by Isobel Bird
She walked over to her bookcase and took down the photo album that she and her aunt had made with the photographs that Aunt Sarah had found some time ago while cleaning out some boxes. Returning to her bed, Annie slipped beneath the sheets and pulled the comforter up around her. Even though it was October, she had her window open a little, and the room was chilly. But it was warm beneath the blankets, and the light of her bedside table lamp was cheerful in the predawn dimness.
Annie opened the book and turned the pages, looking at the photographs. She and her aunt had arranged them chronologically, so flipping the pages was like watching the years go by. She saw herself as a baby being held by her father, whose face wore a nervous expression as he looked into the camera, as if he were afraid of dropping her when the flash went off. There were pictures of her in the garden of the house, playing with a kitten, and sitting on the laps of both her grandmothers, who had died before she was five.
It was fun seeing pictures of herself, but the images Annie loved the most were the ones of her mother and father. Whenever they appeared she paused, studying their faces. Her mother, with her long golden hair, was always laughing. Her dark-haired father was more serious, seldom allowing himself a full smile, but his eyes always shone brightly. Because her parents had usually taken the pictures, they seldom appeared in them together. But there were some, taken by friends or relatives, in which they stood side by side. These were Annie’s favorites. She looked at them for long periods, trying to decide if she looked like one parent more than the other. She had her mother’s mouth, she decided, and her father’s eyes. In general, she resembled her father more, while Meg was growing up to be a smaller version of their mother.
I just wish she could have known them longer, Annie thought sadly as she thought about Meg. She’d been a baby when they died, and remembered nothing about them. She’d missed out on knowing two of the most wonderful, loving people Annie had ever met. That, maybe, was the greatest sadness of all, and the thing for which she felt the most guilt.
She continued to turn the pages of the photo album, pausing here and there to remember or to wonder what occasion had resulted in a particular picture’s being taken. The more she looked at the images the more she remembered. In particular, she remembered the house at 279 Salingford Street, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where she’d lived with her parents. She could easily close her eyes and picture the little pink-and-white Victorian house with its funny peaked windows, white steps, and garden filled with roses and poppies. It had been a place where she’d felt secure, a place where nothing bad could happen to her.
But something bad had happened, destroying that veneer of safety. Still, Annie remembered the house warmly. She hadn’t seen it again after the fire; the people she was staying with had wanted to keep her away from the sight of it. And she’d never been back. She wondered now what had happened to it. Had it been totally destroyed? Had another house been built where it had stood? Was there still a garden?
She closed the photo album and set it on the bedside table. Ten years, she thought. It had been almost ten years since the fire. She’d lived without her parents for a longer time than she’d lived with them. Yet they were still an incredibly important part of her life. They were responsible for who she was, and what she had become. But what would they think of the person she was now? Would they be proud of her? Would they like her friends, and would they approve of her involvement in Wicca? She was pretty sure that they would, but it would be nice to know for sure.
She found herself glancing at the picture that hung on the wall across from her bed. It had been painted by her mother, and it depicted Annie as a little girl, being held by her mother as she stared out at a full moon that seemed to reflect the face of the Goddess. Ever since first seeing it hanging in an exhibition of her mother’s work, Annie had wondered exactly what her mother had been trying to portray in the picture. Now that it hung in her own room she looked at it a lot, and still she didn’t have any answers.
“If I could just talk to you,” she said out loud, speaking to the image of her mother. “If I could just ask you some questions.”
That’s what she wanted for her birthday, she thought. She wanted to be able to see her parents again, to talk to them and have them hold her. Just for a few minutes. That would be the best gift she could ever receive. It was also impossible.
She continued to look at the picture of herself and her mother. And as she did an idea came to her. She knew it wasn’t possible to get her parents back. But perhaps there was something she could do that would help her feel as if she were closer to them. Perhaps she could do something to help heal some of the pain she felt about their deaths.
She lay in bed, thinking. It was too early to get up, even though the excitement inside her was growing stronger the more she thought about her idea. Could she do it? She wasn’t sure, but she knew it was worth a try. She couldn’t do anything until the morning, though, so she tried to will herself back to sleep.
Eventually she did sleep, although fitfully. She woke up every half hour, hoping that the sky outside her window would be lighter. And finally it was. She looked at her digital clock. It was 6:13. Relieved, she got up and went to her bathroom to shower. When she was done she pulled on some clothes and went downstairs. Her aunt, still in her bathrobe, was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea.
“Good morning,” Aunt Sarah said sleepily. “You’re awfully awake for this hour.”
“I know,” Annie replied. “I’ve been up thinking.”
“About what?” asked her aunt.
“My birthday,” Annie answered. “I’ve decided what I want.”
“Hallelujah,” said Aunt Sarah, adding milk to her tea. “So what is it? Clothes? Tickets to see some band I’ve never heard of? The complete works of Sylvia Plath? What does my soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old niece desire most in the world?”
