The Witch House of Persimmon Point

by Suzanne Palmieri

  “Will … I’m never leaving the Witch House. You should know that. I belong to it, and it belongs to me. Anyway, you’re missing the point. Besides the fact that we’ve never kissed, don’t you think that with our shared past we may be ill-suited to marriage? Think about it, William.”

  Will smiled and leaned over, kissing Anne on the cheek.

  “You taste like Coppertone.”

  “That’s because it’s summer. That’s what summer tastes like. Now, stop trying to manufacture this romance and lie back down, you’re blocking my sun. Rude is what it is.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Anne wrenched her windows open, seeking relief from the stifling humidity. That’s when she heard it.

  Music. Rolling in on the sea breeze.

  She followed the sound through the ruins of Haven House, stepping on her own past with a sure foot as the music coursed through her, making her inner strength even stronger.

  When she came through the juniper trees, the beach lay in front of her. It was a stunning night. The moon was high in the sky, almost full, and the water was full of phosphorus, so the foam crashing into the beach was fluorescent green. In the center of the beach, William stood smiling by a bonfire. “Would you care to dance, m’lady?” he asked, bowing.

  “What the heck is all this, Will?” asked Anne, trying to act as if the whole thing weren’t delighting her.

  “I thought we could pretend to be strangers. Start again. A better kind of start.”

  “You want us to fall in love.…”

  “Yes. I do. I think I’m owed this one farce. Come on.”

  “Oh, fine. Who are you supposed to be, anyway? And where is that music coming from?”

  “Old man Bodine let me use his new transistor radio. I am a fisherman washed up from the sea. And you are a saint … or a mermaid. Or just…”

  “Have I told you lately that I am worried about your confusion between devoutness and paganism? A gypsy mermaid witch virgin. How’s that?”

  “Perfect.”

  “You are from the house, no? On the hill?” asked William, putting on a terrible accent.

  “Yes,” Anne said, trying not to laugh. “That would be me.…”

  “Good, good … You must stay for the celebration.”

  “And what are you celebrating?”

  “Life, love … and vino.” Will brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses from a bag at his feet.

  “Oh, you are naughty, Mr. Fisherman. I like it!”

  * * *

  Anne and William drank a lot of wine that night and danced, spinning in tipsy circles until they fell into one another. Then, they swam naked in the sea.

  “I have always loved you, Anne,” said William, swimming closer to her. She could feel his breath as he spoke. The salty water lapped against her bare, moonlit shoulders.

  “Are you going to kiss me, Mr. Fisherman?” she asked.

  “Forever,” he said.

  Anne understood that the feelings awakening inside her were real, and she knew it was what William had felt all along.

  She didn’t want to argue with herself, or with him. And she took it as a good and valuable sign.

  Her body soon found his through the water, and for their first kiss, every inch of them pressed together, electrified that nothing separated them. Soon, with the humid night air pressing against them as they lay on a blanket by the dwindling fire, Anne and William became lovers.

  “We will do this all summer!” Anne said, as she kissed him long and then quick before running back up the rock wall steps.

  “We will do this all our lives,” he called after her.

  * * *

  By October, she was pregnant.

  “Marry me,” said William. They were lounging by the empty ruins of the Haven House pool, wrapped in blankets to abate the crisp October day.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Will. When has anyone in my family ever done the right thing?” she said, shielding her eyes from his look with sunglasses and turning her head toward the gray, sunless sky.

  “Anne, I love you. Please. I know we’re young, but your mother was married close to this age, it’s not such a big deal. Marry me and we can run away to New York or California, just somewhere, and we can have a life. Together.” William felt the earth shift under his feet. He felt a moment of fear. The trees whispered out a warning. His get-out-of-jail-free card had expired. You won’t take her, he heard just underneath a ticking sound that grew louder and louder until his ears rang. Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic. He gulped and shook away his fear. Screw that wicked house, he was taking Anne.

