Then he turns his back on me and I know I’ve lost him forever.
With tears in my eyes, I slip out of the room and down a side hall. I’m outside and running to the bus stop minutes after that.
I could go to the spell shop and talk to Lillian but there’s nothing she can say that she hasn’t already said. I knew there would be consequences to ending the spells. As she said, I shouldn’t have done them in the first place.
What I really want, and what I hope isn’t ruined like the rest of my relationships, is to talk to my mom.
Chapter Thirty
Mom is in the kitchen when I come home. Her hair is a mess, her makeup smudged, and she’s still in the clothes she wore yesterday. She’s drinking coffee at the table in the alcove, both hands wrapped around her mug and staring out the back window.
“Mom?” My voice cracks.
She turns her head, looking at me over her shoulder. “I saw your book.” She nods to the counter where the spell book with the reversals lies. I was so exhausted after I finished the spell that I forgot to put it away, not that it matters. I need to tell her what happened anyway.
“Lillian give that to you?”
I walk into the room, not sure if I’m welcome. “Yes.”
Mom nods, turns back to look out the window. “I was under a spell, right? That’s why my head felt so foggy? Why I was acting on impulse?”
I gulp. “Yes.”
My voice is barely above a whisper but I know she hears me because she’s nodding.
“I’m so sorry, Mom.” I let the tears fall now. No sense in holding them back. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t think…”
“That’s usually the trouble with playing with magic.” Her voice is distant but she turns as I move closer and gives me a small smile. “I should have told you that you could do that. I thought lecturing you now and then about responsible magic use would be enough.”
My next step doesn’t land properly and I stumble. She turns in time to catch me, then helps ease me into the seat next to her with a thump.
“You knew?”
“Not exactly knew. I had suspicions, yes. Little things here and there that happen only to you. Any time you really set your heart on something, have you ever noticed things always seem to go your way?” She runs her hand through her hair. “All those fan letters you respond to? The way you’re able to give people comfort with your words? I’ve seen you when you’re writing them. You’re so intent on your job. You want to bring them comfort and so you do. Do you know how many people have told me just how much you’ve touched them with your responses?”
I shake my head. She always says that I have an impact, I just didn’t know what that meant or maybe I just didn’t believe her.
“Your intentions are powerful, Rowan.” She reaches up and brushes my tears from my cheek with the back of her hand. “You’re just like your dad that way.”
Wait…what? My eyes go wide. My mouth hangs open. She laughs a bit, takes a sip of her coffee, then gets up and leaves the room.
I trail after her feeling like I’m in some kind of dream. My head is swimming. She goes into the front room then stops.
“Oh, right, I cleaned this room out.”
My heart thuds like it’s attempting to escape. “I’m sorry, Mom, I was trying to help you move on.”
She turns and her smile is still there, just sad. She doesn’t say anything, just nods. “I put everything in boxes. Thankfully I didn’t throw them out.” Then she bypasses me. “They’re in the basement. Wait here.”
I’ve never liked this room. It’s not like the other rooms in the house. It’s light, the walls painted a dull gray, but there are stained glass windows on every wall so when the sun shines, unlike today, there are colors everywhere. You’d think that would make it pretty but it doesn’t. It makes it look like a clown puked on the walls and floor. It’s chaotic. Mom says it’s powerful and that Dad loved this room when he was a child. She would know, I guess.
I slump down into one of the comfy chairs in the corner and wait for her to come back. The mob at school was scary. How am I supposed to go back there and finish the year if everyone is so angry with me? It seems impossible. Can I do my courses online? Maybe I should leave the country for a while.
I laugh at that. Running away from my problems seems like the only possible option, though.
Is there a witness protection program for things like this?
“Found him,” my mom says as she comes back in the room. She’s got Dad’s urn in one hand and a stack of paper in the other. She hands the papers to me—they’re neatly bundled and tied with a red ribbon—then she moves to the mantle where she keeps Dad and sets him down.
“Sorry, sweetheart. I wasn’t myself.” She kisses the urn and I realize she’s talking to Dad.
I look down at the papers as a way to distract myself from her whispering. “Are these…”
“Love letters,” she says. “From your dad to me.”
She moves to the chair next to me, then reaches over and pulls one arm of the ribbon so that it unties. I move my hands to the side so that none of the letters slip off of my lap.
“There are so many of them.” I say in awe because truly there have to be hundreds of letters here.
“Your dad was prolific.” She laughs. “And persistent.” She plucks one of the letters from the pile and opens it. “Each one has a poem. Some silly, some serious.” She opens the letter that she’s taken, scans it quickly, then laughs. “But the poems are only one part. He wrote such beautiful and honest things to me when he was trying to convince me to fall in love with him.”
“And you did?” I open one of the letters and read it. Roses are red, violets are blue, it was so great to run into you. I chuckle. “He wasn’t exactly the epitome of creativity.” But then I realize, neither am I. I guess I inherited his lack of poetic skill.
