Edie in Between

by Laura Sibson

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Viking,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Laura Sibson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780451481153

  Cover illustration © 2021 by Lisa Sterle

  Cover design by Jessica Jenkins

  Design by Opal Roengchai, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  For my mother, whose smile spreads magic

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Edie

  Chapter Two: Edie

  Chapter Three: Edie

  Chapter Four: Edie

  Chapter Five: Maura

  Chapter Six: Edie

  Chapter Seven: Edie

  Chapter Eight: Maura

  Chapter Nine: Edie

  Chapter Ten: Edie

  Chapter Eleven: Maura

  Chapter Twelve: Edie

  Chapter Thirteen: Maura

  Chapter Fourteen: Edie

  Chapter Fifteen: Maura

  Chapter Sixteen: Edie

  Chapter Seventeen: Maura

  Chapter Eighteen: Edie

  Chapter Nineteen: Maura

  Chapter Twenty: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-One: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Maura

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Maura

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Edie

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Maura

  Chapter Thirty: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-One: Maura

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Maura

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Edie

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Edie

  Chapter Forty: Edie

  Chapter Forty-One: Edie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  EDIE

  When I wake to the chaotic sounds of the marina on this summer morning, I hear my grandmother in the houseboat’s kitchen, chatting with our ancestors. Sun streams through my small square window. Temperance, at the bottom of my bed, licks her paw and her tail flicks idly. There is a scent of honeysuckle and my mother floats near the bedroom door.

  I smush the pillow over my head, wishing for the oblivion of sleep. But it’s no use. By the time I roll out of my narrow bed to slip my feet into flip-flops, Mom’s gone. I peel off the tank top I slept in and pull on a sports bra and T-shirt. I slept in my running shorts. I’m efficient that way. I open my top drawer in search of a hair tie. Instead, my hand finds the dark purple velvet pouch. I open it, like I do most days. The silver necklace with the acorn pendant pools in the bottom, winking at me from the shadows. I pull out the tiny note handwritten by Mom: For when you need me with you. I close my eyes against the blaze of loss until it fades. Then I tuck the note back into the pouch with the necklace, tighten the drawstrings, and return it to my drawer.

  After tugging my wavy mass of hair into an out-of-my-way ponytail, I head for the kitchen. Temperance leaps from the bed and slides ahead of me as if to say that it was her idea all along to go find my grandmother.

  Sure enough, GG is surrounded by ghosts while she works with her herbs at the kitchen counter. She moves around my grandfather, Edward (cancer), to grab some calendula overhead, but then she backs into her sister, Mildred (heartbreak). GG’s parents (old age for one, pneumonia for the other) come and go, as do some Mitchell witches who must be a century dead at this point.

  As long as I’d been in Cedar Branch—two weeks today—not a day has passed that GG didn’t talk to dead relatives, often while torturing some innocent plants. She chopped them or smashed them or hung them from clothespins that perched on the string crisscrossing the ceiling. The plants, not the relatives. As ghosts, the relatives were incorporeal. They were also silent, but that didn’t stop GG from conversing with them.

  “Should be nice weather tonight for the solstice,” she says to her sister. “Pity the full moon isn’t for a few days yet. That would have made for a very powerful evening.”

  GG mashes a pile of basil. Must be for the poultice that calms mosquito bites. Very popular this time of year. GG prepares and sells many salves and healing remedies. But what she’s most known for is her honey. People describe my grandmother’s honey as revelatory, illuminating, and lifesaving. It may be difficult to believe that all those claims are true, but I’m not saying that they’re not.

  “What did those herbs ever do to you?” I ask, my tone teasing.

  “Good morning, Edie.” GG glances up and smiles at me. Her long gray hair is braided down her back. Years of work outside has turned her white skin a weathered tan. She wears loose linen pants and over her cotton shirt is a smock, protecting her clothes from the messy war with herbs. Her feet are bare.

  The houseboat rocks gently, an ever-present reminder that we are not on land—that I am far from the home I shared with my mother in Baltimore. When I first moved onto the boat, the constant rocking made me uneasy. I couldn’t wait for my feet to feel solid, unmoving ground. Now, after only a handful of weeks, the rocking fades in and out of my awareness, but I still miss my house—and my old life.

  The prisms hanging in the east windows cast rainbows of color across the room and through the ghosts, speckling me as I walk to the French press, avoiding the spirits in my path. Unlike GG, I choose not to interact with them.

  The houseboat is bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. I don’t mean that it seems bigger. I mean that it’s literally bigger. You’d imagine that GG would only have a tiny galley kitchen on this boat, but the counter is spacious (though there can never be enough room for me to avoid lingering ancestors). I had thought to ask GG how she’d managed that extra space, but she might mistake my curiosity for interest in our family magic, so I’ve kept my question to myself.

