Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  One minute, she was on the cover of every magazine; the next, it was as if she had never existed: replaced with the newest flavor of the week with whom the country had found some vague and superficial reason to become obsessed. I vaguely remembered seeing something online about a drunk driving incident in Honolulu, the details of which had long receded.

  Now, standing in front of her, I was both dazzled and afraid. She was by far the most famous person I’d ever represented. I felt dazed and awed by her celebrity, afraid of saying the wrong thing or making some faux pas I’d never recover from. What had Cameron said? Don’t mention her age, hair, and something else? Her leotard, maybe.

  “Hello, I’m Samantha Hale,” I said. “But I go by Sam. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Margo.”

  Margo sniffed and flipped her waist-length extensions.

  “Sam sounds like the name of a fisherman in a rain poncho on the side of a can of tuna,” she declared. “You’ll be Samantha to me. Samantha, I just fired my latest PA, and I need a non-fat, no-whip, triple breve latte with coconut milk because I’m vegan. Can you handle that, New Girl? New Woman, I should say? We’re all about empowerment here at The Manor.”

  The Manor? Did she mean the house? I decided not to clarify.

  “Um, sure Margo,” I said. “But when I get back, could we maybe talk about your image? What you have in mind for your brand and for the new album? I have a lot of ideas I’d like to discuss—”

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said. “That can wait till you get back. I need caffeine and my espresso machine is still not here yet, and I’m pretty sure that wiggity wack coffee shop is only open like, twenty minutes a day. Hurry along now.”

  She slumped back into her chair and Cameron re-situated it to face the fireplace. The fire, I noted, wasn’t lit. I gestured to him and he joined my side.

  “Breve is half-and-half,” I whispered. “What should I do?”

  “Get her the one with the cream,” he whispered. “She’ll have switched to paleo by the time you get back.”

  I navigated the winding road back down the hill as I listened to Miss Behavior and thought that Margo was going to be a lot to handle. But if I could just stick it out and make it work, maybe Coco would see that I really had something. Her partner, Zsa Zsa Y., had recently left the firm and I was gunning for her job.

  Away from Margo and headed towards town, however, I was forced to confront the lie I had been telling myself: as ambitious as I was about my work, I wasn’t here for Margo. I was here to see my mom. Just driving down the road hit me with memories I didn’t even know I had. It was nothing specific or concrete, just a sense of familiarity with a place that should have been foreign to me.

  The narrow road lined with trees gave way to a wide, cobblestone street. The homes were still Victorian and antiquated, but more approachable-looking than Margo’s manor. The businesses were quaint and seemed family-owned and operated, rather than corporate chains: Miller’s Hardware, PJ’s Pizza, Pammy’s Salon. There was a Risotto’s Coffee Emporium sign on a pink and purple house on Main Street that vaguely resembled a wedding cake, but I could see from the car that the sign on the door was turned to CLOSED.

  My heart fell. What would Margo do without her coffee? I wondered what had happened to the now-absent PA. Maybe she had been buried under the house. Alive.

  My phone rang. Yes! Service!

  It was Cameron. I guess Coco or Les gave him my number, because I definitely hadn’t.

  “Forget the coffee,” he said. “She wants tea. I’m steeping the jasmine for it now. But she does need some things for her bath, so you’re going to have to stop at that weird old dragon store on the corner on your way back.”

  “Dragon store?” I asked, confused.

  “There’s like a dragon on it, I don’t know. I don’t understand small towns. There’s a dragon on the sign and they sell a bunch of weird stuff. I need you to find witch hazel and wormwood and newt eyes.”

  “What?” I shrieked.

  “Honey, it is unbelievable for the skin. If you’re not using newt, you might as well just shrivel up and cremate yourself now, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I…guess?”

