Three Witches

by Paula Jolin

  “If you can really do this thing, this obeah,” said Gillian, who still hadn’t ditched her all-magic-is-obeah idea, “then addlepate me right now, Aliya as witness. Let me see for myself.” But Miya said no. Got angry, too, which wasn’t like Miya. But then, basic black, magic-using, manipulating teachers—none of this was the Miya all the boys loved. “It’s not a game, Gillian,” said Miya.

  “Cumberland Street,” said the bus driver. Aliya leaned over two seats and dinged the bell, brought the bus to a stop, and jumped off. According to MapQuest, 114B Mansfield should be the second left. Not the best part of town, this: three-story duplexes crammed into tiny lots, geezer cars— black, blue, white—breathing their rusty last at the side of the road. The still-wet ground didn’t help either: nasty puddles, filled with floating debris. A cigarette carton stranded here, a Fritos bag washed up there.

  Skip, skip, splash. She looked around, sniffed the air. Ripe garbage, wet dog. It was lonely without her iPod or cell phone, without her ghost. “Trevor?” she whispered into the wind. “Trevor?”

  Her feet stopped short at 114, till she realized B was around the back. Had Trevor come here, skirted the nasty mud pie of a front lawn by holding onto the fence like this, found the basement stairs in the back, right here?

  My cousin, Luke said. Not there, Cousin told the police. Assertions with no more substance than Trevor’s ghost. She found 114B scrawled on a piece of cardboard next to the door. She knocked.

  And knocked. What had she been thinking? Cousin Katelin—if cousin she was—would be in class, at work, ordering a latte at Starbucks.

  The door opened. A girl in an extra large T-shirt and bunny slippers said, “Do I look like I have the money to buy your stupid magazines?”

  “I’m not selling,” said Aliya to the girl, a girl with crushed red hair and almost perfect skin and big black circles around sad eyes. Talk fast. “I’m a friend of Trevor’s—”

  “Trevor? My cousin Trevor?” The sad eyes narrowed. “He’s dead.”

  “I know that.” Would she be here if he wasn’t? “I heard you saw him the night he died and—”

  “Nope.” Katelin wasn’t blowing bubbles, but she sounded like she was. “You heard wrong.”

  “The thing is,” said Aliya, “I’m a friend of his. A good friend. A . . . uh, his girlfriend.” First time she said it out loud, and he was three weeks dead. May God have mercy on my unchaste soul. “I need to know, his last night—”

  “Wasn’t me,” said the girl.

  Katelin moved to the side and gestured Aliya in anyway. It smelled like spaghetti sauce, burned, and more garbage, spilling out of the corner bin. “I told the police: I was driving my asshole boyfriend to the bus station. Ex-boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t do that shit anymore, smoke up at the Crescent. Trevor and I used to . . . but that’s over now, for both of us.”

  Aliya looked around the apartment: crumpled blankets on the floor, stained paper plates in the sink, an enormous collage on the wall over the sofa bed. Someone scrapbooked: the collage was edged with gold, matted with olive green. Fancy calligraphy ran down the side and, with true professional restraint, the collage used only five photos. Aliya found the one she was looking for right away, smack in the center: Trevor and Katelin, arms around each other, faces smeared with the same maroon and white paint.

  The girl snapped on an overhead light, and in the dim, dirty room, Trevor’s smile glowed. “He was a bit of a shit these days,” she said. “Drugs, stealing from his mom—not that Aunt Patty didn’t deserve it, talk about cheap! She wants me to take Trevor’s damned dog off her hands. Do I look like I have room for a dog?”

  She didn’t.

  “Right. Drugs, theft, sleeping around . . .”

  Aliya’s back stiffened. “I was his girlfriend.”

  “Mmmm. Sorry. Could’ve been before you. When we were younger, we were close. That picture was from my last semester at BU; he took the train in so he could come to the game. We had—we had a good time. He would have straightened out eventually.” She smoothed back her frizzy hair. “Sucks rotten eggs that he didn’t have the chance.”

  “Yeah,” said Aliya. She swallowed. “You think he was high when it happened?” What she really wanted to ask: Do you think he misses me?