  I duck to avoid getting smacked in the head by the bundles of herbs hanging like bats in a cave. There are also miniature plants and butterflies suspended in clear orbs. Bones dangle from the ceiling, too. Tiny ones stacked and strung together. They clack when you bump in
to them. I try not to bump into them.

  “That coffee’s is not likely to be hot anymore,” GG says, her attention returned to the basil before her.

  “I meant to get up earlier,” I say.

  “I’m not judging,” GG says.

  It’s true. GG doesn’t comment about my sleep or eating habits, so long as I do in fact eat and sleep at some point.

  Same with Mom. Back at home, runners on my cross-country team had commented more than once how lucky I was that my mother allowed me to come and go whenever I pleased—sleep all day if I needed to and eat whenever I was hungry. They’d said I’d wasted all of that freedom because I didn’t use it to stay out late at parties. But I had wished for parents like theirs, who had normal-people jobs and paid attention to when their kids left the house and returned. When I let this wish slip to Mom, it was cause for Tea and a Talk. For this, Mom brewed a mix of spearmint and lemon verbena.

  Over steaming cups, Mom explained that she viewed mealtimes and sleep times as arbitrary. I’d argued back that adolescents crave structure and need it to develop a sense of safety. She asked if I’d ever felt unsafe. I admitted I hadn’t. I always felt loved by my mother and safe in our home.

  Ten months ago, when my days were turned upside down by Mom’s death and I slept all day and haunted the house in the dark hours of night, no one stopped me. GG brought tea of lemon balm and hawthorn berries, sweetened with her own honey. It took me a month or so, but I managed to get myself back on a more conventional schedule. I had to if I wanted to get anything done and stay on track to graduate summa cum laude.

  Now, in the kitchen of the houseboat on this humid June morning, GG looks up from her herbs to inspect me more closely. “Off for your morning run?”

  “Soon.” I slide into the bench seat of our dinette and lean my nose over the coffee. GG was right. It’s not piping hot, but it’ll do. Brigid’s crosses made of straw and triquetras of iron perch on the heads of the windows. Witch balls hang in front of several of them. GG hasn’t spared any magical protection symbols here. There’s an iron triquetra over the window in my room, too. The only part of the room that GG said I could not change.

  Mom appears across the table. I close my eyes tight, but when I open them, she’s still there. Beautiful, as always, her wavy hair floating around her face. Her smile brilliant, like the last day I saw her alive.

  “It’s not getting any easier, Geege,” I say into my coffee.

  “Give it time. It’s the way—” GG starts to say the thing she has said every time I bring this up.

  I hold up my hand. “Please. Just don’t.”

  There is a moment of quiet and then GG speaks again.

  “What does this solstice hold for you?” she asks. “Or is it yet undetermined?”

  “I’m working. Sundays are busy.”

  Even though I’d fought coming here, once I was here, it was obviously pointless to do nothing all day. I’d found Tess, my new running partner, on one of my first runs here. And then she got me the job at the ice cream shop. I planned my ACT and SAT study schedule around my work and training hours. And the rest of the time? Well, the rest of the time, I wished I could go home.

  “I’m leaving soon for the perpetual woods and I’ll be there into the evening to honor the day,” GG says. “Would you like to join me?”

  “No thanks.” I guess I should give GG credit that she keeps trying, but I was not going to be carrying on these family traditions with her. I pour the lukewarm coffee down the drain, watching the brown liquid swirl counterclockwise before disappearing.

  “You’ll need to learn at some point,” GG says.

  “We’ve been over this.”

  And we had. At least once a day. GG was displeased to learn that Mom had not taught me the ways of the Mitchells. But Mom had understood. She knew that I hadn’t been ready, and she never pushed me. Only now, she’s gone. And I’m still not ready. Not after what happened.

  “Edie, you cannot deny who—or what—you are forever. There are consequences.”

  I set the coffee mug in the sink with more force than I intend. “If you’d let me go home like I’ve asked, I could live in peace. Away from this.” I gesture with my hand to the herbs, the bones, the witch balls. All of it.

  “Well.” She sets aside her knife and wipes her hands on her smock. “The plants need me.” GG’s terse words and clipped movements show me that she’s not pleased with the way this conversation has gone.

  Now that we are at the longest day of the year, the plants are beginning a quest to take over the entire roof of our houseboat. Tomatoes and herbs and flowers burst off the roof like abundant hair.

  GG stops at the door that leads to the back deck of the boat. “You are welcome to join me, should you change your mind.”

  I wish I were welcome to return to my home in Baltimore, not welcome to join her for her Celtic worship sessions in the perpetual woods.

  “I won’t change my mind,” I say.

