Love lines (2 page)

“What?” she asked nervously, when I got in her car. “Do
you think it’s so cool to sit in this poky hole of a place, and wait for
someone to rob and steal my so long expected gift for eighteenth birthday? Far
from it! I had to sell my soul for it to my beloved brother. Besides, Christian
said that for such a gift I’ll have to grant all his wishes for the next
ten
years!
Well, he may have it his way. I don’t care anymore,” she said much
happier this time, stroking the leather steering wheel. And then, more
seriously, she added: “You owe me a lot more for being almost an hour and a
half late! And now I don’t even know whether Nora will agree to see us, after
such a delay.”

“
Nora
?” I asked turning to her wonderingly.

“Exactly. The fortune-teller. Remember? A friend of mine
recommended her,” she snapped at me.

“Excuse me. Did you say ‘a friend of
yours’
? What
kind of a friend is not familiar
to me
?” I groaned.

“It doesn’t matter, just trust me.”

And so I did. However, I always did so, as there was no
doubt about Amanda’s talents. She has always been like a sister for me, who I
never had. And she treated me the same way. Although she had an elder brother
Christian, but certainly he wouldn’t discuss a movie starring another popular
handsome guy, or help her to choose a dress for a party. That's why she needed
me so much. In addition, Amanda and I were always on the same wave and, oddly
enough, always knew when the other one felt bad. In such cases she, of course,
referred to her
unreal
intuition, and my ability to apprehend troubles
was always called
a simple coincidence
.

To be honest, I couldn’t even remember a single time
when I had any serious quarrel with Amanda. Of course, there were times of
misunderstanding, but, since neither of us could stay angry very long, after a
few silent hours, we were best friends again.

Less than fifteen minutes later, when I returned from my
memories, I noticed that we had stopped at a low gray house, which looked more
like an old barn than a house.

“Does she live
here
?” I asked, not having the
slightest desire to hear an affirmative answer to my question.

“At least, this is what my note says,” answered Amanda
after a little pause, reading once again what was written in a very nice
handwriting that obviously didn’t belong to her. I took the note from her hand
to make sure that the address was correct. And suddenly I felt that same tingle
on my shoulder, which always went along with the end of my dreams.

“Are you okay?” Amanda asked concerned.

“Yes, it's just…”

She cut me off.

“What’s wrong? Eileen, for heaven's sake, don’t scare
me! Being here is already too creepy, so don’t scare me even more than I
already am!”

I think I finally stopped to listen to what Amanda had
been saying, because she had to call my name for several times before I came to
myself again.

 “It’s all right, I'm sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m just
a little nervous about this stupid meeting.”

During the second touch to the note the very same
picture from my dreams began to appear in my head, but I decided to hide the
memory. “I’m just all nerves,” I thought to myself.

“Shall we go then?” Amanda asked.

It was raining. Which is normal for Norfield. Despite
the fact that the grass in our area is green all year round, snow is rare and
when it does snow it lasts no more than a week, rain is common for all seasons.
But in this case, it made that miserable place look even worse.

The path to the house was paved with small stones and
the heels of Amanda’s shoes constantly stuck in between them.

“If I knew that we had to get over so many barriers I
would put on something else,” she said indignantly.

The door wasn’t locked and opened quietly inward when my
hand rested on it to knock.

“Good morning, ladies,” said the melodious voice behind
us. However, in spite of its melodies, Amanda and I jumped as though being
scalded like a child, and we were frightened by our own shouting.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m Nora, and you
must be Eileen and Amanda?” she asked with a slight smile on her face.

Still being in complete immobility of the recent terror,
we didn’t realize that the gray-haired woman with the incredibly warm blue eyes
turned to us. And
that
was Nora,
the very same
Nora!
The
fortune-teller
! None of this made any sense at the sight of this woman.
Well, at least, certainly not the gray hair and cerulean eyes!

  “We, uh,” I stumbled, “yes, we’ve made an appointment
with you,” I said at last, hardly forming my words in intelligible sentence.
Nora smiled mysteriously in response and nodded, inviting us into the house.

To our surprise, the inside the house was very
comfortable, with lots of flowers and decorations. Nora gestured for us to sit
down at a small double sofa on the opposite side of the fireplace, and she sat
on a chair on my right hand.

 “So, what brought you here, young ladies in this rainy
August morning?”

“First of all, we would like to apologize for being
late,” Amanda said, slightly blushing.

“Oh, dear, time is a relative term,” Nora replied
smiling. “It’s not always as significant as it seems.” I had no idea what she
was talking about, but  finally I decided to discuss the meaning of our
appointment.

“We have a very unusual question for you,” I started
with an as serious expression as I could manage without looking scared. “I
don’t even know if you can help us,” I added unsure.

“Unusual questions this is my specialty,” she said, with
the same warm smile on her face. Without saying anything else, Nora took my
right hand, turning it palm up, and began to examine it carefully. Then I
remembered that reading palms was the fortune-teller's usual way to predict
well, futures.

“I think you didn’t understand me,” I said frowning. “I
don’t want you to tell me my fortune.”

“Tell your fortune?” Nora repeated in surprise. “Oh, you
must have mistaken me for a fortune-teller!” she added with a big smile. “No,
I'm not a fortune-teller, I am Feta.”

 “
Feta
? What’s a
Feta?”
I asked,
wonderingly.

“Yes, I’m a Feta. It means I’m a fate reader. I read
people’s destinies by the lines on their palms. It does look similar to what
fortune-tellers do, but none of them can tell you what I can read.”