She reads the one in my hand and laughs. “No, but it wasn’t the poems that got me. Keep reading.”
And so I do. I read that letter and the next one…and I see words that are powerful. Honest words where my dad confesses his feelings. Where he tells my mom what his hopes and dreams are, how much he wants to share them with her. He tells her how much he adores her, even when she rejects him. Then I think about what Mom just told me, that my intentions make things happen. That Dad could make things happen, too.
“Are you saying that Dad cast a love spell on you?” I look up at her and I’m dizzy, not quite holding steady. Is this for real? Did I inherit some kind of magic ability from my dad?
Mom nods. “He did.”
“And you found out? And married him anyway?”
“Hell no,” she scoffs. “I found out and dumped his sorry behind.”
“Oh.” I look down at the letters. Like Luca dumped me. My heart crumples like paper. I deserved it and more.
Mom reaches out to touch my hand. “I knew your dad could do things. I’d met him a few times at parties and he always seemed to make things happen. Run out of beer? Someone would suddenly show up with a case. Hungry? The pizza guy would show up saying someone had ordered it when no one had. Lock your keys in your car? Suddenly they’d be in your pocket even though you could swear you’d just seen them in the ignition. But only if your dad was there.”
“And you didn’t think that was weird?” But my mind jumps like a jackrabbit to that time Ethan lost his phone when we were at the mall and I somehow managed to find it in his backpack even though he’d already looked there three times.
“Of course I did, but I’ve always been pretty open to weird things going on. Not everything in the universe can be explained. How boring would that be?”
There’s a war raging in my mind because I don’t want to believe any of this, I want to say my mom was just projecting her beliefs on coincidences. “But, Mom, magic? Really?” The words tumble out of m
y mouth with little conviction because I’m thinking of another time, when Mom and I were so hungry for Chinese but it was after midnight on a holiday weekend. We knew none of the places would be open but we went out anyway, thinking we’d have to settle for whatever we could find open. I told her to swing by Lucky Dragon because I had a feeling…a feeling! Low and behold, our favorite restaurant was testing out a twenty-four-hour dining schedule. There had been other times things just seemed to go my way, but all of them could easily be explained away as coincidence. But what if they weren’t? Lilian said that intentions are what’s important when it comes to spell casting. Was I casting spells without realizing it?
She shrugs then taps the letters. “I was dating someone else when I met your dad.”
I snap out of my thoughts. This is something I didn’t know.
She’s looking at another letter, a big smile on her face. “Logan Foster.” She shakes her head. “He was in the psychology program with me and we’d been dating for two years before your dad came to study. Your dad said that it was love at first sight for him.” She laughs again. “It took me a while longer.”
She never talks about the time before Dad. Ever. “So you broke up with your boyfriend and got together with Dad?”
She points to the letters still in my hand. “With the help of those, yes. He wrote me every day, twice, sometimes three times.”
“He couldn’t just text?”
She pats my arm. “No, that wasn’t really a thing back then. And the letters are romantic in their silly way. He didn’t realize that his words were having an impact. He didn’t know that he was casting his own version of a love spell.” She hands me the two letters she’s holding. “After we both figured out what was going on, I broke up with him and he realized just how crappy what he’d done was. Even if he hadn’t meant to cast spells on me, he wanted me to fall in love with him and the way his powers seemed to work, whatever he wanted, he’d get in one way or another.”
Like me. The thought slips past my stubborn resistance, like a hiccup that just won’t go away. “What did he do? I mean, obviously he had to do something to get you to forgive him.”
She nods, her smile fades. “Yes, he did do something.” Tears well in her eyes. “He came back here to Youngstown and got a spell from Lillian. A powerful spell. A binding spell.”
I gulp. “A binding spell?”
“Once he cast it on himself, he could no longer do any magic. He could no longer influence anyone or anything with his intentions.”
Hope flares. “That sounds like a way to fix it, though.” Maybe if I did a binding spell on myself then I’d get back what I’d lost somehow. Maybe if the magic was gone—
“It was a fix. He proved to me over the next few months that his powers were gone and then he wrote me more letters and eventually convinced me to forgive him and to believe that he would never do anything to hurt me like that again.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Mom nods but there are tears in her eyes all the same. “I just can’t help but wonder, if he still had his abilities, would he have been able to stop that car accident from happening?”
A gasp gets caught in my throat. Tears bubble to my eyes now, too.
“He was stopped at a light when that car came through the red. He would have had a few seconds—” She chokes on her words. “If he still had his magic, would he have been able to stop himself from being killed?” She shakes her head. “I’ll never know for sure, but in my heart I believe that he would have been able to stop it from happening. There is nothing in this world that would have prevented him from coming home to us. Nothing. But without his magic, he was just like anyone else in a car accident like that. Dead before he got to the hospital.”
I wrap my arms around Mom and we cry together for a while. I’m comforting her as much as she’s comforting me. Crying with Mom holding me and me holding Mom feels like a release that I need and I hope it feels the same for her.
