Blackbird House (25 page)

“I can’t believe you gave me this house.
 
I don’t even like houses,” Emma said.
 
“I’m a city girl.”

“You always liked that one,” {Catherine told her.
 
“When you first saw it you said it was the most beautiful place, even though it was the edge of the world and we might fall off.
 
You were very brave.”

“Remember Siggy Maguire?
 
She said to say hi.
 
She’s still picking your blueberries.”

“One time I bought groceries there and Siggy ran out after us into the parking lot.
 
She told me you were special.”

“Yeah, I was special, all right.
 
I was half bald and skinny as a rail.

Remember, my hair grew in black for a while.
 
I was a witch, Mother.”

“Siggy didn’t mean it like that.
 
She had tears in her eyes.”

“I don’t know if I’m keeping it,” Emma said.
 
“The house.”

“It was bought on impulse, so it will probably be sold on impulse,” Katherine said.
 
“I wish I was there with you.”

“Is there any such thing as turnip jam?”
 
Emma asked before she hung up.
 
“I found a whole bunch of turnips in the field.”

“Chutney,” her mother suggested.
 
“Try that.
 
That was next on my list, but we never got around to it.”

When Callie woke up, her poison-ivy itch was worse than ever.
 
The bumps on her arms were as swollen as bee stings.
 
She had no interest in the strawberry pancakes, and why should she?
 
She’d already decided to go home.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” she told Emma.
 
“I hate to cut our weekend short, but I’m miserable.”

They packed up the car, but at the last minute, Emma left her own bags in the hall.

“I’m not going with you.
 
I don’t want you to go out of your way for me.
 
It will be faster if you just go directly to New York, and I can easily take the bus.
 
It stops right on the corner by the general store.”

“No,” Callie said.
 
“I’d feel like a flat-leaver.”

“It’s no big deal.
 
Plus, I’m going to make turnip chutney.
 
See?”

There were the turnips lined up on the countertop.
 
“I’ve got to stay.

And I promise I’ll send you some.”

“The crying potion?
 
No thanks.
 
I don’t favor turnips.”

Emma stood in the driveway and waved.
 
She’d forgotten how still it was here; sometimes the wind was the only thing a person heard.
 
She went out to the field and found twelve more turnips, each one a rosy-brown color, tinged purple and white at the edges.
 
Even forgotten things grew, neatly, it seemed, in a row.

Emma liked the earthy smell as she boiled the turnips in the kitchen, then diced them, along with onion and dried rosemary.
 
The jelly jars were under the sink, and she washed them and boiled them in an old lobster pot.
 
By now the windows of the house were too steamed up to look through.
 
She thought about the person she’d been before she’d been ill, and the person she had become, and she didn’t see the slightest similarity.
 
Who was that girl who people ran after in parking lots?
 
Who brought tears to a stranger’s eyes?
 
What might she have done if she hadn’t woken one morning with a swelling under her arm?
 
Who might she have been able to love?

Emma was thinking about this when she saw something outside the window.
 
She felt a chill then, even though the kitchen was hot.
 
As on any jam-making day, the temperature had risen since Emma had begun.
 
It was always that way.
 
Emma and her mother had made jam in the old fallen-down shed, never here in the kitchen, and now Emma knew why. The room had grown terribly warm.
 
It was al most unbearable.
 
Every window was steamy and damp, and water ran down the glass like teardrops.

Through the steam and the glass, a shadow fell across the floor, a dark

blink in the golden daylight.
 
Had Emma seen something outside?
 
She

went to the window and cleared a circle of steam with the palm of her

hand.
 
There used to be coyotes, she remembered that, and this movement

had been darting and quick, the way coyotes were.
 
There used to be

blackbirds, and whatever was out there was flickery just flitting by

Emma saw nothing when she looked into the yard, but she left the jars boiling and went to have a closer look.
 
There was sure to be no one there, she was all but convinced of it.
 
She went striding out, confident she had imagined the shadow, sure of it really, and so she almost walked right into him: a boy of about ten, with blond hair.
 
Quick as a coyote, clearly.
 
Cautious as a blackbird, certainly.
 
But nervy enough to watch her through the window.
 
Not on his own property, that much was obvious.
 
A little trespasser, it seemed.

“I beg your pardon,” Emma said tartly.

“You don’t have to.”
 
The boy had a matter-of-fact, serious face. “It’s your house.”

“That’s right.
 
I know it’s mine.
 
I’m Emma.
 
I used to spend summers here.”

She remembered that local people used to joke that the woods were haunted, that figures slipped in and out of the shadows.
 
Emma’s brother, Walker, now consumed with facts and statistics, had believed in such things.
 
Just because you don’t see a ghost, he once told Emma, doesn’t mean he’s not there.

This boy in Emma’s yard had scratches all down his arms from jumping around in the brambles.
 
He’d taken the laces out of his sneakers, and his ankles had a wobbly, coltish look.
 
He was probably a fast runner.
 
He could probably tell you the name of every constellation in the sky.

“What are you making in there?”
 
He was looking past Emma, through the door.
 
Even out here, they could hear the roiling water in the big pot on the stove and the jars clinking as they boiled.

“Turnip chutney.
 
It’s like jam.”

The boy wrinkled his nose.
 
“Ugh.
 
Turnips are good for nothing.”

“You’d be surprised,” Emma said.
 
“You didn’t say who you were, you know.”

“I come here and go fishing all the time,” the boy said.
 
“Don’t tell anyone or I’ll get into trouble.”

“From your mother?”

She saw now he had hazel eyes, the kind that could look green or gray or brown depending on his mood.
 
She saw something there she used to feel herself and had forgotten about until this exact moment.

“She’s dead,” the boy said.

Emma took a step back.
 
“Are you the Crosby boy Siggy sent over to clear out the shed?”

The boy looked at Emma as though he could see her clearly for what she was: a fool who wasn’t even grateful to be alive.

“I’m ten,” he said.
 
“I don’t work.
 
That’s my father.”

He nodded, and Emma saw there was indeed a truck pulled over in the field, right in the spot where she’d found the turnips.
 
The boy’s father was gathering the moldering oak planking, the roof shingles, the nails.
 
The bed of the truck was already filled with wood, old branches, rotten floorboards, good for nothing or good for everything, it was impossible to tell.

“I caught a hundred fireflies last night,” Emma said.
 
“I read a book by their light.”

“No you didn’t.”
 
The boy had his hands on his hips.
 
He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t know whether or not he should.

“Come inside,” Emma told him.
 
“I’ll show you how to make turnip chutney.
 
We’ll see if it’s any good.”

Alice Hoffman is the best selling author of many successful novels and screenplays, including Here on Earth (Oprah Book Club Choice in 1998), Illumination Nights, Turtle Moon, Practical Magic (made into a recent major film), Local Girls, The River King, Blue Diary and The Probable Future (all available in Vintage).
 
She lives in Massachusetts.