The Seven Boxed Set

by Sarah M. Cradit

  Maddy, I don’t think you’ll be happy until the world burns around you and you’re the goddamn glowing center of it all.

  “Colleen? You okay?” Cassius asked.

  “Yes, fine. Making mental notes.” The rest of the Council had turned to watch her as well. She could smack Cassius for drawing the attention her way. She channeled her focus staying present.

  “Kitty?” Ophelia urged.

  “Yes, Tante. The other item on the housekeeping list is about family record keeping. We need to collect birth records for all our 1971 and 1972 family babies. We also need to visit any births from the last decade to see if the children have begun to manifest powers yet, and record those in the ledgers as well. I believe it’s also time for us to go through and do an overall refresh.”

  Ophelia nodded. “This will be new for some of you. It’s standard practice for us to record all family births, and then schedule regular visits with the families as the children begin to manifest. But we know abilities can change over time as well. Some strengthen, others weaken. Some even manifest later in life, as we’ve seen, especially in the cases of mystics or elementalists. It’s important we always have a very current and accurate register.”

  “I’ll take the lead on this,” Pierce offered. “Pansy and Kitty have enough to worry about, and Colleen already has a tall order with organizing the files.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” his two daughters replied in unison.

  “Let me know how I can help,” Eugenia said.

  “Yes, thank you, darling.” Ophelia started to say something else, then erupted in a coughing fit. Kitty and Pansy reached over to steady her, but she waved them away. After several excruciating moments, she pulled a silk handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her mouth. “As I said earlier, our family is in a period of relative peace. The Curse last struck in 1903, if my memory serves. When my dear nephew, August, passed on in ’61, it was of a long-standing disease, and with no others to follow, we have always considered that a tragedy of life, rather than of a supernatural interference. Things were quiet then until the unexpected death of our dear Madeline.” She offered Colleen a tight, but warm, smile. “Two years now have passed, and we were very near to calling this one a simple tragedy as well. But now we have been sent notice of the untimely passing of two of our cousins in France. We will share the names, though I doubt they will mean much to any of us.”

  “Yes, as Tante Ophelia said, there are two. One is a Heloise Deschanel, aged fourteen. She drowned in a lake near her family’s home. The other, a Pascal Deschanel, was thirty-nine and had a heart attack, though by all accounts was in perfect health,” Kitty read.

  “That makes three in a relative short span,” Ophelia said. “And three cannot be set aside.”

  “You didn’t see them, Tante?” Pierce asked. “In visions?”

  “I don’t see everything, child. Only what the visions give me.”

  “But we aren’t ready to say for certain this is Brigitte’s Curse, right?” asked Eugenia and Pierce groaned. Eugenia was the second child of Blanche, from Blanche’s second marriage, but was the favored child, and the one whose line was set to inherit everything. Her relationship with her older half-brother was not fractured altogether, but they found their strains in the subtlety of power struggles.

  “In here, can we not play the skeptics? In here, of all places?” Pierce asked.

  “In here, of all places, we must,” Eugenia said. She cocked her head. “The family looks to us to lead them, in the darkness and the light. They look to us to separate wheat from chaff and to know when it’s safe to breathe and when we must worry.”

  Colleen had always liked Eugenia. She possessed a quiet strength and was level-headed, focused in a thoughtful way. She reminded Colleen of herself, but Eugenia, a decade Colleen’s senior and already a mother three times over, had always been just out of her reach for a friendship beyond the kinship of cousins. She was smarter than her brother Pierce, and so much more like her mother, Blanche, which was probably why Blanche had chosen her above both Pierce and Cassius.

  Colleen was reminded again how important it was to bring in more from her father’s line, to the Council. All three of Blanche’s surviving children were Council members. Two of Pierce’s daughters. That left Colleen, on an island, set apart from the interfamily dynamics and struggles of her peers in the room. She had grown up with them, but in many of the ways that mattered, she hardly knew them.

