The World From Up Here

by Cecilia Galante

  I glanced at Aunt Marianne. She was standing a few feet away, holding the little rubber ball. She had a smile on her face. “Wow, that’s great, buddy,” I said. “Did you say thank you?”

  Russell turned around and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Thank you!” he hollered.

  Aunt Marianne laughed and walked over. “You’re more than welcome.” She squatted down between Silver and Russell. “Why don’t we go in the house now Russell, and let the girls fin—” She broke off mid-sentence as her eyes fell on the picture of Witch Weatherly. “Honey? Where did you get that?”

  “I printed it off the computer,” Silver said. “And don’t worry, Mom, I’m not …” Her own voice trailed off as her mother took the picture out of her hand.

  “But … why do you have it?” Aunt Marianne asked, studying the image with a puzzled expression. “How do you know her?”

  “I don’t know her,” Silver said. “It’s Witch Weatherly.”

  “Witch Weatherly?” Aunt Marianne blinked. “What do you mean? This isn’t Witch Weatherly.”

  “Mom.” Silver took the picture back, exasperated. “It’s an old picture of her, obviously, before she went to live on the mountain and became Witch Weatherly. I got it off the Internet. It’s no big deal.”

  “But I know that lady.” Aunt Marianne shook her head, reaching for the picture a second time. She studied it again, the lines in her forehead growing deeper. “I remember her,” she said, tapping the picture. “I do. When we came back to visit Greta that time for her birthday. She was in the apartment.”

  My blood ran cold. Momma had known Witch Weatherly? It couldn’t be.

  “Are you sure it was her?” I heard myself ask. “That was a pretty long time ago. It could have been anyone.”

  “No, no, I’m positive.” Aunt Marianne pointed to Witch Weatherly’s forehead. “I remember this strange little birthmark above her eye. It was so unusual that I just kept staring at it. It looks like a little moth or something, doesn’t it? Oh yes, that’s her. That’s definitely her.”

  A shiver ran up and down the sides of my arms. Was it possible that Momma and Witch Weatherly had lived in the same building just a few feet away from one another?

  “Was she in Momma’s apartment?” I asked. “I mean, the day you saw her?”

  Aunt Marianne frowned, deliberating this. “No,” she said finally. “She was sitting on the front porch, reading a book. You know, the apartment building they lived in was really just an enormous house that had been sectioned off into different units. I believe Ms. Weatherly owned it. Your mom was sitting on the porch steps with her when we arrived, and Greta introduced us.”

  “And then what?” I pressed.

  “She shook our hands.” Aunt Marianne smiled. “And I stared at her birthmark a little, and that was the end of it. I didn’t see her again until we left.”

  “What happened when you left?”

  “Nothing happened. She was still on the porch, reading her book, and she put it down when we came out, and waved good-bye. I do remember the book for some reason. It had a very interesting cover, with pictures all over. I think it was called The Secret Power of Plants.”

  “The Secret Power of Plants?” The tiny hairs on my arms prickled.

  “Yes.” Aunt Marianne shrugged. “I think that was it.” She handed the picture back to Silver. “That is just so weird. Sheesh, it’s a small world, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Silver was watching me. “I guess.”

  “Why do you have this picture anyway?” Aunt Marianne said. “You know I told you I don’t want you going—”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Silver cut her off. “But I’m still doing a report on her for my history project. Just off the Internet.”

  “Okay.” Aunt Marianne stood up and held out her hand. “Well, come on, Russell, let’s go back in. I think it’s almost time for Captain Commando.”

  Silver crossed her legs and twirled a piece of hair around her index finger as her mother and Russell walked off. “Wren?” She poked the front of my knee. “You okay?”

  Her voice sounded far away. I felt dazed. My arms and legs felt separate from me, as if they belonged to someone else.

  “Wren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s really weird, don’tcha think?”

  “What is?”

  “Your mom knowing Witch Weatherly all those years ago?”

