A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  Margot laughed, delighted.

  “I still think you’re a seagull,” Vy said.

  “No! Can’t I graduate to a heron or a hawk, or something cool like that?”

  “When seagulls do go beneath the waves, they actually have excellent lung capacity.” She swerved into a different lane. “Those birds are stronger than they look.”

  “Thanks,” I said, biting my lip. Now that the floodgates had opened, all my emotions were bubbling very close to the surface. Oh God, I was going to become the kind of person who cried at commercials.

  I wished that time could extend infinitely between now and when I was supposed to talk to Miles again, so that I could keep living like this. For the first time, I pictured telling him that I’d chosen the Nevertheless women over him. I wanted the things that they had: the power, yes, but more important, the sisterhood. Vy swerved onto the streets of the West Village as dusk started to fall, and parked somewhere far away from the clubhouse’s entrance. Instead of walking into the front door, she and Margot turned down a back alley.

  “So there’s a secret back entrance?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Margot said. “Just in case we need to get to the roof without anyone else seeing.”

  We came to an unmarked, unprepossessing gray door with a small keypad to one side of it. Margot typed in a code—2823—and then pressed the door handle. We entered into a small dark hallway. No security guard here. At the end of the hall was a staircase, and also a musty freight elevator, the same one I’d only ever taken from behind the door in the clubhouse a few floors up. Its gears ground and squeaked as we rose through the air. Laughing, talking, we stepped off the elevator and through the door leading to the roof, along the narrow pathway between trellises to where the trees began. Caroline and the others were already there, locked in whispered conversation. When we emerged into the circle, they turned and looked at us. Iris had a strange, resolute expression on her face. Caroline’s coloring was still a little green, but her eyes were dark. Furious.

  “Welcome back, Margot,” she said, her voice like ice. “They just told me everything.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Margot straightened her shoulders and looked at Caroline with a level gaze. “What do you mean?”

  Caroline began to pace, practically spitting as she talked. “Summoning the dead? Drinking during the rituals? And I hear you allowed Vy to put shrooms in her tea and drug Jillian?” Vy shot me a what the fuck? look, as if she couldn’t believe that I’d sold her out like that. “It’s like everything I’ve asked you not to do—”

  “It doesn’t even get close to everything,” Margot said drily.

  “—and the moment I couldn’t be there, you just did whatever the hell you wanted! And yes, I do have suspicions about how all of a sudden I started to feel badly right before Samhain—”

  “Well, now you sound crazy.”

  “Don’t call me crazy!” Caroline snapped.

  “I’m sorry. But nothing bad happened,” Margot said, her voice calm, as if she were dealing with a child having a tantrum over nothing. “We’re all fine. We didn’t even do any magic toward the old goal, I promise. Maybe you and I should discuss this somewhere—”

  But Margot’s measured tone seemed only to make Caroline more upset. She steamrolled on, as the other women exchanged uncomfortable glances. “It never seems bad right away. It didn’t seem bad with Nicole until months later, and then it was a disaster.”

  “When will you let us move on from that?” Margot said. “I don’t know how much longer I can sit around and do small, selfish magic about Iris’s book—”

  “Excuse me,” Iris said.

  “—when we have a potential to be such a powerful force in the world!”

  “I can’t deal with another mess like that again!” Caroline said, throwing her hands in the air. “Do you know what the guilt has been doing to me? I haven’t been able to sleep since! I’ve told you over and over again that we have to stick to stricter boundaries, and instead it’s always oh, what if this, and maybe we should do something huge that!”

  “Caroline!” Margot snapped. “I wanted to help you fix it, and you wouldn’t let me! Stop trying to control everything. You’re not the queen of this coven.”

  “I’m not the queen, but I am the one who restarted it,” Caroline said, drawing herself up to her full, not-very-high height. “You’re taking us down a dangerous path again, and I should kick you out.”

  Margot looked at her for a second. Then she laughed. “You can’t. Yes, you came to me, and yes, you own the building, so you think you’re the one in charge here, but you and I are both the great-granddaughters of the founding members. One of us can’t just kick out the other. You don’t have the authority.”

  “You’re right,” Caroline said. “So I’ll have to do the next best thing.” She turned to Vy. “I’m kicking out Vy instead.”

  Vy blinked. The other women shot one another worried looks. Margot’s face went white. “What?”

  “Yeah, what?” Vy repeated, her eyebrows slowly traveling up her forehead.

  “Something needs to be done, or we’ll be right back on track to repeating the mistakes we made with Nicole, and nobody else here wants that, do they?” Caroline glared at all the other members of the circle.

  “Of course we don’t. But you can leave Vy out of it,” Margot said, putting her arm around Vy.

  “Vy started the drinking, didn’t she? Vy’s your little confidant in all this, and encourages your behavior. Vy’s not related to an original founding member. So all I need is a simple majority to kick her out. All those in favor?” Caroline shot her hand up like she was punching the air.

  “Maybe we could all talk about this—” I began.

  “Jillian,” Caroline snapped. “No offense, but you’re the newest member and you don’t know what’s been going on—”

  “Then maybe someone should tell me,” I said.

