by Laura Sibson
“Still not ready?” Rhia asks, disappointed.
“You know I want one. I just haven’t figured out the perfect image yet.”
“There are no perfect images, Tess. Pick something that you want on your body.” She turns to me. “Edie?”
“Not this virgin.”
“Virgin?” Rhia raises an eyebrow and quirks a smile.
My stomach does backflips in response and the heat of a blush creeps up my neck and across my cheeks.
“Tattoo virgin,” I say, as though I’m not also a virgin in other ways.
“My favorite kind of virgin,” Rhia says, grinning. “Tech-nically, I guess some would say I’m a virgin, too, if—”
“Enough about virgins!” Tess says. “Focus. How are we going to figure out if something is magicked onto this paper?”
“Wait!” Remembering how the spells appear in the journal, I inspect the paper for a waxy mark. But I can’t find any. I frown and pull Mom’s journal from my bag. “Maybe if I look at the spells that have appeared, I can figure something out.”
Rhia leans over my shoulder as I flip through the journal to the latest spell. “What’s that one?” she asks.
“For removing zits, I think.” I laugh a little.
“Maybe we can reverse it,” she says, reading it. “Let me think.” She closes her eyes. Her brows pull together in concentration. A moment later, her eyelids fly open and she looks excited.
“Marks erased I wish to see,
Reveal yourself anew to me.”
I hold my palm over the paper, ready to say the spell. Shadows creep at the edges of my vision and goose bumps rise on my arms. I stop.
“Are you okay?” Tess asks.
The shadows recede and I don’t want my friends to worry, so I smile and say I’m fine. I start again and this time, I feel the warm glow that comes from magic. As I’m speaking, hand-drawn images begin to emerge on the page.
“Rhee, you were right!” Impulsively, I hug her. Just as quickly I’m not sure if I should have and I let go. “Sorry, got a little excited.”
“No problem. I’m happy to be of service.” She grins at me and I smile back, remembering our inside joke.
The images that we’ve revealed show us a very basic hand-drawn map. Two small buildings adjacent to one another sit in the middle, one smaller than the other. Wavy lines indicate the river flowing at an angle on the right side of the buildings. Only five other buildings are marked: the hardware store, the woods, the antique shop, the cemetery, and the marina.
“Five places to go with five clues.” Rhia beams.
“They’re all places in our town that have been here for a good long while, too,” Tess says.
“And they surround these two buildings,” I say, pointing at the ones in the middle.
“Not only that,” Rhia says. “Look.” She traces her finger from one building to the next until I recognize the shape of a star. “Those five places form a pentacle around these buildings in the middle. That’s definitely some magical planning.”
“Hang on!” I say, inspecting the placement of the buildings relative to the river. I touch my finger to the buildings drawn in the middle. “I’m pretty sure that’s our cabin and the workshop Mom wrote about in her journal.”
“Whoever did this was creating a place of power around those buildings,” Rhia says. “I’ve read that hiding items in the shape of a pentacle usually means that someone was performing an invocation.”
My response is immediate and vehement. “No way. Mitchell magic is about balance between nature and the elements. Magic that helps and heals. My family would never engage in that sort of magic.”
I knew a little of what Rhia referred to when she mentioned an invocation. Some people with innate magic can summon powers, things, the dead, even. But Mom had said it was dangerous work that ended up taking more that it gave. This was magic we were never meant to use.
Tess and Rhia look at one another.
“What?” I say.
“How do you know that for sure, E?” Tess’s tone is gentle, but her point is clear.
“Who else could have done that?” Rhia says. “And why would your grandmother have needed a protection spell?”
I want to bolt, like I do whenever I’m uncomfortable. I want to run off the confusion and fear. But Tess and Rhia have shown me that I can be myself with them. And they are right. I know that they are.
“Can you think of a reason why your mom might have performed an invocation?” Tess asks.
I give a curt shake of my head. But then I think about my mother’s journal entries. How she talked about her grief over her father dying and how GG didn’t speak. I whisper my answer. “Actually, yeah. Mom wanted to see her dead father again.” I pause, trying to digest what’s ahead. “So, if we find those five items—”
“We should be able to banish the bad magic in the cabin,” Rhia says. “And that infection should go with it.”
“Okay,” I say, letting out my breath in a big exhale. “You’ve convinced me. Let’s find some hidden items.”
Chapter Nineteen
MAURA
July 7, 2003
This morning, I found Dad’s lucky coin in my bag. I remembered the time that Dad took me to the racetrack with him. We stopped at the concession stand where he bought me popcorn and a Coke and himself a beer. He handed me the lucky coin and told me to blow on it three times because three times was the charm. That was funny to me. I only needed one time for a charm to work, as long as I did it correctly.
When Dad’s horse came in first, he whooped and picked me up and spun me around, and when he collected his money, he told everyone how I was his lucky charm. I stored the coin in the velvet bed of my jewelry box, occasionally taking it out to rub my fingers over it.
