Homecoming

by Amber Benson

  She took her grandmother’s extended hand and stepped over the lip of the tub, sliding her foot into the near-scalding water. It burned, the pain radiating up her calf, making her eyes water. She closed them and bit her lip to keep from crying. Mimi always made sure the water was just hot enough to hurt but not to cause any serious burns.

  “Go on now, sister.”

  Her foot made contact with the bottom of the tub, and somehow the porcelain was hotter than the water. She wanted to pull her foot back, but this would cause all kinds of trouble. Instead, she put all her weight on the scalded foot, then lifted the other one over the edge of the tub. The pain was excruciating as her toes broke the surface tension of the water, then drifted down to meet their mates at the bottom of the tub.

  She stood there, holding her grandmother’s hand, legs submerged to the tops of her calves. She looked down and saw that underneath the shifting surface of the water, her skin had begun to turn bright pink. She looked back at her grandmother, who nodded, and then Eleanora held her breath and sat down in the tub.

  Her body involuntarily tried to jerk away from the heat, but her grandmother was already there, pushing her backward. The skin on her back screamed as it hit the water, and she resisted, twisting like a hooked fish in her grandmother’s hands.

  “In Jesus’ name, cleanse this child, cleanse her dirty, sinful soul . . . In Jesus’ name, save this wretched girl from her sinful ways, release her from temptation . . .”

  It went on like this, her grandmother holding her under the water, so she couldn’t breathe, air bubbles rising from her nose as she tried to keep her eyes shut, to block the water from scorching her eyeballs. The liquid separated them, muffling her grandmother’s words, but Eleanora knew them by heart. She didn’t need to hear them.

  She held her breath for as long as she could, but then she began to panic, unable to raise herself from out of her grandmother’s killing embrace. The need for air was overwhelming. She tried to kick out at her grandmother, but she was getting weaker, the fight inside her disappearing along with whatever oxygen was left in her lungs.

  She didn’t want to die, but then the realization hit that with death came release and a chance to see her mama again for real, and she changed her mind. She let go, giving in to the blackness as it draped itself around her . . .

  She was still sitting on the kitchen floor. It was drizzling outside and the light was fading, casting a burnished orange glow as it congealed in pools around her calves. The rest of her body was in shadow, blocked by the sink she was propped up against.

  Her grandmother’s voice was exactly as Eleanora remembered it. Slow and reedy—it had sounded no different coming out of Daniela’s mouth earlier that afternoon.

  She tried not to think about Mimi, about the atrocities she’d endured at her grandmother’s hand, but now all those miserable years filled her head. To combat them, she felt an overarching urge to hold her mother’s Bible in her hands. She got to her knees, but a sense of vertigo kept her from climbing to her feet. Instead, she began to crawl across the kitchen floor, the linoleum cushioning her palms and knees. The Bible was in the living room bookcase, on the bottom shelf in between a set of outdated World Books and the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. She pulled it out, settling it in her lap, then leaned back, her head and neck pressed against the wooden wainscoting.

  She opened the book to the first page, and written along the corner of the cover, in her mama’s curling cursive writing, was a name:

  May Louella Eames

  Her mother.

  Underneath it, in the same swirling cursive, there was another name, and a date:

  Eleanora Davenport Eames—b. January 9th, 1944

  Davenport was her father’s last name. Her mother had been unmarried when Eleanora was conceived but had still seen fit to give the baby its father’s name—despite the fact that the mighty Davenport family would not lay claim to the child.

  The bastards, Eleanora thought.

  There were more names in the Bible, but she didn’t concern herself with those for the moment. Instead, she ran her fingers across her mama’s flowery cursive, as close as she could get to actually touching the woman who was now only a memory, a ghost from Eleanora’s childhood.

  She sat there in the fading afternoon light for a long while, fingers gently caressing their names: May and Eleanora—twined together forever in the pages of an old Bible.

