by Mindy Klasky
CHAPTER 25
IT WAS STILL dark out when I attempted to leave the next morning.
Attempted. It took me three tries to actually get out the door. First, I forgot my keys to Gran’s apartment. Then, I left behind my carefully hoarded bag of Sephora cosmetics. Then, I forgot the box of condoms that had languished in my night stand for nearly a year, a present from Melissa to celebrate my so-called freedom from Scott, once he had broken off our engagement. I had not looked favorably on the gift at the time, but now I allowed a spiral of excitement to uncurl in my belly at the thought that they might—finally!—be put to excellent use.
Neko hovered close as I made my way out the front door for the third time. “Don’t make too much noise while I’m gone,” I told him. He nodded, looking for all the world like a teenager being left home alone for the first time in his life. “I left some food for you in the fridge.”
“Salmon?”
“No. Chicken.” He sniffed, letting me know what he thought of that choice. I hoisted my bag on my shoulder, fighting to free the ends of my hair from the shoulder strap. “How do I look?”
“He’s not going to be there until tomorrow.”
“Who?” I asked, forcing myself to sound shocked.
“Be careful, Jane,” Neko said.
“Don’t start sounding like David.”
“For all his faults, David can be right sometime.”
“Well not this time. I’m going to have a wonderful weekend with Jason. And when I come back, we’ll straighten out this witchcraft thing once and for all.” Neko kicked at a stone embedded in the garden path. “Seriously. You don’t have to worry. I’m not letting anyone take the books. And I’m definitely not letting anyone take you.”
He made one last, half-hearted kick before forcing a smile across his face. “You aren’t really going to wear your hair like that, are you?”
“What’s wrong with—” I grumbled in exasperation and dashed back into the house. A quick stop in my bedroom to retrieve a black scrunchie, a dash into the bathroom for a mirror as I gathered up my staggered waves of hair, and then I really, truly, absolutely was ready to go. I leaned forward and kissed Neko on the cheek. “See you Sunday night.”
“Ciao!” He made a big show of waving farewell.
Fortunately, I hailed a cab just one block away. Gran was waiting in the lobby of her building, when I let myself in. She was sitting primly on one of the benches beside the mailboxes. I picked up her small suitcase, led her over to the garage elevators, and we hit the road.
After a brief stop, that was, to pick up Clara. With a rush of shame, I realized that I had not even known where my biological mother was living. It turned out that Clara had rented a townhouse in the northern suburb of Silver Spring. I didn’t get to see the inside, but the front of the building was unassuming: red brick, hunter green front door, whitewashed window boxes that were currently bare.
At Gran’s instruction, I got out to ring Clara’s doorbell. She opened the door almost immediately but kept us waiting nearly fifteen minutes while she ran around, collecting the last of her necessities for the weekend. I started to get irritated, but then I remembered that it had taken me a half dozen passes to gather up my own things. Like mother, like daughter? What a truly terrifying thought.
The ride to Connecticut was uneventful. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed driving, even when the vehicle was Gran’s mammoth Lincoln Town Car. “Best looking car on the road,” she affirmed, every time she got into it. She drove herself to the grocery store and to opera guild board meetings, but the car spent most of its time just sitting in her garage.
We stopped a few times, for food and drink and the elimination of same, but we made great time, arriving at the Farm by 1:00. As I stepped onto the wrap-around porch, I was transported back to my childhood, to the years when I had loved vacationing in Connecticut. As I had when I was a little girl, I centered my feet on the great marble block that nestled in front of the door, and I touched my fingers to the house’s wooden clapboards.
“Protect me and keep me safe from all harm
Watch o’er my family here at the Farm”
A frisson ran down my spine, and I turned to Gran, who had taught me the rhyme on my very first visit, more than a quarter-century before. “Gran,” I said. “It’s like a spell!”
“It’s a tradition, dear,” she chided. But I felt the same prickle on my neck when she repeated the words, and Clara as well.
I gave a second look the inset marble block. Marble. A stone long associated with physical protection. With safety. Security.
