He walks past you into the shop, the bell chiming. You wring your hands, awkward, unable to follow him in. If Sweet James had just shown up like he was supposed to, you wouldn’t be feeling like this. You’re not sure you can remember ever feeling this way before. You kick the wall of the butcher shop and fold your arms. Gus emerges, familiar plastic bag in his hand, weighted by bone and scraps of clinging flesh. You take it and thank him.
“I’ll give you a text,” he says, by way of goodbye.
You don’t care if he does or doesn’t, but you say “Cheers” anyway.
Back in your bedroom, Rossa’s tooth in one hand, a fragile pink wishbone in the other, you spread out your arms and press your body against the owl’s usual manifestation site.
“Come on,” you whisper into the surface. “Please!”
It takes a few fearful, silent minutes before the wall warps a little, before the strange wind picks up and the air around you fills with that gorgeous, awful, familiar pull. He’s come back for you! At last!
Fat hot tears bead down your cheeks as you feel the wall’s consistency turn to quicksand, as Sweet James takes the wishbone. He sucks it in.
more, he says, though his face has not come through yet, though the light is doing wrong things where he is trying to arrive. You rip open the bone bag and push fistfuls of the red waste into the wall. Tiny sacrifices at this unformed altar. He murmurs and groans.
i cannot come to you, he says. the crone has put a hex on the house, she has tried to slow me. it is working.
Your blood stops moving through your body. “No!” you cry. “Don’t leave me!”
The wall looks like a shattered television screen. Too much color and liquid, all disturbance.
i need more of the children bring me blood and i will show you how to put the fire out we have to put the fire out we have to put the fire out you have to
And just like that, the wall is a wall again. The air is ordinary, still, home. You are alone with a tooth in your fist and something terrible to do.
Your phone chimes in your back pocket. You ignore it.
Chapter
Eleven
With a fat knife, Mae spread thick butter onto a slice of Madeira cake and watched Rita, alone in the middle of the back lawn. Rita stood lean and elegant, on one foot, like the blade of a sundial. Her thin shadow angled out past her yoga mat and onto the dense grass. Her eyes were closed, so Mae didn’t feel bad staring. She’d been there, posed on one leg for as long as it had taken Mae to procure the cake from the cupboard, slice it, butter it, and take two bites. Mae was considering fishing out some lemon curd from the pantry, and Rita was still motionless.
Mae’s legs hurt even looking at her.
Bobby was splayed out, seemingly more liquid than animal, near Rita’s foot. Mae took her phone out of her pocket, adjusted the screen for the blinding summer light, and snapped a picture. She reckoned maybe Dad would like it. Like a postcard.
Mae typed, “auntie rita is more fit than me and rossa put together,” with a little monkey laughing emoji at the end, attached the image, and hit send. Rita slowly lowered her leg and opened her eyes, as though returning from some other realm. She saw Mae in the window and waved, smiling a little sleepily. Mae opened the window, the thin gauze curtain pulling slightly, a little inhale of the summer breeze. Rita came and leaned on the windowsill, adjusting her hair.
“You were very still for a long time,” Mae said. “Would you like some cake?”
Rita smiled. “I’ll have a couple of saltines—above on the shelf, the blue box. And there’s lemon curd in the refrigerator, down the back.”
Mae blinked, a piece of sweet fluff crumbling from her slice and falling on the counter. She inhaled and exhaled, pretending she wasn’t at all alarmed by Rita’s knowing expression, or the possibility that her great-aunt was casually walking into the corridors of her thoughts. She put down her remaining hunk of cake to retrieve the crackers and curd.
“Of all the things this garden does, of all the surprises it’s given me, a lemon tree just won’t grow here. A long time ago, back when I lived in San Francisco, we had one in the yard.” Rita produced a cigarette out of nowhere and lit it. “We used to make curd in the summer with the fruit, and gallons of lemonade. The place reeked of citrus, we were practically rotten with them.”
“Is that where you learned to stand on one leg with your eyes closed for, like, six minutes at a time? San Francisco?” Mae asked, meaning, “Is that where you learned to read minds?”
