Legacy

by Cochran, Molly

“Is that what you put in my tuna sandwich?”

  She laughed. “Oh, no. You needed something different. Very different.”

  We both pushed open the swinging doors with our hips at the same time. Hattie moved on; I didn’t. The door swung back, nearly knocking me over.

  He was there, in the kitchen, standing in front of me with a crate of lettuce in his hands.

  Satan.

  Well, almost. Peter Shaw. Actually, he didn’t look exactly malevolent, only surprised. Maybe as surprised as I was.

  “Oh, Peter,” Hattie said breezily. “This is our new helper, Katy.”

  “Kaaaay,” crooned a voice from behind him. It was a child, maybe ten or eleven years old, sitting in what looked like an oversized high chair.

  Something was wrong with him. His head lolled to one side. His eyes were crossed. His mouth hung open, and a line of drool ran down the side of his chin in a rough red gully. There were a few broken crayons on the tray in front of him, and a piece of paper with a drawing on it.

  “Kaaaay,” he repeated, thrusting the drawing toward me.

  Hattie dabbed at the drool with a tissue and put her arm around him. “That’s right, honey,” she said, giving the boy a kiss on the top of his head “This is Katy, our new friend. Katy, this is Peter’s brother, Eric. He lives here.”

  At the sound of his name, the boy kicked his legs and clapped his hands together. The drawing fell on the floor. I picked it up. And gasped.

  It was a drawing of birds flying over a lake, and might have been drawn by Michelangelo. The water shimmered. The crayon-colored sky looked so real that I could almost feel the wind moving. The birds themselves were magnificent, each tiny creature muscled and feathered, each sparkling, living eye minutely different from all the others.

  “This is unbeliev—” I began, but Eric was twisting around in his chair, shrieking and kicking furiously.

  Peter grabbed the drawing out of my hands and smoothed it out in front of his brother. “Leave him alone,” he said.

  I backed away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that he’s so . . .”

  “Brain damaged?” Peter spat. “But then, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

  “Hush, Peter,” Hattie interrupted. “She doesn’t know any such thing. Katy, dear, you go cut six tomatoes into slices, and take out some basil. I’ll show you what to do with it in a minute.”

  I scurried away to the large walk-in fridge, stealing glances at Eric and Peter from behind my shoulder.

  “Why her?” I heard Peter ask as I retreated.

  Hattie didn’t answer him.

  CHAPTER

  •

  SEVEN

  SIGILLUM

  By the last week in October I was an old hand in Hattie’s Kitchen, part of a three-person crew including Hattie, myself, and my new buddy Peter Shaw. Unlikely as it was, Peter and I managed to stay out of each other’s way as we knocked ourselves out to prepare for the annual community Halloween party. Apparently it was an old tradition in Whitfield, as well as the anniversary of the opening of Hattie’s, so Halloween was a big deal all around. We spent the week before cooking and freezing enough food for at least two hundred people, and that didn’t even count the salads and fruit and sauces and desserts that would have to be made fresh. Since there were only sixteen tables in the dining room, I had no idea how we were going to accommodate everyone.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Hattie said, laughing. “There will be plenty of room, you’ll see.”

  I didn’t know how that would be possible, but I’d learned not to doubt anything Hattie said.

  It hadn’t taken long for me to get used to my job. Every day there’d be a new recipe for me to try, usually with some weird component as part of the mix: An antique silver spoon, a handful of rose petals, the branch of a willow tree, a string of glass beads. Even the music she played, I discovered, went into the food. Once Hattie had me cry real tears into a pot of bean soup. That wasn’t easy. I don’t like to cry. Still, for the sake of the menu, I worked up a few drops.

  Also, she was always making me think or concentrate on some emotion or other. “Pick it out of the air,” she’d say, as if things like curiosity and courage were just floating on the breeze, waiting to be snatched up and then tossed into a salad like slices of cucumber.

  Everything we did in the kitchen seemed to be infused with some sort of strange spirituality. Strange, but good. Nobody ever left Hattie’s kitchen feeling sad or mean or wishing they’d never been born.

