Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  “No. Not even for you.” Elle shrugs one shoulder.

  “It’s all wrong,” Jo says miserably. “This isn’t what I saw at all.”

  “Maybe we can’t fight our fate,” Elle suggests.

  “I refuse to believe that.” Jo is uniquely situated to fight fate. To see it coming and bend it to her will. She chose her sisters over everything (her sisters...and wealth and power, a small voice inside reminds her). But they refused to make the same sacrifices. Elle chose Alice. In the heat of her anger, Georgie chose revenge. And now Jo feels farther away from them than ever.

  You cannot survive together, Mam had said. But it’s not so easy surviving apart, either.

  * * * * *

  LOVE SPELL

  by Anna-Marie McLemore

  I THINK I fell in love with el acólito the first time he gave me communion. But I can’t know for sure. I had flinched from his touch so many times, sure God would strike me down for wanting the boy placing la hostia on my tongue.

  The priests have ways of giving us communion without touching us, and the acolytes too. It’s an art as delicate as slipping the red shell off a nutmeg seed. La Virgen Herself must guide their hands. Their fingers never graze our mouths or nick our tongues.

  But la Virgen did not steady this boy’s hands. I imagined Her in the transept, bright with stained-glass light, laughing without sound as his fingers brushed my lips and we each shuddered back as though we might burn each other.

  La Virgen may be our Mother of grace and mercy, but She is also more mischief than our priests will ever admit.

  If the other girls and their mothers didn’t notice el acólito’s fingers on my lips, the pressure of his nails soft as the vein of a feather, it was because they were not watching the acolytes. They were watching our newest priest. A younger one, no older than twenty-five, with a back muscled enough that they could see the hint of it through his cassock, and eyes that shone purple in full sun.

  I had never cared for him, this violet-eyed man they call the handsome priest.

  I cared for him even less when he slapped el acólito’s hand so hard he almost dropped the chalice.

  La hostia caught in my throat. Even soaked in wine, it felt dry and hard as cornmeal. I looked up with my eyes but did not lift my chin.

  El acólito looked so chastened, like a little boy caught reaching toward a blue flame, that I felt my weight sink into the kneeler.

  “Don’t you know anything?” the handsome priest scolded, at a whisper. “We don’t bless witches.”

  * * *

  My aunt has a saying about women like us: Find the right bruja, and you’re half done.

  The Villanueva sisters can bring down any fever, resting their hands on a hot forehead until they know the right green leaves to break the calentura. For susto so bad it’s worth driving a day to cure, my tía recommends a woman three hundred miles away, rumored to be so old no one knows when, or if, she was born. And my second cousin makes a little fortune off gullible tourists, but she also knows how to cure more than a too-heavy handbag.

  My aunt and I don’t cure susto or pneumonia, or rid children of their nightmares. Our gift is for lovesickness.

  “Can you get rid of it?” the lovesick always ask when they come to our door.

  “Yes,” my tía says, so long as they can stomach the cure.

  (It’s our great misfortune that my tía will take anything as payment. A bag of purple potatoes. Jewelry kept from the lovers who left. Leeks so recently dug up that sand still flecks the bulbs. If she insisted on money, we’d have the roof fixed. From a distance, her home has the look of a child’s dollhouse left in an attic, charming in its sloped roof and arched windows, but forgotten long enough to sag under age and wear.)

  Our art isn’t amnesia; we leave that to the Sandovals down the road. No one who visits us forgets the objects of their love. You still know who they are, and that, once, you felt a love for them that wore off like a fever. They become whoever they would’ve been to you if you did not love them. A friend. An acquaintance. A pretty neighbor whose name you may or may not be able to place.

  * * *

  “What are you doing out there?” my aunt asked from the kitchen window.

  I was standing under our Harrow pear, the sad, blighted tree that hadn’t given fruit in two seasons. But I loved it. I loved even its withered branches and sickly leaves, always red and orange as though frozen in autumn.

  I caught my aunt’s look. Just leave it alone and let it die in peace, her eyes said. To her, all my watering and pruning was as useless as trying to grow corn from empty husks.

  She flapped her hands at me to join her inside.

  A young woman had come to us holding a wedding dress, the skirt wide but limp as a pierced balloon. My tía and I already knew who she was. We’d been expecting her. Her pendejo fiancé had left her at the altar the weekend before. Her family was still eating the leftover pigs-in-a-blanket. They’d brought the five-tiered cake to the retirement home three towns over, and donated twenty pounds of silvered almonds to the church.

  The young woman held out the dress to my tía. “Can you cure me?”

  My tía put a hand on my back and pushed me forward. “She can.”

  “Now?” I whispered to my aunt.

  I had watched her give many lovesickness cures. I handed her the matches, added the smallest pinches of ash to the water, mixed the remedios for the heartbroken to drink. But I had never made one myself.

  I worried that getting a good look at me would make the woman run. I wouldn’t be seventeen until fall, a world away from my aunt with her silver braid. Wisdom crinkled the corners of her eyes, while my right temple wore a sprinkling of acne so persistent I’d gotten used to hiding it behind my hair. No lovesick heart would trust a girl who still needed witch hazel.

