“Curiouser and curiouser,” Eleanor said, walking back into the kitchen. Her step was lighter than it had been for years. She’d not realized how much that secret had weighted her down. And just like that … it was all out in the open and cleaned up. No fuss, no muss.
“Ah, that would be for me,” said Byrd. After a short exchange she hung up, turned to Eleanor and said, “Our psychic is lost. I just can’t stand it when interesting things turn alarming. And they just always do that, you ever notice? I mean, whoever heard of a lost psychic? I SWEAR.”
11:30 A.M.
Eleanor sat on the bottom step of the porch with Byrd, watching Maj try to play with Delores (who was old and tired and slept the days away under the Willow tree) while waiting for the lost psychic.
“Byrd, so far Anne’s story is sitting right in my throat like a scream,” said Eleanor.
“It’s hard to hear. And I’m a lot like her, which is hard to say,” said Byrd.
“I just keep thinking about it, then looking at Maj. Then thinking about it. It makes me think maybe the decisions I made weren’t so bad. Nothing like that happened to you, did it, honey? Like what happened to Anne?”
“Things happen to everyone.”
“Bad things?”
“The way I figure it is this: I had to have the bad things happen for the good things to happen. History is history, as far as I’m concerned. This is a new start.”
“Byrd, do you trust me?”
“I think I do.”
“I think I trust you, too.”
“There’s some kind of sissy words comin’ next. I can feel ’em.”
“Well, these women sure knew how to avoid their feelings. Got to be honest with the ones you love.”
“Oh, sure, one slip of the tongue and an entirely too forgiving red-headed daughter and now you’re the queen bee of honesty.”
“Very funny, Miss Byrd. Very funny.”
1:00 P.MM
Amazing Andy toured the house. He walked up and down the stairs, into each room and out—and he did it all walking like he’d been born on a horse. Afterward, he met Byrd and Eleanor in the library.
“So?” asked Byrd.
“Well, y’all, I’m afraid what we have here isn’t a haunting. It’s a hostage situation,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you got spirits here that can’t move on. The house won’t let them go. Usually we got to rid the house of the ghosts. In this instance we got to rid the ghosts of the house.”
“And I thought this would be easy,” sighed Byrd.
“So what’s the next step, where do we go from here?” Eleanor asked.
“Where do you go from here.… That’s tricky. Truth is, this thing scares me. And there’s too much to lose. Death is a sort of occupational hazard.”
“Ghosts can kill you?”
“No, nothing like that. I mean high blood pressure, embolism, heart attack, demonic possession. You know, your garden variety ailments.”
“Oh, I see,” Eleanor said seriously, trying not to break out into hysterical laughter. This guy, wow, she thought.
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but any kind of energy can cause all sorts of things in a body. Ain’t you never heard of people fryin’ themselves to death in a tub just ’cause they wanted to listen to music at the same time? Or say they had an angry relative wantin’ to toss a hair dryer in with them? The point is, I’m always prepared for death, because I’m sure of the peaceful nature of what lies beyond. Death doesn’t scare me.
“But this house? This house traps the dead.”
“And it seems that it traps the women who live here, even as it kills or sickens or drives mad the men who’re foolhardy enough to decide to love them.
“So I’d rather not get too attached to this house or its ghosts or even to you purty young fillies. Comprende?”
“Are you from Texas?” asked Byrd.
“No, why do you ask?”
“Just, you … there’s a cowboy thing. Never mind.”
“I was a cowboy in my last life.”
“I see.”
“And I’ll be damned if I let this Frankenstein house trap me here and rob me of my next reincarnation into what could be untold wealth.
“My advice to you both: run.”
1:45 P.M.
“Are you sure you’re all done? Shouldn’t you walk the extended property, check out the gatehouse?” asked Byrd while Eleanor wrote him a check.