  Lyse

  Mind still reeling from her strange encounter with the mute girl outside the coffee shop, Lyse returned to the house with two bottles of red wine from the bodega wrapped up in a brown paper bag. She didn’t know what possessed her to buy them, but the urge had been overwhelming. Now she set them down on the kitchen table and shrugged out of her great-aunt’s shawl, hanging it up on a peg by the back door.

  “Eleanora?” she called, flipping on more lights as she left the kitchen and walked through the bungalow. “Are you here? I’m back!”

  She turned on the lights in the living room, and though the space was devoid of human life, she took a moment to stand in the doorway, admiring it. With its vaulted ceiling, many windows, and three oblong skylights cut into the drywall overhead, the room possessed an airy, open quality that made it the centerpiece of the bungalow. As a teenager, she’d spent many an afternoon sprawled out on the hardwood floor, her homework spread all around her as she daydreamed about making out with this movie star or that famous musician.

  She smiled, thinking how her adolescent fantasy life had been so much more exciting than her real life. Setting thoughts of sexy rock stars aside, she let her mind drift back to Eleanora. She didn’t know how it was possible to live under the same roof as another human being and not know everything there was to know about them—yet Eleanora seemed to have all sorts of secrets: odd facets to her personality, friendships Lyse knew nothing about . . . And then there was the whole thing with the airport this morning: How had Eleanora known when she’d be arriving at LAX?

  Lyse figured there had to be a logical explanation for Eleanora’s appearance that morning, but no matter how hard she tried to piece it together, the answer eluded her.

  Lyse turned off the overhead light, plunging the living room into darkness again, and continued her search.

  As she moved down the unlit hall that led to the bedrooms, she felt the night burrowing in around the house, trying to swallow her up. She’d never thought of Eleanora’s bungalow as spooky before, but being here alone in the back of the house was kind of unsettling. Even as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she still had trouble seeing what was ahead of her. Shadows loomed in the distance, their humanoid shapes startling her—and she actually stopped dead in her tracks at one point, sure she’d seen something nasty skitter across the hall in front of her. After a minute spent frozen in place, staring blindly ahead into the darkness, she decided whatever she’d thought she’d seen was gone, or had never existed at all.

  She navigated her way down the rest of the hallway without incident, until she found herself standing in front of Eleanora’s bedroom. She rapped her knuckles gently against the polished wood grain of the door and waited.

  No answer.

  After a minute of hemming and hawing, she tried again.

  Still no answer.

  Well, she thought, standing in an abyss of uncertainty, fist poised to knock again. Do I just open the damn door, or do I stand here like an idiot because I’m too scared of what I might find inside?

  Imagination was a strange thing. It could play amazing tricks on a normally sane person.

  As she waited outside the threshold of her great-aunt’s bedroom, Lyse’s mind was dizzy with possibilities—some good and some horrifying. Would she open the door to find her great-aunt resting peacefully on the bed, or would she discover a corpse—

  Stop thinking this ridiculous shit, she yelled inside her head. You’re bein
g an idiot.

  The last twenty-four hours had been overwhelming: Eleanora’s call, almost no sleep, a break-in at her house in Athens, the bizarre afternoon nightmare, and the nutty teenager at the coffee place . . . Now her great-aunt was probably lying dead on a bed, and Lyse was too chickenshit to go in and find out.

  Schrödinger’s cat.

  The words came unbidden, the phrase from a Quantum Physics for Artists course she’d taken in college. She’d chosen it thinking it would be an easy way to fulfill one of her science requirements but instead found herself really enjoying the theories the professor presented to the class. One of the thought experiments they’d discussed was Schrödinger’s cat: Put a cat in a sealed box with a decaying radioactive particle, and the cat was both alive and dead at the same time—until you opened the box, and then all bets were off.

  This shouldn’t have given her courage, but for some strange reason it kind of did.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” she murmured under her breath, and pushed open the door.

