A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  “That was what you said, yes,” Caroline said. “But I’ve been making some inquiries over the last few days.”

  “Wait. Why over the last few days?” Margot asked.

  “That’s not important.” Caroline pressed her thin lips together.

  Margot’s eyes narrowed. “Because you saw that she sided with me when you kicked out Vy, and you’re looking for any possible excuse to quash dissent?” She let out a hollow laugh. “I should’ve expected it. You’re such a—”

  “She’s writing an article about us!” Caroline snapped. “A friend of a friend knows someone who works at the New York Standard, and they’ve heard whispers about some top-secret undercover story that they’re planning.”

  Stunned noises echoed from some of the women like the wind had been knocked out of them, shock at my betrayal all over their faces. And anger too that I would dare to try and take away this clubhouse, this circle, from them.

  “I knew something was off,” Iris said.

  “No,” Margot said firmly. “No. Listen. She was going to write an article about us, sure. That’s why she wanted to join at first.” Margot turned to me. Things weren’t going how she’d planned, but she could still turn this around. “But you’re not going to anymore, right, Jillian?”

  “Right,” I said, my face burning, my fingers trembling. “As I’ve gotten to know you all, I’ve realized—”

  Caroline rounded on Margot. “You knew? You knew the whole time and didn’t tell me?” She gasped, as if she’d been slapped. “Because you knew that I would be the one who would go down, that I had the most to lose because the bribe came from me—”

  Caroline cut herself off abruptly as the other women turned their shocked faces to her. “Bribe? What bribe?” Iris asked. Because of course Caroline and Margot had never told them that part. As far as the rest of the Coven knew, their only mistake had been elevating Nicole too fast, and she’d destroyed herself.

  “I . . .” Caroline began.

  “It was to fix a mistake I made,” Margot said to the others. “Don’t blame Caroline, blame me.” Then she turned back to Caroline, her voice rising. “And that’s not why. I kept it from you because you wouldn’t have wanted to take a chance, but I knew that she would change her mind when she realized who she was.” Down on the street below, a siren wailed, then faded away.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “She’s the third!” Margot said, coming to my side, putting her arm around my shoulder. As the others stared at me in confusion, I felt like a prize pig being presented at a fair, unsure whether my fate was to be feted or slaughtered. “The original founder who left the Coven—Jillian is her great-granddaughter. I found her.”

  For the first time since I’d known her, Caroline was speechless. She opened her mouth, then closed it, then took in a shallow breath.

  “That’s why I wanted to do more magic at Samhain,” Margot said to her. “Not to screw with you, but to show her what was possible. And now, she’s not going to sell us out. She knows that she belongs here. We’re whole again, and it’s time to get back to the important work.”

  As the others whispered to one another, Caroline touched her hand to her throat, staring at me with a strange mixture of awe and joy and horror for what all of this meant.

  “Margot,” she breathed.

  “I know,” Margot said. “With the three of us, united, think of what we all could do.”

  Caroline ran her eyes over me, from my face to my feet, seeing me in a new light, as my heart pushed against my chest. “Maybe we could—” she began, and for a moment I almost felt bad that Margot would get Caroline back on board only for me to ruin it all, but I kept my spine straight and my face composed. Then Caroline’s eyes locked at my waist, caught by something they saw there. In a low, ice-cold voice, she said, “What’s in your pocket, Jillian?”

  I looked down. Ever so slightly, through the dark cloth of my robe, something glowed. Shit, I thought. “Shit,” I said. “I was all distracted texting before this and I forgot to put my phone away. That was dumb of me. I must be getting some messages—”

  I fumbled to pull the phone out of my pocket to see a series of new texts lighting up my screen. “I am so sorry, I’ll go put this in the bucket,” I said, backing toward the door, my eyes flitting to my screen. I’d received a thumbs-up from Miles, plus a message from Vy: Don’t bother with plan. Done w/ Coven. It’s gotten all fucked up. But I didn’t have time to register what any of it meant because I needed to close out of the voice recording, stat.

