Other Words for Smoke

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  but bobby will drink up all your love. The voice came down thunder-deep. it makes him strong, it is delicious.

  The room rippled, colors warping, furniture trembling. The bedsheets were mercury liquid, the ceiling was mirror, the floor below her was sand. Everything was wrong. Mae had no scream in her. She looked at Bobby, at the flowers now assembling into a beast, a face—an owl, a great owl in the wall. The roses around the white feathers trembled as though in a rising gale. The carpet went from sand to silk, then gravel beneath her feet. The ceiling stippled white then mirror then dark, old-blood red. The air reeked.

  Mae took hold of her terror and twisted it, forced it to become courage. The heightening and deadening of every nerve became bravery just long enough to get her to the door, stumbling over Bobby, then slamming it behind her. From inside she could hear her name called by Doris Day in a sick chorus.

  Bobby nuzzled his long face against her and she did not stop him. Let him take whatever it was that was coursing through her. Let all this be over, instead of happening again.

  Chapter

  Five

  The garden felt almost too long as Rossa and Bevan walked. Longer than it had any right to be. Past the bench and the tearful falls of wisteria, purple and gushing. Along a hodgepodge cobbled path, stones loose, a little dangerous. There was long grass, a shed that looked like it hadn’t been touched by a human’s hand in years: windows wintered by cobwebs. It was a forgotten structure from a time when more people lived in the house on Iona Crescent, oddly quiet against the circus of flora all around it, the roar of wildflowers in high summer. All these parts of the garden Rossa had never seen. His allergies began to flare up, his eyes watery, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to dampen this clandestine morning adventure.

  Rossa’s garden at home was a sixth, an eighth of the size of this rolling suburban oasis. How unjust it was that they got a tiny square of paving with a washing line in it, and Rita had this—this wild, this countryside end of suburbia. Maybe having a garden would have made a difference: surrounded all the time by so much green, how could people hate each other like his parents did?

  Bevan pulled open the gate at the back wall; it wasn’t even locked. She beckoned him to follow her and disappeared behind the stone. Rossa peered through first, as though this simple exit was a portal to someplace else. At home, out past his back door was just the next street over, identical to his own—but here there was a riverbank, a busy ravine, then, beyond the farther bank, a forest. Tall, skinny firs stood in an endless row. Rossa could smell them, feel them in the back of his nose and under his eyelids. Still, when Bevan sprang elegantly over the ravine, Rossa followed her.

  He should be nervous about following a girl who might have been a vessel for a malevolent being into the mountains with no map, no signal on his phone. But he wasn’t shuddery or nauseous or uncertain at all—nothing felt that way to him anymore. The air still had a newness about it, almost a chill, and Bevan was a doe, loping through the lean trees.

  He followed, though he couldn’t move as lightly as she. He was a lad of footpath and streetlamp and tarmac, not fallen branch and wet soil and loose stone. He’d have to pay attention so he didn’t fall on his face and make a sap of himself in front of her.

  “The cut is a little ways farther out today, I think,” she said, wrinkling her nose a little, staring into the middle distance. “It’ll take a while to get to the glade. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Rossa wanted to say, “Of course I don’t mind, I’d follow your every step until the end of the world,” wanted to say yes, yes, yes; wanted to say, “Is it too early in the morning to kiss you?” Wanted to say, “When did this start feeling so huge, it’s only been a day?” But he said, “Yeah, cool, that’s grand.”

  Bevan looked at him a second, silent. Her eyes flashed, a tiny smile curling at the edges of her mouth, as if she knew something he didn’t. He pushed down the beginnings of discomfort and they walked on.

  When had he wound up in so deep with Bevan? Had she always looked this way, made of so many splintering details that his eyes couldn’t take her all in? As they walked, the warp of infatuation made her taller, bigger, more. He didn’t know how to look at her, exactly. She was fascinating. She was too much happening at once.

  “Do you come out here often?” Rossa asked her, the undergrowth crunching softly beneath his sneakers.

