Alice had had to call the poor boy, her voice shaking and her tears threatening to tear her throat clear open, and tell him that yes, indeed, she would marry him. He was very quiet for a moment, and Alice understood very suddenly that he had not been all too serious about it either. But now it was very serious, and his mother and Mum had planned nearly every detail. The handsome yet dull-witted young man was set to graduate in the spring, and his plump mother said Alice could live with them while her son attended the trade school and studied carpentry and electrics so he could pass the union test like his father, who in addition to being a bit simple was also exceedingly portly. Seeing the two of them standing next to each other had given Alice a glimpse at the boy’s future. Once the young man joined the union, they could move into a small apartment in town, and his mother would be happy to watch the children as soon as they arrived, which presumably would be soon.
They had a path all lined up, but it wasn’t the path that Alice had seen so many years before on the cobblestone lane back in Glasgow. It was enough to give her pause, though; perhaps it would be a happier road. Knowing what lay ahead made an apartment with the boy not look as terrible as it really was. It wasn’t any use, though; Alice knew this wouldn’t work out, something would break it soon enough, no matter how her Mum and the others chattered about it, and no matter how many choirgirl dresses they hemmed and flowers they ordered. The stars had no intention of letting this path unfold. Alice was almost curious as to what would happen to break up the ever-solidifying plans.
Later that night, as she lay in her twin-sized bed, she looked across the room to the far window. If she lay silent, she could almost hear Arthur breathing. It was a lie, she knew. He wasn’t here and hadn’t been for some time. She’d hoped his spirit would stay on, talk to her, let her know what to expect next, run down the hall and rap his knuckles on the walls like the spirits that still kept her up at night. But Arthur had left in a single breath, his frail body shuddering one last time and going still. Alice had sat with him for a long while before alerting Mum and Aunt Polly. She knew there was no reason to rush him to the hospital; she had seen this moment from the time he was born and loved him more for it. She knew from the time she first held him in her arms that he wasn’t long for this life, and that she must love him enough to make his visit to this world worth the pain it brought. He had looked at her with his great honey-brown eyes, his face pale and scared. He had tried to whisper to her, but his voice was gone, so she had to read his lips. Thank you, he had said. Thank you. He’d never been able to run a block, he’d never know what it was to fall in love, and he’d never dance with Alice at her wedding or play in the ocean. He would never know a world outside of this house, and he had said thank you. Alice shook with the grief that still haunted her years later.
No one had been the same, as was predictable. The living room and long kitchen table had been full of well-wishers and glasses of whiskey. Alice had hidden in their shared room until it was all over. The chaplain, who used to be a rabbi back in his country but had had to flee with his family, had knocked gently and entered the room. He sat on Arthur’s ruffled bed, and his face looked so sad that it broke Alice’s heart to see it.
“I’ve lost many people in my life, my own mother and father were lost in the war, in the camps.” He looked at Alice for a long moment then, and she saw the horror that he spoke of, a path in reverse, grainy as they were when she saw things already past. She felt her chest unhinging.
“I don’t tell you to add to the sadness, child; it’s only that one who has seen death knows better than most the pain it causes.” He spoke quietly, resigned and weary. Alice nodded quietly.
“It doesn’t do much good to talk of God’s plan and whatnot. Paths collide and accidents happen, tragedy is senseless, but that doesn’t make it easier. You have to keep breathing child, and every day a new sun rises.” He rose and paused in the doorway, one last look, and he left.
Alice lay on her bed, missing Arthur and replaying the rabbi’s words from years ago in her head while her terrible wedding was being planned outside the door. Easier though it was, she was not meant to live in an apartment with a union man, her children would not be watched by his enthusiastic mother, and there was no cause for the two of them to keep hemming the pink choirgirl dresses. With a deep breath, she left the room to end the charade; she was calling off the whole thing. This had been a game of chicken, and she was declaring herself the loser. Mum’s steel will had proved stronger than hers. Alice had blinked first and would call the sweet, stupid boy and tell him the wedding was cancelled. She suspected he would be quietly relieved. His mother would cry and storm about and forget soon enough. Mum would say nothing at all, and with a raise of her eyebrows, she would set to calling the woman down the street and cancelling the flowers. For her part, Alice would go back to her twin bed in her empty room and whisper the story to Arthur, just in case he was still listening.