“It is,” Rita said, letting her reply hang in the air a beat. “But this house is where I perfected my practice. I only lived over there for a few years, until Mother17 and Father18 died, and I had to come home to take care of things. Your granddad, Brendan, had his own family to take care of. I’d always intended to go back, but—sure, look.”
“I don’t know why, but I can’t imagine you anywhere but here, in this house.” Mae clacked out a handful of saltines onto a saucer, trying to envision a young Rita somewhere in the pretty, hilly city she had only seen in a handful of movies. “Do you want anything on these?”
Rita shook her head. “This house is where I’ve always belonged.”
How certain she seemed, Mae thought, wondering what it felt like to belong somewhere at all. Might she ever belong here, on Iona Crescent? Could this be her home? And her brother’s—though she hadn’t seen him all day. Hadn’t seen that much of him since their fight. What was it about this house that felt like it was pulling them apart?
Days later, Mae held a well-worn 1970s copy of Tarot for Beginners above the peaks of bubbles in her bath. The pages were yellowed and thin already; a soak might be the last thing to happen to it. The tub in the master bathroom was enormous, claw-footed, and currently filled with so much Epsom salt that Mae was having trouble staying anchored to the bottom. Rita had handed her an industrial-looking white bucket of the shimmering substance and suggested a long soak after four consecutive days of twice-daily yoga had made Mae stiff and achy. Two small, ornate Marys stood on the windowsill amid expensive-looking soaps and lotions. Mae had turned them to face away, out toward the mountains. It had taken her almost ten whole minutes to lower herself into the bath because her body was so done over by the yoga.
“How come doing this makes me feel like I’ve the body of an old lady and makes you feel less like you are an old lady?” Mae had protested, gingerly stretching her arms above her head, her muscles roaring back at her for even attempting it.
“That’s because your limbs are just waking up. In time you’ll feel strange if you go even a day without it.”
Mae had made a face. She’d hurt all over, stiffness and pain in parts of her body she’d never even known were there before: her sides, the backs of her arms. But as she floated in the tub, it all began to soothe, the steam rising around her and making the book warp in the wet air. She’d intended to play her Nintendo, but the more she studied with Rita, the less she’d needed magical worlds on a screen. Her own world had become magical. Certainly, it was studying: iconography to memorize, lists of terms and definitions—it felt a little like school, but good school. Not boring, difficult school.
The bathroom door creaked a little, and Mae peeped over the edge of the bath—Bobby had invited himself in.
“Jesus, Bobby!” she yelped. She was almost totally submerged and wrapped in foam, but it still felt invasive for a talking cat to be hanging around when she had no clothes on. “Would you learn to knock?”
“No,” said Bobby. Mae scowled at him as he jumped into the empty sink, somehow filling it perfectly. His large white paws folded neatly on the lip, the pads black, like little beans.
“What suit are you on?” he asked, nodding at the book.
“Pentacles,” said Mae. “Money and power and all that.”
“Put down the book and I’ll test you,” he said.
“Bobby, I’m trying to relax here!”
“You were studying!”
“Studying isn’t the
same as being tested!”
“Don’t splash me! Cats don’t like that!”
Rossa was frozen in place down the landing from the bathroom, door slightly ajar, where his sister was having an argument with a grown man. An interloper. A stranger. A thief? A murderer? Yes. A murderer in the bathroom. His heart hammered against his chest. Mouth dry, ears pounding, he pushed against his terror to get his phone out of his pocket. He was going to be sensible. He wasn’t going to intervene. He’d call the police. Or text his parents. His hands felt useless, but he got it—no coverage. Okay, he’d do something else—maybe he’d record what he was hearing, to have some proof at least. He thumbed around on the screen, finding his camera, pushing record, but the screen began to fuzz and glitch as he held it. Then the phone tumbled from his shaking hands to the carpet, each bounce down the corridor gracefully muffled.
Foot by foot, he managed to back himself against the wall, his sweating palms flat against the wallpaper. He realized his knees were giving out, but before he could convince his body to try to pull against the gravity of his terror, he was sliding to the floor. The daylight turned sinister, panels of bright drama in the corridor. All Rossa could think now was how to keep his lungs breathing, keep alive—if an intruder was present he’d have to pull his bootstraps up, the action-hero adrenaline would have to fountain suddenly through him. He blinked heavily, in slow time with his breath. The landing felt wrong. He couldn’t make out what the man in the bathroom was saying to his sister. It sounded like questions. It sounded like an interrogation.
