by Skylar Finn
“That woman.” My mother looked out the window, her mouth set in a thin line. “I’d forgotten. Oh, sorry, dear, turn here. Spindle Lane.”
I made an abrupt turn onto Spindle. It was less of a lane and more of a forest.
“This is a street?” I asked, squinting through the windshield at the passing trees.
“Well, kind of. We like to stay out of the way out here in our little neck of the woods. Literally speaking.”
“Where’s the house?” I asked. I didn’t see any houses back here, just trees.
“There it is,” she said brightly. “Just at the end of the lane, there.”
The house appeared so suddenly I almost screamed. It was as if it materialized out of thin air. It looked like a regular house on the bottom, with a series of smaller houses on top. They were like boxes stacked on top of each other, ending in the tiniest one, which had a small round window overlooking the road. It reminded me of a cuckoo clock.
“Did you build this?” I asked, pulling the car to a stop in front of the house.
“Your grandfather did,” she said proudly. It was the first time she sounded happy since I first saw her in front of the store. Her happiness was short-lived, and the smile faded from her face. “He, however, is very much dead,” she added.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure who was supposed to be comforting whom in this situation. There seemed to be no pre-existing etiquette for this particular set of circumstances. I guessed we were making it up as we went along.
“It was long before you came along,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “At least we don’t have to be sad about you missing out on knowing him. Come inside, and I’ll introduce you to your grandmother.”
I trailed after her as she got out of the car and followed her inside the cuckoo clock house. Had she forgotten our conversation inside the apothecary? What was she doing there, anyway? Did she work there, too? What did she do for a living? Who was she?
It was this series of profound and nagging questions that propelled me forward into the house, at which point I immediately fell silent.
The front door opened up to a huge round room, the ceiling of which extended all the way to the very top of the house, ending in a round skylight. It cast a puddle of sunshine on the floor onto a sundial sitting in the center of the room. I stood next to the sundial, looking up into the sky far above my head.
“Isn’t it lovely?” My mother’s voice was quiet and respectful. “We don’t like to be too far from nature here. Come to the kitchen with me and I’ll make us a pot of tea.”
The kitchen was cozy and quaint, with a black-and-white tile checkerboard floor and an exposed red brick wall behind the granite countertops. My mother filled a shiny copper kettle with water and placed it on the ancient-looking range behind her, which had six burners instead of four. I looked around the kitchen, fascinated. Copper pots hung from a rack suspended from the ceiling. There was an old-fashioned wood-burning oven in the corner and a long window the length of the kitchen through which sunlight flooded in. We don’t like to be too far from nature, here.
She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and placed an oversized mug on the table in front of it. I sat down while she busied herself getting honey and sugar from the cabinets and lemon from the massive 1950s refrigerator. I got the impression she was stalling.
“What were you saying before?” I asked pointedly. “In the store?”
She smiled. I could tell she was smiling, even though her back was to me.
“You look so much like me, but you sound like your father,” she said, bringing her tea fixings over to the table. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how you take your tea, so I brought a little bit of everything. I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added hastily at the look on my face. Her earlier description of my father didn’t exactly constitute a ringing endorsement. “Just that relentless ability he has to get to the bottom of things. That drive. I was always more content to wonder, but he always had to have an answer about everything.”
That was perfectly true. At the moment, he thought I was in East Hampton with Coco. As far as I was concerned, it would stay that way indefinitely. While lying to my father about my whereabouts made me feel regrettably like I was sixteen again, I wasn’t up for the inevitable interrogation that would accompany the facts of my actual location.
The kettle whistled and she brought it to the table with a mug of her own. She sat down across from me and scooped a little bit of loose tea from a clay jar on the table into an infuser, resting it inside my mug and pouring the water over it.
“Rosehip, lavender, and jasmine,” she said. “A very soothing combination.”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t a big tea drinker. I was more coffee-oriented. Grandma Hale gave me my first espresso at the age of eleven and I never looked back.
She got up and opened the long window by turning a hand crank. The window slowly rose to allow crisp, cold air to flow into the room. She opened the wood stove and rearranged the logs. I couldn’t really tell what she was doing with her back to me, but a fire momentarily ignited. It crackled merrily away. It was like being inside of a greeting card.
In the meantime, I was so impatient I wanted to scream. What was she doing? She was clearly procrastinating. Why was she being so cagey? Did she need a kidney? My trust fund? What was it? I wanted to throw the tea out the window, jasmine and all. Didn’t these people have a coffeemaker? What was wrong with them?
I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing. I was experiencing what my therapist called “everything all the time right now,” a phrase she claimed to have coined just for me. “Just relax and let it happen,” she said. “Part of the joy of life is allowing it to unfold before you.”
“The joy of life is being able to schedule it in thirty-minute increments,” I said.
She shook her head at me. That wasn’t what she meant at all.
