Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said. “I heard it was your birthday.”

  “Who told you that?” I said.

  “Coco,” he said.

  I saw then that her demand that I call Les, her attempt to let me off “early,” her suggestion that I do something nice for myself (such as a midnight pedicure) suggested that she had not only realized it was my birthday, but had made some effort to manipulate me into having what she thought might be an enjoyable evening for me. I felt simultaneously deeply moved and utterly pathetic. Even my boss pitied my nonexistent love life.

  I did not, however, feel sorry enough to invite Les Rodney in. Number one, I’d already been too badly burned by him to want to re-live the experience and number two, I was pretty sure I was in the middle of having a nervous breakdown.

  Les didn’t wait for an invitation. He gasped as he looked over my shoulder and noticed all the smoke in the living room.

  “Baby! Is your apartment on fire? Where’s your fire extinguisher?”

  He brushed by me, dropping the daisies on the end table next to my keys. He set the bottle of wine down next to the open one on the coffee table. “Your dad would kill me if he found out I let your house burn down with you in it.”

  My dad and Les’s dad were old friends, horribly enough. It was one of the many, many made-up reasons I’d contrived to rationalize the non-fact that I would be different from the other women in Les’s life.

  He opened a window in the living room and pulled the chain on the overhead fan, which had always been too short for me to reach without climbing on the couch. The sight of this—this small thing, his turning on the fan for me with such ease—tugged painfully at my heart. My traitorous heart, which still missed him, in spite of the fact that he was a polygamist lech.

  “What happened?” he asked. He took off his expensive-looking jacket and used it to fan the smoke. It was very efficient. Les was one of those men who could build a fire and order sushi in Japanese. His skills knew no bounds. It was both obnoxious and undeniably attractive.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I guess it was a good sign that he could see the smoke, too. “Maybe the flue closed or something.”

  “By itself?” He arched an eyebrow. “Is your place haunted?”

  “Maybe,” I said, rubbing my arms.

  “I was kidding,” he said as the last of the smoke dissipated. He went over and closed the window.

  “So was I,” said defensively.

  He made himself at home on my couch. “So, what are your plans for the evening?”

  “I have a date,” I said, crossing my arms. “His name is Joel.”

  “Joel what?”

  “Joel Gott.”

  He looked at me with real concern on his face. “Oh, honey,” he said. “You’ve got to stop buying wine from ShopRite.”

  “What are you doing here, Les?” I made a point of sitting on the hearth instead of next to him on the couch.

  “Admittedly, Coco did ask me to drop by,” he said. “She may have mentioned it was your birthday.”

  All at once, her plan expanded before my eyes: manipulate Les into a pity date with me, which for him would be an excuse to slither back into the life of, as he put it, “his favorite girl” (one of four). Once Les had arrived, I would have the opportunity to find out who his new talent was. I marveled at Coco’s devious genius. I bet she was amazing at Risk. I could have refused to do it on principle, but she knew that I would take any opportunity for job advancement. If I got something out of the deal, all the better for me, she would say. I sighed.

  “What have you been up to, Les?” I asked, demurely crossing my legs.

  He smiled, triumphant. At last, I had accepted his overtures.

  “Oh, everything. I just took up hang gliding. And base jumping! There’s nothing like it. I got a Tesla. They’re not nearly as overrated as everyone makes them out to be. Bridget gave me a Hermes tie for my half-birthday. It’s very shiny. Speaking of Bridge, are you going to get lunch with the girls? They’ve been asking about you.”

  “Les,” I said sweetly. “I need another misogynistic womanizer like I need a hole in the head. I will not now nor will I ever, quote unquote, get lunch with the girls.”

  “Baby!” He laid a hand over his heart. I’m convinced he called me this exclusively because he sometimes forgot my name. “You’ve wounded me. I love women. You were always my favorite.”

  I pretended to change the subject. “How’s work going?”

  Les’s eyes lit up. He loved to talk about himself. It was his favorite subject, second only to…himself.

  “It’s great! You know, people are hardly even buying vinyl anymore. I still collect CDs, myself. But I’m like those guys in Silicon Valley who use flip phones, you know? They know how bad smart phones are for us. I mean, it’s like, digital music is so clean, there’s no distortion, no noise, none of those funny little moments in the studio that get left in just cause they’re cool, you know? But that’s what the kids want. Cleanliness. Perfection.”

  “What are the kids listening to these days?” It was hard to get Les out of a soliloquy when he got going. It was like getting Matthew McConaughey out of a black hole in Interstellar.

  “Ye gods, the usual garbage. I can’t even tell one tween from the next. I do have this one, though.” He laughed. His laugh sounded like the warmest thing in the world. He always laughed that way, before he said something awful. “Total train wreck. I’m gonna make so much off this chick from the Lindsay factor alone.”

  “The Lindsay factor” was how he referred to his theory that people will pay good money to watch someone destroy themselves. He said it was a combination of voyeurism and the need to feel better about themselves.

  “Who’s your Lindsay this time?” I asked.