EVERY PASSING GENERATION or so, the Cailleach took a man to be her mate and live with her in the highland crags. He would father a child, and together they would live by the still, black waters of the underground lake that lay deep below the lowland heath, set deep within the enchanted caves. They lived there together in this forgotten and quiet place until he died of old age or she tired of his company and set him back on the road, his memory of the time he’d spent in the cave a blind spot in his vision. The Cailleach suffered neither from time nor the elements and outlived all her mates. Her daughters—they were always daughters—grew up a confusing mixture of magical and ordinary. Half hag and half flesh-and-blood. They left when they became women and quickly forgot where they came from, as was the way with enchantment. They married and had daughters and sons of their own and told vague stories of their childhoods, so much forgotten and lost that anyone who listened figured they had seen a horror so great that they had willfully forgotten the past.
It was quite the opposite: the Cailleach was a loving and generous mother; she shared the secrets of the earth and trees, taught them the birdsong and how to move the clouds and bring the rain. She taught them how to keep the soil fertile and a lullaby to sing to the newly born when they suffered from the grippe. She taught them the words to whisper to the night breeze that would bring a departed soul to the next world. She taught her daughters how to see into the past and the future and how time is running in all directions all the time. She taught them that all the paths and all the what-ifs are happening on top of each other all the time, simultaneously. She would take a stack of thin squares of muslin cloth. One on the next on the next. Each layer is its own history, the Cailleach would whisper gently.
At this, the Cailleach would release a single drop of indigo dye onto the topmost layer. See, she would tell her daughter. See? It bleeds through the topmost path and onto the next. In this way, so many things from the next world touch ours, and our world touches the layer beneath. You have the sight; the Cailleach would take her daughter’s hands in hers. You will see the places where time touches other paths; you will see all the what-ifs and possibilities. You will know things that others do not, and they might fear you for it.
The Cailleach would pray that her daughter would remember the lessons, but they always forgot. They moved on to the world, and the enchantment garnered in their upbringing was lost to a mortal life. They lived long lives, longer than most, and never suffered from disease or illness. They healed quickly after an injury and heard voices in the trees. Sometimes they knew what would happen in the future; other times they saw things that were long past. Sometimes they were feared and other times worshipped. Some took on a quiet life, and no one saw their exquisite abnormalities at all. Some flaunted it and made elaborate shows of speaking with the dead and looking into crystal balls. But none of them remembered where they had learned to show the passage of time by dropping a point of indigo ink through a stack of thin squares of cloth. None of them remembered how to call the winds or why they knew the lyrics to ancient songs that seemed
to quiet the fussiest newborn child.
And so the Cailleach carried on.
THE BOY STANDING AT the door is holding Alice’s hat. It’s a silly top hat used in a dance performance when she was a child; Mum had thrown it out with the rubbish years ago. But here it was, in this strange boy’s hands. The tag on the inside had neat printing: Alice Grace Kyles in block letters so familiar to Alice, she’d scarcely needed to consider the veracity of the boy’s story. His name was Paul, and he had worked at Willow Caverns with her that summer. Now he was here, holding the tattered top hat in his hands.
Looking in his hazel eyes, partially blocked by a flop of rust-colored hair, she recognized him from a long time back, from that lane in Glasgow. Paths are funny things, Alice knew that, and she knew that slamming the door in his face and never returning to her cashier’s job at Willow Caverns would set the entire world in a different direction. Still, she stayed glued to the same spot. Uncomfortable as he was, he held out the hat.
“Do you want it back?” he asked.
“Why would I?” she retorted. “I threw it out years ago. Would you like it if I brought you some of your own trash as a present?” He smiled at that.
