by Laura Sibson
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure.”
When I got back to the cabin, I wrote a letter to Jamie. He deserves to know, I guess. I wrote the letter and told him that I’m having the baby and I don’t need or want his support. I wrote it. I sealed it. And I mailed it before I could change my mind. When I returned, I looked for Mama.
Chapter Thirty-Three
EDIE
I shut the journal and sit for a moment, allowing this new truth to settle. I’d realized that Jamie must be my father. But now Jamie was no longer a dim figure from Mom’s past. He was someone who broke my mother’s heart. Someone I knew, who I’d seen every day of my time in Cedar Branch.
“What is it?” Rhia looks up from doing inventory. “Did you figure it out? Was something revealed?”
This new bit of information makes me want to share what I’ve realized. “Rhee,” I say. “Jim is . . . my father.”
“What?” Rhia breathes out the word. “What are you saying right now?”
“Jamie, my mom’s big summer love, is Jim. And Jamie is my father. Which means Jim is my father.”
“Holy shit,” Rhia says, lowering her clipboard. “You never knew?”
“I mean, I was starting to put things together. I figured Jamie to be my father. But I didn’t know until today that Jamie was Jim. Maybe I should have, but I wasn’t ready to face it full-on, you know?”
“You never knew your dad at all?”
I shake my head again. “My mom used to tell me this fairy tale about how there once was a girl-woman who was so sad and who wished for a girl-baby and then the girl-baby arrived. And that was supposed to be where I came from. When I got old enough, we fought about it. I told her that I wanted to know who my father was. Not some magical story. But she never told me.”
“I wonder why?” Rhia says thoughtfully. “I mean, Jim seems like a good guy.”
“I think I know why,” I say, tapping the cover of the journal with my finger. “Mom had told him about her magic. He didn’t believe her. Told her that she needed help.”
“No, he did not!” Rhia slams her pen on her clipboard.
I toss Mom’s journal on the table. “Yeah, he sure did.”
“That’s bananas!” Rhia says. “Are you okay? This is a lot.”
“It is a lot, isn’t it?” My breathing hitches slightly.
“Yeah, it is.” She reaches out and squeezes my hand. “Are you going to talk to him?”
“I have to.”
* * *
* * *
“Back so soon?” Jim asks when I show up at the marina again.
My stomach jumps with nerves. I rub my hands together and remind myself that I’ve spoken to this man almost every day since I moved here in June. “I have something to talk to you about.”
His nod suggests that maybe he knows.
I hand him the life jacket. “I didn’t actually need this.”
“Okay.” Jim accepts the life jacket and walks into the back area with all of the rental gear. I follow him in.
“And I took this.” I hold up the necklace.
Jim’s eyebrows go up. “I see.”
I shift on my feet. “You used to be called Jamie?”
“Yes.” He whispers the word out. He clears his throat. “Yes, a long time ago.”
“My mother”—my voice cracks—“got pregnant with a boy named Jamie. Here in Cedar Branch.” I feel tears filling my eyes. “Pregnant with me.”
We stand face-to-face and it’s like we’re actually seeing one another for the first time.
Jim places his hand against his mouth. “You’re my daughter. You’re really my daughter.” His voice is clouded with emotion.
“You didn’t know, either?” I ask.
“That I might be your father?” Jim takes his cap off, rubs his hand across his hair, and mashes his cap back on. This is a habit I know and recognize. Now I see it in a new way. It’s not just Jim’s habit, this is my father’s habit. He shakes his head. “Not for sure. You’ve got my hazel eyes.” His eyes crinkle when he says it. “And I hoped. I mean, you’re an amazing kid. But I didn’t know for sure.”
“What happened?”
Jim squints at the shining river, but I imagine that he’s picturing the past. “That summer, she’d just lost her dad.” Jim looks at me. “Your grandfather. She and I were like magnets. Couldn’t stay apart. But I had already signed up for the Peace Corps and I had to leave. Then she told me something about herself that I couldn’t accept.”
“She told you that she could do magic.”
Jim nods. “I didn’t believe her. Didn’t believe in magic.”
“Her journal says that she wrote a letter to you telling you about me.”
His brow wrinkles. “I never received it. But I’m not surprised. There was barely phone service and the mail was not reliable.”
“And you’d ended it anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess I had ended it.”
“Have you been married?” I ask. “Have kids? Other kids, I mean.” Maybe it’s rude to ask this, but I feel that I have a right to know.
Jim shakes his head. “No, I guess I was married to work and travel.” He smiles then, a sad smile. “But I never forgot Maura. From time to time, I’d try to look her up.”
“Mom didn’t have an online presence.”
Jim’s eyes sparkle when he smiles for real. “No, she sure did not.”
“Are you still skeptical of what she told you?”
He holds my gaze for a moment before he breaks it. “No, no I’m not. During all the travel I did, engaging in so many different cultures and belief systems, I came to realize that there is more to this world than what meets the eye. I only wish I’d realized it much sooner.”
“I asked Mom from time to time who my father was, but she never told me. She also said I should never mix magic with relationships, which sort of makes sense now.”
