The real Mary bounded down the stairs, pausing briefly when she saw Salter. “Hey,” she offered, uncertain, shifting on her feet.
Mary’s mother smiled. “You girls want something to drink? Snacks? I can whip up something.”
Salter imagined herself as Helene, and wondered what she would say now, the kind of nice thing Helene knew how to do, make everyone feel comfortable in her presence.
“No,” Salter said. “I’m watching my weight.”
Mary’s mother’s face fell, and Salter felt the woman’s eyes on her legs and arms, the boniness of her, the taut skin on her knees. But the woman muttered something and left.
“I didn’t say anything,” Mary told her, lowering her voice. “At Helene’s? I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.”
“Don’t matter,” Salter said. “Look, Helene, she’s … she’s my girlfriend, OK?”
“OK,” Mary said.
“Do you like her?”
“Sure.”
“Are you looking to fuck her?”
Mary stared, and Salter was reminded how young the girl was. “Don’t know what I mean? Fuck, you know, put your hands on her thighs, tongue in her mouth, let her do the same to you.”
“I don’t—”
“Forget it. Look. It’s fine if you do. Understandable. It doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”
Mary nodded and looked at the floor.
“All of us love her. You can’t help it. Just a thing that happens when you’re around her. So that makes you one of us, you understand?”
Mary nodded.
“Come on, then.”
* * *
Almond talked with Mary on the way over, which suited Salter just fine. The girl was full of wonder and nervousness, making note of everything they passed, even the fast food restaurants. How young this girl was.
When they arrived, Mary was rightfully in awe of the Witches Castle. Her whole body spoke of happiness as she reached out her hand and touched the old stones. She wiped her feet before she entered. Morrow offered her a cigarette, which Mary accepted, puffed without inhaling, and then coughed violently when Almond showed her how to do it properly. They showed her their hidden makeup, and let her put on the reddest lipstick they had. She did it sloppily, obviously new to the whole thing, until they explained it had to be done a certain way, not slathered all over like ChapStick.
The three of them stood around her, watching her feel the stones again, nicking her finger and placing it in her mouth. “Ouch.”
“Careful,” Morrow said, glancing at the others. “You might hurt yourself.”
They fell on her, and at first she did not react, but then she started to shake and cry out, they hit her with their firsts, kicked her in the belly, and Salter stomped her ankle. They used fishing wire cut from Almond’s father’s rods. The worst part was the screaming. This sort of thing must have been new to Mary, because these girls had all learned that screaming just makes it worse, and it was better to hold that all inside of you until it was over. So they gagged her with a piece of cloth ripped from Morrow’s shirt.
When she was trussed up, they sat around her and took the time to breathe deep. Salter snapped open the floorboards and took out the knives, which only made Mary squeal until they kicked her to quiet.
“How we gonna do this without the book?” Morrow asked Salter.
“I know what to say.” She hit her palm to her chest. She did it again when Morrow scowled.
The girls followed Salter’s instructions and placed their palms against the other, each with a knife between them.
“Holy Mother,” Salter began, and Morrow and Almond followed her lead, repeating after her. “Bloody Mother.”
“Bloody Mother,” they chanted. “Bloody Mother.”
They kneeled in front of Mary and began to make shallow cuts on her knees, on her belly, between her toes and on her palms. Salter put her knife up below Mary’s eyes and said, “You move, and I will lay you so low the earth won’t remember where I’ve buried your bones.”
Mary stilled, and Salter cut two lines on her face so that the tears and blood would mix with the snot. They laughed and flexed their hands, telling one another how they already felt the strength. The Bloody Mother was smiling down on them. When Mary was more wetness than skin, they stopped and put down their knives. They would have to wait until night to finish.
* * *
They took turns watching her while the other two would sit outside and smoke. The day dragged, and they had to beat Mary each time she made a noise, but soon enough she figured out the game and stayed silent. Salter was the one who saw her piss herself, but she said nothing. Each girl expressed, quietly to the other, how surprisingly easy it was to do the things that had been done to them to someone else, almost like the memory had been beaten into their bones and now they could perform the same without much trouble.
Helene arrived when the sun was near the horizon and the sky was red. Morrow kept her outside and called for Salter, who stepped out while the other two girls went in.
“You OK?” Helene asked, putting her hand on Salter’s temple. “Ah, he got you. He got you good. But it’ll heal. Always does. Why didn’t anyone tell me we were coming here?”
Salter put her head on Helene’s shoulder and breathed her in.
“Tell me something good,” Salter said. “Please.”
Helene wrapped her arms around the girl.
“What if your bruises healed? That would be good.”
“Not good enough.”
Helene rocked Salter back and forth. She started to list all sorts of changes that might be ahead of them, still: cars, the coasts, kicking their cigarette habit, even their skin getting so hard that once someone hit them again they wouldn’t even feel it, because they’d be immune.
“Not good enough.”
Helene said, “Whatever happens, I’ll be there.”
“Promise?” Salter said. “Yeah?”
Helene almost promised, but her head turned toward the stone house when she heard a squeal. She detangled her body and went inside, Salter trailing after.
