Circle of Three #6: Ring of Light

by Isobel Bird

  But when she stepped into the room she saw that he was there after all. He was sitting in the chair next to the room’s one window. The blinds had been pulled up just enough for him to look out, and he was gazing off into the distance with a faraway look on his face. He didn’t look up, and Annie wondered if he even knew someone had come in.

  She cleared her throat to indicate that she was there, and Ben turned his head. “What do you want?” he barked.

  Annie felt her resolve waning. Ben clearly knew who she was, and he didn’t want her in his room. She couldn’t blame him. She was tempted to just put the package on his dresser and leave. But then she stopped herself.

  “I came to bring you something,” she said, her voice unsteady.

  “I don’t want anything,” Ben said simply. “Just leave me alone.”

  He turned and resumed staring out the window, clearly thinking that he had dismissed Annie. But she didn’t leave, even though she wanted to. Instead, she stepped closer to him and held out the package.

  “Please,” she said. “I want you to have this.”

  Ben glanced at the paper bag in her hands. “I don’t want it,” he said simply.

  “You don’t even know what it is,” Annie said.

  “I don’t care what it is,” the old man answered. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  Annie was getting frustrated. She was trying to do something nice, and Ben wasn’t letting her. She could understand his being upset with her, and even wanting to be alone, but she couldn’t understand why he was being so rude.

  She looked around and saw the picture frame she’d broken sitting on the dresser. Ben had put the photo back in the frame, but the glass was missing and the frame was cracked. It listed to one side, as if it might topple over at any moment.

  Annie opened the bag and reached inside, pulling out the frame she had picked up at a store the night before. It was a beautiful wooden frame, and she’d chosen it because she thought it would show off the black-and-white photo beautifully. Now, as she placed it on the dresser, she saw that she’d made a good choice.

  “What is that?” Ben snapped.

  “It’s a frame to replace the one I broke,” Annie said as she picked up the old frame and slipped off the back. She knew that she was risking making the old man angry again by touching his photo, but she didn’t have anything to lose, so she continued, sliding the picture into the new frame and snapping the back on.

  “There,” she said, holding it out to Ben. “I’m sorry.”

  Ben Rowe looked at the photograph in Annie’s hand, eyeing it suspiciously. But he didn’t make any move to take it from her. Annie stood there for a moment, waiting for him to do something. Then, when he didn’t, she put the photograph back on the dresser and turned away.

  “I hope you like it,” she said as she walked toward the door.

  “Wait,” Ben said gruffly.

  Annie stopped and turned back to him, wondering what he wanted. Again, though, he didn’t say anything. He just stared at the picture on the bureau.

  “If you don’t like it I can take it back,” Annie said. “I just thought you might like a new frame. That one was pretty beat up, and from the looks of the photo it’s one that’s special to you, so I thought it should go in something nice.”

  The old man remained silent. Why did he tell me to wait if he’s just going to sit there glaring at me? Annie wondered. She just couldn’t figure out Ben Rowe at all.

  “That’s me and my brother,” Ben said, breaking the silence.

  “I thought it might be,” replied Annie. “I saw the inscription on the back.”

  For the first time ever Annie saw the man give something like a smile. But almost as quickly as it appeared it was gone, replaced by the familiar stern expression.

  “That was taken in 1942,” Ben continued after a moment. “We were both on leave from the service. I was in the army and Tad was in the air force.”

  “You fought in the war?” Annie asked.

  Ben nodded. “I carried that picture all over Europe with me,” he said. “It was my good luck charm.”

  “No wonder it’s so wrinkled,” Annie said, forgetting that she was speaking out loud and then feeling embarrassed about having said anything.

  But Ben didn’t seem to notice. “That picture was in my shirt pocket for three years,” he said. “I looked at it every day. It kept me going when I didn’t want to.”

  He stopped talking and looked down at his hands.

  “What happened to your brother?” she asked.

  “He was killed,” Ben answered, speaking slowly, as if saying the words hurt his mouth. “In France during a nighttime raid on the Germans in Paris. His plane was shot down.”

  Annie didn’t know what to say. Telling the man she was sorry didn’t seem appropriate. So she remained quiet.

  “That’s what happens in wartime,” he continued. “People die. We all knew that. I watched many of my friends die, sometimes two or three of them a day. I waited to be killed every second I was out there. That’s what soldiers do.”

  “But those people weren’t your brother,” Annie said.

  Ben looked up at her. But this time he didn’t look angry. He looked sad. “No,” he said. “They weren’t my brother.”

  “You must miss him,” said Annie.

  Ben nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been almost sixty years since that photo was taken. Sixty years since I last spoke to him. But I do miss him. I miss him every day.”

  Annie felt a great sadness well up inside her. Ben Rowe didn’t seem like an angry old man to her anymore. He was just someone who missed his brother.

  “Do you have any other family?” she asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “We were the only two. I never married.”

  Annie wondered how Ben had come to live at Shady Hills and what he had done with his life before that. There were all kinds of questions flying around in her head. But one question stood out above them all.

