Love Over Matter (4 page)

But I’m running out of
time.

As a trio of helpful guests, including
a buff twenty-something-year-old guy who may very well be a
paramedic, struggles to deliver the Heimlich maneuver to a
wheelchair-bound liver patient already on death’s door, I drop to
the floor, abandon the bread plate in a sea of sensible shoes and
clutch around the ticket pad until I get a pinch of my fuzzy little
friend (not to mention a bunch of dastardly paper cuts).

I pull the doll out and give it a
once-over, flashes of my marathon knitting session racing through
my mind. When I made this thing, I was hoping to raise George from
the dead just long enough to bare my soul (because a zombie
boyfriend is not exactly on my bucket list). Now I’m praying it
might stop Mr. Smith from bumping up against George in the great
beyond.

I’ve only successfully
employed this tchotchke once, and that was to rouse Haley from a
Robitussin coma when she had the flu. And I’ve
never
tried it on a virtual stranger,
but . . .

I lock my gaze on Mr. Smith’s head—or
slightly above it, to be precise—at the spot where, if he were an
angel, his halo would hover. This is where I get the best read of a
person’s aura, a.k.a. the wiggly field of energy surrounding all
living things.

Mr. Smith’s aura is even sicker than
his complexion lets on: a pool of dusky grey, flecked with bursts
of twinkling, snow-white light—the sign of imminent
death.

The buff guest hoists Mr. Smith from
his wheelchair with an overgrown arm; meanwhile, I begin pinching
the doll between my thumb and forefinger, making it perform
fast-motion sit-ups.

Come on, come on, come
on,
I plead.
Cough
it up.

“
They’re on the way!”
someone squeals, referring to the emergency personnel.

Ian paces by the doorway, his palm
clamped over his temple, his eyes searching the lot for the
ambulance.

The lump in the center of my forehead,
which has been sinking toward my skull since the day after our
treasure hunt, suddenly starts stinging. I ignore the pain and keep
pumping away at the voodoo doll’s stomach.

Twenty feet off, the maybe-paramedic
grasps Mr. Smith from behind, plants a serious fist in his abdomen
and thrusts.

I pump.

He thrusts.

I pump.

He thrusts.

My head stings.

And burns.

I pump.

He thrusts.

I pump.

He thrusts.

Then . . .

Pop!

The doll’s midsection goes soft, and
Mr. Smith chokes a ragged breath. By the door, Ian’s posture turns
rubbery.

“
What’re you doing?” Haley
demands from my side.

I slip the doll back into my apron and
struggle to my feet. “Huh?”

“
I saw you, you
know.”

“
Yeah? So.”

She throws an arm around my shoulder.
“You think it worked?”

“
He’s breathing, isn’t
he?”

Mom blows by us and rushes the
entrance, props the door open for the paramedics, who are just
wheeling up out front, lights blazing and sirens whining. The
frantic twittering of voices, which had blurred into a stream of
white noise during my intervention, seems to escalate. A wave of
exhaustion washes over me, and I drop cockeyed into a
chair.

Haley flops down beside me, a ghost of
a smile on her blackened lips. “It’s kind of ironic, huh?” she
says, jerking her head toward Mr. Smith.

I think she means his almost dying at
a benefit to save his life. “I guess.”

A female paramedic storms into the
restaurant, a walkie-talkie barking from her hip. In her wake
scurry her trim, bearded partner and Mom, literally wringing her
hands. “That’s right,” Mom chirps, directing the trek from the
rear. “He’s over there.” She wags an arm through the air. “Just
past my . . . my banana tree.”

Of course, my mother would mention
that fake, dusty monstrosity. I roll my eyes and tap Haley on the
knee. “We’d better go help.”

Her eyebrows pinch together. “What
for?”

