Lynsey picked up her deck of tarot cards and began to shuffle them.
‘Rebecca did all the right things. Went to college. Studied hard. She’s a professor now. My aunt’s pride and joy! Now, when it comes to me – well, I did it all wrong. Dropped out. Travelled. A free spirit and mystic.’ Lynsey pulled out one tarot card and placed it on the table. The image was of a dancing fool skipping off the edge of a cliff, a merry smile on his face. ‘See, that’s me.’ She smiled. ‘The eternal Fool!’
There was an awkward pause. Lynsey picked up the card and put it back in the deck, before placing the cards face down in front of her. ‘So back to you, Emer, and what you’ll need to do for my aunt Susannah. She’s made the decision not to have radiation or chemo. Your role is to strictly manage her care.’
‘Did she not want treatment?’ Emer had asked.
‘She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which as you know is a terminal prognosis. Susannah was of course offered chemo to prolong her life…’ Lynsey’s voice cracked as she gazed down at the deck of cards, her expression concealed. ‘But she said she wanted to live her life to the full as long as she could. No matter how much we tried to persuade her otherwise, she refused to have chemo.’
Lynsey looked up. Behind the bravado, Emer detected sadness. She’d seen it many times before in the hospital.
‘And now it’s too late anyways,’ Lynsey said. ‘So you’ll be helping with pain management.’
‘That’s no problem,’ Emer had said. ‘I used to work on an oncology ward.’
Lynsey looked her in the eye again. ‘That must have been tough.’
‘You get used to it,’ Emer said, looking away as her stomach cramped from the lie.
After the interview, Emer wandered around Salem on her own. Anything other than return to the desolation of Orla and Ethan’s house in Quincy. She had said she’d help her brother-in-law pack up, but she wasn’t ready to put her sister’s life into boxes yet.
Without meaning to, she found herself sitting down at the table of another tarot card reader. She’d never had her cards read before. Always thought it rubbish, and yet here she was, clutching at anything to help her make sense of the mess she’d made of things.
It was dark by the time she came out of her reading. The rain had got heavier, and she had to run across the street, diving into a bar. Her head was swimming with the imagery of the tarot cards and what the reader had said to her. She needed a drink.
Taking a big gulp of her cider mimosa, she savoured the cinnamon rim around the top of the glass. She adored the taste of cinnamon. The first time she’d gone for coffee with Lars, they’d shared a cinnamon roll and he’d told her about the ones his mother made back in Norway. The taste of the cinnamon drink brought him back to her. The name he had called the buns was beautiful – skillingsboner. It sounded soft and full, like the buns themselves. She remembered his phone message from earlier. She’d still not listened to it. She took out her phone and dialled voicemail.
‘Hey, Emer, it’s Lars.’ She could hear his nervousness in the pause. ‘Please call back. Let me know you’re okay. I’m worried.’
Emer hovered her fingers over the phone. If she called him back now, he’d persuade her to go see him when she got back to Boston. She’d be swept up again in her emotions. Ever since Orla had died, she couldn’t think straight. All she wanted was to get away from her old life, and the guilt. Lars was part of the guilt, no matter how much she wished he wasn’t.
Emer cradled her drink as she sat at the bar and people-watched. She had expected Salem to be a tacky tourist trap, and it was to a certain extent, but she also liked the fact it seemed to be a place which welcomed the different. In Salem, you could let your inner goth go wild, and no one would bat an eye. It felt like the most liberated place she’d been to so far in the three years she’d been living in the States.
She tried to remember what cards she’d got in her reading. There was the Death card. Well, obviously there would be death in her reading – but this was in the future, not the past. The reader had explained it meant change and new beginnings rather than an end. There was also the Queen of Cups, which was supposed to be her, and two Kings. A conflict of some sort. She didn’t like that. And last of all, the Devil came up, too. It was all a bit of a hazy mess. Now, what did the Devil mean again? Orla had had a deck of tarot cards. Used to bring them out at dinner parties to read for friends.
‘It’s a bit of fun,’ Orla had reassured Emer. ‘Not to be taken too seriously.’
Emer’s tarot reader had been a girl about the same age as herself. Why hadn’t Emer asked Lynsey de Luna to read her cards? She’d probably have done it for free. But then she didn’t want her new employer to know too much about her. She needed this job, not just because she was flat broke, but because she needed to go somewhere she had never been before. Not Ireland, not Boston. Somewhere new, where Orla’s imprint didn’t exist.
Emer’s reader had looked her in the eyes, and given her a warning. ‘Be careful,’ she’d said to her.
Had the girl been a charlatan or the real thing? Was Emer’s journey to the island going to change her forever?
Susannah
November 1953
There had been
