by Laura Sibson
“I’m Geraldine Mitchell.”
I turned to find my grandmother behind me in the foyer like some odd version of Mary Poppins. Her long gray hair was braided and twisted into a crown on the top of her head. She wore a long jacket and in one hand she held an umbrella like it was a walking stick.
“How—?” I looked around. “W-when—?” I stuttered, but my grandmother walked past me to the officers sweating on our porch.
“I guess this is about Maura, then, isn’t it?”
The officers seemed surprised, but then they didn’t know GG. I did know GG, so I wondered how long she’d had this sense. And when she’d arrived. I’d been in the kitchen studying since Mom had left, so I would’ve seen her come in through the back door. But those thoughts dissolved when I heard the officer’s words.
As the female officer spoke, GG was still as stone in contrast to the breeze that picked up around us. The wind ruffled the plants. The branches of the trees began to sway. The porch swing moved as though someone were rocking back and forth on it, and all of the wind chimes were set swinging; a cacophony of sound.
“Edie,” she said. “We must go.”
And then we were speeding to the emergency room of the closest hospital. Inside was a foreign space of white sterility. Eventually a doctor came to speak with us. She said a lot of things, but I only registered a few of them, like too much damage and we did all that we could do. They didn’t let me see my mother, which only added to my sense that it hadn’t truly happened. It could not have happened. She’d been right there. In front of me.
By the time we left the hospital, the rain was coming hard and fast. The ride back to the house was slow, with the windshield wipers thumping back and forth, our car a tiny boat in the vast ocean of my mother’s death. On my lap was the canvas bag. The one that Mom had carried on her shoulder when she left for the bike ride. I didn’t remember anyone handing it to me, but I clutched it to my body during the drive home.
Back at the house, I sat on my bed and considered the bag. It was blackened with road dirt. Inside, were two bruised apples, a decimated bag of cookies, a small purple velvet pouch with a silk drawstring, and a red leather journal with a Celtic knot on the cover. The book and the purple pouch had somehow remained unscathed.
Inside the velvet pouch was a beautiful necklace made by Mom. The chain flowed like a shining river, and the pendant was a perfectly rendered silver acorn with a tiny leaf at the top. And on a small card, my mother’s handwriting. A note to me. This was the piece of jewelry Mom had made for me. I couldn’t handle it. Too soon. I poured the necklace back into the pouch and placed it in the top drawer of my dresser.
Then I crawled under my covers to wait for the day when my world would stop threatening to capsize.
The seasons turned even though my mother was gone. I went back to school. I ignored the holidays. Somehow spring arrived, and I ignored my birthday, and then summer had the nerve to come around again. GG announced that we’d be moving to her houseboat, where she lived when she wasn’t visiting us at the house in Baltimore.
I didn’t want to leave my home, the space where Mom and I had lived together. But here I am, alone on the roof of a houseboat with a ghost for a mother. And now I’ve run away from a party and my only friend just because someone—that interesting girl—tried to be kind by expressing condolences.
I stand up beneath the starry sky and begin to climb down the ladder from the roof of the boat. Ten months since Mom died. Nearly three weeks since I moved onto this boat. I let myself into our living quarters and head to my room, where I fall back on the bed. Now, instead of stars, I’m staring at the honey glow of the wood-plank ceiling. My phone lights up with a text. Tess asking if I’m okay.
I’m not sure I’m okay, so I reply that I’m sorry I bolted. I include a sad face emoji.
Tess sends back a broken heart emoji and asks if I want to talk. I don’t want to talk, but I don’t want to be an asshole either. So I just don’t answer. After a while she texts again, saying she’ll see me in the morning. I start to type that I’m not up for our morning run. Then I remember telling Tess that I would never bail on her. I respond with a thumbs-up and a time to meet in front of the diner.
I reach over to place my phone on the bedside table. Mom’s red journal sits beside the lamp. I don’t remember placing it there. I guess GG could have put it there, hoping I’d read it. Though GG doesn’t come into my room much. She believes in privacy. Picking up the book, I run my hand over the smooth leather cover. I wonder if Mom ever bolted from parties. I flip it open to the first entry from June 2003, the year before I was born.
Chapter Five
MAURA
June 21, 2003
When Mama returned from the hospital that night, she came to my room and sat on the side of my bed. She placed her hand on mine and opened her mouth to speak, but instead of words, feathers spilled out, oily black like night. They drifted toward the floor before disintegrating into ash. That’s how I knew my father had died.
Ever since he’d gone into the hospital a few days ago, I’d been wearing one of his old T-shirts. Every night, I wore it. So, when Mama came home late at night, I was wearing the shirt. My mother curled herself around my body as though I was still a small child and not an eighteen-year-old girl-woman.
We stayed like that while the house crashed around us, while the world remade itself in the shape of someone gone. When dawn slid her fingers around the blinds and into my room, illuminating our new world in cruel relief, my mother rose from my bed and left my room.
