Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  But we spent only the one night together, that first night. I did not take his hand again.

  “You’ll stay for dinner?” my aunt asked each week.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I should get home, though.”

  The third time she asked, I followed Adrián toward the door, wanting to confess that the moment of him setting the host on my tongue was never enough.

  But my tongue, still missing the taste of his, would not speak the words. There was not enough of him left in my mouth.

  “She means it, you know,” I told him instead. “My aunt. She’s not just being polite.”

  He turned his face to me.

  “You should stay,” I said.

  “I’d better not,” he said, with a sadness I did not understand and did not have the courage to ask after.

  That night, I filled a hundred more pages with hearts drawn in pencil.

  If he had been a novicio, I could have driven him from my dreams so much more easily. I could have told myself he would never be mine because he would never belong to any girl.

  But when Adrián left his acolyte’s robe behind, it would be for a wedding ring, not a cassock. He would take a vow of marriage, not abstinence.

  The reason I did not bring him into my bedroom again was as familiar to me as the Hail Mary: boys like him, boys who served as acolytes, did not marry witches.

  Boys like Adrián sometimes loved witches, even considered marrying them. But when it came time for any public declaration, they always faltered. Boys who spent years at the altar in white robes could not bring themselves to tell their mothers and their churches that they loved a bruja.

  Love, however, had little to do with any of it. It was fear that drove their hearts. Fear of the priests who might slap their hands. Fear of the mothers who lowered their eyes and shook their heads when their sons disappointed them. Fear of a God they imagined watching them, the shadow of His disapproval on their bodies.

  I wanted to remember nothing but the deepening brown of Adrián’s eyes as he told me he wanted to marry one day.

  Instead, I remembered how boys like him were raised to count girls like me as daughters of the Devil.

  No one taught these boys to hear the voice of la Virgen. Our Lady spoke for us when no one on this earth would.

  * * *

  Three Sundays later, my tía let me sleep. She usually got me up as the sun was just spilling orange into the upstairs bedroom, so I could check the hens for eggs.

  I ran outside at the sound of her truck’s engine turning over.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, yelling over the diesel’s purr.

  Her weathered hands gripped the enormous wheel. “The nursery.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “We’re getting a new tree.”

  I surveyed the yard, crowded with the row of apricot trees, the chicken coop, an herb garden that sprawled all the way to the road. “Where’re you gonna put it?”

  My tía set her sights on the pear tree. “We’re taking that damn thing out.”

  “No,” I said, as though my tía’s house and land were mine.

  “It’s blighted,” she said. “It’s not getting better.”

  The flick of her hand toward the sick tree hurt as badly as if she’d tossed aside the seeds we saved from her heirloom tomatoes. I’d planted that Harrow pear with my tía the first summer I visited her, my small, chubby hands packing the dirt around the base. The sapling’s leaves had been bright as wet grass, and the sky had deepened to blown-glass blue by the time we finished.

  Now that the blight had taken hold, half the Harrow pear’s leaves had withered to red-brown, and the edges of the rest had turned wine-colored. Its spindly boughs and sparse foliage made it look stuck in early winter. For all we could do for the lovesick, we couldn’t help the dying thing in my aunt’s yard.

  I retied the ribbon on the waist of my pajama pants, my red hearts on pink cotton. I could not bring myself to get rid of them even though they reminded me of a boy I could not have. Since the night he’d first touched me, I’d filled three notebooks with drawn hearts.

  “What if someone comes for a remedio?” I asked my aunt. “When should I say you’re coming back?”

  “If someone comes for a remedio,” she said as she drove off, “then give it to them.”

  I couldn’t argue. Marisol had called late last night to say she’d seen the woman with the wedding dress in the center of town, hooking her feet onto another man’s bar stool.

  I sank into my tía’s sofa with a bowl of cereal. I wasn’t making huevos motuleños just for myself.