  “No idea. Don’t think about it, it’ll mess with your head.” Katelin tucked the hair behind her ears. Then she crossed the room, took a cell phone off the dirty counter, checked the Caller ID display. “Nothing. Bastard called me from Mexico this morning, said he loved me but he needed time to think, to find himself. Find himself. Ha, I could hardly hear him over the tequila party in the background. If he loved me he wouldn’t go backpacking for a freaking year. Shithead. That bastard Jack, I’ll never forgive him.” Aliya didn’t know what to say; luckily, Trevor’s cousin didn’t much care. “God, it’s three thirty already. I’ve got yoga at the Y.”

  Aliya showed herself to the door, stood in the wet backyard.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Aliya.”

  “Katelin. See you around.”

  Aliya sludged back through the mud.

  Would they have ended up like this, she and Trevor? Wasn’t that Islam’s argument? Boyfriend Boulevard, also known as the detour to misery. Without God’s rules, without the protection of the marriage contract, was this what you got: cheap apartment, swearing over the phone, cheating in Mexican tourist traps? An incompleteness that hours of longdistance pleading couldn’t assuage. That same incompleteness Aliya felt right now, the one that caused her to remind herself: yes, ten fingers, two kneecaps, one solid chin. Her physical body still held together.

  Had God taken Trevor to save her? Couldn’t be. Even Mariam knew that God didn’t work like that: He was neither so protective of Muslims nor so callous with uninformed Unbelievers. But Aliya felt very far from Trevor as she wandered past the front fence, let her feet sink into the sludge. She came all the way to the edge of the street, checked out the traffic. It seemed deserted. No cars, no trucks, no buses.

  And no ghosts.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MIYA OPENED the shed door. Bikes, skates, that big box of Halloween decorations, and, yes, here it was. She pushed the box aside with one knee, reached behind it, yanked hard. The grill rolled out onto the grass.

  She lifted up the cover. The smell of burned hickory drifted out from under the metal grates. Miya took off one and then the other; both were a little rusty. Their last barbecue, Mom had just set out the burgers when the rain poured down, drove the whole party into the house. Miya had ended up in the doorway, watching the angry rain storm the backyard, hearing the crack of thunder—What was that?

  Nothing like thunder this time. A soft stirring brought her back to the here and now. Not much more than a puff of air, it tripped up her back, tickled the blades between her shoulders.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Miya. But she found herself smiling as she carried handfuls of coal from inside the grill across a short space of brown grass and lined them up in even rows. Now the lighter fluid—drizzle, drizzle, gunk—and . . . wait, had she forgotten the matches? Yep. Back inside the house, where she retrieved them from the vase on top of the refrigerator and brought them out. She set fire to the coals. As they flared up, she was thinking of rain again, of clouds opening, drops pelting, girls running. That magic night, floating above the trees, seeing her true self, a self that glowed with power, with possibilities.

  There had to be a way to do that again.

  She kicked off her shoes, stripped off her socks. Touched the red coals with her fingertips: still cold. She stepped across on tiptoe, for practice—the coals scraped her not-tough-enough skin, but she made it all the way to the end. She closed her eyes, hunched her shoulders, concentrated as she went over the coals again. Nothing. Not yet. Of course, she wasn’t exactly sure what she was hoping for. So far the spirits had been shy, wary, untamed—sliding up to her at brief, unexpected moments, their closeness like the tenderest caress. S
he whispered Welcome, waited for the pss-pss-pss back, for words that would curl up inside her ears, encouraging her, empowering her.

  Time to try again. She readied herself. The coals had darkened with the heat—and yes, they burned her skin— thank the spirits for the chance. A second step; sharp, searing embers, roasting feet. She pulled her mind into a single point of concentration, reached for the words to charm the spirits, to corral them and—

  Crash.

  Miya found herself spread out on the ground, hands pressed against her ears like a metal vise. Stars danced above her, in front of her, on the grass beside her—she blinked once, twice, and they resumed their place in the heavens. Slowly, the banging inside her died down.