  “Yeah.” I blinked, hoping the horror didn’t show on my face. “It kind of is.”

  There was a pause.

  “So I’ve decided when I’m going,” Silver lowered her voice.

  “Going where?”

  “Up the mountain.”

  I looked at her fearfully. “When?”

  “Saturday.”

  “This Saturday?” My eyes widened.

  “Yup. My mom’ll be busy painting again.” Silver raised her eyebrows. “Looks like Russell’s going with her, too.”

  “What about cheerleading?” I asked, sidestepping the Russell comment. “Don’t you have practice on Saturdays?”

  “I quit cheerleading.” She shrugged. “Coach was mad, but I had to do it. Now I’ll have more time to ride Manchester.” She paused, looking back at the mountain. “And to do this.”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t believe she was actually going. That she had a real date set and everything. “Holy cow, Silver, are you really going to do it? All by yourself?”

  “I’m really going to do it,” she said. “All by myself.”

  There was no reason to doubt her.

  I knew Silver Jones well enough by now to know that when she wanted to do something, she found a way to do it.

  No matter what.

  Russell planted himself in Aunt Marianne’s windowsill as soon as we got home from school on Friday and stayed there until Dad’s car finally appeared around the bend, kicking up clouds of dust as it rolled down the long driveway.

  “He’s here!” he screamed, leaping from the ledge. “Wren, Dad’s here! He’s here!”

  I was upstairs in my room, fixing my hair for the fourth time. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to wear it pushed back with a headband, or down straight the way I always did. Dad wasn’t the sort of person who’d ever been interested in things like clothes or hair when it came to me. And yet, for some reason today, it felt important that he notice. He’d finally told me the truth about Momma. He’d trusted me. And I wanted to make sure that he didn’t feel he’d made a mistake. That he could trust me again—with anything—if he wanted.

  I decided to go with the headband. My face looked okay with my bangs pushed off my face. Maybe even a little bit older.

  Dad was already holding Russell in a bear hug when I came downstairs, but he put him down when he caught sight of me. “Butterbean,” he said softly. “Look at you.”

  I walked to him quickly, not wanting Silver or Aunt Marianne, who were sitting there in the kitchen, to notice my eyes getting wet. He pulled me into him, and kissed the top of my head. He smelled different than he usually did, like chlorine and cough drops, and I wondered if Momma’s hospital had a pool.

  “Oh, I’ve missed you,” Dad said.

  “Hey!” Russell poked Dad in the arm. “You didn’t say you missed me!”

  Dad laughed. “I missed you both. Who’s ready for pizza?”

  We went to the Hot Spot and got a booth in the back, near the arcade. Dad ordered an extra-large pizza with pepperoni for us, and cheese fries for Russell, who, for some reason, decided that he didn’t like pepperoni today. Russell had flooded Dad with about a zillion questions about Momma on the way over, and now that he was satisfied she was all right, demanded a handful of quarters so he could go play in the arcade. Dad obliged, and Russell disappeared around the corner.

  “So she really is okay?” I asked when I was sure Russell was out of sight.

  “She really is. Getting better every day.” Dad reached out and touched the side of my hair. “I like your hair like this, honey.
You look so grown-up.”

  “Thanks.” I blushed, pleased that he’d noticed. “But what about the setback you told me she had? You said you’d tell me.”

  He nodded, tracing an invisible line on the table with the edge of his thumb, and pressed his lips together.

  “I know about Witch Weatherly,” I blurted out.

  His thumb stopped moving. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, that she lived in the same house as Momma when she was little.”

  Dad’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “Aunt Marianne told us.”

  “Aunt Marianne wasn’t there.” Dad’s crinkles got even deeper. “How’d she know?”

  “She saw a picture Silver found on the Internet from a long time ago.” Dad stared at me blankly, so I went back and told him about the history project and Silver picking Witch Weatherly as her topic. “She found Witch Weatherly’s college graduation picture and printed it out for her report. And Aunt Marianne saw it and kind of wigged out because she said she knew her. That she remembered her from when she came to visit Momma one summer.”

