One day, Anne was running through the rooms in delight, squealing as if someone was chasing her. This unnerved Nan so much that she pulled Anne to an abrupt stop by the neck of her dress.
“What do you run from, Anna? Who do you see?”
Anne, trying to get away from Nan and back to playing, answered, “Gwen and the little girl! Lemme go!”
“Gwen?” An icy shiver ran through Nan. “What little girl? Who do you speak of?”
“The little girl on the mantel! Lemme go!” Anne kicked her feet.
Nan picked up her granddaughter and sat her on the kitchen counter while she pumped cold water into the sink. Then she dunked Anne, fully clothed and screaming with fury, under the icy water.
“There are no such things as ghosts, Anna.”
It didn’t take long for Anne to learn her lesson. Every time Nan thought Anne was playing with “her ghosts,” she punished her. A slap on the hand with a wooden spoon, a pinch to her arm, and sometimes just a cold stare. Anne learned to hide her joy.
She grew into a small little girl, thin and short for her age. Her hair was black like Lucy’s, but straighter. Thick and unruly, as soon as it grew long enough it was braided, harshly, and braided it stayed. Her face was sweet and delicate, but no one noticed because her eyes were so large they took up most of her small face and, if caught in the right light, tended to disappear altogether. She had pale, freckled skin, unlike her mother’s, or her Nan’s, or her big brother Dominic’s. Anne didn’t look like she belonged to any of them. She was a quiet child in an unquiet house, who wandered around sneaking up on everyone by accident.
She preferred to be alone in the attic with her ghosts.
“No one believes me,” Anne said to an ever-twirling Gwyneth.
“It will be all right. You have us.” She could always make Anne feel better. Gwyneth even took away Anne’s dreams. Anne never knew a nightmare. “Dreams can be bad,” she told Anne, “so I steal them away from you.”
Gwyneth wore the most beautiful old-fashioned white gown Anne had ever seen, even in storybooks. It was a dress perfect for dancing. Chaînés, chaînés. Anne loved the way it moved.
And ghosts move fast. And when they are angry, their eyes go black.
* * *
When Anne wasn’t with her ghosts, she was with Nan.
Anne respected Nan because the house loved her. And Anne loved the house. Sometimes she thought she loved it more than her ghosts or her family or anything there ever was or ever would be. It belonged to her. The Witch House only existed because Nan created it. Anne understood this. And Anne understood Nan. Even when she spoke her native language.
* * *
Time went by. Nan watched little Anne grow, and she loved the child well. Sometimes she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the old woman staring back at her. The world had gone to war twice, and she’d kept those she loved safe—though they didn’t know or appreciate it. Nan spent her days mostly happy. Or at least satisfied. Yet there were deep sorrows that haunted her. Lucy slowly slipped away from her. She would play solitaire on the kitchen porch and smoke cigarette after cigarette. Lavinia still lived in the gatehouse, but her strange son, the reason that man had invaded their lives (Anne’s father or not), was sent away to boarding school. He’d grown stranger year by year. Gavin, who was still in and out of their lives, did his one good deed sending the boy away. And Dominic had grown older and more distant still.
She wondered if there wasn’t room for a little magic now that everything had calmed down. And maybe she could help Lucy, or figure out what was at the core of her worry over Jude. And finally reach out to Vincent and his family. To bring them all to the Witch House, where they belonged.
But Fate, she was a cruel bitch. Because just as Nan began to lower her guard and trust the world around her again, a letter came from her sister Florencia in New York, giving her the news that her brother, Vincent, and most of his family had died.
Full of grief, Nan was more sure than ever that her decision to turn to piety and prayer, to the protection it could offer her family, was the right decision.
Which made her frightened.
“I know something is wrong with her,” Nan told Zindonetta in hushed tones during a visit to the market after she told Nan of her own troubles. “I have reason to believe she has supernatural talents, that they may run in our blood. Tell me, Zindonetta, is there a way to block her from these talents?”
