Three Witches

by Paula Jolin

  Trevor bent his head and she was glad—glad, I tell you— that she couldn’t see his face. He reached for Rambling’s leash, picked it up and wrapped it around his wrist. Rambling pawed the floor a little, impatient for adventure. Miya sat up straighter, leaned forward. “You’ve been through an extraordinary experience,” she said. “You’ll carry it inside you forever.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I’m so glad you shared it with us—it meant a lot to me, this chance.”

  Gillian snapped her phone closed and swung around. “You’re going, then?” More words seemed to hover on her lips—another apology for the razor thing? Poor Gillian. It was so easy to get swept up, swept away by emotion. But in the end, she just said, “You’re sure you won’t—no. Everyone has to find his own way. Good-bye, Trevor.” Aliya half expected her to tell him to look her up the next time he was in Trinidad, but she said no such thing. “Good luck, bredrin. You’ll need it.”

  He stood up. He was still watching Aliya. Searching for some last chance in her face. “Well, I’ll be going then,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He reached out a hand and drew a line down Aliya’s cheek. She shivered. “You never know—someday, maybe years from now, you’ll check your e-mail and there’ll be a message from me.” That’s exactly what she was afraid of. “So I won’t say good-bye.”

  She bowed her head. Struggled, wavered. Could she really let him go? When she looked up, he was launching himself over the roof and onto the fire escape. For a few seconds she could see nothing but his hands. Then Rambling bounded after him, obstructing her view. Rambling jumped down, but Trevor was gone. She could only hear him: the clatter on the fire escape, the click-click of the dog behind him, the clunk as they leaped off the bottom step. “Shit,” said Trevor when they hit the ground. Yip, yip, yip.

  “Same old Trevor,” said Gillian. “Everything the hard way.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to go back inside,” said Aliya. She felt—well, she didn’t know. There were still tears on her cheeks, but they were drying. That tight, can’t-get-free band that had been binding her chest since the day Trevor died—no, she’d been wearing it since the day they met—that was beginning to loosen. Maybe someday soon she would breathe again.

  She looked around the rooftop. It had an aura of party aftermath: a languid, did-we-do-the-right-thing atmosphere, three exhausted girls who’d rather go to bed than clean up the mess. Except, of course, there was no mess. Candles still flickered on three corners, but the smoke from the herbs had long since dissipated. There was one steel pan, one tabla, a backpack, a shoulder bag.

  One exhausted girl moved. Miya. She pushed herself to her feet, smiling, then she came across the roof, handed the tabla to Gillian, who tucked it back into her backpack. “Trevor’s mom deserves the truth, Jack’s family, too,” said Gillian. “But Trevor . . . they have extradition treaties with Mexico, right? They’d send bounty hunters or whatever down there to rough him up and drag his ass back to jail?” She ran her hand across the side pocket and frowned. “We all do things we regret,” she added. “Not right, not brave, but . . .”

  Aliya had already disappointed Trevor tonight, they couldn’t ask her to betray him, too. “I suppose you’re cheery because you don’t feel guilty about Trevor now?” she asked Miya, who’d made her way back and was kneeling by the candles now. Funny how important that had seemed, setting those candles in the perfect pentagram.

  Miya picked up the nearest one. In its flickering flame, her face looked like something out of a movie: Queen Galadriel, or the White Witch. Aliya added, “I thought you might be depressed or something. Not that Trevor’s not dead, that’s some kind of miracle. God is greatest and all that. But this magic nonsense . . . well, we wasted a lot of time and did a lot of stupid things.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Miya. Not quietvoiced, not serene, something else. She stared into the flame for one long moment and then blew it out.

  “Weren’t you the one who was all into this, ‘We have to raise Trevor from the dead, free his spirit from its evil oppression’? Now we find out that he wasn’t even dead, and all your Japanese spirit talking was just some modern myth.”

