The Babysitters Coven

by Kate M. Williams

  I didn’t know how to respond. She was right. Clients like the Harrisons weren’t easy to come by, but what bothered me was something bigger than that, even though I couldn’t even begin to identify or articulate it. Something was giving me major anxiety, and I had the destroyed cuticles to prove it.

  When the bell finally rang, ending the day, I said goodbye to Janis and walked to the corner of the grounds to wait for Dad, since he picked me up on days when we were going to visit Mom. I leaned up against the street sign and tried to shake off my funk for my family’s sake. Dad could rarely be counted on to maintain a smile through a visit to Mom, and Mom was hard to predict. Somedays she was bouncy and all over the place. Others, she was sullen, but either way she couldn’t really hold a conversation. Sometimes, it seemed like she was really trying, but the words were bubbles that popped and disappeared as soon as she got close. It was like her mind gave orders that her body refused to obey. It was hard to watch.

  I always tried to dress in my most cheerful attire for these occasions. Nothing goth, death metal, or grunge, and all rainbows and light. Today I was wearing a pair of vintage Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles and an oversized pink fuzzy sweater that hung off one shoulder to reveal the neon lavender straps of my bralette. I finished the look with platform black leather Sk8-Hi shoes and a silver faux-leather motorcycle jacket with a rose, hand-painted by Janis, on the back.

  It was one of those perfect Kansas fall days, when the air was candy-apple crisp and the sun made everything golden. Across the street, a woman walked a fluffy puppy that barked at every blowing leaf. I tried to look away from such a scene of happiness, only to see a freshman couple taking selfies with their hands wrapped around the same cup. I could practically smell the pumpkin spice and whipped cream.

  Everyone else seemed so happy that it made my teeth ache.

  I squinted, and at the other end of campus saw a flash of dark hair coming out the side doors and walking down the sidewalk. Cassandra. I’d given her my phone number, but I realized that I stupidly hadn’t gotten hers, and there were so many last-minute instructions I wanted to pass on. Like stay away from the San Pellegrino, and how Brandon liked “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” but “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” sometimes made him cry. How, unless she wanted to clean up a puddle of pee, she should just put the dog outside as soon as she got there and not let him back in until the parents got home.

  Cassandra was too far away to yell to, so I turned to check on my dad, and sure enough, his red Ford was rounding the corner right at that moment. He pulled up, and I opened the passenger door. Before I climbed in, I glanced over my shoulder again, but she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Dad and I went to visit Mom at her facility twice a week. Over the years we’d realized that we needed to have a schedule, and also needed to treat said schedule as if it were carved in stone. If we didn’t, we’d never go. Dad pulled away from the curb, and I could tell he was grinding his teeth by the way his mouth was pulled into a straight line.

  “So, um, kid,” he started, “when we get there, you can go straight in to see your mom, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, knowing there was no way the need to strategize was a sign of something good. “Is everything okay?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “She’s being moved to a locked ward, and there’s some paperwork I need to fill out.”

  “You mean to lock her in?” I asked, surprised.

  He must have picked up on the note of panic in my voice, the panic I tried so hard to control every time there was some sort of new development with Mom, and he sighed. “She’ll be able to move freely in the ward but will need a chaperone to go farther.” I nodded, and swallowed around the lump in my throat. “She got out again, and they found her trying to cross the highway.”

  I sucked in a breath sharply and bit down on my lip. The highway was six lanes of traffic with a seventy-miles-per-hour speed limit.

  “Where was she going?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said. “But I spoke to one of the doctors this morning, and we agreed that because her condition is so unpredictable, it’s best not to take chances.” Dad flipped on his turn signal, and I stared out the window, giving a nearby McDonald’s sign a long, hard study as he pulled into the lot and parked in the same spot he always parked in. He looked up at the building in front of us for a second before he turned off the engine, like maybe he was going to change his mind, throw the car into reverse, and drive straight to a sports bar instead.

  In these moments, I always wondered if he was thinking about how he’d never imagined that this would be his life, that he would buy his daughter her first bra or leave a So, You Got Your Period? pamphlet on her pillow. (Yeah, he really did that.) That most of his money would go to pay for his wife to live somewhere where she was (mostly) safe from herself, that he’d be married to someone who didn’t know that putting your hand on a hot stove would blister the skin, it wasn’t okay to eat plastic fruit, and interstates weren’t for strolling.

  I followed Dad across the parking lot to the glass double doors that were always seasonally decorated, as though a few construction-paper pastel eggs or glitter elves could make you forget where you were headed. Today the doors were covered with ghosts and zombies, and it looked like someone had tried to take a bite out of one of the oversized cardboard pumpkins. As soon as we were inside, the chemical-cleaner-and-cinnamon-potpourri smell hit me in the face like it always did, a surprise no matter how many times I’d smelled it before. I still don’t think Mom should be in here, and I don’t think Dad does either, but there’s no place else for her to go.