Before I could question Gran more closely, the door flew open, and relatives boiled around us. Someone took our bags, others ushered us into the kitchen. A dozen helping hands made us more sandwiches than we could possibly eat.
My cousin Leah rested her hands on her hugely pregnant belly as she looked curiously out at the car. “Where’s Scott? Not able to join us again?”
Aunt Jenny leaped to my rescue. “Leah, I told you that Scott wasn’t going to be here.” She lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “He broke off the engagement more than a year ago.”
Leah laughed in fake embarrassment and waved her hand in front of her face. “Of course, of course! I have been so forgetful this pregnancy! They say it gets worse with each one. After three, you’d think I would have learned my lesson. My Joey is just about ready to divorce me!”
Her Joey wouldn’t dare—he’d never find another woman to put up with his wandering eyes and roaming hands. I barely managed to keep from saying that out loud. Leah was exactly why I had not wanted to come to the Farm. Leah, and all my other contented, breeding cousins.
But then, I remembered my secret weapon. I forced a beatific smile to spread across my lips. I tested my tone of voice inside my head, lightened it another shade, then another for good measure. “I invited someone else to join me for the weekend.”
“Who?” Leah asked. I watched Aunt Jenny crane her neck, as if she could make out a body stored in the Lincoln’s deep trunk.
“My Boyfriend,” I said, shrugging to show that my relationship was so steady and stable and committed that I could be casual. “His name is Jason Templeton. He wasn’t able to get away from the city until tomorrow morning, but he’ll stay for the rest of the weekend.”
As I’d hoped, Leah pounced on my information. I spent the next hour insouciantly describing how Jason and I had met, how we worked together, how he was writing definitive articles on George Chesterton and changing colonial scholarship as we’d known it. I even managed to fit in how we had attended the Harvest Gala, making it sound as if we’d planned to be at the event together all along, instead of running into each other by accident.
Gran, bless her heart, kept silent. And Leah, true to form, continued pressing me. She wanted to know about Jason’s family, his background, where he was raised, whether he had any siblings. I didn’t know the answer to most of her questions (despite my most determined research as a reference librarian—that is, using Google to research Jason incessantly—I had not been able to uncover most of my Boyfriend’s background.) Nevertheless, I invented details on the spot. When he arrived, I’d let him know what I’d said. He could back me up.
And until Jason arrived, there were plenty of Farm traditions to take care of. Gran had mapped out who would stay in which rooms. Not surprisingly, I had been assigned a bed in the “Girl’s Room” up in the attic. Clara was parked next to me. We lugged our bags upstairs, and Clara made a show of opening up the round window under the eaves, waving her hands to bring more air into the room.
Cousin Leah was waiting for us when we descended. “It’s always so musty up there,” she said. “Fortunately, Joey and I are in the White Cottage.”
The White Cottage. One of the four outbuildings on the property. They always went to the breeding pairs, as if a couple couldn’t go without sex for two nights in a row. I thought about the box of condoms shoved into the side of my duffle bag. Some of us had survived w
ithout sex for months. Over a year, even.
I knew that I needed to change the topic of conversation or I’d say something I’d regret, so I dredged up my last vestige of maturity and pointed to the choker that Leah wore. “That’s unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen stones like those before.”
She raised her fingers to her throat as if to remind herself of what she was wearing. “Oh, this? Mom gave it to me when I was pregnant with Joe Junior. She said it’s tradition for women in our family to wear it during their last trimester. Oops! You wouldn’t know about that, would you?”
A hot retort rose to my lips, but I made myself look closer at the necklace. The stones were mottled, red with veins of green and white. Sard, I realized. A type of agate, often associated with safe childbirth. (Thank you, Neko, for your patient naming of stone after stone from the kit in my basement.) How long had the necklace been in my family? And what other witchy artifacts lurked here at the Farm?
“Penny for your thoughts.”
I looked up to see another cousin. “Simon!” I leaped to my feet and threw my arms around him. He kissed my cheek and folded me into a bear hug. “How are you?”