  Not even me.

  So I just went along and did whatever she told me. If Hattie wanted a custard full of perseverance, I gave it to her.

  Besides, most of these “spells”—that’s what I called them, anyway—were variations on the love bomb I’d given the cranky man in his tuna. Crazy as it seemed, love was becoming my specialty.

  Sometimes I wondered if what I was doing really was as magical as it seemed. I mean, I wasn’t chanting incantations or burning toads’ tongues, but I could actually feel the love I was putting into that food.

  Or I thought I could feel it.

  I asked Hattie about it once, if what we did had anything to do with magic.

  “There is magic in everything,” she said in her low, warm voice. “You just have to be able to see it. And to see it, you must first believe that you will see it.”

  Getting ready for the Halloween party was so hectic that I hardly had enough time to read my emails or to do any of the other solitary things that my life used to revolve around. It was as if suddenly my whole world got bigger. But it was even more than that: It was as if all my senses were becoming heightened. I could smell the fall air in the food I cooked. I could touch the living heart of a pumpkin or a butternut squash. I could taste the very stars in a sprig of carrot tops. I could hear the song of the sea in the oysters that Peter and I shucked open by the hundreds.

  We had arrived at an uneasy but workable truce. That wasn’t hard, really, since most of what he did was on the outside—pulling up weeds and rotting stalks from the herb garden, driving Hattie’s truck to the docks for seafood, bringing in crates of produce from the market, hauling out the garbage. On the occasions when we’d have to work together, we were usually too busy to do much talking, anyway.

  And Eric was always there, drawing those fabulous pictures with his crayon stubs on the backs of paper placemats. I’d never met a sweeter kid in my life. He was irresistible. Every time he held out his little stick-arms to me and yelled “Kaaaay!” I melted. I think I got more hugs from him during our first week together than I’d had in my entire life up till then.

  And every time was a weird, unique, and wonderful experience. Eric was all elbows and ribs and flailing head. Whenever I’d go near him, he’d get all excited and kick out his skinny legs, usually connecting painfully with some part of my anatomy, while at the same time grabbing me anywhere he could—my hair was a popular spot—and then crush me to him like his favorite teddy bear.

  No one had ever held me like that, as if my being with him were simply the greatest pleasure he could imagine. Or maybe I was just projecting.

  At first Peter made a big deal about my not going near his brother, but Eric just insisted on bringing me into their circle, and in time Peter backed off a little. It was a strange quartet, Hattie and Eric and Peter and me. Strange, like everything else in Whitfield.

  Halloween didn’t start out auspiciously. Eric was sick, so Hattie had to divide her time between his room upstairs and the kitchen which, even at ten in the morning, was a complete nuthouse.

  “Of course this would happen on the biggest night of the year,” Hattie muttered as she carried a stack of pie crusts to the side counter. “Katy, we’ll need ten pumpkin, four French silk chocolate, two lemon meringues, and two banana creams. Peter, you start on the vegetables. There’s a list on the table. I’ll get the bread into the oven.”

  In
place of the usual music, all I heard was the clattering of pans as I gathered the ingredients I needed for the pie fillings.

  “I need a roll of parchment!” Hattie cried.

  “Coming up.” I dropped what I was doing and dragged a stepladder over to the cabinets. Above the canned goods were dozens of industrial-size rolls of foil and plastic wrap, plus smaller oblongs of wax paper, storage bags of various sizes, take-out boxes, doggie bags, and a variety of liquid containers with lids. “We’re in luck,” I said, spotting the one remaining roll of parchment. “Hey, what’s this?”

  There was something behind it, stuck in the corner. From my vantage point on the stepladder it resembled a flattened tree, but when I pulled it out I saw that it was a wall hanging of some kind, with a frayed leather cord that had been snapped in two.

  Under the dust and grime I could tell it was really a beautiful thing, a miniature garden trellis filled with climbing dried wildflowers. Along the bottom were some tiny pumpkins flanking a wooden sign with “Hattie’s Kitchen” painted on it.

