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“Your mother’s a witch.”
She flinched. She couldn’t help it. David had made this joke a hundred times, but she couldn’t train herself out of it. That initial reaction. Does he know?
She wasn’t born with her power, although God knows it wasn’t from lack of desire. When she was a little girl she’d wished with all her might to be able to change the way she looked. To look like all the other little girls, with big round eyes and porcelain skin. There were other ways she wanted to fit in: to eat normal food, to be allowed to sleep over at other girls’ houses, to watch TV after dinner. But she had a better chance of developing powers of self-transmogrification than of changing her mother’s rules, so she stuck with wishing for the least unrealistic.
That assessment faded with age, with the cessation of fairytales. The probability of being able to change her appearance dipped from: unlikely, but possible, to: get a grip Yuna. The likelihood of changing her mother never wavered below big fat zero, so instead all she could wish for was the future. Where she would stay up late without being yelled at, where she could quit playing the fucking clarinet, where she could, for that matter, curse without being forced to brush her teeth half a dozen times, where she could make her own decisions without the threat of an eight-day silent treatment.
She literally counted down the days of her senior year, drawing the number in damp condensation every shower, the anticipation so much more unbearable the closer it become. One of the few benefits of living under her mother’s roof was that she was absolutely going to be accepted into college. It was a matter of where, not if. There was an unholy fight when she declined U of T; for the first time, she stood her ground, and walked out the front door when her mother slapped her, and had stayed at Cassandra’s house, sharing a twin bed for two nights until her parents had filed a missing person’s report. It was worth it. Toronto was far, far too close to Montreal for comfort.
The six days she spent driving to Vancouver were some of the happiest of her life. Sixteen hours of daylight, a dozen cassette tapes in rotation, a cigarette in one hand, and the wind in her hair. She was as light as the smoke that trailed out the open window. There would be no turning back, no return to the cradle. The only piece of inheritance she intended to claim was her mother’s stubbornness, and that, she knew, was a bottomless well to draw upon.
The gift of youth and sisterhood that dorm living bestowed upon her, while not a form of magic, was something that sparkled like magic ought to. She learned it was possible to bicker without malice, to shed one’s skin and try another on for size, to be unashamedly brazen, to follow whims and fancies wherever they led. Boys were fine: plentiful, available, occasionally devastatingly handsome, but girls. Girls. They gave her the love she’d always wanted. Adoration and affection and tenderness. Each one was a sister. Each one was a mother.
She had held Darlene’s hair back over the toilet after a night that had gone too hard, too fast. She had thrown rocks at Danny’s window after he got caught sleeping around on Mich. She had fallen asleep at four in the morning with seven other girls crowded into her dorm room, after they had spent two hours using Jan’s copy of the DSM-II to diagnose Yuna’s mother. She had piled more bodies than seats into her car and driven them to Edmonton so they could attend Marguerite’s brother’s funeral.
So when Jo got into her Wicca phase and asked who wanted to join her in attempting to open their third eyes, Yuna obviously said yes.
The preconditions for spirituality: peace, calm, nature, open-mindedness, were all decidedly absent. Their ceremony was conducted on the lawn outside their dorms, with a definite tang of spilled beer scenting the air. They did not wear hippy-dippy skirts or lacy dresses or — as several boys requested, shouting from the windows — strip naked, but stuck to denim and polyester. Jo said it was ideal to do this at Samhain, but there was no way they were skipping the Halloween parties.
In short, it was a bit of a laugh. Yuna, like all the others, giggled through the motions, dropped the amethyst from her forehead halfway through, mouthed some words, then went back upstairs to finish her Quant assignment.
In the days and weeks that followed, she asked the others if they’d been having weird dreams afterwards. No one else had — or, at least, no one else admitted it. Mich put it down to the grass Yuna had smoked at the Halloween party the following night.
Grass didn’t do this.
Déjà vu wasn’t quite right. She’d had that before. No, this was knowing that what she’d seen was going to happen. In the future. Sera vu, or something like that. Preemptive.
She did not call it Seeing. Not even to herself.
Seeing would be targeted, useful. Lottery numbers, or plane crashes. Who would die young, and who would find love. Prophecies. Her visions were piddly shit.
Gauche blue carpet that she walked on in high heels, feeling unspeakably excited.
Walking out of an unfamiliar bedroom at a party, a bottle of Sambuca in her hand.
