Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “Feeling better?” he asked, looking into my face, smoothing a curl from my forehead.

  The corkscrew of pain was back. I shook my head.

  “Are you sure she was going to meet him here?” Spence asked. “I think we should go. You can talk to her tomorrow.”

  “Here,” I said. “Definitely.” I craned my neck, scanning the faces of people strolling past the game rooms, moving in and out of the carousel, pausing to sift through tickets to see if there were enough for a ride on the kiddie elephant train. My eyes settled on each face, measuring, hunting. Emma, I’d see immediately. Her hair was so pale, it almost glowed at night. But Mr. Mitchell wouldn’t look like Mr. Mitchell. No tie and button-down on him tonight. At Salem Willows, meeting his former student lover, he’d look like Tad. And I’d only seen Tad twice.

  “Colleen,” Spence said. His hand hunted along my hip, and it felt warm and dry as it found and closed around mine. Solid. Reassuring. “Come on. You’re exhausted. And I’ve got to get back. Please let me take you home.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  I spotted a rangy young man hip-deep in a crowd of children, silhouetted against a backlit sign advertising FRESH SEAFOOD LOBSTER ROLLS SCALLOPS FRIED TO ORDER. A familiar slouch, a mess of hair that I recognized. He was just there for a second, his shadow sliding over the wall. Then he was gone.

  “There. Tad,” I said. I pulled on Spence’s hand, whispering, “Hurry!”

  He started to protest, but I shushed him, steering him with me into the stream of people shuffling along the midway, making our way through the confusion of noise and lights. I caught a glimpse of the back of Tad’s head before he disappeared behind a group of twentyish guys, one of whom spotted me and let out a low whistle.

  “I’d hit that,” he said straight to me as we passed.

  I ignored him. It happened so fast that Spence missed it, not that he would have been able to do anything anyway.

  The crowd thinned as we neared the end of the midway, and sure enough, there he was. Tad walked with his head down, shoulders up, hands in his pockets. Washed-black band T-shirt. No jacket. Today looked warmer than it was, and he was probably freezing. New England fools us that way sometimes.

  I touched Spence’s shoulder to get him to hang back.

  “But—” Spence objected as I put a finger to my lips and indicated that we should watch where Tad was going. I hadn’t seen Emma yet. But the corkscrew dug in deeper. The pain in my head made the lights brighter, surrounded by coronas of glare.

  I knew she had to be there.

  Tad paused, backlit by the funnel-cake stand, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and stared down at it for a second. He texted something, and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He looked around, spotted what he was looking for, and continued on. He was heading for a dark corner of the park, past the reach of the bulbs and lights and music. Over by the water.

  When I guessed he was far enough ahead of us, I tugged on Spence’s hand, and we followed. The lights fell away behind us. As we moved closer to the water, I felt the wind chill cut deeper into me. I huddled closer to Spence, who whispered, “Even if that is him, I think we should go.”

  “No,” I said. “Soon. Promise.”

  Presently I saw that we were heading for the older of the two fishing piers, the one out over the rockier water. This one wasn’t as good for the stripers, so hardly anyone went on it, mostly just teenaged kids like us who wanted a private place to make out away from prying adult eyes. But the ocean breeze was too cold that night, and only one figure stood on the very end of the pier, her back to us, pale blond hair almost glowing in the dark.

  Emma.

  I was about to call out to her, but the pain twisting in my head made it hard for me to focus, and I realized from his gait that Spence was practically holding me up.

  “Emma,” Tad shouted. The wind carried his voice to where Spence and I were hidden by the darkness.

  “Wait,” Spence whispered, pulling me with him into the sheltering branches of the willow nearest the water.

  The pain in my forehead blistered so hot that all I could manage to say was “Okay.”

  From inside the sheltering willow branches, I saw Emma turn, her face a twisted mask of anguish, her features smeared by grief. The wind coming in off the water gathered her hair and blew it up the back of her head, standing it straight on end, a white-blond halo on an angel of death.

