The Witch House of Persimmon Point

by Suzanne Palmieri

  “That is all I ask, Anne. That is all I will ever ask.”

  34

  Anne on the Stairs with a Dress

  1970

  For months all Anne could think about was falling down the stairs. She dreamt about it, she saw it in her mind. It reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She would be washing dishes and all of a sudden she was tumbling down the back porch steps. She could hear the sound of the fall and the impact. She could feel the cracking of bones, the hot twisting of ankles. She thought maybe it was because Opal was growing up and she was somehow reliving the death of that first baby that lived in her womb. But still, Anne became very wary of stairs. She didn’t want to fall and ruin Opal’s first communion.

  On that perfect Sunday morning in early May, the kind where it was not quite spring and not quite summer, that Opal was to become a true child of Christ, to receive his body and blood and begin her journey to confirmation, Anne had everything just so. Opal was whimpering and mad as usual, but it couldn’t wreck the day. The dress was perfect, the flowers perfect, the day perfect. The church hall was set for the party with the help of the Ladies’ Guild (they invited her to join, joy!), and Dominic was even going to make an appearance. She had William call and invite him and his family, and they all said yes.

  Everyone was gathering at the front of the church, waiting to go in. They all got there early to get the best seats. The children had gone in already, but the massive doors opened, and Anne saw Opal come out to the top of the steps, frowning. She motioned for her mother to come. Anne ran up the steps to see what could be wrong.

  “Mommy … I am sorry I was mad this morning. I was just nervous.”

  Anne laughed, relieved. “I know, sweetling. Don’t worry, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Anne laughed, “You will find out.… Never mind, go back inside!”

  Opal turned to go, and Anne began to walk down the steep steps (being extra careful).

  “Mommy!”

  Anne was startled.

  “What, dear?”

  “I just wanted to tell you … I have the prettiest dress!” Opal did a little twirl and then gasped.

  Anne felt her fall. Felt the air go before it even went, saw Opal’s little hands try to grab (and actually graze) the hem of Anne’s green silk dress. Then Anne was watching her fall. Opal had somehow lost her balance: her shoe slipped, and she fell sideways, landing hard on her side. Three or four ungraceful somersaults later, she was at the bottom of the church steps, and by the angle of her pretty head, she had to be dead.

  Anne’s heart frosted over. William was screaming. He had been screaming, she realized, for a long time. He broke free of the panic paralysis and ran down the steps so fast he slipped on them, sliding down the last few like a bumpy fair ride.

  He crawled to her and lifted her wobbly head onto his lap.

  “It’s okay Opal, I’m here. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

  Anne sat down at the top of the steps, unable to move. She spoke the Death Life Wither Wander Spell in her head like a prayer. Over and over. She watched as everyone but her crowded around her child. Her baby. Someone cried, “Give her some air!”

  “Air?” she murmured.

  The crowd cleared. William held Opal still, but she was very much alive.

  “It’s a miracle!” William cried.

  “Mama?”

  William began to carry Opal up the steps so Anne could touch her daughter. Feel how close they’d been to losing her. To see God’s love at work.

  “Take her to the hospital, Will. Take her away from me,” Anne ordered.

  “Anne, don’t you want—”

  “Now.”

  Alive.

  Then dead.

  Then alive. Was it the spell? Was it a miracle? Would she be Opal? Or would she be empty? It didn’t matter.

  “I don’t deserve her. I never did. I don’t want her,” said Anne.

  Her voice surprised her. She hadn’t heard that particular tone—that dead tone—in a long time. Opal had to go. She had to be away from Anne, away from this house. Away from this town.

  Anne, not knowing what else to do, went home, sat at the kitchen table of the Witch House, and opened the cards that had been sent in celebration of Opal’s first communion.

  One in particular caught her eye. It was postmarked Fairview, Massachusetts.

  Dear Anne,

  Send her to me. My mother, Evelyn, arranged it long ago. You toyed with fate. You lost.