  I swiped over to the app but before I could stop it, Caroline moved to me at lightning speed (God, she was little but quick, like a fucking hummingbird) and grabbed the phone from my hand.

  “Wait—” I started, as she stared at what she saw.

  She held up the phone for everyone in the circle. “She’s been recording this whole time.”

  A series of murmurs—angry, sad, shocked—burst from the women, rippling out as my betrayal sank in. Margot stepped back from me. “Jillian,” she said. “But I thought . . .”

  Miles was probably entering the code on the downstairs door now, ready to start up the flights of stairs. I needed to buy some time, to keep the circle from disbanding and extinguishing the fire before he got up here. He wouldn’t get to see them in full worship, but at least he’d get to see the roof, the fire, the robes. That would be enough for something at least.

  “What about all the good we could do?” Margot asked, and the fact that she had the nerve to try to make me feel guilty is what set me off.

  “This isn’t good,” I said. “This is insane.” Margot stepped back, her mouth opening. “You’re all a bunch of delusional, elitist assholes, playing with the rest of us as if we’re not real people, as if we don’t matter!”

  “No,” Caroline said. “We’re trying to help—”

  “Right,” I said in a withering tone. “You’ve built this ivory tower and stacked it with only the shiniest women who can pass all your tests—never mind all the other women out there who just don’t happen to be as rich or credentialed—and yet you want to keep all these shiny women downstairs because you still think you’re better. How dare they call themselves witches when you’re the only true ones with the power, according to your family history or some other metric that shouldn’t really matter?” The others bristled, uncomfortable, as I went on. “You’ve appointed yourselves the gatekeepers and played God, and then you want to whine about how everyone’s trying to control you?” I stared at Margot, practically spitting the words at her. “You’re the controlling one now. You’re exactly what you claim to hate.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes turning red. “I’m not.”

  “Oh, spare me. The whole reason you had to bring down Nicole was because you wanted her to enact your agenda over anyone else’s. That’s why you told her about the Coven, and then you had to go scorched earth on her to cover your mistakes.”

  “It wasn’t for my agenda,” Margot said. “Caroline’s work on parental leave, on everything, was so good, I just wanted it to get out in the world.”

  “What?” Caroline asked.

  “Same difference,” I said, my voice dry and steady even though my body was shaking. “And besides, what’s more controlling than pretending to summon someone’s dead mother to get them on your side?”

  “I wasn’t . . . Oh God, that’s what you think? I would never pretend with something like that,” she said, her voice choked. “I felt her there, I swear to you.” For a split second, as she held her trembling hands up to me, she seemed to have no guile at all. She was just a defenseless, scared child telling me the truth.

  “Okay, I’m getting rid of this,” Caroline said, holding my phone up and moving her thumb over the delete button, making the voice memo vanish off into the ether. She threw the phone down onto the ground, where it skidded back over t
o me, its screen cracking. “I hope you know, Jillian, that if you publish this article, we will sue you so hard. If you want to take us down, prepare to be taken down in return. And as for you, Margot—”

  In front of me, the phone lit up again, glowing with a new message from Vy, barely readable through the shattered glass. Also I don’t do shrooms. Brain’s weird enough as is.

  “You keep hiding things from me,” Caroline was yelling at Margot. “And now look what’s happened! We’re supposed to be a team!”

  “Oh, we haven’t been a team for a long time now,” Margot yelled back. “You’ve always lorded it over me: you own the building, you’ll take care of Nicole all alone, I make one mistake and you’re going to punish me forever.”

  I picked up my phone and stared at Vy’s message, trying to make sense of it. Vy hadn’t put anything in the tea. But I had seen things, felt things, that I never had before, things that I wasn’t supposed to be able to feel unless I was under the influence of something, because I was the kind of person who stood on the outside watching, my arms folded around myself, a snarky comment always locked and loaded.