  “What did he mean about the fender?” she asked.

  Ben Rowe laughed. The sound surprised Annie. It was almost creaky, as if the old man’s vocal cords weren’t accustomed to making such a sound. But it also filled her with a rush of gladness. She’d broken through Ben’s shell. She’d gotten him to talk to her, and that felt wonderful.

  “The fender,” Ben said, slapping his hands on his thighs in delight. “I hadn’t thought about that in many, many years. I had a car then, a ‘forty-one Ford, if I remember correctly. Tad begged me to let him drive it. I could never say no to him, so I let him. Of course the first thing he did was run it into an old apple tree while trying to get out of the driveway. I could have killed him, but he was laughing so hard I couldn’t be mad.”

  Ben stood up, walked to the dresser, and picked up the photograph. His fingers stroked the wood of the new frame. Then he looked at Annie.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  Annie smiled. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Like I said, I felt bad about breaking the other one.”

  “This is the only photo I have left of Tad,” Ben said.

  “I noticed that you don’t really have a lot of personal stuff in here,” Annie commented hesitantly. She didn’t want to risk making Ben Rowe angry, not after she’d managed to finally get things off to a pretty good start.

  Ben snorted. “Why bother?” he said. “It’s just a room.”

  “But you have to live in it,” Annie protested. “You should fix it up a little.”

  “I was never very good at that kind of thing,” Ben said.

  Annie opened the paper bag again. “Well, luckily I am,” she said. “I got you something else.”

  Ben watched warily as Annie pulled her second surprise out of the bag. She’d been hanging on to it, in case things went badly. But she seemed to be on a roll, so she figured she could chance it.

  “I think these are a good start,” she said, holding up a pair of curtains made out of a pretty blue material. Sh
e’d found them at the store and picked them up on impulse.

  “This place needs some cheering up,” she told Ben as she walked over to his window. Pulling the blinds up, she let some of the bright sunlight in. Almost immediately the space felt lighter and cozier. Ben watched her as she stood on his chair and took down the empty curtain rod that hung above the window.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  “I know I don’t have to,” Annie answered as she slipped the first curtain over the rod. “But I want to.”

  “Why?” Ben asked.

  It was a good question. Annie had asked herself the same thing over and over as she’d made her plans. Why was she so interested in making friends with Ben Rowe, or at least getting him to talk to her? It would have been easy to just ignore him, to let him keep on being angry and unpleasant. But for some reason she’d felt the need to take him on as a kind of project.

  “I know what it’s like to be lonely,” she said, hanging the second curtain and stepping off the chair.

  She turned to see Ben’s reaction to the drapes. They really did give the room a whole different appearance. The old man was looking at them with an unreadable expression on his face. Did he hate them? Annie couldn’t tell.

  “My parents died,” she told him. “When I was little. I know how that feels.”

  “It doesn’t go away,” he said suddenly. “The pain. It changes as time goes by, but it’s always there. People like to tell you that it goes away, but it doesn’t. It’s like part of you died with the person who’s gone, and you don’t get that back.”

  He seemed to be talking as much to himself as he was to Annie. She knew what he meant. He was right; the pain hadn’t gone away for her either. It had grown less, but it was still there.

  “You came here because of them, didn’t you?” Ben asked her.

  Annie nodded. She hadn’t told anybody her real reason for volunteering at the home, but he had guessed it. She’d come there because she wanted to understand. She wanted to understand what happened to people as they prepared to die. She wanted to look at something that people usually tried hard to avoid. She’d been avoiding it all of her life, ever since the night the fire had claimed her parents. Now she was trying to face it in her own way.

  “The curtains look nice,” Ben said, as if their previous conversation were at an end.

  “Yeah,” Annie said. “I think they look good. And if you want to, we can do some other stuff, too.”

  Ben looked at her. “You’re quite a girl,” he said.

  Annie laughed. “Coming from you, I think that’s the best compliment I could ask for,” she said.

  “But you’re not very good at magic tricks,” the old man added.

  “Just be glad I wasn’t trying to saw you in half,” Annie shot back.

  “Annie, could you come help me in the office for a minute?”

  Mrs. Abercrombie was standing in the doorway. She was looking from Annie to the curtains to Ben with a puzzled look on her face.

  “Can’t you see we’re talking?” Ben snapped at the nurse, suddenly his grouchy old self again.

  “It’s okay,” Annie said. “We’re done. I’ll come back later, Mr. Rowe.”

  As she walked out of the room, she caught Ben’s eye and he winked at her. Annie smiled, silently laughing at their private joke. She knew he had put on his tough guy act for Mrs. Abercrombie. But she also knew that she had made a new friend. Home run, she thought as she went into the hallway.

  “Don’t tell me you willingly went into the lion’s den,” the nurse said as they walked away together.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Annie answered. “I took a whip and a chair with me.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Annie sat in her room, talking to Kate on the phone.

  “She looks terrible,” Kate said. She’d just finished telling Annie what had happened at the hospital that afternoon.

