Girl's Guide to Witchcraft (25 page)

I sat down on the couch and stared at Neko. My belly ached, and I realized that I was dangerously close to tears.

I felt like David and I had just broken up. We’d never been going out, and now we had broken up. Hell, we had shared
one kiss,
and now I was parsing every word of his conversation, trying to figure out what he had meant, why he had spoken, what did he mean when he said….

I
knew
this feeling. I remembered it. It had swooped over me when Scott phoned from London that last time. I had lived with it for those long days after my beloved fiancé had told me that we should see other people. That he had started to see someone else. That he wanted his ring back.

But why should David Montrose make me feel that way? Especially when our fight was about the
real
love of my life, my Boyfriend, Jason?

I gulped the last of my tea as if it were a vodka shot, closing my eyes. Actually, I could use some vodka. Or mojitos. Was it too late to call Melissa?

I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty on a school night. It was too late to get started with mojito therapy.

I closed my eyes and collapsed back on the couch.

“Burning,” Neko said, breaking the silence at last.

“What?”

“Burning witches. Stakes are for vampires, and silver bullets are for werewolves.”

“Gee. Thanks,” I said. “I guess.”

“Anything I can do to help,” he said. “More tea?”

I shook my head and heaved myself upright. It was time to go to bed. Cut my losses for the night.

Tomorrow would be an all-new day. I would get up early to pack. I would take a cab over to Gran’s apartment. We’d drive up to the Farm. I would get ready for Jason to arrive on Saturday. And I wouldn’t have to worry about witches or warders or familiars until after the long weekend was over.

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 nightstand 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 sometimes.”

“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 p.m. As I stepped onto the wraparound 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.

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 to 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 Girls’ 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 duffel bag. Some of us had survived without 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 Jr. 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.

No one seemed to begrudge her the lie that she had lived; no one resented that she had kept her very existence a secret for so long. Clara 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, what spells she might even now be working to be so easily accepted back into the family fold.

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 Girls’ Room, trying on every item of clothing I’d brought with me, brushing my hair, pulling it back, letting it go straight, applying makeup, reapplying makeup, eating an emergency doughnut, 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.

“Mmm,” 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.