  “We have an account with them there, and basically everywhere. That darling man who runs the label is pouring a ton of money into this album, thank goodness. Otherwise, we’d be living in the Paleolithic Era over here. Margo, no, I didn’t mean—please don’t throw that at me—”

  “Les is putting a lot of backing into this?” I asked skeptically. He had made it sound like an afterthought. But based on what Cameron was saying, he had in reality sunk quite a bit of capital into the Margo Metal Reanimation Project. I made a mental note to suggest that as a possible alternative to Pedal to the Metal, which I thought was a stupid name for a comeback album.

  “Oh my heavens, yes. Thank goodness for a good-looking man with money, that’s what I always say…Margo, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mention the patriarchy in The Manor. Darling, I’ve got to go. Please do not forget the eyes. They’re essential.”

  He hung up.

  I drove down Main and looked for a store with a dragon on the sign. Cameron hadn’t given me much to go on. It wasn’t like I could put “dragon store” into my GPS and expect results.

  At the end of Main, there was a side street—more of an alley, really—and I turned down it on impulse. At first, there was nothing but the backs of buildings, and then at the end there was a rose trellis with no roses and a small shop on the corner. The sign above it read Ye Olde Apothecary and was decorated with a dragon. The dragon store.

  I turned into a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac. There was a white gazebo at the end of the street, flanked by white birches. It was the most peaceful space I’d ever been in. I parked the car along the curb and went into the shop.

  A bell jingled over my head. The interior was dark and lined with endless rows of shelves that seemed to tower above my head all the way up to the tiny skylight in the ceiling. The shelves were filled with herbs, spices, plants, and things I didn’t recognize. The room was empty. There was a black velvet curtain hanging in the back of the shop. From behind it, I could hear voices.

  “But Mother, you promised me that if I finished alphabetizing early, I could go to the movies with Jason. You promised! Are you my mother, or are you a liar?”

  “There’s something I don’t like about that boy. He has fish eyes. I don’t trust him.”

  “Fish eyes? Mother, what is that? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “They’re practically on the side of his head. That’s strongly indicative of a herbivorous personality type. I would really like you to find someone who’s a bit more of a meat-eater, you know? Someone who will challenge you. You’ll devour that boy in minutes and there will be nothing left of him but bones.”

  Bones? I thought with a chill. Who were these people? Were they cannibals?

  “I think I heard the bell,” the younger-sounding voice said. I assumed, based on their conversation, they were a mother and daughter.

  “Well, go check. Maybe if you make a sale, I’ll let you leave.”

  “Whatever!” The curtain was swept aside and a smiling, round-faced girl with rainbow dreads swept into the room. She looked about eighteen, but I was terrible at guessing people’s ages. She had about forty earrings and full sleeves on each arm. I squinted at her tattoos: one arm was covered in mermaids; the other in a watercolor-like pattern that seemed to shift before my very eyes the longer I tried to look at it. I blinked and looked away.

  “Uh, yeah, hi,” I said, squinting at the list I’d made in the Notes app on my phone. “I’m looking for witch hazel, witchwood, and um…newt…eyes?”

  “Oh,” she said, with a roll of her dark eyes. “You’re here for Margo Metal. And it’s wormwood, not witchwood, that you’re looking for.”

  “Is this a usual thing for her?” I asked.

  “Ugh, like every day she’s got somebody in here ordering some weird, da
rk stuff. What’s she doing up at that house, anyway? I mean, I know she’s recording an album, allegedly, but like…what else is she doing up there?” She turned and rummaged through the shelves, tossing the odd item into a canvas sack she draped over her shoulder. She seemed preoccupied, but cast me a glance over her shoulder that told me she was very much interested in my response.

  “Just recording an album,” I said mildly.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “That’s what they all say.” She set the sack on the counter. “That’ll be fourteen-fifty, please. Will you be paying cash, check, or charge? Or do you just want it on the account, because—” She stopped as she looked me full in the face for the first time. An expression crossed her face that was difficult to define: one of uncertainty mixed with disbelief.

  “Um, sorry,” I said, bewildered. “Do I know you?”

