Summerwind Magick: Making Witches of Salem

by Rick Bettencourt

  “Becky, I think you’re makin’ a mistake.” Berniece folded her pink ARMY sweatshirt and put it in her luggage.

  “Why? You think I have a future at Wal-dor of Salem?” Rebecca plunged onto the bed.

  “No, but…but Salem’s your home.”

  “Bernie, it’s only for a bit. I’ll be back…certainly in the fall in time for Haunted Happenings and the Halloween—”

  “Halloween?” Berniece locked her bag. “That’s practically a year away.”

  “Well, that’s when the season ends here. I’m going to help her through the winter and to prepare for next season.”

  Berniece shook her head. Her new hairstyle—a side part—drew a chuckle out of Rebecca.

  “Berniece, I can’t take you seriously with that hair.” Rebecca palmed her forehead.

  “What’s a matter with my hair?” Berniece asked, touching the chunk she had combed to the side.

  “It looks like someone took an axe and slammed it into the side of your head,” Rebecca said. “You’re a beautiful woman of color. I like your hair with its natural curl.”

  With hands on her hips, Berniece huffed. “Becky, I know you. You purposely trying to change the subject. I know you don’t give a rat’s ass about my hair.”

  Rebecca rose and walked over to her. “I want to stay here. I like it. I like Viola.”

  Berniece stared at her for a bit and let out a sigh. “What about your stuff?”

  “Call me when you get back, and I’ll walk you through what I’ll need sent up—some clothes, my paints, and a couple of art books.” Rebecca hugged Berniece. “Oh, Berniece, I’ll miss you.”

  Berniece pulled from Rebecca’s grasp. “You ain’t gonna miss me.”

  Rebecca let go. “Why don’t you come on up here? You could move Red Vanilla to the island.”

  “Becky, you crazy. I can hardly get any business in Salem. You think moving to a deserted island’s gonna help?”

  Rebecca paced. “I don’t know, Berniece. There’s just something about this place…something I like. Staying here feels right. I want to give it a shot.”

  “You eyeing that stud?”

  “No.” Rebecca waved her off.

  “Um-hmm. And no messing around with that Dorr’s spell book, not alone. You don’t know what you could get yourself into.”

  “Don’t worry, Berniece. I’ll be fine. You’re taking our book back home? Keep it safe?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Berniece tapped her suitcase.

  “I hope Loni Hodge will be proud of our work once you tell her all the details of our spells.”

  Berniece turned to leave and then shuffled back—in a thunderous scuttle—to Rebecca. “Oh, give me another hug.”

  They embraced.

  “I love you, Berniece.” Rebecca held her friend tightly.

  Berniece sniffled. “I love—”

  Rebecca perceived a cold jolt—a panicked-throb stabbing outward from her friend. “Bernie?” She held her out at the shoulders, noticing the fear in her eyes. “Are you all right? What’s—”

  “Becky.” Berniece stumbled backward. “It…it…”

  Rebecca looked at the window where Bernie stared—nothing—yet a cold chill raked her soul. “What is it?” She touched Berniece’s shoulder.

  Berniece’s lip quivered. “That bat-winged man you seen?”

  Hearing Berniece mention it sent shock waves through Rebecca’s core. “Uh-huh?” Her voice wavered.

  Berniece’s back slammed to the door. “It just flew off…Viola’s roof.”

  Fog covered the widow’s watch. A ship at bay blasted its horn, and the two jumped. “Ah!”

  “Becky, maybe you shouldn’t stay.” Berniece clutched her chest with one hand, the other on the doorknob.

  “What did it…he look like? Was he tall? Did he have big, black wings?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t think it’s bad.” The words shot out before she knew what she’d said. A sense of calm washed over her. “Oh my God.” She cocked her head. “I don’t think it’s bad?”

  “I ain’t waiting to stay and figure it out.”

  Across the yard, Viola stepped out of her house, and Rebecca put a hand on a pane of glass. “I’m staying. I’ve got to figure this out.”

  The inn’s owner held up an umbrella, and her dog scampered ahead of her.

  “’Long as you insist.” Berniece’s voice wavered. “I think I got to use the girl’s room.”