“Wonderful. Carol and I are both great.” I looked around for his wife, as petite as he was massive. “She’s corralling the twins.” Carol and Simon had two seven-year-old boys who must be doing their best to brew mischief around the Farm. They lived on a real, working farm in Vermont, and Simon’s boys always knew more than their cousins about leaping from tall surfaces, eating inedible treasures, and setting small fires to precious objects.
“What’s this I hear about a new beau?” Simon asked, scratching his belly as if he’d just awakened from a nap. I launched into my Jason story, ridiculously pleased that the rumors had already spread.
In fact, I got to repeat my tale more than a dozen times, throughout the afternoon and into the evening, as I caught up with relatives I hadn’t seen in far too long. By the time we were returning to the Farm from a chaotic dinner at the Clam Shack, I was having trouble remembering all the details I’d glossed onto my relationship. Was Jason one of five boys, or six? Did he have an allergy to clams and oysters, or clams and crab? Had we discussed wanting three children, or four?
Back at the Farm, I managed to secure one of the prime wicker armchairs on the porch, along with a woolen blanket. The temperature had dropped as soon as the sun went down, but we’d all suited up with jackets, gloves, and mufflers. The entire family was unwilling to miss out on fresh, country air.
While the children played a rambunctious game of flashlight tag on the sloping front lawn, I leaned back in the darkness, listening to my relatives chatter into the night. Clara was quite a hit among my aunts and uncles, catching up with her siblings as if she had merely taken a long vacation.
She made her travels sound exotic and brave, especially as she drew out a long story about making a spirit quest outside of Sedona, camping in the Arizona desert for thirty days and thirty nights to find her true self. I found my mind wandering to that region’s famous red rock, and I wondered what witchy powers my mother might have found inside herself on her retreat.
By the time I staggered up to the attic, I was drunk on family gossip, the shrieks of children, and a bellyful of fried clam strips. I was asleep before my head hit my pillow.
At sunrise, I was awakened by more shrieking children on the front lawn. I could remember when I had been one of those kids, drawn outside by the early morning mist, captivated by the crunch of dew frozen on the grass. I pulled my pillow over my head and pretended to sleep for as long as I could. Eventually, though, even I couldn’t keep up the illusion, and I pulled on my wooly bathrobe and stumbled down to the kitchen.
The teakettle was always ready to go at the Farm, and I soon had a steaming cup of English Breakfast to help me wake up. In short order, Aunt Jenny had taken charge of the kitchen, heating up the electric griddle and spooning out massive rounds of pancakes. Simon took over frying up a half ton of bacon, and Joey actually bothered to lug in a few gallons of orange juice from the giant refrigerator in the storage shed.
After breakfast, one group decided to head out to Old Mystic Seaport, a sort of Disneyland-on-the-Sea that recaptured the magic of the whaling industry. Another group decided to head into Salem for the annual Autumn Art Arcade, a judged show of local artists.
Pregnant Leah claimed that her ankles were too swollen for her to go anywhere; she staked a claim to the farmhouse’s sunny parlor. I stayed in the Girl’s Room, trying on every item of clothing I’d brought with me, brushing my hair, pulling it back, letting it go straight, applying makeup, re-applying makeup, eating an emergency donut, eating another, contemplating a third (and eventually giving in but promising myself that I would not have lunch.)
Oh, and I drove myself insane wondering when Jason would arrive.
As it turned out, he must have left Washington well before dawn; his boxy blue Volvo pulled into the Farm’s driveway just a few minutes past noon. While I knew that one school of Boyfriend management said that I should wait on the porch for my one true love, I gave in to the Jane Madison School of No Restraint.
I hurtled down the front steps, coming to a gravel-spray stop in front of the driver’s door. “Hello!” I exclaimed as Jason clambered out. I couldn’t keep from grinning. Truth be told, I felt like laughing loud enough for them to hear me out on the highway.
“Mmmm,” Jason said, pulling me in for a kiss that was as perfect as any I could have scripted. My arms automatically went around his waist; I hardly spent any time wondering if he would think I was too forward, too passionate, too needy.
“Any trouble finding us?” I asked.
“None at all.”