  “Tad,” she choked, bringing her hands to her cheeks. Emma was weeping. She started to run to him, but his hands stayed thrust deep in his pockets and she stopped short, her arms wrapping around herself in the embrace that she wanted to find in him.

  “Emma, listen—” he began, approaching her slowly, one hand extended.

  “Why?” The word tore out of her, the sound of a soul ripped asunder, and the pain forced itself deeper into my forehead. I gasped and sagged against Spence, willow branches blowing against my cheeks.

  “Why would you leave me for HER?”

  With a guttural scream Emma hurled herself at Tad, a screaming banshee of rage and despair. He tried to fend her off, raising his hands to protect his face, cowering, backing away down the pier.

  “Emma,” he cried, his voice breaking. “You don’t understand!”

  “She has EVERYTHING,” Emma screamed, scrabbling at him. “Why? Why her?”

  Blows tumbled down on Tad’s head, and he was sputtering, choking back tears of his own, his handsome face contorted in pain. His hands flailed for her wrists, but the wet sea breeze made her slippery, and they couldn’t get ahold of each other. Their shadows struggled together against the stars, Emma wailing in anguish, Tad grunting with the effort of fighting her off. Tad took another step nearer the edge of the pier.

  “Clara,” I moaned. “Oh, no.”

  “She thinks he threw her over for Clara Rutherford?” Spence said.

  I nodded miserably, my hands on my cheeks, tears streaming down my face, and dropped to my knees in the mud.

  “I loved you!” Emma screamed. “I would’ve done anything for you! Do you understand? Anything! Why did you leave me for her? Why? I don’t understand!”

  “Emma!” he cried. “Emma, please!”

  Through her tears and the willow branches and the wind between us, I could somehow feel Emma’s eyes burning red. She shoved Tad in the chest with both hands, and he took another step backward.

  And then another.

  “I—I didn’t—” Tad stammered, and he couldn’t get a grip on her hands to stop her. The wind kicked up stronger, drenching them with spray torn off the tops of the waves, and he took another step, cringing away from the enraged girl in front of him.

  He stumbled one more step back, but there was no more pier.

  He lurched.

  His heel slipped over the edge.

  For a long, sickening moment, Tad’s body swayed in space, one hand grasping Emma’s wrist, the other cartwheeling in the dark, silhouetted against the starry harbor night. Below the pier, whitecapped waves curled and broke across jagged tips of granite.

  “He’s going to fall!” Spence shouted.

  “EMMA!” I screamed. “DON’T!”

  Emma spun around to see who was yelling, and when she moved, she pulled Tad along with her. His weight shifted forward, and Tad flung his free arm around her waist, hurling himself into Emma. They tumbled away from the pier edge and he got a better grip on Emma, dragging her screaming, spitting, fighting from the end of the pier and wrestling her to the grass in front of the willow.

  “Is that what you think?” Tad shouted, tears streaking his face, straddling Emma with her wrists in his hands, pinning her to the ground like a wriggling fish. Her head thrashed back and forth, her feet churning in the mud. “You really think this is about someone else?”

  Emma sobbed, gasping, “I loved you, I loved you, I
’ve never loved anyone but you.”

  Tad leaned over, placing his hands on her cheeks and forcing her to look him in the eye.

  “Emma,” he said, his voice breaking. “Listen. Listen to me. I love you. I love you. There isn’t anyone else. There’s only you. There only ever was you.”

  I clutched Spence, who’d wrapped his arms around me. I felt the corkscrew of pain moving in my mind, like a living thing, burrowing in. Black mist started creeping into the corners of my vision.

  “But—” Emma sobbed. “Clara! You dumped me for Clara!”

  “What are you talking about?” Tad shouted. “I broke up with you because I’m your teacher. I’m twenty-three, Emma! Do you understand? Twenty-three! I’m not allowed to love you the way I want to. Do you understand?”

  Her chest heaved, her face red with weeping. “But—I saw you! You were at her house! I watched you leave! Colleen was there, we saw you with her!”

  Tad glanced at Spence and me cowering in the willow branches, and shouted, “No, you didn’t. My apartment is in Beverly, Emma. Her house is between my apartment and the park. Remember?”

