“So, you’re suggesting we rip her away from everything she knows, right when she needs something real to hold on to. Sounds great,” I responded, shaking my head.
“You didn’t answer me about what happened to your mother.”
“I don’t want to answer that. Some things don’t need to be remembered.”
“Let’s try together. Want to try?” he persisted.
Usually Ben’s soft voice calmed the mean right out of me, but right then I was in no mood to be soothed.
“Why is this such a big deal? What do you remember from fourteen years ago?” I said.
Snotty was always my best defense when I was home in Magnolia Creek. The fact that it made its appearance at that moment should’ve been a warning sign of sorts. There she was, the old me … BitsyWyn Whalen rearing her ugly, vain head. Susan Masters had given me that nickname because I was so tiny when I was born. My mother hated it, but it sure stuck in Magnolia Creek. It’s the name of a girl who makes trouble, and I lived up to it.
Names are so important.
“The day your mother dies is a watershed moment. Something you can’t forget,” said Ben.
“Well, I guess I’m not like all those other girls,” I responded. I’m damn good at sarcasm too, when I need to be.
“Be serious,” he said. My sharp words, though few and far between, never managed to cut into him. It’s part of why I loved him so much.
“Fine. You win,” I whispered, the edge leaving my voice as quick as it had come.
Ben leaned forward, fixed on me. His feet planted far apart, his elbows on his knees. Solid, solid Ben.
“All I know is we had a fight, and I was pretty hard on her. But I don’t remember what I said.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“You didn’t know me then. I was Southern belle mixed with rattlesnake. My venom hurt people.”
“Venom?”
“I always managed to say exactly what cut the deepest, especially with Naomi. That’s her name. Did I ever tell you that? Naomi.”
“You didn’t. It’s a really beautiful name. Was she beautiful?”
“More than beautiful. And I loved her something fierce. More than anyone ought to have the right to.”
“So what happened? How did that change?”
“I grew up and realized she was a junkie and I hated her for it. Then she died. The end.”
“Don’t go,” he asked quietly.
We sat, a new, uncomfortable silence growing between us.
“But if you do? I should come with you,” Ben added, breaking in before the silence began to weigh on us. When Patrick and I were little kids and we’d have a fight, it would last for days because neither one of us would give in first. Paddy would have called Ben an “easy mark.”
But, easy mark or not, Ben couldn’t come. He didn’t know my people. He didn’t know BitsyWyn.
“Oh, no. Nope. You will not come,” I said.
“Why not, Bronwyn?” he asked with the frustration of many years boiling up and out inside the question. Ben was serious. He wanted to know.
“Because it’s not safe for you down there. Especially not coupled with me.”
“What do you mean?”
Dammit. He was going to make me say it. “Jesus, Ben! You and me? Here we’re a kind of fascinating, open-minded progressive couple. Down there? Down there it’s still called miscegenation and you could get yourself killed.”
He laughed at me, put his mug down, and then looked me straight in the eyes. “I know you, Bronwyn. You’re lying. And I can’t understand it, but I’ll play. It’s silly; we’ve already had a black president. Hell, I bet you any money it’s more racist up here in the back of people’s minds than down there where at least it’s out in the open.”
He was right, I was playing the race card to push him away. But knowing that didn’t make me back down. It’s funny how mouths keep on running even when there’s nothing else to say.
“This is no time to be idealistic, Ben. I won’t lose you over some kind of Northern amnesia about the way the world really works. I’ve lived here long enough to get complacent, not stupid.” I said those words and felt smart. But Ben was right. I was making up a good excuse for a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“You’ve never let on that your family was racist, Bronwyn. Are they?” he asked hesitantly.
“It’s not my family I’m worried about. And besides … my family is now reduced to my drunken, eccentric father, a little girl named Byrd, and a great-aunt who thinks she’s the maid. I’m worried about the rest of Magnolia Creek. The Old-timers and the Towners.”
“Why? Do they still lynch black folks, these Towners of yours?”
