Once a Witch

by Carolyn Maccullough

  "Okay, how's this?" Agatha has paired my My Little Pony T-shirt with a white miniskirt.

  "Great! Ready?"

  She looks at me, horrified. "I have to do my makeup!"

  When we reach the bar, it's standing room only and the show has already started. Gabriel is on stage, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His acoustic guitar is cradled in his arms, his face illuminated by a narrow spotlight overhead. A girl wearing a pink and black slip over incredibly skinny jeans is singing in a whis-pery, almost breathless way into the mike, her hips twisting and turning slowly with the music. The guitar chords wrap just under her silvery voice as she sings something about the sea and a shadow she can't ever forget. I listen to the words and try to ignore the thought that she's probably Gabriel's girlfriend.

  "Beer?" Agatha says in my ear, and I nod, my eyes still fixed to the stage.

  Gabriel plays on and the girl sings another song, sometimes picking up a flute to accompany him on the guitar. The bar is crowded, people flickering in and out of the dim light, sometimes jostling into me. Agatha comes back after a while and presses a cold glass into my hand, then waves away my offer of money.

  "They're pretty good," she says finally, and I'm grateful that she doesn't say she's pretty good. I nod and sip my beer, and just then the girl announces in a totally normal voice that they will take a set break. Then her voice dips a little again and she reminds the crowd that CDs on the back table are an amazing bargain at ten dollars each. She gives this hint of a smile and a wiggle of her body as she says this, and all around me people clap and a few guys wolf whistle. The lights brighten slightly and a crush of people moves to the bar on the other side of the room.

  "Bathroom," Agatha announces. "Hold this?"

  I take her beer and stand in the crowd, letting it break around me until Gabriel appears in front of me.

  "You made it," he says simply, then lifts one of the glasses from my hand.

  "Keep drinking that and you owe Agatha a beer," I say after he takes a swallow. He grins but hands the glass back to me, and I spend a few seconds studying the open hollow of his throat and the way his tattoo seems to shine against his faintly damp skin.

  "So—" he begins.

  At the same moment I rush in with, "You're great. Great up there. Looking good." Shut up, shut up, I tell myself.

  "Thanks." He studies me for a minute and then says abruptly, "That clock you want me to find. Are you sure that's really what you want me to find?"

  I gape at him. "What? Yeah, I'm sure. Why?"

  He shrugs. "I don't know. It's like ... it doesn't exist."

  "It has to," I say doggedly. Why would Alistair ask me to find something that doesn't exist? An image of Alistair's face when he didn't look like Alistair flashes into my head.

  "What?" Gabriel says intently, staring at me.

  "Nothing." I drain my glass and start drinking Agatha's beer absent-mindedly.

  "Anyway, I found something—" he begins.

  "What?" I say, nearly choking on the beer. "Why didn't you say so right away?" I jump on the balls of my feet until beer sloshes over my wrist.

  "Because I didn't find the actual clock," Gabriel says, and my happy fantasies abruptly end. "I was going to say I found something that you might want to see, but it's complicated. It's not what you asked me to find."

  "Well, that's helpful," I mutter, dabbing ineffectually at my wrist.

  He pins my gaze with his own, then says, "Maybe if you would tell me the truth about—"

  The girl who he was singing with appears at his side. "We're up, baby," she coos into his ear. She gives me a fleeting smile, a lip spasm, really, before winding her long white arms around Gabriel's neck as if preparing to drag him back to the stage.

  "Tomorrow?"

  I nod. "Where?"

  "Chester and Rennie's house."

  I frown. "Why there? It's ... oh, are you staying there? I thought you were staying in the dorms at Juilliard?" I thought you were like me.

  "I am. Sometimes I practice there with the band. Anyway, tomorrow. Eight o'clock?"

  "Sure," I call as he follows the girl back to the stage, their hands entwined.

  SEVEN

  FAINT STREET NOISE penetrates the thick walls of Uncle Chester and Aunt Rennie's townhouse: the occasional honk of a horn, a burst of song from someone passing by the windows. But inside, the house is silent, waiting.

