Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148955 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 745(@200wpm)___ 596(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148955 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 745(@200wpm)___ 596(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
“Broken-hearted?” she asks.
Yes. But more. So much more. Just broken, mostly.
“I guess.”
“I’m gonna tell you a story. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s just a story. But, if it makes sense… you’ll talk to me. Okay?”
I nod and shrug at the same time.
She sits on the bed and gets comfortable.
I put my head in her lap and she strokes my hair.
“Aunt Nelle believed in a lot of things that most people think aren’t real,” Mom says. “She was more than a conspiracy theorist in her beliefs. You know this.”
My body goes stiff. Holy shit. Where the heck is this going?
“And I know a lot of people never took her seriously, but she was serious. She believed everything she told us. And she didn’t talk about the things she believed with just anyone, Ivy. She did it with you. She did it with me. With your brother a little. Never your sister for some reason. At least not that I know of.”
This was true. And odd.
“Never your dad. She never liked your dad. The way you feel about Rick? That’s how Nellie felt about your father.” Mom takes a deep breath. “Nelle was ten years older than me and before she came to live with us when you guys were little, she lived like a bit of a gypsy. She traveled a lot. Always on the hunt for answers, my sister. She was like Fox Mulder of the X-Files, kind of. Believing the truth was out there for her to find. But in BoHo gypsy form. We all know she was quirky, but also, she was incredibly lucky.”
Aunt Nelle was lucky in a lot of ways, for sure. Except that she got cancer and died in her fifties.
Mom continues. “She won the lottery, as you know. She won it twice. And yet she traveled and splurged on airfare, but other than that, lived on next to nothing. She’d go off on her adventures. She’d go tree planting way up north and be gone for six months. She’d join a mission with her latest church and be gone a year before coming back and joining another church or cult or whatever. Yeah, some of them were definitely cults. She always came back with crazy stories and on the rare occasion your dad caught wind of something out of her mouth, he’d tell me she did drugs.” Mom laughs. “He used to call it that Nellie peyote or some shit. My sister didn’t touch drugs. She wouldn’t even drink alcohol. She was just one of those naturally happy and adventurous people.”
Mom’s right. I remember when she came to live with us and started telling me all the crazy stories of the places she’d been, the people she met, the mysteries out there that she’d heard or crazy things she’d seen. She’d talk about seances. Ghosts. Listening to her stories was like sitting around a campfire for ghost stories, but she wasn’t trying to scare me with them. She was trying to convince me that magic was real. That I could find it, too, like she had, only find more of it because I was so young.
More than once, she asked,
“When are you gonna look for magic, Ivy? It’s out there, you know.”
“All the time you girls were growing up when she lived with us, she didn’t spend much. She helped us by paying off the house when she died, but put a caveat that the deed went in just my name. And she put away enough money for Leo’s education. Your father balked. Why have his name taken off the house? Why only Leo and not you girls in the will? No wonder.” Mom goes quiet. “It’s like Nellie had a hunch about him. Anyway… she didn’t have much else left. I wondered what she did with it. All her winnings. I knew she should have in the seven figures stashed away but figured she gave most of it away. Besides paying off our mortgage and putting a tidy sum into a special account for me for when I retire, she left me a letter when she died. A really crazy letter.”
I sit up and cross my legs, then reach for and take a sip of my Sprite. I offer it to Mom.
“No thanks. I’ll make some coffee in a minute. Anyway, she told me when you were born, sitting there with Amelia on her lap, that she spent the majority of her savings not on an education fund for you kids or anything practical like that. She said she spent the lion’s share of it on securing you and your sister a happily ever after. I thought maybe she meant stocks, bonds, something like that at first, but she acted like I was way off base. I let it go; my sister would just talk in riddles a lot, especially once the cancer went to her brain. But then I got that letter when she died. In it, she told me she went to her fortune teller and paid for you two to have the best fortune possible. True love. She told me, in the letter, to keep my eyes open on the anniversary of her death. That it would begin. And then you went missing.” Mom’s voice hitches. “On the anniversary of her death.”