And, fuck. Even if I wasn’t an empath I could have picked up on her vibes loud and clear over the phone. She thought it was good that he was dead.
So no, my mother isn’t coming to the funeral.
“I’m sure it would be too hard for her,” I say, but from my meek voice, I know that Noora won’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. It’s all bullshit.
But Noora just nods as we head toward a small red hatchback. Once inside the car, I’m met with a plethora of smells, a lot of them familiar like sage and palo santo, the rest earthy, bitter, and cloying. Because my legs are long they’re crammed up against the glovebox and I have to wrestle with the seat control until it slams back.
Noora looks over me with amusement, and for once I see it reach her dark eyes. “Just like your father,” she comments. “He was tall too. Is your mother the same?”
I shake my head and scoff. “She’s five two and a delicate little flower.” And boy, she never lets me forget it either.
Noora makes a low hmmmm noise and starts the car, fiddling with the heat. The controls were set low, which strikes me as odd, but maybe the cold isn’t a problem for her. She’s only wearing a sweater, after all.
“We have no use for delicate people up here,” she says stiffly. “They don’t survive very long. Sorry, I’ll have the heat on in a moment.” The car backs up and then rolls across the parking lot, the tires on snow making a pleasing crunching sound. “Your father told me you used to be a dancer.”
“Yes,” I say, the bitterness in the air now settling on my tongue. “Unfortunately, you have to be a delicate flower in dance and there was a point where I couldn’t do that anymore.” In other words, dance was everything to me, and especially to my mother. But the extremes I went to so I could remain lithe and airy and light eventually took their toll on my body and mind. “But then I discovered martial arts. Capoeira. It’s from Brazil. Combines dancing and fighting.”
Noora takes her eyes off the road to look at me. “He never mentioned that.”
I shrug. I’m not competitive. My heart can’t take anything competitive anymore, not after what I went through. It’s just a hobby. After high school I realized if I couldn’t be accepted in dance anymore, then I wanted to do something else to keep my body moving. I started building muscle, lifting weights, and it just came naturally to me. I used to do a little tae kwon do for a while, even arnis, but capoeira is what stuck.
Noora’s vibe shifts a little. Like this information concerns her. Perhaps she’s old-fashioned and doesn’t believe girls should fight. She’d get along with my mother with that view.
I flash her a placating smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to go beating up anyone at Papa’s funeral.” She gives me a stiff smile and I immediately feel awkward. I look around the car. “So what’s the smell?”
“Do you like it?” she asks.
Not really. “Smells like sage.” And like rotting corpses, I add in my head and the accurate thought makes me shiver. I pull my coat closer around me, my cold hands shoved in my pockets. I’ve always been morbid, but I don’t need these thoughts before my father’s funeral.
“Sage, palo santo, lavender, myrrh and sieni. Mushrooms.”
“Didn’t know dried mushrooms smell like that.”
“These ones are special.”
Aren’t all mushrooms special? I think. If I actually had a social life in high school maybe I’d know what dried mushrooms smell like.
I turn my attention to the scenery passing by the window. Like the view from the airplane, the land is made up of pine trees and snow, with a few low rolling hills thrown into the mix. I have a feeling we’re driving past lakes and rivers, but the thick snow covers them and makes everything look the same.
It’s such the opposite of Los Angeles that I’m suddenly hit with a pang of fear, like I’m on the edge of the earth, close to falling off into infinity, and I feel precariously placed. In my mind I’m looking at the globe and I can see the little dot where I am and there’s just nothing above me at all except ice and snow forever.
Not only that, but I’ve barely seen any cars on this highway and I realize I don’t know Noora at all. I’m about to pull out my phone and check for reception, maybe send Jenny a text even though I have no idea what time it is back home, when the skin on my spine starts to crawl. I have the most awful, unsettling feeling that if I look at Noora right now, that I won’t see Noora at all. That I’ll see some smiling demonic creature. In fact, out of the corner of my eye, I swear I see a pair of horns, no, antlers, growing from the top of her head.