Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  They used to be jealous, Nova and Rosie, that Willa’s gift had so much heft. Nova loved cooking anyway, and being able to comfort people with it was a bonus. Rosie’s gift turned her plant-raising into useful herbal medicines and bath products. But Willa had access to information, whether she wanted it or not. Sometimes she did not.

  The Gherin girls never called it magic, even though they tried to hone and utilize each talent with care. After all, was perfect pitch considered magic? An eidetic memory? No, they were simply unusual gifts.

  Nova gathers the last of the dishes and closes the patio door behind her.

  “Anything else, Novy?” Willa calls from the front hallway. “Cocoa, jalapeños, the good peanut butter, and ice cream?”

  Nova visualizes the aisles, wondering if she has supplies to make a rustic vegetable tortellini. She likes to leave her family stocked up—it assuages the guilt a little, as she flies the miles and miles back to New York. “Maybe I should come.”

  “Just stay,” Rosie says. “In case anyone calls.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Nova frowns. Rosie’s room shares a wall with hers. And for all three nights Nova’s been home, he’s called on his walk from the restaurant to the subway. For no reason. Just to check in. Nova likes the sound of his voice.

  “Nothing, nothing!” Nova can hear Rosie smiling. They both know that this—whoever Nova has been talking to in the evenings—will become worth telling someday soon.

  Rosemary

  Willa drives because she can now and because Rosie likes to sit shotgun with the window down. They soar Daddy’s truck down the back roads with the radio up.

  The trees have put on their yellow dancing dresses. Fall air. And this time, Rosie is going to breathe it in.

  Last fall, she was still standing on shaky ground. After a bad winter, she’d grown back parts of herself in spring and summer, letting the sunlight hit her face. She spent hours in the greenhouse, spritzing and repotting. Clipping back dead leaves.

  She had replanted herself where she belonged, but she needed water and light and air and nutrients. Most of all, she needed time.

  That was a year ago, and she’s strong now. She feels strong in her classes, a year deep into a botany degree. She feels strong riding horses with Daddy on the weekends. Driving to Cheyenne with the girls from her department for ice-cold beers and dancing. Just dancing to dance. With no one’s permission; with no one’s approval.

  The grocery store is still bustling. As always, the girls get a few sidelong glances. No one really believes they’re witches—not with any fervor anyway. But they do wonder. The way you wonder, as a child, if your stuffed animals talk when you’re not there. You know they don’t... Right?

  The rumors about hexes are, of course, fabrications. Gherin girls are raised to rely on karma, that slow and steady mare.

  Up near the checkout, Rosie pauses, breathing in a change in the atmosphere like a whiff of ozone after the rains. And this feeling...it’s familiar. Nearby. A tug on gravity so slight that no one notices but her.

  She glances around, eyes scanning.

  And the linoleum floor falls out beneath her feet.

  Why would he be here? Why?

  Is she imagining it? For months after she left him, she’d startled at every young blond man in her peripheral vision. Even after she heard that he’d moved.

  He’s carrying a case of cheap beer, his high school football buddies following behind him with chips and bags of ice.

  He always was both handsome and pretty, somehow, that dark blond hair kept in a knot at his crown. Jawline cut close around his full lips. And that same beat-up denim jacket, a thrift store find just tight enough to highlight biceps.

  Vain. He was always vain about his looks, though he pretended it was effortless. She’d seen it after she moved in with him, the careful dumbbell reps, the mirror glances.

  Rosie can’t think—at least, not in words. The images flash, a reel of their greatest hits. The month they were both obsessed with that dumb pop song, playing it over and over in his truck. His fool’s gold hair hanging loose as he got up from bed. No. His icy silence. “Forgetting” to pick her up from work. His anger, how it pulsed like a heartbeat.

  Wyatt.

  Wyatt, Wyatt, Wy, Wy, Why?

  Why does a small, warm relief rush in—the vindication that she’s wearing mascara and her best jeans? God, she hates that. She hates that, after everything, she craves his approval. She has since the moment they met. On his first day in school, he—this Army son with a face like an oil painting—settled down next to her in the cafeteria and said, “Hey,” as if picking up a conversation they’d left off in another life. It wasn’t until after the bell rang that he held out a tanned hand. Elegant fingers, Rosie thought. Long but sturdy. She wanted a glimpse at his love line. “Wyatt, by the way.”

