rooftop party that Autumn Aubert reluctantly attended. Sadie's hair was interlaid with Baby's Breath, which her mother complimented to break the tension before presenting her with a gift.

"So...it's sort of a gag gift slash my homage to Seraphine. If you throw it in the trash after I leave, I won't begrudge you for it," Autumn said, revealing a small glass jar in the center of her hand.

"It's a spell jar," she continued. "Some witchy herb energy thing. I never did pick up her vocabulary for all of that but...I know it's for all the good stuff: love and clarity and...fertility."

"This is great, really, I love it. I'm glad you thought of it or that Seraphine possessed you or something," Sadie tried to elicit a laugh but her mother, like a wax figure, retained her troubled expression.

Looking back on that night, that ostentatious display of 'happily ever after,' Sadie found herself suppressing a laugh, slipping into the resigned sort of smile that can only occur when the illusion shatters and one accepts their fate with half-clenched fists.

Digging through her nightstand in the dim light, Sadie locates the small corked and wax-sealed glass jar next to an empty pill bottle. Its trapped contents look lifeless and gray. Powerless.

Rolling onto her back, sinking into the mattress, she places the little harmless keepsake in the hollow of her chest. The glass is cold on her skin. Maybe I'll have a son, her mind distantly entertains.

Sadie Aubert, defeatedly tired, closes her eyes and transports herself back to the encroaching shadows of Pluto's Cave, standing before this open wound in the earth, unsure of whether to venture into a place without markers, a place beyond sunlight.

Sleep envelops her at this crossroads just as she begins to make out a face afloat in the perdurable dark.

//

The next chapters in this ongoing series: Ch.3 - Ch.4