The Accidental Witch

by Jessica Penot

  “You have someplace to go,” I said. “You can come stay with us, and I care if you live or die.”

  “You only care ’cause someone pays you to,” she said.

  “They don’t pay me enough to care,” I said. “Will you let me try to help you? You can come stay with us on psychiatric for a bit and we can talk and try to find you some place safe to go where no one can hurt you again.”

  Elisa turned to face me. She was so beautiful, it was unreal. Tears poured down her angelic face.

  “You really think you can help me?” she wept.

  “I know I can,” I said with a confidence I never would have had before.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “Promise,” I answered. “But first I have to do a screening. Is that all right? I’m going to ask you a lot of personal questions?”

  “Okay.” She nodded.

  I began the long process of completing the psychiatric screening for Elisa’s admission to our floor. She cried as she spoke and I wanted to cry for her. Her story was so sad, it could ring tears from marble. I knew that there was nothing in North Alabama that would save her. There was no housing that would be easy to obtain after she left our floor. I knew her dead end so well. I had mapped it out and put it in my back pocket, but on that day the impossible seemed possible. So I promised her the impossible and gave her one of the three beds we had on the floor.

  I didn’t see Aaron on the way out. I walked out and went back to my little psychiatric floor with a skip in my step. The day was over and it seemed like it had just begun. I walked up to Jenna and Millie who were sitting at the nurses’ station laughing, and smiled at them. I sat down beside them, a first for me. I’d always seen it as a waste of time when patients needed help. Millie and Jenna were talking about restaurants and shoes and all the other mundane things women talk about. Suddenly, Millie turned and smiled at me. I don’t think I’d ever seen Millie smile.

  “You look different,” Millie said pleasantly. “I like the dress.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Why aren’t you running around like usual?” Millie asked.

  “It’s quiet. What’re ya’ll doing?”

  “Talking about what we’re going to wear this Friday,” Jenna said.

  “What’re ya’ll doing this Friday?”

  “I’m going out on a date with my husband,” Jenna said. “And Millie is going to meet some friends.”

  “It sounds like you both have a good weekend planned,” I said with genuine interest.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Millie said. “You’ve never talked to us before.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “It just gets so crazy around here, I feel like my head is spinning most of the time.”

  “That ain’t no lie,” Millie said.

  One of the patients stepped up to the nursing station. His name was Stephen and he’d been admitted for psychosis. He heard voices telling him he was gay and that everyone knew it and they all hated him. Of course, this was just the tip of the iceberg and Stephen’s delusions were so labyrinthian, I couldn’t even begin to describe them all. Stephen’s medication hadn’t really started working yet, which made it virtually impossible to have any kind of conversation with him.

  “I know what ya’ll are saying up here,” he said.

  “We aren’t saying anything about you, sugar,” Millie said.

  “I can hear you. I’m not deaf. I didn’t have sex with him,” he said. “I don’t like ya’ll talking about things you don’t understand.”

  Millie stood up and went to the meditech. It was the machine that the nurses used to get medications from the pharmacy. It made it impossible for them to take anything out of the system that hadn’t been prescribed.

  “Listen, sugar, I’m gonna give you some medication to help you rest a little. Come on over here,” she said gently.

  “It ain’t true,” Stephen persisted.

  “We know it ain’t, but if you don’t take your medication, I’ll have to call the doctor, okay?”

  Stephen took the pill from Millie’s hand and put it in his mouth. He took a drink of water with it. His eyes were wide with fear and panic.

  “I just don’t understand why everyone doesn’t just leave me alone,” he said.

  “Go lay down, honey,” Millie said. “No one’s talking about you.”

  Stephen drifted away from the nurses’ station and Millie rolled her eyes. “God all mighty that boy’s gonna drive me to an early grave.”

  “That poor boy,” Jenna said. “He really needs more than we got to offer.”

  “Back in my day,” Millie said, “they’d take someone like that and lock ’em up for a while. They’d commit him and keep him for a year and then send him to a group home or something. He ain’t ever gonna get any better.”

  “I used to work on a chronic unit in Chicago,” I said. “Everyone there was like Stephen. It was the most depressing place I ever worked.”

  “Why’d you leave Chicago?” Millie asked. “When you left town, I thought you’d never come back. I thought you’d be someone important up North.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You graduated high school with my boy,” Millie said. “Do you remember him? Drew?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I remember him. He was a football player.”

  “Those days are gone,” Millie said sadly. “He messed up his knee. He’s a manager over there at a call center now.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “He always said you were the smartest person in that school,” Millie said.

  “Well, there’s smart and then there’s smart. I was always good at school, but life is something different altogether. I suck at that.”

  “Don’t say that,” Jenna said. “You got a good job when a lot of people ain’t workin’ at all and you got a beautiful house. You did real well for yourself.”

  “I didn’t meet my expectations,” I said.

  “Oh, sugar,” Millie said. “No one ever does that. If you ain’t learned that yet, you’re younger than you look.”

