Woman King Read online

  Rose nodded and escorted me into the house.

  After settling down for a much-needed nap on the couch, I awoke forty minutes later and went to look for my mother. She was not in the house. I slipped on a pair of her shoes that were sitting by the door and walked over to her studio, following a path illuminated by small lights set along the paving stones. Maintaining an old habit I’d been taught as a child, I knocked once before entering.

  “Come,” she called, and I opened the door. She was sitting in front of a canvas with a brush suspended in her fingers. In front of her was the view from the edge of our property. I had seen the same scene a million times growing up, but somehow in her painting she had made the sea seem alive. The deep green blades featured in the grassy cliff that marks the end of our land appeared to be moving. For a moment, I thought I could hear the crickets in the grass, too.

  “It’s beautiful, Mom.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” she said in a soft, low voice that was reserved for me. “Now why don’t you tell me why you decided to come in the middle of the week for a visit? You haven’t done that since gran was alive.”

  When my grandmother Bella Rose was alive, I often visited during the week. After she died, I stopped coming as frequently, not only because I wanted to escape my mother’s grief, but also to avoid my own.

  “I’m not sure why I’m here, Mom. I have been feeling a little unsettled lately.”

  My mother nodded. “I can feel your unease. What’s happened? Have you seen Lily? She usually makes you feel better.”

  “Things are not going as well at work as I would like. I got fired from a job recently, and I managed to blow an interview for a big project that easily should have been mine to win. Honestly, I just don’t feel like myself.”

  My mother abruptly dropped her brush on a tray and turned to face me. “Olivia, you are not yourself,” she said. “Not really. You haven’t been yourself for many, many years. I think maybe it is finally catching up with you.”

  I should have seen the speech coming. But I was feeling so lousy that I had forgotten where this kind of conversation would lead with my mother. Now, there was no avoiding it.

  “Mom, please.”

  “You’re agitated. I don’t blame you,” she continued. “But you have turned your back on a part of yourself, Olivia Rose. It’s like wearing contact lenses when your vision is fine to begin with. You’ve intentionally turned off your own sixth sense. It’s no wonder you don’t feel like yourself. How long did you think you could keep this up?”

  “For as long as I live,” I said, as an image of my mother drinking in our darkened kitchen crept into my mind.

  “I don’t need to use my skills to sense your anger at me, Olivia, and I understand. I love my gift, but it does overwhelm me at times. Your gran was the only person who knew how to help me keep it in perspective. It’s one reason why I never married. I didn’t want to have to pretend I could control my emotions.”

  “So it was OK to be out of control around me?” I snapped back.

  “No, but it’s not the same thing,” she said.

  “You could have turned it off, Mom,” I said, cutting her off. “I have. You don’t need to open yourself up like that.”

  Rose shook her head. “Look at my paintings, Olivia,” she said gesturing toward her easel. “Do you really think they would be so alive if I stopped feeling? I could not function if I closed myself off,” she continued. “Every time I place a brush to the canvas, I feel the energy of life though my hand. I cannot turn my back on who I am because it’s difficult.”

  “Difficult? You call boozing your way through life difficult? You call taking drugs and sleeping for days difficult?” I said. “That’s not what I call it. I call it chaos. I think this curse from our family is a disability. And you medicate yourself to survive.”

  My mother leaned back on her painter’s stool, looking beleaguered.

  I had said too much and regretted my words immediately. I apologized and she forgave me, never having been one to let an emotional outburst offend her.

  Soon after our argument, I left her studio and retreated to the guest house to go to bed, but my sleep that night was miserable. I tossed and turned, in the grip of a terrible, unexplained anxiety. At one point, I was plagued by a dream featuring an enormous black panther that seemed to be stalking me. When I woke up in the morning, I decided to head straight back to San Francisco. I felt guilty leaving my mother without saying goodbye, but knew that she would understand.

  ****

  CHAPTER 3

  For several days after returning home I did not sleep well. Though I fell into bed exhausted, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a dream featuring an enormous panther walking beside me. The setting for these walks seemed familiar to me, but I could never tell exactly where we were. A very odd detail in these dreams was that I felt the animal wanted to speak to me. But of course that was ridiculous.

  Lack of sleep made me increasingly agitated as the days went on. Indeed, I was in no mood to be gracious when the call came from one of my clients asking for an impromptu meeting at my offices. In my experience, no client ever wants to meet the same day unless they intend to fire you. I agreed to the meeting and spent the better part of the morning trying to keep my already shredded nerves from disintegrating.

  At 1 pm inside our office conference room, I greeted my client, a real estate developer who wanted to buy a pair of apartment buildings, tear them down, and build two enormous towers in their place. It would be a difficult project because it involved temporarily relocating hundreds of people, and then offering them a chance to return to the new apartments in the towers, but at the same rent they paid previously. My client also wanted the height of the two buildings to be greater than what the law allows, something that worried city officials, who had never granted such a waiver.