“Well, Ben, I don’t rightly know.” My voice eased back into its comfortable Southern slur whenever I even mentioned Alabama. “And the reason I don’t know for sure is because there ain’t no black people for miles and miles.”
I let him turn all the information over in his mind.
“This racist shit you’re pulling is bull, and we both know it, so I won’t play. But you do seem serious about wanting to go alone, for whatever reason.”
“I’m dead serious, Ben.”
“All right, I hear you. But I’m still going to come. Not right away, though. I think part of the reason you want to go alone is to make peace with Naomi. I think you want to see what you left behind without any outside influence. Am I close?”
“I guess,” I said, but I didn’t know for sure. Ben had a way of making sense, so why argue.
“I’ll give you a week,” he continued. “You won’t change my mind about that. And there’s one more thing…”
“Which is?”
“Promise you’ll marry me when the whole thing is over.”
“What?”
“Don’t play with me, Bronwyn. We belong together. I want to get married, and have a family. Say yes this time.”
Something had shifted between us, a tension we’d avoided from day one.
“Ben, is this some kind of ultimatum or something?”
“That’s exactly what it is. And this is the last time I’m asking. If you don’t say yes, I’ll never ask again. We’d stay close forever, but I can’t promise I’d wait any longer. I have a life to live, too.”
I took a deep breath, completely intending to have the “I’m not ready” argument again. “Okay” fell right out of my mouth instead. If I emerged from the whole ordeal, I’d have no earthly reason left to deny him.
Ben’s smile widened and he had that glint in his eye, the one he got when he was about to beat me at Scrabble.
“Wait here!” he said happily.
He reemerged quickly on the porch and got down on one knee.
I laughed. “Is this necessary?”
“Totally.”
He produced a blue velvet case. “This ring has been in my family for generations. I want you to wear it and never take it off.”
He cracked open the case. Staring at me was the most beautiful ring I’d ever seen. A crescent moon sapphire, with an emerald tucked next to it like a dangling star, set in silver. It sparkled in the morning sun.
“Ben, this is lovely. Almost … Celtic.” The ring made me wonder about this man I’d lived with and loved for seven years. He’d had it in his family for generations? For all the years we’d been together, I really didn’t know anything about Ben or his family. We’d stayed pretty true to the decision we’d made those seven years ago—the one to keep our past separate from our present. “What and where are you from, Benjamin Mason?”
“Why, what were you expecting? An African mask? I’m from Massachusetts for Christ’s sake! Why do you white people all think every single black American is a direct descendent of Kunta Kinte? It’s a disease or something. Really, Bronwyn, I thought you’d know better.”
It was a funny thing to say, especially for Ben who didn’t crack jokes very often, so we laughed together as he placed the ring on my finger.
>
We stayed quiet for a little while, until Ben finally asked the question I’d been turning over in my own mind since Jackson’s call.
“Did he do it, Bronwyn? Do you think your brother killed those people?”
Those people.
Lottie, who wanted to be a ballerina. My best friend. Beautiful, dark-haired, sparkling Lottie. Me and my brother. Lottie and Grant. The four of us, together forever …
“No. There is no way on God’s green earth that Paddy killed anyone.” And I knew it, too. I knew it with the sight my mother passed down to me through magic DNA. That’s when the panic started to rise: Patrick was in prison for something he didn’t do. How on earth did that happen?
“But he was already convicted,” said Ben. “They must have proof.”
“I don’t care what proof they think they have. I’m going to find out what really happened. I owe it to Paddy. I owe it to all of them.”
I was going to have to use all my instincts, all the “shine” I could muster, to exonerate my brother. And maybe get a chance to redeem myself in the process.
But how?
* * *
My plane was delayed and I had to call Jackson, who I knew would send a car to pick me up at the airport. He loves to flaunt his wealth. The phone rang too many times for any good to come of the conversation.
“’lo?”
He was drunk.
“Hey, it’s me. My plane is delayed.”
Keep it informal, like you saw him yesterday.