  I’d told myself that I’d been able to lose myself in the circle only because of the shrooms in my system, but I was just looking for an excuse. Deep down inside of me, I wanted that communion, didn’t I? And more than communion, I wanted to believe in something, whether it was magic, or the possibility of something greater, or maybe just the idea that people could be better than they were.

  I wanted to believe that I could be better. Because I had been playing with them all like they weren’t real people too. Throwing Libby under the bus, letting them open up to me while planning to expose them all. I told myself it was for a greater purpose, and in some ways it was, but really, I wanted that impressive byline so that someday I could be a gatekeeper myself.

  “I know I messed up, but you didn’t trust me to learn from it—” Margot was saying.

  “And I was right, because you did it again! Again, you’ve shared it with the wrong person, and jeopardized us all!” Caroline screamed. She lunged toward Margot as if she were going to kill her, as if she were going to push her backward to the roof’s edge and throw her off. The other members were all arguing among themselves too, yelling about what to do, about if anyone else had known that there was apparently some kind of bribery involved, hurt and rage and resentments that had been simmering between them all coming out. Nobody was watching Caroline as she hurtled forward except for me and Iris. Iris’s eyes widened, and she moved as if to restrain Caroline, but she was too far away to stop Caroline’s wild, violent body as she collided with Margot.

  But Caroline didn’t push Margot backward. Instead, she wrapped her arms around her. “I’m not doing any of this to punish you. I’m scared. I want to trust you, but you make it so hard, and I just don’t know how we’re going to fix things this time. And what if we’ve never fixed things at all, just broken them?”

  I thought of the coincidence of seeing Nicole by the water. I’d been having a whole lot of coincidences lately, more than one person should have in her entire life.

  Maybe there had been something swirling around us in the woods that night. Unseen currents. Unseen spirits. I didn’t know if it was magic, but maybe it was more than sheer randomness. Even solid Raf, whom I trusted more than anyone, believed there might be things in this world we couldn’t explain. And if that were the case, maybe Margot hadn’t been coldly pretending to be my mother after all.

  Margot was crying now too, wrapping her own arms around Caroline in return. “I’ve only ever wanted us to be better, to get back to how good and hopeful it was when we started,” she said. “But it’s gotten so bad.”

  Nicole had rot in her foundation, but she was so afraid of losing anything she had that she’d tried to prop up a shakily built house anyway. There was rot in the foundation of this coven too, rot inside the cloistered walls of Nevertheless. The power had gone to everyone’s heads. Still, as Caroline and Margot held each other, trembling with guilt and sadness and regret, I saw that there was a spark of something here worth saving. If I exposed them to the public, they’d be ruined. But if I didn’t write the article and I let them go on like they were, getting away with it all while gripping tightly to everything they had, they’d be ruined too.

  “What do we do?” Caroline asked Margot, her voice catching.

  Miles was probably well on his way up the stairs now. Even if I withdrew my article, he could pick up the torch and carry it himself if he saw everything, now that he knew where the building was. Oh God, how could I have invited a man here, to watch these women the only time that they were able to be free?

  Everyone was arguing or crying, a cacophony of angry voices around me. Nobody was paying attention as I walked to the edge of the fire, which snapped and danced in front of me. Use that anger to rebuild, Nicole had said.

  A stick, a larger piece of kindling, burned at my feet. I drew it from the fire and held it in the air. Then I touched it to the ivy on the trellis nearest to me. The ivy was dry, and so was the wood it wound around. It all caught immediately. For a moment, the sound and the smell of it was covered by the bonfire we’d already built, and I watched as the flames began to spread, racing from one trellis, one tree, to another.

  Then Caroline turned and saw the forest around us starting to catch fire. She gasped, and the others turned too. “Run!” Caroline shouted.

  We sprinted to the door and threw it open right as Miles and the Standard’s fact-checker (a short, unassuming man) were entering the antechamber from the other side, out of breath. “Who the hell are you?” Caroline said, then shook her head. “No time, the roof is on fire!”