  There was a groan of hinges giving way, and then she was inside. The room was pitch-black. She couldn’t see two feet in front of her. She felt around the wall until she found the switch plate and flipped it on, bathing Eleanora’s bedroom in incandescent light.

  The bed. There was someone in it. A lump where a body was curled into a fetal position.

  “Eleanora?” Lyse said, taking a tentative step farther into the room.

  “Eleanora?”

  She spoke louder this time but still got no response. She took another step.

  “Eleanora? I’m not trying to scare you, but I’m coming in the room . . .”

  She grasped the edge of the star-patterned quilt covering Eleanora’s bed and yanked it back in one swift movement to find . . . nothing. No body, no corpse, no skeleton—just a pile of bunched-up blankets on top of the mattress. That was her lump. Something touched her shoulder, startling her, and she screamed.

  It took Lyse a moment to understand that the hand belonged to Eleanora.

  “What the hell?” she shrieked, terrifying her great-aunt, who was holding on to the wall for support, her breathing labored as she watched Lyse cycle through rage, anger, and shame in the space of a few seconds.

  “What is wrong with you?” Eleanora sputtered, waving a shaking finger in Lyse’s direction.

  “You scared me,” Lyse said, beginning to feel really stupid for letting her imagination work her up into such a hysterical frenzy. “It was dark and I thought someone was in the bed, and you were gone . . .”

  Lyse felt the tears starting. She didn’t want to cry, but she’d been so keyed up that a good cry was probably the best way to calm her down.

  Eleanora squinted at her grandniece, seeming to decide that maybe Lyse was justified in screaming at her, after all. She offered Lyse her hand and guided the two of them over to the bed, settling Lyse, then herself, down on the edge of the mattress.

  “Oh my God, you scared the bejesus outta me,” Lyse groaned as she rested an arm around Eleanora’s frail shoulder, hiccupping back tears. “I looked all around the house, but you weren’t answering me, and then I opened the door, and I thought—”

  “You thought I was dead,” Eleanora finished, with a snort.

  “No, that’s not true,” Lyse said, lying through her teeth.

  “I don’t know why everyone wants to put me in my grave before my time,” Eleanora said, sighing. “I’m not dead yet, thank God.”

  Lyse hiccupped up another sob, then sighed.

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  She spat the words out, as if saying them fast enough would magically keep Eleanora alive forever.

  “But everybody dies, Bear,” Eleanora said, removing Lyse’s arm from her shoulder. “That’s the price of being alive.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to have to pay it.”

  Eleanora laughed.

  “I don’t mind, actually,” she said after a few moments of silence. “Death isn’t the end, Bear. I know it for a fact.”

  Lyse stared back at her. They’d never discussed Eleanora’s religious views before, and she was surprised to discover that she’d expected her great-aunt to be an atheist, or at the very least agnostic. Eleanora’s avowal that life went on after death was an odd pill to swallow.

  “There is more in this world than what we can touch, see, hear, taste, and smell, Lyse,” Eleanora continued. “Which is a lovely way of segueing into another topic, one I’ve wanted to discuss with you before but was too cowardly to do so.”

  Lyse’s mouth went dry as a desert, the lack of saliva forcing the smooth muscles in her throat to contract painfully against one another as she tried to swallow. She didn’t know what her great-aunt was going to say to her, but it couldn’t be good.

  “Don’t look so scared,” Eleanora said gently. “I promised you earlier that there were things to talk about, and they weren’t bad.”

  Lyse nodded but didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “I guess the way to do this is to just rip the Band-Aid off,” Eleanora murmured, looking up at Lyse. She smiled, and Lyse was sure the gesture was meant to convey calm, but it did the opposite. Now Lyse was sure something terrible was in the offing.

  “Don’t give me those sad eyes,” Eleanora said, looking put upon for the first time since Lyse had gotten home. “You had that same look on your face the first time you asked me to take you to the store to buy maxipads. It’s really not that bad.”