  Vivian Pratt

  “Fairview? No … Fortune’s Cove. I remember from the book.” Anne went into the library and pulled down her big black book. She went back to the Book of Nan and skimmed the entries and clippings.

  Evelyn Pratt to read fortunes at Haven House.

  “Thank you, Nan,” she said.

  * * *

  William took charge of gathering Opal’s things and accompanying her to Fortune’s Cove.

  He came back a different man.

  “I knew it was just a dream,” Anne said, pruning roses.

  “It wasn’t a dream, Anne, it really happened. And you sent her away. You must tell me why. It’s not right. She’s not right. She’s empty. She didn’t even cry for you.”

  “She is gone. I’m not an idiot. Having her at all was the dream. I wasn’t good enough to have her, to keep her. She couldn’t stay. She wasn’t really real, she wasn’t really here.”

  “Shut up, Anne,” he said, his voice choked with anger. “It was you. You and this suffocating house! You stole her from me, because you couldn’t bear to actually lose her. That split second of loss almost killed you, so you sent her away, and you sent me to do it! You are a demon after all. You stole my heart, and now it’s broken.” He broke off in a sob.

  They stood in the garden by the roses for what seemed like a lifetime. It was very dark now. William was quiet. All tears shed.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” he asked, wiping his face with his robed arm, Father William still. Only Father William now. His pretend family was dead.

  “What do you want me to say?” Anne asked, flippantly.

  “Fuck you, Anne. Fuck you and your ghosts and your house. I am done. I am finally done with you, Anne.”

  She knew what William had said was true. He’d even cursed. That his language amused her was what finally broke her free of her carefully manufactured “numb.”

  “Well, praise the Lord, then, Father William,” she said.

  * * *

  Anne went to Opal’s room. She opened the closet and found a box of paper and her set of crayons. No, not a set of crayons—a box containing many of a single color. Too many of a color called permanent geranium lake.

  As she boxed up the life of a little girl, a little girl she dressed in that very room a week before, a nine-year-old who belonged to her but whom she always felt disconnected from, it occurred to her that she didn’t know if she was sad because her child was gone or that now she would not have much to keep her busy anymore. The numb seemed to take hold again. Maybe she was a sociopath? Maybe she couldn’t feel anything. Maybe William and her mother had both been right all along.

  But then, her eyes fell upon a blanket that Opal had wrapped around a stuffed animal, pretending it was a new baby, and it just so happened to be the very same blanket William wrapped Opal in right after she was born. A plain, white blanket with satin binding. Opal had carried it, slept with it, loved on it for her whole life. Anne lifted it to her face and breathed in her daughter. The world ended. There were no words. There was nothing but bright, shiny, black pain.

  She could not feel this.

  She refused.

  But it swallowed her whole. She fell asleep on the floor of her lost child’s room amidst a sea of lost child’s belongings with the lost child’s infant blanket draped over her own lost face like a shroud.

  Anne sent the blanket to Opal the next day, never expecting to see her dau
ghter or the blanket again.

  And then one day, in 1984, there it was.

  Wrapped around her granddaughter, Stella.

  35

  Gavin in the Witch House with the Letter

  1971–1998

  William couldn’t stay away. He was back within a year. When they reunited, the loss of Opal had taken its toll on William; he was ill. His eyes would go dark and distant mid conversation. He’d look right through her.

  Anne didn’t mind. Company was company. Her ghosts had left her, too. Opal’s fall changed everything.

  Sometimes, when she allowed herself to remember those sweet years, she pictured it as she would a movie. Then she would sigh, wipe a tear off her cheek, and, as she was known to say in town, “Move the fuck forward, for fuck’s sake.”

  That was that.

  And then, in 1984, fourteen years after Opal was sent away, Stella arrived in a basket on the porch of the Witch House.

  She was a proper baby, with black hair and pink cheeks. A baby Anne recognized as one of her own. Not blond and perfect. Another kind of perfect. A clever sort of perfect.

