Next, I found her Facebook page. More photos of her running track, her in a yellow sundress, eating an ice cream. A shot of her giving a piggyback ride to another girl in front of a pretty redbrick school, the kind that I had only ever seen on TV. I scrolled through the comments people had left behind.

Julez, we love you. Come back home, babe.

J, you are missed. I hope wherever you are, you are safe and sound.

I’m a stranger, but your story caught my eye. God Bless You.

I knew why I wanted to leave, but why would a girl like that just pick up and go? I took my tarot deck out of my bag, shook the cards from their red silk pouch. You weren’t supposed to ask the cards a question about someone else’s fate if they hadn’t requested it, but I couldn’t help it. I’d only pull one card. Just a hint, I bargained. What really happened to Julie Zale? I shuffled the deck and the cards stuck together in the humidity.

The card I drew was the Moon. The card for women. The card that meant mystery, confusion, even insanity. But it could also mean knowing, intuition, or a sign that you needed to face what scared you the most. When she taught me tarot, Des claimed it was mostly learning to bullshit, that the cards were just props, ways to tell a story. But I believed in what tarot could tell me, in letting the cards speak. I also needed to believe that magic and meaning sometimes reached into our world. Or else there was just my life—the high school diploma I would never get, the shop, the mangy feral cats, the mother who never wrote anymore. Des coming home from a shift at the club with her pupils huge and glossy, rubbing at her nose.

If I wanted to use magic, The Wisdom of Tarot was filled with rituals and spells that promised to guide you toward the information you desired. I could try making an offering—I had never done it before. The book claimed that these rituals were powerful, that if you wanted to cast one, you needed to take great care. I imagined working alongside my mother, grinding dried flowers into powders, lighting sacred candles, arranging crystals into circles. According to her last postcard, four years ago, she lived in the guesthouse of a movie producer: 518 Montvale Road, Los Angeles, California. The main house was pristine and white with a wide semicircle of a driveway, a sweeping green yard. I imagined myself there someday, my bare feet on the lush grass.