Across the carpet, on the wall facing Rossa’s trembling body, a radiator sat, cold. Rossa counted the indentations in the white metal as he breathed himself back to sanity, each corrugated ridge his breath, an up and a down, a pattern—until it wasn’t. Until the white metal became matte, like bone. Until each ridge was no longer even, but toothlike, all wrong, a white mouth of fangs in his vision. A sinister origami of white.
Rossa knew what it was like to be afraid. He’d known the dark crawl in his belly when his parents thundered in the kitchen, his fists balled into his duvet, his head under the covers, praying that his bedroom door wouldn’t open to a furious parent in its frame. He’d known the paralysis that came over him sometimes when his father’s explosive anger was directed down at him or Mae, how that turned his stomach to cement, stole his voice from his throat. Rossa had been afraid, all right. But this was different. Worse.
The radiator had formed into the lines of a face—but not a human. A beast, a dragon—no, an owl. The sharp sloping beak, the white metal becoming feather. It clicked and groaned and Rossa’s body went numb, darkness flickering across his vision, like the glitching of his phone screen. Dark fractals of truth slammed into him—he’d never be able to help Mae, he’d always be too afraid, he was useless, weak, a coward. . . .
He didn’t feel himself faint. Nobody ever does.
Rossa woke to the cold of a wet cloth on his face, Mae towering over him wrapped in a towel, reeking of sandalwood. Bobby’s fat paws rested on his chest.
“He’s awake,” the cat said, voice deep and human, like a newscaster or a man on the radio: he was no intruder, he was the man talking to Mae in the bathroom. Not a man. A cat. Maybe not a cat, even. Something else.
Rossa turned his head, retched, retched a second time, and then the black curtains fell in his mind once more. He was out.
When he came to again, in his bed, Rita was lighting candles on the bedside locker. It took him a moment to find the question, the hundreds of questions folded into one that he wasn’t even sure his aunt would answer.
“What is going on in this house?”
Rita smiled down at him, the white lighter in her hands, but there was something crooked in it, something he barely recognized, or maybe was just seeing for the first time.
“If your great-aunt is a witch, wouldn’t you expect her to have a talking cat? Wouldn’t you expect the house to be a little funny?”
Rossa didn’t say anything, and his aunt lit a cigarette as he lay there. It seemed strange to have someone smoking in a bedroom—there was too much fabric around that could catch light if a hot ash dropped at the wrong second. The smoke was too dense, too heavy around him, and he didn’t like it, but he couldn’t find words. This was her house, after all; she could smoke wherever she wanted.
“I was very scared,” he admitted to her, voice tiny, hoping beyond hope that she might stub out her smoke and hug him, stroke his hair, tell him she was sorry for not warning him about the talking cat and weird hallway. Tell me it’s okay, he willed her. Tell me it’s okay.
For a second it almost looked like she was about to laugh.
“Are you still scared?”
He was, but he said, “No.”
She did laugh, then. Short, hard, and sharp enough that it hit Rossa between two of his ribs like a bad little knife.
“You’ll get braver in time. In order to become brave, we must feel all that fear has to offer, then rise above it. Do you think you can do that for me? Now. I’ve a cup of tea here for you, it’ll make you feel much better.”
And Rossa took a small copper cup from his aunt. It did not at all taste like the black tea they drank down in the kitchen, but it was warming his belly by the time that occurred to him. And then he was beginning to sleep again, his consciousness dropping calmly away from his eyes, like sinking back into warm, dark water. He was sure he could still smell the smoke, still hear the click of the door closing him in.
