Chapter Text
“Which one is yours?” The question comes from Maura’s right, where a woman with what she could only describe as ‘tresses’ of blonde hair has been placidly watching the crowd of screaming children for the past five minutes.
Maura hasn’t seen the woman around the co-op before, which isn’t all that surprising. Maura is almost always late to pick up Blue, and Blue almost always finds it in her stubborn little heart to forgive her for this transgression. For such a young girl, Blue shows a great understanding of the thin line that separates their family from the rest of the community, an understanding that fills Maura with simultaneous pride and sadness. Blue hasn’t asked Maura to volunteer at the co-op since she was seven.
Maura feels a little guilty at the thought that she might be around more if she knew that any of the other parents were this gorgeous. She points to Blue, who is in the midst of telling off a boy who had been chasing her around with a booger on his finger. The woman laughs, and Maura is irked to discover that it sounds as clear and as lovely as her brilliant blue eyes. “Oh, I should have guessed! She looks just like you,” the woman says. She pauses, adds, “She’s cute.”
“Do you have any kids here, or are you just here to watch? Should I have seen you on Dateline?” Maura’s inability to make proper small talk is another reason that she doesn’t make much of an effort to show up on time.
The woman laughs again, and it is exactly the same, almost like a laugh track recorded once and then played over and over again. The tape hasn’t degraded at all though. It still sounds just as earnest as before. Maura’s eyebrow twitches. “I have three. Ronan and Matthew.” She points to the middle of the chaos, where a boy with dark, almost black, curls is dragging a tow-headed boy along the ground by his wrists. The blonde, younger boy is laughing delightedly even as his t-shirt and jeans get all scuffed up on the concrete of the community center basketball court. The woman does not seem worried. She redirects Maura’s focus to the fenced-in corner of the court, where an older boy deigns to look up from his thick chapter book to talk to one of his classmates. “Declan.”
“Three boys? You must be a saint.”
“Hardly.” Pause. “I’m Aurora. Lynch.”
“Just a damn Disney princess then. Maura Sargent.”
They shake hands. Aurora’s hand is warm, soft, and well-moisturized even though her calluses hint at some amount of physical labor. Maura is just thankful that a decade of professional palm-reading has made her hands less clammy when meeting with attractive strangers. Back in the day, Blue’s father had made her palms sweat so much that they would leave a wet spot on his shirt when Maura tried to playfully grab his arm.
She feels an insight creep up on her like a bead of sweat falling down her spine, but she shakes it off as she lets go of Aurora’s hand. It was usually best to give people a chance to introduce themselves as they wanted to be seen before you started clairvoyantly stripping them down of all their pretensions.
“New in town?” she asks.
Aurora shakes her head, hair bouncing around her face. “Just to the co-op. We live over in Singer’s Falls, but there’s nothing closer. I was worried that the boys were getting a little too insular.”
“I can’t say this place will help much, but at least it gets you out of the house.”
“I certainly don’t do that enough.”
“Amen!”
Aurora chuckles, a little deeper, but it still follows that same delightful rhythm. She puts a hand over her white smile. Her eyes meet Maura’s intensely and her hand lowers. This particular gesture does strike Maura as almost mechanical, practiced somehow.
Aurora asks, “How do you spend your time? When you aren’t doing school?”
So no one had told her about the Sargent family. “This and that. I work from home, so there’s no escape on that front.” She isn’t sure why she skirts the truth. She’s not ashamed of her clairvoyance or how she makes her way in the world, but she won’t deny that polite conversation is harder with people who know.
Blue runs up to them then, resting her head against Maura’s ribcage. She whines, “Mom, can we go now? It’s three, and Jeremy won’t stop being a dillweed.” Maura might correct her manners, if Jeremy was not, in fact, such a dillweed. She wraps an arm around Blue’s small, tense shoulders, and turns to Aurora. Only a lifetime of practice stops her from gasping.
Aurora is still lovely, a rose-tinted vision in a soft blue dress, but her edges have turned filmy and insubstantial. She looks like an overhead transparency super-imposed on the crisp fall day around them. She looks like a ghost. Maura breathes sharply and removes her hand from Blue. Aurora’s form snaps back into a concrete shape.
“Looks like I’m being summoned. It was nice to meet you, Aurora.” If her voice is hard, well, it usually is.
Aurora smiles and returns the sentiment. If she noticed anything odd about Maura’s behavior, she doesn’t show it. She stretches out one of those lovely hands to shake again, and Maura pretends she doesn’t see it. Maura has not detected an ounce of malevolence from the woman, but it’s still something of a personal policy of hers to not let unknown magical entities touch her. (As for known magical entities, she supposes Blue’s very existence speaks to her stance on that issue.)
Once they’re in the car, Maura rounds on Blue. “Have you seen that woman around before?”
“Mmhmmm. She’s the new boys’ mom. Ronan sucks, but he’s still better than most of the boys, I guess.” Blue fixes her with a pinched, critical look that Maura recognizes all too well from the mirror.
“She’s at the co-op a lot?”
“Well, yeah. Most people’s moms are.” Ouch. “She’s nice.”
