A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

end of our favorite movie, The Breakfast Club. My teacher had agreed with me that yes, that was a good movie. Then she’d told me she was so sorry to hear about my brother and had given me an extension on the assignment.

That night, when I’d come home from Raf’s, my mother called me into the kitchen. My teacher had telephoned to express her hope for my brother’s speedy recovery, and my mother had had to explain that not only was my brother not injured, but I didn’t have a brother at all.

“You’ve got a gift for stories,” my mother had said, interrupting my attempt to bullshit my way out of the new mess I’d created. She sat at the kitchen table, back straight, with her gaze locked on mine. “Your father has that too. And that can be such a superpower, to have an imagination like you do, to have the right words at the tips of your fingers and to be able to say them with conviction. But it can lead you down a dangerous path. You can end up hurting people.” Something had flickered in her eyes then. I’d realized only later that she’d still been talking about my father. She’d leaned forward, taking my hands in hers. “I need you to promise me now that you are only going to use that gift for good.”

“I promise,” I’d said.

“Also,” she’d said, shaking her head, “you know you’re not allowed to watch The Breakfast Club yet. Obviously you are grounded.”

In the years since, I’d done a pretty good job keeping my word to her. But as I watched Libby’s retreating form step into the elevator, her shoulders hunched, her jaunty, ridiculous beret wobbling on her head, I didn’t know if my mother would be proud of what I was doing and who I had become to do it.

I would have given pretty much anything to ask her.

THIRTY-SIX

When we went upstairs—behind the mysterious door, down a hallway to a freight elevator, and then passing through a sort of antechamber with a door opening onto the roof—I was relieved to find that the excitement this time was of a different kind than the plunge-a-knife-into-your-palm variety. Instead, the women were planning a trip, talking among themselves about logistics and supplies. Margot floated over to me, Caroline walking briskly at her side.

“Clear your schedule for next weekend,” Caroline said.

My fingers itched to check my calendar, but we’d all put our phones in a bucket in the antechamber. It was where the women normally changed into their robes (although not for this meeting, this was a planning meeting and needed to be briefer. Besides, my robe hadn’t come in yet from the special, high-end store where such robes were apparently made, and they didn’t want to make me feel left out). We dropped our phones and other distracting devices in that antechamber, so that nothing took away from the worship. Then we passed through a door that locked automatically behind us, and we were out under the stars.

Next weekend. I didn’t think I had any plans. Who would I even have them with, now that Raf didn’t want to see me? Libby certainly wasn’t going to swoop in to invite me to anything either. “Halloween?” I asked. “Are we doing something wild? I should warn you, my thing with costumes tends to be that I think of a pun at the last minute—”

“Oh, beautiful Jillian,” Margot said. “Who cares about Halloween? It’s Samhain.” She pronounced the word saw-when.

“What’s Samhain?”

“The best weekend of the year,” Caroline said.

“The time when magic is most potent,” Margot continued. “When the moon is full, and the veil between the worlds is thin.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

“We have a tradition now,” Caroline said. “A trip.”

“It started when I bought a cabin in the Hudson Valley, deep in the woods, a few years ago,” Margot said offhandedly. “After my big breakup.” Gus, I thought. That controlling, pretentious film director with whom she’d lost herself.

“We’d reconnected that year, and we went there, just the two of us, for Samhain.”

“Caroline had told me about her idea to start Nevertheless, so we did some spells for the success of that,” Margot said. She paused and put a hand on Caroline’s arm. “Honestly, us reconnecting, Caroline telling me about what she thought we could do together—it was part of the reason I had the strength to leave that relationship in the first place.”

Caroline put her hand on top of Margot’s. “We did all the typical post-breakup things at the cabin, of course,” she said. “Wine and chocolate and hexing the ex.” Maybe that was why Gus’s movies hadn’t done well since he and Margot broke up. No, I reminded myself. Coincidence, not real magic.

Caroline smiled at Margot, and Margot smiled back at her as they reminisced in silence for a moment. It was the most tenderly I’d seen them look at each other. I’d assumed that Caroline was the type of woman to have ten bridesmaids (no, more than assumed—I knew! It had been in the Vogue article about her wedding) but no one to whom she was truly, deeply close. But now, watching her and Margot, Margot who had not even been one of those ten, I saw that I had been wrong. The two of them weren’t just business partners. They cared for each other. They had history, good history, despite the tension I sensed between them.

“Our magic is so much more powerful once we can get into nature and away from the noise of the city,” Caroline said. “Although obviously we could never live in the country full-time.” She shuddered slightly at the thought.

“What we do here is nothing compared to what we’ve done out there,” Margot said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, last Samhain was right before the mayoral election,” Margot began.

“Margot—” Caroline said, a warning note in her voice, the tenderness between them starting to turn prickly again.

“All