“No worries, darlin’, I’ll let the driver know.”
I knew it.
“You don’t have to send anyone, I can rent a car when I get in.”
“Nope. You’ll come home in style, sugar.” Sugar. I hadn’t heard that in a dog’s age. I broke out in a cold sweat right then. Maybe I shouldn’t go. But there was Paddy. Who would fight for him if I didn’t? Jackson’s fighting power had to be depleted. And Lottie deserved retribution … and I had a niece who was growing up alone. I had to go.
Then there was Grant.
It seemed an age since I’d loved him …
“How’s Byrd?” I asked abruptly, pulling myself back from the edge. I couldn’t start thinking about Grant or I’d never get on the plane, period.
He cleared his throat. “Byrd? Well, now. What should I tell you about our girl? I suppose you should know she has strange ways. Not like yours or Minny’s, more like your mama’s were when I met her, strong. Only she likes ’em and uses ’em all the time. Oh, and don’t let this one shock you. She looks like your mama, too. Sometimes I can’t even look into those green eyes of hers.”
She has strange ways. So much in one little sentence. Byrd had the Green blood coursing through her. That, mixed up with whatever Stella gave her, meant Byrd was destined to shine.
Paddy and I believed in magic. When you’re little, everything around you is “normal.” It’s simply what you know. Besides, when my own touch of “shine” showed up, even the parts of our family history we thought were exaggerated seemed true.
When I was little, there was magic around me. The rising moon, the setting sun. I saw it hidden in Naomi’s sea-green eyes and in Great-aunt Minerva’s glowing palms. I felt it the first time Grant kissed me.
So hearing Byrd had strange ways didn’t shock me.
It was the next sentence that threw me under the bus. “She looks like your mama, too.” I wondered for a moment at the straight-up unfairness the world had to offer. I grew up wishing nothing more than to see my mother’s face looking back at me in the mirror. Her full, black hair and pale skin that tanned a honey gold in the Gulf Coast sun. Those big, startling, green eyes, and delicate yet strong elfin chin. If she’d had a tail, she’d have looked just like the mermaids in the stories she used to read to us.
I longed to look like her. To be a mermaid.
Instead, I look like purebred Whalen. Not a breath of my mother in me. Patrick, either. We’re both blond with ice blue eyes and porcelain skin. Dolls, those Towners used to call us. The Whalen Dolls. The only thing I had of hers were her hands. Delicate and thin. She loved that we had that in common. She’d put my palms up and make them cup her face, then she'd kiss each of my fingers and fold them shut one by one.
“There’s an island just across the bay from where I grew up, did you know that, Bronwyn? I was always afraid of it, just like you’re afraid of Belladonna Bay. So I never went. But I heard stories, that over there when mamas do that with their babies, and the babies open their hands, the smell of roses fills the air, and a feeling of love washes over them, making the word love unnecessary. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, love? If I could give you that?”
There was such sadness in my mother. She never did understand that those light kisses on my fingers gave me all the love I’d ever need.
The very thought of that bit of land behind the Big House, shrouded in a veil of sweet, sick mist was enough to make me turn right around all together.
“You still there, sugar?”
“I’m here,” I said, choking back tears. “But I got to run. You tell her I’m coming, okay? You tell Byrd that Aunt Bronwyn is on her way.”
Jackson laughed so hard he dropped the phone.
“And what, may I ask, is so goddamned funny?” I asked when I could hear him breathing in the receiver again.
“Look, sugar, she ain’t gonna care a lick about you showing up or not.”
“Oh, yeah, then if she doesn’t need me, why am I coming?”
He was quiet.
“I didn’t say she didn’t need you, I said she wouldn’t care. She’s wild like them snakes that hide in the tall grasses, Wyn. You’re gonna have to charm her some. Then again, I could be mistaken. I can’t tell which way that girl will go. Just like your mama, bless her soul.”
I figured that was all I was going to get, so I tried to ask him about Paddy, but he’d dropped the phone again, and my flight was boarding.