“So, when I started to realize you had the same kind of magic, I just let it go. I wanted to see how it would develop. I didn’t really think about the consequences of that.” Mom pulls back and wipes my face. “I should have warned you at least.”
“This is not your fault, and you did warn me not to play with magic,” I say with all of the conviction that I can manage because I know she’s blaming herself for not only my screw up but also for being the reason that Dad bound his powers. “I should have stopped casting the love spells when I realized they were working.”
“The responsible thing to do would have been to introduce you to Lillian as soon as I suspected you were following in your dad’s footsteps.” She sighs. “But I was too caught up in my world and, I must admit, I wanted to see what would happen with your abilities if we just let them be. Forgive me?”
I frown. “Only if you forgive me. I did cast a love spell on you…”
She laughs. “Yeah. True.” Then she looks at me expectantly.
“I forgive you.”
“And I forgive you.”
We collapse into each other’s arms again and cuddle up on the chair. We used to sit like this a lot when I was younger, when I didn’t hate this room so much and I still craved my mom’s arms around me every chance I could get. I don’t know when that changed, exactly, but I regret giving it up for all the years that I pushed her away.
“When I read your dad’s letters, I feel his presence.” Her voice cracks.
I’m missing Luca and I only just started dating him. I can only image how much Mom misses Dad. When Dad died and she knew she wouldn’t be able to talk to him again, well I guess I can understand why she hasn’t wanted to move on.
“When your dad died, I was so lonely. Of course, I had you, but you were just a baby then, not really understanding what had happened.”
My mom always told me that I was the reason she was still alive. Not because she had to live after Dad died to take care of me, but because she stayed home with me the night that Dad died. I was going through a phase, very clingy and not wanting to stay with my usual babysitter. Dad wanted to go to this ghost tour at a local house. But they both knew I would have squawked the whole time. Mom told him to go along without her.
“He was always into the paranormal stuff. More than I was at the time.” She smiles. “He wanted me to get into paranormal psych almost from the first moment he learned what I was majoring in. He thought it was the coolest thing to study. It was actually at his insistence that we ran some tests on him and that’s how we discovered the range of his abilities.”
“Why didn’t he study paranormal psych?”
“Because he was a writer, sweetie. A good one. Well, with nonfiction anyway. Even without his magic. And his parents never wanted him to pursue a “useless degree,” as they called it. Journalism didn’t impress them. It wasn’t practical. But your dad had a gift at digging to the truth of things and he had a plan. He wanted to write a book. He was writing a book about hauntings and he wanted me to help. He thought we’d make a dream team of paranormal proportions, as he liked to say.”
“The night he died…”
“He was heading out to do some research for his book. The ghost tour wasn’t a new one but it was steadily gaining a reputation for actually producing ghostly interactions. Your dad was fascinating by the afterlife…as well as past lives.”
He never made it to the ghost tour obviously.
“We made a deal, your dad and I, that if one of us died we’d keep an open mind, and try to reach out. To find a way to communicate.”
I wish I’d known more about this. I wish I’d asked her to tell me why she loved paranormal stuff like she does. I wish I’d treated her with less contempt and more understanding because she’s always, always, treated me that way. “That’s why you went into paranormal psych after he died?”
“Partly, yes. There are so many m
ysteries in the world, so many strange things that go on. I figured if I learned all there was to learn maybe I’d get a chance to see your dad again in some way. What harm does believing in that have? Especially since I know that he was the only man for me. Truly, he was.” She squeezes me.
And that’s the part of her stories that I always heard from her. That’s the part that made me sad and led me to believe that she would be happier with someone else. But I realize now that loving Dad is so much a part of who she is that there is no other person.
“You cast a spell on me to find someone else, didn’t you?”
I look at my hands. Shame brings tears to my eyes once again. “I’m sorry,” I say as I look up at her briefly.
She’s not mad, though, she’s just smiling in that way she has. It warms me. It makes me feel like everything is going to be okay somehow.
“You’re so in love with him still,” I say.
“I am.”
“And I was scared that you’d never move on. That you’re missing out on life because you’re trapped to the ghost of Dad. I mean, the idea of him being the only one, I just didn’t ever understand that.”
She nods.
“I thought you were maybe losing touch with reality, you know, with all the experiments that are happening lately, trying to connect with him. It scares me sometimes,” I admit. “You seem so convinced that you’ll find him somehow. It’s not normal mom behavior. And I don’t want to leave you because I’m scared you’ll lose control and do something silly and dangerous.”
Not unlike what I did to her when I cast that love spell. I sigh inwardly.
Her eyes widen slightly. “Is that why you don’t want to go away to school?”
I gulp. Nod.
“Oh, honey.” She pulls me closer into her chest. “You don’t have to worry about me. I know what I’m doing.”
“But—”
“And you don’t get to decide what’s normal or not until you get a psych degree for yourself.” She squeezes me harder.
“Fair point,” I admit. What do I know anyway? “You’re okay now?”
Love Spells and Other Disasters Page 24
