Page 3 of Rise of the Melody
I shouldn’t tell her all of this, considering how much she wanted me to find a different career path, but she was the only person I could talk to. I pulled out my phone with a shaking hand and started the video. When my voice first began, she sucked in a breath. And then her eyebrows crinkled. Her head began a small shake, and she took the phone from my hand to watch more closely. I crossed my arms, feeling nauseated as I recalled Mr. Goneley’s reaction. But my voicedidsound great. Not to brag. It hadn’t been just a great performance in my mind.
When it ended, Aunt Lorna’s lips were pressed tightly together as she passed the phone back to me. “I know you enjoy singing, Letty. And it’s been a wonderful hobby to have growing up?—”
My heart dropped. “Auntie, don’t?—”
“Enough!” She raised her voice over mine. “This is a fool’s errand! This path will be filled with heartache.” She seemed to struggle for words before saying, “Do you really want to be just another New York starving artist working as a waitress and facing disappointment after disappointment?”
My breath caught in my lungs. “Why don’t you believe I can do it?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in you. It’s just unnecessary hardship, Letty! You can help me run this business, oranybusiness. You’ve got an eye for detail and math. You’re smart.”
Ugh, this again!
“I would be miserable!” I insisted. “And I’m more than happy to help you with the shop, but that’s your dream, not mine. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I’m going to sing, Aunt Lorna. It’s my gift.”
“I don’t think it’s what your parents would have wanted,” she blurted.
Her face turned ashen as my stomach twisted and burned with acid. My parents had disappeared on a whale-watching excursion when I was four. We rarely spoke of them. Her eyes looked full of both panic and shame.
“That’s not fair,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “You can’tknowthat.”
I watched, as if in slow motion, as my aunt’s face pinched in pain and she grabbed her temples, her knees buckling.
“Auntie!” I dropped my phone and grasped her upper arms, leading her to a velvet armchair to sit. She breathed heavily, a small whimper escaping. She’d suffered from headaches and migraines since I could remember, but this one looked more severe than normal. “You need to see a doctor. What if something’s really wrong?” I’d lost too much sleep worrying about brain tumors, but as usual, Aunt Lorna shook her head.
“No doctors. I’ve got it under control.”
I gritted my teeth in frustration. Yes, she was the most talented herbalist possibly ever, especially in the western world. People traveled to Moonlight Apothecary from all over to get her tinctures and homeopathic healing herbal mixtures when modern medicines and clinical chemicals didn’t work. I’d seen her work miracles like a modern-day witch doctor. She was a genius, but herbs could only go so far. If she would get an MRI at least we could know what the real problem was.
“I’m okay.” She sat taller and her forehead smoothed. “I’m sorry.” She met my eyes and there was regret there. “I shouldn’t have brought up your parents.”
I nodded, at a loss for words. Her erratic behavior and headaches were scaring me lately. My aunt had always been eccentric and special. I’d come to think of her as this magical sort of being, though I knew how unhinged that sounded. But I’d seen strange things as a child. Whenever I asked for explanations, Aunt Lorna always had some logical reason for the things I’d witnessed her do when she thought I wasn’t looking. A book sliding across the table to her waiting hand. One of her potions turning bright green, then bubbling down to a muddy brown as she chanted in Gaelic—literal miracles of near-death to life from her potions. Multiple candle wicks blowing out at the same time when there was zero air movement in the room.
It had been a while since anything like that happened, so I chalked it up to fuzzy memories and childish wonderings.
After a moment, Aunt Lorna touched the ornate cuff on my wrist that she’d given me, turning it as if inspecting it. The underneath was a layer of salt, sulfur, and agate fused together and embedded onto dried fish leather. On the top was a layer of ammolite gemstone plating—iridescent red and green that looked like dragon scales. The cuff was said to provide protection and ward against evil. When she’d put it on me years ago, she’d spoken a line of Scots Gaelic as she sealed it shut with a glue substance. She was funny like that. Old pagan superstitions from when she’d grown up in the highlands of Scotland. To me, her Gaelic phrases sounded like spells, which would be apropos considering the amount of rare mystical texts and spell books she sold here. It was because of her that I said weird things like “gods” and “Gaia,” aka Mother Nature, the creator of faeries in folklore.
A sound came from the shop’s door.
“Jeebus!” Aunt Lorna’s scream had both of us jumping. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, and I followed her eyes. The giant dog stood there taking up the entire doorway staring at us through the glass. He had that greenish tint again. Had he rolled in moss or something gross?
“Coo Shee!” she yelled. I’d never heard my aunt sound so terrified before. “Letty, hide!”
“Aunt Lorna, it’s okay!” I stood and motioned to the door. “It’s just a stray dog I found on my way home today. I know he’s scary looking but he’s actually really good and sweet.”
Suddenly the dog was pushing open the shop door with his body, and Aunt Lorna screamed again, grabbing me. We did a silly tug-of-war where she tried to pull me into the back room and I yanked back, trying to reassure her that everything was okay. The dog got close to us and sat down staring at us in that intent way of his. All four cats, which had been quietly resting in their various places, suddenly began a ruckus of hissing and screaming in a flurry of orange and black as they ran, scuttling and sliding along the tiled floor until they escaped through the doorway of dangling beads to the back room. The dog watched them with a tilted head, and I swore he appeared amused.
“Good boy,” I said. “See, Auntie?” He took up a lot of space in her small shop.
She was gripping me hard, breathing erratically as she stared at it. “I’ve never…I’ve only heard…Gaia above. Did it—I mean, has he…barked?”
“What?” I thought about it. “No, he hasn’t made a sound the whole time I’ve been with him.”
She nodded and I saw her throat bob with a hard swallow. “That’s good. Very good then.” Slowly, she began to relax, still staring him down.
I told her the whole story. “He’s sort of attached himself to me. I don’t know why. I’m going to take some pictures of him and post them online. I’m sure his owners will be looking for him. Wouldn’t you think?”
Aunt Lorna never lost the look of worry. She pinched her upper nose and closed her eyes for a long moment of quiet.