  The first knock at the door was earlier than usual. The lovesick didn’t often come in the morning. They came late in the afternoon, when the way the light slanted made them so sad they couldn’t carry it, or in the evening, when no one would see them at the back door. I figured it was Marisol with morning gossip, so I didn’t bother slipping a bra on under my shirt, or rubbing the splash of milk out of my pajama pants. I wanted Marisol to tell me she’d seen the woman with the wedding dress kissing a man twice as handsome and a hundred times kinder than the man in the Camaro.

  But when I opened the door, Marisol wasn’t there. Neither were the Villanueva sisters, or Señora Delgado, or any of the other curanderas.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, wishing I’d at least thrown on jeans.

  “I’m looking for your aunt,” Adrián said. It sounded like a question.

  I dropped my arms from my chest and braced a hand on the door frame, wondering if he would look away.

  He didn’t.

  “She’s gone for the day,” I said. “What do you need?”

  The smallness of his laugh made it sound even sadder. “What do you think?”

  The back of my neck heated, remembering all the hearts I’d drawn that summer.

  The way my mother told it, girls always held on tighter than boys. A boy moved on while the girl still scribbled her first name with his last.

  Did Adrián want the love he had for me gone so much he couldn’t even wait for it to fade from his boy-heart? And if he had really been lovesick over me, wouldn’t he have stayed some Sunday when my aunt offered him a place at our dinner table?

  “Fine.” I waved him inside.

  He handed me a folded strip of cloth, deep pink as roselles.

  The ribbon that had fallen out of my hair that night.

  I stilled the twirl of heat in me as fast as it rose.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t get it anywhere,” he said. “I kept it that night.”

  I took the ribbon and held it tight to my palm. That night always came back to me like the layers of a perfume. The smell of the trees in the dark, the soap and dust of his jacket, the train’s rusted metal on the cold air.

  But a new scent drifted off the ribbon.

  Salt.

  Not the kind from a jar.

  The kind a boy had let fall onto a hair ribbon.

  I owed my life that night to a boy who took walks alongside the railroad tracks when he couldn’t sleep. I could at least give him the remedio.

  There was nothing else for a bruja and a boy worthy of an acolyte’s robe. His mother hadn’t given him a proper boy’s name just so he could love a witch.

  I burned the ribbon, and flicked the smallest pinch of the ash into water. I added things that might remind him of me. A lemon blossom off the tree that shaded our front walk, the bud purple and cream. A splash of leftover wine like the kind he blessed when he gave me communion. I stirred it with a teal feather, one Gertrudes had shed last summer and that I had cleaned and kept.

  Adrián held a groan at the back of his throat. “I have to drink that?”

  I twirled the feather’s vein through the water. “No cure worth having is pr
etty.”

  He cuffed up his sleeves, knowing what came next.

  “Why wouldn’t you ever stay?” I asked, because now there was no reason not to.

  “You never seemed to want me to.”

  The feather stilled in my hand.

  Of course I wanted him to.

  His stare opened, as though waiting for me to tell the truth.

  Yes, I wanted him to stay. Every time.

  And I wanted him never to stay, because then I would become another bruja who had gotten her heart broken by un acólito.

  He offered his hands, holding them palms-up in front of me, as though I could have my pick of his fingers.

  I held a clean sewing needle over the pad of his ring finger.

  He nodded at me. Go ahead, his face said.

  But I couldn’t make my hands do it. Not when I felt the hot glow of his heart warming the needle like a live coal.

  In the bright trembling of my fingers, I heard a whisper, soft and blue as la Virgen’s veil.

  She would not let me take from this boy that which was already mine.

  Adrián’s love was not a small, discrete thing I could draw from him like a lost jewel. It had grown tendrils and brambles. It had encircled his heart like morning glory over a brick wall. Like moonflower vines crawling and wrapping around everything they could reach.

  The sound of green things filled the kitchen. Leaves rustling in harsh wind. Shoots breaking up through spring ground.