  “Eugenia is right,” Cassius said. “This is why we exist as a Council. This is hard for us because it’s new. None of us were alive when this happened before, except Tante Ophelia. We have to trust her guidance on this one, so we can guide the others.”

  Pierce sighed. “Fine, brother. Tante, when this last happened, at what point did the family begin to believe the Curse was back?”

  “At the loss of the third,” Ophelia replied. “You are looking to me for something finite and tangible, but we are not dealing with anything of the sort. There is no template for this accursed tether our family wears. Is it not possible that every untimely death is not somehow tied back to Brigitte’s vow to see us suffer? How would we know?” She coughed again, and something landed in her handkerchief. She regarded the prize and stuffed the rag back in her pocket. “There is no magic number. There is no guidebook.”

  “Shouldn’t we consider that there might be an explanation grounded in science?” Colleen asked.

  A titter of chuckles passed through the room. It echoed through the chamber, which stretched into the darkness.

  “Maybe for others, science makes sense,” Pansy said. “Ain’t never made sense for us.”

  Colleen ignored her and turned to her great-aunt. “But science has come a long way since the nineteenth century, or even since the start of this century. If we really think there’s a correlation between these deaths, and, as Eugenia said, we have a responsibility to the family, shouldn’t we at least explore it?”

  “And study what?” Pierce asked. “What, exactly, could science tell us? Science would tell us your sister died from trauma caused by a horrible accident. That Heloise’s lungs filled with water, asphyxiating her. That Pascal’s heart gave out, probably because of some undiagnosed heart disease.”

  “Maybe,” Colleen said. “Or maybe it could help us discover something genetic. Something recessive that becomes dominant every couple generations and predisposes us—”

  “Enough,” Ophelia said. “There are very few things not open for safe debate in this room. That we are cursed is not one of them. Eugenia, I’d like you to please reach out to other branches across Europe and see if there are others we must add to the list.”

  Eugenia nodded.

  Colleen’s chest burned at the dismissal. Only Ophelia knew that Colleen’s motivation to become a doctor was a desire to understand her family’s afflictions and gifts from a scientific lens. And, rather than shutting it down, as she’d just done in front of all of Colleen’s peers, she’d encouraged Colleen’s dream. Now, she didn’t know what to think.

  The meeting continued and then came to a close, but Colleen’s cheeks were aflame with shame and embarrassment, and her mind couldn’t stop weaving further betrayal around her aunt’s words.

  “Having a sleepover here, are we?”

  Colleen looked up. The room around her was empty, except Ophelia. The others had gone home, though she couldn’t say when. She had no memory of anything past Ophelia’s harsh words.

  “Sorry, Tante. I’m leaving.” She slid her chair back, but her aunt laid a hand on her forearm.

  “You’re cross with me.”

  Colleen started the denials, but there was never any point in deception with the woman who had borne no children of her own but was nonetheless the undisputed family matriarch. “I don’t understand. When I told you what I wanted to do, you encouraged me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Forgive me, but I really don’t—”

  “I think you do,” Ophelia replied. “I ha
ve led this family as best as I know how, Colleen. Often that required a certain degree of rigidity and maintaining of the status quo. People fear what they cannot understand. They rally around those things they do.”

  “You’re saying…” Colleen searched for the words. “I don’t know.”

  “You do. Go on.”

  “You think they’re incapable of action when the answer is nebulous, but when it’s clear… even if the prognosis feels hopeless…”

  “Yes,” Ophelia said. “Something along those lines. Leadership demands much of you, but perhaps the hardest is knowing when to open the window and let others in, and when to close it and protect them.”

  “Then why tell me this at all?”

  “Because, one day, a day that will not be so very far in the future, you’ll be sitting in my chair, Colleen. You’ll be leading this family, and when you do, you’ll have the authority to choose when to open the window and when to close it.”