Mama did not speak, so I called my father’s sister, a woman I barely knew at all. She arrived and handled all the arrangements—as they called them, as if they were a cluster of Mama’s flowers. Mama remained silent during the arrangements. Dad, it turned out, had planned everything fairly well on his own. There was a letter with the details in his top drawer. It had been there for a while, probably. Mama knew it had been there, probably.
In the event of my death, it began. He had decided he would be cremated, and that his ashes would be stored in a red cedar box. I’m certain that he chose the wood because he loved working with cedar and not for its healing and cleansing properties. It’s not that he didn’t believe in our craft. He lived with us, after all. But he was a simple man when it came down to it.
Throughout all of it, Mama never opened her mouth. I made her the calming chamomile tea with a sprinkle of the soothing spell she’d taught me, but she didn’t touch it. She nodded to the people who came to hug us and clasp our hands in theirs. They said things that couldn’t help us. Not those words, anyway.
After it was all over and Dad’s sister had left, Mama and I sat in the silent house, looking at the cedar box that contained my father. Six days since Dad had died and my mother still hadn’t spoken. And my father had not appeared to us. Mama stood and went to the steps. I followed her up the stairs and to my mother and father’s room. Now it would only be my mother’s room. I watched as Mama pulled her travel bag from the shelf in her closet. I watched as she selected a few things, and I understood. I went to my room and did the same.
We met downstairs in the kitchen. We turned off the lights and left through the back door, not bothering to lock it. What we valued was in a red cedar box. We placed our bags in the trunk of the car. I settled into the passenger seat and Mama into the driver’s seat. Then we pulled out of the driveway and headed for the highway. We traveled with the sound of the car swallowing the black ribbon of road, my hands resting on the flat top of the box.
We arrived at the cabin in early evening. I breathed in the familiar smell of pine and earth. I watched fireflies dance in the waning purple shades of the day. We didn’t have keys because we rarely needed them. I whispered the words since Mama still wasn’t speaking, and the door opened for me. I sighed my comfort at being back at our beloved cabin, the rich smell of cedar filling me with thought
s of my father. I placed my father’s ashes in my room, on my dresser. One by one, Mama and I opened all the windows, inviting the evening air of the summer solstice to float through our cabin. Outside, the insects buzzed with evening chatter and the frogs croaked their replies. I walked down the steps to the dock, and I sat there, knees tucked under my chin, watching the water ripple before me, dark and alive. Mosquitos danced near me and away, never biting, one of the benefits of being my mother’s daughter. The rickety old houseboat bobbed in the water.
Last season, Dad had shown up at the dock driving it. He’d won it in a poker game, he said. Was he already sick then? Did his body know that it was beginning its march toward death? Did he know?
I wanted to see him, and I wondered if Mama’s silence was the reason he hadn’t appeared. I wondered if there was something we could do to bring him to us. An evening rain began to fall, so I climbed the steps back to the cabin. I’d expected that Mama would speak now that we were here. But on the porch, she rocked in her chair and stared out at the river, which met her silence with its own.
Chapter Six
EDIE
When I finish reading, I close the journal and hold it between my hands. Temperance lies on my pillow. Mom hovers nearby.
“I had no idea,” I breathe out the words, and I half expect to see feathers.
I hadn’t given much thought to the reality that Mom had been through what I’m going through now. That GG had now lost two beloved members of her small family. Mom still hadn’t seen her father’s ghost when she wrote this entry.
It had been days after the accident the first time I saw Mom. Maybe even a full week. I’d spent most of those days in bed, then I’d get up and run in the dark of night. Hours, days, dates—they held no meaning. But when I woke that day and I saw Mom, I was flooded with relief. She wasn’t dead. She was here, at my bedside, like any typical morning.
Only . . . she didn’t respond when I spoke to her, and if I paid any attention at all, I’d notice that her hair defied gravity, brown curls floating around her head. And she wasn’t exactly standing on the floor. She was floating. Maybe only an inch or so. But still. Also, there was the issue of no shadow.
After the third time Mom appeared to me, I went looking for GG. I found her in the kitchen repotting a gardenia.
“Morning, Edie.” GG examined me over her glasses. “It’s good to see you up in daylight.”
“I’ve been seeing Mom.”
GG didn’t stop sprinkling food at the base of the plant. “Oh, good! I hadn’t seen her, and I was beginning to wonder, but I saw her just this morning as well.”
“It’s true, then,” I said.
“Many things are true. Which one are you speaking of?”
I sighed. “That we see our dead?”
“It is the way of our family. Had you doubted that our dead stay with us?” GG stopped working with the gardenia to look at me.
“Maybe not doubted, exactly,” I say. “Maybe I’d hoped that it wasn’t true.”
I never denied that our family was different, magical, witchy. How could I? Each child born to a Mitchell possessed power over an element. And they had other talents, too. GG’s way with plants far surpassed the typical green thumb. And Mom’s ability with jewelry, well, people came from very far away to buy from her collection.
“As logical as you are, and you hoped for that?” GG asked. “Did you imagine that your mother and I talk to the air?”
“But it’s not normal.”
GG made a noise of annoyance. “Normal.” She shook her head and washed her hands. “Why you became so interested in normal is well beyond my understanding.”