  “Margo Metal. She’s not metal, like, at all, which I always found ironic. She just kinda dresses that way, the way Avril Lavigne always dressed up like a Hot Topic punk to basically sing Celine Dion covers.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “Didn’t Margo Metal have that huge hit about catfishing some dude on Instagram?”

  “Not Who You Think I Am,” he said. Then he sang. His singing voice was the one thing that kept me from drunk dialing him these last few months. It was a high and horrible falsetto that belied his lack of anything resembling a soul. “I’m not who you think I am, baby! I’m just an artificial girl in an artificial world! Captcha me cause I’m a bot, still you hold out hope I’m hot, cause you’re a lonely little loser out in Knoxville, Tennessee.”

  “I kind of like that song,” I said. It reminded me of Les.

  “Baby, it came out like, five years ago,” he said. “And even then, she was over the hill.”

  “Dude, she was like, twenty-five,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said solemnly. “Twenty-five is like a grandma in pop star years. Time to retire.”

  “So why are you releasing her stuff?” I said skeptically. If I knew Les, it was probably something sexual.

  “I’m not sleeping with her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said smugly. Like he deserved a medal just for not doing something most normal people would never do, anyway. “She’s thirty years old, trying to make a comeback in pop. This isn’t Madonna we’re talking about here. She hadn’t been relevant in like, eons.”

  “I’m thirty years old,” I said, wounded. “As of…” I looked at the antique clock on the mantel. “Five minutes ago.” I was born late, just before midnight.

  “Baby, you’re not a pop star!” Les came over and sat next to me on the hearth. He was thirty-eight, and I considered his observations hypocritical at best. “You’re a child, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Ew,” I said, squirming out from under his arm.

  “Well, not a child,” he hastily amended his previous statement. “More like a teenager.”

  “That’s still gross, Les,” I said.

  “Like, a legal one. Anyway, no one’s gonna accept this aging behemoth out on
tour, y’know? They just won’t. Her original fans are in law school and these new kids were born yesterday. But I think there’s an irony aspect I can really sell. You know?”

  “What if she’s actually good?” The more he spoke, the madder I got. I just wanted him to be wrong about everything in the entire world. Including me.

  He scratched his chin. He had an intensely cultivated five o’clock shadow at all hours of the day. “I never thought of that,” he said contemplatively. “You know what? Everyone loves a comeback story.”

  “Let me represent her,” I said. “Me and Coco. Give her a fair shot to win her public back. You know? We could really legitimize her. How do you know she won’t pull it off? And if she does, with us on her side…”

  He ran a hand through his hair, his eyes closed. He loved his hair. He was always petting it and commenting on how soft it was. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or just enjoying the pleasurable sensation of his own hair.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Oh my god, yes. This could actually be legitimate! I could make so much money.” He opened his eyes and seemed to remember I was there. “We could make so much money! Oh my god, baby! This could be so good for both of us.”

  He leaned forward to kiss me, and the overwhelmingly familiar odor of cigars and Veuve hit me in the face in the hurricane rush of his breath. I winced and shoved him away.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “There is just one thing, though.”

  “What? What thing?”

  “If you’re going to join her team—and she does still have one, minus a PR person, good news for you—you’re going to have to join them while she records her new album. Unless you wanna phone it in, which I don’t think you do.”

  “Where is she recording her album?” I said suspiciously.

  “Some little hovel in Middle of Nowheresburg, PA. You know, the other Pennsylvania.” As far as Les was concerned, there was the real Pennsylvania, where we were from, which consisted solely of Philadelphia and the Main Line. Then there was what he referred to as “the other Pennsylvania,” which was everything else. “It’s called Mount Hazel.”

  I felt a strange lurch in my gut. Mount Hazel was where I was born. It was where my mother lived. Presumably, she still did. I thought of what I had seen earlier and wondered if it was really all just a coincidence.

  At the same time, I felt a strange sense of resolve swirl and solidify inside of me. This could be my chance to meet the woman I always wondered about and find out if she was as crazy as my dad always said. If she wasn’t, then maybe I wasn’t crazy, either.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. I didn’t even consider calling Coco. In that moment, I felt like this was the most important thing in the world; like even if she fired me, I would leave the safety of my salary and strike out on my own for this opportunity. It meant that much. “Tell Margo she has a new PR rep.”

  Coco was less than pleased. “Margo Metal?” she shrieked into the phone. Coco never slept. “That was eons ago!”

  “She’s making a comeback,” I said.

  “Sammy, you know how much I love your idealism. I really do. That ends in your forties. I’ve got to tell you, girl, this is not going to do good things for us.”

  “But what if she does make a comeback?” I said. “And we were the only ones smart enough to take advantage of it?”

  There was a pause. I could hear her considering it in the silence. I could almost hear the gears turning in her ceaselessly moving mind.

  “Do you really think this woman could make a comeback, Sam?” she asked. “I mean, I’ll ask the triplets, but I don’t even know what the kids are listening to these days.”

  “Who cares about the kids?” I said. “I liked her.” I held the phone away from my ear and listened to the sounds emanating from the kitchen. Jill had showed up with a third bottle of wine. Les, for reasons best known to him, was making a soufflé. (He could also cook.) They were both singing Not Who You Think I Am.