  Lyse didn’t think she’d ever felt terrified and mortified at the same time. It was a brand-new experience.

  “Just tell me,” Lyse said finally, the words sticking in her dry throat.

  “Okay, I’ll just tell you,” Eleanora agreed. “Oh lord, this is gonna sound nuts, but here goes.” She took Lyse’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Lyse, I’m a witch.”

  “Are you high?” It was out of her mouth before Lyse could stop herself.

  Eleanora raised one pale silver eyebrow.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  Lyse pushed off the bed, stumbling to her feet, and then she began to pace. Whatever she’d been expecting, it was certainly not this.

  “What does this mean?” Lyse said, trying to wrap her mind around what Eleanora had just told her. “Are you, like, a Wiccan or something? Do you like to go burn effigies out in the woods, or dance naked under the stars, or do sexual-healing spells, or whatever?”

  Eleanora let out a loud guffaw.

  “My goodness, do you have an imagination—”

  “I’m the one with an imagination?” Lyse said, incredulously. “You’re the one who just called herself a witch.”

  Eleanora shrugged and leaned back against the tangle of bedsheets Lyse had mistaken for a body.

  “It’s nothing like you think. Witch isn’t even what we prefer to call ourselves. I use the term because it’s the easiest way to explain—”

  “Go on, then. Explain.”

  Eleanora nodded in acknowledgment. Yes, she did indeed have much to explain.

  “Do you ever feel like there’s something different about this place?” She waved her arm to include the bungalow, herself, and possibly the whole of Echo Park.

  “Maybe. Yes. I don’t know.”

  Lyse was feeling very confused.

  “It’s because this area, all of Echo Park, in fact, rests on a flow line. We’re sitting on a confluence of energies—psychic and magnetic, just to name two—and this is what gives us the magic—”

  “O-kay,” Lyse murmured, but now the bedroom was starting to feel claustrophobic, the walls pressing in on her like a slow-moving trash compactor.

  “There are covens everywhere, in cities all across the world where the flow lines converge, connecting everyone and everything. All energy, all matter . . . it’s the same, Lyse. Nothin
g can ever be destroyed. It only changes form.”

  Lyse pulled out the wood-backed chair from Eleanora’s dressing table and sat down heavily.

  “Now you’re starting to sound like my physics professor—”

  Eleanora grinned. “Science and magic are very much the same thing. The ‘magic’ stuff is only called that because science doesn’t have an explanation for it yet.”

  “So, why now? Are you telling me this because you’re dying?” Lyse asked, standing up again. There was just something about sitting still that she couldn’t handle. She needed to feel her legs working, her body moving.

  “Yes and no. Yes, you need to know because I’m dying, and even if I weren’t dying, I need to ask you to promise me something. So you’d have found out either way.”

  “A promise,” Lyse said, holding on to the only sane part of the conversation. “What do you need me to do for you?”

  Eleanora sat up, leaving the tangled bedsheets even more misshapen. She hoisted herself onto her feet and stretched.

  “My back and hips aren’t what they used to be,” she confided. “Just a sad old lady these days, Bear.”

  The day Eleanora had realized guilt was Lyse’s chief weakness, she’d become a master at brandishing it like a cudgel. Lyse hated that she could be so easily manipulated, but time and time again, when the right heartstrings were strategically plucked, she found herself acting the part of a complete and total pushover.

  Like right now—she was cooped up in this tiny bedroom, emotionally trapped by guilt until Eleanora decided to let her go.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Lyse said, angry at Eleanora for being so frail, and mad at herself for not being able to run away. “Please sit down, you’re gonna wear yourself out.”

  But Eleanora was already shuffling over to the small closet in the corner of the room. She knelt down in front of the doorway and began to pull out pairs of shoes.

  “What’re you doing?” Lyse asked, kneeling down beside her great-aunt.