  Anne looked at William. He was so sincere. His blue eyes told her he meant what he said. She knew this was a defining moment in her life.

  “I can’t leave here. I don’t want to leave here. But … yes, I’ll marry you. I suppose it’s the right thing to do. The Christian thing or what have you.”

  “You will?” he said.

  “Of course. Just as long as you don’t have me wearing an apron and making perfectly portioned meals and all that. And I don’t know the first thing about being a mother. So don’t get all worked up about it. I plan on making a ton of mistakes. We’ll be weird, Will. We’ll be outcasts. Are you ready for that? Because out of all the things I hate about the women in this family, that’s the one thing I’m proud of.”

  “Terrifying the community at large?”

  “Precisely. And I’m not wearing a white dress, just so you know.”

  * * *

  “Listen here, I know I’m young, but Will loves me, and you of all people should understand.… No.… that’s not right.…”

  Anne was in her bedroom, practicing her speech in the mirror. Her nervousness was rattling her. Why tell them? They probably won’t even notice, she thought.

  The real truth was, Anne was secretly hoping her mother would finally open her arms and her heart to Anne. That she’d see Anne doing the same type of thing she’d done with Vito, and that similarity would let Lucy finally show love toward her daughter. And maybe Nan would be warmer and less strict with a new baby. And even Dominic might come home. Anne felt like perhaps she could right all the wrongs with this one act of normalcy.

  But just when she had worked up the courage to call Lucy and Nan to a meeting and was coming out of her room, she heard the kitchen screen door slam.

  “Nan! Where are you going? I need to talk to you,” she called out as she ran down the stairs, letting her fingers fly across the stairwell walls, her imagination tossing around romantic ideas of a reformed happy family. She rushed into the kitchen and hugged Nan tightly.

  “I must tend the garden, Anne. You know that. You have become too lazy with your books this summer, young lady. What do you want?” asked Nan, trying to free herself from Anne’s embrace.

  “I have news. Big exciting news! And I want to tell you and my mother together.”

  “You think I don’t already know? You’re with child. You intend on marrying William, yes?”

  “You know?”

  “Just because I wish the ways away, doesn’t mean they go. Of course I know. But you mustn’t tell your mother. Not yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s been drinking since morning. Because you are too happy. Because she will be angry. Don’t do it. Come with me outside instead and tell me of your plans while I pull the weeds.”

  “No, I need to have some lunch first.” Anne knew that would get Nan to leave her alone. Nan liked to see her eat.

  “There’s focaccia with olives in the oven. Eat and then come outside.”

  Anne kissed Nan on the cheek. But once the screen door was shut and Nan was inside the vegetable garden, Anne ran upstairs to tell Lucy.

  * * *

  It did not occur to Anne that Lucy might not be immediately emotionally available simply because Anne was finally ready for a relationship. Other people rarely occurred to Anne at all. In this way, she was like her mother.

  She found Lucy s
itting in a chair at the end of the second-floor hallway, smoking a cigarette by the window. She didn’t even look at Anne. She took a drag of her cigarette and said, “You’re pregnant.… I can tell. I can smell it on you. I see your breasts. That pansy boy. That God lover. Did you let him do it? Or did he take it from you, like the other one? You let him, I know you did. And you want me to be happy. Yes. I see it all.”

  “Mother … Lucy. Mama … I just thought maybe we could look at this as a new beginning.”

  Lucy laughed. “You are a shadow.” She laughed harder now, with a wicked singsong lilt to her voice. “Who are you? I can’t see you, you ugly little ugly shadow. You weren’t even supposed to be born. You were a demon inside me.… So was that man.… Just shadow demons … the two of you.” With that, Lucy began to move toward her bedroom door.

  Anne watched her walk away, and then, quietly, without meaning to, or without even expecting her mother to hear, said, “Gavin wanted us. You chased him away. He might have stayed with us. It could have been good, you could have married him, and we could have been a family.”