“And the traffic wasn’t bad?”
“Oddly enough, at six o’clock on a Saturday morning, traffic is relatively light. Even around the Beltway.” The laughter behind his words made my heart pound, and I tried to shake my goofy grin off my face. This was all too perfect. It couldn’t be happening to me.
“Come on in!” I said, finally remembering that I was supposed to be the hostess. “Most folks have gone out for the day, but there are still a few of us here.”
“I didn’t mean to make you miss out on all the fun,” he said, running a long-fingered hand through his unruly curls.
“I haven’t missed out on anything,” I said. And Jason’s smile absolutely convinced me that I was speaking the truth—as if I ever could have doubted. We climbed the steps to the front porch.
“So, Professor Man really does exist.” Leah barely smiled from the top of the stairs, her pregnant belly thrusting toward us like the body of a malevolent spider.
Jason turned toward me in mock surprise. “And here, I thought that all my years of schooling were wasted. Professor Man! To the rescue!” He slid his left palm to the small of my back, and the motion ran a shiver from the top of my head to my tailbone. “Jason Templeton,” my Boyfriend said, shaking Leah’s hand.
“Leah Stark,” she said reluctantly. I could read her thoughts as clearly as if they were words written on the parchment pages that filled my basement. She wondered how I could have landed a catch as perfect as Jason. She gave me another appraising glance before she stepped aside. “Well, I’d better get back to the kitchen. I promised to start the baked beans for tonight.” She whirled back to Jason with all the subtlety of a tabby pouncing on a mouse. “Jane said that you were allergic to clams, but we’ll have halibut and side dishes at the clambake.”
Jason, bless him, didn’t bat an eye. “Jane always remembers my allergies. I hope you didn’t expand the menu just for me, though.”
Leah rolled her eyes. “No. Most of the kids hate clams, anyway.”
“They’ve got good taste,” Jason said with a smile. He reached around Leah to hold the screen door for her as she went back into the house. I could have melted on the spot.
Instead, I remembered that Jason had never been to the Farm before. “Here!” I exclaimed, once the screen
door had slammed closed behind us. “Let me show you the upstairs.”
As we clambered up to the attic, I waited for him to comment on his sudden shellfish allergy. Instead, he waited until we were on the upper landing before he wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me close and nuzzling my neck. It was a good thing that he was holding me; otherwise, I might have swooned like some silly woman in a Shakespeare comedy, tumbling back down to the ground floor.
“So,” he whispered, his lips close to my ear. “Anything else I should know about myself before I meet the rest of your family?”
I squirmed, but his fingers tightened around my waist.
“I don’t suppose you have four brothers, do you?”
“Nope,” he said. “Only child. But maybe I forgot the Wyoming branch of the family.”
“And, um, you’ve always wanted to have three kids?”
“I’ve never really done the math. But three’s as good as any other number. Anything else?”
I shook my head, unable to meet his eyes. I could feel his laughter against my side. “I’m sorry—” I started to say, but he stopped me with a kiss. A serious kiss. A steal-your-breath-away-and-make-you-wonder-where-your-toes-went kiss.
“Don’t be. That’s what this weekend is all about, right? Building up our own fantasy world away from the pressure of work?”
And that’s when I knew that I loved him. Not had a crush on him. Not dreamed that he would replace Scott on the appointment book in my heart. Not imagined that he would sweep me off my academic feet and admire my librarian accomplishments as if they meant something in the world at large.
Love.
Quickly followed by a darting twist of guilt through my belly. I couldn’t help but think of poor Melissa, struggling through her First Date hell. She was working to achieve this. She was hoping to experience what I had been lucky enough to stumble upon. All of her strategies, her pools of men, her hopeless, hapless first dates, they were all supposed to lead her toward this warm vanilla rush of comfort, of fun. Of love.
I’d found it, and she had not. Of course, a little voice nagged at the back of my mind, I had the benefit of the grimoire spell. But a girl had to use all the assets at her command, didn’t she?
“So,” Jason said, easing away from me. “I suppose you’d better show me what’s up here, and then we should get back downstairs before your cousin thinks that I’ve carried you away.”