“A trip,” Annie told her.
“A trip?” her aunt repeated. “You mean like to Paris or something?”
Annie shook her head. “No,” she said. “To San Francisco.”
Aunt Sarah looked at her in surprise. “San Francisco,” she said. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Annie said, nodding. “I’m sure. I want to go home.”
CHAPTER 2
“What would you like to talk about today?”
Kate looked at Dr. Hagen. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
It was her fourth meeting with the therapist her parents had insisted on taking her to after she’d told them about her interest in Wicca. So far things had gone surprisingly well. Kate had expected the doctor to tell her that there was something wrong with her and insist that she must have severe mental problems if she was into witchcraft. But Dr. Hagen hadn’t been like that at all. She was nice, and although she hadn’t offered any opinions on the Craft one way or the other, she at least seemed to know something about it, which was more than Kate could say for her parents. They still refused to even say the word witch. Kate had noticed that they were even a little edgy about the Halloween decorations that were going up all over town now that the holiday was approaching.
“Why don’t we talk about the night of Cooper’s hearing?” Dr. Hagen said.
Kate sighed. She’d already told the therapist about the events of that evening several times. But Dr. Hagen kept going back to them.
“You went out with your parents that night to go bowling,” said the doctor, as if she were making a time line for a jury or something.
“Right,” Kate said. “My father thought we should do some kind of family thing, I guess. I’m not sure he even knew about the hearing, but maybe he did. Anyway, he insisted that we all go out to King Pins.”
Kate thought back to the night a few weeks before when Cooper had gone before the school board to argue against the ban they’d placed on the wearing of symbols associated with witchcraft. In particular, they had forbidden her to wear a necklace featurin
g a pentagram, or five-pointed star. She’d fought hard for her right to keep wearing it, and the result had been a showdown with the seven-member board, one of whom was Ralph Adams, the father of Kate’s former friend Sherrie Adams. Mr. Adams in particular had wanted to see all symbols of Wicca banned from the school, but ultimately Cooper had prevailed when a lawyer who also happened to be a witch had come in to help Cooper out. The woman was a friend of Sophia’s, who ran Crones’ Circle bookstore, where Cooper, Kate, and Annie studied Wicca, and she had provided the legal ammunition needed to reverse the board’s decision.
But that hadn’t been the most important part of the evening, at least not for Kate. And it wasn’t what Dr. Hagen wanted to hear about. She wanted to hear about how Kate had defied her parents and gone to the school board meeting to support her friend.
“We went to the bowling alley,” said Kate. “It was me, my parents, and my Aunt Netty. We bowled a game, and Aunt Netty and I won. Then my dad suggested we switch partners so that I would play with him and my mom would play with my aunt. I told him I needed to go to the bathroom first.”
She paused. The doctor waited patiently for her to continue. “When I went to the bathroom I just sort of found myself walking out the door,” Kate said. “I didn’t even change my shoes. I just walked to school wearing those stupid bowling shoes.”
Kate laughed a little as she recalled how silly she’d looked walking down the street in the shoes that were half green and half red. They’d been really uncomfortable, but she’d kept going.
“Weren’t you concerned about what your parents would think when you didn’t come back?” asked Dr. Hagen.
“Not really,” said Kate. “I wasn’t exactly thinking about that. I just knew that I had to get to that meeting.”
“Why was it so important to you?” asked the doctor.
It was a good question. The first time the therapist had asked her, at their session the day after the board meeting, she hadn’t had an answer. But she’d been thinking about it a lot since then, and she’d come up with one.
“I didn’t want Cooper to go through it alone,” Kate explained. “At least that’s what I told myself as I was walking there. I said I was doing it for her. And I was. But that’s not the real reason I went.”
“What was the real reason?” Dr. Hagen asked her.
“I was doing it for me,” answered Kate. “I was doing it because I needed to stand up for what I believe in.”
“Even though you knew your parents would be angry?”
“That’s the funny thing,” Kate said. “I didn’t really care whether they were angry or not. I mean, at first I thought maybe I was doing it to show them that they couldn’t keep me from being who I am, you know? And yeah, I knew my dad would go all aggro when he realized I was gone. But that was all just in the back of my mind. I really was doing it because I needed to. See, all this time Annie and Cooper and Tyler and pretty much everyone have been telling me that I need to let people know that I’m into Wicca. They’re right. But the person who needed to hear it most was me.”
“What do you mean?” said the therapist. “Obviously you know that you have an interest in Wicca.”
“Yes,” Kate replied. “I knew it in my head. But I needed to know it here,” she said, putting her hand over her heart. “I needed to know that it really meant something to me and wasn’t just this idea I said I believed in. It’s sort of hard to explain.”
“You needed to risk losing it?” suggested the doctor.
“Kind of,” said Kate. “I needed to make it real. When I went into that room and stood up with my friends so that everyone could see me, it made it real for me.”