  I laughed. Millie was actually being nice. It seemed amazing that I could work with someone for over a year and not know anything about them. I really couldn’t believe that Millie was Drew’s mother. Drew had been the bane of my high school existence. He had tortured me ritualistically and made sure everyone knew that I was about the ugliest female to ever walk through Dismal. What amazed me most was that he had told his mother I was the smartest person in school. In school, if he’d looked at me and told me my shirt looked like crap, I would have considered it a compliment because he wasn’t saying I was a beluga whale.

  I should have known I was connected to Millie somehow. Everyone in small towns is connected by kin or knowledge somehow. That was what I had loved about Chicago. Everyone was an anonymous stranger and no one cared about your business.

  I looked up at the clock. “Well,” I said casually, “I guess it’s time for me to head out.”

  “Some friends are going out next Friday. They’re people you might like. Would you like to join us?” Millie asked.

  “I’d love that,” I said. “I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow.” I waved and walked off the floor. I stepped outside into the cool evening air and took a deep breath. It had been a strange day. I decided that it was entirely possible that I had just had my first good day in more than a year. I couldn’t even remember the last really good day I’d had, so I certainly was overdue for one. It was possible that I had believed in the magic of the spell book, so I had acted in a way that brought the magic to life. I’d put on a nice dress and nice shoes. I’d made myself noticeable.

  I got in my car and turned the ignition. Still, it would be nice to know for sure. I knew that it was more probable that my dress and my attitude had shifted events in my favor, but the coincidence was huge and it wouldn’t hurt to do an experiment. As I drove home, I made plans. I needed to test my theory. I wo
uld cast three more spells. If all three of them worked, it was more than the red dress. If the others failed or if only half of them succeeded, I would know that there was some kind of placebo affect involved. I smiled. I knew exactly what spells I would cast. I would cast spells for Stephen and Elisa. I would cast spells for Harry and Rachel. I would cast spells for the well being of all of my patients.

  * * *

  It took me almost two hours to get home, grab the spell book, and drive from store to store looking for everything I needed. It wasn’t easy to find crystals in Dismal. It was kind of like looking for gold in your underwear. People just didn’t keep certain things in certain places and Dismal was one of those places that still thought witches should be burned. On my way home, I passed a huge bulletin board that said Repent or Burn. Beneath this chipper statement was an advertisement for a local church. Whenever I saw signs like that, I had to wonder why God would want followers that only followed out of fear. It never made sense to me that God’s philosophy would be so similar to a Third World dictator’s.

  It didn’t really matter what I thought, however. Ninety-percent of Dismal went to the Baptist Church and those that didn’t go there went to the Holiness Church down by the river. My dad and step-mom had always gone to the Holiness Church. The sad thing is I would have killed to go to the Baptist Church because it was so much more liberal than our church. My step-mom enforced the rules of the Holiness faith like a woman that really believed Hell was somewhere just beneath the crawl space of her two-bedroom shack. It hadn’t helped my general unpopularity that I’d been forced to wear long denim skirts with sneakers for the duration of my high school education, and the fact that I hadn’t been able to cut my hair or wear makeup, was like a nail in my social coffin. My dad would have rolled over in his grave if he could have seen me buying objects for the dark arts, in a red dress, with lipstick on.

  I stepped into my house with my paper bags full of contraband. Lawson’s truck was still in the driveway, so I knew he was there, but I didn’t see him when I walked in. I grabbed a soda out of the fridge, slipped into some flip-flops, and headed out towards the cemetery with all my witchy wickedness. I knew just where I wanted to go to set up my altar. The book had emphasized the importance of placement. You didn’t want the magic in your house. You wanted it someplace sacred. There could be no mirrors, no computers, no Wi-Fi availability. All books but the spell book had to be closed. I knew exactly where to go, to find my place.

  I walked over the wooden bridge and into the woods. The slave cabins sat quietly in the waning evening sun. Tall magnolia trees towered over them leaving scattered white petals on the ground beneath them. One of the cabins was in a better state of repair than the others. The roof was still intact and the floors were still strong. There was an old wooden table in the corner that was sturdy. I walked in. The sun drifted in through the window and onto the old floor. I knew I had chosen well. The cabin moved me. I sat down beside the old wooden table and placed a large iron tray on it. I placed four candles on the tray. They were all blue for healing. I surrounded the candles with rose quartz and herbs. I looked at my altar and raised my hands in the air. There were words I was supposed to say. There was a god I was supposed to name, but as the words passed my lips, they changed.

  “I dedicate this altar to the spirit of this place,” I said.

  I bit my tongue. I didn’t know why the words had come out wrong. I let it pass and used the white altar candle I had placed in the middle of my candle garden to light all the other candles.

  “I dedicate this candle to Elisa, may she find a place of peace in this world,” I said as I lit the first candle.

  “I dedicate this candle to Stephen, may his demons be driven out and may his madness leave him,” I said as I lit the next candle.

  “I dedicate this candle to Harry. May his sorrow run from him,” I said as I lit the third candle.

  “I dedicate this candle to Rachel. May she learn to forget the horror that is her past,” I said as I lit the fourth candle.