  “Mom?” she called, without taking her eyes off my face.

  “What is it, Tamsin, because if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, the new POS system is not that hard, I’m not getting a square reader and—” The other voice from the back approached, Doppler-like, until it revealed itself as attached to a slim woman I guessed to be in her late forties, based on the age of her daughter, although she could have been ten years younger. It was impossible to tell. She stopped next to her daughter and stared at me as well.

  I was getting extremely uncomfortable. I reached into the pocket of my white pea coat and took out a twenty-dollar bill, which I left on the counter.

  “Um, just keep the change, okay?”

  I turned to rush out the door. Just as I wrapped my fingertips around the handle, the bell jingled and the door swung open. I stopped short of colliding with the woman on the other side. She froze on the stoop, staring at me in shock, and I saw then that I could have been looking into a mirror of my future self.

  It was my mother.

  5

  Family Reunion

  She stood in the doorway, staring at me in shock. It was as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. After a minute, I started to feel afraid. Was she dismayed, or happy? It seemed impossible to tell.

  “Hi,” I finally said. It seemed like as rational a starting point as any.

  Wordlessly, she threw her arms around me. In her embrace were two dozen birthdays, Christmases, and a thousand little reassurances I’d never known. I knew then that my mother loved me, whatever had driven her and my father apart. And I wondered why he kept her love from me for so long.

  She held me at arm’s length, as if to get a better look at me.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said. Her voice, similar to mine but lower by a couple of registers, was warm and humorous, with an unmistakable undercurrent of sadness. “I wasn’t sure what he told you about me.”

  Over her shoulder, I could see Minerva’s eyes darken at the mention of my father. Tamsin shot her a worried look. It seemed to be a sensitive subject for all of them.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” I said.

  Her expression was unspeakably tragic. “Not want to see you? Samantha, I’ve dreamed of it every day, for all these years. It was just your birthday. That’s always been a hard day for me.”

  Minerva’s expression could now best be described as stormy, verging on full-blown tornado. Tamsin tugged on her arm.

  “Maybe we should give them a minute, Mom,” she said gently.

  Minerva blinked. “Of course,” she said, adding, “Sam, it’s good to see you, dear.” She followed Tamsin behind the black velvet curtain and they disappeared from sight.

  “She seems familiar,” I said. And she did, in a way I couldn’t quite place: like the woman who sat next to me on the train, or the pastry chef from whom Coco bought her eclairs. Truthfully, I was just trying to make conversation. What do you say to the woman who carried you for nine months when you haven’t seen her in decades?

  My mother looked devastated. I regretted my lame attempt at conversation immediately.

  “She’s my sister,” she said. “Your aunt. Tamsin is your cousin.”

  Now I understood why they looked at me the way they had. Not only was I clearly the long-lost daughter of Isadora Hale, I was also their long-lost relative. Pretty intense for a Monday morning in retail.

  I struggled to remember them. My memories of leaving Mount Hazel were fuzzy at best. Everything around that time was. It was as if the trauma of leaving my mother was so acute that my mind sought to erase it in order to protect me. Most of the people I knew formed their earliest memories before they started school, but I had little to no recollection of anything prior to first grade. That was when my dad enrolled me in a private school in the city—after he took me from Mount Hazel to his mother’s house in Gladwyne, where we lived until he found an apartment closer to work.

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, Sam.” She sighed and squeezed my arm. I felt startled by the unexpected contact, but simultaneously reassured. “Minerva hates your father on principle, but I didn’t help the situation, to be honest.”

  She sat down on a stool behind the counter, pulling a second one out and gesturing for me to do the same. I sat across from her on the other side of the register.

  “He seemed different when we met. Grounded in all the ways I wasn’t, with a stability that seemed desirable at the time. But I didn’t realize how close-minded he could be. How narrow and unrelenting in his insistence that the world be a certain way, in a certain…order. How unforgiving he was when things weren’t. I had no business with a man like that. He never could have accepted me.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. I didn’t know whether to be angrier at my father, for taking me away from half my family with little to no explanation, or at my mother, for assuming they could never work it out. She hadn’t said anything about mental disorders or being crazy. Was she avoiding the subject?