Chapter
Twelve
Mae was in the living room, missing Rita’s hour of morning yoga in the soaking sunshine of the garden. Her great-aunt, brother, Bobby, and Bevan were out stretching and meditating, and she was spooning a paisley cushion on the floor. In the days since Rossa’s faint, Rita had been trying to include him in things a little more, keeping a closer eye on him. Mae wasn’t sitting out on purpose—she’d only had her period a handful of times before and it was still a fresh and alarming inconvenience to her: the pain still slightly mystifying. She hadn’t learned to expect it, or feel comfortable at all while it was happening, despite Rita’s dispensation of floral teas and strong effervescent painkillers.
To Rossa’s credit, he hadn’t ever been weird about it. He was weird about almost everything, but not about this, giving her a hug and a half apology that morning: “If I could swap it out for the awful stuff that happens to me, I would.” That had made Mae laugh as she held her nose and downed the fizzing glass that Rita promised would take the edge off the dull ache in her abdomen. Mae didn’t want any of the gross goings-on that her brother was dealing with to happen to her, or anything. The last thing she needed was more bodily mysteries to unveil themselves to her. This, she reckoned, she could just about handle. Yoga she most certainly could not handle, and she was kindly excused.
Rossa offered to sit out and keep her company, but Mae shooed him away. He was good at yoga, and it put him in a better mood. It suited him, and Rita was encouraging. Even Bobby was encouraging. Rossa liked being good at things, and when they weren’t in school and he had nowhere to prove himself, it put him on edge. It was good, too, for him to spend a little time with Bobby, now that he was in on the secret, even if Mae felt a bit put out. But trying to bend and stretch and breathe seemed impossible right now, her body an inconvenient, sore knot.
All Mae wanted to do was lie there with her half ache and the strange glint the painkillers left on her mood, letting the music wash over her. Playing out scenarios in which Bevan would be her best friend . . . then, as their closeness deepened, her girlfriend. Then her wife. She envisioned them as old as Rita, two soft suburban witches.
A familiar, leggy shadow cast down over the floor. Of course this wasn’t her great-aunt or her brother. Vanilla and shea butter against the incensed air of the house, of course it was her. Mae was getting used to the rhythms of the household, even though it had only been a couple of weeks. She recognized how the atmosphere felt thicker whenever Bevan
entered her orbit. She barely had to open her eyes.
“Mae, do you have your ears pierced?”
Mae’s eyes shot open—Look at the ceiling, don’t look at Bevan, you’ll be useless. “No. Never thought about it.”
“Really?”
Bevan crossed the carpet and sat with a thump right beside Mae. Mae had to look at her. She’d been so good at avoiding any time alone with her. So good at distracting herself. Until now.
Bevan’s hair hung in dense blond bunches on either side of her head, her neck long, two gold hoops hanging from her earlobes. Heather-gray hoodie. Denim shorts. No shoes. Pink toenails. Eyes for a hundred years. Chewing gum. Unfair, impossible legs. She held a fizzing glass, not unlike the one Mae had drunk to ease her pain earlier. She sipped it as though it was a soda.
“Why aren’t you out in the garden?” Mae asked, eyes still half closed. Bevan was too much too look at.
“Period. Too sore to stretch.”
“I’m . . . me too.” Mae still found the word “period” very adult, it still didn’t fit in her mouth right—or her body. Awful. She buried her face in her cushion. She was scarlet for herself. This wasn’t the chat she wanted to be having with Bevan. She didn’t want to be near Bevan. Not at all.
Bevan gave a throaty laugh and slapped the floor. “That’s so funny. You know girls sync up, right? You probably gave me mine early.”
Mae had read about this in a pastel medical-looking pamphlet somewhere, and was only marginally as horrified by the idea of “syncing up” back then as she was in this moment. She peeked out from the pillow.
Bevan knocked back the fizzing glass. “This, though. This really helps. Rita probably shouldn’t be giving it to us, but it’s better by miles than the pain. Can you believe we can bleed for days and stay alive? Women are, like, miraculous.”
“I wish we didn’t have to.” Mae snorted into her cushion. She wished she could crawl into the soft quilt of it and disappear.
“Sorry, babe, this is our lot until we’re like, almost Rita’s age. Better get used to it. Twelve times a year, every year, more or less—unless you get pregnant.” Bevan made a cheers gesture with the last dregs in her glass and drained it. Mae was uncomfortable, but reached for her cooling mug of tea and raised it in response, limp.
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