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

“Jillian,” she said, and her voice was higher, still Margot’s voice but as if it had been mixed with a different one.

“Margot,” I said, stepping back. “Do not fuck with me like this.”

“My little skeptic,” she said, and leaned forward, her hair swinging toward my face. It didn’t smell like jasmine now. It smelled of smoke, yes, but also the faint scent of vanilla, like the perfume I’d given my mother as a present so many years ago. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. Oh God, how I wanted it to be happening.

“Stop it,” I said.

“It’s okay.” She reached out and touched my cheek gently. “Are you keeping your promise?”

“I . . .” I said, my breath leaving me as if I’d been punched in the stomach. You have a gift for stories. I need you to promise me that you’re only going to use it for good. I stared into those wide, concerned eyes as they waited for my answer. “I’m trying,” I said when I could speak again. “I’m really trying to use it for good, but I don’t know.”

All those times I thought I’d seen her in the man on the subway, the woman on the street, only to have her disappear—I’d felt so strongly in those brief seconds that there was more of her waiting for me. Always, I’d come back to my senses. She was gone, irrevocably gone, and I was never supposed to be able to talk to her again because that was just the way that the world worked, but now Margot was saying in that strange, un-Margot-like voice, “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

“I’m not sure about that this time,” I said.

“I wish I could help you.” She shook her head. “But how’s our Raf doing?”

“He’s—” I began, then cleared my throat. “You’d be really proud of him.”

Margot gave me a look my mother had given me a million times before, one that managed to be both wry and empathetic at the same time. “You need to figure that out too, don’t you?”

“I guess I do.”

“I just want you to have a family,” she said, and I couldn’t stop a little laugh from escaping me.

“Right, because my eggs are dying.”

“Well, yes,” she said, with a slight smile. Then her face turned serious, searching again. “But it doesn’t have to be that kind of family.”

A lump rose in my throat, and before I even knew what I was doing I had reached out and clasped both of her hands in mine. “Are you all right? Are you . . . warm? Sorry, that’s a stupid question—”

“I’m warm. I just miss you.”

“I miss you so much. All of the time.” My lip trembled, and I bit it, trying to swallow the tears. Big girls don’t cry.

“It’s okay,” she said, and traced the corner of my eye, where a tear was threatening to spill out. “You can. You should.”

With that, the floodgates burst open. I wept in an all-consuming way like I hadn’t in forever, maybe not since I was a child. Sounds escaped me, gasping, wretched sounds over which I had no control, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I sank onto the ground, onto the cold dirt.

Margot wrapped her arms around me and began to cry too. I clutched her tightly, and our bodies shuddered and heaved against each other for a long time. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. When my sobs ran out and we grew still, I wiped my nose and took a sniff in. I couldn’t smell vanilla anymore. Whatever had just happened, it was over.

The strange expression on Margot’s face drained away. She wiped her nose too, her tear-streaked cheeks, and blinked a few times as if she were waking up. My head was heavy, but the rest of my body had grown lighter. I was devastated that it was done and so grateful that it had happened at all.

“Thank you,” I said.

Margot gave me a small, sad smile. “I’ve never been able to do that with my mother. She won’t come. But maybe next Samhain, you can help me.”

“I can try,” I said, my voice rusty from the tears. Margot leaned forward and brushed her lips against my cheek, so lightly I barely felt it. Then she looked up at the sky, stood, and pulled me to my feet.

“Come on,” she said. “We only have a little time.” She grabbed our robes and we ran through the woods, barefoot, thrashing through low-hanging branches, scrambling over rocks. As we ran, a strange thought hit me: I wanted to tell Raf what had happened, how I’d been able to talk to my mother again, to tell him how she’d asked about him. I shook that thought off and kept running. The ground before us rose in an incline and we climbed it, emerged through a grove of trees onto a ridge as the sky began to lighten around us. We sat on the grass, panting softly, as the others who had stayed up came through the trees behind us. We all wrapped our robes around ourselves like blankets and watched the sunrise. Pinks and oranges streaked across the sky. The only sounds were the rustle of a breeze in the leaves and our own awed breathing.

I realized then that I hadn’t tried very hard to talk to anyone about Nicole Woo-Martin because I wanted to believe that they couldn’t have hurt her. They’d only ever wanted to build her up, not bring her down. Maybe too they weren’t as elitist as I’d thought. Margot had figured out that I wasn’t rich, that I wasn’t even close. That’s why she’d found me a free apartment. And still, I was here beside them, worthy of their love.

As the morning light caught in Margot’s hair and brightened Vy’s face, I didn’t want to betray them anymore. I didn’t want to write about this night, to try and make sense of it. I didn’t want to lose this beautiful, precious place, where things were magic and