  “This is not the moment. You don’t really get to talk right now, okay? If Vy wants to advocate for herself, she can.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna beg,” Vy said. She stuck her hands in her pockets, her face still unreadably blank.

  Caroline sniffed. Way down on the street below, a car honk sounded. “Then it’s time to vote. Everyone?” The other women hesitated. “Let me remind you,” Caroline said, “of how we all felt the day that Nicole resigned. Do any of you want to go through that same disappointment again? That heartbreak? Knowing that we elevated a candidate into power so quickly that it went to her head, and she felt she could threaten someone’s job if he wouldn’t keep sleeping with her? If we don’t set strong boundaries, it’s only a matter of time before we go too far again. So it’s time to choose what you want the future of this coven to be.”

  Slowly, all of the other women besides me, Margot, and Vy put their hands in the air, their expressions solemn. Just a couple of hours ago, we’d all been lounging like sisters. Caroline counted, taking note of my hand at my side, then addressed the group.

  “That settles it,” Caroline said, solemn. “I’m sorry, Vy, but you broke the rules. You’re no longer in the sisterhood. So mote it be.”

  For the briefest of moments, a heartbroken expression crossed Vy’s face, before it returned to its usual inscrutability.

  “Caroline,” Margot said, her jaw clenched.

  Caroline whirled on her. “If you want to quit in protest,” she said, “go ahead.”

  Everyone turned to look at Margot as she swallowed. After a long moment, she shook her head, avoiding Vy’s eyes.

  “I didn’t think so,” Caroline said.

  Vy turned on her heel without any last words, without even a good-bye, and clomped over to the door. The elevator let out its soft, high shriek as Vy descended.

  “I’m sorry, Margot,” Caroline said, a flush coming over her cheeks. She’d won the war
, but her voice wavered, as if maybe she were wondering if she should’ve fired shots in the first place. “But you didn’t give me a choice. Now we need to do a casting-out ritual, and then we can begin to heal.”

  Silently, Margot knelt to gather little pebbles from the dirt, and soon everyone else joined her. Someone else—Tara—began to build the fire, like Vy usually did, and it wasn’t nearly as good.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I dreamt of Raf that night. We were in his old living room, teenagers again, and I stood before him, holding a sheet of paper, ready to recite some of my terrible poetry. I began to read the words in front of me. “‘There is a world where it works with us, a world where it works so well, and we have a couple of kids who eat dirt.’” I stopped, confused, because those weren’t my words at all, but his. And when I looked up from the paper, he was walking toward me. We weren’t teenagers anymore. We were older, middle-aged, maybe. He took my face in his hands and drew me to him, but his hair smelled like Margot’s, and when I woke up, she was sitting on my bed.

  “Jillian,” she said.

  “Jesus!” I flinched, then rubbed my eyes. “Can you knock from now on?”

  “I need to talk to you. I was hoping it wouldn’t have to be so soon, but . . . well.” She sat very still, almost a statue in the darkness. I reached over and flipped on a light, registering the time.

  “I’m generally not a great conversationalist at four a.m.”

  She sprawled on her stomach, her face in her hands, and gazed up at me, dark circles under her eyes. She was still wearing the same long dress she’d had on earlier in the day. She needed a shower. “It was fun when we did the bigger magic, wasn’t it? Just more . . . fulfilling.”

  “Nope,” I said, pulling the pillow over my face. “No way. I’m staying out of this.”

  She pulled the pillow gently off my face. “I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

  “Look,” I said, and sat up, a bad taste in my mouth both literally and figuratively. “I’m mad about Vy too. But maybe we have to let this blow over and then try to reason with Caroline to let her back in.”

  “It’s not going to blow over.”

  “I think Caroline has already realized she went too far—”

  “I don’t want it to blow over.” At the wary look on my face, she scooted closer to me. “We were on the right track to achieving our goal, to electing the first female president. But then we messed up—I messed up, I can admit it. And because of that, Caroline has decided that we can only do selfish little magic instead. But you look at everything going on in the world and . . . I can’t just sit back anymore.”

  “Margot,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the kind of magic you’re talking about . . . that feels like a whole different scale, and maybe it’s not worth it to blow everything up because—”

  “Because you don’t think it’s possible,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she reached into the pocket of her dress and carefully pulled out a black-and-white picture. She placed it on the bed between us like it was a sacred object. “My great-grandmother gave me this. She was still alive when I was young,” Margot said. I leaned forward to look at the photograph. “I showed it to Caroline once, and she glanced at it for a minute and then moved on to other things. But I studied every detail.”

  The picture showed three women, rich women, dressed in evening gowns—all satin and puffed sleeves and furs. It must have been the 1930s, but these women had clearly escaped the austerity of the Depression. The one in the middle sat in a leather armchair. The women on either side of her placed their hands on her shoulder. They all looked at the camera with frank, proud gazes.

  “It’s the original coven,” I said, and Margot nodded.

  She pointed to the woman on the right, who had catlike eyes and Margot’s straight, elegant nose. “My great-grandmother. She’d tell me the history, when I went to visit her in her nursing home. How they began to meet in secret to protect their families and their fortunes and themselves. When they worked together, they were free. Powerful. So much more powerful than women were supposed to be.”

