Homecoming

by Amber Benson

  Standing there in her towel, she didn’t think she’d ever been more attracted to a man in her life. And what made it all the more interesting was they hadn’t actually had sex.

  She’d slept with him in a drugged-out fantasy, his giant arms wrapping around her middle, hugging her tightly to his chest, but only in her mind—and she’d felt safe there, enveloped in his scent and warmth. Weir was the antithesis of the wussy, metrosexual men she usually dated: masculine, solid, deliberate, knew exactly what he wanted, and didn’t seem afraid to take it when he saw it.

  She even loved his tattoos . . . loved the indigo octopus tentacles as they pulsed along with the movements of the muscles under his skin—

  Stop it. You hardly know this guy. The ritual made you feel close to him, that’s all. You’ll see him again and he’ll be like a stranger to you.

  She opened the bathroom cabinet and took out a bottle of lotion, slathering it all over herself, trying not to imagine that they were Weir’s hands running up her body, not her own.

  She finished drying off and threw on some sweats. Then she left the bathroom door open so the steam could evaporate. As she walked down the hallway, she heard Eleanora talking to herself in the kitchen and decided to check in on her.

  Eleanora was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking confused.

  “I thought I put my pot tincture away after I used it, but it’s gone,” Eleanora said, throwing up her hands in resignation. “I guess it got up and walked off on its own.”

  She waited, her head cocked, as if she were listening to someone, and then she laughed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I did not go through that whole bottle in two days—”

  “Maybe you put it in another cabinet?” Lyse asked, deciding not to mention the fact she’d just caught Eleanora talking to herself.

  Eleanora looked up, surprised to find Lyse standing in the doorway.

  “I suppose I could’ve put it somewhere else.”

  Lyse opened the refrigerator to get a soda.

  “This what you’re looking for?” She held up a small glass bottle she’d found on the top shelf wedged in between two soda cans.

  Eleanora clapped her palms together happily.

  “That’s it! You’re a genius!”

  She plucked the bottle from Lyse’s hands and ran to the cabinet to grab a glass. Lyse shook her head and went back to scouring the fridge. She remembered she hadn’t had any dinner, and she was starving. She pulled out a pie pan with one slice of quiche left in it and carried the whole thing to the kitchen table.

  “Good, I’m glad you’re eating that. I was gonna throw it out tomorrow,” Eleanora said, turning to face Lyse, who was leaning back in her chair, eating the crumbly quiche with her hands. She wore a blissful expression on her face as she stuffed the last bite into her mouth.

  “What?” she said, raising her head, eyes glazed over from too much food, too fast.

  Eleanora wore an amused expression.

  “Nothing. Just enjoying you being here,” Eleanora said. “That’s all.”

  “Enjoying me eating all your leftovers, don’t you mean?” Lyse said, grinning.

  “That’s it,” Eleanora agreed. “That’s the only reason I like having you here. To eat me out of house and home.”

  Lyse rubbed her belly and sighed.

  “That was delicious.”

  She closed her eyes and felt sleep tickling her brain. She was excited to go to her old room and crawl into bed. Maybe tomorrow she’d wake up and go through her old clothes, the ones she hadn’t wanted to take to Georgia when she left for school. They were still hanging up in the closet. She could take a look at them, see if anything still fit or was at all salvageable.

  “I wanted you to have something.”

  She opened her eyes. Eleanora was sitting across from her, a small leather-bound journal in her hands.

  “What is it?” Lyse asked, watching as Eleanora nervously played with the journal’s cover.

  “It’s my personal diary,” she said, an earnest expression on her face.

  “Like all your girly teenage hopes and dreams,” Lyse said, grinning.

  She expected Eleanora to respond with some pithy rejoinder, but her great-aunt only stared down at her gnarled hands.

  “Come on,” Lyse said, sitting up so she could poke Eleanora’s hand with her finger. “You’re supposed to laugh at that.”

  “Nothing to laugh about,” Eleanora said, not looking up. “This is serious business to me.”

  Lyse sat back in her chair and sighed.

  “Fine, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make fun of your diary. I was just teasing you.”

  “Why don’t you bring your chair around here by me?” Eleanora said, patting the spot beside her.

  Lyse did as she was told, dragging her chair around the table until they were sitting side by side.

  “That better?” Lyse asked.

  Eleanora nodded.

  “I want to give you a story,” Eleanora said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s not a particularly happy story, but it’s mine and I want you to have it.”

  The sound of Eleanora’s voice was like a drumbeat in Lyse’s head, the repetition of syllable and sound weaving together like the incantation of a spell. Lyse yawned, her tired mind yearning for the oblivion of sleep, and that was when she felt the lightest of touches on her wrist.

  Eleanora leaned in, her words a hush in Lyse’s ear: “My grandmother Mimi knew that no matter what she did, the Devil had my foot, and she was powerless to stop him from taking me . . .”

  And then Lyse began to dream.

  * * *

  . . . and because she “loved” me—a word that even now sounds unbelievable to my ears—she did something she thought might save me, unhooking the Devil’s claws from my soul once and for all.