Zindonetta told Nan to pray.
“What is wrong with me?” Anne asked in perfect Italian. The women stared. Zindonetta turned in a huff and walked away: having unintentionally aired her own dirty laundry in front of Anne was discomfiting.
“What is wrong with me?” Anne asked again as Nan dragged her back home.
“You have no father,” Nan said. “Someone in this family should have a proper father.”
And a part of Nan believed that. That maybe a father would have been the best thing for all of them. The Amore women were in need of balance.
Zindonetta was right. God would have to suffice.
* * *
Gavin came back when Anne was four, bearing a gift for the house.
The sculpture was actually a chimney flue. A big piece of metal capping with a fanlike top that he found at a secondhand shop and decided to bring home. It never made it inside.
“What is that thing?” Dominic asked.
“Get it off my grass,” Nan said, before she went back to shelling peas.
Lucy said nothing. She walked back into the house and shut the door.
He was gone the next day, but the new “lawn ornament” stayed.
Anne, on the other hand, little though she was, was convinced it would be how he found his way home again, a beacon of sorts. She was the one with the candle in the window, the one left behind, the prisoner in a strange place with strange eyes and a strange complexion to go with her strange outlook on the world. The sculpture would stay as some kind of stand-in for Gavin, becoming almost beautiful in its rusted imperfection.
* * *
Anne began her education at the Our Lady of Sorrows Parochial School when she was in the first grade. Anne was so quiet and strange that her family forgot to register her for kindergarten.
Once enrolled, she caught right up and was, in fact, a stellar student. She even became the teacher’s favorite because she did all of her work perfectly and on time and never made a sound or even got dirty. The nuns were convinced she had the calling, and this endeared her to her grandmother.
When Anne wasn’t with her ghosts, she was with Nan.
Nan who kept the peace. Nan who kept tradition. Nan who anchored them to the daily ins and outs of their lives.
Monday: Catechism.
Tuesday: Trash day.
Wednesday: Ladies’ Guild.
Thursday: Canning (or off-season harvest).
Friday: No meat.
Saturday: Bread baking.
Sunday: Mass.
Sunday supper was always an affair rife with tension.
Nan would sit at the head of the long oak table, while Dominic, now a man of eighteen, would shovel food in his mouth in an effort to escape the house sooner. Lucy sat with her chair at an angle, wishing she were back in bed. Her beautiful awfulness took up too much air in the room. She didn’t eat. She had a glass of bourbon, and she smoked a cigarette.
“Lucia, put that out! Please!”
Lucy took a long drag of her cigarette and gave her mother a sideways stare.
“You’re the one who makes me come down here.” She exhaled the words and smoke at the same time.
“You can’t live in your room,” said Nan.
Dominic cleared his throat and in an effort to be done with this meal dumped his salad onto his pasta in silent protest.
“Why do you disrespect the pasta? It didn’t do anything to you,” said Nan.
Anne raised her hand.
“Damn it, Anne,” Lucy growled, “put down your hand. You’re
not in school.” Lucy mumbled under her breath, “Slow. I don’t care what those nuns say. She’s slow.”
Nan had enough.
“Lucia, why not ask her if she has something to say? Would it kill you?” She turned to Anne. “What is it, Anne?’”
Anne stood up on her chair. It looked as if she were in a spelling bee and it was her turn at the podium. They looked up at her curiously. She had their attention. It was time. She froze for a moment, and then spoke.
“Listen to me. We have ghosts here. There are two of them … two.” She held out two fingers.
Nan, Lucy, and Dominic all began talking at once.
“… get down.”
“… Crazy Anne!”
“… foolish girl.”
“We heard you the first decade!”
Anne got down off her chair and stared at her plate. She twirled a braid with her finger. And then felt a hand on her arm. She turned to face her mother.