  But the woman held out the wedding dress. Without meaning to, I opened my hands and accepted its weight.

  Sometimes, my tía tried to talk her pacientes out of the cure. Love should be driven from the body only if it will destroy all else, she often told them.

  “Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” she warned.

  But she did not try to talk this woman out of it. When her novio took off with half their wedding gifts in the back of his Camaro, the women in town made the sign of the cross out of gratitude. The loss of fine sheets and silver was worth getting rid of this man who considered the voices of women chatter, meaningless as the clicking of a barn windmill. I thought I felt the very earth under us sigh in relief as he crossed out of our town’s limits.

  The woman hadn’t just brought the wedding dress so she could clutch its satin. We needed a little of it, a piece stained and starched by tears she had cried for that man.

  She held her back teeth tight as I ripped a scrap from the hem.

  My aunt looked on as I burned the cloth. The flame swallowed it up, and when the ashes cooled I added a tiny pinch to a jar of water. My aunt had made me practice this a hundred times. The motions of my fingers had to be careful and precise, especially with the ash. The line between cure and poison is always fine, and walking it takes all the skill and gift I have in me.

  Making a remedio meant listening both to my own don and all I had learned from my tía. Always, the cure had to be drawn from the lovesickness itself. A few drops of honey; their wedding cake would have been pastel de miel. Lavender; she’d tucked sprigs of it in her shoes and into her hair the day he left. Guajillo chile, her favorite kind; she would need to get her bite back to heal her own heart.

  The woman held out her hand, knowing what we needed last.

  Your blood is sick with your own love, my tía always said. A little bit of the sickness helps make the cure.

  It was the same reason we needed something that held their tears.

  I lifted a needle from the ones we’d boiled in water and held
in the blue flame of the stove that morning. The woman did not flinch when I pricked her finger, or when I held her hand over the jar, the red twirling into the grayed water.

  I handed her the remedio. She shuddered. They always do at the sight of the dull water, tinted faintly with their own blood, that they must now drink.

  But she drank it.

  Later, when we were cutting back the wild mint, my tía said, “You are ready.”

  I tossed a handful of leaves into the burlap bag. I had learned the lovesickness cure under my aunt’s watch. I could not imagine keeping my hands steady without her. Not now, not in fifty years. “Don’t say that.”

  “That’s you letting your fear speak for you.” She tucked a spray of bluebells into my braid. “If you let fear be your voice, you will never have sure hands.”

  * * *

  My aunt has a saying about men like the handsome priest: The only thing that bothers them more than brujas who ignore God is brujas who enter His house.

  She did not go to church with me. So she had not seen el acólito cringing with the shame of having his hands slapped just after he’d washed them with holy water. She had warned me that if I went to service I was a fool, and that if I tried to take the Eucharist, I was a fool twice over.

  That Sunday, with el acólito’s fingers on my lips, I understood my aunt’s warning. And when I heard the whispers trailing after me like a wedding train—she has nerve, doesn’t she? You know her tía’s pear tree doesn’t give fruit; la Virgen Herself blighted it—I knew I would not go back.

  Instead I knelt with my rosary each night, el ave maría and the Twelve Truths of the World on my lips. I said my prayers to God, who I believed still wanted me, even if the men who took up His name on Earth never would.

  * * *

  My mother had warned me, before she and my father let me come live with my tía to learn about my gift. She warned me that, especially in small towns, people believed in our remedios when they needed us and called us sorceresses when they didn’t.

  “They’ll stab you in the back, cariña,” my mother told me. “One day they’ll drag you into the middle of town and cut your throat, all of them screaming you’re a witch.”

  “If they stab me in the back, I’ll be dead before they cut my throat,” I muttered as I packed my clothes.

  But I listened. I kept to my aunt’s house and to short errands in town.

  I only slipped once. It was that summer, a night my heart felt so emptied, so untethered from the weeks I’d gone without taking la hostia, it was as though my body went looking for it. I sleepwalked right out of my aunt’s house and into the road.

  My aunt’s house melted into my dreams. The colors she painted the rooms—dark green, deep gold, rich blue—became the shades of the land and sky in autumn. The smell of her kitchen, the jars of marigold petals and rosebuds, transformed into a night garden. The wooden stairs were rocky ground, so that when my feet touched true ground outside, my sleeping body could not tell the difference.

  I woke startled, hissing like a cat. I flinched at how the wet earth had crawled up the backs of my pajama pants, sticking them to my legs. The wind whipped the ribbon off my braid, my hair flying free.

  The shriek of an engine tore through me. My heart flinched with fear and recognition. My feet found traction on the rough wood of railroad ties, but then lost it, so fast I thought the wind had hands.

  El acólito, out of his white robe with the white cord for a belt, now wore the jeans and duck-cloth jacket of any other boy out at night.

  El acólito, who did not have his fingers light on my lips but his hands tight on my waist.

  The acolyte, who had just pulled me out of the way of the late train.