This year, when Dad got sick, I pulled that coin from its bed of velvet and blew on it like before, then I tucked it under his pillow. But deep inside I knew that no amount of magic—not even if you performed it perfectly—could cure cancer. When he died, I retrieved the coin. Though I knew it was no more than an old coin with no luck left, I saved it, putting it in my bag before we left for the cabin.
* * *
* * *
A couple days after Fourth of July, Jamie stopped by as the sun was making her languorous journey toward the edge of the world. His T-shirt and jeans were dirty from work. His boots clomped down the steps and across the dock to me. His face was shaded by the bill of his baseball cap. He looked like someone who got things done. Someone you could depend on. I smiled at him. Smiling was getting a little bit easier each day. He gestured to the never-ending sanding that I was doing and asked if I needed a hand.
I laughed and told him that I’d probably need help with the boat until the end of time. He joked back that he only had until dark. We shared a bag of chips and he asked my favorite flavor. I told him sour cream and onion and asked his. He said barbecue unless Utz crab chips were an option. He said no one did crab chips like Utz.
I laughed and thought about how I could change these chips to be his favorite in the time it took to pass the bag from my hand to his. But I didn’t. Not yet.
Jamie and I dusted our fingers on our pants and got to work. We worked on the boat until it was too dark to see clearly. Then, I pulled off my shorts for a quick dip. I still had my bathing suit on from earlier. I asked him if he was coming in as I lowered myself into the water.
He said he didn’t have a suit, but I said to come in anyway, that no one would see. Jamie turned to look up at the cabin. Butter-yellow light melted from the wide picture window that overlooked the river. I told Jamie that Mom doesn’t come down here.
Jamie pulled his shirt over his head. He was built like a boy who’d already spent a life outdoors, his body honed for work. He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and dropped them on the deck as well. Look
ing up at him from in the water, seeing his barely covered body, I was seized with need. I wanted to hold him and kiss him. I wanted to be held and kissed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this. It was sudden and intense. My eyes didn’t leave his body as he stepped to the edge of the dock.
Jamie dropped into the water and swam to me with easy strokes. We treaded water, looking at one another. We didn’t speak, but again, this wasn’t my mother’s silence. This silence swelled with possibility. I treaded water closer to him. He offered a small smile.
I moved closer, trying to work up my nerve to ask what I wanted to ask. The water buoyed me, and the waning light gave me a boldness that daylight never could.
I couldn’t get the words out. But Jamie knew what I wanted, and I guess he wanted that too because he reached out a hand and pulled me through the water until our bodies touched. I wrapped my legs around his torso, almost sinking us both. We laughed and then my lips were pressed against his, our bodies crushed together. We maneuvered to the dock and Jamie held us up by grabbing hold of it with one hand while he held me close with his other.
I told him to be careful of barnacles and he answered by kissing me. I allowed myself to get lost in it, in the sensation of skin on skin and the water embracing us both. For the first time, I felt something besides the detonation of Dad being gone.
In the middle of a deep kiss, Jamie let go of the dock and we sunk beneath the black water. I wished I had fins and gills so that I could continue kissing him underwater. We held hands, but our bodies separated. I floated, weightless and sightless, tethered to the world by my fingers entangled in Jamie’s. Our bodies rose toward the surface.
When we pulled ourselves onto the dock, slick as dolphins, I lay my towel down and pulled Jamie close.
He brushed my wet hair away from my face and touched his forehead to mine. His eyes flashed in the moonlight when he asked if this was all okay.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him against me. Jamie kissed my lips and my bare shoulder. He kissed my neck, which tickled and made me giggle.
But then he kissed my temple and said he needed to get back. I didn’t want him to move away from my body. He pulled his T-shirt over his still-damp torso and wrangled into his jeans. I laid back on my elbows, watching him cover his beautiful body from my sight. I was surprised by how badly I wanted him.
After he left, my mind went back to Dad’s coin and I wondered if maybe there is some luck still left inside it.
* * *
* * *
Today, I took the coin and Dad in his box into his workshop. He had everything that I needed, of course. While I worked, I felt his presence more than ever. In the worn wooden handle of his hammer. In the old welder’s hat that perched on a shelf. In the vise connected to the workbench, the paint long since peeled away from the metal ball at the end of the lever that I used to tighten the clamps around the coin. When I was finished with my work, I looked at the result and I imagined that Dad would have been proud of me.
Tonight, Jamie took me back to the boathouse. After he guided me up to the loft, I handed him my gift.
He looked surprised and unwrapped the tissue paper. Holding it up by the string, he asked if it was the lucky coin that I’d told him about. My throat closed up with emotion. All I could do was nod. Jamie kissed me deeply. Then he slid the black cord over his head and touched the coin with two fingers.
We laid on the soft blanket that Jamie had brought up here for us. I settled my back against his chest. His cheek, with its hint of stubble, rested on mine. He kissed my temple.
Then he told me that he liked the photo, but I didn’t know what he meant. That’s when he told me that there was a photo hanging on the Wall of Fame in the hardware store of me and my father with one of the chairs that Dad had made.
I smiled, remembering the memory. I’d asked Mom to take the photo after Dad and I had finished the chairs. He’d insisted that I sit on the chair and he’d stood next to me. I frowned. I’d framed the photo and given it to Dad for Father’s Day; he’d kept it on his dresser in the cabin. What was it doing at the hardware store?
