Once a Witch

by Carolyn Maccullough

  When Aunt Lydia announced that she was leaving for California, Gabriel and I tried everything we could to convince her to leave him behind. Rational arguments, screaming fits, hunger strikes (I lasted all of five hours before I caved), and silent treatments. Nothing worked. On the day they left, I extracted a promise from a mute, white-faced Gabriel that we would write each other every week. Then they drove off, Gabriel's face turned away from the house and from all of us gathered on the lawn. Instead, he stared steadily at the back of his mother's head in the passenger seat as if hoping to bore a hole through her skull. Good thing for her that wasn't his Talent.

  Two months later, he sent me a cool hand-drawn map of his new town, full of skulls and crossbones on all the places where he swore there was buried treasure, since we were crazy for buried treasure stories. But by then my infamous eighth birthday had come and gone and I was in a state of prolonged shock. A few weeks after the map, he sent me a long letter all about his new school and how it was nothing like our old one. Then he sent me a note asking only, "Why haven't you written back???" with the three question marks all in red. Then nothing after that. I still had all the letters.

  But now I shrug. "Listen, Gabriel, we were just kids. Go. Mingle. Really." I step back, trying to ignore the look he is giving me, the old familiar what are you up to look that seems not to have changed at all. I melt into the crowd.

  "Tamsin," my mother says, materializing in front of me, "have you congratulated your sister and James yet?"

  "I just got here," I remind her, even though I know she knows this perfectly well.

  "How was the store? Busy?"

  Suddenly, Alistair's earnest face comes swimming back to me. I had forgotten all about him, what with running Gabriel over with my bike. I shake my head a little to get rid of the image. He'll get over it after a few weeks, I remind myself. "Not really."

  She takes in a breath, puts her hand on my arm. "Will you try to be nice to your sister tonight?"

  "I always try to be nice to her."

  My mother shakes her head. One silvered strand springs free from the knot she's imposed on her normally wild hair. "Try harder," she says, and that persistent groove between her eyebrows deepens.

  "Yes, Mom." I sigh, aware that I sound like a textbook case of the angsty teenager. If only. "Anything else? I was about to go change," I add.

  My mother looks relieved. "Oh, good," she says hopefully, and I resist the urge to laugh. She smiles as I move away, but I can feel her watching me.

  A few feet away, Uncle Morris blinks in and out of sight for the amusement of a baby, who shrieks and laughs in her mother's arms. She keeps reaching out to pull at Uncle Morris's little gray tuft of a goatee, and he lets her get just so close before disappearing again. I can't help smiling. I remember him playing the same game with Rowena and me when we were little.

  I trudge past piles of other aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of the family. Everyone smiles and/or waves, and I smile and/or wave back but don't stop. I know the looks I must be getting behind my back—the lifted eyebrows, the overly expressive shrugs, the whispers of sympathy. Poor Camilla—her daughter, such a waste, so unbelievable. Hasn't happened in the family since who can remember. And she was supposed to be, supposed to be, supposed to be...

  "Move," I say, booting a small boy out of the way as I begin to climb the massive oak staircase. He scuffles closer to the wall but glares at me with narrowed hazel eyes. I can't remember his name, but I do remember that he's the son of one of my particularly annoying second or third cousins, Gwyneth, who can cause a rime of ice to grow on anything with one flick of her finger.

  A stuffed teddy bear is floating near the vicinity of my hip, its glassy eyes whirling back in its head as a small toddler reaches desperately for it. Her fingertips just brush one paw before the bear flips lazily out of reach.

  I glare at the boy with new loathing. "Just like your mother, you little brat," I snarl, snatching the animal out of midair and whacking it over the boy's head.

  "Ow," he whines, reaching up to rub his forehead.

  "That didn't hurt," I answer witheringly.

  "We were playing a game," he mutters. This used to be one of Gwyneth's favorite defense lines whenever the adults found any of us coated in ice, our lips blue with frost.

  "You were playing," I snap. "She wasn't." I present the bear to the tear-stained child, who regards me doubtfully with big brown eyes.