“Anne,” said Lucy. She trembled, tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “You listen to me. It isn’t ghosts … no, not ghosts and ghoulies … it is this gobbler house. You better run, little Anne, run far away!” Lucy had both of Anne’s arms now and began to shake her.
“It ate me, Anne. It eats me every day.” Lucy pulled Anne into her chest. Anne drew in a deep breath of her mother. It was so rare that she had the chance. “It is the house, it is the house, it is the house…” Lucy whispered, her wet lips pressed against Anne’s forehead.
Then, as if possessed, Lucy began to say it louder, her voice strangled as she gripped Anne’s braids, pulling them until Anne was forced to stand on tippy toes so her braids would not be pulled right out her head.
Instantly Dominic was prying Lucy’s hands off Anne’s hair. Lucy fell back into her seat, deflated. Dominic returned to his spot and continued eating.
“Anna,” said Nan in Italian—her attempt to soothe the child with something they alone shared—“there are no such things as ghosts. And this house is a miracle for us. It is the best and finest house. Why not go outside and play, okay? Let your mother rest, she is unwell.” Nan turned to Lucy. “Lucia, did you take your medicine? You have to take your medicine!”
Lucy laughed. “Is it an illness or is it demons? Make up your mind, old woman.”
* * *
“How can we make them see us, love?” asked Gwyneth later, in the attic.
Ava was cuddled up in Anne’s lap, her wheezing chest pressed to Anne’s own. The sound of Anne’s own strong heartbeat, made Ava’s seem more real. Anne shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t know either.
“How am I supposed to know? I am not a ghost … or at least, I don’t think I am.…” Anne trailed off.
Gwyneth danced across the attic, her dress skimming the wide floorboards. Anne sighed. “You are so pretty, Gwen. I wish I looked more like you.”
In a flash of white, Gwyneth was in front of Anne, cupping her face in her ghost hands. “My Anne, you are by far the loveliest little thing I ever did see. Someday you will notice.”
She danced away again, saying, “About the scaring … we will do our best. But you need to help, too.”
“What do you mean?” Anne was confused.
Gwen answered her in a singsong voice.
“Little Anne, you are us and we are you. We are the house and the house is you.”
Anne, still puzzled, tilted her head at Gwen.
“What I mean, Anne, is it is all connected. Why not do some of the scaring, too? Come on! Join us in the fun!”
Suddenly Anne was full of ideas, and in no time at all, the Witch House was full of screaming.
19
Anne in the Bedroom with a Jar of Spiders
It began with the spiders. Anne liked spiders, but her brother didn’t. She kept a collection of them in jars in the attic nestled amidst the empty bottles Nan used when she made her famous homemade dandelion wine.
Wolf spiders were the best. They were not big like tarantulas, but big enough. It was so easy to unscrew the metal tops off the mason jars and dump them out on top of Dominic while he slept. She knew she should just dump them and run, but the temptation to watch the chaos happen between her pets and her pests was too good to pass up.
At first, she had to nudge the straggler spiders out of the jars to join the confused fuzzies already trying to figure out their new environment. They scurried about, feeling their way across his forehead and into his deep thick hair. Dominic didn’t wake up right away. He squirmed and flicked his hands in his sleep. But as the spiders found nostrils and eyelids and a mouth, he woke up fast, jumping to his feet, slapping them away.
“What the hell, you little freak!?” he asked.
“It’s a going-away present. I didn’t want you to forget me,” said Anne.
If it wasn’t spiders, it was knives.
“Mama, come get her before I kill her!” Dominic would yell, holding a pillow against his chest and warding his little sister off. And Lucy would run in quick and heroic, to hold Anne’s hand, the one with the carving knife, up over her head. This effectively made the scene look even more dramatic than intended, and Anne silently thanked her mother for the embellishment.
If it wasn’t knives, it was hanging herself.
Anne had invented a harness of sorts that allowed her to hang herself from beams and light fixtures without really hanging herself.
Dominic woke to the beam creaking.
“Anne! Oh, sweet Anne!” He scrambled to hold her little body up and save her.
