Madame Z snapped her cell phone shut. “Fools, every one of them,” she said. Her pallor was gone; apparently talking to Silas had shaken her out of her funk. “Ahh! I see you found Fernando!”
“Is that whose skull that is?” I asked. “Fernando’s?”
“Oh God,” Yun Sun moaned.
“Wormed his way to the surface after a gully washer, out in Chapel Hill Cemetery,” Madame Z told us. “His coffin, that is. Crappy wooden thing, must’a been from the early nineteen hundreds. No one left to care for him, so I took pity on him and brought him here.”
“You opened the coffin?” I said.
“Yep.” She seemed proud. I wondered if she’d worn her Juicy Couture during the grave robbing.
“That’s gross that it still has hair,” I said.
“He still has hair,” Madame Z said. “Show some respect.”
“I didn’t know dead bodies had hair, that’s all.”
“Skin, no,” Madame Z said. “Skin starts to rot right away, and believe me, you don’t want to smell it when it goes. But hair? Sometimes it keeps growing for weeks after the deceased has made his crossing.”
“Wowzers.” I reached down and tousled Will’s honey-colored curls. “Hear that, Will? Sometimes the hair keeps growing.”
“Amazing,” he said.
“What about that?” Yun Sun asked, pointing to a clear Tupperware container in which something reddish and organlike floated in clear liquid. “Please tell me it didn’t come from Fernando, too. Please.”
Madame Z waved her hand, like Don’t be ridiculous. “That’s my uterus. Had the doc give it to me after my hysterectomy.”
“Your uterus?” Yun Sun looked ill.
“I’m going to let ‘em toss it in the incinerator?” Madame Z said. “Fat chance!”
“And that?” I pointed to a clump of dried-up something on the highest shelf. This show-and-tell was proving far more enjoyable than our actual readings.
Madame Z followed my gaze. She opened her mouth, then closed it. “That’s nothing,” she said firmly, although I noticed she had a hard time tearing her eyes from it. “Now. Are we done here?”
“Come on.” I made praying hands. “Tell us what it is.”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“I do,” I said.
“I don’t,” Yun Sun said.
“Yes, she does,” I said. “And so does Will. Right, Will?”
“It can’t be worse than the uterus,” he said.
Madame Z pressed her lips together.
“Please?” I begged.
She muttered something under her breath about idiot teenagers and how she refused to take the blame, whatever came of it. Then she stood up, pawing the top shelf. Her bosom didn’t jiggle, but stayed firm and rigid beneath her top. She retrieved the clump and placed it in front of us.
“Oh,” I breathed. “A corsage.” Brittle rosebuds, their edges brown and papery. Sprigs of graying baby’s breath, so desiccated that puffs of fiber dusted the table. A limp red ribbon holding it all together.
“A peasant woman in France put a spell on it,” Madame Z said in a tone that was hard to decipher. It was as if she were compelled to speak the words, even though she didn’t want to. Or, no. More like she did want to but was struggling to resist. “She wanted to show that true love is guided by fate, and that anyone who tries to interfere does so at her own peril.”
She moved to return the corsage.
“Wait!” I cried. “How does it work? What does it do?”
“I’m not telling,” she said stubbornly.
“‘I’m not telling’?” I repeated. “How old are you, four?”
“Frankie!” Yun Sun said.
“You’re just like all the rest, aren’t you?” Madame Z said to me. “Willing to do anything for a boyfriend? Desperate for a heart-stopping romance, no matter the cost?”
I felt my face go hot. But here it was, out on the table. Boyfriends. Romance. Hope flickered in my chest.
“Just tell her,” Yun Sun said, “or we’ll never get to leave.”
“No,” Madame Z insisted.
“She can’t, because she made it up,” I said.
Madame Z’s eyes flashed. I’d provoked her, which wasn’t nice, but something told me that whatever it was, she hadn’t made it up. And I really wanted to know.
She put the corsage in the middle of the table, where it sat doing absolutely nothing.
“Three people, three wishes apiece,” Madame Z declared. “That’s its magic.”
Yun Sun, Will, and I looked at one another, then burst out laughing. It was ludicrous and at the same time perfect: the storm, the wacko, and now the ominously issued pronouncement.
And yet the way Madame Z regarded us made our laughter trickle off. The way she regarded Will, especially.
He tried to resurrect the hilarity.
“So, why don’t you use it?” he asked in the manner of a teenager being helpful and polite.
“I did,” she said. Her orange lipstick was like a stain.
“And … were your three wishes granted?” I asked.
“Every last one,” she said flatly.
None of us knew what to say to that.
“Well, has anyone else used it?” Yun Sun asked.
“One other lady. I don’t know what her first two wishes were, but her last was for death. That’s how the corsage came to me.”
We sat there, all silliness squelched. The situation felt unreal, yet here we were, in this moment.
“Dude, that’s spooky,” Will said.
“So … why do you keep it?” I asked. “If you’ve used up your three wishes?”
“Excellent question,” Madame Z said after staring at the corsage for a few heavy seconds. She pulled a turquoise lighter from her pocket and struck a flame. She picked up the corsage with a fierce determination, as if committing to a course of action long overdue.
“No!” I yelped, snatching it from her grasp. “Let me have it, if you don’t want it!”
“Never. It should be burned.”
My fingers closed over the rose petals. They were the texture of my grandfather’s wizened cheek, which I stroked when I visited him at the nursing home.
“You’re making a mistake,” Madame Z warned. She reached to reclaim the bundle, then jerked her hand back convulsively. I sensed the same internal warring as when I first goaded her into speaking of the corsage, as if the corsage had an element of actual power over her. Which was ridiculous, of course.
“It’s not too late to change your fate,” she managed.
“What fate would that be?” I said. My voice broke. “The fate where a tree falls in the forest, but poor me, I’m wearing earplugs?”
Madame Z fixed me with her thick-lashed eyes. The skin around them was as thin as crepe paper, and I realized