  “I’m just another bot, in another world that’s not! Real, everything around you is so fake!”

  “I think it has a lot of market appeal for her original audience, frankly,” I said. “It will remind everyone of when they went out drinking every night and felt invincible, just when they’re starting to worry about getting older and fearing that it makes them uncouth.”

  “That’s a valid point,” she mused. “You do have valid points, Sam. I’ve always liked that about you. But are you sure you want to go to Podunk boontown to deal with this woman?” Coco, like Les, had strong feelings about the land outside the greater Philadelphia area.

  I closed my eyes. I thought of home. The home I had never known.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Besides, you know what they say. Everyone loves a comeback.”

  3

  The Other Pennsylvania

  I awoke the next morning to the sound of Les snoring beside me. My head pounded from the wine hangover and the weight of my bad decisions. I told myself it was a one-off thing. Les never left the “real” Pennsylvania if he could help it, so it was unlikely my temporary weakness would follow me all the way to, as Coco put it, “Podunk boontown.”

  Besides, it was my birthday. It was the one day I had each year to convince myself my life didn’t suck and that I had things to look forward to the next year.

  I left Les slumbering in my sleigh bed, briefly considering smothering him with my feather pillow (but only briefly—I congratulated myself on my mental restraint) and went over to my closet. I tugged my ancient plaid suitcase from a high shelf and staggered under its unexpected weight. I’d forgotten it was filled with shoes.

  Truthfully, I felt more excited about this than any trip I’d ever taken: I had a mission, I had a purpose. I had a secret from my dad for the first time in my life. There was obviously no way I was going to tell him that I’d been assigned to a job in Mount Hazel. I could only imagine his reaction to that piece of news. I found I preferred not to think about it at all.

  It’s not that he ever tried to stop me from seeing my mom once I turned eighteen. It was just kind of an unspoken assumption on his part that I didn’t want to any more than he wanted me to. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to, it was just that I didn’t want to hurt his feelings with the knowledge that I secretly did. So I never told him.

  It seemed easier to let him believe what he wanted (or needed) to believe than to be honest with him about it. And it was easier for me, because there was a part of me that was afraid. I didn’t want to complicate our simple, easy life together. And what if she didn’t want to see me? I’d never recover from the blow.

  Now I had an excuse to go to Mount Hazel. And if I changed my mind when I got there, so what? I was just there for work. I recited it like a mantra: I’m just going for work. If I happened to run into my long-estranged mother and had the opportunity to interview her regarding her mental state, it was more of an added bonus.

  I went downstairs to make coffee. When I came back up, steaming mug in hand, Les was in the shower. He was singing InstaFame, the second single from Margo Metal’s sole album: her ubiquitous debut, philosophically titled Miss Behavior.

  “When I was a girl, I looked so very lame, then I got a couple filters, now I have InstaFame! Wrap me up in likes, and I might undress for you, tell me everything you like, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do…”

  Margo’s coquettish lyrics were warped by the strange filter of Les performing them in my bathroom, although the shower had excellent acoustics. It acted as a sort of Auto Tune for his dreadful singing.

  “Hey, beautiful!” He poked his head out of the shower. His face was soapy, his expression self-satisfied. “Coming in?”

  “No.” I set my coffee on the sink while I brushed my teeth. The caffeine was beginning to kick in, along with an overwhelming tide of regret. Sometimes Les felt like a nightmare I was unable to wake up from. Soon, Kimmy would call and ask if I wanted to go to CrossFit with her and Bridget. We’d discuss everyone’s favorite
subject (Les) before going out for Thai.

  I shuddered. The only thing worse than my present hypocrisy would be to openly condone Les’s life choices and adopt them as my own.

  “Your loss.” He disappeared back into the shower and resumed his impromptu performance of InstaFame. “InstaFame! I’ll be your girl, for all the world! InstaFame! I will never be the same!”

  “I doubt that,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t hear me over his epic solo. I checked my face for wrinkles and my scalp for white hairs. I had a single silver strand growing from the middle of my head, the direct result of working for Coco, I was sure, but I left it alone. I thought it made me look distinguished. Coco kept pushing me to go get Botox before I got wrinkles, “as a preventative measure,” but I was resistant to the concept of having botulism injected into my face. I sometimes caught her studying me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  “You know, I’m not saying that you’re old, so it’s a moot point,” she said to me one day, and I looked up, startled, from my Coco-issued laptop. “But you look weirdly young. I almost didn’t hire you, because I thought I was getting another fresh-faced nitwit straight out of Villanova. It’s almost as if you don’t age.”

  It’s almost as if you don’t age. It was one of those things I heard before without thinking about, like the long series of coincidences that comprised my life. Individually, they seemed largely meaningless, like things that could happen to anybody, but cobbled together over time, they seemed to make up a quilt of strange and inexplicable activity.

  The cherry blossom tree outside the window of my childhood home that only bloomed when I came home from college, regardless of the season. The constant power outages in my first apartment in every building but my own. The crankiest of pets who instantly warmed to me, their owners commenting with surprise, “That’s weird, s/he usually doesn’t like anybody.”