  Down on the lawn, Jay Evans approached Viola and handed her an envelope. He shook her hand, tapped the brim of his baseball cap, and jogged away.

  New York City to Miami

  Traffic sped past Carolyn as she stood on the corner of New York City’s Twelfth and Third. Fast-falling snow billowed behind taxis as they raced by. Too light to stick to the ground, the flakes surged, decorating the city white.

  Life after filming Witches of Salem took adjusting. Despite the accolades from her performance in the yet-to-be-released film—at least, that’s what Rudy had told her—being back in New York unnerved her. Rudy had her booked to the hilt.

  She stepped off the curb with a coffee in one hand, the strap of her purse dangled against her back, and she pinched a cell phone between her shoulder and ear. She listened to the next voice message: “Hey, Carolyn.” Michael’s upbeat voice distinguished him. “I just wanted to say hello…” Smiling, she hurried along the crosswalk, and a taxi blared a horn. “Piss off!” She flipped the driver the bird with her beverage-holding hand.

  “Call me. I’ve got news,” Michael continued. “Oh…I can’t wait for you to call! We’re selling the house.”

  “What?” Carolyn crossed onto the other side of Third.

  “It’s too big. With Terrence in limbo, we’re thinking of doing something completely different! Not sure what yet. We’re going to Europe while the agent gets the house ready for the market. We’ll talk.”

  “Wow.” Carolyn shut the phone and put it in her purse. “I wonder if they’re going back to California.” She didn’t feel out of the ordinary talking to herself in New York City. “Starr would love that.” Terrence’s mother was forever trying to get them back there.

  Carolyn continued southward, onto Eleventh, past Webster Hall, heading toward Fourth where Peggy lived. Her curiosity about Michael’s message faded as she approached her friend’s apartment in Stuyvesant Square. The doorman greeted her warmly, and with a call to the leading actress upstairs, he let her in.

  “I go to open my mouth and I clam right up,” Carolyn confessed to Peggy, after settling in on her friend’s black leather couch. “I haven’t been able to sing since the wrap party on Summerwind.”

  “Summerwind?” Peggy, an elegant woman of color, wore a knee-length dress that hugged her sleek figure and looked as if it were something from the pages of Cosmopolitan. “Where’s that?”

  “The place we filmed the movie, Witches.”

  “Oh, yeah, that.”

  “Well, that was over a month ago. And I just can’t sing right. I feel like…I feel like I’m going to burst from not singing.”

  Peggy, never missing the opportunity to show off, went to her piano and launched into a tune—one from her three-month run of Any Place I Hang My Hat. Halfway through, she motioned for Carolyn to join her.

  Carolyn knew the song. She’d helped her practice it. “Oh, I don’t know.” Carolyn hated proving herself, especially in front of a colleague who’d already reached what she wanted—or did she?

  “Sing, girlfriend!” Peggy clamored the ivory keys and belted a high C.

  Carolyn attempted to step into the song, but she pictured her throat as a flooded carburetor. Fits of false starts ensued, but she couldn’t find the right note or even the point to enter.

  In a thunderous chord progression, Peggy stopped playing. “What’s the doc say?” Carolyn’s longtime therapist, Dr. Silverstein, was no stranger to Peggy. Not that she’d gone to him, but she’d heard the psychologist’s name mentioned
countless times in conversation with Carolyn.

  “High school trauma.” Carolyn traced a finger along the piano. I admitted it. That’s a start.

  “Glee club was that bad, huh?” Her Tony sat on a glass shelf behind her—received for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role from a Musical.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “I heard Rudy wants you to be a bumblebee for the new Rosterfeld’s ad down in Miami.”

  “A…a hornet…it’s a hornet, not a bee.”

  Peggy flipped through the songbook set along the music rack and began “Evergreen” from Streisand’s A Star is Born. “C’mon, I know you can sing this one.”

  Carolyn cleared her throat, chuckled, and then hummed the song’s opening as Peggy played.

  Peggy flinched and banged a key with one finger. “You’re flat.” The piano chimed an F note. Peggy pointed to the apartment’s acoustic-tiled ceiling. “Higher.”