  She clasped his hand, a touch that jolted up her arm. “Rosie.”

  “Rosie,” he repeated. Trying it out in his mouth. Maybe knowing, even then, that he’d say it a thousand more times.

  He is in the grocery store, of all places. In a town where he no longer lives.

  Now they stand a few yards apart, eyes locked.

  She walks toward him. Or does she? It feels like the tile itself slides her into his orbit.

  He steps toward her, too, drawn away from his group.

  “Rosie,” he says quietly. Reverently, she thinks. Just the one word. He has the smallest smile on his face.

  “Hey.” She pushes a loose piece of hair behind her ear. Tries to return the smile so she looks relaxed, and not like her heart is a rusted motor whirring to life. She means to ask what he’s doing here. Her hands tremble.

  His eyes skim down her body, drinking her in, gulping. “You look good, Ro. I guess that’s cliché to say.”

  She wants to snatch her name from his mouth. Only people who love her get to call her that. Instead, she lifts one shoulder. “When have I ever disliked clichés?”

  Hadn’t she loved when he played guitar for her? Hadn’t she worn his football jersey knotted at her waist? I know it’s stupid, he’d said, pressing the soft mesh into her hands. But all the other guys’ girlfriends wear them. And Rosie, well, she’d felt so pleased to be claimed by him, to wear his name on her back.

  He’d been right that it was stupid.

  “What are you doing tonight? I’m staying with Dev—we’re having people over. You should come.” He runs a hand through his hair, casual as can be.

  “Yeah, maybe. Why not?” she says, wanting him to be impressed with her nonchalance. To see that she is unbroken.

  Why not?! she thinks. Because he sank his claws into your soul so deeply that the puncture wounds bled for months. And, in this moment, you’d reopen them if he so much as nodded toward his truck.

  “Will!” Wyatt says, eyes finding her over Rosie’s shoulder. “Hey, look at you!”

  When Rosie turns to look at her sister, she finds Willa with eyes narrowed. Novy always looked at Wyatt like that, like slats of blinds, snapping near-closed. The Gherin girls couldn’t read minds, not like people whispered about anyway. But Rosie could so clearly hear Willa wanting to reply: Hello, Satan.

  “You’re a junior!” he is saying. “Right? Man, how did that happen so fast?”

  “Right. Crazy.”

  “You should come over, too! House party at Dev’s,” he says.

  “That’s nice,” she says, in a tone that suggests it is not nice at all. Why can Willa—her little sister—be as cold as he deserves, while Rosie flounders politely? “But Nova’s home this weekend. So we better get going.”

  Willa reaches out a hand. Rosie will not take it. She puts her arm through Willa’s, her sweater a buffer between them.

  “Well, if you change your mind...” Wyatt says. “Try to stop by. It’s been too long, Ro.”

&nbs
p; “Okay,” Rosie says, looking back with a smile.

  Stop it! a base part of her brain screams. No more smiles, no more trying.

  Once they’re in the truck, Willa exhales. “God, that was weird, him being there. Right?”

  “I mean, not really. He’s back in town visiting friends.” Rosie hears herself defending him, even in this tiny thing. She forces herself to think of Gnomey, waiting for her at home.

  Those are the last words they exchange in the truck.

  Willa

  The whole ride home, Willa worries that Rosie is sitting in the passenger seat, remembering the good times. Willa is remembering the bad ones.

  On graduation day, he gave her sister a simple rose gold ring.

  “It’s not an engagement ring,” Rosie explained, her hand splayed out for Willa and Nova to see. “Just a gift.”

  So romantic, Willa thought.

  Nova blinked at the woven band. “I thought you liked yellow gold.”

  Rosie pulled her hand back, scorned. “It’s rose gold. Like my name.”

  She moved in with him in September, the day after fall equinox. Two towns over. They’d both commute to the local college.