  "You're just jealous," he mutters. "Because you can't do anything."

  Before I can stop myself, I whip the toy back from the toddler's hesitant fingers and mash it over the boy's head a few more times.

  "Ow!" he cries again.

  "I was just playing," I say pointedly before holding out the bear to the little girl again. This time she snatches it away from me.

  "You're welcome," I say and stomp up the rest of the stairs.

  A vision of New York City in the summer—trash bags piled on the cracked sidewalks, glittering streams of traffic, and hordes of people trundling along with Century 21 shopping bags—slips through my head. A brief and lovely oasis.

  I've got to get back to school.

  THREE

  IN THE TEMPORARY SANCTUARY of my room, I pause for a minute before the small gilt-edged mirror above my dresser to smile at a snapshot of Agatha in a pink frilly smock shirt. The words I MISS YOU. CHICAGO SUCKS! are written in black Sharpie across the bottom of the photo. I run my hands through my curly dark hair, make a brief search for my brush, give up, and jab a couple of glittery pins into the mess instead. I finger the hem of my My Little Pony T-shirt, frown, and search out my emergency pack of cigarettes that I wedged into the gap between my night table and the wall. Yanking up the window sash, I blow smoke rings through the holes in the tattered screen.

  "Oh, gross, Tam," my sister's cool voice comes from behind me. My last smoke ring comes out crooked, tearing itself into jagged wisps before I turn around. "Don't you know how damaging that is to your health?"

  I widen my eyes. "Really? I wish they printed warnings or something on the package. So irresponsible of them."

  My sister shakes her head, somehow managing to keep every single strand of her gleaming blond hair anchored in its elegant chignon. She's wearing a knee-length sleeveless black dress, black heels, a string of pearls, and no makeup beyond a slick of pink gloss on her lips. It amazes me how Rowena, amid all the debris of chipped plates, cracked tiles, peeling wallpaper, and uneven floorboards, manages to look so refreshing every day. She's all polished surfaces and glimmering reflections, someone who doesn't need makeup and probably never will. In addition to all of her extraordinary Talents, she also happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful.

  I feel grubby just looking at her.

  Now her large green eyes, fringed with thick lashes just a shade darker than her hair, narrow at me. "Is that what you're wearing?"

  I look down, shrug. "Yeah, I just changed. Like it?" I inhale and exhale, ignoring my sister's pointed little cough. "Shouldn't you be downstairs receiving congratulations and everything?"

  "I came up here to see if you were coming back down." There is just the faintest lift to her voice that I almost don't catch. But I've learned to follow every intonation of my sister's voice. Rowena is extremely Talented in the art of speech. Her voice is like pure honey mixed with cinnamon and wine. She can mesmerize when speaking, her voice looping and twining through people's heads until they would walk off cliffs into the sea if she asked. As if that's not enough, she can also give the power of speech to inanimate objects. When we were younger she used to delight me for hours by making the statues in the garden speak, their voices full of stone and dust. Then, when I turned eight and everything didn't happen the way it was supposed to happen, the usual sisterly cracks between us grew to canyon-size chasms. Any time she tried to use her power on me after that, she would catch herself, give me such a searching look that I could hardly stand it, and hurry away.

  "What do you think of Gabriel?" sh
e asks.

  I know if I hesitate or blush or do anything else besides answer immediately, Rowena will latch onto it, so I say as normally as possible, "He's okay, I guess. Seems like the same old Gabriel."

  "Really?" Rowena considers me as if I'm some kind of odd insect she's never seen before. "I think he's totally changed. So handsome now. I mean"—she waves one hand through the air—"if you like that look."

  I can't help myself. "What look?"

  She smiles. "You know. The scruffy musician look."

  "He's a musician?"

  "Didn't you know? He's going to Juilliard this semester. So now you'll both be in the city." She adjusts her necklace, her fingers gliding over the polished pearls. "You know," she says thoughtfully, "Uncle Chester and Aunt Rennie are going to be away for most of the fall. You could live at their house instead of in your dorm room." The way she says dorm room makes it sound more like leper colony.