  Carolyn sighed. “I never go off pitch. You see?”

  “Hmm.” Peggy proceeded to sing the song, eloquently, making Carolyn wonder why she came there seeking comfort in the first place. “You’ve got to feel it,” Peggy added, halfway through the song, singing her advice.

  Carolyn rolled her eyes. Four years ago, she’d taught the one-hundred-pound-soaking-wet beauty how to belt and even coached her for the audition that landed her an award. “Thank you, Peggy. But I know that.”

  The piano music moved into a roaring refrain then stopped. “So this commercial Rudy wants you to do…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “He needs the money.”

  Peggy tsked. “Why do you—never mind.”

  Since Rudy had returned to Carolyn’s life, a mountain of debt followed him: gambling, drug money, and the IRS. “I feel bad for him,” Carolyn said.

  Peggy glowered. “He’s not your responsibility.”

  Carolyn knew this but realized her own actions rarely followed logic. She fidgeted with the piano’s lid prop.

  “Love is blind,” Peggy said.

  Love? Carolyn scratched the back of her neck. Did she love Rudy? “I fly to Miami next week.”

  “Would you like to practice being a bee?” Peggy meant well.

  “A hornet. I’m all set.”

  At LaGuardia, Carolyn waited for her Delta flight to taxi from the gate. “Why do I always sit on the wing?” she muttered as a corpulent woman shoved a carry-on into the compartment above her. Carolyn jumped when it slammed shut. “Oh, hello,” Carolyn offered. The woman’s readying of the seat next to her made it clear who her row partner would be.

  The lady didn’t reply. Instead, she lifted the aisle-side armrest, turned, and butt-first fell into the seat.

  Carolyn swore the plane rocked. She reached for a magazine, but now, with even-tighter quarters, she could hardly move. I mean no disrespect, but please don’t let this be a full flight so I can move. She felt bad for the woman attaching an extension to her seat belt.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said a female voice over the loudspeaker, “this is going to be a full flight. If your carry-on won’t fit in the compartment above, please see a flight attendant to assist you.” The message ended with a clamor of the phone hanging up.

  A passenger in front of her murmured something about Lynn, Massachusetts. Carolyn pressed her forehead to the window. Boston…Lynn…Salem…Peabody.

  The kids back in school used to chide, “Trot, trot to Boston, trot, trot to Lynn. Watch out”—and they’d insert a name—“you might fall in.” It was an innocent song. The first time she’d heard it was on a bus trip to New York City with the drama club.

  In 1984, during a high school senior field trip to New York City, Carolyn and Michael saw The Wiz. Enamored by the show, when they returned, she begged the choral director, Father Twomey, to let her sing The Wiz’s finale in the drama club’s spring performance.

  Father Twomey, a gentle, rotund man whose priesthood, while seeming to have no place in a public high school, met without problems for students and faculty. He was impressed with Carolyn’s rendition. “Diana Ross better watch out!” he told her during the audition. “Of course you can sing it.”

  In the basement of her home, she rehearsed it over and over. “Flawless!” Michael told her. He was the only one allowed to witness her practicing.

  Finally, ready or not, the night of the performance came, and she was determined to let the audience hear her. It’s not as if they never had. It’s just that it was the first time since Seth and the football team’s harassing.

  With an added forty pounds, gained within the last few years, her large 185-pound, six-foot frame, dressed in a sequined gown she found at Lane Bryant, stood on the PVMHS stage—Michael in the wings, in the front row her mother, and in the audience her peers.

  The first half of the song went well. She sang perfectly on pitch and recalled all the words. She felt at ease. She smiled and found support in Michael’s presence. As the song’s ending neared, her nerves worsened. The song’s crescendo, rehearsed so many times, was her favorite part and the showcase of her voice.

  In the air, whispering the song aboard the 727, Carolyn recalled her mother shaking her head in the audience. Carolyn looked over at her large row partner, who slept with a magazine resting on her bosom.

  From her purse, Carolyn took out a book You’ll See It When You Believe It. She paged through it, landing on the chapter titled “Intuition and Synchronicity.” Rebecca and Berniece’s spell came to mind. After reading a few passages from the book, her eyes grew heavy.