Marguerite calling out “Babe!” as Yuna looked up in the library.
Opening the door in a building, heart beating fast as hell, the paint fumes making her nauseous.
The thing was, they came true.
Sometimes it took years: seven years, for her to walk across that hideous carpet on her first day working at the Treasury. And sometimes it took days: Marguerite calling her attention to hurry up and come to lunch already. But they always happened, eventually.
When she ended up meeting David, she knew he was going to be important to her, because she’d seen him older, driving the two of them somewhere while she fiddled with the radio. When she went apartment hunting, she knew she’d found The One because she’d seen that closet before, with her linen inside.
She penned a letter while Jo was taking a chem mid-term, sitting cross-legged on her bed. Is this expected? Is this my third eye? How do I make it stop? The address she copied carefully from Jo’s Book of Shadows, and paid an exorbitant amount to send it via airmail to the Wiccan Society in Britain.
The answers, when they came, six weeks later, were supremely unhelpful. She should cultivate her ability, not reject it. They would welcome a visit from her if she wished to study under their tutelage, but more important than that was her connection to the Gods. There were many rituals they could recommend, but Wicca did not offer formulaic sacraments. She should search for her own path, seek connection in a way that best suited her own expression.
Following their guidance, she listened to her heart and pretended this wasn’t happening.
That strategy worked just fine until they wanted a baby. Tests, tests, more tests, the supremely frustrating advice to relax and it will happen. And all the time, thinking: I’ve never seen a baby in my dreams. Every morning, waking with a vision of ladling soup into bowls, or cheering at a hockey game, or waiting at an office printer, or Mich’s voice on the telephone while she curled the cord around her fingers. But never a crib, never crying in the background, never a rounded belly, and never, not once, a tiny bundle pressed to her chest.
She found a Magick Shoppe in the Yellow Pages and told David she had an appointment for a pap smear.
Feeling every inch the supreme idiot, on their last summer weekend at the lake cottage, two weeks before the equinox (the young woman at the shop had highly recommended waiting until a full moon Sabbat, but Yuna would rather die before telling David, and there was no way she could organize a secret outdoor bath in November), she sneaked out in the night and walked down to the shore. She rubbed potpourri across her stomach (rose petals were recommended; this would surely be good enough), stripped off her pyjamas, and stepped into the water.
Floating naked on her back, the moon turning the water to milk where it caressed her skin, she murmured the words. Abracadabra would have been equally mortifying, even with not a soul there to hear it but herself. Moon above, moon below, let your silver waters flow, she repeated, again and again, until the words lost all meaning, long after her skin had wrinkled.
When they returned to Ottawa she filled a canister with dried rosemary and stuck it under their bed and wondered whether she would feel better if this worked or if it didn't.
It didn’t take long.
A week later, one night after they’d made love, she dreamed of a toddler in her rear-vision mirror, sleeping as she parked a car. Not her current car, a new car. Sturdy and reliable and in all likelihood the kind of thing David would buy once she hit her third trimester.
She was wrong about that: he bought it when she was nine weeks in, to take advantage of the end of year clearance sales. Questions about fate and predestination didn’t worry her anymore like they had in college, because she had never thought she could love someone like she loved David, or that someone like him would love her back. Someone who pushed back against her stubbornness not with anger, but with a cock of the head and a warm hand on her shoulder and, later, before they went to sleep, with a gentle question: what was that really about?
And, honestly, who really gave a shit about free will when she got her Shane, her perfect perfect Shane. In the day he slept and cried and smiled. And in the nights, she watched him at one, four, eight, on David’s shoulders, splashing in the lake, asleep on a couch. One by one, all her dreams came true.
It took her four years to realize she’d never dreamt of him older than what looked to be about twelve.
She waited and waited, jumpy as a live wire, but an older Shane never came. The dreams continued, relentless, but he wasn’t there anymore. The day the last of her unrealized visions of him came true, on a unremarkable February day in 2003, when Shane came into the kitchen as she chopped ginger and asked what smelled so good, she wound up locking herself into the bathroom and weeping, clawing at her chest.
Every day from then on, she woke up and asked the question she’d steadfastly refused to ask before: is he going to die today? Every day, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour of every day, until David had pressed her hand and asked what was wrong once too often, and she did what she did best. Which was: something. Anything.