“She won’t shut up,” Morrow said, slapping the bound girl on the back.
Mary wailed much louder than they’d heard her do before when she saw Helene.
After all this, Salter thought she would take some kind of joy or comfort in Helene seeing the girl like this, but she felt nothing at all, not even as Helene protested, as asked them what the fuck they were doing, as she took a swing at Morrow for standing in her way, but Morrow had long since learned how to duck. Even when Helene started to cry as much as the girl, she didn’t feel one thing one way or the other, just a kind of memory that she should probably feel something, but was not quite sure what.
But she did know that she loved Helene, so she told her what they were going to do, how they had to do this dirty thing to summon the Bloody Mother, because they were sick as shit at being beaten down like they were, and so it was their turn. Helene only cried harder, but that was just the sort of good person she was, the kind of girl who would cry for just about anything, because she could feel whatever she wanted to for anyone.
Helene asked why it had to be Mary, of all the people-fucks who they lived around, and all the people-fucks in the entire world.
“Because she isn’t us,” Salter said.
Helene sniffed, then she nodded, said she understood, in the way they always understood one another. “I can’t stay for this,” Helene said, running a hand over her swollen, mucky face. She looked Mary straight in the eye as the younger girl started crying hard. “I don’t have an excuse, I gotta go back home. They’re expecting me. They might come looking.”
They walked outside, and Salter fully expected Helene to tell her she was crazy, to demand that she let Mary go and be done with this whole mess, or worse, that none of this w
as real, and she’d made the whole Bloody Mother thing up, it was just a story in a book full of lies.
Instead, Helene wiped her eyes and asked if Salter wanted to hear one last good thing.
Of course.
“There isn’t nothing good left anymore.”
* * *
Mary’s eyes were closed when Salter came back inside, and Morrow said she had to kick her to keep her quiet, and she may have kicked too hard. Salter did not say so, but she thought that might be a kindness after all.
“Did you bring it?” Salter asked Morrow, who nodded in the affirmative. She went outside and came back with a red gallon jug. Almond wobbled on her feet.
“This isn’t funny anymore,” she said.
Salter turned to her and bared her teeth. “Are you out?”
“Course not,” Almond said. “Just saying. Not funny.”
“It isn’t supposed to be.”
They followed Salter’s lead. She cut her own palms and wiped the blood over her face, because they must mirror the Bloody Mother, as she had in the motel. She repeated, Bloody Mother, Bloody Mother, Bloody Mother, and shivered across her whole body. This is how magic must happen, the kind of magic for unlucky girls, their whole bodies twisted up and their voices going numb as they repeated the words. Morrow emptied the jug on Mary, and the sweet stench of the gas made it all the more real what they were about to do. What they were about to become.
Salter lit a cigarette, took a long breath in, and dropped it onto the girl.
The fire was fast, and it consumed far quicker than it ought to have, but that too was just part of the ceremony of the whole thing, and the heat was the magic, and the blood that oozed out was the magic, and though Morrow kept her distance and Almond backed up as far as she could, shaking her head, Salter stepped closer, and waved the flame toward her, breathing in the smoke as she could any burning thing she put in her mouth.
She burned all the things she hated in that girl’s body, and then she burned fat-fuck Daddy too, the lazy fuck, and his cramped house and his boxes of rocks, and she burned her mother because she lived in that house without living. The fire spread in a straight line across the whole shit town, and knew it must be erupting up like a beautiful thing, washed pure in flames. She burned the church where the old man lingered, made sure to spend a few extra minutes on his hands and mouth, really tear him up good. She spread it out all around them, from coast to coast, and then jumped across the water, and burned everything on the other side of it all. She burned just outside, because she wanted to burn as well. The Bloody Mother wouldn’t let her come to harm, not at the height of her power. This was love, after all, the kind that hurt as much as it made what it cherished powerful, and everything had ever hurt and would ever hurt would be crisped and dead. Once she stepped outside she would walk along the ashes until she found Helene, who was not allowed to burn, because good things could not burn like the rest of the garbage, and together they would dig until they found green things buried under the ash, and start again. There was still worth left, underneath.
She was fire itself.
Morrow was the one who threw water over the dead girl, and the splash hit Salter. She looked outside, fully expecting the charred remains, for how could it be anything less, when it had been so very very hot?
It was as green and dark and clear as it had ever been.
Salter dug up one of their handheld mirrors and looked at her reflection, and what she saw looking back at her was what she always saw, the same nothing face, the reddened skin and acne scars, the same brown eyes, the same unbrushed hair. Only there was her own blood on her cheeks, just as she had left it outside of her body.
“There isn’t fucking anything!” Salter, screaming. “There wasn’t supposed to be nothing!”