  She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her forefinger and thumb, which I’d soon learn was a habit of hers.

  “Sam, I don’t know quite how to tell you this,” she said. “Our family is…different, from other families.”

  “Different in what way?” I asked, staring at her.

  “Have you ever experienced anything strange? Something your father, or science, or religion couldn’t explain?” she asked. “Like a dream, or a…vision, maybe? Something that might have scared you at the time, or maybe even reassured you. Not all the time, maybe just…sometimes.”

  I watched her, too afraid to voice any of the things I’d seen and have them confirmed as some sort of latent schizophrenia. She was vocalizing everything I’d ever wondered about for my entire life.

  “What does it mean?” I said finally.

  She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them, studying me.

  “It might be best if I didn’t tell you,” she said. “It might be better if I showed you.”

  “Showed me what?” I asked. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Some things,” she said, “are better left unsaid.”

  It was with those cryptic words that she got up and glided through the front door of the shop. Puzzled, I got up to follow her. She locked the door behind us.

  “I walked here,” she said apologetically. “It’s only a few blocks, if you don’t mind.”

  There was a strange mist hanging over the cul-de-sac that hadn’t been there when I arrived. I don’t know why, but it freaked me out for some reason.

  “I can drive us,” I said, and it felt weird, like I was showing her a drawing I wanted her to hang on the refrigerator. I can drive. See, look? Look what I can do.

  “Okay,” she agreed. It seemed as if she wanted to avoid saying or doing anything that would offend me or possibly scare me away. It made me sad. It had been so long since she’d seen me last, and it was obvious that now she was afraid of losing me again, walking on eggshells to avoid that possibility. I couldn’t say how I knew this, only that I knew without ask
ing.

  I walked over to the Nova at the curb and unlocked the passenger side door for her. I suddenly felt embarrassed to be driving such a thing and desperately hoped she wouldn’t ask where it came from.

  “This is an interesting car,” she said, studying it as she got in. “You know, I think your grandmother had one like this. Is it yours?”

  “Is she still alive?” I asked. “Grandma, I mean?” It was a dirty trick on my part. I thought of my dad and grimly concluded that I’d learned from the best. I just wanted to deflect her curiosity away from the Les Rodney situation, which was embarrassing enough to admit to myself, let alone my long-lost mother who I wanted to think highly of me.

  Right away, I regretted it. Again.

  She looked stricken. “Oh, that’s right, you—yes. She’s alive. She’s at the house. You’ll get to meet her. I mean, if you—if you want to, that is.”

  Listening to her halting uncertainty regarding whether or not I wanted to meet my own grandmother, I felt the beginnings of something uncomfortably resembling hatred towards my father for making her feel this way towards me: uncertain, apologetic. I reminded myself that it was entirely possible she was responsible for all of this, the lost years and constant underlying sadness, and that we potentially could be driving toward nothing more than a large pile of cat hair in a junkyard that she claimed was her home, and that maybe I had been better off. Yes, that was entirely possible. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

  “Is Grandma mean?” I asked, trying to distract her. I didn’t really care if she was mean or not. I assumed she was. Grandmothers, in my experience, were always mean.

  “Mean?” She looked startled. “No, she’s actually a very kind and magnanimous soul. Why do you ask?”

  “Grandma Hale is,” I said. “Kind of mean.” I knew that she loved me—she bought me dolls, and later clothes, and even later my college education, but something about Grandma Hale always frightened me into sitting up straighter and remaining as silent as possible in her presence. She held tea parties with me on her best china with real tea and eyed me coldly if I spilled any. We never baked cookies or brownies, and the tea parties were always held with low-fat, store-bought lemon cookies that tasted like tiny rocks.