  Gabriel stares at the painting on the wall for so long that I think he's gone into a trance. It's a drawing room scene, very similar to the upstairs drawing room. Rich yellow drapes with fancy-looking gold tiebacks frame the large picture windows and the room is scattered with sofas and chairs. A fire is blazing in the fireplace, the flames looking as though they're about to leap beyond the fire screen. However, the three people standing in the picture don't seem to be paying attention. Two of them are men, dressed in long black frock coats. Their backs are turned to the viewer while the third figure, a woman, is caught in profile. My eyes wander over her slim painted features and then over her dress, a brilliant red, which is a perfect echo of the tiny points of red, maybe rubies, on the face of the clock hanging directly above her head.

  The clock that looks exactly like the one that Alistair wants me to find.

  "That's not the same clock," Gabriel says at last.

  I've been holding my breath without realizing it, and now it all escapes me in a rush that sounds like a cross between a what and a huh. "Whua!"

  Smiling for the first time since we entered the house, he says, "'Whua'? Well—"

  But I'm not in the mood. "Look!" I snap Alistair's painting at him, the paper making a crackling noise as I wave it in front of Gabriel's face. "It's exactly the same. And that explains why it was so familiar to me," I add, rattling Alistair's paper some more. "Obviously, I've seen Uncle Chester and Aunt Rennie's painting before."

  Gabriel looks at the print I'm holding and then at the painting on the wall. "Yeah, I know," he says with what I feel is exaggerated patience. "Let me explain again. That object"—and here he points to the clock in the painting—"is not what you told me you want to find."

  "What do you even mean?" I ask, trying not to sound sulky.

  Gabriel walks over to the massive staircase and folds his long frame onto the second step. There's a rip in his jeans and his right knee pokes through briefly as he arranges his legs in a sprawl. I follow, sit beside him. After a minute, he sways his knee into mine and says gently, "It's not calling to me the way that it normally does. It doesn't feel real. Maybe it never really existed."

  "But it might have," I say softly. "Right?"

  Gabriel shrugs. "Possibly."

  "Okay, okay," I say, more to myself than to him, as the glimmerings of an idea are taking shape in my head. "The clock in the painting and the clock on this piece of paper are one and the same. I'm sure of it. But you can't find this clock." I fan him with the edge of the paper.

  "It's not—"

  "Shhh!" I knock the back of my hand against his arm. "I'm processing." Another term I learned from Agatha. "That's an old painting there," I say slowly. "I checked the date. 1899. And he said the clock was lost in 1887. So maybe you can't find it now because it doesn't exist anymore. But it does in that painting." I try to keep my voice level. "Gabriel, don't you think that's it? That it existed once but it doesn't currently?"

  Gabriel inclines his head slightly toward me. "Who said the clock was lost in 1887?"

  I open my mouth, close it again.

  "Tam, tell me what's going on," he says. When I don't answer, he hooks his fingers under my chin and turns my face up to his. "Please," he adds simply.

  "Okay, okay," I say at last and lean back a little because his fingers are too warm on my skin. "This guy came into the bookshop over the summer, this professor at NYU—the night you came home, actually. Anyway, he had heard of the bookstore—you know, the finder's agency part—and he asked if I could help him find something, a family heirloom that was
lost more than a hundred years ago. And I agreed to do it." I pause, giving him a hopeful look.

  Gabriel waits me out.

  "Um ... I didn't tell him that I don't have ... any Talent. Oh, but I did tell him that I was Rowena." But it comes out more like ohbutldidtellhimthatlwasRowena.

  "What?"

  "Yeah, okay, it was stupid, I know. But he thought I was Rowena and then I just sort of..."

  "Went along with it?"

  "Exactly."

  "But you told him later, right?"

  I'm not sure if he means the no Talent part or the not being Rowena part, but I decide to tackle both. "No," I whisper, staring at my toes in their neon green sandals. "I should have, but then maybe he wouldn't want me on the case anymore. He'd just go back and ask for Ro. And I ... wanted to prove to my family that ... oh, forget it, it's stupid."

