“Like Dad’s,” Rowan says hoarsely, although he doesn’t know about the ones I found in the forest.
“Like Dad’s,” I murmur.
It’s just the three of us again. Rose disappeared soon after Olive’s sister showed up, and we all figured Olive and her mom had some catching up to do. Olive and Laurel.
Nothing’s been taken, or it doesn’t look like it. Not that there’s much here to take. We do a careful sweep anyway. When we go back outside, there are boot prints on the ground around all the houses. There are loose screws and bent nails from where all their boards have been torn off. It’s a pretty thorough job.
“The police then, looking for Cathal,” says Rowan, like he’s trying to convince himself. I shake my head and tell him about the boots I found with Rose.
“And you’re sure they were his?” he asks me. I just look at him.
“Show me,” he says.
But when we get into the forest—down the slope and close to the lake, me leading and Rowan behind me and Ivy following with a frown—there’s nothing there.
The boots are gone. The baby teeth. The diary keys. The bloodstains could be the shadows of the bark of trees.
“I hate that this keeps happening,” I say. “I hate that I can’t tell what’s real and what’s in my head. Like Olive’s sister said. I hate that I don’t know.”
Rowan sits heavily on a rock and rests his elbows on his knees, pressing his hands together in front of his mouth like he’s about to pray. “I know,” he says. “Just—I hate not knowing whether Mom’s alive or not. I hate all this.”
“I know,” Ivy says very softly from a few yards away. “I know. About your mom.”
Rowan’s voice is blade-sharp when he says, “What? What do you know?”
Ivy looks like she really doesn’t want to answer. She looks like she wishes she hadn’t said anything at all.
“Ivy?” Rowan asks.
Ivy’s shoulders droop and my heart drops with them.
“Did Mags tell you something?” he says. I still can’t speak.
“It’s not that,” whispers Ivy.
“Then what?”
I open and close my mouth like some silent song. My heart beats another irregular rhythm.
Ivy looks at the ground, then she looks at me. “The spell worked,” she says. “Both spells worked.”
Each word’s loud in my ears.
Rowan asks, “How do you know?”
“My mom’s with her,” Ivy says then, and my heart’s a whole drum kit. “Your mom. She’s in a treatment center.”
“She’s in rehab?” says Rowan, but I can hardly hear him over the beating of the drums.
“I didn’t want to tell you in case it didn’t—in case she doesn’t—in case afterward things are still the same.”
Heartbeat drumbeats getting so loud, my whole body jumps with it. I can’t stay in my skin.
“But Ivy, she’s alive. She’s getting help. That’s huge. That’s already different.” Rowan’s eyes are bright, but I’ve heard through Ivy’s words to what’s hidden behind them.
“You knew all along,” I say to her when I can finally speak. “You’ve known since the very beginning.”
Ivy looks like she’s about to cry.
“Didn’t you?” I say, my voice like sandpaper.
“I’m sorry,” she barely whispers.
“You what?” Rowan says, like he doesn’t believe it. Like it hasn’t sunk in yet.
“I didn’t want you to leave me. It was only ever me and Mom. I was so lonely. I love you both so much.” Ivy’s eyes fill with tears.
“But why, Ivy?” It’s like I’m pleading with her to explain, because I don’t understand how she could’ve kept this from us. When all this time I’ve been torturing myself.
Ivy says, “When I got your message that you’d run away, that you were thinking of coming to Balmallen, I told my mom and she—she’d just heard from yours. I told her I’d keep an eye on you and she said to tell you your mom was trying to get better, that she couldn’t contact you just yet, and I meant to, I really did. But we were here together and it was so wonderful. You have to understand: Mom keeps me so close. Like she needs to keep me safe from the world. But I love the world! I loved being here with you. It was this amazing adventure, and I felt like I had a proper family for once, not just me and Mom. I was going to tell you. I just . . . wanted this to last as long as it could. I was so afraid if you went back to your mom it’d be like every time you came to us when we were kids. Everything would be going so great, and then your parents would just whisk you away and I’d be alone. I couldn’t lose you again.”
I shake my head. Rowan looks kinda shell-shocked.
“That’s why you wanted to cast the spell again?” he asks. “Not because you thought the one we cast at the party didn’t work. You knew it had. You knew she was alive. You knew exactly where she was. This is why you did it? To keep us close? To stay living in this—this—place? This was not a cute camping trip, Ivy.”
Ivy’s tears spill over. “I know that,” she says. “I know that. I swear that’s not why I did it, not at first. I cast the spell just like I told you—because I didn’t want you to have lost your mom for good. I did it so it would work. Treatment. Rehab. So she’d come back to herself. So she’d find her way.”
“But you lied to keep us here.”
Tears drip off her chin. “Where would you have gone?” she says. “This place is—it’s yours. It’s yours.”
“It’s an abandoned development, Ivy; it’s nobody’s,” Rowan says angrily.
“No, some of the houses were paid for before the work stopped,” she says. “The one we’ve been staying in—number five—your grandparents bought it. For your mom and dad, when you were small, before it was built.”
Rowan and I look at each other and I know we’ve got the same look of disbelief on our faces.