Maybe she’s right; the
paramedics seem to have things under control. Then again, Ian looks
like he could use a shoulder to lean on. “I’m gonna
go . . .” I say. Haley shoos me off, her mouth
twisted into a smirk.
I don’t like
him,
I want to tell her.
Not that way.
Instead, I
say, “Why don’t you check on the guests? Try to calm them
down.”

I rise and start heading for Mr.
Smith, but then I catch Dad summoning me to the kitchen with a
nervous head bob.

I abruptly change course, nearly
spinning out as I shift around Mom’s silk ficus. “What’s up?” I say
when I get within my father’s orbit.

“
Is he okay?” Dad asks, his
nose twitching and eyes darting.

My heart clenches like it did when Mom
got sweaty and collapsed on the lawn. “Sure,” I say with a nod.
“Disaster averted.” I give him a reassuring grin.

He puffs out a tense
breath. “
Thank God
.”

* * *

I met George Brooks by a puddle behind
the rear wheel of a box truck, the day his family moved into Willow
Crest, the up-and-coming neighborhood to which my parents had, two
years earlier, scrimped and saved enough money to relocate Haley
and me.

“
What’re you doin’?” I
asked him through the gap in my six-year-old teeth.

He pushed a stone around the puddle
with a twig, paused to fix his ponderous brown eyes on me. “None of
your beeswax.”

I rose a few inches from my crouched
position and glanced over my shoulder, my mother’s watchful form
still in sight. “Can I try?”

A doubtful
tsk
ing sound burst from
his lips. “You don’t know how.”

I rocked on my heels, folded my arms
over my knees. “I do so.”

The freckles seemed to rearrange on
his face. “You can’t,” he told me flatly. “I made it
up.”

We went silent for a while, the way
old married folks sometimes do. “I’m good at stories,” I said
eventually, his game of stone maneuvering entrancing me.

“
Oh, yeah?” he replied,
sounding intrigued but skeptical.

I shot him my know-it-all nod.
“Uh-huh.”

“
How old are you?” he
asked.

My first lie: “Seven.”

He grimaced. “Nuh-uh. You’re too
small.” He gave me an appraising once-over. “I bet you’re five, at
the most.”

“
Well,
you
only look four,” I said (my
second lie), my face flushing and my eyes stinging with
tears.

“
Don’t cry,” he told me,
the confrontational tone disappearing from his voice. He tapped my
shin with the twig, then held it up as a peace offering. As I
accepted, he said, “I’m George, by the way. And I’m eight, not
four.”

I twigged three stones to the edge of
the puddle, where I strung them together like pearls. “I’m
Cassandra,” I informed him. “But people call me Cassie. Or Cass,
for short. I have a baby sister, Haley.” I waited for him to dish
the dirt on his siblings, but he just fell back on his palms like a
crab and started kicking at the truck’s enormous tire. “You got a
sister? Or a brother?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m
adopted.”

I wouldn’t have known
what
adopted
meant, except that six months earlier, my parents had
deposited Haley with a babysitter and trucked me to a matinee
showing of
Annie
at the discount movie theater. For weeks afterward, I was
convinced (and terrified) that Mom and Dad would die, leaving me to
scrub floors and starch sheets at the knee of the devious Miss
Hannigan. “Since when?” I asked, thinking of Annie, who was older
than George when she found her “daddy.”

“
Same as you,” he said with
a shrug. “Since I was born.”

I wanted to tell him it was okay that
he was adopted; it didn’t matter to me. In fact, it was more than
okay. It was neat and cool, and it gave him something in common
with a movie star. But I couldn’t put this into words, so instead I
asked, “Wanna play jump rope?”

He crinkled his brow. “Jump
rope?”

“
Yeah,” I said with a shy
smile. “You can be the swinger, and I’ll jump.”

“
Got a rope?”