  “What? Me?” She’d always assumed it would be Eugenia. Strong, savvy Eugenia with the perfect husband and three perfect young sons. Blanche’s darling. Everyone’s darling.

  “Of course, you. And I can’t demand, or even ask, you to lead the family the way I did. When you’re magistrate, you can decide if science is the path to take this family down. If they’re ready for something they can’t wrap their arms around.”

  “But… Tante, I’m nowhere near ready to step into your shoes.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest, that at ninety-four, this could happen at any time. Colleen would have said it was her greatest fear, before she had buried one of her siblings.

  The lines in her great-aunt’s face shuffled around as the old woman smiled. “Do you know how I came to be magistrate? Have I ever told you?”

  Colleen shook her head.

  Ophelia chortled. “I declared myself magistrate, that’s how!” Her laugh dissolved into hacking coughs before she continued. “When my grandparents, Charles and Brigitte, brought the family to Louisiana, they did not bring with them the tradition of the Council. The Council goes back centuries. Seventeenth or eighteenth, I forget, and such details become less important over time. Charles’ father, my great-grandfather, was magistrate in France, and he beseeched Charles to continue this practice in the New World. I discovered this by accident, as a child, when I overheard my grandfather talking about this very thing to my father. When I was old enough, I wrote a letter to several relatives in France, looking to piece together what the Deschanel Magi Collective was, and how I could continue what my grandfather had failed to do.”

  Colleen was transfixed. She’d never heard any of this, and she doubted Ophelia had shared these memories with anyone else. She’d known only that the Collective was very old.

  “I’m growing very tired, so let me reach my point,” Ophelia said. “Our traditions bind us, Colleen. But all traditions begin somewhere. You’ll have your time.”

  “Thank you for telling me this, Tante. I always feel so much better after time with you.”

  Ophelia settled her cane into the wood floor and wobbled to her feet. “Sleep calls, but there was more I meant to say to you, dear.”

  Colleen sat back down. “Okay.”

  “Forgive Evangeline,” her aunt said. “She needs you, but you need her more. The grief you all share requires unity to overcome, and you will need unity in the coming years. And this boy… Rory…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do not lose another hour of sleep over him,” Ophelia said. “Rory isn’t the man you’re going to marry.” When Colleen’s jaw fell loose, her aunt added, “I’ll beg your forgiveness at a later date for my unsolicited soothsaying, but for now, you have more important things to deal with than the fickleness of love that has already expired.”

  Three

  Virgins and Super Freaks

  “It’s a nice day. You should go outside.”

  Maureen hurled her math textbook—really, the only book in her room, and only because she had no choice—across the room. It hit the wall with a thud and slid to the floor, pages akimbo.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “No, you’re not saying anything, you’re dead.” Maureen dove under the covers and pulled the blankets tight over her head.

  She screamed when Madeline appeared beside her in her fortress. “Look, Maureen, as an empath, I get why seeing your dead loved ones is a drag, but as your sister—”

  “No, my sister is dead. Dead!” She pressed her face into the pillow. “Dead, like Peter, like Father!” Dead, dead, dead, all of them, but that didn’t stop them from making demands. Madeline begged and pleaded with Maureen to pass messages to her sisters and brothers, to their mother, but Maureen couldn’t give her what she wanted. No one could ever know she was a freak who communed with the dead.

  She couldn’t explain to anyone why she didn’t grieve for Madeline as they did. That, for her, Madeline had never actually left.

  You have to tell Augustus it’s not his fault! And Colleen, oh, she’ll blame herself forever! And tell Mama…

  No, she couldn’t, even if it did tear at her heart to say no.

  “Why, Maureen?” Peter sang in his melancholy refrain. She’d thought the rules of these… ghosts, or whatever the hell they were, tethered them to certain places only, but apparently not Peter Evers. Peter Evers had evolved, to torture her at home now, too. What else might he evolve to do?

  There was no one to ask.

  “Sweet Maureen, we’re still family, even in the afterlife,” her father said.