  The list of concerns had been mounting, now making it almost a full day’s job to respond to the telephone calls and emails regarding the project. I have a small but highly competent staff in the office, yet it was obvious that this project was becoming overwhelming. Generally, I don’t believe in being overwhelmed and refuse to allow myself to feel that kind of emotion. The problem, in this case, was that it blinded me to my own limitations.

  “Thanks for making time to see me, Olivia,” he said with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

  “You don’t need to thank me, Tom,” I said, my lips fixed in a weak grin. “But I am wondering what brought you to my office in the middle of the day instead of calling.”

  “Listen, um, I have been speaking with my investors and we have decided that we’d like to bring in another consultant to help, err, round out the team.”

  “Round out the team,” I repeated.

  Tom looked down at his hands for a moment before he spoke, a sure sign I was going to hear bad news.

  “The thing is,” he stuttered. “We’ve been speaking with Stoner Halbert and have asked him to come on board.”

  There he was again. It seemed we were going to be spending a lot of time together, whether it suited me or not.

  “I see,” I said calmly. “Have I failed to do something? Are you unhappy with my work?”

  Tom shifted in his chair, but again would not meet my gaze.

  “Olivia, this is a big project and we absolutely must get approval. The bank has given me a limited time to complete the entitlements, or the loan will evaporate. Lately, well … Look, this is no reflection on you. I think this is a situation where a larger team makes sense. We need some additional firepower.”

  It was difficult for me to hear him speak because the blood was pounding so loudly in my ears. I had never been superstitious before, but I was beginning to wonder if someone or something had jinxed me.

  You know how there are moments that define us as adults? Well, this was one of them for me. I did not want to lose the project. I was already worried about my reputation, having lost one client already to Halbert. Professionally,
I could not allow myself to become enraged, so I swallowed my pride. After a lengthy and awkward moment of silence on my part, I put on my game face and smiled.

  “Tom, if you think that bringing Stoner on board will help improve our chances, then I am all for it,” I said, my voice slightly cracking. “Why don’t we set up a meeting next week to get the team together and brief him on the status of things.”

  Tom smiled, and this time it was a genuine smile.

  “I knew this wouldn’t be a problem for you, Olivia,” he said beaming. “You are one tough cookie. I’ll tell Stoner to call you and you two can arrange a meeting.”

  “Great. OK,” I said, beaming right back at him, “I will look out for his call.”

  We shook hands and I showed Tom out. After he left, I walked back to my office, shut the door, and, for the first time in many years, began to cry.

  Halbert must have been on Tom’s speed dial, because he called me less than an hour later to arrange a meeting. By the time he called, I had stopped crying and had moved on to brooding.

  “Aren’t you a good sport,” he purred into the phone when I told him I would make the necessary arrangements to merge our teams. “Not many people would be as gracious about having to work with another consultant. What’s your secret?” His tone was friendly, but oddly biting and I was anxious to get off the phone.

  “The important thing is for this project move forward and for the client to be happy,” I said, trying to sound indifferent.

  I was, of course, lying

  ****

  CHAPTER 4

  After everything that had transpired, it seemed like a good day to leave work early. My head ached, the result of a toxic cocktail of sensations swirling within me. I needed to deal with my anxiety, embarrassment and anger. Since when did I need help to complete a project? Why was I suddenly not powerful enough? I had no answers to these questions, but I felt a growing sense of unease.

  At home, I tried to work in my garden. Putting my hands into the dirt usually helps to distract me from my troubles. For some reason, the lots in the Inner Sunset are more generous than in other parts of the city, and my yard is larger than most. Slowly, I had been transforming my plot into a Provençal garden, complete with olive trees and lavender. I am an unabashed Francophile, having visited the country many times with my mother over the years to attend her exhibitions.

  My introduction to French began in kindergarten, as my mother insisted that I attend a French bilingual school. There, a kindly older woman from Toulouse taught me my earliest words. In addition, I lived in Paris briefly during college through an exchange program, where I expanded my studies to include French grammar. The garden is one way I stay connected to France—right down to the antique wooden park chairs outside on my deck.

  This time, however, even the garden didn’t help me relax. Though I managed to settle a half-dozen shade plants into the soil on the south side of the garden, I still didn’t feel any better than I had before. In fact, I felt worse. I went inside and opened my laptop. I fiddled with my iPod and created a few new playlists. I updated my Facebook status, and then went back to Spotify to look at new music. Finally, after another hour of spinning my wheels, I texted Lily and asked her to join me for drinks. She immediately agreed to meet me.

  I dusted off most of the soil from my clothing and went upstairs to shower and change. I pulled out a black cotton dress with ballet sleeves and a pair of leopard-print flats, then rummaged through my closet until I found a slate-grey cashmere cardigan that draped to my knees.

  I headed off to the Mission, a part of San Francisco where one should not show up in a suit and tie. The epicenter of fashion and cuisine, the Mission is in constant motion. It’s a favorite spot among the young and creative who are drawn to its avant-garde clothing boutiques and stylish restaurants. It also happens to be one of the warmest parts of San Francisco—blessed with less fog than most parts of town.

  I was meeting Lily at Foreign Cinema, a popular restaurant where movies are projected onto an enormous wall. On nice evenings, it’s heavenly to sit outside on the patio and watch a film while enjoying steak frites and a nice glass of Bordeaux.

