Flowers everywhere. I was back in Zinnia's room. Back? Had I left? How could I have traveled so far without leaving the bed?
I cleared my throat and said, “I'm feeling a bit strange,” which was the understatement of the year.
The other two stopped talking and turned to face me. Zinnia was still sitting on the chair, and Zoey had taken a seat on the bottom corner of the bed. I looked from one to the other and back again. My aunt and my daughter were separated by thirty-two years, but now that both were softly lit by the same golden glow of the bedside lamp, they looked like the same person.
“We're all the same person,” I said woozily. “The exact same. Are we clones?”
Zinnia leaned forward and pressed her cool hand against my forehead. “Zara, we're not clones. You've had a very challenging experience tonight, and you're seeing our similarities. Trauma brings us all closer, and with special families such as ours, the women are always quite similar.”
Zoey shuffled back on the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest. “Mom, she means in witch families. You're a witch, and I'm a witch, and Auntie Z is a witch. It's a family thing.”
My thoughts suddenly shifted into sharp focus around someone I'd had my share of ups and downs with. Someone I'd loved and hated and all the feelings in between.
I turned to my aunt. “Was my mother a witch?”
“No,” she said softly. There was pain in her expression. “Sometimes it skips a generation.”
“Is that why she died?”
She took my hand. “No, Zara. Your mother's passing had nothing to do with our family gift. It wasn't anyone's fault. Sometimes things just happen.”
“She knew that you were a witch?”
“Yes, but she didn't know about you. None of us did.”
“I'm not going to be a witch,” I said with a bit of a snarl. “No, thank you. I decline.”
Zinnia gave me a patient smile. I recognized it as the same smile I used at work to kindly let people know it was time to step away from the reference desk. It was the smile reserved for people who, even in the face of indisputable evidence, were clinging to some ignorant belief. It was the smile reserved for ding-dongs.
“You don't have a choice,” she said. “Be grateful for your gift.”
“Some gift. I feel like goose poop right now, and I feel like I'm having LSD flashbacks, even though I've never actually taken LSD. If this is being a witch, I hate it.”
“You only got your gift on Sunday,” she said. “When Zoey turned sixteen that day, she got hers, and you got yours at the exact same time. I can only surmise that the channels opened, and the energy transferred from the Divine Bank to both of you.” She squeezed my hand. “The only reason you didn't get yours at sixteen was because of Zoey.” She glanced at my daughter. “Because of the, uh, accident.”
I gave my daughter a loving smile. “Getting pregnant with Zoey was the best accident that ever happened to anyone,” I said, just as I had hundreds of times before. “Thank you very much.”
“I didn't mean to offend you,” Zinnia said. “I'm simply explaining what happened. When your gift didn't manifest at sixteen, we assumed you'd been skipped. My sister was so relieved that her daughter would be normal.”
Zoey chortled. “Normal? My mother has never been normal.”
“I tried to be normal once,” I said. “Worst four minutes of my life.”
“Your witch gifts have been repressed these last sixteen years,” Zinnia said. “This used to happen all the time when girls got married off as teenagers. It's not so common these days, but you had your...” She paused, perhaps considering the least offensive way to state the facts. “You got your other gift, Zoey, and now here we all are. Three Riddle witches.”
“Here we all are. In my psychedelic nightmare, in a room covered in zinnias, in a town called Wisteria—a town I'd never heard of before I got the idea to apply for a job here.” I squinted at my aunt. “You did that to me. You must have done your hocus pocus to bring me here.”
Zinnia jerked her head back, looking aghast. “Of course not,” she said vehemently, shaking her head so hard her red hair whipped like red snakes. “We witches don't cast spells to influence each other.” She bit her lower lip. “Except when safety is at risk,” she added quickly.
“What about the shoe store? On Monday, I was compelled to buy boots that day, and then I just happened to run into you. That was one of your spells. You all but told me as much when you made fun of me for believing in coincidences.” I shook my finger at her. “Witch!”
“No,” Zinnia said, still looking upset at the suggestion. “We simply don't do that.”
“But it's possible, right?” I pointed to the big book sitting on the bed next to my daughter. “Is there a summoning spell in that book?”
Zoey rested her hand on the book possessively. “Mom, don't be paranoid. This is a whole magical thing that's happening to us. Forces beyond our comprehension.”
Magical? Sure. But that didn't mean it was wonderful or even something I wanted. The air in the small room felt burned and stagnant. I wanted to be back home in my house, in my own bed, with my plain, nonflowered duvet cover and my plain, nonflowered walls.
“Enough magic for one night,” I said. “Sweet child of mine, help me out of this bed. We're going home.”
Zoey extended her lower lip in a pout. Usually, when I saw that lower lip extend half an inch, I'd tell her a bird was going to come along and poop on it, but I wasn't in a teasing mood. I gave her one of my no-nonsense looks.
“You're being such a mom,” she whined.
I sounded even more like a mom when I answered. “Whatever this new thing is, it can happen to us in the safety of our own home, during daylight hours.” I pushed the blankets out of the way so I could dig my way out of the soft bed. My arms felt as weak as twisty ties, and my head was still full of garbage-can drummers, but I had to get out of there.