  Rosie and Nova had a blow-up fight. Novy said moving in with a guy before turning nineteen was the most Grander, Wyoming, thing that Rosie had ever done. Rosie shrilled back about Novy’s snobbishness. You only support me when I make the same choices you would make! Rosie cried. But I’m not you, Novy!

  Rosie loaded all of her possessions in his truck as Momma sat on the back porch. Willa had helped, cheerful and naïve, with arms full of boxes.

  Daddy kissed Rosie’s cheek and whispered, so that Wyatt couldn’t hear, “You come home anytime, Rosie girl, okay? Day or night.”

  Willa waved as they drove off, blissful as newlyweds. When she turned to go in, Daddy had his back to the road, one hand gripped over his heart.

  Weeks passed. In the greenhouse, leaves went dry as paper, curled up at the edges. Petals drooped like too-loose silk.

  Rosie rarely answered her phone. Didn’t stop by. She returned texts by saying she’d call later, but if she did, it was brief and blandly cheerful. Glib explanations of all the housework and decorating they’d been doing. She dodged concrete plans by chirping, “Yeah, maybe! I’ll let you know.”

  She never let them know.

  Willa twisted off the cap of Rosie’s homemade jasmine lavender shampoo, trying to hang on to the realness of her.

  Later, they heard she deferred her admission to the university. They heard she was still working at the florist’s shop, but also waitressing late at night. Willa didn’t know till later that Momma would drive to the gas station near the diner some nights, just to see Rosie move from table to table.

  One night, Willa exploded at the dinner table. “We should just go get her!”

  “That’s not how it works,” Momma said quietly. Daddy looked like he was going to cry, right there over the nice roast that Novy taught them to make.

  “Why not?”

  Momma exchanged a look with Daddy, unreadable. “Rosemary is an adult.”

  At the time, Willa thought her mother was trying to point out that it was normal—healthy—for an eighteen-year-old to move out of her parents’ house. That they’d all do well to remember that Rosie was her own, not theirs.

  After, though, Willa heard it differently. Heard her mother reminding herself that Rosie was legally an adult, that they couldn’t just go and take her back. That, in trying to, they might drive her closer to him.

  It lasted six months.

  Six months that, later, Rosie, wouldn’t talk about.

  On the day the first crocus bloomed, Momma stopped scrubbing midway through a pile of dishes. The plate clattered into the sink, and she rushed outside, Willa on her heels. She thought maybe Novy had caught an earlier flight.

  But it was Rosie, sitting in the passenger seat of an old sedan, driven by a middle-aged woman Willa had never seen. But Momma had seen her before. Another waitress at the diner.

  Rosie stared up at the farmhouse.

  Momma ran to her, splecks of mud flicking across her long skirt.

  Rosie got out of the car, sheltering a scrawny black cat in her arms. Willa couldn’t tell, in that moment, if Rosie was protecting the cat...or using the cat as protection between herself and the rest of the world. Momma wrapped an arm around her middle girl, murmuring, and Willa hurried to get Rosie’s bags.

  “Thank you,” Momma told the woman driving. “I can’t... I just. Thank you.”

  “I’ve been with a few real pieces of shit myself,” the lady said, shaking her head. “’S hard to leave. Real hard.”

  “Can I give you some cash, for the drive over from—”

  “No, no,” she said. “Rosie’s a good girl.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Momma said, emphatic. Then she turned in to Rosie. “Come on, baby. You did good.”

  “I don’t know what I did wrong.” Her mouth was pale and dry. What kind of winter had done this to Rosie, Willa wondered.

  Momma’s voice was a fierce whisper. “You did nothing wrong, my love.”

  Rosie slept for two days. Willa brushed her hair, but Rosie shifted to avoid Willa’s hand touching her skin. Daddy read to her even when she fell asleep, stories about seven generations of one family, about magic and the real world intertwining. Willa sat outside the door, listening to his voice.

  Finally, Rosie let Momma rub her hands and feet. She wept and wept—onto her eyelet pillowcase, onto the cat’s fur. Sometimes it sounded like howls. For weeks, she barely spoke. The most noise Willa heard her make was tsking at the cat.

