Once a Witch

by Carolyn Maccullough

  She eyes Gabriel and me on the steps and moves toward us, her filmy skirt swaying gently with the motion. "I need—"

  "A break," I say hastily and jump up. Carrot coins tumble down the steps and I see Gabriel snatch one out of midair. I hope she hasn't overheard anything.

  "I'll sit with her," I say, nodding toward my sister's door. Lydia hesitates, looks at Gabriel, then at me, and then at the closed library door at the foot of the stairs. She nods briefly. I start to move past her, but she catches at my wrist.

  "Call me if she seems like she's waking up. I don't know how long this will last. It seems to be less and less ... effective." She shakes her head at something unseen and releases me.

  "Can you do it again?" I ask nervously. "Like, just to be safe?"

  Lydia stares at me and then I realize she seems to be staring at something beyond me. I almost look behind me. I wouldn't put it past Uncle Morris to be eavesdropping in the hallway while invisible.

  "It's dangerous. If I do it too much."

  "Oh," I say softly, and the image of a man lying so still on a floor slams through my head. Lydia continues down the hallway to the top of the stairs, and I watch as she and Gabriel dance awkwardly around each other. I have a few seconds to consider the irony that all my life I've felt like an outcast in my family for not being Talented while all his life Gabriel must have felt just the opposite. I wonder just how much Lydia must have loved Uncle Phil. Then I wonder why.

  Squaring my shoulders, I step into Rowena's room.

  A small bedside lamp casts a faint glow across my sister's skin, but even with the extra light I can see just how pale she really is now. Her breathing is shallow and fast, unlike the deep coma breaths she was taking a few hours earlier, and I pause inside the doorway, wanting to call Lydia back. But then Rowena seems to settle deeper and a smile crosses her face. Her hair is spread out across the pillow, glints of gold shining here and there. Three strands are caught in the comb on her night table and I touch them lightly, trying to imagine Aunt Lydia combing my sister's hair. I spin the comb on the tabletop. It must have been James. After settling Rowe-na in her room, my mother had taken him by the shoulders, turned him in the direction of a spare bedroom, and told him to sleep. It seems he hadn't slept for two days. I had caught my mother's eye then, but she'd shaken her head and sidled away from me and into the library with a mouthed "later."

  My sister stirs and I turn back, swallowing hard. If I have to, I can stop her. Then I think about this for a minute. I may be able to stop her from using her Talent on me, but I can't physically stop her from running over me to the door. To get back to Alistair. I need to talk to my mother. I need to talk to ... I glance at the phone on the table and pick it up quietly, one eye on my sister, who has settled again. I dial the number I know by heart.

  "Hello?" Agatha's voice is polite and I realize she doesn't recognize my home number.

  "It s me."

  "Tam! Where are you? Where have you been? I called your cell, like, five times already and it keeps going to voice mail. What happened to you? I thought we were supposed to—"

  "I'm sorry," I rush in. "I ... there was a home emergency."

  "Is everything okay?" Agatha's voice is expectant; I can feel her waiting to be reassured and I bite my lower lip.

  "Yeah, it's okay now."

  "What's going..." She trails off, waiting for me to interrupt her, and when I don't, I can sense her confusion coming in waves over the line. "You didn't even sign out. Hags is going to be pissed."

  "I know." I rub my forehead. We can get away with a lot at New Hyde Prep, but even Hags has her limits.

  "What do I tell her?"

  "Look, it's ... complicated. I mean, everyone's okay," I say, glancing over at Rowena, who twists suddenly and whimpers. "Mostly," I add.

  "Tam ... you're being ... weird. Are you sure—"

  "Yeah. Yeah. I swear. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I won't be home tonight. And not for the rest of the week. And the weekend, too."

  "What about Cynthia's party on Friday? I thought you—"

  "I'm sorry," I whisper. "I'll try. But I..."

  "Okay," Agatha says, but I can tell that everything is not okay.

  "Um ... so how was your day?"

