Love Potion #2

by Margot Early

  “I was immature,” she said. “Not realistic.”

  He shook his head. “Romantic. And I like that about you. I’ve never been in love before, Cameron. With anyone.”

  He saw the smile in her brown eyes.

  “But are you going to give me time to finish my project before the wedding?” he asked.

  GABRIELA WAS TEETHING, and Paul, seeing Cameron exhausted from nursing, took the baby out to the living room. He scouted Cameron’s bookshelves until he found a battered copy of Wuthering Heights, not the vintage edition Sean had given her but a paperback that appeared to have been read and reread. He took a teething ring from the freezer where it had been cooling for Gabriela and settled on the couch with the book and the still hiccupping infant.

  Wolfie had come inside, and during Gabriela’s recent crying the animal had inched closer and closer to her and Paul. Paul, the most detached of animal lovers, couldn’t help thinking that the shy animal wanted to comfort the baby.

  He read Wuthering Heights for two hours and dozed off with Gabriela asleep on his chest. Later, he was not sure what awoke him. But two wolfish eyes were right beside him with Wolfie’s partly gray muzzle. The wild dog’s tongue touched Gabriela’s face, but when he saw Paul’s eyes—now open—he backed up and edged back to lie down near the doorway.

  Paul smiled. Cradling the baby against him, he got up of the couch to switch off the living room light and go into the bedroom where Cameron slept.

  PAUL AND CAMERON decided to marry during the week after Christmas, when Paul was sure his project would be done. Cameron eschewed a wedding dress and bought some new pants and a flowing blouse and covered both with her hooded camel’s hair coat. Because of the likelihood of snow—and so that her grandmother could attend the ceremony—Cameron decided the best spot for the wedding would be the interior of the winter saki exhibit.

  The veterinarian, amused, later said that during the ceremony the female had let the male within five feet of her, which was progress.

  After the ceremony, everyone had refreshments in the warmth of the Reptile House, a quieter setting than among the primates, and Cameron’s grandmother remarked, “Well, I’ve never been to a wedding like this.”

  Cameron stood beside Paul and watched Bridget’s children chase Sean Devlin through the building. She told him, “I’m not the kind of person to give anyone a love potion.”

  Paul said, “And he doesn’t deserve it.”

  He and Cameron gazed over at Bridget, her short dark hair in a boyish bob, long bangs curling back from her strong face, who was talking to Mary Anne about Mary Anne’s pregnancy. He shook his head. “I would never do that to anyone.”

  “Very honorable,” Cameron agreed.

  Paul’s father appeared with Gabriela in his arms.

  “She’s looking hungry and starting to get a little cranky,” he told Cameron, handing her the baby. Cameron and Paul went to sit in chairs near the monitor lizards. When Paul stood up, Clare Cureux took his seat.

  Cameron remembered the confession Clare had made to her son months before, the thing she had done to preserve her career as a midwife. Like Paul, she somewhat doubted that the sacrifice had been necessary. Surely, no court would have convicted Clare of anything.

  It wasn’t something Cameron could ever mention to her, imagining the shame Clare must still carry over the incident.

  Clare smiled at mother and daughter as Cameron nursed Gabriela. “Bridget looked like that,” she remarked. “That nose. I’ll have to show you baby pictures.”

  Cameron was grateful for this, for this simple warmth, comparatively rare in her interactions with Paul’s mother.

  Clare said, “Well, I have a present for you and Paul, out in the car. It’s not wrapped, so I’ll tell you what it is. My mother’s wedding ring quilt.”

  “Thank you!” Cameron exclaimed, knowing the quilt. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes. I have other quilts of hers, and I gave Bridget one on her marriage.” A look of sadness crossed Clare’s face, sadness and concern for Bridget’s widowed state, Cameron supposed.

  Cameron said, “Clare, I know you don’t—well, approve—of love potions. Yet you make them.”

  “Approve isn’t the right word.” Clare frowned as she formulated her thoughts. “I make them because they are part of my family heritage—and not a part I find disgraceful. My mother made them and her mother before that. It is a family recipe, if you will, and each of us has slightly altered ingredients, because the ingredients aren’t the essential elements.”

  “It’s your gift,” Cameron articulated.

  “Well—” Clare was obviously uncomfortable discussing it.

  “Have you ever refused one to someone?”

  Clare didn’t have to think. “No.”

  Cameron looked at her. “But surely some people want to, say, steal someone else’s spouse.” Or fiancé, she thought, remembering details of Mary Anne’s buying a love potion.