  Now, in the passenger seat, Rosie is silent, and Willa worries what happens once they get home. There is no Momma to soothe her. No Daddy to take the night shift with his gentle presence. Novy will know what to do, Willa reassures herself, pressing into the gas pedal. Novy always knows what to do.

  Nova

  The autumn wind snakes up to the porch, and Nova pulls her sweater tight. She stares at the road from town as if her sisters will manifest right then, like they won’t show up if she blinks. Willa texted her from the grocery store: He’s here. It was perhaps the fastest Nova has ever typed a response: Get her out of there.

  Oh, Rosie girl. Would she cry and rage and feel it? Or would she be sunken-in and wispy, floating away like smoke?

  Nova hadn’t been here when Rosie came home last year. Nova arrived the next day and walked right upstairs, leaving her bag in the foyer. Momma and Willa warned her that Rosie didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to be touched, didn’t want to cry. She’s processing, Momma said. But when Nova knocked, Rosie’s voice said, quite clearly, to come in. She was sitting up in bed, staring out the windows at the paddock and toying with the ends of her loose hair.

  “Hey,” Novy said, her voice thin with sorrow. “Oh, Ro. I’m so sorry about all this.”

  Rosie turned, eyes narrowed. “You always hated him. Don’t pretend to be sad.”

  “Rosie.” She knelt beside the bed. “I’m not pretending. I’m just sad for a different reason than you are.”

  Novy was sad because her sister had become a gambler. Rosie trudged home to him every night, joylessly asking to be dealt in. She offered more and more pieces of herself on the green felt table, believing this one—no, really, this one—would win him fully. And so here she sat, curved inward and seeming impossibly smaller than when she started.

  Rosie pressed her face into her hands, though no tears would come, and Novy climbed onto the bed beside her. Rosie let Nova cradle her, as Nova had on the day she was born. In the hospital photo, Nova looks so careful with her delicate baby sister.

  “It’s okay,” Nova crooned. “Everything’s okay now.”

  Later, Novy would get up to make her banana-walnut muffins, heavy on the cloves, a
nd some mint tea.

  Now, Nova runs her own hand over her hair—until she hears the tires down the lane, grinding against pebbles in the dirt.

  Rosemary

  Rosie jumps out of the truck, staring at her older sister waiting on the porch. “Novy? Everything okay?”

  Nova says, “What is he doing in this town?”

  Rosie is genuinely befuddled, as if her older sister is revealing a long-hidden clairvoyance. She turns to Willa, who looks away. “You texted her?”

  “I panicked, Ro! I thought you might go with him.”

  “Oh, my God,” Rosie says, throwing her hands up. “Honestly, the both of you. I was fine. I’m fine.”

  “Didn’t he move away?” Nova demands.

  “He’s visiting! Staying with a friend! Jesus! What is wrong with you two?”

  Willa takes a deep breath in, perhaps to mediate between them. Instead, her voice carries on the wind, yelling. “Do you remember the day I visited you at that house, Rosemary? That’s what’s wrong with us.”

  Rosie’s chest constricts—a gasp or a sob, she can’t tell.

  “I can take care of myself, and it’s shitty that you don’t trust me to.” Rosie pushes past them. She clutches the bannister up the stairs, replaying his face in her mind. His eyes, locked on her mouth. It feels, as always, like an old cartoon, like the sight of him pounds her upside the head with a wooden mallet. She’s woozy, with images of him spiraling around her vision.

  He was here. He was right down the road. Why had she been nice to him? Rosie has spent a year being strong, feeling so capable. But he must have known she’d crumble in his presence. Why else would he have strolled right up to her, with that easy smile? She’d moved out of their house over a year ago without a word, fleeing after he left for work. She must be weaker than she thinks, because even he could see it.

  Rosie can remember the fallout. She can remember all the times he was moody—punishing her with silence. All the times he made her feel like she was to blame for everything bad in his life. She remembers sitting in the empty bathtub of their too-small house, sobbing with the fan on so he wouldn’t hear. Because he wouldn’t comfort her. He’d be angry that she was making things harder.