Nita shrugged as she walked in through the gates that led into the parking lot. There was plenty of time to get into the highly theoretical stuff later. For now, she had work to catch up on… and some other business to finish.
She went down to the temporary office where she usually found Mr. Millman. There he was, sitting behind the desk and reading a magazine while eating the last couple of bites of a bagel with cream cheese.
He glanced up as Nita came in. “Morning,” he said.
Nita sat down, put her book bag on the floor, reached into her jacket, and came out with the cards.
“Before you start in with those,” Mr. Millman said, “one thing. We left on a slightly jangly note the other day…”
“Did we?” Nita said, refusing for the moment to smile at him, refusing to let him off the hook.
“I think we did, especially since you cut half your classes shortly thereafter.”
Nita shrugged. Millman’s eyebrows went up as he took note of the gesture. “I just wanted you to know something,” he said. “Whatever the secret is about what’s going on in your life right now — I want you to know that there’s no need for you to tell me, ever, and I have no intention of pressing you.”
Nita looked at him with surprise, because this wasn’t what she’d been thinking. She also looked at him with amused suspicion. “What is this, some kind of reverse psychology?”
Mr. Millman looked at her in shock, and then laughed. “What? Like you’re a three-year-old or some-thing, and you’ll do the opposite of what I suggest? Spare me. This is supposed to have been counseling, not brain surgery. I was merely saying that my intent was just to counsel you — not to dig around in your skull for juicy tidbits, like something out of a horror movie about bad Far Eastern food.”
Nita snickered. “Okay,” she said. “I thought you were going to say something about my anger.”
“Anything that needs to be said,” said Mr. Millman, “I’m sure you’ll take care of it.”
Nita slipped the cards out of their pack and started to shuffle them. It was surprising how easy the false shuffles were when you were really paying attention to them. “Name a card,” she said.
“Five of diamonds,” he said.
Nita nodded, put the deck down on the desk, and cut it twice, to the right, to make three piles.
“Turn one card over,” she said.
Millman reached out and turned over the top card of the leftmost deck. The top card was the five of diamonds.
“Not bad at all,” Millman said. “Do I get to pick another one?”
Nita gave him a look. “I wouldn’t push your luck if I were you,” she said.
He grinned a little and sat back.
“You look a whole lot better,” he said.
“I feel a whole lot better,” Nita said. “And I think I don’t need to be here anymore.”
“What, school?” Millman said, raising his eyebrows.
“Not school here. Here here,” Nita said.
“Oh, you’re cured then?” he said.
Nita cracked up. “Why not?” she said. And then said, “Cured of what?”
“You would be the one to tell me that,” Millman said.
Nita was quiet for a moment. “If you mean, am I over my mom dying? Don’t be silly,” she finally said. “She’ll always be part of me. It’s going to hurt for a long time that she’s not still in my house. But nothing can take her out of my life. Am I over wanting to just sit and suffer and let life go by? I think so.”
“Then I would say,” Mr. Millman said, “that my work here is done. Insofar as any of it was my work.”
He reached out and turned over the top card on the middle pack. It was the ace of spades. “Aha,” he said.
“What?”
“Highly symbolic.”
“Of what?”
“Well, that would be a long story. That little leaf-shaped thing, the ‘spade’…” Mr. Millman picked up the card, looked closely at it. “The history of the word is tangled. But it goes back at least as far as the Greek spatha. That was a sword, once upon a time. Of the four suits, that’s the one that has most to do with power: air, the sound the sword makes in the air, the spoken word; the weapons held by the Power that faces down the Power That Fell…”
He picked up the ace and the three cut packs, shuffling them together again.
Nita looked at him.
“So,” Mr. Millman said, putting the deck down on the desk and doing a credible riffle… much too credible, now that Nita thought of it, for a man who claimed that he couldn’t get the cards to stay up his sleeve. “Any last questions before we finish up here?”
She looked at him, thought for a moment, and found a question it would never before have occurred to her to ask him. The answer would have been in her manual, but she wasn’t going to consult that right now. Considering the question, Nita first made sure that she had the wizardry she wanted ready in the back of her head. If you were going to remove someone’s memory, the less time you spent dithering over it, the better.
“Are you on errantry?” Nita said.
He raised his eyebrows again in that expression she’d learned could mean almost anything but surprise.
“No,” Mr. Millman said. “But I know some people who are.”
Nita sat there, astonished, trying not to exhibit it. Millman sat there and kept shuffling.
“You don’t have to be a wizard to know one,” Millman said, “once you know what you’re looking for. And when you’re willing to see what you’re looking at. Not many people are, but that’s humans for you.” He fanned out the cards for her. “Pick a card, any card.”
Nita picked one, turned it over. It was the joker.
Mr. Millman grinned, folded the hand up, tapped the cards back into order, and pushed the deck back toward Nita, meanwhile glancing at the door. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said. “And I’ve had a word with your sister’s counselor: She’ll be introducing me to Dairine later in the week. Meanwhile, go well.“
Nita got up and took back her pack of cards, grinning, too. She headed for the door.
There she paused as something occurred to her. “‘Supposed to have been counseling’?” she said.
Mr. Millman shrugged.
Nita shook her head again. “Dai stibo,” she said, and left.
That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight, wobbling around and around, shining on something, while somewhere off in the near distance, a single drum held a drumroll.
What the spotlight was following was a clown act. The clown had purple hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, the circles ever decreasing. Around and around and around went the clown, in jerky, wobbling movements. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t get off! I can’t get off!
The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. It had already pounced. Now the tiger had become part of the clown…and the clown was its cage.