“Why, Ivy?” I plead again. “Why didn’t you tell us all this? Why did you let us believe our mom was dead—that I’d killed her—that we had no place to go? Why would you do that?”
Now Ivy’s really crying. “I was going to,” she sobs. “I really was. I just didn’t want to give you false hope.”
“Ivy,” Rowan says. “We could take it. If you’d told us. We’d’ve been okay. Even if Mom still doesn’t—if she’s still the same—we can take it.” He stands up and gestures toward me. I go to follow him up the path back to the development.
“Will you forgive me?” Ivy asks softly behind us.
He doesn’t say anything, but I know that we will.
I follow my brother up through the forest and Ivy stays by the rocks and the trees, but we’re not far away when she says, “But there was a fire.” Rowan and I stop and turn around. Ivy’s eyes are red from all these truths she’s finally telling. “Those boots you found—your dad’s ones—she was wearing them.”
“What?”
“Your mom said it to my mom in her letter. There was a fire. She used the boots to break the window. She’s been wearing them ever since.”
Rowan and I both look around the forest like our mom will just appear out of thin air, new streaks of gray in her red hair, our dad’s big boots on her feet.
“There’s one last thing I didn’t tell you,” Ivy says. “Your dad didn’t—I don’t know if he—” She takes a little breath. “I just mean my mom says they haven’t heard from him since.”
Tonight I’m just waiting for my parents to appear. Outside my window in the darkness. Facedown in a field. Deep in the forest, looking like the ghosts of their younger selves. I keep feeling like this is them coming back in pieces: a silver lighter, a pair of boots. Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me.
I watch the world darken from the cracks between the boards covering my bedroom window, my drawing pad loose on my lap, char
coal dust in the air. Tonight I’ve been drawing people, not things. Rose at the corner of a parking lot, her head on her knees. Rowan on the rubble heap. Ivy with her crossword. Olive on her bike. My mom as a girl.
There’s a figure walking along the wall of the development. I freeze and watch it, remembering the boot stains, the ransacked kitchen. When Ivy said that stuff about my mom earlier, I let myself believe that maybe it was her. Tearing the place apart with grief or guilt. Looking for us. But what if it wasn’t her? Would she really wreck the place like this out of guilt? What if I’m just choosing to believe it was her so I can’t think it was somebody else?
But what if it was my dad, with his hard hands, his angry voice? They haven’t heard from him since, Ivy said. As if he just disappeared the same way he just showed up back when my mom called herself Ash. She thought she and her friends had called him up—found this lost soul in the middle of the forest and fell in love with him. In hate with him. Maybe both. If she thought he was a lost soul, did she think me and Rowan were always half lost?
Maybe we called him up, too, with our spell. Maybe it was him howling in the forest, burning. Maybe it was him ghosting the development. If he did lose his life in that fire, maybe it’s his lost soul we called up. And, if that’s the case, I guess Ash was able to burn Jude after all.
I press my face closer to the crack in the boards to see the figure walking toward the house. It stops moving before I can make the person out clearly. I’m about to go call the others when, quietly into the dusk, a small stream of soap bubbles floats out into the development.
I take the stairs two at a time and nearly fall flat on my face. I stop a few yards in front of Rose, who doesn’t smile.
“I didn’t know if you’d come back,” I say. She knows all my secrets now.
“I didn’t either,” she tells me.
I want to touch the sides of her eyes where her makeup has smudged.
“I thought this was . . . kind of too much,” Rose says. “The spell, the . . . crazy magic. Cathal disappearing. Because of us. It’s . . . a lot. To know that we’re responsible. That I’m responsible.”
I think, Good riddance. I think, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. But I’m not sure that’s what she wants to hear. Instead, I say, “You’re not responsible. It’s not your fault.”
“You should have seen Chloe.” Rose’s hands shake when she sends another bunch of bubbles blowing through the development. “My mom’s treating her for shock. You should have seen her and her parents come in. Eyes like they’d lost everything.”
“Rose,” I say. “Even if we did make him disappear, which there’s no proof of—I mean, he was at a party with some friends. Maybe he fell in the lake. Maybe he OD’d. Maybe he got on a bus to Dublin as a dare and will come back broke and hungover next week. But if we did do it, if it was the spell, he’s the one who attacked you. He’s the one who made you think you’d lost everything. He did that. Not you.”
Rose’s eyes are wet. “I wanted him gone, wanted to teach him a lesson, wanted to find something big in exchange.”
“So maybe we’re both monsters. But they were worse monsters than us.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“We didn’t know what would happen. Hell, we didn’t know we could cast a magic spell. There’s no way we could have actually wanted this, because we wouldn’t have believed it possible in the first place.”
“I’m not sure I still completely believe in it now.”
I shrug. I’m pretty convinced. And I’ll bet she is, too. “What are you going to do,” I ask, “if he comes back?”
Rose squares her shoulders. “I talked to my mom,” she says. “She called Olive’s aunt Gill right away. I figure . . .” She looks down at the bubble wand in her hand. “There’s more than magical ways to make somebody pay.”
Maybe it’s the same for my dad. Maybe it’s enough that we want to keep our mom away from him now, too. Maybe this kind of thing needs people to work together. To find each other.