Jim looks at me and his eyes are full of shame. “Edie, I’m so sorry.”
Something flashes in my mind, a connection. “She wrote that you didn’t bring the boat back to the dock after the work was done. You parked it here at the marina?”
Jim stares at his feet. “There’s nothing that I can say. I was young and stupid.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” If the houseboat has been at the marina all this time, then maybe the last item is on the boat. I clarify. “Has our houseboat been docked here ever since then?”
Jim’s brow furrows as he thinks. “I was gone for years, but I’m pretty sure it’s stayed here all that time. Why?”
I grin. “You may have helped me figure something out. I’ve got to go.” I turn to leave.
“I’ll see you again, right?” Jim calls after me.
I turn back. “I live on the purple boat parked at your marina, so yeah.”
“I mean, will you speak to me? You have every right to turn your back on me like I did your mother.”
I pause. “I’m young, but not stupid.”
He smiles to hear his words turned around. “At least I didn’t pass on my stupidity to you.”
At the idea of DNA being passed on, something occurs to me. I walk slowly back to Jim. “Do I have grandparents?”
His eyes fill with tears then and he’s laughing at the same time. My heart opens up. “Yup.” He nods. “You’ve got a cranky but loveable grandfather. And an aunt who likes to boss me around—even though she’s younger than me—and a couple annoying and adorable cousins, too.”
I realize I’m smiling. “I’d like to meet them sometime.”
“And they will love meeting you.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
EDIE
It’s Friday and we’ve all gathered at Cosmic Flow. Tess has brought chips, I’ve brought Gummis, and Rhia has brought root be
er.
“How was your grandfather’s birthday party?” I ask Tess.
She takes a handful of chips. “Well, you probably shouldn’t do a surprise party for an eighty-year-old man. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Other than that, it was really nice. Except for my little brother smashing cake in my hair. But, oh my gods, enough of that, Edie—I can’t believe that Jim’s your dad!”
“I know, right? I went to the perpetual woods yesterday just to be alone with my thoughts,” I say. “Oh, and I found this there, too!” I pull the protection bag from my pocket to show Rhia and Tess.
“Nice,” Rhia says.
“Are you feeling okay about Jim?” Tess asks.
“I don’t hate the idea. Turns out I even have some relatives. But I can’t even think about all of that until I know that we’ve dealt with all of this.” I gesture to the protection bag and my arm. “But something Jim said made me pretty certain that the final item, the ‘love, worn in a never-ending circle,’ could be on the boat.”
“I’ve been thinking—it might be a ring,” Tess says, touching a ring on her hand. “That’s like a never-ending circle, isn’t it?”
“Wait, yes, it totally is,” I say, watching Tess spin the ring around on her finger.
“I didn’t say anything before because you and Rhee know so much more than I do.”
“We don’t, though,” I say to Tess. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
“I’ve also been researching the lore,” Rhia says, popping a red Gummi in her mouth. “And I found references to the Luctus spirit your grandmother mentioned. It’s attracted to grief and it feeds on memories.”
“That’s awful!” Tess says.
“Yeah,” Rhia goes on. “And it can only manifest in liminal spaces.”
“What does that mean?” Tess asks.
“In-between places,” I say. “Thresholds, places of crossing over.”
“That’s why it could get to you when we were leaving the perpetual woods,” Rhia says to me. “And when you’d hold those items, because you were between the present and the past.”
“But how did it attack the beech?” Tess asks.
“Maybe because it’s a weeping beech. It has the space underneath that’s sort of between places,” I say. “GG was really excited when I showed her the vial of blood. She said she’s working on the final step. Whatever that means.”
“A few accounts of dealing with this spirit say that you need a holy relic to banish it. Others say you need three witches from the same bloodline. And they all say that ashes of the dead are required.”
“Like any dead person?” Tess asks.
We look at her. “What? Not like I have any ashes on hand. Just trying to understand what we need.”
“Ashes of the person who caused the grief that called the Luctus spirit,” Rhia clarifies.
Not that the clarification matters because none of those solutions seem possible for us. There are only two witches alive in my family, we definitely do not have access to any relics, and I have no idea where the ashes of my grandfather are.
“Let’s gather the last two items,” I say. “If GG feels like we have a shot, we need to trust her. She’s my grandmother. She only wants me to be safe.”
* * *
* * *
As we walk into the cemetery, Tess asks if we are going to the war memorial. When Rhia and I both give her blank stares, she rolls her eyes and says that it’s a statue for fallen soldiers.
“Maybe your grandfather’s dog tags are somewhere around there.”
Rhia points to a sign for the office. “Let’s ask about it.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the cemetery would have an office with a living person in it. Rhia’s idea is a good one. We go in and ask the woman working at the desk.
“Oh, yes. The war memorial was created after the First World War. People started leaving dog tags on there and now it’s pretty much covered in them.”
We all look at one another with eyes wide. The woman gives us a map with the spot marked. Following a winding path through the cemetery, we find it.
