Garden Spells

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “I used Grandma Waverley’s life-insurance money to remodel.”

  Sydney turned away a moment, ostensibly to watch Tyler climb the stairs to his front porch and then walk into his house. She had stiffened, and it occurred to Claire that this was shocking news to Sydney. Had she really expected to find their grandmother here, alive and well? What was she expecting? “When?” Sydney asked.

  “When what?”

  “When did she die?”

  “Ten years ago. Christmas Eve, the year you left. I had no way to contact you. We didn’t know where you went.”

  “Grandma knew. I told her. Say, do you mind if I pull this clunker behind the house?” Sydney knocked on the hood with her fist. “It’s sort of an embarrassment.”

  “What happened to Grandma’s old car, the one she gave you?”

  “I sold it in New York. Grandma said I could sell it if I wanted to.”

  “So that’s where you’ve been, New York?”

  “No, I only stayed there for a year. I’ve been around. Just like Mom.”

  They locked eyes, and suddenly everything was quiet. “What are you doing here, Sydney?”

  “I need a place to stay.”

  “For how long?”

  Sydney took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t leave Bay here.”

  “What?”

  “Like Mom left us here. You can’t leave her here.”

  “I would never leave my daughter!” Sydney exclaimed, a touch of hysteria tinging her words, and Claire was suddenly aware of all that wasn’t being said, of the story Sydney wasn’t telling. Something big had to have happened to bring Sydney back here. “What do you want me to do, Claire, beg?”

  “No, I don’t want you to beg.”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Sydney said, forcing the words out, like spitting sunflower-seed shells to the sidewalk, where they stuck and baked in the sun, getting harder and harder.

  What was Claire supposed to do? Sydney was family. Claire had learned the hard way that you weren’t supposed to take them for granted. She’d also learned they could hurt you more than anyone else in the world. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”

  “Come on, Bay, I’m pulling the car around back,” Sydney called, and Bay ran to her mother.

  “Bay, do you like strawberry Pop-Tarts?” Claire asked.

  Bay smiled, and it was Sydney’s smile made over. It almost hurt Claire to look at, remembering all the things she wished she could take back from when Sydney was a child, like chasing Sydney out of the garden when she wanted to see what Claire and their grandmother were doing and hiding recipes on high shelves so Sydney would never know their secrets. Claire had always wondered if she was the one who made Sydney hate being a Waverley. Was this child going to hate everything Waverley too? Bay didn’t know it, but she had a gift. Maybe Claire could teach her to use it. Claire didn’t know if she and Sydney would ever reconcile, or even how long she was going to stay, but maybe she could try to make up for what she’d done with Bay.

  In mere minutes, Claire’s life had changed. Her grandmother had taken in Claire and Sydney. Claire would do the same for Sydney and Bay. No questions asked. It’s what a true Waverley did.

  “Pop-Tarts are my favorite!” Bay said.

  Sydney looked startled. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” Claire said, turning toward the house. “Evanelle did.”

  Sydney parked the Subaru beside a white minivan at the back of the house, in front of the detached garage. Bay hopped out, but Sydney got out a little slower. She took her tote bag and Bay’s backpack, then she went around to the back of the car and unscrewed the Washington State license plate. She stuffed it into her bag. There. No clues as to where they’d been.

  Bay was standing in the driveway that separated the house from the garden. “This is really where we’re going to live?” she asked, for about the sixteenth time since they’d pulled in front of the house that morning.

  Sydney took a deep breath. God, she couldn’t believe it. “Yes.”

  “It’s a princess house.” She turned and pointed to the open gate. “Can I go see the flowers?”

  “No. Those are Claire’s flowers.” She heard a thud and watched an apple roll out of the garden and stop at her feet. She stared at it for a moment. No one in her family ever found anything odd about having a tree that told the future and threw apples at people. Still, it was a better welcome than Claire had given her. She kicked the apple back into the garden. “And stay away from the apple tree.”

  “I don’t like apples.”

  Sydney went to her knees in front of Bay. She pushed the little girl’s hair behind her ears and straightened her shirt. “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “Bay Waverley.”

  “And where were you born?”

  “On a Greyhound bus.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Everywhere.”

  She took her daughter’s hands. “You understand why you have to say these things, don’t you?”

  “Because we’re different here. We’re not who we were.”

  “You amaze me.”

  “Thank you. Do you think Claire will like me?”

  Sydney stood, then took a moment to steady herself when dark spots appeared in front of her eyes and the world tilted off its axis for a moment. Her skin felt prickled, as if with goose bumps, and it hurt to blink. She was so tired she could hardly walk, but she couldn’t let Bay see her like that, and she certainly couldn’t let Claire see her like that. She managed to smile. “She’d be crazy not to.”

  “I like her. She’s like Snow White.”

  They walked into the kitchen through the sunroom and Sydney looked around in awe. The kitchen had been remodeled, taking over most of what had been the dining room beside it. It was all stainless steel and efficiency, and there were two commercial refrigerators and two ovens.