  “So you say, but you know where I’ll be?”

  “Yes.” Before I stopped learning about our magic, before I realized that it wasn’t for me, there was plenty that I had learned. The names and meanings of trees, the eight major celebrations, basic recipes for basic problems, and the clearing in the woods where GG keeps her bees and where all the rituals take place. I almost miss that place—the magical clearing with its perpetually blooming trees, bees buzzing around hives, and the sense of peace that I always felt when I was there.

  “I’m off to tend the plants, then,” GG says.

  As GG leaves the room, my eye catches on the handblown glass witch ball twirling in the middle window, casting purples and blues across the room as the light shines through it. Something shiny sparkles inside. My phone pings with a text and I pull my gaze away.

  Tess wonders whether I’m bailing on her or what. I reply that I’ll be there in five and get a GIF of a guy collapsing at the finish line of a race in response. I laugh, toss my phone on the counter, and trade my flip-flops for running sneakers.

  Our boat is docked at the farthest slot in the Cedar Branch marina. We are the only liveaboards. GG must have some agreement with Jim, who runs the marina. I’ve never asked about it. In the mornings, Jim seems to be everywhere at once. Some boats need to be rented, others filled with gas, and still others pulled out of the water for spray washing and who knew what else. But he always takes a moment to say hello to me. No matter how busy.

  “Mornin’, Edie,” Jim calls to me from the huge contraption that pulls boats out of the water. An Orioles baseball cap covers his sandy-brown hair, which is longish and curls a bit around his ears. “Going to be a hot one.”

  “Already is, but I don’t mind,” I call back. “Catch anything this morning?”

  Jim fishes when he can sneak out before the marina gets busy. He’s gone and back before I even wake up.

  “Yup. Nabbed a bass for my dinner.”

  “Nice! See you,” I say, waving.

  His smile is quick and genuine as he waves back. Then I’m off, up the short hill from the marina entrance to the shaded lane and then out to the main street with its line of shops and restaurants. Cedar Branch is a tiny town with no stoplights and no national chain stores. It’s somehow avoided becoming built up in the way of most towns around the Chesapeake Bay, maybe because it’s sort of remote. Coming from Baltimore, it’s unusual not to see a major drugstore, coffee shop, or bank on every corner. Then again, there aren’t many corners here. I find Tess gazing into the diner’s broad plate glass window. I stop next to her.

  “Are you lusting after the pancakes—or the boy serving them?” I ask.

  “Both?” She turns, smiling. “Almost gave up on you.”

  “Never give up on me.”

  “What’s the torture plan for today?” she asks. Her short strawberry blonde hair is held back from her wh
ite, freckled face by a bright pink headband. A tiny nose ring glints in the sun. She’s wearing a tank top with a picture of a unicorn pooping a glitter rainbow. Her running shorts match her headband. We must look startingly different (her: adorably girly, me: boring jock), not to mention she’s the super-extrovert and I’m the one who spends Saturday nights with test prep.

  “Loving the retro shirt,” I say.

  “Right?” I’d met Tess on the bike trail the second or third day I’d been in Cedar Branch. We were waiting our turns at a water fountain when I asked about mileage on the trail. It turned out she could use some support for her new running effort, and I wanted someone to work out with. We’ve been running most days since.

  “It’s a hill workout today. Where should we go?” I ask.

  “Ugh,” Tess says. “Hills? In this heat?”

  I grin. In these few short weeks, we’ve gotten to know each another pretty well. And Tess knows that I won’t give up on a workout due to weather or whining.

  “Fine,” she says. “For what passes for a hill around here, we want to head to Shaw Road.”

  “Lead the way.” I gesture for Tess to go ahead.

  “You’ll probably ditch me as soon as you learn these roads.”

  “I’ll never ditch you.”

  Tess laughs as we start our warm-up down Main Street. The seafood place is stocking up for the day. Al, the owner, calls out to Tess, who smiles and waves back. We weave our way around the summer people in line for coffee. The bar is quiet, as is the so-called metaphysical supply shop. We branch off from Main Street and go a while until we branch off again to a smaller road, which turns out to be Shaw. As Tess hinted, it isn’t much of a hill, but this area is so flat that I’ll take any elevation.

  “We’ll do repeats to that giant oak up there. Let’s take them fast to make up for lack of elevation, okay?”

  Tess nods and we set off up the dirt-and-gravel road, kicking up dust as we go. I’ve run two seasons of cross-country, starting my freshman year. I did really well for a freshman, but sophomore season was rough because Mom had just died. Going into junior year this fall, I want to place better than ever. Since GG had to move me here because of her work, I’d lost my summer training group and my regular routes. So it doesn’t matter to me that Tess is new to running. I crave company for my runs, and she wanted accountability.