  I checked the shifting light from the window.

  The green of the Harrow pear filled the frame. It loomed and grew, breaking out of its two-year winter. The branches burst with health and new greenery. The blighted leaves fell away, and the wind took them. A million little white petals speckled the boughs, showing up on the dark wood as quickly as snowflakes. Red-gold fruit formed like water drops and weighted down the branches.

  Those dozens of new pears left me silent except for one breathless laugh.

  Adrián followed my gaze to the window. “Wasn’t that...”

  I nodded.

  He’d seen it shriveled and blighted. He’d seen the sand-colored leaves clinging to the branches. He’d prayed over it, asking God and la Virgen to touch the boughs. Now it stood bushy and clover-green, so heavy with fruit the branches bowed.

  I pushed his hair out of his face and put my mouth on his.

  In the fearless way he believed, in the brazen hope he kept in his heart, he was as much brujo as I was bruja. That pear tree, green and alive, was as much his doing as mine.

  I wondered how many hearts in this town held magic inside them. Knew it. Feared it. I wondered if this was why they shunned us, if we brujas reminded them too much of something within themselves.

  The scent of pears slid in through the cracked window. It slipped between our mouths, Adrián’s lips close enough to touch mine as he breathed.

  I spread my hand over his shirt, feeling the thick fabric underneath, and I wondered if my fingers spanned wide enough to cover his heart and the veins that held it.

  The sun lit up the Harrow pear, casting shadows on his body and my hands. It filtered through the leaves and blossoms. It caught in the drops of water that jeweled the pears. That tree, once blighted, now held every season we ever saw. The countless five-petal blossoms. The green of deep summer. The weight of fruit in fall. Everything but the winter we’d known for so many months.

  I came back to church that Sunday. My aunt did not. I didn’t blame her. Even the Harrow pear, in its full greenery, could not match the weight of being turned away from the altar rail for so many years. She stayed home, planting the sapling tree she had brought home with her, a mate for the now-living Harrow pear.

  So that Sunday, I walked the length of the nave alone.

  Adrián gave me la hostia with a sureness that scared the violet-eyed priest from slapping his hand. He blessed me in front of the congregation, and in front of the priests who had trained him to turn away witches. He gave me what he was meant to refuse me, and in doing so, he declared the way in which we belonged to each other.

  I took the host, to show Adrián’s mother that I was a bruja with heart enough for her son.

  That afternoon, Adrián and I would walk through town. The main streets, not the back roads. He would wear his white robe and cord even as a bruja kept pace alongside him. We would bring communion to my aunt, who knew there was at least one acolyte behind the altar rail who would bless her.

  And that night, I would untie the white cord from around Adrián’s waist. I would take him from his white robe. I would slide into his hands the soft weight of a new pear.

  As I thought of these things, I caught la Virgen in the corner of my vision. Beneath Her blue veil, She cast Her eyes to the church floor. But Her lips held a small smile, as though She will always see the love we carry in our hearts long before we understand it to be there.

  * * * * *

  THE GHERIN GIRLS

  by Emery Lord

  Nova

  ON THE LAST night Nova is home, she cooks out on the back patio. Steak kebabs with spicy eggplant and mushrooms. Honey-roasted corn and grilled bread with burrata.

  Nova eats slowly, watching her sisters laugh around the fire. The flames reflecting in Willa’s glasses. Rosie’s hair draping past her shoulder, tiny buds from the greenhouse tucked into the braid. Nova remembers that Rosie taught herself to do this at some point, plait her hair like a feudal maiden. But sometimes it feels like Rosie was born just knowing how to look like Rosie.

  Sometimes it feels like Nova will never stop being relieved to see Rosie here at home, safe and happy. It was two years ago this very weekend that Rosie moved out. It was her choice—Nova knew that. But it felt like Rosie had been stolen away into a dark kingdom.

  As they’re finishing up, a little shadow snakes his way into their circle. Cats should be scared of fire, Nova thinks.