“Most people’s moms don’t have a business to run. A business that puts food in your mouth,” she snaps. Blue’s expression sours further. Maura takes a deep breath and tries again. “Listen, Blue. I have a feeling about that woman.” Blue leans forward in anticipation. In spite of the hardship that the family gift and her personal lack of it has put on her, Blue is always eager for a taste of it. Maura is keeping a wary eye on that.
“There’s something about her that isn’t quite right. If you need something, ask one of the other parents, okay? Promise?”
“But what isn’t right? Is she a Republican?” Blue doesn’t really know what that means, but she’s gathered from Calla’s rants around the kitchen table that it’s one of the worst things a person can be.
Maura feels her mouth twitch, but she keeps serious eye contact with Blue. “I don’t know exactly. I wish I could tell you, kid. Promise me, though?”
Blue sighs like an old woman. She kicks her feet against the back of the passenger seat. “I promise.”
“Thank you, Blue.” Maura starts the car and gets them on their way home with only a little grumbling.
It’s already November when Maura runs into Aurora again. She had meant to keep a close eye on the situation, but October is a busy time for psychics, even in a town as small as Henrietta. Maura is feeling extremely weighed-down with single parent guilt, her inability to ever have both full pockets and adequate energy for Blue at the same time. There had been too many days recently where Jimi had taken Blue to the library to do her lessons online, too many days when picking up Blue from the co-op was just another checkmark on the convoluted carpool schedule.
She’s relieved when a regular client cancels their standing Thursday appointment due to a minor dental emergency. (Maura had warned him a few months back about the dangers of substituting lollipops for smokes, but he’d waved her off.) She makes it to the community center a whole fifteen minutes early. There’s no point waiting in the car since the heat doesn’t work, and she spots a familiar blur of blonde hair and rosy cheeks at the steps of the building that reminds her that she’s fallen behind on her snooping.
Maura thinks she manages to sidle up to Aurora casually, a feat made easier by her short stature. The other woman turns to her and smiles as if they’re actually friends. “Maura! It’s good to see you!” Her voice is even more pleasant than Maura remembered. It ought to be annoying, like a perky news anchor on local television, but it was more like the soothing narration of a book on tape.
“You as well,” Maura replies, “You’re not inside today?”
Aurora shakes her head with genuine regret. “A fence broke over in the south pasture. I had to get it fixed up, so the cows could graze.” Maura is still wary of Aurora after the notion she caught from her the last time, but damn, if the image of such a beautiful woman wielding a hammer doesn’t do something for her.
“No help from the mister?” Remember, she tells herself, normal housewife conversation.
“He travels a lot for work. The farm is mostly a passion project.” Maura makes a note of this, switches ‘nineties wardrobe’ over from the ‘working class’ column to the ‘overworked mom’ column. “Speaking of, has your husband been doing pickup? I haven’t seen you around lately.”
Maura smiles wryly. It’s best to get the unwed mother thing out of the way early. “I’m not married. Blue’s been carpooling with her cousins who go to the public school. It takes a village and all that.”
“That sounds lovely! Not that you don’t miss the time with Blue, but how nice it must be to have a community to fall back on. Niall-that’s my husband-isn’t close with his family.”
Aurora responds so naturally and with so little judgment that Maura almost doesn’t catch the odd half-truth at the end. She isn’t sure if it’s a psychic thing or a “nose for bullshit” thing (like her mother before her, she has both). What she doesn’t have is any social graces, apparently. She asks, “And your family?”
Her eyes flash a bright, watery blue before they crinkle in a sad smile. “Not much to speak of, I’m afraid. None here, at least.”
Maura feels like an asshole. She likes to stir up a little trouble, and she isn’t afraid to speak her mind, but she doesn’t like to intentionally prod people’s wounds, no matter how mysterious. That said, apologies aren’t her strong suit. “Sorry. I’m too nosy for my own good sometimes.” She attempts a self-deprecating smile, and when Aurora meets her eyes she can tell the other woman doesn’t hold it against her. She has a deeper sense that Aurora physically doesn’t have it in her to hold a grudge.
“It’s not always nosy to want to get to know people better.” All traces of Aurora’s brief sadness are gone. Tabula rasa. Maura feels a bit unnerved. Maybe she’s just too stubborn to understand someone so carefree. Aurora rushes on, “Listen, I know we’ve only spoken a couple times, but what would you say to a playdate? My boys are slow to warm up to people, but I’ve heard Ronan mention Blue a few times, and that’s practically a rave review from him!”
Maura wants to say no. She’s learned the art of excuses from the other side of the equation, from parents who are all too encouraging of their children’s blossoming friendship before realizing that Blue Sargent is the psychic’s daughter. But there’s something about Aurora. Maura realizes abruptly that both times she has spoken to her, Aurora was surrounded by other parents but not engaged in conversation with any of them. She’s charismatic and lovely and she could probably charm any of them. Nonetheless, something about her kept them at a distance, maybe the same something Maura saw the first time they’d met.
“Why not?” she says, throwing caution to the wind. “You said you live on a farm?” Aurora nods eagerly. “Blue does love animals. I’m sure she’d have a great time.” If nothing else, Blue can pet a cow and Maura can try to pick something up from the surroundings that explains the mystery of Aurora Lynch.
“It’s a date then!” She laughs, and Maura tries not to hear it as a warning siren.