“I think having your mother taken from you has left you with an impulse to control events in your life,” my therapist said. “And yes, I realize you were told it was for your own good, and perhaps it was, but even small children require some explanation as to what is going on and why things are happening that are beyond their control. Now that you have agency over your own life to make your own choices, you try to control everything so nothing can be taken from you again. You need to know that not everything can be controlled.”
At the time, I was annoyed that I paid her two hundred dollars an hour to hear things I had no desire to hear. But her words stuck with me in moments of frustration, such as this one. You need to know not everything can be controlled. I opened my eyes to see my mother watching me with concern.
“Are you all right?” she asked with such sincerity that I blinked in surprise. Had anyone ever asked me that? And meant it?
Are you all right? Les Rodney asked, after explaining to me that I was the fourth of his four girlfriends, and as such he could only spend one day a week with me. Three of the other seven were allotted to them, and the remaining three were his “chill days.”
Are you all right? asked Coco at the end of a particularly grueling day, when I tried to keep up with her on the elliptical machine and then passed out in the sauna of her exclusive gym.
Are you all right? asked my father, as I stared out the window at the end of every birthday dinner, when he would order the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and toast to another great year in my wonderful life, and I would wonder: if it was all so great, then why did I feel so empty inside?
For some reason, it felt like she was the only person who ever said it and meant it. I looked at her with tears in my eyes, unable to speak. Through the window, I heard birds chirping, even though it was the dead of winter.
The dead of winter. Birds. I looked up, startled by the unnatural sound.
A blue bird sat on the long branch of the white birch that grazed the window. As I watched, a second one fluttered down to join the first. A third bird flew in
through the window and landed on the table right in front of me: a cardinal.
I stared at it, speechless.
My mother bit her lip. She looked down at the table.
“Mom?” I said, uncertainly.
“Our family…” she said hesitantly. “We’re not like the other families, Sam. We’re a very old family. We have a history. As you’ve probably realized by now, you’re part of that history as well. Whether you know it or not.”
“What history?” I asked.
“I guess there’s really no better way than to just say it,” she said.
“Say what?” I practically screamed. I was getting agitated again.
“Samantha,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You’re a witch.”
6
The Witches of Mount Hazel
I laughed. I immediately got up from the table and pushed the chair in. Grandma Hale hadn’t raised me without manners.
“Great,” I said. “That’s just great.” I brought my mug to the sink. “Thank you very much for the tea, Mom. It was nice meeting you.”
I felt relieved, in a way. I didn’t have to be mad at my dad. She was crazy. She was. There was no other explanation.
“Sam, wait,” she said, jumping up from the table. “Please. Hear me out. I know how it sounds.”
“Do you?” I asked. “Do you really? Because it sounds insane. You know that, right? It sounds unbelievably batshit crazy, actually. If you want to get into specifics.”
The cardinal, which had contented itself with nipping its beak into the jar of honey on the table, chose that moment to fly directly into my hair. I shrieked hysterically.
“Get it out! What is it doing, oh my god! Is this a spell? Are you casting a spell on me for not doing your bidding?”
“Bidding?” An even deeper voice than my mother’s rumbled from the kitchen doorway. “If anyone is doing any bidding, I would hope it would be mine. Although I would most likely suggest that you find your own way, as that will always serve you better in this world.”
I turned toward the door, still screaming, and stopped. The bird immediately untangled itself from my hair and flew out the window. I might have had no memory of her, but there was no mistaking the undeniably powerful woman who stood in the doorway: my grandmother.
I’d once thought Grandma Hale a formidable opponent, but this woman made Grandma Hale look like Grandma Moses. Thin and diminutive, barely larger than Margo Metal, it wasn’t her stature that gave her such presence. It was something radiating from the core of her being, focused by the twin lasers of her ice blue eyes that seemed to penetrate my innermost thoughts.
“Grandma?” I said uncertainly.
She smiled warmly. She wasn’t scary at all.
“You should see me when I get angry,” she said gravely, but her eyes still twinkled. She crossed the kitchen to embrace me. She smelled like dough baking and gardenias.
“Did you just read my mind?” I asked, appalled. I immediately thought of the most embarrassing thing I could think of: my most recent evening with Les Rodney. I blanched.
“There is no such thing as mind-reading,” she said, a touch impatiently. “People are utterly transparent. You can read them like open books. We only think we’re concealing our true thoughts and intentions, when we’re as transparent as the water in a brook.”
“Okay,” I said, dazed. “I think I need to sit down again.”
My mother pulled out my chair from the kitchen table and I immediately collapsed in it. I turned to her.
“How did you light that fire earlier?” I demanded.
“With matches and a bit of dry kindling, if she knows what’s good for her,” said my grandmother, shooting her a look.
My mother flushed. “We try not to use magic more than necessary,” she explained to me. “We don’t want to attract any unwelcome attention to ourselves.”