* * *

A wild squawk from Clive jolts me back
to the task at hand: cleaning his cage, a job made harder by the
fact that I’ve pimped his nest. “Oh, behave!” I chastise, my
bird-friend hopping and pecking around the carpet and occasionally
dipping under my bed. I withdraw the last branch of his forest, run
a feather duster over it (ironic, I know) and set it aside. Most
people probably wouldn’t devote so much attention to a rescue crow,
but I can’t help feeling obligated to make Clive as comfortable as
possible, especially after what happened to Clive-ina (that’s what
I call Clive’s poor, deceased mate, God rest her feathered
soul).

It takes me another five minutes to
pry the wood-chip-covered newspaper from the bottom of the cage,
Windex the bare plastic to a scratchy sheen and reline it with
comics. (I like to think that one day Clive will learn how to read
and appreciate my sense of humor.)

I’m in the midst of
sprinkling cedar over Snoopy when
bang!
bang! bang!
goes my door, heralding Haley’s
arrival.

I shoo Clive into his barren hovel.
“What?” I say, agitation rising in my voice as Haley whips up
beside me. I stare past her at the gaping door, unable to stop
myself from sighing.

“
What’re you doing?” she
demands, matching my irritation. She taps her foot and nibbles at
her pinkie, her fingernail squeaking between her teeth.

I freeze her with a serious
glare. “Shouldn’t
I
be asking
you
that?”

My sister would do well to lose the
Elvira hairdo, G.I. Joe footwear, and Marilyn Manson wardrobe.
Because, honestly, she’s a walking cliché. “Huh?” she says
blankly.

“
What do you want?” I
grouse, my head involuntarily cocking.

She drops onto my bed, bunches my
pillow into a ball and tucks it under her chin. “Opal,
uh . . .” she says, trailing off for a few beats,
“. . . she, um, needs you
to . . .”

I roll my eyes. “When?” I ask, knowing
what my sister’s friend wants: a supernatural favor.

She grins sheepishly. “Five minutes
ago?”

chapter 4

Opal Madden lives in a converted
church (formerly Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian) with her golf-pro
stepfather and fragile, often intoxicated mother, a washed-up soap
opera actress.

“
You’re lucky it’s Monday,”
I tell Haley as we coast to a stop in Mom’s Prius, my lack of a
driver’s license endowing me with a paranoid eye twitch, “and the
restaurant’s closed.” I pop the shifter into park. “If we get
caught,” I add, channeling a last-minute surge of adrenaline,
“
your
head’s on
the chopping block, not mine.”

She wiggles a hand under her cape (on
top of everything else, she’s in Dracula mode today) and withdraws
a small bottle of clear liquid. I don’t recognize it until she
spins it around, revealing the half-peeled bourbon label. “Here you
go,” she says, tossing the holy water in my lap. “I thought this
might help.”

I shut the car down. “How did
you . . . ?”

She smirks. “I have powers too, you
know.”

“
Ha-ha.”

“
Remember when you used
that stuff on Dad?” she asks with a twirl of her dye-damaged split
ends. “And he thought the coffee maker was on the
fritz?”

I fight a smile.
“That
was
pretty
funny. But it got him in for a physical, didn’t it? And once his
lab work came back okay, Mom stopped freaking out about the
possibility of him dying. So it was a win-win.”

“
That’s true,” Haley
allows, her gaze fixed on the front door of Madden’s House of
Worship.

I sense something moving
inside and, sure enough, Opal’s svelte, pale face appears, framed
by a stained-glass-bordered window as if she’s a religious icon or
one of the living portraits from
Harry
Potter
.

“
Action!” I spout, a
performance on the horizon—at least on the part of Opal’s
mother.

Haley unbuckles, and I stifle a laugh.
My sister is a knot of contradictions: head-banger music and death
gear, safety belts and white-light altruism.

We traipse over to the church’s
entrance, Opal’s knobby arm, followed by her slim-to-nonexistent
profile, slipping out to greet us. “Sorry,” she begins, her eyes
sandpapered- and puffy-looking, “but I didn’t know who else to
call.” She gives a faint snort-sniffle.