  What happened? She’d been reaching for the spirits— how long had she been balanced there?—when something had launched itself in the way. The single note of a discordant symphony erupted, a dozen incompatible instruments blaring all at once, rampaging inside her head. It had lasted a single second, it had gone on a million years. Some force she’d never sensed before, dark and shady and—what was the right word? Malevolent. She found herself shivering. A little at first, and then her hands were trembling and she had to tuck them under her arms, her teeth were chattering and she had to clench them together.

  Miya rolled onto her side, nose so close to the coals if it’d been a little longer she would have singed it. They must be blazing hot by now, she should test herself again. But somehow she couldn’t. There was something else she needed to do first.

  THE SUN WAS SETTING behind the white church. Thick pine trees on three sides cast long shadows before blending into forest. The church wore that shuttered look, doors and windows closed tight, a small placard in front announcing No prayer group this Thursday. Out in the deserted parking lot, the wind tossed needles, small stones, pieces of yellow paper.

  Aliya and Gillian were already sitting on the front steps when Miya arrived. She circled the church, wondering if she would get a hint of Trevor—that unhappy, dead feeling that pressed against her body now and again. By the time she rounded the last corner, she was sure: no Trevor. The heavy atmosphere of Christian God must have driven him out. There was blood here, and pain, but it was the pain of holes in the hands, thorns in the head. For the first time, Miya felt affection for the body on that cross. Not creepy, just another ascetic trying to gain power.

  Gillian, punching buttons on her cell phone, didn’t look up when Miya joined them, just pressed the phone so tight to her ear it looked as though she were trying to weld it in place. “Straight to voicemail,” she muttered. “Again. The woman’s got no job, no man, where the hell can she be?”

  Aliya met Miya’s eyes. “He’s not here,” she said. “I can’t feel him at all.”

  “No,” Miya agreed. She sat down next to Aliya, almost reached out and took her hand. “This place is hostile to spirits, I sensed it as soon as I arrived.” That was a slight stretch. There was no “as soon as” in power, at least not for her. Everything was about patience, about focusing her mind, reaching out, finding, feeling. “But anyway, that’s not why I called you guys.”

  “You can still smell the flowers,” said Aliya. She brought a hand to her nose as though it held a bouquet. “Gardenias, lilies, roses. Trevor liked roses, yellow ones. His mom would have had yellow roses.”

  Gillian put down the phone and looked across at Aliya. Concern creased her face. “Memorial service was weeks ago, girl. The sweet stuff you’re smelling could be from half a dozen funerals since.”

  “The yellow roses, those were Trevor’s,” Aliya said stubbornly. She sniffed. “And the cedar—no, it’s not there, I can’t smell it. It’s gone. He’s gone.” Her lips trembled a little. “He’s gone,” she said again.

  “It’s not that,” said Miya. Wind picked up, fluttered one of those yellow pieces of paper across their feet. The sun’s pink light dipped behind the church, the grass and trees and gravel around them went gray. “I told you guys about the techniques I’m working on, the books I’m reading. I’ve been trying to figure out how to help Trevor, to ease his distress.” Sometimes that hint of Trevor came with a sense of pain, with faint moans, with futile fits and starts, as though, in trying to slip away, he was always jerked back.

  Go drown yourself. No, she needed to stop thinking that. It drained her power every time she did. Still, she couldn’t help picturing this church as it must have been a few weeks ago, the parking lot crammed with cars, solemn girls in dark dresses filing up the church steps, Trevor’s mother leaning on someone’s arm as she made her way down the aisle.

  Not someone’s arm, Luke’s arm. Dressed in a dark suit, sunglasses hiding those bloodshot eyes. An hour or two before, he’d been storming around Trevor’s room, tearing pillowcases, smashing picture frames, throwing computer parts against the wall. Passionate, tormented Luke. If only she could have spared him that.

  She should have come to the service. Shouldn’t have been afraid of what Mrs. Sanders would think, what other people would say—

  Enough with the regret, Miya.

  No one spoke. Gillian flicked her fingers over her cell phone as though she could obeah up the message she was waiting for. Of course, maybe she could. Aliya had picked up one of those yellow papers and was twisting it back and forth between her fingers. She straightened it out on her knees. In memory of Trevor Sanders, Miya read over her shoulder. Beloved brother, son, friend.