  Of course, I didn’t understand any of this until I was long gone from Massachusetts, far away from everything and everyone I’d ever known, my childhood and adolescence a dusty memory locked up tight inside my mind.

  My mama had powers, and so did her mother before her—though Mimi did everything she could to excise that part of herself, while my mama was her opposite. My mama reveled in her special abilities: magical powers that, as a nurse, she used to heal the hopelessly sick and to deliver new life safely into the world, when without her help both the mother and infant would’ve been lost.

  While Mimi hated what she was and stuffed her powers deep down inside her until they were dead and (mostly) buried, my mama embraced her calling. She left home at seventeen to become a nurse, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she joined the Nurse Corps and was stationed in a military field hospital in Italy until she found herself pregnant with me and was discharged.

  My existence, you see, was due to pure happenstance:

  A wounded young man from Mama’s small town in Massachusetts came under her care. He was a year younger than she, but they’d known each other tangentially in school, had friends in common, spent time at the same adolescent haunts. Their shared history, and the intimacy of war, brought them together in a way that could’ve never happened back home. My mama was poor and my father, James Davenport, was from one of the wealthiest families the town of Duxbury had ever produced.

  I was made one frightening night when screaming bombs lit up the sky like the Fourth of July, and everywhere men went off to battle and died like pigs at slaughter. My parents’ coupling was quick and unplanned—two terrified human beings clinging to one another in order to remind themselves they were still alive—but it was enough to conceive me. Sadly, my father was sent back to fight shortly thereafter and died never knowing of my existence.

  How do I know all this? Did my mama tell me these stories?

  Yes and no; in her lifetime she did not get the chance to whisper her st
ories to me, her only daughter. I did not get to sit at her feet and hear them fall from her lips like precious jewels—because one cold winter morning, on her way back from Mass General after a long overnight shift in the maternity ward, Mama’s car skidded on black ice and hit a tree.

  For all her magical healing powers, my mama could not heal herself.

  Yet I know these things. Know them because of a quirk in my nature, passed down to me through all the Eames women who came before me. I am a blood sister and my gift is clairvoyance. Since I was a small child, I could see ghosts and talk to them. Even visit scenes from their life, experiencing them as if they were my own memories. I was there, observing in spirit, the night my parents created me. And I knelt beside my mama as she lay on the icy road, blood streaming from her mouth as she took her last breath and used it to murmur my name.

  This was my crime. Speaking and fraternizing with the dead. This was why Mimi believed the Devil had my foot, and why she enlisted deluded, fanatical men to save my everlasting soul—and it’s also the beginning of how I came to live in Echo Park in the bungalow on Curran Street overlooking Elysian Park, and how you came to join me, changing my life forever.

  I wanted to tell you this story, Lyse. One I have never told to anyone, at least, in all its parts, because I think it will explain how important the coven is to me, and why I want to ensure it lives on through you, the only other human being, besides my mama, that I have ever truly loved.

  * * *

  It was getting worse. Harder to control. Eleanora didn’t have to wish for it anymore. It just sprung itself on her at will—and if she happened to be washing the dishes, well, if there was a dish in her hand it was done for.

  “Papa,” Eleanora said, taking the frail old man’s hand in her own and giving it a squeeze. “The things I see are getting worse.”

  She called her psychic talents “seeing” because it was easier than explaining what they really were.

  Papa hardly ever opened his eyes anymore, staying asleep for longer and longer stretches of time until Eleanora was afraid he would just stop waking all together.

  Not that she blamed him. Imprisoned in his body, trapped in a dreary existence offering no respite save death, why did he choose to keep going? She didn’t understand, but she knew he must have his reasons.

  At least his room was nice, and he could listen to the radio whenever he liked. Mimi kept the station turned to the Jesus Hour, but whenever her grandmother was out, Eleanora would change it, turning it to a classical station Papa liked. No one had ever told her what Papa liked to listen to, but sometimes when she was “seeing,” she observed him as a much younger man—and that was how she knew he loved Bach and Beethoven.

  “Papa?” She said his name again, and this time he squeezed her hand back. It was so slight a movement anyone else wouldn’t have felt it, but Eleanora had been ministering to her papa practically all her life, and she knew what each flicker of his eyelid, each twitch of his hand meant.

  “I saw Mama again. She was just beautiful. You must’ve been so proud of her.”

  Another squeeze. This one stronger. Her mama, May, had been Papa’s favorite. A real daddy’s girl, Mimi said.

  “She was as big as a house—with me inside her, and she just glowed.”

  This elicited a twitch of his eyelids.

  “I visit her a lot in my mind, Papa. She doesn’t always know I’m there, but I can see everything.”

  Eleanora loved talking to her grandfather. She knew he didn’t judge her, and he would never ever, under any circumstances, repeat what she said to him because he hadn’t spoken a word since Eleanora was a child—but that wasn’t the only reason. Before he’d gotten ill, he’d kept Mimi at bay, acting as Eleanora’s protector when she was too small to look after herself.

  It scared Eleanora to think of what Mimi would do if she realized how much “seeing” went on inside her head. She’d already endured so many scalding baths in her lifetime that just the thought of getting in a full tub made her skin burn.