  "I have to live in the dorms. It's a rule." The happiest moment of my life was when I got the acceptance letter from New Hyde Prep. The second happiest moment was when I read through one of the several slick and glossy school pamphlets and learned that all students have to live in the dorms. "And I like the dorms."

  A delicate shudder crosses my sister's face. "Why?" she says, the word infused with scorn. "Why would you want to live there among..."

  "Among what? Among who?" I ask quietly. The cigarette bites into my fingertips and I drop it into a glass of water on my night table, watching it extinguish instantly.

  "Among people who don't know what you are." My sister picks her words with care, dropping them like so many stones between us. I stare at her.

  "Rowena. In school, I am not a freak. I don't stand out. I blend in. You can't imagine how wonderful that is—to blend in."

  "I wouldn't want to," my sister says stiffly, straightening up.

  I look at the cigarette butt bobbing in the glass of water. "Of course you wouldn't. You don't need to," I say quietly.

  One of the conditions of letting me go to school in New York City was that I would live with Uncle Chester and Aunt Rennie in their century-old townhouse on Washington Square Park. But when I informed my mother that I couldn't live there because of the school rule, it set off the worst argument we've ever had. Okay, the second worst argument. The worst one was the one we had about my going away to school in the first place. We both screamed until the sky turned the color of a rotten plum and an odd combination of rain and hail began to smash into the ground. A few minutes later a fierce wind rose and rattled the windowpanes and doors as if determined to find a way in. Finally, my father entered the kitchen and explained in a serene voice that the weather would continue to worsen until we stopped arguing. Even then my mother seemed prepared to continue, until my grandmother walked into the kitchen and said simply, Enough. Let her go.

  I remember feeling simultaneously grateful and sad. Grateful that my mother would now have to let me go and sad that my grandmother obviously didn't seem to care all that much about where I went. Then again, having me around was probably a constantly chafing reminder that she had been wrong once.

  "Just because you don't have any Talent doesn't mean you're one of them," my sister says, and all of a sudden I'm exhausted.

  "Seriously, Ro, can you go back to your party now and leave me to pollute my lungs in peace?"

  My sister moves toward the door. "I know you said you just changed, but I'd reconsider if I were you. That T-shirt really isn't that flattering."

  Even though Rowena doesn't have our mother's gift of moving at lightning speed, she can still move pretty fast. Especially when I've just hurled the contents of the water glass, cigarette butt and all, at her. Water splashes against the empty door frame, running in dirty rivulets down the grooves of painted wood. "Brat!" My sister's shriek, a distinctly unmelodious sound, comes from somewhere farther down the hallway. I slam my door closed in response.

  I can't help smiling.

  I dawdle as long as I can but finally emerge from my room wearing my American Airlines 1960s flight attendant dress. It's a white zip-up sheath dress with red and blue piping around the hem, and there's something so cheerful about the stitched logo on the front chest pocket. Needless to say I love it, and I'm pretty sure I'll be the only one here who does. With the possible exception of Gabriel.

  Pausing on the now empty landing, I catch sight of Rowe-na's perfectly coifed blond head studiously turned away from me. She's standing next to James, one hand lightly resting on his arm, not that he needs this anchor. James watches my sister like a child watches a night-light in a darkened room. He seems afraid that at any moment she'll flit away from him and blow out. It would drive me crazy, all that besotted staring, but Rowena seems to accept it gracefully, naturally, like everything else that falls into her lap.

  At this point even some of Uncle Chester's homemade wine is starting to sound good.

  But before I can find any, I see my grandmother in the corner of the room seated in the massive blue velvet chair. This is where she prefers to sit during any of the family gatherings. Relatives ebb and flow past her, paying their respects. At ninety-three she is the official head of the family.

  I make my way toward her, waiting until Aunt Linnie has kissed her papery cheek and fluttered away, sparks of light dancing from the tips of her fingers as they do whenever she gets excited.

  "Tamsin," my grandmother says. Her deep, rich voice issuing from her narrow body never fails to surprise me. At any given moment, she would have to raise it only a half degree to command the attention of the room.

