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

FORTY-THREE

We all slept until the afternoon. When I woke up, my feet ached. I turned my heel over to reveal scratches and bruises from the night before. I had a splinter that I didn’t remember getting. I pulled it out with my fingernails.

The smell of coffee and butter drew me to the kitchen, where I found Tara, frying up potatoes at the stovetop while Iris and Ophelia sat at the table drinking coffee as if their lives depended on it. Tara shoveled some of the potatoes onto a plate and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said. “God, do shrooms make you ravenous the morning after? ’Cause I am starving.”

“Shrooms?” Tara asked.

“From Vy’s tea.” Tara gave me a blank look. At the table, Iris’s back stiffened. Oops. “Did she not pass it around to everyone?”

“Apparently not,” Iris said.

“I’m not mad or anything that she did it,” I said, and it was true, even though I should have been livid. “It was a really wonderful night.”

“Sounds like next time she should share with us all,” Tara said.

We ate in the living room, sitting on the couches and the pillows, our feet tangling together under plush quilts, recovering and relaxing. My mother and I used to veg out on our couch together all the time, in those couple of years that I’d taken care of her. We’d spent multiple afternoons a week under the blankets cupping huge mugs of tea, gossiping about everything like middle school girls. My mother had always been so busy when I was growing up, trying to earn enough to support a family as a single mother, so our leisurely afternoons together were the one unexpected upside to her illness.

Now I had a kind of warmth like that again, as we moaned about our aching calves and told each other stories. Iris sat, lost in thought, by the window, every so often exchanging looks with Nina. But the rest of us passed one another snacks and laughed until finally, regretfully, we knew it was time to go home.

•   •   •

In the van, Iris’s sports car zipping ahead of us, our phones all dinged at once. We’d driven back into service, and we had a new e-mail from Caroline.

Feeling much better today, she’d written to the group, and cannot wait to hear about your trip! Let’s all meet at the clubhouse when you arrive back in the city so you can fill me in? Let me know your ETA. There might be people around, so use the back entrance, obviously.

We sped toward the West Village, a new camaraderie among the three of us. Margot and I sang along to Vy’s yowly Icelandic music, making up lyrics, and she pretended that it didn’t bother her. I felt a sudden, deep surge of tenderness for her and her unapologetic weirdness.

“I thought you hated me for the longest time,” I said to Vy, who gave a kind of harrumphing noise in response.

“Oh!” Margot said. “Why?’

“Basically the first thing she ever said to me was that I was a seagull who was afraid of the ocean.”

Margot laughed, delighted.

“I still think you’re a seagull,” Vy said.

“No! Can’t I graduate to a heron or a hawk, or something cool like that?”

“When seagulls do go beneath the waves, they actually have excellent lung capacity.” She swerved into a different lane. “Those birds are stronger than they look.”

“Thanks,” I said, biting my lip. Now that the floodgates had opened, all my emotions were bubbling very close to the surface. Oh God, I was going to become the kind of person who cried at commercials.

I wished that time could extend infinitely between now and when I was supposed to talk to Miles again, so that I could keep living like this. For the first time, I pictured telling him that I’d chosen the Nevertheless women over him. I wanted the things that they had: the power, yes, but more important, the sisterhood. Vy swerved onto the streets of the West Village as dusk started to fall, and parked somewhere far away from the clubhouse’s entrance. Instead of walking into the front door, she and Margot turned down a back alley.

“So there’s a secret back entrance?” I asked.

“Yes,” Margot said. “Just in case we need to get to the roof without anyone else seeing.”

We came to an unmarked, unprepossessing gray door with a small keypad to one side of it. Margot typed in a code—2823—and then pressed the door handle. We entered into a small dark hallway. No security guard here. At the end of the hall was a staircase, and also a musty freight elevator, the same one I’d only ever taken from behind the door in the clubhouse a few floors up. Its gears ground and squeaked as we rose through the air. Laughing, talking, we stepped off the elevator and through the door leading to the roof, along the narrow pathway between trellises to where the trees began. Caroline and the others were already there, locked in whispered conversation. When we emerged into the circle, they turned and looked at us. Iris had a strange, resolute expression on her face. Caroline’s coloring was still a little green, but her eyes were dark. Furious.

“Welcome back, Margot,” she said, her voice like ice. “They just told me everything.”

FORTY-FOUR

Margot straightened her shoulders and looked at Caroline with a level gaze. “What do you mean?”

Caroline began to pace, practically spitting as she talked. “Summoning the dead? Drinking during the rituals? And I hear you allowed Vy to put shrooms in her tea and drug Jillian?” Vy shot me a what the fuck? look, as if she couldn’t believe that I’d sold her out like that. “It’s like everything I’ve asked you not to do—”

“It doesn’t even get close to everything,” Margot said drily.

“—and the moment I couldn’t be there, you just did whatever the