Harmony Skye was the psychic’s nom de scéne. Yuna knew nothing about her, other than a gushing recommendation from the new proprietor of the Magick Shoppe, and a phone number on a business card. Harmony wore three silk scarves and too much eyeshadow, but other than that she appeared reassuringly sane.
They immediately got off on the wrong foot. Her panic made Yuna brash and direct, and Harmony misinterpreted her blunt questions as those from a sceptic trying to unmask a fraud. Once they got past that, she was kind and reassuring, and probably quite relieved she didn’t need to try to contact some long-dead aunt.
In many circles, she explained, déjà vu was thought of as a psychic wink from the universe. Universe, Gods, God, whatever one wanted to call it. The common interpretation was it was a little flag planted in the sand: you’re on the right track, keep going. The fact that Yuna was still having her premonitions — Harmony’s word, decidedly not Yuna’s — was a good thing. The fact that Shane was no longer present wasn’t necessarily a sign of grief in her future, but maybe a sign that Shane’s path was no longer clear.
After endless questions about the recent presence of owls, moths, untrustworthy clocks, and dreams of weddings, which Yuna presumed were dangerous omens, Shane’s immediate future was declared as safe as it could be. She offered to perform a spell to guide Shane’s path, which Yuna only accepted out of some perverse politeness.
Harmony lit four brightly-colored candles and set them on pre-drawn compass points on the floor. She acknowledged the God of each element as she lit each one, and Yuna tried to pass off her fidgeting as interest, not embarrassment. When she was told to write her wish for Shane’s future on a scrap of paper, she scrawled Prosperity — the first thing that popped into her head — and watched as Harmony spilled wax from each candle onto the folded note.
Stupid, she thought on the way home. Stupid, stupid girl. Not only for the $150 she’d just forked over, but for wishing for prosperity. Who was she, her own mother? She hadn’t needed a guarantee of future success when she was eleven, she’d needed love. So much love.
That night, when the boys went to bed, she repeated the spell as best she could, itchy with self-consciousness. She had to make do with tea-lights and her best approximation of where the sun rose and set, but she could do a far better job on her intention. To feel so loved, she wrote, before she poured wax on the paper, and buried it (and, after a moment’s hesitation, the prosperity note too) under the hydrangea.
And by the morning, she’d had a vision. Just a fragment, of Shane as a grown man, so tall and broad and serious. So handsome, how did they make someone this beautiful? He stood in the open archway with his hands in his pockets, looking terrified. She could feel in her own body some kind of frightening anticipation, undefined and amorphous and confusing. The sound of the front door shutting.
And that was it. She never dreamed of Shane again. But it was enough.
Yuna often thought about those slips of paper. So inconsequential: not precious, artisanal, antique, special. Just scraps of printer paper with ballpoint ink. Black, she thought, though maybe the second one had been a blue pen. She couldn’t remember anymore. Prosperity and love.
Prosperity he had in spades. In buckets. In shipping containers. Almost too much, she thought sometimes. What did it do to a plastic brain, still morphing and learning, to be a multimillionaire before you turned twenty? Would it change who he was, the fundamental essence of Shaneness, to know that, if he wanted, he would never have to work another day in his life? Did he know how to clean the filter on his washing machine, or had that always been done by a maid? Did he know the cost of a bag of milk? Had he ever wanted something and had to save up for it? He knew how to work hard, to strive, but he would almost certainly never know the particular horror of being one car repair away from destitution.
Not that she wanted him under financial strain. But she didn’t want him to be considered an other, either. Living on a different plane of reality to the rest of humanity.
It was probably a bit late to avoid that now.
The note she’d written asking for her son to feel loved, she had come to consider as some kind of farcical trick played by bored and bemused mythological Gods. Fucking Phaethon and Apollo.
Because he was loved. Adored. Sometimes a little too much (there were two stalkers under restraining orders out there in the world). By thousands and thousands of people who didn’t know him at all. Who never saw him lying on a couch, scrolling on his phone. Or how his feet jiggled all afternoon if he didn’t exercise in the morning. Who didn’t know that his eyes welled up if anyone so much as mentioned The Iron Giant.
It wasn’t the love Yuna had wanted for him: for who he was, not what he did. Perhaps she’d ruined it by burying the notes together, prosperity and love intertwined. Perhaps neither of the rituals had even had any effect, and this was all dumb luck and wasted brainpower.