This made Anne give a nervous giggle. Her eyes opened, seeming to glow and wobble in the moonlight. This sent Dominic jumping back with even higher-pitched nervous screams.
There she was, hanging and dead, yet not dead.
“You are really crazy,” he cried.
Anne, still hanging, shrugged her shoulders with her palms up as if to say, “And?”
She released the clasp between her legs and was on the ground before Lucy could even enter the room.
Anne crept away into the shadows and drew her knees up to her chest. She put her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth. This episode frightened her as well. She never would have thought her brother cared so much. Anne was confused.
Anne watched as Lucy sat with him. She looked like some sort of mother goddess in the moonlight. Or like the saints and icons Anne studied in school.
“I hate you,” she whispered as she rocked. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
The next day, Lucy and Nan put a lock on the inside of Dominic’s bedroom door. Anne, though she was disappointed, wondered why they hadn’t thought of it sooner. Stupid. They really are so stupid, she thought.
* * *
Late one night, after being banned from terrifying her older brother, Anne and her ghosts were at Nan’s kitchen table. Anne sat cross-legged on top, and Ava stood just behind her. She was playing with Anne’s braids, bringing them up, and letting them fall. Gwyneth relaxed in one chair and had her legs up on another, her hem dragging the floor. She was telling Anne wild stories about when she was little: her strange father, quiet mother, and silly boys at balls.
Gwyneth made Anne laugh. It felt good to laugh.
“Tell me again about the watermelon! Tell me again how you threw it off the roof and everyone thought you fell and were dead! That one is so funny, Gwen! Maybe we should try that one here tomorrow?”
They all giggled.
Waking to the sound of a child’s laugh, Lucy, curious, came down the back hall steps and entered the kitchen the same moment that Nan entered from another doorway.
They saw Anne, sitting on the table, surrounded by candles. She was laughing. And impossibly, her braids were looped upward, as if there were an invisible string suspending them.
Nan looked at Lucy’s horrified face, but said nothing as she turned around and left the kitchen.
Anne, startled, stopped laughing, and the braids immediately dropped.
“Mama?”
Lucy went to turn away as well. But she hesitated. She wanted to invite that lonely girl, that lonely haunted girl, right into her arms and fold her up and take her away. She wanted to smell the top of her head and tell her, I’m sorry. But, no. It was too late for all that.
“I have to get out of here!” Lucy cried instead.
But where could she go? Lately the doors, front and back, would not even open for her. How…? It was too much, again. And so she tied her robe tight, did not answer Anne, and took the path she had ten years earlier, the path leading away from Anne.
She locked herself in her bedroom. Like Dominic, who slept better because of the lock.
The night before he graduated high school and left the Witch House for good, Dominic packed, excited about moving to a new city. Lucy was helping him. She’d quietly slid the bolt across the door. Dominic didn’t want to know that his mother, his beautiful broken mother, was scared of Anne, too. He didn’t want to leave her alone with all the crazy.
“Maybe you should send Anne away.”
“Why?”
“Don’t do that, Mama, don’t act like you don’t know.”
Lucy thought for a moment and went to her son, her best friend since Vito died, and held both of his hands.
“Dominic, my sweet boy … maybe you don’t see this, and I am sorry to be the one to tell it to you. Anne belongs here. You are the one who has to go.” She looked at his trunk and half-packed things and continued, “I’m not right in the head. Nan isn’t either, even if she hides it better. We may kill each other. And what about the house? It never liked you, never liked me either … but it likes Anne.”
Just then, there was a chafing, squealing sound of metal against metal. The lock on the inside of the door was slowly jimmying itself back through the metal loops securing it to the door.
Dominic and Lucy stood there and watched. They didn’t scream. The time for screaming was over. It was time for him to leave. The house was spitting him out. The metal slowly clicked completely away from itself and the door cracked open. The house had spoken. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
The Witch House of Persimmon Point Page 13