  Bevan hummed. “Not really, no. Only on special occasions. I just thought you should see it. It’s where Bobby came from. It’s why the house is, well—you know.”

  Special occasions. Rossa reeled. He was a special occasion! Bevan laughed sharply then, in a way that disoriented him a bit, but he didn’t address it. Instead he asked, “Do—do you know what I mean if I ask if it’s going to feel like the house?”

  The girl nodded. “It is, yeah. The whole glade. Like it doesn’t agree with physics or something.”

  It took them forty minutes, almost tripping and squeezing through narrow rows of slender trees before they started to clear. A glade opened up ahead. Rossa’s tongue moved to the spot in the back of his mouth where his tooth had been. The air was dark and magnetic all around him as they stepped forward.

  There it was, then. A split in the world, the scarred fabric of the universe. It was gorgeous. It was wrong. Like when a television is broken, or a photograph held up to heat, the surface of the world had ruptured. Not the ground, the earth—but the air, hanging in the middle of the glade. Scarred white light, casting fat prisms on the grass. A cut, suspended.

  On the ground beneath it was a small stone structure, open and facing them. A grotto, wherein stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, her face pallid, her gown blue, her halo a yellow that wanted to be gold. Plastic roses all at her feet. It looked like a poorly made child’s toy below this incredible anomaly. A plaque was fixed to a stone,23 but he couldn’t make it out. The air all around Rossa was too warped. The morning light took on an almost ultraviolet quality, the rubber in Rossa’s sneakers glowing, his clothing rippling in a wind his skin couldn’t feel.

  Bevan was, undoubtedly now, a foot taller than she had been when they left the house, her hair a chaos of gold rings. All of her bigger. She leant down and picked a stray long-stemmed daisy from the forest’s edge, and it was tiny in her hand. She laughed at it and plucked a few petals before throwing it over her shoulder and stepping into the meadow. Her hair lifted around her.

  Bevan sat down a few feet away from the scarred and shattered slice of sky, and Rossa followed suit. The grass was soft beneath them, the day just starting to warm—any trepidation Rossa had felt was replaced by sheer awe. This giant girl, this tremendous place.

  “You should stay at the end of the summer,” Bevan said, quite suddenly.

  “What?” Rossa couldn’t keep it in his mouth. “Are you serious?” If he’d thought a little longer he would have said something slightly more dashing.

  “Yes, you should stay. I know there’re awful things happening at home for you and Mae. So, stay. We could do with a man around the house.”

  Man. What a massive word. Rossa felt like anything but a man here in the shadow of a closed-up portal, beside Bevan. Boy, he felt like, for sure. Boy. The least magical thing for miles.

  “I . . . I’ve only been here a day. I’m not sure you or Rita would want to put up with me for much longer than a few weeks.”

  Bevan shook her head. “No, I think we would. You could draw pictures, we’d feed you—you could keep me company, fix things around the house for Rita. Think how nice it would be.”

  Something like an alarm went off somewhere in Rossa’s head. A faint warning—something a little greedy in Bevan’s tone. But it flattered him more than scared him.

  “That’s a sweet picture. But . . . what about Mae?”

  Bevan trilled a laugh. “Oh, Mae doesn’t want to be here at all, can’t you tell? Besides, you’re hardly going to hang around your twin for your whole life, are you?”

  “No . .
. but I can’t send her back to Mam and Dad on her own. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  Bevan tutted a little. “Perhaps she can stay, too. She likes studying with Rita, I suppose. I wouldn’t mind her being about as long as you were here.”

  Rossa’s chest was tight; this was more than just flattery, this was out-and-out flirtation. He felt, for a second, embarrassed that the statue of the Mary had eyes at all, like some deadened audience, watching what was beginning to feel quite intimate.

  “Has being out here made you bolder?” he asked, giving her a little nudge. As he touched her, he realized that he just about came up to her shoulder. Mere contact felt seismic. She took the knock for effect, then nudged him back.

  “Something out here just makes everyone . . . well . . .” She gestured. “More, I suppose. So yes.”