  He slides up against Rosie’s leg, nudging at her, and Nova shakes her head. “The black cat is just...not going to help with the rumors, Rosie.”

  “Oh, like anything ever helps with the rumors.” Rosie scratches a line down the cat’s nose, and he closes his eyes happily. “Don’t listen to her, Gnomey.”

  The cat has lived here for over a year now, ever since Rosemary came home. They’ve had cats at the farmhouse before, of course, but none that came inside every night to sleep at the foot of Rosie’s bed.

  “I still can’t believe you named the cat Gnome,” Nova mutters.

  “He named himself.” Rosie picks him up protectively. She sits between Nova and Willa, her natural place as middle sister. There are always three Gherin girls born to a generation: one to support you on each side.

  That, as much as anything, is why Momma always spends the fall equinox with her own sisters—this year, in the Cotswolds. Nova comes home from New York to be with Willa and Rosie. Day and night in equal balance; sisterhood in balance. Daddy, bless his heart, is visiting his brother in Denver this weekend. Always quietly supporting his girls, even if it means giving them some time alone.

  “I couldn’t eat another bite,” Willa announces.

  “Oh no?” Nova holds out one hand. “So you don’t want snacks for the movies later?”

  Nova’s last night home for equinox is always a fall movie marathon, mostly witch films—their little joke. Willa lays her palm on Nova’s, smiling innocently.

  “Espresso brownies, eh?” Nova laughs a little. “And toffee ice cream?”

  “Oooh,” Willa says. “Yeah.”

  “I used the last of Momma’s cocoa on the kebabs.”

  “I can run out,” Rosie says. “You need jalapeños for Daddy’s meat loaf anyway.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Novy considers this. She’s had her fill of Grander, Wyoming. Last time she went to get groceries, a girl from high school sa
id hello and then: I’d heard you buzzed your head. That just about summed it up. Grander: where you can move two thousand miles away, and people will still hear about your damn haircut. “And more peanut butter, if you want me to make that sauce for noodles before I go.”

  “You don’t have to prep meals for us,” Willa says. “We can do it.”

  Well, they can make deli sandwiches and pick up takeout, anyway. Rosie is too dreamy-eyed for cooking, prone to burnt-black edges and fire alarms. And Willa, well. Willa thinks cooking seems too fiddly when frozen pizza tastes so good.

  When they’re all done, Nova douses the fire pit, and it gives off that satisfying sizzle. Around any given bonfire, she thinks of being twelve, the year her history class touched on the Salem Witch trials. Every face in that room craned toward her, awaiting reaction. My mom’s an herbalist and a doula and a massage therapist, she wanted to scream. To this day, half those kids’ parents shuffle into Momma’s sunny parlor for appointments. Some weep on her table, worn-out by pain. Momma kneads their backs and coos, “It’s okay now. Let it out.”

  When Nova asked her mother if they were related to the Salem witches, Momma smiled at her three girls. “In a way, you’re related to many women who have suffered for misunderstanding and fear.”

  Nova liked the idea of interconnectedness, without a clear explanation. Willa, their little National Merit Semifinalist, needed data. But there were no textbooks on the Gherin family women, just a few cracked leather journals with generations of handwritten notes. In middle school, Willa charted out a family tree—the taxonomy of their gifts. The three of them, and Momma, were listed as Tactile. Momma could soothe, but only by touch. Sometimes that meant calming colicky babies; sometimes it meant helping heartbroken people finally cry—releasing their buried feelings was ultimately soothing. Over the years, she’d discovered this to work, temporarily, on burns and bug bites.

  Nova could sense what specific food would taste best to people in that exact moment. Rosie knew what plants needed to thrive. It made her a nurturer in all the good ways, but it also made her try to fix things she could not fix. Like broken boys who would break her, too, if they could. And Willa, well—she could feel every nuanced emotion with just a brush of skin on skin.