I knocked twice on the door to the Boy’s Room, just to make sure that it was empty. When I showed Jason where he’d be sleeping, he looked shocked. “I thought…” He trailed off, but the way his eye roamed over my sweater told me exactly what he’d thought.
My cheeks flushed, and I started to stammer. “I did, too. I mean, I’d hoped. I mean, I wanted….” I took a deep breath and forced myself to exhale slowly. “I’ll see what I can arrange. There are cottages on the grounds. They’re spoken for, but maybe…”
He leaned over and brushed a wayward strand of hair off my cheek. “See what you can do.”
My heart was pounding by the time we got back to the kitchen, and that had nothing to do with the climb down the steep stairs.
Jason was the perfect Boyfriend. As the family troops returned from their morning excursions, Jason met relative after relative. He let himself get roped into a surprisingly brutal game of touch football on the front lawn, managing to capture one of Simon’s twins and hold the boy upside down while a teammate scored the winning touchdown. He helped collect wood for the night’s bonfire, securing a tiny pine cone that he pressed into my palm like a secret token. He sat on the porch with Gran, holding out his hands for her new skein of wool, admiring her knitted shawl and asking intelligent questions about her latest project.
He even carried on a spirited conversation with Clara, about whether our colonial forefathers had been capable of breaking free from their Christian indoctrination to experience a true spiritual awakening in the rugged new land of America. I think that he gained innumerable points when he proclaimed that Plymouth Rock was a symbol of all religious settlement of the New World, and that the stone beneath the pilgrims’ feet was echoed in the crystal around Clara’s neck.
Chalcedony, I noticed at a glance. The stone for motherhood.
If Clara caught my intent gaze, she ignored it.
My contribution for the evening clambake was a giant casserole dish of apple crisp. Some of the cousins had brought back bushels of orchard-fresh apples that afternoon, and I had found myself grinning as I peeled and cut them, slapping Jason’s fingers away as he tried to steal slices. When the kitchen timer beeped its alarm, I excused myself from the porch to remove the bubbling, cinnamon-scented dish from the oven.
And when I turned back to the counter, Gran was standing in the doorway.
“He seems quite charming, dear.”
I let the fluttering joy beneath my heart burst through my smile. “He is, Gran. He really is.”
“I’m surprised that you’ve never mentioned him before.” I heard the hurt behind her words, and I knew that she was asking if I was ashamed of her. She’d always worried about my being different from my friends, growing up without the standard issue of one mother and one father.
I set the hot apple crisp on a cooling rack before looking up at her again. “Gran, it’s not like that at all. This has all happened so quickly. There have been so many changes, just in the past couple of months.”
“Changes?” She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Suddenly, I was assailed with deja vu. I’d had this conversation with my grandmother before. We had talked about Jason, about my job at the Peabridge, about the mysterious collection of books in my basement.
I blinked and realized that we’d never had such a discussion. But we had talked throughout all my painful years of high school. Through the trials and tribulations of my first date, my first kiss, my first agonizing decision of who to invite to a Sadie Hawkins dance.
I took a deep breath, ready to share with Gran, ready to tell her about Neko, and David, and what little I had learned about witchcraft. Before I could get out the first words, though, Leah burst into the kitchen. “Oh, good,” she said. “You’ve got the cobbler out.”
“It’s a crisp,” I said, irrationally annoyed by her appearance.
“Crisp, cobbler, freaking brown betty. The kids are screaming for dessert. If you had children, Jane, you’d know that they really can’t be kept waiting when they’re excited like this. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how you single women survive.”
My retort was hotter than the crisp in its casserole dish, but before I could spill out a venomous reply, Gran pulled herself up from her chair. “We’d best make sure all the little monsters get more sugar, then, shouldn’t we? At least they’ll work it off running around the bonfire.” I flashed her a smile of gratitude and scrambled for bowls and spoons.
The crisp was declared a success, and everyone adjourned to the back clearing for the evening’s main event.