  “Hell’s bells!” Was there nothing, nothing at all that could turn this off, once and for all?

  Her mother’s pistol, perhaps. Maureen didn’t know how to use it, but it couldn’t be so hard, right? Pull the trigger, boom, problems over.

  And not just the problem of these meddlesome ghosts, either.

  Madeline knew about Maureen’s most recent trauma. Father, too, probably, and maybe even that pervert Peter. Only Madeline had tried to talk to her about it, though.

  As if talking did any good at all. Talking wouldn’t erase the baby growing in her womb. It wouldn’t change the laws, either of the court of society. It certainly wouldn’t do anything about her mother’s insistence Maureen had no say at all in what happened to the baby, either.

  When she’d suggested going away to a convent to have the child and send it off for adoption, like other young and unwed mothers did, Irish Colleen practically fainted away. Your father left me to protect you children and your fortune. You really think it would be wise to have a bastard running around out there who can show up twenty years from now to challenge their right to financial entitlement?

  Pierce Guidry knew a guy, who knew a guy. Maureen had seen the propaganda in her health class about these “guys.” Back-alley abortionists who were less concerned with sanitation and more with cash up front. But apparently that was good enough for Mama! The appointment was made. The date set, for when Maureen would be forced against her will to murder her own baby.

  Pleading to her mother’s Catholic guilt made matters worse. “Don’t drag Jesus into this, Maureen. He didn’t make these decisions for you. But he did give us science, and doctors who know how to help fix things when our children make terrible mistakes.”

  “So, Jesus created abortions?”

  “He made me your mother, and as your mother I make the rules!”

  Okay, sure. Whatever that meant.

  The clock downstairs chimed noon. Their appointment with “the guy” was in an hour, somewhere out in Carrollton. They’d ride the St. Charles streetcar to the end of the line, and then walk six blocks. Maureen didn’t imagine she’d be real keen on walking those six blocks again after whatever heinous procedure awaited her, but her mother had said the service included a discreet taxi home to Oak Haven.

  “I know this is hard, Maureen. There’s still a way out of this, you know.”

  Maureen pinched off the flutter of emotion in her chest. She channeled the emotion into
anger. “Oh yeah, Maddy? What’s that? Die like you?”

  “I’d never wish death on you,” her dead sister answered, smiling sadly. “But you could leave. As long as you’re here, Mama will make decisions for you. You have no choice. Out there…”

  “Out there is nothing!” Maureen cried, for her world was never as big as Madeline imagined hers to be, and even the mere thought of it being so was enough to send her spiraling into hopelessness.

  * * *

  Her friend Susan showed her the printing press in the office of the school newspaper. They had two, actually; the big one was for the weekly Sacred Heart Gazette. The other was for smaller projects, like the fliers plastered on the boards by the front office, or outside the gymnasium, announcing school dances, fundraisers, sports sign-ups, and the other events of the high school social calendar.

  Maureen had, briefly, an inkling to be a school journalist. She even went as far as taking one of their fliers once. But she’d transferred from public school to the Academy of the Sacred Heart when she left middle school behind, and all the key positions in clubs and sports were taken by the girls who’d been Sacred Heart students since kindergarten.

  Susan was one of those girls, but she was more approachable and friendlier than most of them. Maureen thought this was because Susan was a bit simple in the head, but she was nice enough and Maureen had nothing against a simple girl. Simple girls made easy wives later. Easy wives, easy lives. Everyone knew that.

  She was the closest thing Maureen had to a friend, unless she counted Chelsea Sullivan, and she only counted her occasionally, depending on whether they were embroiled in one of their epic fights, which they were the day Maureen found herself in the office of the school newspaper. Chelsea wouldn’t have approved of the idea that blossomed from the visit, at least not outwardly. She wanted everyone to think she was as pristine as her three older brothers, but she wasn’t, and Maureen reminded her of that a little too often.