The color drained from Amazing Andy’s face. “You … you mean that house at the front of the drive?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I, uh, I didn’t feel much at all as I went by in the car. I’m sure it’s fine. And really, I’m late for another appointment.” He grabbed the check from Eleanor as she was signing and ran, leaving a line of ink in his wake.
2:00 P.M.
Eleanor slapped some cheese between slices of bread—cooking was always her Mimi’s specialty, not hers—while Maj and Byrd sat at the kitchen table trying hard not to laugh.
“So, do you think he was downright strange or what?” asked Byrd.
“I think he was stupid. Not strange. And I’m a little aggravated that he couldn’t tell us more. No. Scratch that, forget that reincarnated old cowboy, I’m mad that we can’t pool together our resources, our magic, and figure this whole thing out quicker. We’re almost out of time. Really, are there no happy people in our family? Not one single solitary happy ending? This isn’t very promising for either of us. Or Maj,” Eleanor said, glancing at her daughter.
“Mama, I can just draw my own ending. I have all the colors,” Maj said, taking a big bite of her sandwich.
“Anyway,” Byrd said. “All good stories have interesting beginnings. And we might not be able to find a happy ending, but damn, we got the interesting beginnings down pat. And even though a lot of bad things happened to those who came before us, there’s got to be a happy ending. I think. Because that’s what you’re missing.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
“What happens after any ordinary happy ending?”
“More beginnings. And more endings. Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Because the only ending would be death, and in our case, that isn’t actually an end.” Eleanor sighed. “Oh, Byrd, I don’t know which way is up anymore.”
“It just all depends on how you look at it, Elly. I mean, we’re all dyin’ every day. Some days it worries me, and some days it don’t. I’m just going to come back and haunt you all anyway.”
Eleanor smiled. “Maybe it’s time you finish telling me Anne’s story. Maj, why don’t you go play? But no wandering off to high clifftops this time.”
“Okay, Mama. I’m gonna go to the attic to finish my new drawing with Anne.”
“Love you, baby girl.” Eleanor brought Maj in for a quick squeeze before letting her skip away. She briefly wondered what picture Maj was working on but let the thought get lost as she turned to Byrd. “So, Nan is dead, and Anne just lost whatever chance she had at her own happy ending. What happens next?”
“Nan’s funeral was a disaster, evidently. There was Lucy having relations with the funeral director, and Anne catching them in the act. And then there was the fact that Anne had avoided William since she got out of the hospital. He wanted to talk to her, you know … kiss and make up. Talk about the baby they lost. Things like that. But she wasn’t having it. So the night of Nan’s funeral, she decided to kill herself.”
“Well, she obviously didn’t do it. You’re here after all.”
“Cousin Eleanor, there are many ways to die.”
Eleanor raised an eyebrow. “How dramatic, young Cousin Byrd.”
Byrd ignored her and continued. “As you hear the rest of this story, I dare you not to believe that a big huge chunk of Anne, my crazy great-grandma, died in that fall. Because as strange as she was before, as downright evil as people thought she was, she got exponentially crazier after that terrible day.”
&nb
sp; 25
Anne in the Garden with a Train Ticket
1957
Anne sat on the beach, staring at the waves.
Just three hours earlier, Nan had been buried at that shit show of a funeral. She shivered and raked her hands through the shell-peppered sand. Periwinkles, moon snails, coquina clam, oysters.
A storm must be off the coast, she thought. A man-made stone pier stretched out into the mist on her right, most of its rocks already submerged. The waves slapped angrily against them. In the fading light, everything had become gray, the sea and sky one. But dark clouds had rolled in, breaking everything into a living, breathing, undulating black-and-white photograph. Anne was awestruck by its intensity. She often felt a want, a deep longing, to be inside of nature, part of the actual process, to feel the whole thing. She felt it in the fall when the leaves would change. She wanted to be able to experience the whole vivid display of reds and oranges and yellows all at once instead of one or two trees at a time. She wanted it all to crash over her, through her. It seemed to her that human eyes had a very limited existence. There was so much more to see and not enough windows in the body.