“But you didn’t know that was going to happen,” Dr. Hagen said. “You didn’t know all those people would stand up.”
“No,” Kate said. “But I knew that if I went there something would happen. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I did. I knew I’d have to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I’m Wiccan.’ ”
Dr. Hagen wrote something down in the notebook she always seemed to have with her. “Now tell me about afterward,” she said. “What happened when the meeting was over?”
“That was the weirdest part,” said Kate. “When it was happening I didn’t really think about afterward. It’s like when you see those movies where the kids all stand up to the parents who won’t let them hold a dance, or to the people trying to close down their school or whatever. They always end it right at the point where the kids win and you’re all excited for them, but you never see what happens after that. All I was thinking about was how cool it was to see all of those people standing up with Cooper, and how great it felt to be one of them.”
“But at some point someone has to do something,” the therapist said.
“Well, people just filed out,” Kate said. “It wasn’t any big thing. I went to talk to Cooper and Annie and everybody, and that was it. Nobody on the board said anything to us, and there were no fights or anything like that. At least not until my parents showed up.”
This was the part she’d just as soon forget about. She’d been so excited about the outcome of the meeting, and about her own coming out as a Wiccan, that she’d almost forgotten about her parents. At least until the doors had opened and her father had walked in.
“My father figured out where I was,” she said. “He came over to the school to get me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so mad. He stormed into the room and started accusing everybody within sight of trying to corrupt me. Mr. Rivers tried to calm him down, but he was just furious. He told Cooper’s dad that he could let his own daughter make a fool of herself if he wanted to but that I wasn’t going to be any part of it. That’s when I decided it was probably best to just get him out of there. I knew if I didn’t someone would tell him that I’d announced to the whole room that I’m Wiccan. As it is, he found out anyway. One of his customers told him the next day at the store.”
Kate stopped talking. That was pretty much where the story ended anyway. Her father had come home from work and informed her that she wasn’t to leave the house for any reason other than school and intramural basketball league games until he said that she could. She’d argued with him for a while, but she’d known it was a lost cause.
“How do you think your father felt about your saying that you’re Wiccan?” asked Dr. Hagen.
“I might as well have told him that I’m a murderer,” said Kate glumly. “He just doesn’t get it at all.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother doesn’t get it either,” Kate answered. “But I think she thinks this is just a phase I’m going through. I mean, she didn’t even tell my father about the E-mail I got from Tyler.”
“Why do you think she didn’t?” said the doctor.
“Maybe because she remembers how much my grandmother didn’t like my father when they were going out,” said Kate.
Dr. Hagen nodded. “What about Tyler being a witch?” she said.
“I’m not sure my mother even thinks witches are real,” Kate replied. “Like I said, I think she’s convinced that this is just a phase I’m going through and that if they keep me away from my Wiccan friends I’ll forget about it.”
“But they can’t keep you away from them entirely,” said Dr. Hagen. “You see them at school.”
“For now anyway,” Kate responded. “My dad is still talking about sending me to St. Basil’s.”
“How would you feel about that?” asked the therapist.
Kate thought about it. Tyler attended St. Basil’s, which would be a plus. But she would miss Cooper, Annie, Sasha, and the rest of her friends at Beecher Falls High. It would also mean having to quit the intramural basketball team, which she didn’t want to do. Ironically, before her father’s meltdown she had almost had to quit anyway because a majority of the games were going to be held on Tuesdays, the same night her Wiccan study group met at Crones’ Circle. But now that she’d been forbidden to go to the class she had Tuesdays free. It was, as far as K
ate could tell, the only possible bright spot in her otherwise dismal situation.
“I don’t want to go there,” she said. “I like my school.” Then she had a thought. “Couldn’t you tell my dad that sending me to St. Basil’s would be a really bad idea?” she asked.
Dr. Hagen smiled. “I don’t take sides,” she said.
Kate frowned. “Then what do you do?” she said.
“I try to get you to think,” the doctor answered unhelpfully.
“I’m tired of thinking,” Kate told her. “I think too much as it is.”
“Maybe we should do something different then,” said the therapist unexpectedly.
“Like what?” Kate asked, wondering what she might have in mind.
“Word association,” Dr. Hagen said. “I’m going to say a word and you tell me the first word that pops into your head. No thinking involved. Just say the first thing that comes to you.”
“And the point of this is?” asked Kate.
“Maybe there isn’t one,” said the doctor. “Maybe it’s just fun.”
“Right,” Kate said. “That’s just what me seeing you is all about—having fun.”
Dr. Hagen didn’t say anything in response. She sat back in her chair, thought for a moment, and then said, “Home.”
“Family,” Kate replied almost instantly. It seemed a logical choice to her, since her home was where she lived with her family. She wondered if it was the right answer. She looked for any sign of Dr. Hagen’s feelings about her response, but as usual the therapist’s face was unreadable.
“Friends,” said the doctor.
“Acceptance,” Kate said, surprised at how quickly the word came to her.