  “Who says he wasn’t dead?” Miya’s voice came out of the dark now. Exultant, that’s what it was. Aliya gaped and even Gillian dropped her jaw. “Of course he was dead. Don’t you get it? We brought him back.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  ALIYA STARED at her, open-mouthed. Gillian raised her eyebrows so high they almost disappeared into her hair. But their skin glistened, their breaths came hard and fast, their faces shone with power. Whether they knew it or not, they’d been part of something amazing tonight.

  “Didn’t you hear Trevor’s story?” she asked Aliya. Miya spoke gently. Truth took some getting used to; look how long it had taken her. “He has no idea how long he was out, no idea what happened after the accident. He was dead, gone, nothing—you yourself said you could sense him, feel him, smell him. What about in the forest? Do you really think he wasn’t there with us?”

  “But then . . .” Aliya broke off. She pushed her heavy hair behind her ears, wiped the sweat off her forehead.

  Had to give the girl some time—and some information, too. Miya picked up the nearest candle, blew it out. “Then we concentrated,” she said. “Reached out to the spirits. We touched the fabric of time, erased it and rewove the past. We changed what happened.” No small thing. “It’s true, I didn’t really understand what was going on. All this time, I thought Trevor wanted to be free, to make his own way to the land of the dead—or wherever the dead are, I’ll have to learn more about that. I didn’t realize that what he really wanted was to come back.”

  She stopped talking, dropped the candle into her drawstring bag. Reached over for the incense burners, popped them in on top of it. Trevor was gone. His physical presence had climbed down the fire escape, taking with it the sound of his feet, the smell of his cologne, but his spirit—that was gone too. She remembered his sudden disappearance on the rooftop, right over there, on that gutterless stretch which now had faded back to black. His sudden reappearance a few feet away, just above the fire escape.

  She’d never forget the sight of him, coming up over the side of the house.

  “I’ll take that,” said Gillian to Aliya, voice like a whisper, and the steel pan passed between them. They exchanged isn’t-she-crazy looks, Gillian’s hand went up to her ear—was she drawing a circle around it? But why should Miya care? They’d see it for themselves, in the end.

  Miya closed her eyes, pictured Trevor-the-ghost one last time: coming up onto the roof like a pale phantom, hard to see at first, almost impossible to make out his words. He’d grown substance as he talked, as though feeding himself with words instead of food. What about those harsh sentences that had set him on his path to ruin, so many days ago? Do you think I’d care if you were dead? Would anyone? Nothing, no discomfort now, not even a sliver of pain. She had put it right. They had put it right.

  She looked across at Aliya, head tilted back, staring up at the stars; at Gillian, stuffing the steel pan into her backpack. The three of them, such unlikely partners. Such successful ones. Taking up another candle, Miya said what she was thinking: “After this, making Luke fall in love with me will be first-round College Bowl.” Puff, puff—she blew out the candle.

  Aliya’s eyes left the stars, came back to earth, back to Miya. “Are you joking?” she asked. “You can’t be going on with this.”

  “So this was all about Luke?” asked Gillian. She zipped up her backpack. “Why not snare him in the old-fashioned way: the short skirt, the bottle of wine?” Her eyelids fluttered, like she had some secret memory. “Or better, be a bit Nancy Drew about it—tell him about Trevor, head down to Mexico together to look him up, something like that.”

  She didn’t get it, did she? Miya wasn’t looking for some superficial love thing.

  “After all,” said Gillian, “don’t you think we’ve interfered en
ough? A hurricane in Trinidad, the obeah man packed off home, a boy loses his hair, a girl loses her boyfriend.” Maybe she did get it, some of it, after all.

  Aliya spun around, stared at Gillian. “Seriously? You believe all this stuff? Raising people from the dead? You think Trevor passed over and we brought him back?”

  “I’m saying: Why interfere with it?” Something hovered on Gillian’s lips—was that a smile? “I’m entering a new, mellow phase of life.”

  Miya leaned over and blew out two more candles. Sure, they were skeptics now, but that would change when they’d had a chance to really think about things. A little research and they’d get how extraordinary this night had been. She’d type them a reading list in the morning. She picked up the last candle, held it out in front of her like a fiery toast. “Here’s to Trevor,” she said. “May he live long.”

  Then she blew out the candle.