  "Good," she says, but now she is too polite, like the way she answered the phone, and I squeeze my eyes shut until I see needles of light burn and dissolve.

  Rowena moves again, her hands scratching across the pillow. The sound of her fingernails on the cotton sheets reminds me of mice in the walls. "I have to go," I whisper. "I'm sorry, Agatha."

  "Sorry for what?"

  But I shake my head, because what can I say? "Sorry for not calling earlier."

  We hang up and I imagine her sitting in our dorm room, staring out the window, more than a little confused. I sit on the edge of Rowena's bed and look down at her. Wake up! Wake up and tell me what's happening.

  And as if she hears me, her eyes open. "You," she says flatly.

  "Hi, Rowena," I say. Her eyes are darker than I've ever seen and glassy. Now that she's awake, I kind of wish she weren't. Nervously, I glance toward the door. How long a break does Lydia need? "Um ... do you want to go back to sleep?"

  "No," she whispers, then closes her eyes as if to make a liar out of herself. We are quiet for a few moments, breathing in ragged concert with each other. Then her face creases with anguish. Still with her eyes closed, she sighs. "You stopped me. All these years I wondered when you'd realize." Her eyes snap open and suddenly all light and air in the room seem to be sucked away.

  "What do you mean?" I whisper.

  But she is silent. Her eyelids flutter shut and she seems to drift back into sleep. "Rowena," I say sharply. "What are you talking about?" I jab her shoulder.

  Keeping her eyes closed, she says in a thistle-thin voice, "All this time they told us not to ... not to ever..."

  "Ever what? Ever what?" I pinch the skin of her upper arm hard, hard enough for angry pink fingerprints to spring to life. But she doesn't even stir.

  "Let her sleep," a low voice comes from behind me, and I whirl to face Lydia, who is standing just inside the doorway. She is looking steadily at me and sympathy flickers in her gaze. Sympathy or something else, I'm not sure.

  I swallow. "What did she mean?" I don't even ask if Lydia heard the conversation or not.

  Lydia walks toward me, her steps soundless, puts her hands on my shoulders, and turns me toward the door. "Go talk to your mother."

  "Who told—"

  "She's the one who can answer you, Tamsin." Then her fingers tighten for an instant. "Try not to judge her too harshly."

  But when I leave Rowena's room, I don't go find my mother immediately. I mean to. I have every intention of walking through the library door and confronting her and my father and whoever else happens to be in there. Even when I find myself wandering through the now empty hallway and then climbing a short spiral of stairs to my grandmother's wing of the house, I'm still planning in my head what to say to my parents.

  My grandmother's sitting room is cold, and glancing at the windows, I see that somebody has left one open. The curtains are snapping and billowing, filling like sails on a ship, and as I cross the room and reach for the window sash, the material winds its way around my arms like a burial shroud. I shake myself free and slam down the window harder than I should. A chip of paint falls from the molding, landing on my shoulder. Brushing it off, I turn and stare at the closed bedroom door. I've never gone into my grandmother's room without being invited. Then I remind myself that I've never done a lot of things before today. With that thought in front of me, I march through the door.

  I don't know what I expected. To catch my grandmother muttering some spell or incantation to the new moon glimpsed through her window or maybe consulting some ancient tome. What I do see disturbs me even more than either of those things would have.

  She's asleep. Fast asleep. In bed with the covers tucked up to her waist, her hands folded n
eatly on her chest, and her long white hair in a single braid trailing over the pillow. For one instant the resemblance between her and Rowena is so sharp that I find myself squinting hard into the half-light of the room. But no, it's my grandmother.

  The table by her bed holds the customary scattering of fresh flower petals and a small brown bottle with a pale spidery vine of some sort cut into the glass. It looks like one of the bottles that my mother and grandmother hand out to the women who come to the back door in the dead of night.

  Trying to make sense of all this only causes a dull throb of pain to echo across my temples. My hand is groping for the doorknob when my mother blinks into view close to my shoulder. A little too close, actually.

  "Sorry, Tam," she murmurs.

  "It's okay," I mutter. "I wasn't really using that foot anyway."