  “Did Aunt Marianne say anything else?” Dad asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Well, she said she knew it was Witch Weatherly because of some birthmark on her face.”

  Dad nodded.

  “And that she seemed quiet. She was reading some book about the power of plants on the porch when they got there.”

  “Anything else?”

  I thought back, but nothing else came.

  “Nothing about the fire?” Dad’s voice was so soft that I could barely hear him.

  I sat forward. “The what?”

  “The fire.” Dad cleared his throat. “The fire in the house that burned everything down. Did Aunt Marianne say anything about that?”

  I shook my head, an uneasy feeling beginning to wind its way through the middle of my chest. “No. Why?”

  Dad winced, as if something inside his stomach hurt. He brought a glass of soda to his lips and swallowed. I watched his Adam’s apple move up and then down along the inside of his throat, like a tiny walnut. He put the glass back down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “That’s what Momma’s setback was about, honey,” he said quietly. “She told us what happened. She was just a little girl. She didn’t know any better. But she was alone one day, and she started playing with matches …” He stopped talking, looking at me desperately.

  I didn’t understand. Setback? Just a little girl? Playing with matches? Then a shudder ran through me. The people of Sudbury hadn’t burned Witch Weatherly’s house down.

  Momma had.

  I lay in bed for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling after Russell started snoring, and trying not to think about everything that had happened in the past ninety-six hours. But it was impossible, like trying to stop sand from pouring out of a paper bag after you’d cut the bottom out. Russell’s freak-out had exhausted me. And finding out how depressed Momma really was, followed by Aunt Marianne’s recognition of the picture of Witch Weatherly, made my head spin. But the most frightening of all had been discovering that Momma had been responsible for setting the fire at Witch Weatherly’s house all those years ago. No wonder she’d been so terrified of lightning storms. And now I understood why she had collapsed at the sight of her birthday cake with all those burning candles.

  “It was an accident, Wren.” Dad’s voice echoed in my ears. “She didn’t mean to do it. But she never told anyone, and she’s carried the guilt of it for years. I didn’t even know about it until four days ago. But it explains everything, when you think about it. The sadness all these years, her shutting down like she did after Grandpa died, maybe even her hair turning gray.”

  I didn’t think it explained any of that.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that things were starting to add up in a completely different direction. Momma’s gray hair, her breakdown, the blotches all over her hands, which appeared every single spring without fail, at the exact same time of year as the fire; they were all part of Witch Weatherly’s revenge. The people of Sudbury said that Witch Weatherly had gone and haunted Creeper Mountain as payback for losing her house. She’d had a score to settle, vengeance to take. But no one except Witch Weatherly knew the truth about Momma. Which meant that Witch Weatherly hadn’t just haunted Creeper Mountain.

  She’d haunted Momma, too.

  I got out of bed as quickly as possible without disturbing Russell and headed for the bathroom. I sat down on the floor, drawing my legs up against my chest. The wall was cold against my back, the tiles cool under my bare feet. I stared through the little space between my knees. The familiar buzzing sound began in my head, the kind that started when things started to get too crazy, too hard to sort out.

  Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Making a mountain out of a molehill, the way Dad always liked to say. But what if I wasn’t? What if I was right, and Momma was stuck inside one of Witch Weatherly’s spells?

  No. It couldn’t be. That was ridiculous.

  I got up again and began to pace back and forth along the bathroom floor, trying to shake the anxious feeling inside my chest, which had settled there like some kind of rock. It felt as if my whole body was shaking from the inside out, as if something was trying to push its way through to the other side. My eye fell on a water glass sitting on one of the bathroom shelves. It was filled with Aunt Marianne’s eyeliner pencils and makeup brushes. I took out a bright blue pencil and positioned it between my fingers. Over, over, in, under. Over, over, in, under. Again. And again. And again.

