The young man setting out with his pack into the sunshine was handsome and smiling, turning his dark face to the sun, and only the cliff edge at his feet gave a clue to the deeper, darker meanings of the card—impetuosity, na?veté, impulsiveness.
“This card is called the Fool,” Hal said softly, and when the woman gave a little broken sob and a nod, almost in spite of herself, she went on, “but tarot isn’t about simple meanings. The Fool, though he can symbolize foolishness, doesn’t always mean that. Sometimes this card means new beginnings, sometimes it means doing things without thinking about the path ahead, without considering the future.”
The woman gave another dry, choking sob, and said something that sounded like “His future!” in a tone of such bitter disbelief that Hal could not help herself—she put out her hand.
“I . . . forgive me, but . . . is your question about your son?”
The woman began to cry at that, broken and in earnest, and as she wept she nodded, and Hal heard words tumbling out—names of drugs, of treatment centers she recognized in Brighton, needle exchanges, of money stolen from handbags, of treasured heirlooms sold and pawned, of sleepless nights waiting for a call that didn’t come. The story between the racking sobs was plain enough—a desperate struggle to save a son who did not want to be saved.
A choice, the woman had said, and Hal knew what that choice was, and she wished now that she had not opened the door.
With a feeling of foreboding, Hal turned the second card. It was the Wheel, reversed.
“The second card you chose represents the obstacle you and your son face together. This is the Wheel of Fortune, or the Wheel of Life. It symbolizes fortune and renewal and the cycle of life, and shows that you and your son have come to a turning point”—a little, reluctant nod, as the woman swiped fiercely at her eyes—“but here it’s reversed—that’s what we call it when the card is upside down like this. The Wheel reversed represents bad luck. This is the obstacle that has come into your life. There are negative forces here that are out of your control, but they are not always completely external—they come about as the result of choices we’ve made in the past, your choices and your son’s, of course.”
“His choices,” the woman said bitterly. “His choices, not mine. He was a good boy, until he took up with those boys at his school and started dealing. What was I supposed to do—stand by and watch him sink into depravity?”
Her eyes were bleak holes in her skull, and as she waited for Hal’s response she bit at the chapped skin of her lips, pulling at it with her teeth until a bead of blood appeared. Hal shook her head. Suddenly she wanted this to be over very much indeed.
“The last card represents a possible course of action, but”—the hunger in the woman’s eyes made her add hastily—“it’s important to know that it is not a prescription. The cards don’t predict the future—they don’t give a fail-safe course. They simply tell you what could, on a given day, be one outcome to your problem. Some situations have no simple resolution; all we can do is steer the course that causes the least harm.”
She turned the card, and the High Priestess turned her serene face up to the dim, flickering light. From outside there was a gust of wind, and in the distance Hal heard a seagull’s scream.
“What does it mean?” the woman demanded, all her skepticism gone, subsumed by desperation for answers. She stared down at the figure on the card, seated on her throne, her hands spread like a benediction. “Who is she—some kind of heathen goddess?”
“In a way,” Hal said slowly. “Some call her Persephone, some say she is Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Some call her even older names. In French she’s called la Papesse.”
“But what does she mean?” the woman said again, more urgently. Her fingers closed like claws on Hal’s wrist, painfully tight, and Hal had to fight the urge to pull away.
“She means intuition,” Hal said shortly. She disengaged herself from the woman’s grip under pretense of rearranging the cards into a single pile, the Priestess on top. “She symbolizes the unknown—both the unknown within ourselves, and the future. She means that life is changing, that the future is always uncertain, no matter how much information we can gather.”
“So what should I do?” the woman cried. “I can’t go through this over and over, but if I throw him out, what kind of mother does that make me?”
“I believe . . .” Hal stopped, and swallowed. She hated this part. Hated the way they came to her asking for answers she couldn’t give. She thought carefully, and then began again. “Look, this is a very unusual spread.” She turned the rest of the pack over and spread them out, showing the woman the ratio of major to minor cards, the fact that the vast majority of the pack were numbered pip cards. “These cards—these numbered ones, with the suits on them—these are what we call minor cards. They have their own meanings, of course, but they are more . . . mutable, perhaps. More open to interpretation. But these others”—she touched the cards the woman had chosen, and the rest of the trumps, dotted through the spread—“these symbolic cards are called the major arcana, or trumps. To have a spread that’s completely composed of trump cards, as you had, that’s statistically very unusual. There just aren’t that many of these cards in the deck. And the point is that in tarot, these cards represent the strong winds of fate—the turning points in our lives—and when you get a large number of them in a reading, it can mean that the situation is largely out of your hands, that it will play out as the fates intend.”
The woman said nothing; she only looked at Hal, her eyes so hungry they made Hal almost afraid. Her face in the candlelight was shadowed, the eye sockets sunken.
“Ultimately,” Hal said softly, “you have to decide for yourself what the cards are telling you, but my feeling is that the Priestess is telling you to listen to your intuition. You know the answer already. It’s there in your heart.”
The woman drew back from Hal, and then she nodded, very slowly, and bit her white, chapped lips.
Then she stood, threw down a crumple of banknotes on the table, and turned on her heel. The kiosk door banged behind her, letting in a gust of wind, and Hal snatched for the notes, spreading them out, and then shook her head when she saw how much had been left.
“Wait,” she called. She ran to the door, forcing it open against the thrust of the wind. It caught from her fingers and slammed back against the side of the kiosk, making her wince for the fragile Victorian glass, but she could not spare more than a glance back to check it was okay. The woman was already disappearing.
She began to run, her feet slipping on the wet planks.
“Wait!”
The wind had picked up, and a mix of rain and salt spray stung her eyes as she reached the entrance to the pier, the illuminated sign above the entrance casting long, flickering shadows.
“Wait, come back!” she called into the wet night, straining through the drizzle for a shadowy figure. “This is far too much!”
She was panting, but now she tried to still her breath, listening for the sound of footsteps hurrying through the darkness; she could hear nothing above the roar of the sea and the patter of the rain.
The promenade was empty, and the woman had disappeared into the darkness as if made from rain herself.
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