He placed a hand on her eyelids and said, “Don’t look, Mommy, I’m going to walk you to the living room.”
“Okay, not looking,” she said as Jacob put his hands on her shoulders and tugged her upright out of bed. Grinning nervously and keeping her eyes closed, she allowed him to push at her back to direct her out of her bedroom. Caitlin immediately walked into the edge of the open door.
“Oof!”
“Sorry, Mommy. Okay, we’re in the hall, go right.”
“I know where the living room is,” she said, laughing, and then suddenly stopped. One bare foot had landed in something slimy.
“Ew!”
Her eyelids barely fluttered open before Jacob ran his hands over them again. “Don’t look!”
“There’s something gross—”
“Don’t look! Arfa threw up.”
“Is that the surprise?”
“No! Don’t move. I’ll get paper towels.”
Caitlin stood blindly in the hall on one foot. She listened to the sound of Jacob’s feet retreating and paper towels ripping off the roll. He was talking to himself, muttering something about cat puke. He chuckled. The smell of coffee wafted toward her from the kitchen. She didn’t think Jacob knew how to make coffee. Then she felt him wiping off her foot with the paper towels.
“Is it safe for me to stand yet?”
“One second, I’m getting the floor.”
She could hear him rubbing the puke into the carpet.
“Okay. You can walk now.”
Propelled again by her son, Caitlin put one foot in front of the other until she could tell by the blast of sunlight through her eyelids that they had reached the living room. Jacob positioned himself in front of her and said, “Open!”
Caitlin opened her eyes and saw, standing before her, her mother leaning over the dining room table with the coffeepot. A homemade chocolate Bundt cake was waving four candles at her, and crepe paper twirled from the chairs to the ceiling light to make a green and yellow tepee.
“Surprise!” they chorused. Jacob was so excited he started jumping, then stood on a chair near the cake, still yelling, “Surprise! Gotcha!”
“Hey, Jake,” his grandmother piped over him as she poured fresh coffee into two mugs. “Derriere in the chair.”
“I don’t understand French!” he answered back.
“You understand Irish?” she demanded with a touch of brogue, pointing at the wooden seat.
He stopped hopping around and obediently went to where the no-nonsense finger was pointing.
“Were you surprised, Mommy?” he asked in a tone that was both giddy and sheepish.
“Well, I’m surprised I’m forty,” she said, hugging her mother around the shoulders. “What the heck time did you leave home?”
“As soon as the bread rose,” Nancy replied, patting Caitlin’s hands. “Your father would have been here too but we had a no-show at the bakery so he had to fill in.”
“I’ll call him later,” Caitlin said, sitting in the seat of honor. Quickly she glanced around for Arfa. The tabby cat was snoozing in sphinx position on an arm of the couch, obviously no worse for wear.
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” Jacob chanted, bopping up and down in his seat. “Make your wish!”
“All right,” she said, though it was Nancy’s stern gaze that quieted him.
Caitlin looked at the candles, thinking about being forty, about Jacob’s having recently turned ten—
About Atash setting himself on fire, the flames leaping over his clothes…
My god, she thought, and quickly blew out the candles.
She vaguely noticed that Jacob was still leaning forward with expectation. An instant later the candles relit themselves. Jacob shrieked with laughter but Caitlin heard only screaming. She saw the man who burst into flame in the courtyard in Galderkhaan when she’d shared Atash’s vision. Shaking, she blew out the candles again and of course the trick flames came back, now with all the souls of Galderkhaan burning and screaming and dying. Caitlin tried to keep it together, covering her nose and mouth with one hand, but she was visibly shaking. Jacob, unaware, was laughing and clapping.
Nancy O’Hara, who noticed everything, said to Jacob, “Now you get to put them out, the way I showed you.”
Gleefully, he dipped his fingers in a small dish of water hidden under a napkin. He pinched each candle out with a ssst, the smoke wafting upward in tendrils.
Nancy occupied Jacob with helping her pull out the candles and then cut the cake into slices while keeping an eye on her daughter. Caitlin was breathing slowly, purposefully, through her nose, with her hands clasped in front of her face. She closed her eyes, checked her hands to see if they had stopped trembling, and took a few more shallow breaths.
Gradually, Caitlin normalized, nodded thanks to her mother, and sank a fork into a proffered slice of cake. With Jacob safely occupied by his own slice, Nancy murmured to Caitlin, “You’re not done with that previous case?”
Caitlin didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.
“But you’re not going to be traveling any time soon.” It was pointedly a statement from Nancy, not a question.
“I—I don’t know,” Caitlin said quietly. “I never know.”
“Don’t do something dangerous and make me play the mother card with you, Caitlin. Grandparenting is enough.”
“Mom, you didn’t want me going to Thailand after the tsunami. What if I had listened to you? I wouldn’t have met Jacob’s dad, and you wouldn’t be a grandmother.”
“I was worried about your safety. You knew it was a dangerous situation and went anyway. And after your recent experiences, I am still concerned.”
Caitlin sighed wearily. “Mom, you run a bakery—”
“Meaning what, exactly?” the older woman asked. “That I shouldn’t have an opinion about how my daughter conducts her life?”
“No, I meant that our worlds are different.”
“Caitlin, I meet more people every day than you do in a week—”
“I know. And you should be proud, Mom. I am, of you and Dad. I just mean that—”
“You think you know what’s best for you, I know. I’ve heard it before,” Nancy continued. “But here’s my take. You’re world renowned. You’ve ‘made it.’ What I’m saying, with a mother’s pride, is, why can’t you stop fighting so hard and enjoy that?”
“Enjoy? Mom, that’s a word I apply to stepping in cat vomit because it makes my son laugh. Beyond that? I need to understand things, not just fix them. Sometimes that means going where the challenges are. Knowledge is worth the risk for me. Sometimes, like a week ago, things end without being tidied up or understood. Am I satisfied? A bit, sometimes. But I get no real peace or enjoyment. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t run my practice like a bakery.”
Nancy raised one eyebrow, took another bite of cake, and for a second everyone just chewed. Then she said to Jacob, “Don’t forget the other surprise, kid.”
“Oh, I almost did!” he exclaimed, crumbs flying from his overstuffed mouth.
Jacob leaped toward the silverware drawer and pulled out a tiny gift with an enormous pink bow and more tape than wrapping paper. As Caitlin struggled to open it—enjoying the moment, and proving it to her mother with a genuine smile—Jacob stood next to her with his hand on her shoulder, jiggling up and down. At last she got it open and found a key chain with a thin brass circle. There was a maze etched into the brass.
“It’s a labyrinth,” Jacob said, saying the word like he owned it. He pulled it from her hands and brought it close to her eyes. “It’s medieval, Grandpa said. There’s only one path.” His pointer finger traced around the whorls of the maze. “See? You can’t get lost. Whichever way you go, it gets you to the middle!”