  Dad disappeared into the office, and I made my way down the hall to Mom’s room, a path I could walk in my sleep. At her door, I knocked softly, and when there was no answer, I let myself in. Today Mom sat with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, her head leaning dejectedly against the back of her chair. Despite everything—the escape attempts and the freak-outs, and the pharmaceutical cocktails that were introduced to try to prevent them—Mom was still gorgeous. Her skin was milky moon pale, and her cheeks were always rosy. Her slate-blue eyes were made even more startling by her midnight-black hair, which didn’t come from a box and still wasn’t streaked with strands of silver. I had not inherited her good looks, which made me happy. If I hadn’t inherited her looks, then maybe I hadn’t inherited her mind either.

  I threw my bag onto the bed, then started in on what I always did when it was just the two of us: I told Mom everything. It was kind of like a reality-TV confessional; I just vented and said whatever was on my mind. In a way, it did feel like having a conversation, even though I never got a response. Usually she just sat there, staring out the window and not even looking at me. Occasionally she’d contribute something off topic, like “Why, this pancake isn’t very good at all” as she took a bite out of a catalog.

  It was okay. I didn’t expect much.

  But today, when I was right in the middle of telling her about how the new girl in school wanted to join our babysitting club, I looked at her, and she was sitting straight up, almost leaning forward in her chair, her eyes wide and clear, totally focused on me.

  “Mom,” I said, not able to help myself, “what do you know about babysitting?” Just then, Dad walked into the room behind me, in the middle of a conversation with one of the staff, and by the time I turned back to Mom, I’d lost her again, and she was back to just staring out the window.

  * * *

  —

  The sun was beginning to set as Dad and I were pulling out of the parking lot, and the sky was the colors of candy corn. Dad was tired, and I could tell he was worried by the way he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and quoted The Big Lebowski when the Eagles came on the radio. He was trying to be lighthearted and pretend nothing was wrong. When my phone rang with an unknown number, I didn’t a
nswer—I rarely answered even when I did know the number.

  I honestly probably would have continued to ignore it if Dad hadn’t been sitting right there, looking at me as we sat at a stoplight, just waiting to make some sort of Dad-ish comment like “Why do ya even have a phone if you’re never going to answer it?” So I hit accept and said hello.

  “He took a poop!” a voice screamed into my ear.

  I was about to hang up on this soon-to-be-obscene caller when she continued, breathlessly, “Esme, it’s Cassandra! He pooped. What do I do?”

  “Brandon?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course! This holy terror that I’m babysitting. Who else would I be talking about?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. Brandon Harrison was only two and a half years old, but he was already about the best-behaved kid I’d ever babysat for, as long as you steered clear of anything itsy-bitsy. “You mean in his pants?”

  “No, in the thing that looks like a smaller toilet that sits next to the big toilet. Like, what is that anyway? A planter?”

  “Oh my God, Cassandra,” I said, realizing what was going on. “He’s supposed to do that. It’s part of potty training. Surely you’ve seen one of those before!”

  “No…,” she started, then changed her mind. “I’m mean, yes, of course. But it’s been a while. I don’t remember. So I just leave it there?”

  Was she serious? “No, you dump it into the toilet and then wash it out.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Cassandra, where is Brandon?”

  “He’s right here,” she said. Then she lowered her voice and said, “Esme, I think he wants me to help him wipe his butt.” Her voice was crackling with fear.

  Something was dawning on me. Something that I’d been suspecting but hadn’t wanted to admit to myself.

  “Cassandra,” I said, “have you ever babysat before?”

  A beat of silence. Two beats. “Yes,” she said. And then she hung up.

  * * *

  —

  Dad and I stopped for Mexican, but I felt too queasy for queso. I sent Cassandra several texts and eventually tried calling her back, but she never answered. This was one of those times when I really cursed myself for not being able to drive, because if I could have, I would have come up with some excuse and driven straight to the Harrisons’, to make sure their house was still standing and their kid was still alive. I kept checking my phone, wishing I knew what time they were supposed to get home.

  I hadn’t told Janis about Cassandra’s panicked phone call, but she had the burner phone, so if the Harrisons called to complain about our new sitter’s total ineptitude and obvious lack of childcare experience, Janis would be the first to know. Would she ever forgive me?

  The babysitters club was really important to me, and now I was terrified that Cassandra Heaven was going to make me lose it. Why in the hell had she wanted to babysit in the first place if she knew nothing about kids?

  I must have fallen asleep shortly after midnight, because that was the last time I looked at my phone, and the next thing I knew, I was awake and the sun was streaming through my windows.

  I grabbed my phone to see if I’d somehow slept through Janis’s angry texts, but there was nothing. Usually I was as conscious as a corpse at this hour on a school day, but I was too wired to go back to sleep, so I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and tried to make a mental list of what I knew about Cassandra Heaven.

  Good hair.

  …

  And that was as far as I got. Nothing to suggest competence, responsibility, or knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver. What on earth had possessed me to hand over one of our prized babysitting clients to a girl I knew literally nothing about?

  Finally, at an appropriately late hour, I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed for school. I’d been so distracted the night before that I hadn’t planned my outfit. So shirt and pants were just going to have to do. I called it “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come.”