  “These potions have a way of taking care of themselves. The person who buys the potion…” Clare gave a smile that, to Cameron, seemed sad. “There’s always a need for more love in the world, Cameron, and the people who buy these potions need love. And love changes them, changes everyone, for the better.”

  Cameron couldn’t argue with that. “Have you ever given a love potion to someone? I mean, administered it?”

  “Never.”

  There was an absolute finality to the word. Cameron considered Bridget, who seemed to brew and distribute love potions with a slightly cavalier attitude. “Have you ever been afraid that, say, Bridget, might give you one?”

  Clare laughed. “Why on Earth would she?”

  “When you divorced—” Cameron wished she hadn’t asked the question.

  “Bridget was a little girl. What she knew in life was her parents living apart.”

  And Paul, a little older, who remembered something different, didn’t have the Cureux gift for making the draughts—or the desire to give them to anyone.

  Cameron bit her lip and thought of all the women who had come to the Women’s Resource Center, all the stories she’d heard. Paul shouldn’t have told me, she thought. About what his mother had done. But Cameron supposed he’d had to tell someone.

  Clare said, “So Paul told you.”

  Cameron had forgotten, forgotten the Cureux Sight. Clare must have sensed.

  She grasped Clare’s strong brown hand with its prominent veins, realizing as she did that it was the first time she had held Clare’s hand, though Bridget’s had been constantly in hers during labor. “If you ever need to talk about it, there are counselors at the resource center—or I can find you someone out of town.”

  Clare shook her head. “It happened a long time ago. And I chose it, Cameron. I was very young. My clients were the most important thing to me, and I did what I thought was best for them. Today, things are different. And perhaps I should have fought it back then. Midwives spend so much time in court, defending themselves, fighting for the right to practice. They all simply want to care for their clients, but they also feel a need to stand up for all midwives, to change the laws, to draw more women to homebirth and to midwifery-based care. I felt that life was too short—and those few women in my care, too important. It was disgraceful, but it was a choice I made.”

  Cameron nodded, puzzling over the dilemma. “Would you do the same thing today?”

  Clare shrugged. “Today, I’d accept the fine and the brief jail time for practicing without a license. Of course, they might try to make it manslaughter. And they could have then. The people were gone, only their stillborn child left as evidence. Probably, it would have meant a long time in court, and if I’d practiced during that time…”

  Cameron considered all of it and believed that she, if she’d been Clare, would have taken the other road. Her family would have come first. Not to mention trading her body for…

  After leaving Clare, Cameron sat next to her grandmother for a half hour and heard Ja
cqueline Billingham describe her own wedding and honeymoon in Charleston. Cameron and Paul had not planned a honeymoon yet. It seemed strange to them to bring one’s baby daughter on a honeymoon and neither wanted to be parted from her while she was still so young, so Paul was planning something for the future.

  That night, when the three of them went home, Cameron felt a deep contentment. She and Paul were married, and their wedding had been exactly as she would have wished it.

  When they had settled Gabriela, Cameron said, “I want to give you your wedding present.”

  “Likewise,” he said, grinning, because the secretive project in the sunroom seemed to have taken on a life of its own. Two weeks before, he’d taken to throwing a sheet over it when he wasn’t working on it. Cameron was pretty sure it was a dollhouse. She’d never had one, had always been a tomboy, but she liked the idea of having a dollhouse.

  She went into the bedroom and returned with a package she’d wrapped the week before. She hadn’t had the slightest idea what to give him for a wedding gift, spending much time pondering the things that were most important to him and trying to find something that would be both useful and special.

  What she’d done had taken time. Paul said, “Should I open it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s take it in the sunroom.”

  And in the sunroom, the dollhouse stood unveiled. Cameron gazed at it in initial wonder, then came closer to study it, turning on two lamps to see better as Paul unwrapped her present to him.

  It was a photograph album, containing photos she’d collected from both their lives and from their life together. She’d added, beneath some of the photos, poems and quotes from favorite books and aphorisms and paradoxes she’d read and liked. Paul grinned as he turned pages, laughed at an Oscar Wilde quote, gazed in rapture at a photo of Cameron holding Gabriela in the NICU.

  Cameron could hardly spare attention for his reaction to her gift. Her heart soared as she saw what Paul had assembled, what he’d created for her.