  “And you think doing a ritual might help?” Annie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I don’t think it can hurt, right? We’re always talking about how magic is energy and how it can be used to change things. Why couldn’t we use it to help heal someone? When I was doing that report for class I read a lot about how early witches were really people who knew how to heal.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Annie asked her friend.

  “I’m not sure,” answered Kate. “I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it. We just got home a little while ago. I’m going to think about it tonight and come up with something. But I thought maybe we could get together tomorrow night at your house and do it. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” Annie said. “Just let me know if you need me to get anything or do anything. Do you think we should talk to Sophia or Archer about this?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kate replied. “It’s not like that first time, when we didn’t really know what we were doing. Besides, it’s not really a spell or anything. I think we’re okay on our own.”

  Annie paused, unsure of whether or not to say what she was thinking. “What about Cooper?” she asked finally.

  Kate sighed. “I thought about that, too. I don’t know. She’s been so distant lately, and she said she doesn’t want to be involved in anything to do with Wicca right now.”

  “This is sort of different, though,” Annie countered. “It’s not like it’s with a group or anything. It’s just us.”

  “It would be nice to have her there,” Kate admitted. “I guess I could ask her.”

  They talked for a few more minutes and then hung up. Annie sat on her bed, thinking about what was happening. She looked at the picture hanging on the wall across from her bed. It was one her mother had done. Her aunt had found it in a storage space while looking for paintings to use in a show of Chloe Crandall’s work that she had arranged as a surprise for Annie the month before. The painting depicted Annie as a little girl looking out a window at the moon. Whenever Annie looked at it she felt happy, as if her mother were still there, holding her in her arms.

  She didn’t want Kate to lose her aunt. She knew her friend was afraid that that’s exactly what was going to happen. Even worse, she had time to think about it. When Annie’s parents had died, it had been unexpected and sudden. The shock had been terrible, and the pain almost unbearable. She imagined it had been the same for Ben Rowe, losing his brother the way he had. Neither of them had gotten a chance to say good-bye to the people they loved.

  But Kate was watching her aunt die before her eyes. Annie wasn’t sure if that was easier or harder. It gave Kate a chance to say everything she wanted to. But it also meant that she had to spend every day not knowing if it was going to be the last one they had together. Would it have made anything easier if she had known that her parents were going to die? She didn’t know.

  She heard laughter coming up the stairs from the kitchen. Her aunt and her little sister were doing something there. Annie smiled at the sounds of their voices. They sounded so happy. Meg’s high-pitched shrieks were followed by her aunt’s rolling laughter, as if they were chasing one another around the room. Despite her concern for Kate, Annie couldn’t help but be glad that she had people she loved around her.

  “Hey,” she called, jumping off the bed and heading for the door. “Stop having so much fun without me.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hello?” Cooper said, picking up the phone next to her bed. She wondered who would be calling her at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  “Hi,” said Kate. “It’s Kate.”

  There was an awkward silence as Cooper hesitated. She didn’t know what to say next.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said finally. “Sasha told me about your aunt.”

  “That’s sort of why I’m calling,” Kate said. “I was wondering if you could help me out.”

  “Sure,” Cooper said instantly, relieved that Kate didn’t seem to be angry with her. “What do you need?”

  “Annie and I
are doing a ritual,” she said. She stopped, letting the words sink in.

  “A ritual?” Cooper said doubtfully.

  “Yeah,” Kate continued. “At her house tonight. It’s to help my aunt. Well, I hope it will help her. I don’t really know. But at this point it can’t hurt.”

  “Is she that bad?” Cooper asked, avoiding Kate’s question.

  “It’s not good,” answered Kate. “The cancer is in her bones.”

  Cooper closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her forehead. She could tell Kate wasn’t doing well herself. Her friend’s normally cheerful voice sounded almost drugged, as if she hadn’t been sleeping much.

  “So what do you think?” Kate said. “Will you come?”

  Cooper let out a long breath. “I don’t know, Kate,” she said. “You know I’m done with all of that.”

  “I know,” Kate said, “but this isn’t really like doing something with a lot of people. It’s just me and Annie.”

  “I just don’t think I’d be any use,” Cooper said. “You know you have to be in the right frame of mind for this stuff to work right. I don’t want to bring any negative energy to it.”

  There was more silence as Kate didn’t respond. Then she said, “The three of us have done some really great work together. Your energy was part of that. In fact, if it weren’t for you we would probably never have gotten together.”

  “That was different,” Cooper protested. “I was really into all of it then. I’m not now. I know you and Annie don’t understand what happened to me, but it wasn’t a lot of fun. I don’t want to get involved with that kind of thing again.”

  “I think you’re blaming everything to do with Wicca for what one group of people did to you,” Kate said.

  “Maybe I am,” Cooper told her. “But that’s not the whole thing. It’s about magic, Kate, and about what happens when it gets out of control. Remember what happened with you and Scott?”

  “But I didn’t know what I was doing!” countered Kate. “Now I do. And so does Annie. And so do you. It’s not going to get out of control, I promise.”