“It’s weird, though, don’t you think?” he asked, an air of teasing in his voice.
He was a bit over a year younger than Alice and had just graduated from high school. Alice had just finished her first year of college, where she was studying to be a teacher. It was the last thing she wanted to be, but the engineering schools hadn’t returned her queries, and despite her straight A’s, they hadn’t appeared with any scholarships. It was a good career, Mum had told her, it has stability; you can travel.
Alice was disappointed, and Grandmum Rowan back in Glasgow had written her saying she still knew people at the Women’s Medical College even though she was long since retired. Alice had thought about it, but she did not feel the call to medicine the way her Mum and Grandmum had; she wanted to build things, she wanted to design and construct and work out all the minute details that others paid no never-mind to. But the United States, for all its myriad wonders, did not take kindly to a woman who wanted all that. The job at Willow Caverns was a summer job, and a good one at that. It paid $1.15 per hour. Alice kept it all in an account in town, an account that she hoped would pay for a deviation from the path that never seemed to stray too far from her line of sight.
She took the hat from Paul, the boy who worked in the maintenance office at Willow Caverns. She wished him a good day, and he grinned back at her. He would be arrested by the end of the summer. She didn’t know it was going to happen, but it was no surprise to her. He and another boy got drunk after work, as many of the workers did, deep in the tourist caves: they would drink beer spiked with vodka—a cave party, they called it. Except this time they drank too much, and Paul and the other boy decided it would be funny to hide the cash box deep in the cave so the unpleasant manager would have a good start the next day. Their plan was to let him panic, then replace it when he looked away, making him think he was crazy. However, Paul passed out on beer and vodka in the cave, and when the manager found him there the next morning, he quickly made the connection between the missing cash and Paul. It didn’t matter later, as Paul’s friend and others tried to explain the joke. It wasn’t funny, and Paul spent a couple of nights in jail until the manager dropped the charges on the condition that Paul never set foot in the caves again.
Alice wasn’t sad. She knew she would see him again. Hopefully not too soon; she had some living to do before then. The tattered top hat was once again thrown in the rubbish bin. It had always been trash.
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE she knew her daughter would set forth into the world, Cailleach had inked the interlocking jagged lines of Ingwaz into her wrist, just as she had done for all her daughters.
“But how will I forget all this?” the girl had asked in a pleading voice, not understanding.
The Cailleach had stroked her soft skin and tucked her unruly raven-black hair behind her ear. “It is the way it must be, mo sto’r. You must make the choice to remember; that is the way with our magic. It is an old story: you must cross the Lethe into the mortal world and leave it all your memories of this place. In time you may remember, but it is likely you will not. I can only leave you with this as a guide. You must follow the path on your own.”
The girl had buried her head in her mother’s chest, and the Cailleach had held her until she slept. She knew her daughter, when she woke, would begin to forget her face, her life, and her abilities. She would begin to doubt herself and be at the mercy of others for understanding. It was the way it had always been with their kind. The Cailleach herself had been the daughter of a hag even greater than she. She had been cast out of her mother’s house and set on a lane. In time she remembered who she was and what she was capable of. She learned the old magic and how to live among men, yet apart from them.
She watched her daughter start down the lane as the sun rose the next morning. The jagged lines of ferocity brought together in unified peace burned onto her arm. The girl turned to wave and cast the Cailleach a confused look. It was already starting, the old hag thought softly. She whispered a prayer of protection and turned away from the inevitability of her loss.
JOHN KENNEDY HAS BEEN SHOT. Alice stood in front of her class. Her students were seated, books on their desks open to an interrupted algebra lesson. Overhead, the announcement blared on and on: the president of the United States has been shot as he rode in a car with Mrs. Kennedy. The school principal paused, more words to say but not sure how to say them. The whole world stood still for a long moment, and then a boy in the back of the room, a boy with a blond crew cut and blue plaid shirt, started clapping.
“Goddamn commie! That’s right, he got what he deserves!”