  Someone—a local artist, she discovered by the signature—had painted on canvas a backdrop that stretched behind the dollhouse, windy moors with rocky outcroppings and wild birds in flight. But the house. Outside the structure, slanted firs and gaunt thorns stood as though blown by the wind. Miniscule threads of grass grew up between tiny flagstones leading to the door. Even miniature griffins were there, weathered and crumbling over the door. The windows were narrow, the corners enforced with round pebbles, like river stones. And at the garret window of the rambling wooden house were two amazing dolls, dark-haired and dark-eyed, tiny and perfect. And there were others too, other dolls, other characters, other times, and over the door was a wooden sign dated with the year 1500 reading HARETON EARNSHAW, and the dark interior had a great fireplace with an assortment of guns over it. It was a place she had read described but seen only in her mind’s eye. Tears sprang into her eyes. “I love it so much.” He had made her Wuthering Heights.

  Her reaction was everything Paul wanted, the tangible sign of the complete redemption he’d wanted for months, her letting go of what he’d been unable to be in the past and accepting and loving utterly what he was now.

  He laid aside his own gift from her to enjoy later while he showed her all the dolls that Mary Anne had helped him find and remake into Cathy and Heathcliff as children and teenagers and adults, of old Mr. Earnshaw and Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar and Isabella Linton and old Nellie Dean and Joseph and Catherine Linton Heathcliff and Hareton and Linton Heathcliff, and all the dogs and even the tenant Mr. Lockwood, to whom Nellie Dean told the story.

  And Cameron spotted, in the clouds and wind across the moors, two ghostly figures leaving footprints, just impressions of the nature around them, but hand in hand. She and Paul stayed up for hours thinking of ways to recreate the books Mr. Lockwood found on his first night at Wuthering Heights, discussing ideas for more furniture, plans for the stable, and Paul’s hunt for Heathcliff’s and Hareton’s dogs.

  Cameron whispered, “I never had a dollhouse before. And this is so much more than a dollhouse. This is a world come alive.”

  When she could finally bring herself to leave it and come to bed, she and Paul lay down with Gabriela between them, and she reached over the baby to touch her husband’s face. “I’m so happy.”

  “We both are,” he told her. They breathed in the dark while snow fell outside the windows. “Do you remember that night at school? Halloween?”

  Cameron laughed. “Of course, I do.”

  “I had glitter in my bed.” He laughed. “Maybe that’s how I knew you were the one.”

  “You didn’t know,” she answered. “You told me it would get in the way of our friendship, or something like that.”

  “Cameron, I knew that you—whatever I had with you—was something I didn’t want to destroy. And back then I probably would have destroyed it.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, disbelieving.

  “You were my best friend. Still are.”

  They put their heads together on the pillow to kiss.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep,” she said. “I’m too happy.”

  Paul touched her hair.

  She asked, “Do you think Bridget…and Sean…?”

  Paul propped himself up on his arm to shake his head at her. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I can think about it. And your mother says she’s never refused anyone a love potion.”

  Suddenly Mariah sat up from where she lay on her bed. She lifted her head. Outside, her father howled and Mariah joined in, singing with him.

  Cameron teased Paul. “It’s a sign. A sign that I should…”

  Paul carefully climbed over Gabriela and around to the other side of his wife. “A sign that I need to help you get sleepy.”

  With his body against hers she knew a perfect completeness. She was home. He was home to her—Paul, with Gabriela there close to them. And she understood the unreachable maleness of him yet how their souls were alike. She whispered, “‘Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’”

  Paul said, “When I read those words, I could only think of you and me.”

  She held him more tightly and knew she had never been happier and that each day to come she could be more so. And she could bring ever deeper happiness to this man she so loved.

  She said, “Oh, thank you, thank you,” and she was speaking not just to him but to the divine that had made her love with him possible, to the gifts of this full moon of life.

  His cheek was against hers, and she thought there was dampness there between them, and she looked at him in the dark and touched his eyelashes and tried, for him and who he was, the man he was, to not show she noticed their wetness. And he behaved as though it wasn’t happening and kissed her mouth. She wanted no more.

  IN THE DARKNESS of the primate exhibit, the male saki, who should have been asleep, saw his chance. He picked up the soft red thing and carried it back up into trees where he preferred to be. His mate ignored him, was probably sleeping, the baby nestled against her.

  He did not know that the soft thing he’d taken from the floor was supposed to be a fire truck, just knew that sometimes, if you hit the soft things, something happened.

  He banged the fire truck on a tree branch, and a wailing sound cried through the exhibit. He hit it against the tree branch again. When the wailing died, he struck it a third time and listened to the strange cry rise and fall. In the silence, he prepared to hit it again.

  But then, she came.

  She came and stole it from him.

  And he went closer to where she was, and she did not throw it at him.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-5562-7

  LOVE POTION #2

  Copyright © 2010 by Margot Early.

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