  "Grandmother," I say, bending to kiss her. She smells like the tinctures and poultices she's forever making, a mix of something sharp and sweet, like the first breath of spring. Tonight she's dressed all in white, diamond clips skewering the silvery bundle of hair piled atop her head. But despite the obvious effort, I can't help but notice that her skin has the yellowing sheen of old satin and her eyes seem to have sunk deeper into the hollows of her face.

  "Sit beside me," she bids, and I sink to my knees. Surreptitiously, I touch the fringed hem of my dress, focusing only on the feel of the suede between my fingers, emptying my mind of everything else.

  My grandmother can walk through people's minds like the smallest and lightest of spiders on their skin. They will almost never feel the impact. The last time she did it to me was when I was six.

  My cousin Jerom had recently discovered his Talent of slowing down or speeding up his motions, so I'd convinced him we should try to "fly" (or actually fall really slowly) off the roof. I think my added weight on Jerom's back messed up his calculations, because one broken ankle later, I found myself blabbering that this wasn't my idea to my grandmother and mother, who had come running at the sound of Jerom's wails. My mother was hovering over Jerom, calling for Uncle Chester, and I was watching her, when suddenly there was the lightest touch inside me, like the first drops of rain. A rush tumbled over me, and my vision darkened and then suddenly sharpened again. My grandmother shook her head at me, and I felt as if I had swallowed mouthfuls of dirt. Anyway, I don't think that she's done it to me since then, but just in case she tries, I am always on guard.

  My eyes skip over the room, coming to rest on Gabriel, who is talking to Rowena. She's smiling that cool half smile that makes her look as though she knows a delicious secret, and her face is inclined down, only half turned to his. This is one of Rowena's favorite poses, doubtlessly because it allows people to drink in the beauty of her flawless profile. I bite my lip. I can't watch this, so I look down at my hands.

  "You've met Gabriel again, I see," my grandmother says, and I start.

  "Yeah. I kind of ... ran over him. With my bike."

  My grandmother looks at me, then closes her right eye briefly. It's unnerving the way she can close one eye completely while the other remains wide open, unblinking. "Why ever would you do that?"

  "Not on purpose," I protest before I realize she's laughing.

  "How was
the bookshop? Any customers?"

  "A few," I answer, briefly considering Alistair Callum. Tell her, tell her now! Then I let my mind go blank. "I didn't get to re-price those poetry books for you."

  One eyebrow twitches upward, sending a ripple effect of wrinkles across her forehead.

  "I'll do it tomorrow," I add hastily.

  The eyebrow slowly relaxes. "You work hard," she says at last, her voice gruff.

  "Yeah. I ... thanks."

  A shattering sound makes me look up. Uncle Chester has opened the china cabinet and is hurling plates to the floor and then grinding the shards underneath his shoes for good measure. I watch him do this until the cabinet is empty. Then he runs his hands over the shards and hands whole plates back to his audience of rapt children. From his elaborate hand gestures, I can only surmise that he's encouraging them to smash the plates so the fun can start all over again.

  Suddenly, my mother catapults into view, snatching plates left and right out of the children's hands. Her face has this tight look on it and I'm expecting her to start breaking plates over Uncle Chester's head any second now. But just then the front door opens. My father has arrived, straight from the greenhouse from the looks of him. Still cradling plates, my mother vanishes from Uncle Chester's side to rematerialize next to my father. She leans toward him, her lips moving rapidly. No doubt she's furious that he's late and covered in dirt.

  Later we all troop out to the backyard where the stone altar resides. There is no hint of the rain that slashed down earlier in the evening or the humidity that's been lingering all summer. Instead the sky is clear and the stars bright, and a soft breeze scented by night-blooming jasmine is blowing across the yard, catching lightly at skirts and shirts and hair alike. But I'm unable to enjoy my father's best efforts at weather-induced good cheer. I'm too aware of Gabriel and how he hasn't looked at me beyond a quick glance as we all filed through the back doors. Okay, so yes, I pushed him away before, but that doesn't mean that he has to stay away. I'm sure Agatha would have a ball analyzing this one.