  Michael escorted the seventeen-year-old Carolyn off stage and into the wings, where the new Carolyn waited. “I’ll show you how to sing,” she told her teenaged self and motioned for the musical director to begin.

  Father Twomey and her mother looked exactly as they had that night in eighty-four. At first, she sang softly and then tore into the crescendo. Her voice built with passion.

  Michael called and cheered in the wings yet the audience began to leave. Her mother and Father Twomey scrunched their faces in disgust and sang, “Trot, trot to Boston. Trot, trot to Lynn. Watch out, Carolyn, you might fall in.”

  “What?” She awoke with a start. The large woman next to her lumbered her way down the aisle toward the plane’s bathroom. Carolyn could still hear the orchestra playing from her dream and, without thinking, began singing it, quietly at first, but something came over her—the need to sing—and by the time her row partner came back down the plane’s center aisle, Carolyn stood in the middle, singing full voice.

  The passengers, in rapture, cheered her on.

  A stewardess approached Carolyn. “Ma’am, that’s lovely and all but…”

  Carolyn belted out the chorus. She couldn’t stop.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the stewardess said louder. “I’m going to have to ask you to take your seat.”

  When the plane arrived at the gate, Carolyn deplaned first—as requested by the flight crew.

  “What happened to you?” Her mother took Carolyn’s purse. They hugged at the gate. “You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus.”

  “Gee, thank you.” Carolyn brushed back her bangs.

  Her mother stroked a lock of Carolyn’s hair draped over her shoulder. “Are those split ends? Or do I need to see my ophthalmologist? Nope.” She petted Carolyn’s head. “Split ends. We’ll have to get you a protein pack…or maybe a soak in that hot oil solution I got over at Wally World.”

  Carolyn rolled her eyes. “Oh, God, Mom. Is that the first thing you notice? My hair.”

  “How could I not? It’s a mile high of frizz.”

  Some of the passengers had also deplaned, and Carolyn grabbed her mother by the shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  “And you look too skinny.” Her mother wore fashionable shoes and clicked past a pretzel shop. “Have you been eating right?”

  “Mom, you wouldn’t believe the flight I had. Can we just go?”

  A few ho
urs later, Carolyn’s neck cradled in a chair pillow at her mother’s kitchen table. A warm towel wrapped her cholesterol-treated hair.

  Her mother applied a mud mask to Carolyn’s face. “Are you still seeing that shithead Rudy?”

  “Mom!” Carolyn attempted to rise, but her mother held her at the forehead.

  “Carolyn, you know how I feel about him. He’s just like your dad’s money-hungry agent. He’ll do you no good.”

  “You know I hate when you talk about Dad like that. I thought you wanted this for me.”

  “Wanted what?”

  “You always talked about how proud you were of me when I sang as a kid.”

  “Well, of course I was…I am!” She slapped mud under her daughter’s eyes. “Honey, I want you to be what you want to be. You’ve always said you wanted to sing, so I’ve gone along with it.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. Now lay still.” Mrs. Sohier slapped two slices of cucumber over her daughter’s eyes.

  “You know I want what’s best for my little girl.” Her mother picked at wet strands of hair on Carolyn’s forehead. “Now let’s leave that cholesterol in your hair another thirty minutes or so. I can’t believe you haven’t been protein-packing. We’ve talked about this. With your gorgeous hair?” Her mother tsked. “I’d kill for a mane like that.”

  “You want some? I’ll cut—”

  “Shh. You’re going to break the mud mask’s seal. I paid a fortune for it over at the spa.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “I’m gonna put an extra packet in your luggage. I want you to use it once a week.” She tapped Carolyn’s hand. “You hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Carolyn muffled.

  “Shh.”

  Carolyn huffed.

  Her mother scraped a chair up beside her. “I ran out of the cleansing cream, but I’ll order some and have it sent to your apartment. You should use that every day.”

  “Um,” Carolyn mumbled.

  “It’s very important for a girl your age to start thinking about her face. You don’t want leathery old-age skin and dried-out hair when you get older. The sooner you start taking care of it, the better. You listening?”