Rose gave her hope, for a week or two, until she actually saw Shane in the flesh. When she could tell this wasn’t some torrid whirlwind romance like the pictures suggested, nor something quieter and deeper, like she was hoping for. Shane, if anything, only seemed more anxious, more worried, more withdrawn.
And that was it. Two months out of eight years of adult life. There had been girls and group dates in high school, no one he seemed to be particularly hormonal for, and then Rose. And, of course, the fans. Fuck the Gods and their sense of humor.
And fuck those blue linen shirts too, while she was at it. They had become his default clothing, half a dozen of them in his various wardrobes, and every time she saw him in one, she wondered if today was going to be the day of her last vision of Shane.
She had absolutely no vision of Rozanov having bruised ribs, so if this had been a legitimate accusation of sorcery, she could have passed a lie detector test. She’d just watched a lot of hockey in her life. A lot of hockey. Anyone with eyes could see it if they knew what to look for.
Scott Hunter, though. There had been a dream, three or four years ago, where David had been on his laptop and over his shoulder she’d seen on the screen a picture of Hunter lifting the Stanley Cup. He wasn’t going to be playing for too many more seasons, surely. And with Shane out injured, and now Rozanov out too, this would surely be the year it would come true.
“She’s a witch!” David called out again, after she suggested the Admirals would go all the way, and she made herself laugh.
It was barely three weeks later that the day came.
David had come home in an odd mood. She could feel the tension stretching his skin; not in any kind of voodoo witchy sixth sense, just because she knew him well enough to recognize how profoundly unlike himself he was being. But she didn’t feel fear until he denied it. And denied it and denied it. Said he didn’t see Shane, he must have been swimming. But he so clearly saw something, no matter what he said.
They were seated in the living room, Yuna giving him a dose of his own medicine: waiting, waiting, quiet and observant, when a car door slammed. As she stood, she could see Shane in one of those shirts, striding up the path. There was another man there, but all she noticed was the rigidity in the set of Shane’s jaw. This is it this is it this is it, she thought, right up until the front door shut and the foresight her dream had given her ended and Rozanov, meek as a shy preschooler, walked into their home, and she didn’t have the first clue what to think anymore and she sure as shit hadn’t predicted any of this.
It wasn’t until later, after she’d been able to accept some basic but entirely novel facts, that everything else came crashing in. That maybe she had (or maybe she hadn’t) unlocked some path with her silly little pieces of paper, but either way that hadn’t been enough. That she’d been so fiercely, intensely devoted to not being her own mother, to loving her son with every fibre of her soul, that she had horseshoed all around. She’d loved an idea of him so loudly, that he hadn’t felt able to tell her the idea was malformed, that he had internalized that this stupid Platonic ideal of Shane was better than the true and beautiful, scarred and mended version of him.
She had come so close to turning into her own mother after all. Only allowing her baby the space to be the way he was “supposed” to be.
What had she done to deserve a child who forgave her? It was all David’s genes, it had to be, because Yuna hadn’t seen her mother since she packed her bedroom in boxes and drove to Vancouver.
She would earn that forgiveness, she would. She would listen to Shane, and make time for getting to know Rozanov, and give her advice and let them ignore it and let them lead and let them learn they could bring anything — anything — to her and she would give her honest opinion without forcing it down their throats and support them, no matter what. She would not be her mother.
Once David was asleep, for the first time in fifteen years, she crept out of bed and went looking for the candles. This time she thought of both of them, Shane and Ilya, when she poured the wax over the paper and buried it in the garden. Peace. They both deserved it.
And then she went to bed, and dreamed. Of Shane.
She would never dream grand prophecies, or even particularly poignant moments. All these decades after her first vision, she no longer wanted to.
She dreamed of Shane setting a fruit platter down at their dining table, preemptively smacking at Ilya’s outstretched hand.
She dreamed of both of them in the backseat as David drove through countryside, fast asleep like little boys.
She dreamed of the sound of Shane’s crying coming through the phone.
She dreamed of putting a mug down next to a Scrabble scorecard for four players.
She dreamed of Ilya’s laugh, head thrown back and howling, echoing across the water, as she looked out the cottage window at him and Shane by the fire.
She dreamed of Shane poaching eggs in an unfamiliar kitchen.
She dreamed of Ilya climbing into the front seat of her car at the airport pick-up zone.
She dreamed and dreamed, and could hardly wait for the future to begin.