The Accidental Witch

by Jessica Penot

  Diane threw a chart at me, pulling away from my gawking. “You can wipe the drool from your face now,” she said.

  “Ha ha,” I said.

  “Bed three is hearing voices telling him to kill his mother,” Diane said. “Bed four will kill himself if we don’t give him hydrocodone and he is allergic to tramadol and buprenorphine. Bed six is a homeless fellow who wants to hang himself or find a warm bed.”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “I swear the crazy is contagious lately,” Diane said.

  “We prefer the term mentally ill,” I answered.

  “When’s your shift over?” she asked.

  “Six,” I said. “Bob’s working the night shift.”

  “You wanna get drinks when you’re off? “

  “I think I’m going to need a beer or seven,” I said.

  “Finnegan’s?” Diane said.

  “Is there any place else?” I answered.

  “Not that I would be caught dead in,” Diane responded.

  I smiled at Diane and took the first chart from the pile. I drew a deep breath and walked in to room 8.

  * * *

  It was seven before I finally sat down at Finnegan’s. The greasy bar looked like it always did. There was an assortment of college kids from the university campus and a few old bikers playing pool in the corner. There were the locals sitting at one side of the bar looking like they would catch on fire if they mingled with any of the others.

  I had a large Belgian ale in front of me. I went almost entirely unnoticed in my smoky corner of the bar until Diane walked in. Diane was gorgeous and not a single man in the bar missed her appeal. She was wearing a skin-tight tank top and skinny jeans that fit her so closely, she might have been naked. She had big breasts and a tiny waist. She looked like a gothic porn star. She smiled and sat down next to me and ordered a beer. She had her nose ring back in and in the tiny tank top, you could see all of her tattoos.

  “You look like you’re in a funk,” Diane said as she lit a cigarette.

  “How can you smoke those things? You’re a nurse. You should know better,” I said.

  “How can you live on Cheetos and animal crackers?”

  I shrugged.

  “So, how’s the house warming going?” Diane asked as she exhaled smoke.

  “Okay,” I said. I had recently bought a house. It had been the largest commitment I had ever made in my life and I had chosen the house with the same wisdom I had used to choose my ex-husband. The saddest thing about it was that I knew it was a bad decision even as I’d made it. It was like I just couldn’t help myself. The house was old. It was so old, it had a name. It was called The Black Magnolia and ghost stories and legends hung off of it like the Spanish moss in the trees around it. The ghost stories and the disrepair hadn’t mattered, however. As soon as I had stepped into The Black Magnolia, I knew the house had to be mine. It wanted me and I wanted it, and as there really wasn’t much else permanent in my life, and as I had self-destructed in every other semi-reasonable way, I couldn’t think of a reason not to drive another nail into the coffin.

  “Is it haunted?” Diane asked casually.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I replied.

  Diane cackled. She threw her head back and laughed like a witch. I had no idea what she was laughing about.

  “What’s new with you?” I asked.

  Diane stopped laughing and took a drink of her beer. “Same old, same old. I got a date with that radiologist.”

  No surprises there. “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He asked me out for Friday night. He’s gonna drive me to Huntsville and take me to a real restaurant.”

  “Isn’t he married?”

  “If she were taking care of him right, he wouldn’t be leaving town with me, would he?” Diane said.

  “Diane, if I didn’t love you so much, I would call you the biggest bitch I’d ever met.”

  “I am the biggest bitch you ever met,” Diane said.

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Diane laughed with me. She put her hand on my hand and her laughter faded to a smile.

  “You know,” she whispered, “someday you are going to have to start loving yourself as much as you love your patients. You are going to have to take some of that good advice you give them.”

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  “You can’t stay out there in that old house by yourself forever. You have to forgive yourself and move on. There are other men.”

  I laughed again. “I’m too old for that and I’m not pretty enough to keep up.”

  “First of all, you are 33 not 63 and second of all, you are just as pretty as any other woman in this town. You just hide it under shaggy hair and baggy clothes.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand,” I said.

  “Listen, honey, if you had been as happy with old Johnny Boy as you think you were, you never would have cheated on him in the first place.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  “You know it is. If you stop and think about it, you know it is. He was an ass and you deserved better and still do. He was just another surgeon with a god complex and you are just another woman with a doctor fetish.”

  “I don’t have a fetish,” I said.

  “Yes, you do, sugar, and it is time to get over that, too,” Diane said.

  I smiled and put my hand on Diane’s. She didn’t understand. How could she? She still looked like a twenty-year-old goddess. Time had been kind to her. I didn’t blame myself for anything. I wasn’t wallowing in my guilt. I sure as hell wasn’t punishing myself. Being married to that cheating bastard, John, for ten years had been punishment enough. He hadn’t waited for the ink to dry on the marriage certificate to find another woman to spend his evenings with. As far as my Dr. Fetish, well hell, I had always worked in hospitals. Of course I wanted doctors. They’re what I saw every damn day and if I ever met a nice engineer, I certainly would give up doctors forever. But that was about as likely as my head spontaneously combusting, seeing as there were no nice engineers in Dismal.