  They wordlessly went to the kitchen table and sat, watching Claire put on coffee and then slide two Pop-Tarts into the toaster. Claire had changed—not in big ways but small ones, like the way light changed throughout the day. A different slant, a different hue. She carried herself differently; she no longer had that greedy, selfish way about her. She seemed comfortable, the way their grandmother used to seem comfortable. Don’t-move-me-and-I’ll-be-fine comfortable.

  Watching her, it suddenly occurred to Sydney that Claire was beautiful. Sydney had never realized her sister was so beautiful. The man she was with earlier, the man from next door, thought so too. He was clearly attracted to Claire. And Bay was captivated by her, not taking her eyes off her even when Claire put warm Pop-Tarts and a glass of milk on the table in front of her.

  “So, you run a catering company?” Sydney finally asked when Claire handed her a cup of coffee. “I saw the van.”

  “Yes,” Claire said, turning away in a swish of mint and lilac. Her hair was longer than it used to be, and it veiled her shoulders like a shawl. She used it for protection. If there was one thing Sydney knew, it was hair. She loved beauty school and loved working in the salon in Boise. Hair said more about people than they knew, and Sydney understood the language naturally. It had surprised her that some other girls at beauty school thought it was hard. To Sydney it was second nature. It always had been.

  She didn’t have the energy to keep talking to Claire when Claire was making it so difficult, so she took a sip of the coffee and found it had cinnamon in it, just like Grandma Waverley used to make it. She wanted to drink more, but her hand started shaking and she had to set the cup down.

  When was the last time she’d slept? She’d made sure Bay slept, but she was too scared to sleep more than small pockets at a time at rest stops and Wal-Mart parking lots along the way. Miles of highway ran on a permanent loop in her mind, and she st
ill felt the hum of the road in her bones. It had taken them ten days, surviving on the food she’d packed, white bread and gingersnaps and cheap packages of peanut butter and crackers, the ones where the peanut butter tasted oily and the crackers crumbled at the touch. She wasn’t sure she could last much longer before she broke down in tears.

  “Come on, Bay,” Sydney said the moment Bay finished her breakfast. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “I left new sheets from Evanelle on the beds,” Claire said.

  “Which room?”

  “Your room is still your room. Bay can sleep in my old room. I sleep in Grandma’s now,” she said, her back to them as she began to bring down large canisters of flour and sugar from the cabinets.

  Sydney led Bay straight to the staircase, not looking around, because she was disoriented enough and didn’t want to discover what else had changed. Bay ran up the stairs ahead of her and waited, smiling.

  It was worth it. All this was worth it, just to see her child like this.

  Sydney led her to Claire’s old room first. The furniture was different, mismatched. The sewing table used to be in the sitting room downstairs, and the bed used to be in their grandmother’s room. Bay ran to the window. “I like this room.”

  “Your aunt Claire used to spend hours at that window, staring out at the garden. You can sleep with me, if you want to. My room has a view of the blue house next door.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m going to start bringing in our things. Come with me.”

  Bay looked at her hopefully. “Can I stay up here?”

  She was too tired to argue. “Don’t leave this room. If you want to go exploring, we’ll do it together.”

  Sydney left Bay, but instead of going downstairs to get the boxes and bags left in the car, she walked to her old room. When she was young she spent a lot of time by herself in her room, sometimes imagining that she was trapped there by her evil sister, like in a fairy tale. For two years after her mother left, Sydney even slept with sheets tied into a rope under her bed so she could crawl out the window when her mother came back to save her. But then she grew older and wiser and realized her mother wasn’t coming back. She also realized that her mother had the right idea by leaving in the first place. Sydney couldn’t wait to leave, to follow her boyfriend Hunter John Matteson to college, because they were going to be in love forever, and even if they came back to Bascom it would be okay, because he had never treated her like a Waverley. Not until the very end, at least.

  She took a deep breath and entered the room reverently, a church of old memories. Her bed and dresser were still there. The full-length mirror still had some of her old stickers on it. She opened the closet and found a stack of boxes full of old linen that mice had gotten into. But the room didn’t have an air of neglect. There wasn’t any dust, and it smelled old and familiar, like cloves and cedar. Claire had taken care of it, hadn’t turned it into a sitting room or filled it full of things she didn’t need or use anymore or taken Sydney’s old furniture out.

  That did it.

  Sydney went to the edge of the bed and sat. She put a hand over her mouth as she cried so Bay, singing quietly in the next room, wouldn’t hear.

  Ten days on the road.

  She needed a bath.

  Claire looked prettier, and cleaner, than she did.

  Grandma Waverley was gone.

  Bay liked it here, but she didn’t yet realize what being a Waverley meant.

  What was David doing?

  Did she leave behind any clues?

  So much had changed, but her room was exactly like she’d left it.

  She crawled to the pillow at the top of the bed and curled into a small ball. She was asleep seconds later.

  CHAPTER

  3

  There was an art to the male posterior. That’s all there was to it.

  Well, that was most of it.