  "Why would you pretend to be Rowena?" Gabriel asks. "You're way prettier."

  Now it's my turn to stare at him. "What?"

  But he's moved on. "So that answers why I couldn't find this," he says and raps the paper with his thumb. "It doesn't exist anymore. Even if it is the same clock as the one in that painting, it's still not what your professor wants. At least not currently."

  "Explain to me how it works."

  "How what—you mean how I find things?" And now for some reason he looks worried.

  "I want to know," I say simply. And for once I really do.

  Gabriel doesn't answer right away. But at last he says, "Okay. It's like, when someone wants to find something, I can hear the object."

  "You don't see it?"

  He gives a quick shake of his head. "No. And hear is the closest word I can think of, but it's more like feeling an echo. I feel this echo of whatever the thing or person or place that's lost is, and then I ... follow it."

  "Even through time?" I whisper.

  Gabriel's face goes completely blank. "Why would you ask that?"

  "I don't know. No reason, really. I just thought it was..." I break off, staring at him, and even though his face hasn't changed at all, not even by one twitch, somehow I know. "You can, can't you?"

  A siren wails past the front windows, blaring its warning into the dark.

  "I've never told anyone that I could do that. I didn't know at first. It took me a couple of years before I figured out that yes, I could follow something through time. But..."

  "But what?"

  "We're not supposed to," he says simply. And all of a sudden I feel the gulf in that we.

  "Why not?"

  "This has never been explained to you?"

  I look at him.

  "Apparently, they do this at the Initiation Rites," he adds.

  When a person turns twelve in my family, he or she has been Talented for four years. Four years is the general time that it takes for a person's power to fully strengthen. So on Samhain, the entire family gathers and celebrates the new Initiates. The year I turned twelve, two of my cousins did, too, so of course a big celebration rite was planned. The night of Samhain, I locked myself in my room. For once my mother didn't pop into view to confront me and Rowena didn't try to convince me with sugar-syrup words and my grandmother didn't order me downstairs. Alone in the suddenly silent house, I watched everyone troop out to the woods before opening my science textbook and trying to study for the quiz we were having that week on ecosystems. Later, I tried not to strain my eyes for the telltale ladders of smoke that would signal the bonfire had started. Instead, I colored the photos of arid deserts in my textbook a vile shade of green, not caring that I was defacing a school textbook, and tried to block the sounds of chanting from my ears, even as my lips moved reflexively in the four prayers. In my mind's eye, I can still see the stain of color spreading from the tip of my marker across the porous page. I'd have to say that ranks as my second worst birthday, only just behind the year I turned eight.

  "I never went through those," I point out, even though he knows this.

  "Neither did I," Gabriel answers, and I blink in surprise.

  "You didn't? Why not?"

  "Oh yeah, my dad would have loved that shit." His voice is mocking. "Those were the years when my mom was pretending that we were actually normal people. The all-American family. We did normal Halloween things. My mom dressed up every year as a pumpkin or something equally stupid."

  I try not to smile. "Not a witch?"

  Gabriel shakes his head. "Hell, no. Never that. That would be a little too close to home for my dad. No, I trick-or-treated until, like, thirteen, and then I went out with my friends and did the usual stuff—"

  "I've read about that," I say wistfully. "Toilet-papering houses and shaving cream."

  "Stealing candy from little kids is more like it. That and lighting dog shit on fire."

  "Oh." I think about this for a few seconds. "That's lame. And disgusting."

  Gabriel shrugs. "What can I say? I was thirteen."

  "So your mom never told you about—"

  "She was weird about being Talented." He pauses, rubs one hand across the back of his neck. "She had this mini altar that she took down every day right before my dad came home. Dirt from the backyard, flower petals. A dish of water. You know the drill."

  I nod.

  "Anyway, she still believed in everything, but it's like it went into hiding whenever my dad was there. This whole other person came out. And I could never figure out why."