“Don't go yet,” Zinnia said. “Your powers are fresh, and you don't know how to control them.” She gave me a no-nonsense look of her own, and for a moment, my mother was in the room with us.
In an instant, the image of her eyes overlaid a memory of my mother's eyes, glaring at me the same way. Telling me I was too impulsive for my own good, and I'd made a terrible mistake. Telling me I had to give up the baby or lose everything. A terrifying anger billowed up inside me, then and also now. On some level, I knew it wasn't fair to transfer my feelings about someone else onto Zinnia, but she looked so much like her.
“You're not the boss of me,” I said, practically growling.
“I am the elder witch, so I am your boss,” Zinnia said. She flicked one hand, and the lamp in the room blazed three times brighter. “There are protocols,” she said coolly.
I grabbed my daughter's hand and stood on shaking legs. “I don't know how you summoned us to this town, witch. And I don't know what you want from us. I will admit that the thing you did with the sparkly lights was really cool, but that's beside the point, and we will be storming out now.”
Aunt Zinnia's hazel eyes blazed with a fury I knew well. It wasn't just the fury of a redhead. It was the fury of a redhead with the last name of Riddle, and it was a dangerous force.
With my daughter's hand gripped tightly, I stormed out of the room. The house had two stories, like ours. We went down a narrow staircase and stopped by the door for shoes. I couldn't find the boots I'd been wearing earlier that evening, but all the footwear was the exact same size. Aunt Zinnia and I were foot twins. I picked a pair of attractive, ankle-high granny boots and started lacing them.
“I'm borrowing some of your boots,” I called over my shoulder. “And if you don't like it, you'll have to witchcraft them off my feet!”
Chapter 15
I worried that perhaps I'd gone too far in daring my aunt to witchcraft her boots off my feet. But a minute passed and nothing happened.
Aunt Zinnia didn't even come downstairs to see us out the front door. I could hear he
r talking to someone—presumably on the phone with someone. It was a person named Viv, or Finn, or maybe Winnie.
Zoey's eyes were glistening as she stood by the front door. Her pouting lower lip was in danger of getting pooped on by low-flying pigeons.
I listened to the snippets of conversation floating down from my aunt's second floor and then asked my daughter, “Did I just hear Aunt Zinnia call someone Winnie? Do you think she's communicating with the ghost of Winona Vander Zalm?”
“It sounds like she's on the phone,” Zoey said.
“Can ghosts talk on the phone?”
“We should wait around and find out.”
Wait around? My heart was fluttering in my chest, the way it did when I took a mega dose of vitamins on an empty stomach or when something was really wrong.
“No,” I said. “We're leaving now.”
I pushed open the front door and looked outside. The sky was red. The sun was coming up. I'd been unconscious most of the night.
I grabbed Zoey's arm and pulled her out of the house and down the sidewalk.
“You're ruining everything,” she cried, walking at the slowest speed possible without standing still. “My whole life, I've always wanted to be special. And now that I find out I am, you're wrecking everything.”
I yanked her to speed up. “You are special! But more importantly, you're my daughter, and it's my job to look after you. That woman might be family, but we don't know anything about her. There's a reason she hasn't been in our life all these years. Several reasons.” Reasons my mother had never explained.
Zoey relented to walking at a normal pace. I glanced around at our surroundings. I didn't know this neighborhood. I barely knew our own street, and yet I was absolutely certain we were heading toward our home. My body felt tuned in to some sort of global positioning system, as though every cell in my body had a compass pointing to my house.
Was that one of the side benefits of being a witch? Direction skills? What a waste of magic, I thought. Direction skills could be recreated with modern technology, and there were probably phone apps that didn't even cost a buck.
“You can't stop me from seeing her,” Zoey said.
I hadn't said anything about never seeing Zinnia again, but her sass got under my skin. “Sure, I can. We'll move back to the city. You never wanted to come here in the first place.”
Zoey expressed her displeasure with a wordless whine. Not my favorite tune.
I kept walking with my lips pressed tightly together.
Before I had a kid, I thought children would be pretty easy, maybe because I was still a child myself. I knew what I wanted, after all. But I underestimated how complicated children's emotions could be and how their unhappiness doesn't always have a quick fix. Some problems can be solved with a nap or a sundae, but those aren't the ones that break you.
No matter how many times I told Zoey she was special, she was always looking for something more. Even as a loving and devoted mother, I was only one person. I couldn't give her everything. I couldn't pluck the stars from the sky and put them in her hands. I couldn't even find a stable male role model other than the various bachelors who lived in our old apartment building, and even them I never trusted alone with her. I couldn't make my beautiful, innocent, sensitive daughter happy at all times, and that was painful.
Now she wanted to embrace being a witch. What was I to do? Give her as much guidance as possible and trust that she'd be safe and smart about it the way she was about everything else?
Or did I have to get on board as well?
She'd stopped making the whining sound, but I could still hear it inside my head as a phantom tune of unhappiness.