  I sat back and looked at my little candle garden. It was a healing garden. The book said to draw the energy for the garden from around you. I breathed in and watched the fire. Suddenly, the flames flickered bright and each one popped, like a firecracker. I jumped back. Large sparks rose up from the garden like fireflies. The scent of magnolias filled the air and it became so thick, I coughed. The sky above the little cabin darkened and the sunlight faded.

  I sat in front of the garden, as I had before and watched the fire dance. I felt as if it were pulling my strength into it. I grew sleepy. My fatigue spread out throughout my body and I lay down on the dirty wooden floor. I lay on the floor watching the candles grow brighter as the smoke coiled upwards in thick spirals.

  As it had the night before, sleep overtook me. I drifted away into a netherworld where I walked hand in hand with a strange man. He was dark. He had dark skin and dark hair. His eyes were black and when I held his hand, I felt at peace. We walked alone together through a world that looked like something a bad science fiction writer would dream up.

  When I awoke, it was daylight and the sweat dripped off me and puddled on the floor. I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before ten. I had slept for almost thirteen hours on that hard floor. Thank God it was Sunday and my off day. The candles had burnt out and only wax was left. I raised my arms above my head and stretched.

  “The magic is spent and sent,” I said. “I thank the spirits who helped me in last night’s work. May you go in peace.”

  I stood up and stretched. My back felt like I had spent the night on the rack. I leaned backwards and felt my back pop. I looked at the candle garden with its spent magic. I cleaned up the used wax and the other altar items and buried them in the cemetery behind the shack. I left the spell book and the other items I would need later in the cabin and began the walk home.

  It was cooler than it had been in a long time that morning. It was overcast, with thick clouds blocking the sun, but it wasn’t raining. I enjoyed the walk back. I took in the scenery. Wild roses bloomed along the trail and butterflies flitted in and out of patches of flowers. As soon as I stepped onto the large white porch that surrounded my house, the sky opened up and the rain poured down in sheets. I watched it fall for a minute before I stepped inside.

  I looked around. It almost looked like a real house. The wallpaper was up and the paint had been finished. I walked through the house, turning the lights on and off. The wiring was done. The house was cool, a sure sign that the air conditioning was actually working.

  My phone rang in my pocket and I jumped. People didn’t call me anymore. I didn’t have many friends and the few I did have, knew I didn’t like talking on the phone, so they texted me. I answered.

  “Hi,” a deep voice said.

  I said, “Dr. Becket?”

  “It’s not too early, is it?”

  “It’s 10 a.m.”

  “Yeah. Is that too early? I’m sorry I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “No. I just didn’t think you’d really call me,” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Good,” he said. “It’s my off day, so good.”

  “Mine too,” I said.

  “Really?” he said. “Would you like to grab lunch or something?”

  Lunch. That was a bad sign. At least the numerous chick flicks I watched on a regular basis said it was a bad sign. The truth was I had no idea what it meant, but I liked to imagine that the screenwriters who wrote chick flicks knew more about dating than I did. Of course, they didn’t seem to be right about anything else, so who knew.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Can I pick you up?” He seemed hesitant.

  “Yeah.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said and then I gave him directions.

  “Would noon be okay?
” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “See you then,” he said.

  “See you then,” I replied as the phone went dead. I stared at the phone for a minute. I certainly hadn’t seen that coming. He had asked me out, but I was under the impression that the likelihood of things like this actually coming to fruition was about one in a million. Maybe I was just bitter.

  I looked down at my red dress. It was dusty and covered in muck. I had slept in it. I looked at my watch. I had two hours. I sprinted up the stairs and stripped down naked as I ran to the shower. I rinsed the funk off of me, did all the usual girly things women did to preserve their youth and make themselves pretty. I was never really sure any of these rituals worked, but they were like magic. The ritual felt good and the hope they provided created a relief to the daily anxiety of being a less than perfect woman.

  Finally, I stood in front of my closet wrapped in a white towel. I stared vacantly at my disheveled wardrobe. There was nothing I had worn in the last year that would be even remotely appropriate for this date. I really had no idea what would be appropriate, but I knew my usual collection of baggy dresses wasn’t going to cut it. I dug around for a while until I came to a collection of clothes that were still in the wardrobe bag in the back of the closet. I unzipped the bag. Memories flooded over me. Shit. I knew there was a reason I hadn’t opened that bag.

  Pressed suits and black evening gowns filled the bag. Bits of wreckage left over from the days when I had been full of potential. Remnants of a life that had gone up in smoke and fire. I looked through the bag and found what I was looking for. A delicate tank top and a pair of jeans that fit like a second skin. I squeezed myself into the pants and pulled on the loose shirt. I couldn’t believe the jeans still fit, but it was a very tight fit. I found matching jewelry and I put on a pair of sandals in time to realize I needed to paint my toes.

  When I was done, I looked in the mirror. I wasn’t half bad when I took the time to care. I would never be a natural beauty, or even a beauty, but at least I didn’t look like a bag lady. The doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. He was ten minutes early. Really? My ex had never been early. I had spent most of my married life waiting and I hadn’t known there were real men in the world who didn’t expect you to wait thirty-five minutes for a date.