  When I saw her at lunch, Janis could sense that something was wrong, but I think she chalked it up to the gray mood I was always in after a visit to Mom. When she asked me if I’d heard anything from Cassandra, I just shook my head and pretended to shrug it off. “No news is good news, right?” I said, then forced a laugh and immediately tried to change the subject.

  “So, your house or mine?” I asked. Since it was Friday, I assumed Janis and I would do what we always did when neither of us had a babysitting job lined up: see how many episodes of The Office we could watch in one night. Our current record was twenty-one.

  “I’ve got to pack tonight,” she said. “This is that weekend we’re going to Chicago for my mom’s thing.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. Janis had told me about her travel plans weeks ago but hadn’t mentioned them since, and I hadn’t asked why she hadn’t mentioned them because I knew. Janis’s mom was speaking at a conference the following Monday, and they were going early so Janis could low-key check out the campus at Northwestern, one of her backup schools. “That’s cool. That’ll be fun.”

  Fortunately, the bell rang, cutting off our chances to have a conversation about how I would amuse myself for forty-eight hours in Janis’s absence. I’d have a lot of real conversations with my dog and a lot of pretend conversations with Michael Scott.

  I spent most of my school day looking for Cassandra, but it felt about as useless as trying to get followers on Twitter. I didn’t know where her locker was. I didn’t know what classes she had, and her phone went straight to voicemail. I might as well have just written a message in lipstick on a bathroom mirror and hoped that she had to pee.

  For the first time ever, I was actually looking forward to gym, hoping I could finally corner Cassandra there. Then, of course, she skipped it again. Was it me she was avoiding, or the forty-five minutes of aggressive badminton? Thankfully, racquet sports were not Stacey Wasser’s forte, and class had barely started when she got sent to the principal for telling the teacher to shove a birdie up…well, it wasn’t somewhere nice.

  I saw Janis briefly, and she graciously tried to hide her excitement and even went so far as to say she wished I was coming with her, then an uneventful Friday rolled into an equally uneventful weekend. It at least gave me time to plan my next two months of outfits.

  I never heard from Cassandra, and for the first time ever, I was actually grateful when Monday rolled around. School might be awful, but at least it was a distraction.

  Of course, I didn’t see Cassandra until after school, when I was walking to my locker and happened to glance out the door. There she was, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, looking right at me. I turned and made a beeline for the doors, pushed through them, and headed straight for her. Her face transformed into a smile when she saw me coming, which pissed me off. By the time we were standing face to face, I was so mad that I was foaming like an overfrothed cappuccino.

  “You lied!” I hissed. “You’ve never babysat before!” If Cassandra had been worried about me finding her out and being mad about it, nothing on her face showed it, and the smile stayed firmly in place.

  “Okay, so I panicked,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called you, but I didn’t know what else to do, and I didn’t want the kid to, like, die or anything.” Then she crossed her arms and leaned back like she’d just dropped her verse in a rap battle.

  I sucked in a breath. “I don’t want a kid to, like, die or anything either, Cassandra,” I said as calmly as I could manage, even though I hadn’t been this pissed since a ten-year-old babysitting charge had dumped a half gallon of milk into my book bag. (Ten-year-olds should know better.)

  “I thought I could fake it, but it was way harder than I thought it was going to be,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder, casually.

  “You said you liked kids!” I was trying hard to keep my voice fr
om rising. “You said you had tons of experience!”

  “I know,” she said. “I do like kids, and I’ve always wanted to babysit. But, first time for everything, right?” Cassandra raised her hands in a don’t-blame-me gesture that was completely inappropriate, since this was unquestionably her fault.

  I actually smacked my forehead in disbelief. “It doesn’t make any sense! Why on earth would you lie about babysitting? Why do you want to be a babysitter? Just get a job at the froyo place like everyone else our age!”

  “Listen, Esme. I do want to be a part of the babysitting club. I’ve always wanted to babysit—and,” she said, “I wanted an excuse to talk to you.”

  Maybe I should have been flattered, but I wasn’t buying it. Anyone who wanted to use me to social climb wasn’t going to get far off the ground. “No one wants to talk to me that bad, Cassandra,” I said.

  The smile on her face faded, and she looked somber. “I do, Esme. Trust me. I’m sorry that I went about it the wrong way, but maybe we could go somewhere and talk now?”

  “No,” I said, brushing past her and heading down the sidewalk. “I don’t even know you, and you already risked my professional reputation and put a kid in danger.”

  “The kid is fine,” she said.

  I spun around so that I was facing her again. “Brandon! His name is Brandon. And he is fine, but no thanks to you!”

  “Okay, fine. Brandon is fine! We had a great time, and he only cried for, like, ten minutes, when I made him go to bed.”

  “He usually doesn’t cry at all!”

  “Okay, my bad.” She pumped her hands like she was trying to calm me down. “Just listen for a minute.”

  “I’m going home.” I was suddenly filled with the urge to put as much distance between us as possible.

  She grabbed my sleeve. “Come on. We’ll give you a ride home.”