  That should have earned me an exasperated look—one that my mother is pretty happy to dole out to me whenever I speak—but instead she turns and walks toward my grandmother, sinking to her knees by the bed. Her hands travel across the covers until they link with my grandmother's hands and then I have to look away. I don't want to see my mother crying.

  "How long has she been like this?"

  "Since Rowena ... Rowena put her under some kind of spell."

  My eyes dart again to the little brown bottle on the night table. "She drank that? Wait, how do you know Rowe-na did it?"

  My mother lifts her head slowly to look at me with puffy eyes. "Because she told me. Your sister sat there and told me with a smile on her face and a light in her eyes that—" My mother pauses, smoothes the coverlet over the shape of my grandmother's body. "She told me that he wanted her to."

  "But..." I move closer to the bed and stare down at my grandmother's wax-colored face. "Can't you just wake her up?"

  "I've tried. Everything I could. Everything I know. Nothing. Nothing. I can't break a spell of your grandmother's making." My mother's fingers tighten on the coverlet before she goes back to her obsessive smoothing.

  "This is her spell?"

  "Yes," my mother says, and although there is an ocean of bitterness in her voice, she picks up my grandmother's arm very tenderly. "See? She must have drawn her own blood here." I don't want to look, but I do. In the pad of my grandmother's thumb is a bright red pinprick. "And then she mixed it in with valerian root and witchknot and she must have drunk it. All because Rowena sat there and compelled her to." My mother presses her face into the coverlet for a moment and then blots her eyes with the lace edge.

  I frown, stare down at the bed, then revise my earlier impression. My grandmother seems stiff, almost as if she's frozen. She doesn't seem asleep in quite the same way that Rowena is now. "That's why Lydia's been using her power on Ro," I say, my eyes skipping away from the blood mark.

  "I didn't know what else to try," my mother admits. "If I keep her here, she just tries to leave, and now this. If I let her leave, then she's with that...man," my mother spits out.

  "Alistair Callum," I say, the name dragged from my throat.

  "Yes," my mother agrees tiredly. "She told me his name."

  A snapshot of his blue handkerchief flashes into my head and the initials stand out clearly, blazing white thread letters against the blue backdrop. AEK. And then I remember the nameplate on his office door. "I don't think that's his real name," I say slowly.

  "How do you know that?" my mother demands, her hands smoothing the coverlet until long past any hint of a wrinkle is left. "Do you know him?"

  I sink down beside her. The room is quiet except for the occasional gasp from my mother, who is crying again. Outside the window a crescent moon glitters in all her sickle-shaped glory.

  "He came into the bookstore one night over the summer. He asked for help in finding an old clock. A family heirloom. It had been lost, he said. In 1887."

  Now there is no sound in the room at all. It's as if my mother is holding her breath. "Why?" she says finally, anger threading through her voice. "Why didn't you tell us?"

  Suddenly, I feel an answering flare of anger. "Why didn't you tell me that I had a Talent? You must have known!"

  Two dark spots of color have crept across my mother's cheekbones. In one quick moment she gets to her feet. "Your father should know this," she mumbles, not exactly meeting my eyes.

  "Wait a minute." And suddenly I know she's about to flick out of the room. Without thinking, I surge toward her in my mind and silently scream, Stop. I stumble to my feet and we stare at each other. And once again my grandmother's long-ago words run through my head. Your daughter will be one of the most powerful we have ever seen in this family.

  "Tamsin," my mother says at last, and one hand goes to her throat. I'm sorry, I want to say, and also, Did it hurt?

  But instead my next words come out like perfect stones to skip across a lake: even and hard.

  "Why did you lie to me all these years?"

  When my mother and I walk into the library, a small sullen fire is smoking in the fireplace, guarded on either side by the china firedogs. I swallow. Rowena used to make those firedogs sing in rusty yelps and barks and I used to laugh until I cried.