 Feeling even more awkward from offending this nice
woman, I decided to keep quiet and started watching her. At first she only
touched my hand lightly, following the line shapes on it with her fingers. Then
she pulled out a bottle of light blue liquid of her dress and she poured a few
drops onto my palm. In the places where the drops fell, my skin began to
tingle. But the most surprising part started a few minutes later, when the
drops began to spread on the palm of my hand, filling the lines on it. Nora
took my hand once again and began to stroke the lines.

 “I see, Eileen, you have been having very strange
dreams recently. And what you see in these dreams scares you. But don’t be
afraid of your own destiny, my dear. This is what we are born with. Speaking of
which,
you
were born to be a part of the Fairey family.”

“What? No, my name’s Clark. Fairey is Amanda’s name. You
must be wrong,” I said slightly confused.

  “I'm never wrong, Eileen,” Nora said quietly. “I
always say what I see, what is written on the lines of your hand and, it’s
fate. And you, my dear, are a Fairey, a Fairey bird. You are marked by the fire
and your wings are shining in the sunlight. Don’t be afraid, darling, fate
itself will help you find your way in this life.”

After all this, Nora let my hand go, and the blue water
drops disappeared as if by magic, as well as the tingling on my palm.

On the way home I was replaying Nora’s words in my head
for the hundredth time, trying to find at least some sense in all the things
she had said. After that weird meeting Amanda took me to the cafe, where I had
left my car and said she had to hurry, something about some urgent task, and
was gone. Later I realized that during the conversation with Nora she hadn’t
said a word, and then behaved quite suspiciously.

 As you can see, strange occurrences have become an
essential part of my everyday life.

 Stopping at the entrance to my house, I couldn’t help
but think that, except for Amanda, who was currently solving her
strange
business
, I had no one else to share my impressions about the meeting I had
just had. When I said that Amanda had replaced a sister that never existed, I
think I forgot to mention that she also had replaced a family that never
existed either.   

My parents were never married. My father, according to
my mom, left us long before I was born and disappeared without a trace. Since
then she had been getting married so many different men, that I finally stopped
counting her official spouses. I don’t think that she is a featherbrained and
irresponsible person; she is just a very peculiar woman. As my beloved
grandmother, Stephanie Mitchell says, my mom is
a thin, vulnerable nature
.
That's why each of her next husbands seemed to be a lot more understanding and
sympathetic than the previous one. The funny part was that she always swore to
love each of them, trying to convince them and herself of her faithfulness with
endless wedding vows.

 “He is the best man that I’ve ever met, Eileen,” she
said every time, standing on the threshold of another marriage.

In addition to the frequent change of spouses, Catherine
Clark had a passion for endless traveling, so I usually learned about the place
she was staying at from the postcards that she sent me in incredible amounts
from each new place she lived in at the moment. And now, opening the mailbox, I
knew that I would find one more card there. This time my mom and her new
husband Kyle, Carl, or whatever his name was, were standing against the
background of a dozen kangaroos somewhere in Australia. On the flip side, as
always, was a brief message
:

“Dear Eileen! I congratulate you on being accepted to
Sheffield. You are such a clever girl! With love. Mom and Dad”.

 I smiled at this stupid signature, which was written on
all of her cards. If you believe each of them, for me, at least, there were
about a dozen fathers, whose names I could hardly remember. I don’t know why
she liked to sign her cards this way. Maybe she just didn’t want to offend her
husbands, or just created the illusion of a real family. Anyway, she was my
favorite Catherine. Yes, just
Catherine
, as
mother
made her feel
too old to me, and she didn’t seem that old.

This luxurious Mediterranean style white villa, where I
live now, belongs to my grandmother, who, since my childhood has been the only
family member within hundreds of miles of me. I have uncles, aunts and numerous
cousins, but as I have already said, they all live too far away.

Stephanie Mitchell was a dark-haired green-eyed and
rather svelte woman over sixty. She was a real commander by the nature. That’s
why she could afford to travel a lot and to buy expensive gifts for her
favorite and the only granddaughter, and not to worry about the fact that funds
for all this luxury may not be enough. In her thirties, she became a widow and
took control of a huge shipbuilding company that belonged to my grandfather
Stuart Mitchell. According to her, they lived very happily, even though it
wasn’t a long life together. Later her own life changed dramatically, that
influenced the formation of her iron will and qualities of a real leader. She
didn’t only prevent the collapse of her husband’s company, but also managed to
achieve its prosperity.

Thanks to my grandmother I never knew what a lack was
not only of money but also of the infinite love, which she seemed to have tried
to endow me for my entire family. And she really succeeded. The only pity was
that currently, she was traveling around the countries of South America, and I
was alone, just like I always was and have been most of my life.

Leaving the stack of mail on the round table in the
hallway, I went to my room, where morning chaos still reigned from packing and
knocking over books onto the floor. I hated it when something wasn’t in the
right place, but the preparation for the trip to Sheffield slightly shifted my
priorities right now. Right in the middle of the room was a suitcase that I still
needed to pack. That same pile of books on the history of ancient Greece was
still spread out after the morning storm. I couldn’t decide which of these
books may be useful to me at the university, so I decided to take them all. I
planned to study architecture of ancient and modern civilizations, and this
explained my choice of literature.

 “How great it would be to spend the next five years
somewhere far away from Norfield, and in the company of my best friend!” I
thought excitedly. Of course, I loved our little town, but the prospect of an
independent and adult life was quite alluring. Again, I remembered Amanda and
decided finally to find out what the secret business was that she may have
without me.