  I grabbed my shoes. Iris grabbed the bucket, because you’ve always got to save the phones. She began to fumble around inside for her cell so that she could call the fire department, but Margot grabbed her arm and began to pull her to the stairwell.

  “Get outside first,” she shouted, and we all kept running down the flights of stairs in shock, our gasping breaths and our pounding feet the only sound besides the rush of wood catching, this old building that women had been hiding themselves away in since the 1920s, a building built before the fire codes had changed, threatening to collapse around us. I hadn’t expected it all to go up so quickly and, as we fled, I realized that the flames might kill us, that my impulse had actually been a deadly one, and there would be no rebuilding at all. The stairs seemed endless. In the mass of moving bodies, I stumbled, falling to the ground as women in robes pushed past me. Overhead, the sound of shattering glass rippled through the air.

  “Jillian?” Margot called, turning around. “Jillian! Come on!”

  I picked myself up and ran toward her through the smoke. Another face appeared in my mind: Raf, smiling at me in his shy, hopeful way. He was the person I wanted to see when I was scared. But it wasn’t only that. I wanted to see him when I was happy and sad and all the other things too. I ran faster. I had to get out of this building. I had to see his face again.

  I sprinted down the final flight of stairs. Ahead of me, Margot held open the door to the alley, and I plunged into the fresh air. Iris was dialing 911. Miles was looking at the door, frantic, relief coming over his face when I emerged. He started toward me, but Caroline charged up to him and asked, “Sorry, who the hell are you?” Some of the other women were shouting, asking one another if they’d seen how the fire started.

  Margot turned to me. “You did it, didn’t you?” she asked, her eyes blazing. The fire hadn’t killed me, but she still might, so as the flames began to shoot out the windows of the floor below the roof, I turned and kept running, flying through the darkness down the streets of Manhattan, all the way to a storefront lit with lanterns on the Lower East Side.

  FIFTY-THREE

  When I burst into Raf’s restaurant, the hostess at the front tried to stop me. “Sorry, we’re closed for the evening,”
she began, but I ran past her and back into the kitchen, skidding to a stop next to Raf, who was arms-deep in a sink full of soapy dishes. When he saw me, he froze, wary.

  “Hi,” I said, then bent over to catch my breath.

  “Uh, guys,” he said to the few remaining dishwashers. “You can take off for the night.” Reluctantly, they did, shooting furtive, curious glances at me. (Right. Because I was still wearing a fucking robe, like I’d escaped from a fancy church concert.)

  “So . . .” he said, removing his arms from the water and reaching for a dish towel. “What’s up?” Just like the first night I’d found out about the Coven, simply being in his presence made me feel better, safer, hopeful. A cute, dark curl fell across his forehead and I wanted to brush it back. How I hoped he hadn’t changed his mind and thought better of things. If he’d healed his heart and taken up with one of those lithe model-groupies in the weeks since we’d seen each other, I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  “I just did something that was probably very stupid,” I said when I was able to speak again. “And there’s a chance I’ll go to prison forever, or that the women of Nevertheless will send a hit man to kill me in the night.”

  “Jillian—” he said with concern, dropping the towel and stepping toward me.

  “No, it’s okay. I had to do it. It was the right choice. Probably. Yeah, now that I know everyone made it out safely, it was the right choice. But I was thinking about what I’d regret, if they kill me or lock me up forever, and it was only you.”

  “Me?” he asked, a glimmer of hope beginning to shine in his eyes, and that glimmer of hope gave me what I needed to keep going.

  “It was only that I wanted to tell you that I love you.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and raised an eyebrow. “Like as a cousin?”

  “Not at all,” I answered, and stepped forward to kiss him.

  Our hearts pounded against each other. He wrapped me up in him and kissed me back, and it was exactly where I wanted to be. I never wanted to stop touching him. We’d been children together, and we’d be old together, or at least we’d give it our best shot as life threw its typical curveballs our way. I melted into him as he backed me up against the counter, both of us smiling and gasping and clutching each other like we’d never get enough.