“What’s considered necessary?” I asked. I couldn’t explain what about my grandmother had made me so willing to accept the curveball my mother had just hurled at my face, but something about her presence prevented me from questioning anything. Was it witchcraft? I looked wildly around. Who else was here? Were they witches, too?
“Settle down, girl,” said my grandmother. “You look like you’re going to run through the wall.”
“Can I do that?” I asked frantically. “I mean, if I wanted to? Like, what would I say?”
“You would say ‘ouch,’ I would imagine,” said my mother, frowning. “We’re not invincible, Samantha.”
My grandmother sighed. “You always were terrible at explaining things, Isadora. I never should have left this to you. Make some more tea, please. Get out of the way for a moment.”
My mother, looking offended, huffed off to the stove with the kettle. My grandmother looked at me calmly. She had kind eyes, gentle and filled with understanding.
“How are you feeling, dear?” she asked.
“Overwhelmed,” I admitted. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“You don’t seem as resistant as you did a moment ago,” she said.
“I always knew,” I said, getting excited again. “I always knew there was something. I just didn’t know what it was. You know? I mean, does that make sense?”
“Of course it does,” she said. “I do know. We all do. It’s only when someone tries to conceal that information from us that we become separate from ourselves. Our powers are a part of us. They make us who we are. When someone tries to take that away, it’s like they’re taking away part of who you are.”
“You mean my dad,” I said, growing somber.
She sighed. “Oh, he meant well, your father,” she said. “He thought if he could only get your mother away from her crazy sister and crazier mom, he could make her into—what, exactly, I’m not sure. A woman with a bob and cultured pearls, playing doubles tennis and baking him enchiladas.”
“Enchiladas?” I said, mystified.
“I don’t know what men eat,” she said with a sniff. “Your grandfather has been dead for forty years. This is an all-female household.”
“I think the metaphor you’re looking for is ‘tuna noodle casserole,’” called my mother from the kitchen. “That, or maybe meatloaf.”
“Beet loaf?” My grandmother looked revolted.
“Meatloaf! Meatloaf.”
“Oh,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “How perfectly disgusting.” She turned back to me. “Listen, my girl, one thing you need to understand: there’s us, and there’s them.”
“Men?” I asked.
“The other people. The ordinary ones. They will never understand us. We will never be like them. And you shouldn’t want to be. All their talk of normalcy, of fitting in—it’s just to make themselves feel better. Like there’s a prescribed order to things, and if they only follow it, everything will be fine. Well, there isn’t. There is no normal, there is no place to fit. But if they acknowledged that, they’d be at the mercy of nature and will and fate, do you see? They’d be responsible for their own decisions, and no one wants that. Do they?”
“Um,” I said, still dazed. “No?”
“No, of course they don’t. Too hard! But we live according to the will of the earth, not the will of man. And there’s nothing a man can stand less than a woman who won’t live according to his will.”
“So, is this like, a…” I struggled to put my idea into words.
“A what?” she asked, eyebrows raised.
“Like a feminist commune? A radical feminist commune?”
“A what?” She looked appalled. “What is that?”
“She means like the 60s, Mother,” called my mom from the kitchen.
“Oh,” she said. “Those.” She looked disgusted again. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is a coven. It’s a group of witches who live and practice magic together.”
“A coven?” I said. Miserably, I admit. It was all becoming too much again. This was nothing I could put into my planner.
“It’s too much, Moth
er.” My mom bustled back over to the table and impatiently poured hot water in both of our mugs. “She can’t handle all this information at once. We’ve told her she’s a witch and that we live here as a coven, but not what any of that means. She’s lived in the ordinary world her whole life. We don’t even know what she’s doing here. She could have run into me by accident.”
“There are no accidents,” my grandmother said solemnly.
“I came here for work,” I said slowly. “But I knew that I might find you. I wanted to find you.”
My grandmother shot her a look that clearly said, see? Or maybe I could hear her thoughts. I was starting to feel dizzy again.
My mother looked moved. Moved, relieved, and overjoyed all at once. “I always hoped…” She smiled. “I never changed my name back, you know. In case you ever wanted to find me.”
“You never should have changed it in the first place,” my grandmother grumbled. My mother ignored her.
“You should come back for dinner,” she said. “You know, if you want. Maybe go home first, or back to your hotel, and process all of this. Minerva and Tamsin will be here. We can talk, maybe catch up on your life.” She looked so hopeful I would have never said no, even if I had no intention of coming back. And I had every intention of coming back.
“That would be nice,” I said. “I would like that.”
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“In this old house at the edge of town, just after the covered bridge. On Black Iron Lane. The musician I’m doing PR for is recording her album there. I—what? Is there something wrong?”
My mother had raised a hand to her mouth. My grandmother glanced at her and said nothing.