I snuggled into Jamie, hoping that his arms around me could protect me from the sad thoughts, allow me to forget for a few minutes. As if he sensed what I needed, he pulled me closer to him, wrapping his arms around my midsection.
I wiggled my butt into his crotch, and I felt his body respond to me being so close. Our hands roved over one another’s bodies, banishing everything beyond this boathouse. Jamie and I half-undressed beneath a blanket was my sole focus. I was trying hard not to push Jamie. He didn’t seem as ready as I was. But we went further this time. He’d slid his hand down my pants and I’d slid my hand down his.
Then, he stopped. He said that I meant a lot to him, but that he’d be leaving for the Peace Corps soon and wasn’t sure it made sense to get serious right now. And he wanted our time to mean something. Not just be a summer hookup.
I didn’t understand the idea of applying logic to our time together. But I said okay because I’m not sure what else you can say when someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. He asked if I was mad and I told him that I wasn’t. Mad wasn’t the right word. I was yearning, I think.
Chapter Twenty
EDIE
“Mom’s latest journal entries definitely do not help us in our search,” I say, when Tess and Rhia and I are once again together. What I don’t tell them is that the journal entry did potentially fill in a huge blank in my life. Based on the timing of the entries, this Jamie guy is most likely my father. I’ve wondered about my father’s identity for so long and now I’m seeing their relationship unfold through Mom’s journal. I feel sort of guilty for finding out this way. Maybe that’s why I’m not ready to tell my friends quite yet.
“Nothing about secret maps or shadow-filled cabins?” Tess asks.
“Definitely, no.” I make a face when I remember Mom’s entry and how I needed to go for a run to work it out of my system. I’d been hoping it would lead me to another spell, but no such luck. “The sooner we banish this thing, the sooner I can get back to normal.” I rub at the lines running up toward my wrist.
“If that’s what you want,” Rhia says, keeping her eyes on the map. She clears her throat. “Clue number one goes with the antique shop. Should we go look for a watch there?”
“Let’s do it,” I say. “And clue number two, which might be keys, should be here.” I tap the drawing of a cluster of trees on the map.
“The woods?” Tess says. “That sounds hopeless.”
I almost agree with Tess. Then it hits me that I know exactly where in the woods my mother would have hidden something.
“It’s not!” I say. “We have a place where we go.”
The perpetual woods—where I’d confronted GG on the day I’d discovered the cabin—is the only place a Mitchell would hide something in the woods.
“If that one will be easy, should we do it now?” Tess asks.
“I never said easy,” I say. “I said that I know where it is.”
“Want to tell us what to expect?” Rhia asks.
“Well, we have to go at night.”
“Okay, and why?” Tess asks.
I look at Rhia, wondering if she already knows what I’m going to say, but it seems that this bit of magic is new, even to her. “There are places that non-magic people can only see under moonlight.”
“No way!” Rhia says, her face breaking into that smile that I’ve begun to look forward to.
“Under moonlight?” Tess squeaks. “Maybe I’ll sit this one out.”
“We need you,” I say.
“Yeah, Tess, we’re in this together now,” Rhia says.
“Fiiine,” Tess says. “When are we doing this moonlight walk?”
“A full moon or near-full moon would be best,” I say.
“We just
had a new moon a couple days ago, so the next full moon won’t be for another couple weeks,” Rhia says.
“So, antique shop first?” Tess says.
“Antique shop first,” Rhia and I say together.
* * *
* * *
The tinkling of the bell over the door disrupts the silence of the antique shop. The space is cramped with old things. I run my fingers across the top of a smooth wooden table that holds an array of pewter and brass candelabras. A cluster of arrows mounted on the wall point toward the ceiling. Next to them is an old-fashioned rucksack. Beneath those items, a quilt stand holds a variety of handmade quilts. Each of these items had meant something to someone. Did the items still hold meaning after the people were gone? My hand goes to the acorn pendant and I think of Mom.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice trills. “Hello? Hello! Hello!”
“She always does this,” Tess side-whispers to me.
The woman continues to call out hello as she emerges through heavy black curtains from a back room. She is short and round. Her graying black hair is piled on her head and held there by pencils, as far as I can tell, and her bright red lipstick works with her light brown skin. She wears a multicolored loose-fitting dress. Stacks of bracelets on both wrists create a kind of music when she waves to us.
“Well, hello!” she says. “Rhia and Tess, how wonderful to see you both. And who is your friend?”
“Hi, Ms. Alvarez, this is Edie.”
“Oh, you must be Geri Mitchell’s granddaughter.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to this small-town thing. I force a smile. “That’s me.”
“Tell her hello for me, will you, hon? And tell her that the last salve did the trick, just as she said. She’ll know what I mean.” She winks at me. “Now, how can I help you girls today?”
Tess speaks up. “Can you show us your men’s watches?”
“Of course. Right over here.” She walks us to the display case. “You take a look and if you find something, you give a little shout, okay?” She waves and then disappears back through the curtains.