  “But—”

  “For God’s sake, you’ve been there! Why do you think we had to drive up from the other direction? You think I wanted to drive right past my student’s house? With you in the car?”

  Emma gasped a ragged breath and started to keen. Her entire body trembled, her mouth pulled back in a rictus of pain, tears pouring from her eyes and into her hair.

  “Emma,” Tad murmured, smoothing her hair away from her forehead, cradling her. He placed a soft kiss on her pale eyebrow. “Emma.”

  Something burst. I couldn’t explain it. One minute I was there, watching my friend’s lover lean forward and press his lips to her, kissing her eyelids and cupping her cheek and smoothing her tears into her hair, and the next all I could see was red, and fireworks exploded in my brain and I was surrounded by sparks raining down from the sky, as if all the stars were falling around us, lighting up the willow and raining sparklers everywhere, flaming up into a deep red glow, and then, there was nothing.

  “Colleen?”

  I groaned and rolled onto my side. There was grass in my mouth.

  “Hey,” someone said. A guy. He rested his hand on my cheek.

  I blinked once, twice, and turned my head in the direction of the voice.

  A face swam into focus. It had a funny flop of hair on top, and sideburns, and pleasant smile lines around the mouth. The face was frowning down at me with concern, lit up with garish carnival lights. I could hear children screaming, and the music of the carousel. I broke into a smile.

  “Spence,” I sighed.

  “Can you sit up?”

  “Huh?” I groped around myself, feeling the damp mud underneath me. I pressed my hands against the ground, testing to see if it would give. It didn’t, and I maneuvered myself into a sitting position with care so as not to dislodge any of the rattling pieces inside my head.

  “Are you okay?” He was picking willow leaves out of my tangled curls and brushing dirt off my shoulders. His eyes looked worried.

  “I’m—” I looked around myself, as if maybe the answer had fallen out of my pockets. Then I remembered, and my eyes widened. “Emma!”

  “Shh,” Spence shushed me, placing a finger on my lips. He glanced over his shoulder, and I followed his look.

  My friend was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her limbs tangled together with my disgraced AP US History teacher. His fingers were in her hair, and he was kissing her pale eyebrows, murmuring, “I’m so sorry, Emma. I’m sorry.”

  She was crying, softly, but her face was smooth, her eyes closed, her hands twisted in his T-shirt, soaking him in.

  I looked back at Spence, who mouthed, We should go.

  I nodded, wordlessly, and he helped me to my feet. My knees felt watery. Spence wrapped an arm around my waist and we tiptoed away, leaving Emma and Mr. Mitchell—Tad—alone together, in the shadows, unobserved, the only place where they were allowed to be.

  INTERLUDE

  SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  MAY 30, 1706

  You started to believe?” Reverend Green whispers. He’s edged nearer to me in my telling. His handsome face is inches from mine. I can smell his breath, the sharpness of cider and ink.

  I study his face. His teeth and lower lip are still darkened from licking the tip of his quill. The whiskers on his face are growing in from a long day listening to me. It’s nearly dark, and I’ll be sent home soon. But then again, we both know how it ends. We both know the root of my infamy. Why even bother to finish?

  Without making a conscious decision about what I’m going to do, I take the Reverend’s cheeks in my hands and pull his face to mine. His skin feels like satin under his rough whiskers, and I have just enough time to know the warmth and salt of his lip as I take it between mine. It’s soft and delectable, and my tongue edges forward, wanting to touch him, wanting to taste him, wanting to take him into my mouth. Our kiss lasts only an instant before his hands close over my wrists and he pushes me away from him in horror.

  “Ann!” he hisses with a panicked look at the door.

  We struggle, his fists gripping my wrists and forcing me apart from him.

  I laugh, pulling my wrists free and wiping my mouth on the back of my sleeve. I wonder if my own lip is stained with ink now. The look of tension in his face suggests that yes, it is.

  “Don’t worry, Reverend Green. It’s almost over,” I whisper to him.