The bonfire was everything that I remembered from my childhood. Flames leaped high against the pitch-black sky, sending up sparks in ever-changing patterns of light. My back grew chilled, even as my face was toasted by the fire. Someone broke out bags of giant marshmallows (Jason and I shared a fond smile), and Hershey bars magically appeared beside boxes of graham crackers. The kids tracked down long branches for marshmallow-roasting. One of Simon’s twins discovered a coveted five-pronged stick.
I learned that Jason preferred his marshmallows charred to a crisp. I learned that he liked extra chocolate on his smores. I learned that he could lick stray graham cracker crumbs from the corners of my mouth, in the dark, on the very edge of the fire’s light. And I learned that he could protect me from the spookiest ghost stories in Connecticut, his arm hollowing out a perfect circle by his side.
As the kids fell asleep and parents began to make noises about shuffling off to bed, Simon came and sat beside me. “It’s been a long time, Jane,” he said, nodding to Jason, as if to i
nclude him in reminiscences.
“Too long,” I sighed.
Simon held out his fist, and I automatically extended my hand. Something brass slipped from his fingers to mine. “Blue,” he said.
The Blue Cottage. The one that Gran had set aside for Simon and Carol, to give them a break from their boys. The one that was nestled on the very edge of the Farm’s property, far away from prying eyes. “Simon, I can’t.”
“Of course you can. I’ll take the couch in the main house. Someone has to make sure that the boys don’t sneak out too late. And Carol will be fine up in the Girl’s Room.”
Jason’s fingers tightened on mine. I leaned forward and kissed Simon on his cheek. “Thank you,” I said.
“You look happy,” he replied, and he nodded toward Jason again. “Both of you.”
We waited a few minutes, just for appearance’s sake. Someone called for another ghost story, and there was a good-spirited debate about whether it was time to bring out a bottle of schnapps.
I waited until the singing began before I clambered to my feet. Trying to look innocuous, as if I were heading out to search for a new marshmallow stick, I eased into the darkness. Jason followed behind me, close as a shadow.
My feet knew the path to the Blue Cottage; they’d traveled the walkway often enough when I was a child. I clutched Simon’s key like a good-luck charm. I felt Jason breathing behind me as I worked the lock. When I fumbled for the light switch, his fingers closed over mine, keeping me from springing the cottage into brightness.
The moonlight was enough. It puddled on the queen-sized bed, illuminating the wedding-ring quilt that had been in the family for as long as I could remember.
I barely managed to set the key on the night stand before Jason was kissing me. These were not the sweet, promising kisses that he had stolen on the stairs. These were urgent kisses, plying kisses. They reached down into my belly, twisted me, arched me against him with an urgency I had long ago forgotten.
We were like animals, there in the Blue Cottage. We were like fairies from the woods around us, Titania and Oberon, come together in desperate forest love. Jason tugged at my sweater, peeled off my jeans. I returned the services, pulling him closer to me.
The air was chilly in the cottage, kissed by the autumn night. We dove underneath the quilt at the same time, pulling it up to our shoulders and giggling like mad children. For just a moment, I wondered what Jason was seeing. I worried that he would feel betrayed by my too-chunky thighs, that he would close his hands around my waist and realize that I was never going to be a ballerina. I was never going to be a sculpted Russian ice queen.
But then his hands moved with a new urgency. Even I—a woman who had been left high and dry on the sexual seas for over a year—recognized what pushed against my belly.
“Damn!” I exclaimed.
“What?” He barely pulled back.
“The condoms! They’re back in the house.” I was furious with myself. Embarrassed. Disappointed. Desperate. “Maybe Simon and Carol—” I started to say.
But Jason silenced me with another kiss. And when I’d abandoned the ridiculous notion that my happily married cousin might have rubbers sitting around his weekend cottage, Jason sat up. He fumbled for his jeans in the pooled darkness on the floor. He reached into his pocket and drew out a ring of keys, placing them on the night stand. He extracted his wallet. He opened it up.
And he displayed a foil packet.
A glorious foil packet.
A foil packet that was ripped open in a matter of seconds. And put to astonishingly good use in the middle of the Connecticut woods.