* * *
One of the problems with taking photographs for a living is you can’t just glance at anyone. You have to look into them.
The people boarding the plane looked, almost without exception, like each had been disillusioned with life somewhere along the line. But what really got me was the kids. Not like you’d think. They never annoyed me, it was worse than that. Especially the little chubby towheaded toddlers. They hit me like a sucker punch straight to my gut. All of whom, boy or girl, could have been Paddy as a baby.
And there’s one of those blond babies on every flight, isn’t there?
I flew home to Magnolia Creek by way of Mobile, Alabama, with a little twin of baby Patrick sitting right in front of me the whole way home. Each mile that went by brought me closer to that baby I remembered—and the family I left behind.
Would they even want me back? ran through my head over and over, until I did the only thing I could do. I fell asleep and began to dream.
My bare feet stood on the warm planks of a painted wooden floor. It was a bright, glossy Caribbean blue. A snake slithered slowly toward me out of the creek, but I couldn’t move.
I only woke when the plane finally began its descent and the fear of what I was doing moved too close. I thought of Cleopatra, and how she killed herself by putting her arms inside baskets full of asps, and then I looked down at my ring.
Ben? I changed my mind. I’m glad you’re going to meet me down here, because right about now the odds I make it through this thing with my head on straight don’t look too good.
4
Byrd
Only the children know what they are looking for.
—The Little Prince
Jackson had to come lookin’ for me to tell me what I already knew, and I didn’t need a premonition to see it. I’d heard him on the phone. He’d asked Aunt Bronwyn to come take care of me, and he’d come out of his study to tell me: she was on her way.
He walked onto the wide front lawn, as he always did, and let out his yell. “Byrd! Come on home, Byrd! Fly this wa
y, honey!”
When he looked for me, and God knows he was always lookin’ ’cause I was always hidin’, he never ventured out to the back of our property. Seein’ as Jackson is best at avoiding what frightens him most, it makes sense, him only lookin’ for me where he wouldn’t find me. I suppose it always occurred to him that I might overcome my fear of Belladonna Bay and skip on over the creek to explore its misty acres. And he couldn’t face that. I told him he didn’t need to worry, that it was the one rule I heeded. But he knew I was lyin’ because it never did have anything to do with the rules.
I don’t pay no mind to rules. Seems to me, rules are things made up by scared people too afraid to die, so they can’t live. Or too lazy to make their own decisions. Rules are for breakin’, as far as I’m concerned.
No, it wasn’t because of a silly old rule. I never went over there because I never met a mystery I didn’t like, and Belladonna Bay was the best mystery of all. Jamie and me, we’d grown up believing all sorts of things about that place. None of which were good.
Anyway, the mystery goes like this: the Old-timers say that those people who came on over from England, the ones at Roanoke that disappeared (and if that ain’t the biggest ambiguity of all time, I don’t know what is), well, the Old-timers reckon those people didn’t go missing after all.
Nope. They just got cold.
So they up and moved. And where do you suppose they found themselves? Right here in Magnolia Creek. Well, it wasn’t a creek back then. Back then, it was a wild and raging river. And Belladonna Bay was a tempting piece of forest that sat smack-dab in its center. Why they chose to end up there isn’t known, but the Old-timers say there was already a curse on that place. A beautiful, sad sort of somethin’ that drew people there like moths to flame.
When the people began to build their new settlement a mighty ruckus started. You see, some of the people wanted to live in the forest like the Indians, all natural like, but some wanted a real village with English houses and rules. They fought, and in the end, part of the colony fled. But it was the wild ones who stayed. And then, after a spell, they just disappeared inside that forest and became shafts of light. Ghosts who never died. And if anyone from the outside comes on over to that place, this mist (or miasma as Jackson likes to call it, always saying it like “my asthma”) creeps in their minds and lungs and right into the bloodstream. Makes it so they can’t tell what they seen or can’t never go back to how they were before.
The Witch of Belladonna Bay Page 3