  She grinned but didn’t look right at him. “It’s the same thing that makes Bobby grow. Sometimes he gets as big as a lion, can you imagine that?”

  “Are you a lion, too?” Rossa’s voice almost came out a whisper.

  Bevan laughed. “Maybe.”

  She bared her teeth a little at him, and he could have sworn her pupils switched from circles to slits to triangles—then back. But then she kissed him. And her mouth was shocking, and her hands tender on the sides of his face, growing and shrinking at once. If she was a lion, then he was a ball of string in her giant, dangerous hands, happily undone.

  She only stopped kissing him for a second to ask him again, her voice low, to stay in the house after the summer ended. Rossa said yes—at that moment, her fingertips skirting the edge of his T-shirt, he would have said yes to any damn thing she asked of him. Anything at all.

  Chapter

  Six

  Mae sat at the kitchen table, head between her hands, rattled. She was mortified: getting caught by Bevan would have been better than this, Bobby’s judgment and disappointment—and now Rita’s. What did she think she was doing creeping around that closed room? God, how Rita’s face fell as Bobby led her into the kitchen and said, “Found her in Bevan’s room. Sweet James must have opened it. I got her out just in time.”

  How steely the old woman’s eyes. Mae saw her own failure reflected back in a face she loved—the first time disappointing someone was undoubtedly a heavy thing. She could barely muster an “I’m sorry,” still breathless with shock, vibrating with adrenaline. She reckoned she’d better just cry it out while she could: take a moment to feel sorry for herself before whatever punishment her great-aunt and the magical cat would dole out.

  Rita handed her a clump of floral tissues. “Dry your eyes, girl. You can tell me what happened when you catch your breath.”

  Mae nodded, and balled the tissues to her nose and eyes. The stinging heat of humiliation was one thing, but crawling under that was something else: what had the strange man’s voice meant—Sweet James? Was that what Bobby had called him?

  Bobby padded along the table and sat at the corner, watching Rita lean down into the stove with the poker, rousing the red coals.

  “The wall started to transform under her palms. We should clean her hands.”

  “Did he talk to her? Did she answer him?” Rita didn’t turn away from the fire, and her tone was clipped.

  “I don’t know if she went looking or if he called her. Maybe a little of both things.” Bobby shot her a look, and Mae had the distinct sensation of being on trial, like getting called to the principal’s office in school. She hadn’t been looking for anyone but Rossa, but she had trespassed. Maybe she deserved this.

  She shrank in her chair, waiting for the eruption. The scolding. Maybe a glass would be thrown to the floor, a wall punched, a table shoved, plants knocked from their stands. The logical part of her brain knew that there was no way her great-aunt would ever shout or break things near her, but she couldn’t quite shake the specter of her parents’ war zone.

  Rita picked up a small pair of bellows from beside the stove and began to pump air into the hearth, coaxing smoke up out of the scarlet gut of flame. As it thickened, she kicked the door closed to stop it from spilling into the whole kitchen. She went to a cupboard, fumbled around, before removing an empty jam jar, the words “Raspberry Sweet Preserves” blown into the side of it, the lid red and white. She opened it and cracked the stove door, then dipped her jar inside, as though the fire was a bucket of dishwater. When she removed it, the jar was full of swirling white smoke. The old woman locked the stove door,24 screwed the lid on the sweet preserves jar, and turned to the table. Mae had just about stopped crying but was still sniffling, steadying her breathing. Rita looked at her, then at Bobby, then at the jar of smoke.

  “This should be enough for now. Bevan didn’t tell you to go in and do any of that, did she? You need to tell me the truth.” Rita’s coldness was melting into concern, but that didn’t make Mae feel much better. If there was one thing she hated more than pissing people off, it was worrying people. How had she managed to do both?

  “No, she’s barely spoken to me at all.”

  “How did you know to touch the wall?” Rita pulled out her chair and a cigarette, and Bobby stepped into her lap. Her lighter clicked and hissed.

  “I didn’t know to. I just did it. I was following—I felt something and I was following it.”

  She wasn’t technically lying, and she was sure that Rita could read what she was thinking anyway. The old woman raised her eyebrows.