  Lucy snapped around with some sort of fierce wildness to her eyes that Anne had never seen—it was scarier than even the faces of her ghosts at their most warped. Through clenched teeth, Lucy railed at Anne. She said all the things she never should have said. The things no child should ever hear. She made a very bad mistake.

  “Let me tell you something, sweetheart. I had a family. I had a family that I lost. Vito, dead. Dominic? Gone, never writes, never visits. All because of you. I thought if you were anything, you were smart. He didn’t leave us, I didn’t chase Gavin away. I forced him. I made that demon leave, and I begged him to take his spawn with him. But guess what? He didn’t want you! He wanted me … only me. Not you. Who would want you? Hmmmm … who would want you? No one. You are one hundred percent unwantable.”

  Lucy had drawn closer and closer to Anne, and she was practically on top of her when she spit out the word unwantable. Anne wiped Lucy’s bourbon spit from her face, and then something unfamiliar happened. Anne broke open, and the anger she had held deep inside unleashed. It lit like wildfire, fast, furious. Anne didn’t even know she could feel such a pain in her heart, that she had feelings that ran that deep. A primal scream escaped her, and she slapped her mother across the face with such a force it threw Lucy backward. When Lucy got up, her eyes were open inhumanly wide. She rushed at Anne, and terror sent Anne running back down the hallway to the stairs.

  Anne turned around to look at the wild hate in Lucy’s eyes, knowing everything was different, and then Lucy just … pushed … just pushed her a little bit … and down she fell, backward, hitting the curved wall, before falling forward again. The moment she landed she knew two things for certain:

  She was done trying to love Lucy.

  And she knew she’d lost the baby.

  She hit her head at the bottom and blacked out, but only for a moment. No one came.

  Lucy wasn’t running down the stairs. She was crying at the top of them, saying, “I’m sorry, my little Anne, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over again.

  Nan didn’t come running inside.

  And of course, Gavin wasn’t there to help her either. He’d been gone forever and always would be.

  There was no one to protect Anne. She would have to stop letting herself get hurt. She would have to be a soldier, and her ghosts would be her guns.

  * * *

  At the same time that Anne decided to not listen to her Nan, instead setting off a whole slew of disastrous events that might have otherwise been avoided, Nan had gone to work in her kitchen garden. The garden was just beginning to push up sprouts. The day was warm for early spring, and Nan began to daydream of what a life could be like here if the three of them could reach some sort of peace and just love one another. It occurred to her for the first time that they were all so similar. Maybe this was the time. The time to let the past be the past. Maybe it wasn’t too late. If Anne was brave enough to reach out to Lucy, why couldn’t she, her own mother, reach out as well?

  She knew Anne could make a connection with Lucy, if she tried hard enough. Anything was possible with hard work. And she knew that this pregnancy, however inconvenient, could be the thread that would knit this little family together.

  Nan knew she was not a girl any longer; it was time to put her thoughts into action. She opened her eyes, ready to begin anew, and started at the sight of a child at the end of the garden path.

  She tried to blink it away. This was a phantom child, not a real one. But the child held fast. And then Nan knew. It was Ava. And instead of holding out her arms, which she longed to do, had longed to do since that painful day at Haven House when everything collapsed around her, Nan got scared.

  Her whole body recoiled in horror and shame. She didn’t mean to—in reality, she was in a repair-damage kind of mood that day—but the ghost was so vividly frightening to Nan that her reaction was involuntary. Ava’s little ghost heart broke in that moment. And so she left as quietly as she’d appeared.

  “Wait! Ava! I’m so sorry.…”

  And it was too much for Nan. Her heart broke too. “Ava … if you won’t come back to me, I guess I have to follow you. Like sardines. Like we used to play … ready or not.…”

  * * *

  William, (who had decided Anne needed company when she broke the news to Lucy and had returned too late), was the one who found Nan. He started yelling for Anne, who stumbled out of the Witch House hunched over in pain, blood on her head and on the seat of her dress.

  “Anne!”

  “Will Will Will Will!”