She shook the dead girl’s body, willing anything to come out, residual magic that must be there. She screamed and screamed until the night erupted in blue and red lights, and wailing sirens and voices, and she heard men’s voices, guttural, telling the girls to put up their hands, and then Helene’s voice, crying, telling them to please don’t shoot, please do not shoot, those are my friends. Morrow fell to her knees and bit her lips together to keep them shut, but Almond ran, crying out that she didn’t know, didn’t know, until one of the men in blue tackled her and forced her face into the ground. A man was wrenching her arms behind her and saying something, but all Salter heard was his disgust, the way he couldn’t quite form a sentence, gagging as he was on the air. Salter met Helene’s eyes, saw her mouthing I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but she had no idea what Helene had to be sorry about.
Yet Helene kept crying in a way that made it seem like she would never stop, and all she would be from then on was a body that only held sadness, and Salter knew she had tapped into a cruel, wrong sort of magic after all, because Helene’s sorrow would fall to the earth and take root, as all pain does, and every once in awhile, when it rained, it would rise up and remember, and try to hurt whatever came near it, because that kind of thing knows only one way, and no better than that.
Juniper
When my father leaves in the morning, my mother asks me to go outside and find the plant with the fleshy leaves and the pinkish-white flowers. I place my thumb and second finger around the olive green buds and strangle them into a basket. When it is so full that the berries drop over the edge, I run home and give them to Mother. She thanks me with a long kiss on my forehead. She fills a jar with water and salt, so much salt that when I stick my finger in the wet and bring it to my lips I pucker. Mother slaps my hand away and tips the basket into the salt water. Some fall onto the table. Those I pluck and plop into my mouth while Mother tightens the jar lid. She places it on a high shelf next to the ripened fruit with a thousand seeds that my father gave her months ago. The jar skims the side of the fruit and, though the jar is smooth, the bright film holding the juice of the seeds has been waiting to break, and the slight jostle makes one of them burst and bleed.
All white and splotchy-pink, my brother cries in Father’s bedroom. Mother chops tomatoes with a heavy knife.
Because my brother is too young to play with me, I go outside and climb the juniper tree my father’s great-great-great-grandfather planted when he was a little boy. Once, my father told me that the juniper tree used to grow straight up as all trees do, but junipers grow with all their beauty aching at the top, and ours stretched with so much heavy loveliness that the leaves and branches weigh down its trunk. It is bent in half, like a woman craning her arms over her head and behind her knees, and all its loveliness drags on the dirt.
I climb to the top bend and dangle my feet. My brother cries so loudly I can hear him through the window in my father’s bedroom, but he does not cry like a brother should. He sounds like a twittering sparrow, those small brown birds with tiny bones and unremarkable voices, but once you hear them you remember the color of your front door, and the way it whines when you pull it open.
The juniper tree is not far from my father’s window, and I watch my mother slam into my father’s room. Her dress and hands are stained with tomato pulp. My brother, who is not really my brother, stops his twittering. Young though he is, he knows when Mother is angry, and when she enters my father’s bedroom she is always angry.
When I was in my mother’s belly, Father had prayed for a boy. Yet when he held me he said I was such a beautiful girl that he cried and almost dropped me in his joy, his hands were shaking with so much happiness, that is what he tells me. After, he went out to find a gift for my mother to thank her for carrying me. He was gone for many weeks, and my mother’s breasts were not enough to feed me all by her lonesome. She had to squeeze the teat of our neighbor’s goat, but the goat was inclined to dry up. I was born small and suckled little, and even now I only come up to my father’s waist.
When my father returned to her, he got down on his knees and gave my mother a red fruit. He peeled away the le
athery layer from one side, and there were thousands of dark seeds wrapped in paper-thin coverings, floating in rich juice. My mother held her hand open to receive it, and when my father gave it, the leather of the fruit grayed and hardened, the seeds burst in her hand, and it withered to half its size.
My mother ate one seed. She said it tasted like ash.
When I was older, I watched from my window the night my father went out alone with a small white candle. He kneeled before his forefather’s bent juniper and dug a shallow hole in the ground. He reached his left hand down to his thighs and trembled what lay between them, moaning all the while. When he sighed, he covered the hole and kneeled his lips to the ground and placed a kiss. He went inside with dirt on his face, and when I saw my mother in the morning there were dirt lips on her cheeks.
After, Father spent long months away from home, and during those months my mother stayed in the kitchen and smoked thin cigarettes. I asked her what was wrong, why didn’t she move, but she only put her hand on my head and told me she was waiting for bad news, and that you must always wait for it in stillness, else it will arrive sooner than you like. When my father returned, he had a baby on his arm, fresh born, wrapped in white linen and with a diaper that smelled of rotting avocado. There was dirt on the babe’s fingers and neck.
He needs changing, my father said to my mother. And milk.
Mother would not look at him.
When I reached to feel the baby’s skin my father told me that the baby had been born of the tree outside—just like a miracle, this boy was!—and I was to love him as if he was my own brother, because he was, even if he really was not. He looked at my mother when he said this, though she would not look at him. She shook the ash off her cigarette.
Does the tree have a name? she asked him.
Father put his hand on my head and told me to go to my room. I did not move fast enough, and his thick fingers started to hurt, so I hid myself in the darkened corner of the living room. I am so small that I can hide in nearly any spot without being discovered, and so quiet that once I am out of sight I disappear.
Magic for Unlucky Girls Page 16