  “Let’s put something better on the radio,” Eleanora said as she got up from the hard-backed wooden chair she’d pulled up next to Papa’s bed and went over to the radio, fiddling with the knob until she found the classical music he liked.

  There was static, and then the opening bassoon solo of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring exploded out of the beige Bakelite radio’s tinny speakers, sweeping Eleanora into another world. She pirouetted away from the dresser, where the radio always sat, and skipped back to the bed. She was surprised to find Papa’s eyes wide open, bloodshot sclera and bright blue irises fixed on her.

  “What is it, Papa?” she asked, as the rest of the orchestra swelled to join the bassoon in a frenetic cacophony of sound.

  Papa’s eyes drifted away from her, over to the plain wooden dresser, and he began to blink furiously, eyeballs glued to the radio.

  “Do you want me to turn it off?” she asked starting to move back toward the dresser, but the blinking stopped. “No? Then what?”

  More intense blinking, and his right hand began to twitch.

  “Wait,” she said, understanding dawning. “You want me to turn it up, don’t you?”

  Eyes and hand relaxed, almost as though they were sighing with relief. Eleanora smiled, then went over and turned up the volume, the chaotic music filling the room.

  That was when she noticed the tear. It hung from the fringe of Papa’s right eyelash. He blinked, and the tear dropped down the side of his weathered cheek, getting lost inside the folds of his nightshirt.

  “Oh, Papa,” Eleanora said, rushing back to his side to grasp his hand and squeeze the soft flesh of his fingers. “Please don’t cry.”

  It happened so infrequently, she almost forgot it was possible, but every now and then Papa would just lie there crying. There was never a specific reason she could discern. After a while, she decided it must be something he was thinking about, a thought or memory she didn’t have access to and therefore couldn’t understand.

  It was awful to watch him cry because there were no sounds or movements to accompany the tears. She was used to her own crying jags, silent sobbing that shook her body and made her head hurt. Sometimes, when she couldn’t contain herself, she’d press her face into her pillow and scream, the sound muffled by the pillowcase and the delicate down feathers.

  “What is it, Papa? I wish you could just tell me,” she said, hating that there was nothing she could do to help him.

  The music had calmed, a false lull before the chaos began again, and she sighed, letting the music enfold them both.

  “I wish you could talk to me, Papa,” she said, her voice low and melancholy.

  His fingers twitched against her palm, and she knew he was trying to tell her he wished he could talk to her, too. The music danced around them, loud enough that if Mimi came home, she’d throw a fit and complain, saying, What will the neighbors think about all this heathen music playing in our house?

  Eleanora didn’t think there was anything heathen about beautiful music, but what did she know? As far as Mimi was concerned, everything Eleanora liked came from the Devil—especially the “seeing.”

  I wish I could take Papa with me, so he could visit with Mama again, she thought, the idea absurd, but then something inside her told her that no, it wasn’t absurd—maybe she could take Papa with her.

  She didn’t know why she’d never thought of this before. It seemed like such a simple, perfect idea.

  “Would you like to go on a trip with me?” she asked the old man. “Come with me to see my mama again?”

  He blinked rapidly, fingers twitching inside the cocoon of her hand.

  He wants to go, she thought as a fiery curiosity began to gestate in her belly. Can I really do it?

  She’d never tried to take anyone with her before—it wasn’t as though there was anyone to take. No on
e outside Mimi and Papa knew about the visions, and she’d always been too terrified to share them with anyone else. Now she wondered how she could do it. How could she bring Papa along with her into the ghostly world of her “seeing”?

  “I’m gonna try, Papa,” she said, smiling down at him, her words tinged with excitement.

  She closed her eyes, still holding tight to her grandfather’s hand, and focused on what she wanted to do. She pushed away any worries—like that Mimi would come home early from her Ladies’ Auxiliary church meeting—and let her mind’s eye wander.

  “I want to see Mama,” she said aloud, putting her “want” out into the universe . . .

  “. . . where is this?” Papa asked.

  He was standing beside her, fingers laced between hers, but he wasn’t the papa of now. He was the papa of before—before the stroke that silenced him and kept him trapped inside his head.

  Instead of answering him, she took a moment to look around, unsure of when or where they were. All she could see was that they were outside in a field of summer daisies, the sun beating down as the wind navigated its way through the sea of white and yellow flowers with a soft hush. She turned her head, but all she saw behind her were more daisies.

  “I don’t know, Papa,” she said, finally. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Papa said, lifting his free hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

  He was a handsome man, and Eleanora saw that she resembled him more than she’d ever realized. New Englanders, both of them, cut from the same hunk of granite, sharing the same hawkish nose and flinty eyes, the same stern set of the mouth. Even though his hair was salt and pepper to her brown, and his skin wrinkled with age to her smooth, unblemished complexion—anyone who saw them together would know the same blood flowed between them.

  “May?” Papa said, and he squeezed Eleanora’s hand so hard she could feel her knuckles crack.

  She followed his gaze, but all she could see ahead of her was an unending field of flowers.

  “Where’s Mama?” Eleanora asked, struggling to see.