  “No, Anne! No!”

  Anne didn’t think she’d ever stop hearing their own screams.

  “It’s over,” she said when she reached him. “Everything is over. It’s over. It’s over. It’s all dead. Everything is dead now.”

  Lucy looked out the window and screamed with them.

  The house screamed, too.

  Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

  24

  Cupid in the Garden with a Hatchet

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015

  10:00 A.M.

  Eleanor was in the kitchen on the phone with Anthony. Maj and Byrd were told to leave, but they hid in the hallway, listening on the other phone.

  Eleanor: “Are you planning on hanging up on me again?”

  Anthony: “You used to do it to me all the time.”

  Eleanor: “Yeah, but you said I was crazy. So unless you’ve become just like crazy ol’ me, you need to be the one that doesn’t do it. Right?”

  Anthony: “You sound different.”

  Eleanor: “I am different. I think. Well, I feel good. There’s a teenage girl here, a cousin. She’s like Maj. I’m home.”

  Anthony: “I was thinking I’d come for a visit. Now I’m sure I will.”

  Eleanor: “Why?”

  Anthony: “I don’t know.… To see my kid? To see you? To figure out if I have any place in your new ‘home’? To meet a strange girl living with you? God, Elly.… Why do you need to make this hard? I’m telling you I miss you. It’s been two days, and I miss you. I want to see you. Isn’t that what you want from me? Some epic love song? This is it. Take it or leave it.”

  Eleanor: “Are you bringing Josephine? I need to know how many vacuum bags to buy. It’s easy here, laid-back. You’d hate it. And here’s a piece of news: I can live wherever I want. You have no say at all. She’s not even yours, remember? You have no claim.”

  Click, dial tone. He’d hung up on her again. Like always. But this time, Eleanor didn’t try to call him back.

  “Mama?” asked Maj from the hall, still holding the receiver in her hand. Byrd’s eyes were full of regret.

  “I didn’t know,” said Byrd. “I wouldn’t have helped her listen in if I knew you’d go all truthtastic.”

  Maj ran upstairs.

  “Should I go after her?” asked Byrd.

  Eleanor wanted to run after
Maj, too. But she was too damned angry. Angry with herself, angry with Anthony. Angry with decisions.

  Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

  “I don’t know. How would you like to be treated after a damaging secret is revealed? She’s like you. More like you than me. I need a drink.”

  “Then leave her. She probably already knew. She’ll come down, and you can tell her the whole story.”

  “There’s more to it, you know.”

  “I figured.”

  “She may have known, heard, sensed that Anthony wasn’t her real father. But as far as I know, she has no idea that her real father was a borderline sociopath who tried to kill us.”

  “Damn.”

  “Love is evil, Byrd,” Eleanor said, furiously buttering toast.

  “You may not believe me, as I sure do love myself some evil … but I don’t agree. Love is love. It’s its own damn menace, but it isn’t evil.” Byrd shrugged.

  “And what exactly would you call something that made you do things you would never do? Act how you would never act? What would you call something that could make a peaceful person rage or a well person sick? A natural disaster is what it is. Like being caught under a mudslide suffocating while in the last stages of rabies. And here’s the kicker.… When someone offers you a way out, you smile and tell them to fuck off. That’s love,” Eleanor said.

  “Well, when you put it that way,” laughed Byrd.

  Maj came back into the kitchen, and without a word, Eleanor picked her up and walked outside.

  They were quiet with one another.

  “I know all the things, Mama. I just am scared I’m like him. I’ve always been scared of that. But then we moved here and Byrd was here and I’m like her. And you, too. So I’m not scared now.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “No. I was more surprised. Then, I went upstairs and Anne told me a secret.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It’s a secret.” Maj smiled.

  The phone rang again. Maj popped up and ran back inside the kitchen to grab it. “Hello, the Witch House residence, Your Majesty speaking. Yes, okay, hold on.… Mama, some man named Amazing Andy says he needs directions. He can talk to ghosts.”