Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

Dread Disease and a sicko ex-fiancé I had had to escape from.

      Caroline the Psychic didn’t ask to see my hand to trace my lines. She didn’t ask for my favorite number. There were no fancy-schmancy teacups or tarot cards, only a flickering candle between us and Lydia’s quiet humming. I think it was a southern song, one the slaves would have sung in the fields. A song with an upbeat tune but words so tragic, so hopeless you wanted to cry.

      Caroline stared at me. “Let me look at your knees.”

      “My knees?” She nodded. “Okeydokey. You’re the psychic. If you can read knees, all the better.” I pulled up my skirt. My knees were scarred in several places from childhood.

      “What’s this scar from?” Caroline asked, pointing to the smallest scar, shaped like a half moon.

      “I was hit by a car.”

      “Hmmm,” Caroline said, her shiny brown hair surrounding her head like a veil.

      I thought I heard wisdom in her “Hmmm.”

      “And this one?”

      “That one I got when I was a baby.”

      She arched an eyebrow at me. It looked like the wing of a blackbird.

      “My mother said I was too fussy that day. She put me on the patio of our apartment when it was raining. I stood up in my high chair and fell over the top.”

      I didn’t tell her the rest of it. Aunt Lydia had told me later what happened. She got the scoop from the neighbor next door, who heard my pathetic cries. The neighbor had rushed over and untangled me from the tray of my high chair.

      There was a gash on my head where the tray of my high chair had hit me when it slipped off in the crash. My hands, elbows, and knees were also bleeding messes. The gashes required nineteen stitches. The new scrapes and bruises simply added to the old scrapes and bruises and two old breaks in my bones.

      The neighbor had banged on the sliding glass door, but my mother didn’t answer, being passed out in bed, upset and drunk because another boyfriend had walked out. So the neighbor had called the police, who called Children’s Services and an ambulance. I went to the hospital and had eleven stitches put in my head and eight on my knees. I still have the scars.

      Children’s Services picked me up for the third time that year and deposited me in a foster home until Aunt Lydia found out about it and came and got me. She petitioned the court for custody, for the second time, but lost when my mother, Candy, who is very petite, except for her breasts, and can look like the most harmless, lovely woman anyone has ever seen, convinced the judge that she had mended the error of her ways, wasn’t drinking anymore, and had found Christ. She was born again, praise the Lord. She was walking with Jesus and felt blessed to have this second chance at living a holy life.

      The judge, a devout Christian, believed her, and back I went with my mother. Aunt Lydia was furious, she told me later, but my mother was careful from then on out. Not because she wanted me, but because she didn’t want Lydia to have me. Then Lydia would have won. Candy couldn’t have that. Ever. Even if her child’s life was a miserable, terrifying mess. Lydia was quite a bit older than she was, they shared only a mother, and they had never, ever gotten along. “I don’t get along well with sociopaths,” Aunt Lydia had told me once.

      I know Aunt Lydia lived with a massive amount of guilt for not rescuing me from my mother, but there was nothing she could do. She tried again and again, when she could find us, or when I could secretly send her a letter, to convince Candy to let me come and stay with her. But except for summertime, Candy always said no. And yet, I think my mother often hated me, especially when I became a teenager.

      “Hmmmm…” Caroline said again. “It looks like a scar of inner pain. Of betrayal. The pain is still in you, isn’t it?”

      I nodded, but wasn’t too impressed. It’s not hard to discern from that story what really happened.

      “That’s one of the things you’re running from, isn’t it? Besides the fiancé?”

      I swallowed hard.

      “In fact, you have another scar here that was caused by your mother, wasn’t it?”

      I looked down at Caroline’s little hand. She was tracing the largest scar on my knee and was studying it, as if looking through a microscope.

      “Well, that one isn’t exactly from my mother,” I hemmed.

      “Yes, it is,” she insisted, rubbing it softly with her finger. “Your mother caused this one. Again, it was neglect. Not the same sort of neglect, but neglect, right? Yes, I can see that I’m right. I’m very sorry.”

      I wanted to burst into tears. Sometimes a kind voice, a steady look, and a touch will make you cry, and this was it.

      Yes, that was the worst scar, the tunnel to more scars, all of the same sort, all emblazoned on my heart as if I’d been branded by a cow poker.

      “So.” I tried to bluster my way out. “What kind of fortune do you see in my knees? What’s my future?”

      Caroline laughed. “Oh, I can’t see a thing in your knees for the future. They were the door to the past, to your pain. I’ve already seen your future. I saw it when I walked in the door.”

      “You saw my future?” That was alarming.

      “Yes,” said Caroline. “And no. I saw a purplish haze around you and—”

      “A purplish haze?”

      “Yes. That stands for change, and for choice.”

      “What else?” I knew there was something else. She was pleating her fingers together and the eye-twitching was getting more intense.

      It would be melodramatic to say that the candle between us flickered and went out, but it is the truth. That candle died. Just died, the wax swallowing up the wick, and though other candles burned in the room and Aunt Lydia had her embroidery light on, it was dark between me and Caroline.

      “Julia, honey—” she began.

      “Just tell me. It can’t be worse than what I have now.”

      “I see blackness. A rim of black around the purple. All around you. It’s a warning.”

      “A warning?” Fear danced its way from my toes to neck, and I felt my heart start to palpitate again, my hands filling with blood that was filled with chunks of ice. My unknown disease, triggered by stress.

      I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get a breath.

      “Someone hates you.”

      I nodded.

      “Be careful.”

      I nodded again. “But what about the purple you’re seeing?”

      “It has something to do with chocolate,” Caroline said seriously. “When the chocolate comes, your whole life will change. It’s the impetus.”

      Suddenly my breathing stopped, then started again. Had she said “chocolate”? My heart stopped rushing, stopped racing, the ice melted in my veins, the curious blackness that often obscured the edges of my vision when this mystery disease attacked started to clear.

      “You’re on the road to chocolate,” she told me, her mouth grim. “And there is no way to veer off course.”

      “Got it,” I breathed, trying not to laugh. “Watch out for chocolate.”

      “That’s right,” Caroline said, holding my hands in hers, her eyes serious. “Watch out for chocolate.”

      4

      If I could jump into the sunrise I’m sure all my problems would be solved.

      I thought about this while I watched the sun peek above the row of blue mountains in the distance. The sun was the color of egg yolks, the pinks and oranges