I kinda laugh. “It looks like the spell did work,” I say to her. “’Cause it sounds like you’ve found your strength.”
Rose laughs as if what I’ve said is totally cheesy. She sends a bunch of bubbles flying right at me. “So what have you found?” she asks.
“My mom, I hope,” I tell her. I explain about what Ivy said. I tell her there was someone in the house. If it was my mom, she might still be here in town. She might just be waiting with Mags. Waiting for us for once. Then I smile at Rose and I add, “And I found you.”
Rose laughs again. And I know that I fall in love too easily. I keep secrets and I tell lies. I drink too much and I steal things sometimes.
I’ve lost my heart. Not all losses are bad.
“If it was your mom who came here,” Rose says, “if she’s staying in town and was waiting for you to get back home, or for Mags to tell you where she is—I hope you’ll stick around a while.”
“I’ll stick around a while.” My lost heart glows.
Her kisses are serious. We’re all lips and tongues and hands in hair and it’s so easy to lose sight of the things we’re not sure of. Both of us like monsters casting spells that destroy other people’s lives because they’ve destroyed ours. It would be easy not to believe it. To say they’ll both show up someday—Cathal and my dad. To tell ourselves there’s no such thing as magic.
Except: I had the spellbook in my pocket. I felt it there the whole time we rode home. It was there when we found the house broken into. It was there when we went down to the woods. It was there when I looked out of the window and saw Rose walking toward me, and I put my hand into my pocket and touched it just to make sure. I felt the leather cover and the threadbare rubber band. I felt the crinkle of well-worn pages. My fingers were around it.
I felt it when it disappeared.
Olive
Monday, May 15th
Lost: Ourselves, over and over
Mom walks around the kitchen while she waits for Emily to come back downstairs in clean clothes and dry shoes. She straightens the vases by the window, but her sleeve knocks some flowers onto the sill. She arranges all her spice jars in a row. She touches the dried herbs over the stove.
“She’s okay, you know,” I tell her, even if it’s not something I’m entirely sure of myself.
“When you’re a parent,” Mom says, “you’re always worried for your children. Even if you don’t let them see. When they ride a bike at night. When they stay out late. When they come home drunk.” I stare hard at the floor. “Last night was any parent’s worst nightmare.”
“But she’s okay,” I say, even though I understand. This whole day was one long nightmare. “We found her.”
Mom twitches at the word found. I wonder if she suspects we cast the spell, like she did long before we were born. If she does, she says nothing.
But I know the spellbook—or at least her old diary—is on her mind, because she says, “I’m going to give Noelle a call later. Get Amy’s number. She should be with her kids.”
I freeze. Hazel’s words run around my brain. I murdered my parents. Now who’s the monster? If the spell brought Emily back, does that mean it can bring Ash back, too? Or was Emily never really lost to begin with?
“Is she . . . Did she stay in touch with Ivy’s mom?” I ask. “Like, she’d have her number?”
Mom nods, her gaze still absent, her mind elsewhere. “They stayed as close as anyone could be with Amy,” she tells me. “Although there were always things Noelle shared with me that she didn’t with Amy.”
I’m still finding it so hard to believe my mom is Laurel. That everything she wrote about in that diary happened to her.
“Like what?” I ask.
Mom stares out of the window into the garden. “I don’t think she ever told Amy who Ivy’s father was.”
My mouth hinges open.
“She must have suspected,” Mom says. “It was fairly obvious to the rest of us.”
“No,” I say. “No way.”
“But Amy was always willfully oblivious at times.”
I actually have to sit down. I lower myself onto a chair and the dogs come to nose at my lap.
Jude. Of course it was Jude. Ivy’s father was Jude.
She’s Rowan and Hazel’s half sister.
“She kept that kid locked up so tight,” my mom is saying. “Like she wanted to keep her safe. I’ll call them both tonight,” she adds. “It’s long overdue.”
I wince and consider telling her what Hazel said to us all about her mother and the fire, but at that moment my phone lights up on the table. It’s a message from Rowan.
Ivy lied. Her mom was with mine all along, and Ivy knew it. Mom was in rehab. The magic made her find her way.
A second message follows right after.
When we got back to the house today someone had been there, looking for us. We called Mags. Our mom is in town.
My jaw drops open. It can’t have been the spell. But I can see why Hazel and Rowan would believe it was.
Emily appears at the door to the kitchen in clean clothes, her hair brushed and tied up in the kind of messy bun that usually takes me at least five hours to get right. “Dr. Driscoll thinks there was probably some kind of leak in the gas pipeline under the road,” she says. “It’s over that side of the lake. But she said to come in anyway.”
Dad follows her into the kitchen and Mom hands her a bag of cookies. “For the road.”
“I know what happened,” Emily says in an undertone as she passes by me to get to the door. “To Rose.”
I can feel my brow furrow. “You do? How?”
“I used my brain, Olive,” Emily says scornfully. “It didn’t make sense what Chloe was saying about seeing Rose with Cathal at the party. And then I was at her place and his phone was charging and I saw all these messages. . . .”
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 25