  Sure, my hair was shaggy, but that was just my hair. I could spend two hours on it in the morning. I could wail on it with the straightener, but it would still look like a frizzy wedge of brown fluff, and tying it back just seemed to encourage it to frizz even more. I wore baggy clothes because I’d put on fifteen pounds since the divorce. I put on fifteen pounds because I ate bricks of raw cookie dough when I was depressed and drank at least two beers every night. We all have our negative coping skills.

  Still, I smiled at Diane. I smiled at her because she meant well and I loved her. I loved her friendship and the fact that she thought her little intervention might change everything for me. It might make me decide to get my hair done and buy new clothes and date an electrician. She wanted to help me see the light. The problem was there just wasn’t any light to be seen and I was really looking.

  “Shit,” Diane said looking at her watch. “I gotta go. I got a date.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I stood up and paid the bill. I always paid the bill. I got in my BMW and headed home. The car was the one good thing John had given me. I got it in the settlement and I wasn’t going to pretend like I didn’t love it. I also got some money and I got to keep the engagement ring, which I hocked to pay the down payment on my house.

  The house was outside of the city limits, down a lonely stretch of country road that meandered through the woods and into the mountains. Dismal was located in the foothills of the Appalachians. The mountains were small and old. In the mornings, fog hung on them like tinsel on a Christmas tree. The tall stately trees overshadowed the gravel road. I turned left into my long driveway. I owned all the land, too. The Black Magnolia, my house, sat on more than one hundred acres that had once been farmland. I pulled up to the front of my house and stepped out into the moonlight. Home crap home. It was a blessing that the lawn was overgrown and strangled with vines and kudzu. The overgr
owth hid the ruined mansion that sat in the shadows of a forest of magnolia trees. There was no such thing as a black magnolia, but the shadows that hung over the ocean of magnolias wrapped them in darkness and made them appear black.

  The house was enormous. It was an old Italianate style plantation house in red brick. It had five fireplaces and twenty rooms. There was an old barn in the back and several small cabins lined the property. They were in significant disrepair and had been the slave quarters of the old house. I stepped onto the white porch of my home and the wood groaned in angry protest. It was still light outside. The days were long in the summer. It was hot, and sweat had beaded on my chest just walking between my car and the house.

  I opened the door and jumped when I saw that Lawson was still standing on a ladder in the huge foyer. He was the contractor I had hired to renovate the old house. He was installing a new light fixture in the foyer.

  “Good Lord, Lawson,” I said. “What are you still doing here at this hour? You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Sorry about that, ma’am. I didn’t mean to scare you. Just trying to get caught up. It took me longer than I thought it would to rewire the parlor and den. This place is a real mess,” he said.

  I looked around at the peeling wallpaper and chipped banister. The house had once been a work of art. I could see that. It had looked like Tara from Gone with the Wind. Those days had long since passed and several fires and shitty patch jobs hadn’t helped any. The once classic façade had been mixed with gingerbread flourishes and modern windows. All of that had gone completely down the toilet when the previous owners had abandoned it twenty years ago.

  “I know,” I said. “Why are you here by yourself? Your crew didn’t stay to help you?”

  “Nah,” he said with a wink. Lawson had once been a very handsome man, but years of hard drinking and smoking had completely eroded that. He didn’t seem aware of this, however, and he still acted like every woman on earth was just waiting to lie down and spread her legs for him.

  “You know I ain’t superstitious,” he said. “But the other fellows don’t like being here at night.”

  “It’s still daylight,” I said.

  “That don’t matter,” he said. “They heard all the stories, you know?”

  “I know,” I said.

  I walked through the foyer to the large parlor and turned on the light switch. I practically giggled when it flickered on. I looked up at the light. I had gone to seventeen different antique stores to find all the fixtures for the house. They were all Victorian or older. The light that hung in the middle of the parlor was a red glass converted gaslight and it was stunning. Crystal tear drops dangled from the ends of it. The parlor was perfect. Everything was from that period. I had even managed to hang the wallpaper myself. It was red, too. This was my red room. An old Victorian sofa sat in one corner with two wingback armchairs with tulle print on either side of it. Everything was Eastlake style except the baby grand piano in the corner. I smiled. The parlor was done. Three rooms were done. I set my purse down on the sofa and collapsed into one of the armchairs.

  “If you don’t mind me askin’,” Lawson said. “Don’t you care about all those stories? Most ladies would be afraid of stories like that and you’re out here all by yourself.”

  “There isn’t anything that died in this house that is scarier than my ex-husband,” I said.

  Lawson laughed and climbed down from the ladder. He stood in the middle of the foyer and studied it. He was doing a good job and I could tell by the look on his face that he was proud of his work.

  “We didn’t get to the upstairs today,” he said.

  “That’s okay. I’ve got plenty of flashlights and that portable AC unit has a really long extension cord,” I said.