  Lily was waiting in the long hallway that led to the hostess station when I walked in the door. She smiled, a tentative smile, given that the last time we’d seen each other I had left in a funk. But Lily was my best friend, and it wasn’t her fault that Stoner Halbert seemed to be stalking my clients.

  As we were about to be led to our table, I noted a group of men checking her out. Lily’s beauty is such that it can be startling. She is over six feet tall, with straight black hair that falls down to the middle of her back, the blackness accentuating her pale, seemingly glowing, skin. Tonight she looked especially striking in a pair of slim jeans tucked into boots and an amazing vintage military coat, complete with brass buttons. She’d fashioned her hair into two long braids on either side of her head and, as a result, a small tattoo at the back of her neck was visible. The tattoo was a tiny bit of writing in a language I did not recognize.

  “What’s the tattoo?” I asked as we walked into the dining room, leaving Lily’s admirers behind.

  Lily smiled and rubbed her fingers over the images. “It’s nothing. It’s a design a friend made when I was in college. It’s gibberish, really. Sometimes I forget it’s even there.”

  “What does it say?” I asked, intrigued by her reticence.

  “It’s written in an old language,” she said. “It means peace and order.”

  “Peace and order,” I repeated. “Sounds nice, where can we find some of that?”

  Lily squeezed my hand. “You never know, Olivia, it might be right around the corner.”

  We were seated at a table outside in the courtyard. The movie was starting early, before sunset, because it was Lord of the Rings, the first part of the trilogy.

  “Oh, I love that movie,” Lily said picking up a menu.

  “We could do with a bit of make-believe,” I said, scanning the dinner specials. “It’s no fun to be in the real world at the moment.”

  “It was no picnic for Middle Earth,” Lily said. “After all, they had a war to contend with.”

  “Yes, but it’s make believe,” I said, pausing to order a glass of wine with the server. “In the real world, there are no such things as fairies or dwarves. There is no handsome warrior who will come to save civilization and pledge his undying love to the woman of his dreams. That kind of magic only exists in movies.”

  Lily seemed to be struggling with a thought; she furrowed her brow and appeared to be on the verge of telling me something. But the shadow quickly passed, and she laughed. “Well, thank goodness for movies… and martinis,” she added quickly as her drink arrived at the table.

  We ordered dinner and sat back in amicable silence to watch the Hobbits. Once our plates arrived, Lily turned her attention back to me.

  “How are you doing, Olivia? We haven’t spoken since you came to see me at my office.”

  “I’m not great,” I said honestly. “I feel like Stoner is stalking me. He seems to have found a way to get in between me and two of my clients; they all appear to think he’s magic, a new, powerful consultant with a set of skills no one has seen before.”

  This brought the same dark look back to Lily’s face. “Do you think someone in your company is helping him?”

  “No, I think I am helping him. I am not at the top of my game,” I said, trying to keep my voice low because of the movie. “I’m not doing my best work, and each time I make a mistake, he seems to be right there. It’s beginning to take a toll on me. I haven’t slept well in weeks.”

  Lily leaned over and placed her hand on mine. “You’re having trouble sleeping?”

  I nodded. “ I fall asleep, but then I am plagued with the same confusing dream.”

  Lily’s face took on the same worried look again, “What kind of dream, Olivia? Are in you danger?”

  What an odd question to ask, I thought, but I decide
d to ignore it and describe my dream. “I’m having this dream. It doesn’t seem dangerous, but when it happens, I feel like this animal is trying to speak with me.”

  “What kind of animal?” Lily asked, looking pensive.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I said, feeling the need to reassure her. “It’s a black panther and she seems to want to speak with me.”

  “She?” Lily repeated. “How do you know it’s a she?”

  “Good question,” I said, pausing to take a sip of wine. “I don’t know, really. It seems like a she. In my dreams, the panther walks beside me, but she never blocks my way. And when I wake up, it feels like she is still there, trying to help me. Crazy, right?”

  Lily shook her head and smiled. “Maybe the panther is trying to tell you something. But it might take a while to figure out what it is.”

  “Well, let’s hope it happens soon,” I said, “Before Stoner manages to take over any more of my business.”

  I went home that evening feeling better. It had felt good to tell Lily about my problems at work and about the dreams. I was hoping that confessing my anxiety would help me finally get some sleep. Instead, I was plagued once again by the dream. This time, however, the panther’s purring sounded even louder in my head. It seemed that the animal was trying to get my attention. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling quite unwell. Not only was I was disoriented from a general lack of sleep during the last few days, but also hungover from the wine I’d consumed with Lily. I went downstairs and climbed on the couch in my living room. Wrapping an old wool blanket around my shoulders, I flipped through the channels on my television until dawn trying to relax.

  I took the next day off of work, again. I was too tired to go into the office. My trusty iPhone allowed me to scan emails and return a few calls, but I remained in a funk and could not seem to focus on my work. I decided to catch a movie, and then go out again that evening for drinks. This time Lily wasn’t free to join me, so I went out on my own.