  The next day, a Monday, the village reassembles in the meetinghouse to witness Martha Corey’s examination. We girls are there, and the crowd in the meetinghouse is even denser than it was yesterday, with more of them milling about outside, craning their necks to hear reports repeated by listeners stationed at the door. They lead her in, her imperiousness dampened by the binding around her wrists, and she’s brought, glaring, up to the front of the room while Goodman Noyes begins with a prayer. Goody Corey looks appalled that she must listen to prayer while her hands are bound at her waist.

  “Goody Corey. You’re here to answer to the charges brought against you,” Judge Hathorne bellows so that everyone can hear.

  The woman who once boxed my ears after I trod upon her foot lifts her chin and says quietly, “I should like to go to prayer.”

  “Very well.”

  We all wait, obedient to the judge’s mandate, while she closes her eyes in silence.

  Finally, unable to keep the assembly waiting any longer, Judge Hathorne interrupts her silence. Pointing to us, he says, “Why do you afflict these children, Goody Corey?”

  On cue, we girls begin to tremble and shake.

  “Afflict them? I do not,” she says with a toss of her head.

  “Who does, then?” Judge Hathorne asks, looking down his long nose at her.

  “I don’t know. How should I know?”

  Our numbers have grown. In addition to me, the two Bettys, Abby, Mary Walcott, and Mercy Lewis, there’s my mother sitting with us, as well as Goody Pope, Goody Vibber, and Goody Goodall. At a look from Goody Corey the women around me shriek. My mother’s hands fly to her throat, as though she were choking. Some of us scream of being bitten and pinched.

  “I see her likeness coming!” one of us screams. “She’s bringing a book! She’d have us sign it!”

  Onlookers shout encouragements, urging us to look away, urging us not to sign.

  Goody Corey frowns at us and holds her bound hands up. “I have no book.”

  “She has a yellow bird!” I cry, half out of my mind, unsure where the words are bubbling up from. “It used to suck betwixt her fingers!”

  “Do you have any familiar spirit that attends to you?” Judge Hathorne asks the prisoner at the bar.

  “I have no familiarity with any such thing. I’m a gospel woman,” Good
y Corey insists.

  “Ah! She’s a gospel witch!” I scream.

  The judge turns his attention to me.

  “Tell us, child. You have proof of this?”

  “Yes,” I say, scarcely aware of what I’m saying or what part of my fevered mind invents it. “One day when Lieutenant Fuller was at prayer at my father’s house, I saw the shape of Goody Corey and someone else, I think it was Goody Nurse, praying at the same time to the Devil. I’m sure it was the shape of Goody Corey.”

  Goody Corey looks on me with a mixture of pity and distaste. Her face says that she’s always thought I was a rogue, and that now she’s finally been proven right.

  “They are poor, distracted children,” she says, keeping her voice measured and sane. “And you’d do well to give no heed to what they say.”

  “On the contrary,” Judge Hathorne says, his voice mild and instructive. “It is the judgment of all who are present that these children are bewitched. It is only you, Goody Corey, who claims they are distracted.”

  Uncertainty pulls at Goody Corey’s cheek. For the first time I think Goody Corey sees the danger. While she weighs how to answer this charge, how to face those powerful men who are aligned against her, she bites her lip.

  Abby screams, and we all join in, a pleasurable and horrible echoing in the meetinghouse, and it feels so good, the screaming, letting out all the fear and recrimination and frustration we carry around day to day.

  “Look!” Abby wails, producing my arm with the infected bite. “See how Goody Corey afflicts us!” Mary Walcott holds out her bitten arm, too.

  Next to me I spy Betty Hubbard digging into the flesh of her inner arm with her fingernails, clawing into herself deep enough to draw blood, and she holds up her arm and shrieks, “And I, too, Goody Corey sends her shape to bite and bedevil me!”

  Around me all we girls are screaming, producing bite marks on our arms and wrists, and the magistrates and spectators crane their necks like pecking chickens to get a better look at our ripped skin, our bleeding flesh, the evidence of our bewitchment.