The room sat in stunned silence for moment, and then the class erupted with whistles and cheers. A pimple-faced boy in the corner stood up, his arms raised over his head in some sort of prayer or celebration. The words from the overhead announcement had Alice in a deep state of disbelief and shock. She stood in the room, the cheers and chants of the overprivileged students surrounding her, and she felt her breath catch. She turned to the chalkboard and stared at the start of an algebra equation that had been interrupted by the speaker. A well of rage and anger coursed through her, and she slammed both hands on the board. The room went quiet, nervous titters emitting from the class.
“Shut up!” Alice’s voice was clear and strong. “You have to live with this! You have to live your whole life with what you’ve done!” She paused; the stunned faces of the once-cheering students were slack with surprise. Alice didn’t yell; in fact, her principal had talked with her on multiple occasions about being stricter, more assertive. But now she had found her voice, and the words poured out in an angry tumble. “Your whole life, when someone asks where you were when President Kennedy was shot, you get to tell them you cheered! You cheered like the little monsters you are! You live with that your entire life! You can’t take it back; you can’t undo it. Live with that.”
Alice’s whole body shook with rage and shock. Pimple-face sat down slowly, his face still red with its previous exuberance. An invisible wave of impact washed over her, and all of a sudden, Alice saw it all. She saw the pimple-faced boy sitting behind a cheaply made pressed-wood desk, his gut keeping his chair at a distance, his face red and strained with invisible pain. She saw him slump over, his pudgy, sausage fingers reaching out for help that was not coming. But today, the pimple-faced boy was just a fourteen-year-old kid echoing his parents’ politics, a fourteen-year-old boy who had no idea of the impact of this moment. None of them did.
Alice looked around the room and saw their paths laid out before them. She saw the boy with the blond crew cut and plaid shirt dressed in a football uniform, a college crowd screaming and cheering as he ran. Suddenly he was knocked down, a pain shooting through his knee and back. The blond boy didn’t know it now, but it would be the end of football, the end
of walking without a limp. But now he was a kid who doesn’t even really know what a communist is and certainly does not know what it is to lose a husband, a wife, a loved one. He was cheering for a concept he would never quite understand.
Alice took a deep breath, her left wrist pulsing irrationally. It was as though an invisible wall surrounded each of the children in front of her. They could not see their fates; they did not know their paths. The pimple-faced boy would live his life, kiss his wife, and go to work that day never knowing it would be his last. Maybe he would yell at his kids, or curse at his neighbor, or leave his wife with a crass word on that morning, never knowing it was the last time he would see them. The boy with the blond crew cut would not believe what the doctors told him; he would deny and deny and deny that his days of being hailed for his body were gone. He would remember the last time he had run the field, or climbed steps without pain, and never know it was gone forever.
But what hell would it be to know? The entire class was stock-still, as though time had stopped, as she pondered the horrific what-if of the hell those wretched creatures would suffer if they lived the next ten or twenty years knowing full well their fates and having no way to escape them. They would doubt it and think themselves mad; they might think her a witch and discount the lot; they might never join the football team, never take that office job. They would live in fear.
“I think she’s gonna cry.” The pimple-faced boy spat, his face twisted in a sadistic glee.
Alice brought her hands up and held the invisible curtain that saved the children from their fates for a long minute. The class sat mesmerized, their cheers silenced, their smiles erased. Then, before she could think too much on the matter, she brought her hands sweeping to the floor, and with it the layer of protection that had separated them from their paths was erased. The pimple-faced boy saw his whole life laid out before him; the blond crew cut knew instantly that he would be cut down. The others knew as well. They saw their future husbands never return from work, lost to the twisted metal of a car crash or another woman. They saw their own demises. Some were banal and ordinary, the running out of breath at the end of a long life. Some were more, a pulse sent through the brain at the wrong time that caused the entire structure to collapse. Alice realized what she had done and stood in front of the stunned and silent crowd, unable to take back what she had cast out in anger.
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