  Their faces showed it—power in the tilt of their chins. The one in the middle held a cigarette between her lips and smirked at the camera. “They used to do undeniable magic,” Margot went on. “She told me that once, they actually flew. Just lifted off the ground and soared, landing on the spire of the Chrysler Building.” She paused and looked at me. “I know, you’re thinking that was probably the dementia talking.”

  “Or they were doing some very powerful flapper drugs.”

  “I don’t think so. I swear it was the most lucid I’d ever seen her. It was like the Coven was the one thing she could remember in vivid detail.”

  We both looked down at the picture again. The woman on the left had Caroline’s thin lips and pale coloring, her hair in a platinum bob.

  “What happened to the third member?” I asked.

  “She left the city. Afterward, they added more people to the circle, and they had influence, sure, but they never got back to the same level of magic after she was gone.”

  “No more night flying?”

  “Jillian,” Margot said, her voice urgent. “Listen. I forgot about all this as I grew up. But one day when things were really bad with Gus, I was in the bathroom, staring at a bunch of pills, thinking that maybe I should just take the easy way out. But then I remembered there was another option. I could do what my great-grandmother did, build something where I could fly.” Her eyes were shining now. “Shortly after that, Caroline and I saw each other again for the first time in a long while. She told me her plans for Nevertheless, and that night, I left Gus.”

  “So it sounds like your relationship with Caroline has meant a lot to you,” I said, even as I wondered—was I trying to keep everything simple (or rather, as simple as it could be in this batshit situation) for the sake of an article, or because I had so recently begun to feel a kind of belonging in this circle, and I didn’t want to watch it rip itself apart?

  “It has,” Margot said, her voice small and sad. She straightened her shoulders. “But now Caroline’s trying to control everything too, like Gus did, and it’s making all of us small. I think I can change her mind, but I need you to help me.”

  “I get it, why you feel that way. And I’m so sorry about the shit you had to go through. But I can’t get mixed up in this.”

  “It has to be you,” she said, clasping my hands, staring up at me with such a strange intensity that I had to laugh.

  “As Caroline very helpfully pointed out today,” I said, “I’m new, and I don’t get to talk, so I really don’t think I’m much use to you.”

  “Look,” she said, and moved her finger on the photograph to the woman in the chair, the cigarette dangling from her lips. Something about her face struck me as familiar. “My great-grandmother’s biggest regret was how they treated the third member. When she asked them for help escaping her abusive husband, they tried to keep her in the circle instead. So when she left, she didn’t even say good-bye. She just disappeared. My great-grandmother always hoped that she was all right, that maybe one day, someone from her family would rejoin the circle and make it whole.” Margot moved her finger down the photograph until it rested right below the necklace around the third woman’s neck. My necklace.

  “I summoned you,” she said. “When everything was getting bad with Nicole, I did a spell to bring you into my life. And then one day, a local paper printed some feature on In the Stars, as part of a trend piece on astrology. I never read the paper anymore, but for some reason I read it cover to cover. Even the obituaries section.”

  She reached into her pocket again and pulled out a newspaper clipping: Kathleen Beckley, beloved mother, dead from cancer at age fifty-seven, leaving behind a daughter, Jillian. I’d spent hours looking through family photos, trying to find the right one to send in to the pap
er, finally settling on one I’d taken of her years before, where she was giving me her signature wry look. Where she was wearing the necklace.

  “No,” I said, my heart thumping. Coincidence. This was a coincidence that had spiraled far out of control. “I’m sure a lot of people have necklaces like that.”

  “They probably do. That’s why I double-checked. I looked her up, and I worked backward. Your great-grandmother had gotten married again and had her children with her second husband, but I figured it out.”

  It fit, as much as I couldn’t believe it. My mother had told me about her rich grandmother, who had left an abusive husband in New York and gone far, far away. Her grandmother who talked sometimes of the luxury she had given up but wouldn’t talk about so many other things. She was the reason Margot and I were here in this bedroom, having this conversation.

  Margot looked at me, so vulnerable all of a sudden, and for the first time I realized how much power I had.

  “So then, what?” I asked. “You stalked me?”

  “I just made sure that our orbits overlapped,” she said.

  “This is so fucked up, Margot,” I said. “Why this whole rigamarole, with me needing to prove myself, me needing to screw over Libby? Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “You’re guarded, Jillian. A skeptic. I’ve learned my lesson about telling people all of this before they’re ready. If I’d told you right off the bat, you would have run screaming in the other direction.” That was true. Part of me wanted to run screaming even now, while another part thrilled as Margot kept talking. “You had to want to come yourself, to think it was your idea. Besides, you needed to prove yourself to Caroline. I could talk you up to her, sure, and fudge your background check, but you still had to impress her on your own merits. I couldn’t have her knowing who you were too soon because, if things went wrong, it would just be another unforgivable mistake from me.”

  The room spun as I tried to process it all. I was someone who belonged. Someone who still had a family of sorts after all. When I’d felt that communion around the circle at Samhain, it wasn’t just delusion. It was written in my blood.