  “Look at this,” I said, scrambling down with it in my hands. “It’ll be perfect for tonight. We’d just have to fix the—”

  I don’t know what I said after that. I felt a rush in my head as if everything was speeding up and slowing down at the same time. When I looked back down I was still holding the wall hanging, but it was perfect. No dust. No dirt. I touched it and turned it over, examining it on all sides. It looked brand new. But how?

  I lifted it, felt its weight, smelled the fresh green scent of new flowers. The hanging was going to be a gift for Hattie. My best friend. I’d made it myself, in honor of Hattie’s opening night, October 31, 1994.

  1994? That was before I was even born! I pushed. I struggled. I scrambled to make sense of things, but in the end I wasn’t strong enough. When I looked down again I realized that the hands holding the wall hanging weren’t mine. They belonged to someone older than I was, not old, but a grown woman.

  And I was not Katy Jessevar any longer. I was her, this woman with her slender, busy hands, who smelled like roses and wore blue shoes and white stockings. I had made the wall hanging with flowers from the Meadow and miniature pumpkins I’d grown myself, in a window box. I’d drilled holes into the “Hattie’s Kitchen” plaque and used wire to hold it in place.

  Hattie wouldn’t see it, but on the back of the sign I’d drawn the sigils for “Best Efforts” and “Help From Others.” I’d wanted to wish her luck, but every witch knew better than to call for something like “Good Fortune.” That was a sure way to trip yourself up, because no one really knew what “good” meant. Or “fortune,” either. No, Best Efforts was straightforward. Hattie would always give her best effort. And you never knew when you’d need help. My wish for her was that when that time came, someone with a kind heart would step up to lend a hand. I hoped it would be me.

  I put clear nail polish on the pumpkins as a finishing touch, then blew on them. Love breath. As I did, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror on the dresser. It was disturbing. My eyes were as strange as everyone said they were, inside and out, strange eyes that saw farther than I wanted to see.

  I wish, I wish . . . but there was no sigil for what I wanted. I wanted a subtraction. Take away the sight, the gift, the visions, the knowledge. I’ll trade them all, gladly, for a life like everyone else’s, a normal life spent with no thought of what was coming, no thought of the Darkness, the Darkness and the fire that was its sou . . .

  In the mirror the breath that poured out of me caught fire and spun around me like a dragon’s.

  I shut my eyes tight. Not real, I told myself. I’d had these visions before. They didn’t mean anything. But behind that rational, clear thought was another, a voice speaking softly from deep inside, from a place that knew more than my mind could ever know. And that voice said, Not yet. But soon.

  Oh yes, it was coming. My nightmare vision would darken the whole sky and destroy us all. But who would believe me? Why was I the only one who could see it?

  Run! I thought desperately. I could run away, couldn’t I? Leave this place, take the people I loved, move far away. . . .

  No, no, no. Darkness and fire. That was how my world would end, I knew, and nothing I could do would stop that.

  The flames exploded around me. I felt my skin blistering, smelled my charring flesh.

  I screamed.

  I came to in Peter’s arms.

  “Katy, Katy!” Hattie was pressing a wet cloth to my face. “What happened, child?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The parchment and the wall hanging were lying on the floor beside me. “I was bringing this thing to you, and—” I touched it with the tip of my finger. Instantly I felt the fire around me again. I jerked my hand away. “It was as if I was someone else,” I explained, bewildered. “A whole other person.”

  “Never mind,” Hattie said. “Did you hit your head?”

  “No, I’m fine, except . . .” I pointed to the hanging. “She made that. The person I . . . I was. It was for you, I think. She wrote something on the back of the sign.”

  “Oh?” Hattie chewed her lip as she untwisted the thin wires. There on the back, just where the woman in my—what? Fantasy? Dream?—had drawn them, were two geometric symbols.

  “Best Efforts,” I remembered.

  “Help From Others,” she added, her eyes filling.