  She knew it was her granddaughter, even though there was no note, just a little scrap of paper pinned to a pink sweater that said:

  Stella.

  “Of course there wouldn’t be a note, Miss Stella,” Anne said, carrying the basket inside. “For all anyone knew, I could have been in one of those moods where I don’t leave the house at all. You may have starved out here, or frozen. Or worse. But no, no, not you, little one. Not you with all that sun shine. Now, let’s get you settled.”

  A stilted phone call came a week or so later.

  “I don’t want her. I guess it runs in our blood, giving up children,” said Opal.

  “Well, I suppose we can make that end here. As it began with me. No one else did that. I was the one, Opal. I loved you too much to keep you.”

  “You’re wrong, we all leave each other. You were the one who actually did it almost right. Nan left Lucy by dismissing who she was. Lucy left you with all her hate and drinking and so on. Must have been harder to have your mother leave you over and over again each day. You didn’t love me, Anne. You loved the idea of me. I know that now. And I’m too busy for a child. If I’m cold, you created me. Bury her in the backyard or what have you. See if I care.”

  Anne was almost proud of the cruelty.

  “Do you want me to tell her about you?”

  “I want you to tell her I’m dead. Because I am.”

  The line went dead.

  Cold and surgical. Anne thought about crying, but she’d brought it on herself.

  “Rule number one, baby Stella. You can’t cry over it if you built it,” she said.

  * * *

  She took a job working for William at Our Lady of Sorrows parochial school. She taught third grade science. Her classroom was a beautiful and peaceful place. Anne was strict, but despite everything, she did have a way with children. They trusted her. The large windows in the room let in plenty of light for her students’ seedlings to take hold. She used the entire year to teach them about the growth cycle of plants and their relationship to the earth and to the sun. She loved Mother’s Day especially, when all of her little children would take their baby plants home as gifts to their mothers. It was always a happy day for the third grade. The third grade was also the year where she prepared them for their first communion. Though this could have been a difficult task, what with her losing Opal on the day of that milestone, Anne liked living the day over and over again. It helped her remember her lost girl from a safe distance. And it helped her remember her lost girl’s dead father. Some wounds bring strength.

  1988

  Dear Anne,

  I wonder if you ever guessed that I was the one who left you money and food all these years. I am not telling you now because I want your gratitude (if you are reading this, I am dead anyway) or because I need your forgiveness: after all, I am your aunt. I wasn’t a useful one until I got sneaky. What with everything that happened, I didn’t know another way. I just thought you might not have known it was me, and this would clear up the mystery. I don’t like mysteries or surprises, which I suppose is ironic, given my son. I want you to know that I always knew what he was doing. What he did to you, as well as to the others, and there were many others. That is my sin. And I’d like to say I was able to help him, but we all know that would be a lie.

  I did love him, Anne. And I wanted to protect him from himself. I didn’t do a good job.

  I am not mad that you killed him. You are family, after all. And for all the crazy on your mother’s side, there’s a homicidal gene pool on your daddy’s side that you can’t escape, I guess.

  I don’t know why or how, but you must have. You dispatched him, and I am grateful.… I would have gone back to my family straightaway, but then I saw you in the garden with your belly, and I knew I had to stay … stay and try to keep helping you.

  Anyway, the long and short of this is that I feel I still owe you a debt, and I have nothing to give you but a secret. You will find a key with this letter. A key to a trunk in the attic of the gatehouse. Do with it what you will.

  Please know that I am very sorry.

  Opal was a lovely little girl, Anne. She reminded me so much of him. I’m sure wherever she is, she’s happy. You were brave and right to send her away.

  Best,

  Aunt Lavinia

  Anne turned the key over in her hand. It had been a long time since she’d thought of Lavinia. She thought about Jude. She thought too much about Gavin. But chubby, insipid aunt Lavinia, who never said much and should have showered more, wasn’t on the top of her urgent thought list.