  “And you’re sure the owl hadn’t come before Bobby showed up?”

  Mae nodded.

  Rita picked up one of the shining little geodes from the table and began to worry it, with her thumb. “What if he wasn’t coming for her, Bobby—what if he was coming for you?”

  Bobby laid himself down flat, his body liquid cat. “That’s a fair point. He hasn’t seen me in a few years.”

  “Who is he?” Mae asked, voice small. She had known there was something bad, but she didn’t know it was a person—or if not a person exactly, a life. A monster.

  Rita held her cigarette by her mouth, not smoking from it. She and Bobby exchanged a glance. “You should probably just tell her, Rita. She heard him. He talked to me in front of her.” Bobby’s tail flicked.

  “Oh, should I now? Why don’t you? He’s an old, dear friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  A coldness swelled between the witch and the cat for a second. You tell her. No, you tell her.

  “Will one of you please tell me?”

  Bobby looked at Mae, his eyes so human, then gave a long stretch, leaping onto the table, settling in for a story.

  “When I came here, I came here with an old friend. We’re—well, we’re very much alike, he and I, but the way we get along with human beings is quite different. His name is Sweet James.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Mae felt sick. That weird night at the end of last summer hadn’t been a one-off. There had been something—someone else creeping around the house this whole time, and nobody had thought to let her in on it. It had a name. It wasn’t just some amorphous strange or bad thing, it had a name that nobody had told her. There she was thinking she had been let in, the littlest witch in the house: but no, they had her blindfolded the whole time. Her face burned.

  “We needed to make the badness smaller for you. You never would have set foot in here if you knew what was happening behind the walls. But we both know you’re better off here than you are at home, no matter Sweet James, no matter the strange. Aren’t you?” Rita’s voice was a blade.

  The scale of Mae’s disgrace towered. She felt like a child. Rita had been so good to take them in, and she was right. Mae hated this feeling but would take the weird of this house over what went on back home any day. Magic—even something like Sweet James—is a more honorable secret to keep than, well, the other thing. Whatever her parents were.

  Rita held out the jar of smoke. “This is a tiny protection charm to keep you a little safer from him. Put out your hands.”

  Mae obeyed, laying them on the table, s
ticky with tears against the oilcloth. Rita mumbled rhythmically to herself, eyes half closed, before unscrewing the lid of the jar and placing it at Mae’s hands. The beat of Rita’s whispering increased as, following the command of her fingertips, the smoke danced up and out of the jar, over the table, and onto Mae’s hands.

  It was hot, and she flinched, but she let the gray magic lace around her fingers. It pulled and it wove, braiding itself this way and that. The heat fluctuated in time with Rita’s whispers, obedient to the incantation. For almost a minute, an intricate matrix was built around Mae’s fingers. Her flesh turned pink under the heat. She wasn’t at all afraid of it; rather, transported by it. A world less intense seemed to fold around Mae.

  Rita’s incantations reached a fever pitch, the heat seared a second; then the smoke dissipated, leaving the three at the table in silence. Mae turned her hands over and over, inspecting a tiny even grid of white scars left behind, so faint that they were barely visible at all.

  “You won’t be able to summon him now, Mae, intentionally or not. It’s for your own good. The spell is temporary, but will last you until the end of the summer, maybe longer, and is designed to stop you from seeking a depository for your fear. Though you’re not a girl full of fear at all, are you?”

  Mae didn’t feel afraid exactly. Or particularly protected. She looked at her hands again.

  “Now. I’ve a session to host in an hour and need to meditate, I can’t be going in to this group of women anything less than serene. Don’t want to alarm them.”

  The old woman got up and tapped her fingers on the table three times.

  “Join me, Bobby?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “I’ll stay here with Mae for the moment.”

  “The other two will be back in three minutes. Do your best, won’t you, not to tell them? Though I can’t imagine you’d want either of them knowing you were looking for them.”

  Rita walked out of the room, clutching her shawl tightly around herself, the door closing sharply behind her with a deliberate click.