Anne took off her shoes and walked thought the sand, cutting a sharp diagonal to the left to walk on the rocks. She was going to walk out to sea. If she was going to kill herself, it had better be cinematic.
The rocks were cool and wet beneath her feet. She knew to avoid the dark spots of slippery seaweed and the barnacles—they drew blood, and why shouldn’t they? They were alive, and her feet would hurt them, too, as she made her way slowly out to the very edge. A perfect stillness came over her even as the waves crashed all around her. She could hear the roar of the ocean, the crush of the waves on the rocks, the sucking in of the tide, the rushing out of the tide, until the wind rushed in, filling her eardrums with its whistles and ghostly screams. Then just as quickly, it would retreat, and the sounds of the ocean would pummel her again. She felt the mad sea spray on her face, God’s spit, God’s blessing, it slapped her, burned her, made her unable to see. She closed her eyes against it and raised her arms up so that the wind could just take her, and for a moment, she thought that the earth, the sea, the rocks, the horizon, the clouds, the sky, would all just swallow her up, because for one moment she felt she had achieved what she had spent so long searching for, a “oneness” with the planet.
It’s time, thought Anne.
“Anne!”
William’s voice rose above it all, and Anne’s spell was broken. She would not, after all, be swallowed up by the sea. She felt torn: throw herself in and end it now (begin it?).
All of a sudden she was a bit cold, and a little off balance on the rocks (the water was up to her ankles now), and she felt a feeling she didn’t like. She felt afraid.
“I’ll not die afraid,” she said. “I will walk from this earth with a straight back and a fearless disposition if it kills me.” She turned toward William. “Keep your pants on, Will. I’m just thinking. Why don’t you just go on home?” she called.
“Anne, please talk to me. You owe me this much.”
“I owe you?” she said, rushing back to the beach to face him.
“I lost the same dream you lost.”
“Fine. What do you want?”
“Marry me. Just marry me and let’s try again.”
William had tears in his eyes. He tried to hold them back, but Anne saw his Adam’s apple moving back and forth, choking down the hurt.
If he’d just waited a second longer. If he’d been brave enough to let those words of love and support linger inside of Anne, let them take hold, this story would have a much different ending. But instead, he said, “I’m going to seminary, Anne. If you won’t have me, I have to go.”
Amore women never respond well to threats.
“You want to be a priest, Will? You?” She laughed in that cruel way she learned from her mother. “And when will you start diddling little boys? Hmmmm? These things are, what did Gwen say? Cyclical, you know.… It happened to you, you will do it to someone else.…”
William stared at her in disbelief.
“You don’t get it, Anne. You don’t get it and you never will. After I met you, those things never bothered me anymore. Every time it happened, I thought of you. I thought about us, escaping, being a family. Like it was the price I had to pay. But I am done paying, Anne, especially for something that I can’t have. If I can’t have you, then I don’t want anyone, and the only thing left for me is the only thing I know.”
“Don’t you do this to me, Will. Don’t you make me say this. I will hate you for it. You know who I am, you know me. I can’t love you! I can’t leave here!” Anne wanted to throw up. If William was asking this of her, then he really didn’t know her. Which meant no one did, no one at all, except for ghosts.
He looked at her for a long time. He let his eyes linger over her pale face and angry, beautiful eyes. In his mind, he saw himself touch her hair. She smelled like roses. Had he ever told her that? Like wild roses. He walked away from her.
Anne was alone.
* * *
William wrote to her. But Anne never wrote back. He’d done the unforgivable.
He’d left her. That was all there was to it. And Nan had left her, too. Death was no excuse.
Everyone left her.
Anne didn’t like to dwell on how much she thought about her father. How many times she’d daydreamed about him swooping back in and taking her away. Protecting her.
The more she wanted it, the more she fought feeling anything at all.
That’s when she decided to go find him.
And Lucy couldn’t be bothered to care enough to stop her.