  I had six portable air conditioners throughout the house. The southern heat was unbearable in the summer. I could live without running water and electricity, but I would have killed myself without the air conditioner. When I first moved in, there’d been no electricity, so I’d bought a generator and the air conditioners and just camped out.

  “You got a package today,” Lawson said as he handed me a small box.

  “Thanks,” I said as I took it.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Dr. Michaels.”

  I gave Lawson a hint of a smile and he grabbed his ladder and walked back to his truck. I sighed deeply and looked at the box in my hands. It was small and wrapped in brown paper and twine. I didn’t know people still wrapped packages like that. There was no return address. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would send me a package. My father had died last year. My step-mother hated me, and my half-sisters and brothers were just too lazy to go to a post office. They wouldn’t even call, or text me, let alone send me anything. My real mom had run out on my dad and me when I was a baby. Everyone else in the family was dead. All my friends in Chicago had sided with my husband in the divorce, so I’d been left alone. Diane was my only friend. I couldn’t imagine who would send me anything.

  I carefully pulled the twine and the brown paper fell off. Beneath the paper was a large, leather bound book. It looked like an old journal or recipe book. It was tied together with a red ribbon and the ribbon held numerous pieces of paper. I ran my hands over the smooth leather and read the title of the book. It simply said Spells.

  I laughed and pulled the red ribbon that held the book together. The book fell open. Inside, it was like a recipe book a mother would pass on to a daughter. There were old typed pages with handwritten notes in the margins. There were pages added with handwritten spells on them and drawings.

  “What the hell?” I said as I leafed through the old book. There were potions and summoning spells and candle spells. In-between pages, there were pressed flowers and herbs and some of the pages were stained with old candle wax.

  I set the book down and went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. At least the kitchen was done. It looked like any other modern kitchen. It had granite counter tops and marble floors. I’d spared no expense making it look like something that belonged in an old southern mansion. I wanted the house to be perfect and I had Johnny Boy’s money to help me achieve that dream. The lights flickered when I entered. I would have to talk to Lawson about that in the morning. I took a beer out of the fridge and opened it. I had a sip and grabbed a roll of cookie dough. Armed with the cookie dough and beer, I returned to the book. It had fallen off the counter, to the floor, and was opened to a page. I laughed again. The page it had opened to was love spells. That was just what I needed.

  I sat down and ate and drank and leafed through the book. I stopped at a page with an interesting picture on it. The spell was an awakening spell. It awakened you to the supernatural world. I hesitated and looked at the script around it.

  Something fell upstairs and the lights went out. I fumbled around and found the nearest flashlight and switched it on just as the lights flickered back on.

  “Lawson, you asshole,” I said as I turned the flashlight off. “The wiring is done in the parlor, my ass.”

  A sudden wave of fatigue washed over me and I picked up my mess and carted my sorry butt upstairs. I climbed into bed with my flashlight. I still had the book of spells. It had been so long since someone had given me something that I had forgotten what it felt like. I knew the book was more than weird. It bordered on creepy. A normal woman would probably burn the damn thing, but I wasn’t a normal woman. I was a lonely divorcée living in a house known to be haunted, but I loved it the way most people love their pets. I was the daughter of a man who had made it clear that he loathed me, with a step-mother who’d bought me toilet paper for Christmas. The creepy book was wonderful to me. It meant that someone out there, even if they were a freak, cared about me, and freak love was better than no love at all.

  * * *

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. There were two police cars out front. That was actually pretty standard for our unit. The police had to carry folks to the regional h
ospital for commitment often enough, but there was a quality about the air that morning that told me something was really wrong. It was hot. Even at 8 a.m. It was so damn hot, my shirt clung to my sweat-covered chest.

  I walked into the hospital. We had our own little wing, so the six offices in the front were all the therapists’ and doctors’ offices. I could see the police had one of the night nurses, Shequella, in one of the empty offices. I moved past the office and unlocked my office door. I set my stuff down and turned to lock it again and returned to the psychiatric floor. The CEO was on the floor and she was talking with Amy, the clinical director.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “Kara and Wayne are dead,” Amy said coldly. She was trying hard to hide her anger. “They hatched some kind of scheme together and hung themselves from the bathroom door using each other’s weight as a counter balance.”

  The impact of this information was like a punch in the face. I sat down.

  “I just had sessions with them yesterday,” I whispered.

  “I know,” Amy said

  Jenna was the nurse that day and she was the polar opposite of Millie. She was so sweet, she made sugar look bitter. She was the nurse all the patients loved. She went out of her way to talk to everyone and make sure they were all right. She was always ready with a cheerful smile and a word of encouragement. Jenna was crying.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Jenna said. “Ms. Kara was doing so much better this time.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t believe it, either. I always had faith that Kara would get better. Time would heal her wounds and she would move on. I had spent so many hours sitting in my office with Kara that I couldn’t even count. I had always believed I was helping her. I was healing her, but I hadn’t done anything. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save Wayne and if I couldn’t even do that, why was I even here?