  My breathing started to slow. The shakiness began to lift. For a single moment, staring at the spinning pencil, all my thoughts about Momma and Witch Weatherly moved somewhere deep in the back of my head.

  Suddenly, the pencil slipped. I watched as it dropped between my fingers and fell to the floor. I made no move to pick it up. Instead, a ticker tape of thoughts moved steadily through my head, like a train on a track: Only one person in the world could lift the spell that Witch Weatherly had put on Momma. But it could only happen if that someone went up that mountain and convinced Witch Weatherly to do it.

  A sudden wave of nausea forced me to my knees. I leaned forward and pressed my head against the floor. But a sour taste pooled along the back of my tongue, and I crawled on all fours, holding on to the side of the toilet as I retched once and then again, gasping for breath.

  There is no way, I told myself. There is just no way.

  A knock sounded on the door. I closed my eyes and put my head down on the edge of the seat.

  Silver opened it a crack and peeked in. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happened?” She leaned in a little farther. “Oh my gosh, did you get sick?”

  I lifted my head and stared past her, waiting for the room to stop swimming. There is just no way. It’s completely, one hundred percent, absolutely impossible.

  Isn’t it?

  It occurred to me again that I had just ridden a horse. A galloping horse, at that. I’d been thrown from it, too, and lived. I’d also ridden in a plane—without an engine! I’d been six thousand feet up in the air, and I’d come back down without a scratch. I’d even told off Cassie and Nora—and come away in one piece. In a little more than a week, I’d done three things I’d previously thought were impossible. At least for me. Which meant …

  “Wren?”

  “I want to go with you tomorrow,” I whispered.

  Silver stepped inside quickly and shut the door. “Are you sure?”

  No, I was not sure. Maybe, in fact, I had just gone temporarily insane. But if I didn’t try to help Momma, who would?

  As I looked up at Silver, I realized there was something else, too. Over the past weeks, somehow she’d become my friend. And I cared—a lot—about her safety. Which meant that I didn’t want anything to happen to her on that mountain tomorrow.


  “I’m sure,” I said. “I don’t want you to go by yourself. I think it’s better if you have someone with you.”

  “It’s going to be steep,” Silver said.

  “I know.”

  “We’ll have to use hatchets. To cut the brush.”

  “I know.”

  “We might run into hornet-head snakes.”

  “I know.” I shuddered. “And we have to keep an eye out for the hidden pits.”

  “Oh, Wren!” Silver threw her arms around me. “Thank you!”

  I held her tightly, a tiny part of me feeling glad to have made her so happy after all she’d done for me.

  But another, much larger part of me could only pray that we would get back down the mountain alive.

  “Do you think your mom suspected anything before she left?” I struggled to keep up with Silver as we started out across the pasture the next morning. Her natural gait was nearly twice as fast as mine, and even with my long legs, I had to trot to keep up. “I mean, our backpacks are pretty full for a little picnic.”

  “Nah.” Silver strode on ahead. “She was too busy getting all her painting stuff into the car. Don’t worry. We’re fine.”

  I bit my lip, thinking of our cover story, which had involved a lame explanation about cloud-watching, sunbathing, and picnicking out in the field. Aunt Marianne had even offered to take Russell to dinner since we seemed so intent on having the whole day to ourselves, and so our curfew had been inadvertently extended until six o’clock.

  In reality, our backpacks were close to bursting. We had two rusty hatchets we’d found in the barn for cutting back the brush and thorns, bug spray, sunscreen, and two cans of Mace, which Silver said would kill—or at least slow down—any hornet-head snake that crossed our path. I’d managed to sneak a large white sheet inside my backpack to throw over the red raven—just in case—and we each had a pen and paper, two peanut butter sandwiches, four granola bars, six sticks of string cheese, and three bottles of water. Silver had her cell phone, too, of course, in case of emergency, and she had packed a small tin of Aunt Marianne’s caramel fudge brownies as a housewarming gift for Witch Weatherly. It was the least she could do, she said, since the old woman was going to give us some of her time.