Lucy said. “You will terrify the entire gulf coast with your pale skin, and how do you know he even wants to see you?”
“He doesn’t have a choice.”
* * *
Anne stood outside the streamliner to Florida, thinking about just how amazing the world outside her small Witch House reality actually was. She wanted to watch the rushing people for hours. But her train was boarding. The streamliner was more art than transportation. Bulletlike, smooth. Gentle as well as dangerous. It astounded her. So Anne put her palms on the cold steel, but it was a new train. It didn’t have many stories to tell her fingers yet, so she let the tide of people move her into the coach.
The train ride took a day and a half. Anne was rapt the whole journey. It’s one thing to know that the world has all sorts of different places in it, to see pictures; it is another thing entirely to know it with all your senses. As the train went further south, the doors would open to let passengers on or off, and the smells that would come in were different from anything Anne was used to. Spicy and sweet. The smell of salt marshes and pine groves mixed with date palm and the heady perfume of tropical flora intoxicated her. The ground also became flatter, the stops less congested, the people friendlier. It was an amazing voyage. But then it was over, and it was time to do what she came to do. She stood before the open train doors, unsure of what to do or where to go next.
Trust yourself, she thought.
She got off the train, and the heat smacked into her, heavy and damp. Anne walked until she came to a street lined with tall live oaks and dripping with Spanish moss. Each tree was placed with care in front of an amazing brick dwelling with wrought-iron fences. They unfolded, magically, one after the other, as she walked by. They were close together and similar in architecture, but each house had its own flavor, its own character. They liked her well enough, but they weren’t her house, nor were they the house she was looking for.
She stopped in front of the house. There was a sign on the gate:
Magnolia House.
Gavin had just finished shaving in the sunny front bathroom on the second floor. He looked out the window and saw her right as she looked up. They locked eyes. He knew her instantly.
Gavin wiped off his face quickly, motioning for her to go around. Anne came through the gate and headed to the ba
ck of the house, taking in the stonework walkway and the lush tropical gardens. It was all so rich-seeming, so luxurious. Excess met with restraint. This is Southern charm, she thought: restrained excess.
The back of the house was one massive screened-in porch with several sets of wide planked whitewashed wooden steps leading to different entrances. Anne walked up the stairs feeling only half herself. She was not as nervous as she was excited to see Gavin. She paused, taking a moment to look the grounds over. Palms mixed with deciduous foliage and other fantastic shrubs, dotting the emerald green lawn. The landscaping pointed downhill, like perspective in a painting, to the dock and a sailboat and the river behind that led to the sea. Anne felt her world shift to Technicolor—the world of her father, her own personal Oz.
“A river…” she whispered. It was late afternoon, and the sun had bathed everything, Anne included, in a wash of golden light. She turned back around to knock, but Gavin had already opened the screen door. Her hand wavered midair, her jaw slack for a moment, and then she walked past him.
“Well now, this is a surprise. Come on in, my girl!”
“I’m already in,” Anne said. Of all the first words to her father, these were not the ones she expected to say.
“I know … just tryin’ to lighten up the air a tiny bit.” He shut the door, turning to greet her properly with an open hand. Gavin watched an internal struggle play across her face. She moved toward him stiffly with her arms open, as if she were going to embrace him (which would have been surprising, yet fine with him), but her face was contorted in contempt and her neck strained backward against the rest of her body. Gavin had heard of mixed emotions, but this was ridiculous.
“Okay, fine!” Anne burst out, stomping her foot before she shot toward him, flinging her arms around him. Gavin hugged her tight. She smelled like Lucy, like roses. God how he missed her.
“Shhhhhh…” he hushed. “I’m right here, it’s okay now, Pap’s got ya’. I’m right here. Now, what brings you all this way, honey? Not that I am displeased to see you, but I would have liked to prepare for your arrival.”
Anne pulled herself away, mad at herself for touching him—for seeming weak.
The Witch House of Persimmon Point Page 18