The hand was the same.
Then and there, I wanted to cut off every other back cover and peel away what was hiding an important piece of my history, my mother’s history. Before I did though, I lifted the cover again, shoved my reading glasses on my face, and rifled the pages. My athame buzzed in anticipation. I touched its tip to the top page.
Nothing.
I peered at the edges again. With the help of a magnifying glass, the paper looked thick enough to split, like layers of phyllo dough just beginning to dry out. I teased in the tip of my blade and coaxed it back and forth until I’d opened a six-inch section. I blew into the space.
Nothing.
Closing my eyes, I searched through the floor to the root cellar, to the soil directly under the house, all the way to the edges of the property. I pulled everything I could toward me, toward my desire to know my mother, my desire to know my history and enrich my future, my sons’ futures. I squeezed my eyelids shut, inhaled, and blew again, through pursed lips, softly exhaling multi-stranded threads of hope, desire, and curiosity into the small opening.
The top, bottom, and inner edges of the paper separated. The outer edge became a fold, and when I lifted the paper away from the spine, a map of my property appeared. Hand-drawn and not accurate to the current buildings, it looked like it had been rendered a century ago. Maybe more.
My A-frame house occupied the same footprint as an earlier one, but the outbuildings were gone and sections labelled for livestock had succumbed to stands of blackberries, salal, and a smattering of native trees. I pictured egg-laying chickens hiding from the eagles and hawks that would have known exactly where their roosts were located.
I refolded the map and eyed the next page. This one separated into two full pages that had numbered lists, much like a table of contents. One word and its accompanying icon leapt off the page.
Portal.
I took a closer look at the map, tried to keep my fingers from leaving prints on the page, and scanned for the word portal as well as its icon, a hand-drawn thin circle within a thick circle with the dot on one side, like a door handle.
The spot occupied by my garden had not changed purpose or location. And the nearby tree could be the old crabapple. A portal icon nestled in its spidery branches.
Figures.
I hunted for more and found another portal icon straddling my property line and the road and yet another in the stand of fir trees at the back of property. When I flipped to the table of contents again, I read a series of sub-headings underneath the chapter titled Portals.
How to Create a Portal. How to Travel Between Portals. Safety Tips for Portal Travel. Packing Tips for Portal Travel. What to do when you are stuck in a portal…cannot find your way out of a portal…encounter enemies inside the portal…are followed into the portal.
How to Close a Portal. How to Destroy a Portal.
Destroying a portal. Sounded like one of those magical things with consequences I didn’t want to consider.
I took my athame to the third page then the fourth and the fifth, but I didn’t meet with the same success. No more pages opened to me, and rather than end up with ripped or otherwise destroyed or unreadable pages, I turned to the next book in line.
An hour or so later, I had removed the outermost layer of each. Volumes one, two, four, and five were lined up on the floor in front of me. Each sported a burgundy leather cover decorated with gilt silver flourishes and my mother’s hand apparent in the embossed drawings. Volume three had nothing written on the front and was similarly blank on the inside. I touched my tongue to an inside page, half hoping my saliva would unveil the first of many secret words, but the page stayed blank.
Volume three was the best candidate for my grimoire, but before I laid my claim, I would show it to Maritza.
Thirsty from my efforts, I filled a glass with water and lemon slices, drank it down, and set to my next task. Removing books and personal things out of my office required trip after trip. When it came time to move my desk—something I wished I had done first rather than last—I had to heft the desktop off the sawhorses and lean it against the door jamb. With the help of old towels to protect the floors, I dragged the heavy slab of wood across the hall. Once the desktop was back on the sawhorses, hunger drove me to the kitchen.
A quick check of my phone showed I had texts from Thatcher and voicemail from Rose.
“We took the ferry to VAN.”
“Going to Ikea for furniture.”
“Will be home around midnight. Love you.”
Well, an evening to myself. And no Tanner in sight. The pang in my chest at being left alone was unexpected. I curled my fingers around the pouch I’d reclaimed and rehung around my neck, and contemplated my options. Eating was an obvious start.
I set a plate on the counter and rifled through the refrigerator. Buffalo mozzarella cheese floated in a bowl of cloudy water next to half of a Black Krim heirloom tomato. I pulled those out, dashed to my garden for a few basil leaves, and swore at the lack of bread when ransacked cupboards yielded only rice crackers. I stacked slices of cheese and tomato, added a basil leaf and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and ate my dinner standing by the sink. Made cleaning up all the easier.
The slapdash meal filled my belly, but the hollow spots in my heart weren’t reacting well to the poke of jealousy’s pointy nails. I didn’t want to be that person who