The war memorial is nothing like I expect. It’s a granite statue of an angel at least fifteen feet tall with her arms outstretched and face inclined downward, beneath a huge old ash tree. As the office lady told us, from her arms hang hundreds of sets of dog tags. It’s an amazing sight.
“I guess we need to start looking,” I say. “This could take a while.”
“Edie, Edie, Edie, when will you ever learn?” Rhia asks.
“Learn what?”
“What you are. What you can do. Tell the dog tags to pre-sent themselves to you.”
“Like with the photograph at the hardware store?”
“Exactly.”
I take a deep breath, close my eyes and hold out my hand.
“Wait!” Tess says.
My eyes fly open. “What?”
“Here.” She hands me a pair of oven mitts.
I close my eyes again.
“Wait!”
I open my eyes.
“Do you have your protection bag?” Rhia asks.
I pat my pocket.
Rhia and Tess both nod at me.
I close my eyes to envision the dog tags and I open my eyes again. “What if I end up in the Luctus spirit realm again?”
“Call your fire, like you did before,” Rhia reassures me.
Finally, I close my eyes, picture the dog tags, and chant the words, “Lost thing, come to these hands.”
I open my eyes. The dog tags sit in the oven mitt and I have not gone to the shadowed place.
“I think we’ve finally got the hang of this!” Tess says.
I’m so relieved that I don’t even speak. I just give Tess and Rhia a nervous smile and we walk back to Main Street. I hand Rhia the dog tags in the safety of the oven mitt and she takes them to wherever she’s keeping the rest of the items locked up. One more keepsake and we’ll be that much closer. I rub the arm that’s always cold now and I’m reminded that we’re far from finished.
* * *
* * *
I wake to the rude call of crows. The sun is beginning its confident march across a cloudless sky. The river rocks our boat gently. I lock my door and light a candle and crumble some lavender in it. This morning I want the calm of lavender over the sharpness of the rosemary that I usually use.
I sit cross-legged on my bed and close my eyes to bring up the image of a ring. I open them. I can’t remember the last time I saw Mom. She used to appear to me every day and I couldn’t take it, but now I need her. I think back. It was after the beech. She’d appeared and I told her to go away.
My hand goes to the acorn charm. I force myself to let it go. It’s Mom’s fault that I’m in this mess. If she’d never invoked the Luctus spirit, I wouldn’t be infected, and I’d probably be home by now.
I close my eyes to push away the thought of my mother with her big smile and floating hair. I’m determined to focus on the finding charm again. Behind my closed eyes, I imagine a ring. I whisper the finding spell.
All that comes to me is shades of blue and purple. I try again with the same result. The third time I try, I can’t focus because the rocking of the boat, usually barely noticeable, is increasing to the point that items on my dresser are actually sliding. I peer through my small window. Thick clouds, heavy with rain, race toward us. I climb up to the roof of the boat.
“What’s going on?” I ask GG. “It was a clear sky like five minutes ago.”
A gust of sudden wind whips my hair around my face. The clouds grow bigger and closer by the second. The river, reacting to the wind, turns black and angry. The boat rocks on its moorings. I can feel the tug as the river tries to pull the boat out into her flow. I squint at the sky.
“We should go below
,” she says.
The plants are swaying, threatening to topple in their planters. Lightning cracks the sky, followed quickly by a boom of thunder so loud and so close that I feel it in my chest.
GG frowns. “Go below, Edie.” Her voice is stern.
I turn to the ladder. My hair flies around my face, defying gravity, like Mom’s hair whenever she appears. As I start to climb down, I feel light, like I’m not attached to the boat. I look down and realize that I’m not. I’m floating away from the ladder.
“GG, help!” The wind consumes my words.
The water roils itself into whitecaps. I hang in midair for a fraction of a second. Then I’m falling fast. The words of the Charm to Keep Dry come to me. I shout them before I plunge into the water.
I bounce back up as though I’m in a plastic bubble. That spell came to me quicker than any other spell. All of these weeks and the magic is beginning to come naturally. I think about Mom embedding those spells in the journal for me to find. Despite my earlier anger, I’m seized with a missing of her so deep, that I feel as though I’m sinking. Suddenly, the bubble disappears and the black river swallows me whole.
Underwater there is no sense of the sudden storm raging above. I’m not a great swimmer to begin with and now I’m weak from this infection, bone-tired from seeking hidden items and dealing with magic above my pay grade. Shadows flow toward me, ribboning around my body.
My limbs feel too heavy to move. The shadows tighten around my midsection. Bubbles of oxygen leave my nose and rise to the surface as I sink. My acorn necklace floats upward as well, and I remember the note that came with it: For when you need me with you.
But she’s not with me. I’m on my own. I give an angry kick. My body begins to rise. I kick again and pull water with my hands. My right hand breaks through the surface of the water. My face is free. I gulp air. Up here on the surface, the river is wild. The flow, usually barely noticeable, pushes me away from our boat.
Jim runs down the dock, tearing off his shirt. He leaps onto the stern of our boat. GG seems to study the water for a moment before she climbs to the roof. Jim kicks off his shoes and dives into the river.