  My father is standing by the wall of windows that look out over the fields toward his nursery. As we enter the room, he turns, crosses behind the massive walnut desk that is cluttered with papers and books and pens and the bottles of ink that my mother still loves to use, and meets her halfway across the room. She tilts her head back and looks up at him.

  "Tamsin just ... stopped me from using my Talent."

  My father gets this expression on his face that means he's probably wishing that he had something of my mother's gift and could transport himself back to his gardens instantly. "She needs to know," he rumbles at last, speaking directly to my mother. "Althea, whatever she was doing, didn't feel the need to enlighten us, and now I say tell her."

  The mention of my grandmother's first name stops me.

  My mother presses her hands to her temple, kneads for a minute, then wanders over to a small pink armchair by the fire and sinks into it. Finally, and without looking at me, she says, "Tamsin, you do have a Talent. More than one, it seems."

  I lean against the wall because it feels as though my legs have just turned into water.

  "No one can use their Talent against you. It simply won't work. You can also stop anyone from using their own power even if they're not trying to use it against you."

  "Like I stopped Rowena today. From compelling Gabriel."

  "Yes. And from compelling James, too."

  "So then ... whatever's wrong with Rowena, I can stop it." And I can't keep the triumph from spreading through my voice.

  But my mother is shaking her head. "That's different. You can stop something while it's happening to you or to someone else. And like I said, power won't ever work against you. That includes spells. But when it comes to someone else"—and here my mother shakes her head again—"you can't undo what's already been done."

  "How?" I breathe. "How do you know this about me already? When I never even knew this stuff about myself!"

  "When you were four or maybe five," my mother begins, "I found you in the stillroom. Somehow you had climbed up the shelves and found a whole basket of strawberry leaves that I was drying, and then you found your way into the strawberry juice that I was brewing."

  I have no memory of this whatsoever.

  "It wasn't just strawberry juice, though. It was a very powerful sleeping spell. Designed to knock a grown man out for days. Which is what Cathy Monroe had paid for."

  "Who's Cathy Monroe?"

  My mother waves her hand. "She used to live on Hancock Street with her husband. Her extremely violent husband. She wanted a three-day head start when she left him."

  "Which you made for her."

  My mother nods. "Which you drank."

  "And?"

  "And nothing. You stayed awake. I made another batch and Cathy Monroe had her three-day head start."

  "Did you see me drink it?"
<
br />   My mother permits herself a small smile. "No. Not the first batch. The second and the third and the fourth, yes. Your father drank the second batch with you and slept through the third and the fourth."

  I gaze at my father, who is now adjusting the logs in the fireplace with a poker.

  "Okay, but how did you know that I could also—"

  "Your grandmother has never been able to read your mind."

  "Never?" I think back on all the times I prepared empty-headed thoughts in case she was attempting anything. "What about the time when Jerom broke his ankle? I felt her do it then."

  "You felt her try," my mother corrects me. "Did you also feel dizzy right after that?"

  I think back to the day I flew on my cousin's back and recall the sweeping head rush that came over me after I fell. I had always assumed it was a late reflex to the shock of plummeting through the air or from landing so hard. I nod.

  "When we first start to use our Talents, it often takes us by surprise. Some of us get dizzy; others get tremendous headaches."

  "So glad I'm suddenly part of the 'we' and 'us' club now," I say.

  "The more you use your Talent, the more that effect lessens and finally disappears," my mother says, ignoring my comment. She presses her fingers into her forehead so hard that it looks as if she's trying to rub holes in her skin. "There's more," my mother adds, as if wondering how much to reveal. "Your grandmother thinks you can mimic other people's Talents."

  "What?"

  "If someone uses their Talent against you, as in to harm you, it won't work. But if they continue to do it, you can acquire it."

  "How does she know this?"

  My mother shakes her head. "That I don't know. She said she saw it, that she saw you do it."

  I stare at my mother. "When? I can't have ... I never did that." I touch my locket necklace, twisting the chain in my fingers. "Why ... why did you keep it secret from me all these years? Why did you let me think I was ... this big fat disappointment to you all? And why did Rowena get to know and not me?"