  "Why what?"

  "Why would she ever want to be with someone if she could only be a quarter of who she truly was in front of him? And I could never figure out why my dad accepted that—required that—from her. It's like being with someone and their arms or their legs are missing and you don't even notice. It was crazy." Gabriel shakes his head, then looks at me and grins. "Okay, that's probably more than you needed to hear."

  "No, I..." I adjust the strap of my sandal where it's pressing into the arch of my foot. "I like talking to you about this. It's ... nice," I finish lamely. "I never talk to anyone about their ... Talent."

  "Why not?"

  "I..." My fingers press into the worn spot on my skin until pain pricks across my nerve endings. "It hurts too much," I say finally. I can't look at him as I continue. "I feel like my family tolerates me but that I'm a constant failure to them."

  And instead of saying things like "You're not a failure" or "That's not true," Gabriel says nothing at all but rests one hand on my arm.

  Heat pours through my skin.

  "Things ... weren't supposed to be like this," I add. We're quiet for a while, listening to the house creak around us.

  "I'm sorry we moved away," Gabriel says. And then his hand tightens on my arm until I look at him. "Why didn't you write me back?" he asks.

  "I ... felt weird." Like you wouldn't like me anymore.

  "Even with me?"

  I shrug. "Even with you."

  Our faces are close enough for me to observe that his eyes are not as dark as they first seem. Instead, there are tiny flecks of green radiating from his irises.

  And then the grandfather clock in the hall strikes the half hour and I'm jolted back to what I need to be jolted back to.

  "Okay, what if I want to find that object there?" I say and point toward the painting on the wall. "Forget about this piece of paper. What if I want to find the clock in the painting?"

  "Somehow, I knew you were going to say that." Gabriel sighs and leans back away from me.

  "And what if I want to go with you?" And now I'm holding my breath, too afraid of what he'll answer.

  "Whoa! Who said that I would even go in the first place?"

  "Please." I wedge my feet on the bottom stairs. "I know we're not supposed to tamper with time or whatever the rule is, but—"

  Gabriel's brows twist. "It's not just that," he says in a way that makes me think he cares little about breaking rules. "It's dangerous. I've read enough about time to know that it's not a good idea to mess with it on the whole."

  "What if we were really, really car
eful? And we did it just this once. And no one has to know, right?" Inwardly, I imagine the looks on my mother's and grandmother's and Rowena's faces when I bring home the payment that Alistair will give me after finding his clock. I could drop the money onto the table. What's this? Oh, just a little something that a customer gave me after I—

  The stairway creaks a little as if weighing in and I jump. Thankfully Gabriel doesn't seem to notice. He's too busy staring off at the painting.

  "You know," Gabriel says thoughtfully, "my mom never really explained that rule to me anyway. It was one of those conversations that we had to have on the down low, and my dad came home in the middle of it and we never picked it up again."

  "And no one's ever explained it to me, either. I mean, why would they bother?" I say, making my face as innocent as possible.

  Gabriel puts one finger to his chin in an overly thoughtful pose. "So no one's actually forbidden us to do this or explained why it would be a particularly bad idea?"

  "Nope." I shake my head sorrowfully. "No one."

  We grin at each other, and suddenly he stands up and pulls me to my feet. Off balance, I rock close to him for a minute. Close enough to learn that he smells like clean laundry. His hands linger on my arms a second and I try to step back, but he tightens his grip. "Do you really want to do this?" His voice is low and all traces of his grin are gone.

  I nod.

  "Do you promise me that if we do this, you won't touch anything? That you will follow my lead at all times?"

  I would salute but he's pinning my arms to my side, so I settle for nodding again.

  But Gabriel looks unconvinced, so finally I say, "Yes, I promise."

  "Okay." He releases me and steps back to study the painting again. Surreptitiously, I rub my arms. I can't help but stare at him. He looks so intense, so determined and otherworldly, that I'm having a hard time remembering that this is the person who used to play sock puppets with me when he was six and I was four.