I broke the silence, speaking gently. “Will you give me some time to think about everything? I don't even know what happened last night. I was having a great time, and the food was perfect, and we were all having a lovely time. My aunt was asking about family gifts, and then something took over me. I was still aware, but I wasn't in control. Like stage fright, but without the fright.” I remembered how loose my mouth had felt. “Was I speaking in tongues?”
“You were possessed, Mom. I don't know about tongues, but Auntie Z said something about a Witch Tongue.”
“What did I say?”
“You kept saying toast. Then you went into the kitchen, filled the sink with water, and tried to electrocute yourself.”
The toaster.
That dirty rotten appliance. It had been in the kitchen when we moved in, quietly pretending to welcome us even while plotting my murder.
The ghost was in the toaster. Simple enough.
And if I'd been electrocuted, that would explain the soreness I had in every muscle, as well as the shakiness in my chest. It also explained my anxiety and agitation and why I couldn't sit around in my aunt's house and calmly accept this giant bombshell. I'd taken two shocks, one of them physical. My hands didn't show any visible burns, but some of my fingertips were numb.
“That wicked toaster has to go,” I said. “We've discovered the source of evil in our house, and it's a small appliance. The minute we get home, I'm throwing it out, and then we can get back to our normal life.”
“As normal as life can be for two brand-new witches.”
We walked in silence for a block while I digested the information.
Finally, I admitted, “We are going to make excellent witches.”
“Do you really believe it? Can I start studying spells at home? Or are you just saying that to keep me from running back to Auntie Z right this minute?”
“Shh,” I said.
Zoey went quiet immediately. That was the power of a librarian's professional-quality shushing. Or was it a librarian power after all? I'd always been good at shushing. Even as a page, my shushing had been unmatched. Had this been my witch powers seeping through?
Zoey leaned in and whispered, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. It's me. And my mom. 'Cause we're both witches.”
I snickered and looked around.
It was still dawn, too early for most people to be up yet. I had the creepy sensation we were being watched, but all the houses we walked by had dark windows.
Maybe it was simply the effects of being shocked, but I did sense something different inside myself. A new vitality was coursing through me. It was similar to how I'd felt when I was pregnant—after the morning sickness had passed. I knew I wasn't pregnant, because I hadn't had any wine coolers or other activities in a very long time.
Was this what it felt like to finally have a word for that sense of being weird, of being different from everyone else? Was this what it felt like to know you were a witch?
I put my arm around my daughter’s shoulders and whispered, “My name is Zara Riddle, and I'm a witch.”
Zoey giggled. “My name is Zoey Riddle, and I'm also a witch.” Her voice had risen above a whisper.
“Shh,” I repeated, glancing around the sleeping neighborhood. “We don't want the whole town to know, or they'll be beating a path to our door to get love spells and pimple potion and whatever else it is witches make or do. What do you think witches do?”
She shrugged, lifting my arm. “I guess we'll find out.”
“We need reference materials. I'll check the library, but they didn't have anything on sleeptoasting, so don't hold your breath. Our occult section is a bit anemic.”
“Was great-grandma a witch?”
I inhaled sharply. “She must have been! Wow, this explains so much about our family. I wish she was alive so I could talk to her about this.”
“We could ask her ghost,” Zoey said.
A snaky cold feeling shivered up my spine.
“Let's start with the basics before we hold any séances, okay?”
“Sure.”
“What are the basics?” I turned to look at her. “You must have been talking to Zinnia for hours while I was unconscious.”
Her lips twisted in a funny half smile. “The basics are simple things
like finding lost objects and influencing a coin flip.”
“That sounds so boring. What about flying?”
“We're not superheroes. You can't go around flying over people's houses on a broomstick. That's how people get burned at the stake. Most of what we talked about was her warning me to keep my powers hidden from the outside world.”
“They don't burn people at the stake anymore. I'm no lawyer, but I don't think witchcraft is anywhere in the criminal code.”
She stopped walking and faced me, her expression serious. She whispered, “But Auntie Z said there are bad people who will kill others to take their powers.”
I groaned. “This is why we can't have nice things.”
My daughter and I turned onto Beacon street just as the lights next door at the Moore residence were coming on.
The faint scent of peppermint was in the air.
“Ms. Vander Zalm?” I sniffed the air and patted myself cautiously.
Zoey narrowed her eyes at me. “Should I be concerned?”
“Only if you see me with a toaster.”
She stopped on the sidewalk in front of our house. “It's Saturday, so since I don't have school today, maybe we can go check out the beach?”
“You go inside and get a few hours of sleep,” I told her with motherly authority.
“What about you? You're not going to do something embarrassing, are you?”
“Probably.” I nodded at the blue house. “I'm going to invite the Moores over for brunch today.”
Zoey blinked at me in disbelief. “Brunch?”
“We moved here to Wisteria for a fresh start, remember? We talked about not being such introvert homebodies anymore. We're going to take tap dancing classes and see arty movies with subtitles and watch community theater and have people over for brunch!”
“What about the family gift?” She stared at me like I was crazy, and maybe I was.
“We can handle multiple new things.” I shook imaginary pom-poms. “New life in Wisteria. Social activities. Woo hoo!”
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