  Miya cleared her throat. “I’ve been trying to increase my power, and it’s kind of worked,” she said. Her voice sounded banal, harsh in front of the empty church. She lowered it. “The thing is, though, I’m not sure if I’ll be ready this weekend; that’s what I wanted to ask you guys about. There’s something that’s blocking me, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like some kind of malevolent force.”

  Gillian looked up, her round eyes as infinite as two black holes. “Malevolent force?” she echoed.

  Miya grimaced. “I knew I couldn’t describe it properly,” she said. She tried again. “It’s not something powerful, not something chasing me, not a spirit, not really. It’s more like it’s just in the way.”

  “Trevor,” said Gillian.

  “I told you, Trevor’s not malevolent,” said Aliya, but her lips trembled.

  Miya searched for another way to define the force, failed to find it. Still, she knew it didn’t have the dense, mournful presence that Trevor did. “Not Trevor,” she said. “Something blocking me from reaching the spirits, from advancing to the next level.” She frowned, tried one more time, but it eluded her. “I don’t think it’s a spirit at all.”

  A wheet-wheet-wheet echoed in the churchyard. They all started. “Oh,” said Aliya. “My watch.” She peered down at it, trying to make out the numbers in the almost-dark. “Seven o’clock. Must be.”

  Gillian stared at her, muttering to herself. “‘Lined with silver, smelling of soy sauce’—oh. ‘Something black crowing in his ear’—oh. Stupid mook, stupid obeah man, stupid, stupid Gillian.”

  Had Gillian’s obeah taken over? Miya couldn’t see auras yet, couldn’t command spirits, couldn’t even overcome this new blockade. She spoke more sharply than she meant to. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry,” said Gillian. “No, it’s nothing, really. I mean, I just figured something out. Something that I totally misunderstood the first time. I think I know what your malevolent force is.”

  “It’s not Trevor,” said Aliya. Hadn’t they already agreed on that? She twisted the yellow paper in her hands again, and it tore in half.

  “No,” said Gillian. Her face took on a grim tinge. “It’s not.”

  “So this weekend is out?” Aliya asked. The paper was in half a dozen pieces now, a few of them scattered at her feet. “I just feel—I can’t help but feel—he’s fading away. If we wait till next weekend, he may be entirely beyond us.”

  “We can do it this weekend,” said Gillian. Her voice was as grim as her face. Cold too. “I’ll take care of th
e malevolent force.”

  “If you want to meet tomorrow morning before school,” Miya said, “we could—”

  “No.” Gillian was shaking her head, cutting her off. “This is something I need to deal with by myself.”

  Miya shut up. For the first time in days, she felt uncertain. Control snaked its way across the stone steps toward Gillian, stepped daintily over the yellow pieces of paper between them. Should she struggle for it? But the kitoshi had said something about this—what was it? The words floated back to her, haunted her, comforted her: Here, in America, the spirits are more powerful . . . I believe it’s their contact with other spirits from all different parts of the world. Still, she asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” said Gillian. Fair enough. Miya gave a 183 little ground to obeah.

  “I’ll bring something that Trevor loved more than himself, we’ll need it,” said Aliya, as though she’d been reading Asceticism, Power and Pain over Miya’s shoulder. She’d bring it? For one scary second, Miya thought Aliya meant she would bring herself, but then she added, “Well, it’s already at the house. But I’ll take charge of it.”

  Miya started to ask for details, What do you—but no. Not tonight. Aliya was already standing up anyway, already brushing off the seat of her jeans. “I better get out of here,” she said. “My parents are going to have a fit if they realize I’m not in my room.”

  “Will you be able to get out this weekend?” asked Miya, but Aliya was already tumbling down toward the road, already running after the bus screeching to a stop around the corner. Gillian fumbled in her purse, came out with her keys. “You need a ride home?” she asked Miya.

  “No thanks.” Miya stared up at the dark blue sky. Somewhere in those trees behind the church there must be spirits. Why not climb the highest tree, up, up, up, until she was swaying with the wind? Conquer your fear, another vital step in her quest.