  “They’re sigils.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how did I know that? I’ve never even heard that word before. ‘Sigil’? What’s it even mean?” I heard my voice growing shrill with panic.

  “You probably read it somewhere,” Peter said. He made it sound as if I was showboating.

  “I’m telling the truth!” I shouted.

  “Shh.” Hattie stroked my hair. “I know you are. What else did you see?”

  “Well . . .” I didn’t know if I should even mention this part.

  “Go on.”

  “And then the room burned around her,” I said quickly. “At least, I—she—imagined it did.”

  Peter frowned, but said nothing.

  “Hey, I don’t understand it, either,” I said defensively.

  “The Darkness,” Hattie whispered. “Even then she saw it coming.”

  “That’s what she called it,” I blurted, astonished that Hattie would accept what I was saying so easily. “But it wasn’t really darkness. It was fire. And it was as if she knew . . .”

  Peter pushed me onto the floor and moved away from me, a look of suppressed rage on his face.

  “Hush up, boy,” Hattie spat.

  He threw up his hands and stomped back to the vegetable table.

  I pulled myself up to a sitting position. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said, too tired to play any more games.

  “I should have known,” Hattie said. “The first day you worked here. When you touched that man’s hand, you could see his whole life.”

  “I guess.”

  “That is your gift, Katy.”

  I shrugged. “It was more like a game, really—”

  “No.” Her eyes were stern. “It was never a game.”

  “But I was concentrating then. It doesn’t happen all the time.”

  “It still happened. And now you touched this—” She smoothed the tips of her fingers over the hanging. “—and you saw the one who fashioned it. You became her.”

  “But how?” I asked. “And why? Why me? Why her?” I rubbed my eyes. “I didn’t even know her.”

  Hattie took my hand and exhaled, a long, ragged breath. “Yes, you did,” she whispered. “She was your mother.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  EIGHT

  JUSTICE

  An ear-piercing shriek broke the tension. It was Eric. His screaming shook the walls. Peter wanted to go to him, but Hattie insisted that he stay in the kitchen with me.

  It was embarrassing. I hadn’t meant to make a scene, especially not today. And Peter Shaw and his crappy
attitude were the last things I wanted to have around while I was trying to figure out what had happened.

  I’d somehow gotten into the head of my mother. My dead mother, who my dad and his girlfriend had called criminally insane. And what else? Oh, yes, demonically possessed.

  “You’re supposed to be making coleslaw,” Peter reminded me. I jumped.

  I had kind of come to a standstill over the twenty-gallon mixer. The vat was filled with eight heads’ worth of sliced, chopped, and marinated cabbage. All I had to add now was mayonnaise, seasoning, lemon juice, and twenty grated carrots. It was some time after carrot number ten that I’d zoned out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t know what you’re doing here, anyway,” he grumbled.

  “I was invited to work here,” I said, full of bravado.

  “You were invited because you’re an Ainsworth.”

  I slammed my fist on the counter. “Doesn’t anyone around here listen? My name is—”

  “It’s Ainsworth,” he said quietly. “Whatever you say, whatever you believe, you’re one of them. What happened today proved that.”

  I looked at the floor. “I think that was just . . . stress . . .”

  He threw up his hands. “Stress? You were reading a dead person’s thoughts, Katy.”

  “Hattie said it was a gift.”

  “Yeah. An evil gift.” He picked up the wall hanging from the counter and threw it into the garbage bin.

  “How dare you!” I huffed. “My mother made that!”

  “Your mother was a psycho!” he spat.

  I lunged at him. He grabbed both my wrists and held me at arms’ length. “Do you want to know what kind of person your mother was? I’ll tell you. When my brother was a baby—a baby—she picked him up and threw him against a wall.”

  I felt the air whoosh out of me.

  “I was there. I saw it. So did Hattie. And about a hundred other people.”

  “You’re lying!” I screamed.

  “Go to the library and look up the news stories,” he said. “Afterward, she walked away like nothing had happened.”