I looked away. There were things that even GG didn’t know. But all that mattered now was that I was not taking part in any of it—not the way that GG could grow plants and infuse honey with something that exceeded what the bees provided, not the way that Mom created jewelry that held emotions. Not the way that each of them could command an element or brew remedies and tinctures that solved everyday problems. Now I could add to that list that I definitely wasn’t interested in seeing ghosts.
“Mom understood.”
“Your mother needed to teach you. And I’m certain that she would have. She had not planned for this.” GG gestures to indicate us being together and Mom being gone. “But your mother’s death and the fact that she never got around to teaching you does not change what or who you are. Make no mistake: you are a Mitchell woman. And you will need to learn what all of that means for you.”
Now, lying on my bed having read the first journal entry after bolting from the party because someone I don’t even know mentioned my mother’s death, the rocking of the boat maddens me.
I pull in a deep breath to steady myself the way Mom taught me when I was young. What can you touch? she’d ask. What can you smell? What can you hear? I try over and over, but it’s so hard to yank myself from the past. I think of the cabin and feel my mother’s grief overlaid with memories of how it was for me when Mom died.
There’s a slight sheen on the last page of her entry. It’s as if some wax was dripped or smeared on the paper. I run my finger over it. It’s smooth. The moment my finger touches it, though, I sense the zing of magic. The room is illuminated with a golden glow. I am awake and alert. Then, as though I just read them and it was imprinted on my retinas, I see directions for opening a stuck door.
A CHARM FOR STUBBORN LOCKS
1. Blow three times into the empty keyhole.
2. Press your left thumb against the keyhole.
3. Say these words: With my breath and words I’ve spoken, sticky lock, I bid you open.
4. Twist the doorknob and the door will open! I know the spell doesn’t sound very impressive. But it always works. I promise.
After a moment, the image dissolves. The room doesn’t seem so bright and the hyper-alertness fades. Now at the top of the page are the words A Charm for Stubborn Locks. I admire how Mom magicked the spell into the book more than the spell itself. I mean, how often do you come across a lock without a key?
No sooner have I had the thought than I picture the locked door to the cabin. Here is a way I can get in without my grandmother knowing. A glimmer of hope on a suck-ass night. I almost smile as I turn out the light to go to sleep.
* * *
* * *
I wake flooded with thoughts of Mom and GG in that cabin alone with their heartache. I put on my running gear to meet Tess for our morning run.
“Morning, Edie,” Tess says when I arrive.
“Are you greeting me with my actual name?” I ask. “No Barn Bolter or Soiree Sprinter?”
“Nah, not when you were obviously upset. Also, ‘Soiree Sprinter’? Give me more credit, please.”
That gets a smile out of me, which says a lot right now. We warm up at an easy pace down Main Street heading toward the bike trail that was once a rail line running alongside the river. “I’m thinking we do a tempo run today. Does that sound good?”
“To be clear—none of these runs sound good. I’m only doing this so I can catch my little brothers when I’m babysitting.”
“Fair,” I say. “Keep up with me and you’ll outrun ’em all.” I jokingly nudge her as I jog past.
“Oh, I’ll keep up,” Tess says, bumping me right back. “If by ‘keep up’ you mean fall down gasping for breath. Also, I have no idea what ‘tempo run’ means.”
“It’s when you push the pace for a sustained period,” I say. “Not quite race pace. We’ll do two miles.”
“If you say so.”
We fall quiet for a few minutes as we drop into our pace. “You want to talk about what happened last night?” she asks.
A motorboat roars down the river, pulling squealing kids on an inner tube.
“Any chance we can pretend it didn’t happen?” I ask.
We continue o
n, the bright morning sun slanting toward us.
“How ’bout those O’s?” Tess says, in an obvious bid to break the silence.
“Didn’t take you for a baseball fan.” I give her a small smile.
“I love all things summer.”
We run another half mile before I speak again. “It’s been ten months, but sometimes when it hits me, I feel like I’m drowning.”
“You mean about your mom being gone?”
“Yeah,” I say. We turn onto the trail and I start to pick up the pace. “It’s like I’m stuck in this in-between place. Trying to move forward but also wishing to have her back.”
The trail takes us toward the bridge that crosses over Cedar Branch River. The wood chips are soft beneath our feet and the trees shade us from the summer heat. It reminds me of the Stony Run trail at home where I loved to train.
“It’s a lot though, losing your mom. Maybe be patient with yourself?”
Instead of answering, I push the pace a bit more. Patience is not part of my DNA. Tess impresses me by keeping up.
“You’re doing great,” I say. “You sure you’ve never run before?”
“Ha!” she pants next to me. “I’m actually dying. And maybe a little back in middle school.”
A few people pass us coming from the other direction. A woman with a stroller, two guys running, a few people on mountain bikes. Tess greets every person with a smile and a wave.
“Do you know everyone in this town?” I ask.
“Almost,” she says. “But I’m an equal-opportunity greeter. Hey—did you ask your grandmother about the cabin?”
“Yeah, it was a no-go.”
“What do you mean?”
“She basically forbids me to go back there.”