  Even as a girl used to hearing bruja whispered at her back, the smallest things could still embarrass me. And now, even with this boy’s hands on me, even with my pulse still hard in my throat, I felt the odd shame of realizing what pajama pants I was wearing. Red hearts on a pink cotton background. My mother had bought them for me to make fun of how I drew hearts on everything. The edges of my notebooks were crammed with them. I couldn’t leave a note for my tía without adding a heart to the corner. My mother called it a funny habit for a girl learning to cure lovesickness.

  When the acolyte and I both got our breath back, when the last freight car had screamed past and the rasp of metal faded, he slackened into politeness. He stepped back, dropping his hands from me and asking if I was all right.

  Even with the formal posture, he still wore that shamed look he’d gotten from the violet-eyed priest. I didn’t know why. There was no one out here to see us.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Odd words from a boy who’d just kept my own dreams from killing me.

  He lowered his head, more than he needed to for our small difference in height, and I understood he was not embarrassed that the church had seen him scolded.

  He was embarrassed it had happened in front of me.

  The idea that he cared what a bruja thought of him was like the brush of his fingers against my lips. It was the whisper of the pear tree’s leaves the first season it flowered and greened.

  I had been near enough lovesickness to know better. But I brought el acólito into my aunt’s house, both of us silent as we passed her door.

  He let me take his clothes from him for the night. Not all of them, but enough that he showed himself to me. He told me how his mother had given him a girl’s name when he was born. That girl’s name had never truly been his, so his mother named him again. She decided that just because she was wrong the first time did not mean she shouldn’t christen him the second, this time with a boy’s name. A name that suited him.

  “Adrián,” he told me. His proper name, the boy’s name his mother had given him.

  He told me this as he took my clothes from me, as though these were things he needed to see all of me to tell.

  * * *

  After that, Adrián brought communion to me and my tía.

  I wondered how hard the violet-eyed priest would slap him if he caught him smuggling la hostia from the church. Adrián brought it to my aunt’s kitchen, adorned not with somber cloth but with ristras of bright chiles, where the blood of Christ would be an inch of Tempranillo from a bottle forgotten the night before.

  My aunt took communion, but always with a laugh, as though she were obliging this boy.

  “I don’t believe God hides Himself behind an altar rail, or in bread,” she said one Sunday as he unwrapped la hostia, blessing it on her kitchen table. “But I will take it, if it will make you happy.”

  Adrián gave his own obliging smile. “It will.”

  “And you don’t worry over giving communion to an old witch?” she asked.

  “No.” His laugh was soft as he lifted la hostia from the cloth napkin. “I don’t.”

  My tía never said thank you. Or, she did, once, by shoving one of our live chickens at him, a red-brown one with a few tail feathers as blue-green as a peacock’s. She did not ask if he wanted it. She only thrust the hen into his arms and said, “She gives good eggs, and she won’t peck you much when you come for them.”

  The chicken—I had named her Gertrudes the summer before—squawked and flapped as Adrián adjusted his grip on her.

  “Show our guest out,” my tía said.

  I led Adrián to the front steps.

  “I’m sorry about my aunt,” I said once I shut the door behind us. “She’s not just humoring you, I promise. She does believe.”

  His shrug was slow. “Faith comes in as many forms as the faithful.”

  “You sound ready for Holy Orders.”

  He laughed. I was glad he took the compliment the way I meant it, that I thought he could one day match the wisdom of the old priest, or the kind spirit of the short priest. Not the fury and judgment of the handsome one.

 
“Thank you,” he said. “But the priesthood, it’s not for me.”

  “You don’t see yourself in the cassock?”

  “I see myself married.”

  He looked at me with the same clear stare as when he gave me la hostia. But there was no altar rail. And I was not kneeling.

  I had only tasted his mouth once, that night a few weeks earlier. But I remembered it as well as the taste of a communion wafer.

  His look was so unbroken and unguarded that it held for only a few seconds before we both shivered away.

  “I mean—” he caught on the words “—one day.”

  I took in a breath of the air between us, hoping there was some trace of him on it.

  Adrián held Gertrudes out to me. “This seems as good a time as any to give you back your hen.”

  Gertrudes flapped again.

  “You’ll take good care of her, I know it.” I eased her back into his arms, calming both her and Adrián. “All I ask is you don’t cook her. She’s a good layer.”

  “I wouldn’t cook a hen you’re fond of, even if she didn’t lay. But I don’t want to take her from you. She’s yours.”

  “Don’t you know anything?” I asked, my voice laughing but hard. “Never refuse a gift from a witch.”

  I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t meant the echo. I cringed hearing myself mimic the handsome priest.

  The light went out of Adrián, his shoulders slumping as though the fault was rightfully his.

  He nodded his goodbye.

  I let him go.

  And because I could not go after him, I filled a notebook with a thousand pencil-drawn hearts.

  I said nothing to my tía about how Gertrudes was my favorite. She knew, and if I had mentioned it, she would have smirked at me.

  She did anyway, that night as we fired her cast-iron pan on the stove.

  It was a smirk I read easily, just as she wanted me to.

  I may have given him your favorite hen. But you gave him your heart.

  * * *

  June opened into midsummer. Redbud blossoms gave way to the blue-purple flowers of the chaste trees. And every Sunday, Adrián came.