  She gave Stella lunch and went directly over to the gatehouse.

  Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

  Time to enter the lair.

  The attic Lavinia referred to was a tiny crawl space with exactly enough room for exactly one thing in it. A steamer trunk chock full of cash.

  Filled to the brim.

  She smiled a little and then, thinking maybe there could be more things hidden inside, Anne considered wandering around the gatehouse. She’d never spent too much time there.

  But Lucy had.

  And before her … Reginald Green had.

  And before him … Archibald.

  She had Nan’s keys on the big silver ring. Keys to places in the house that would have been locked up since before Haven House was destroyed.

  Anne knew the stories, and it occurred to her that perhaps she’d missed something quite simple all along. Some darkness that tainted all their lives.

  * * *

  She never spoke or wrote much about that day. All anyone knew was that she was seen nailing boards against the windows as if a storm were coming.

  “No one will ever live here again,” said Anne. As if it were an opposite curse.

  She didn’t need the gatehouse for money anymore. She had a big old pile in a steamer trunk. And it was cheap, living just the two of them. Besides, that house never did well with renters anyway. There’d been a series of tenants, mostly people who were new to the area, but terrible things seemed to happen over and over again. It became almost comical to Anne. But not to Stella, who, as she grew, had much less of a sense of humor. She was delicate and very clever. But she felt the hurts of the world.

  There was the university student who fell down the porch steps and, in the opposite of a miracle, broke his back, becoming paralyzed from the waist down.

  There was the man who felt the house was suffocating him and the only way to loosen the pressure in his head was to put an ice pick in his ear and pound at it with a mallet.

  There was one botched abortion, at least three lost limbs, and always, each and every time, a broken heart.

  It was as if the property was spitting them all out.

  Stella, who was just a tiny thing when most of the terrible gatehouse events were happening, used to say, “I do not think that our Witch House lik
es the way these tenants taste. It only likes you, Gran.”

  “We don’t have to worry about that anymore, Stella girl. No we do not.”

  * * *

  Stella and Anne were always seen laughing, skipping, and pointing at the sky. Stella was a happy child. She loved her house. And she loved her Gran.

  Slowly, as the perfume of her past wore off, or at least grew fainter, Anne’s status in the community improved again. Perhaps because the raspberry jam she made was so sweet, Anne became beloved.

  Most agreed, however, that it was really Stella.

  Her change could have been due to Anne wanting to give Stella the security she never had. It could have been many things. But mostly it was love. And fear.

  She’d seen Stella’s future in the girl’s eyes. That she would die in childbirth. Anne convinced herself that the only thing to do was to keep Stella safe and sound at the Witch House. There would be no baby.

  In some ways Anne actually took over Nan’s role in the community; not the way she’d tried before, by acting the part. No, this time she became a sort of strega and wise woman. People would come to her for advice, at the markets, after church, in the schoolyard, but not to the house, never to the house. Sometimes, on New Year’s Eve, people would ask her over to their houses to ring in the new year, and inevitably, once it was known that she was going to be there, a line would form in front of her, full of people wishing to have the malocchio (evil eye) taken off of them. Her grandmother had taught her how to do this odd trick, and somehow people seemed to know she had the “gift,” so she would hold bowls of water over their heads one by one and drop pure olive oil into the water to dispel the curses. It didn’t matter to her if it really worked or not, but it seemed to matter to the masses, so she was happy to oblige. The people of Haven Port were falling in love with Anne, not just for what she could help them with, or how she taught their children at school, but also for what she could make.

  Anne fell into a thriving seasonal business. Her raspberry jam was so popular she began putting up other things that her garden gave her. She had preserves, relishes, pickles, and all sorts of wonderful things to help bring summer to the table during their cold winters. The farmers’ market, more popular than ever, was a place where she sold much of her canned goods, with little Stella in one of those old-fashioned aprons by her side.