  The young runners on the university track had such verve and tone and, probably best of all, if Evanelle ever felt the need to give them something, she could never catch them. Obviously her gift knew that and never decided to kick in at the track during the school year. But in the summer there were slower, older people on the track, and sometimes Evanelle had to give them little packets of ketchup and tweezers. She even had to give one old woman a jar of sourwood honey one day. They gave her strange looks on the track in the summer.

  That morning, instead of going to the track, Evanelle decided to walk downtown before the shops opened. There were always runners around the square. She followed a few of them until she came to Fred’s Gourmet Grocery and happened to look in the window. It was well before he normally showed up for work, but there was Fred, in his stocking feet, getting a container of yogurt out of the dairy section. His rumpled clothing was an obvious indication that he’d spent the night there. Evanelle supposed the rose geranium wine didn’t work on James, or maybe Fred decided not to use it after all. Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren’t. Memories, even hard memories, grew soft like peaches as they got older.

  Fred and James were a steadfast couple, everyone knew that. The fact that they were gay had been overlooked a long time ago, when it was obvious they were one of the always-togethers, a distinction usually reserved for very old couples. She knew Fred. She knew that what people thought was important to him. He was a lot like his father that way, though he’d never admit it. Once someone told him something critical, he would hold on to it for a long time, change everything he did just so he wouldn’t face the same criticism again. He would hate for anyone to know that he and James were having problems. He was an always-together. He had so many expectations to live up to.

  She knew she should leave, but she decided to wait for a moment to see if her gift would kick in. She stared at him, but nothing occurred to her. She had nothing to give him but advice, and most people weren’t inclined to take that too seriously. Evanelle was neither as mysterious nor as clever as her Waverley relatives who had always lived in the Queen Anne home on Pendland Street. But she did have the gift of anticipation. From the time she was a little girl, she brought her mother dishcloths before the milk was spilled, she closed the windows before there was even a hint of a storm, and she gave the preacher a cough drop before he had a coughing spell during the sermon.

  Evanelle had been married once, a long time ago. The first time she met her husband they were six years old, and she gave him a small black stone she’d found on the road that day. That night he used it to tap on her window to get her attention, and they became the best of friends. After thirty-eight years of marriage and not once feeling the need to give him something again, she was seized with the need to buy her husband a new suit. It turned out to be because he didn’t have a decent one to be buried in when he died the following week. She tried not to think too hard about her gift, because then she would think about how frustrating it was not to know why people needed the things. Sometimes at night when her house felt particularly empty, she still wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t bought her husband that suit.

  She watched Fred go to the picnic-supply aisle and open a box of plastic utensils. He took out a plastic spoon and opened his cup of yogurt. She really should be moving on, but then she got to thinking about how nice it would be to live in a grocery store, or better yet a Wal-Mart, or better still a mall, because they had beds in the linen departments of the stores and a big food court. She suddenly realized that Fred had stopped short, the plastic spoon in his mouth, and he was looking back at her through the window.

  She smiled and gave him a little wave.

  He walked to the door and unlocked it. “Can I help you with something, Evanelle?” he said, stepping outside.

  “Nope. I was just passing by when I saw you.”

  “Is there something you want to give me?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Oh,” he said, as if he really wanted something,
something that would make everything all better. But relationships were hard. There was no cure for them. He looked around to see if anyone on the street had seen them, then he leaned forward and whispered, “I’ve asked him to be home early for the past two nights, and the past two nights he hasn’t come home at all. I don’t know what to do with my time at home when he’s not there, Evanelle. He’s always so good at making the decisions. Last night I couldn’t even figure out what time I should eat. If I ate too early and he came home, then I couldn’t eat with him. But if I waited too long, it would be too late to eat. At around two o’clock this morning I figured I should get things ready to fix breakfast in case he came in. That would be a nice gesture, right? I came here to pick some things up, but James usually leaves me a grocery list, so when I got here I wasn’t sure what to get. I kept thinking, what if he doesn’t want grapefruit? And what if I brought home coffee beans he doesn’t like? I ended up falling asleep on the couch in my office. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Evanelle shook her head. “You’re putting it off is what you’re doing. When you have to do something, you have to do it. Putting it off only makes it worse. Believe me, I know.”

  “I’m trying,” Fred said. “I bought rose geranium wine from Claire.”

  “What I’m saying is you have to talk to him. Don’t wait for him to come home. Call him and ask the serious questions. Stop putting it off.” Fred got a stubborn look to him, and Evanelle laughed. “Okay. You’re not ready for that. Maybe the wine will work, if you can get him to drink it. But no matter what you decide to do, you should probably do it with shoes on.”

  Fred looked down at his stocking feet, horrified, and hurried back into the store.

  With a sigh, Evanelle walked up the sidewalk, looking in windows. Most of the morning joggers were gone, so maybe she would just go home and clean up before she went to visit Sydney. Claire was a little panicked, though she tried to hide it when she called Evanelle last night to tell her about Sydney’s arrival. Evanelle calmed her down and told her everything was going to be all right. She reminded Claire that coming home was a good thing. Home was home.