“No.” He shakes his head. “You misunderstand. I don’t mean you couldn’t have started a fire. I mean that youwouldn’thave. That’s not who you are, Judeth. I can see that much.”
I want to believe he’s right, but deep down, I know there’s no other explanation. “I remember,” I tell him. “I remember when it exploded out of me. I didn’t mean to but… it happened all the same.”
“What did?” His eyes narrow, searching my face for answers, secrets I’m still keeping.
“He was going to rape me,” I finally explain. “My grandfather. He found me in my grandmother’s room. I was getting older, filling out, and he’d noticed.” I reach up and run my fingers through the golden strands I keep bluntly cut, just past the shoulders. “We had the same color of hair—my mother, grandmother, and I. Hethought I was her, I think, my grandmother Aurelia. He was never right after she died.”
Levi looks more shaken than I’ve ever seen him. “That’s awful,” he manages to say.
“He was an awful man,” I continue. “For years my mother tried to keep him away from me. She mostly succeeded by letting him have her instead.”
His face blanches. “You mean?”
“Incest.” It’s a horrible, ugly word. Saying it,finallysaying it, disgusts me. But it is our truth. “We had a rule against casting in our family.”
“Casting?” he asks.
“Spells and rites. Using our magic to bend the world in our direction. My mother always said that when you force something to bend, eventually it breaks. So, we never did. Except my grandmother Aurelia. She wanted one thing more than life itself—my grandfather. And eventually it cost her that. They were lovers but he was a heartless man. He strayed and he left her. So, she broke the rule and made a love spell. Mother never told me what was in it or how she did it, just that it happened. Only, if you cast a love spell on a man incapable of love, it turns into something else. He came back to her. He married her, even. But he became obsessed with her, controlling and possessive. He built Solidago to keep her like a finch in a cage. He was insatiable and belligerent where she was concerned. And as she braced against her constraints, resenting him more and more, he grew worse. In the end, she could see only one escape. They say she jumped from the bluffs into the sea by our home. I think she thought that would finally end the spell. But she was wrong.
“With my grandmother gone, my grandfather obsessed over her memory. The house became a shrine as well as a prison. His eyes turned to my mother, who looked so like her and was entering adolescence. I don’t know how long they stayed like that; two bees trapped in a bottle. Eventually she ran away, but I imagine the damage had been done by then. She would have stayed awayif not for me. My father died young. She tried on her own, but we ended up on the streets. Solidago was a mirage in the distance, a promise and a curse. She knew she’d pay if we went back, and she knew how, but I would have a place to live and food to eat. She gave in when I was five, and that’s when I first laid eyes on the house and my grandfather.
“My mother had asaying—The Cole women are an inferno. As a girl, I thought she meant our power, the ability to conjure fire. But now, I think she meant our anger. Everything we were repressing, shoving down deep in that house, all the brutal, hideous truths. For me, it all finally came up and out that night. I became the inferno she always warned me against.”
Levi’s face is stricken, a twist of horror and grief. He rubs his eyes, blinks rapidly as if he can wash what I’ve told him away. “Judeth, what you’ve been through…” He pauses, swallows. “It’s unthinkable.”
I use a sleeve to wipe the sticky, wet tears from my face.
“Even if the fire that night was your doing,” he goes on. “Anyone who knew your story, the story you’ve just told me, would understand.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t make it okay. Innocent people died, not just my grandfather. Though the revered Macallister Bates was all anyone could talk about.”
“That may be true,” Levi says. “But those lives are on his conscience, not yours. The destruction that visited your house that night, maybe it came through you, but he wrought it with his own hands. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I nod, a glimmer of light dawning deep in the crawl space inside me where this story festered for years. “Still, I was warned repeatedly not to use my power, that our magic was a curse. The women in our family were taught generation after generation that we could not trust ourselves with it. If I had listened…”
Levi reaches out and brushes a hand against my cheek. “I don’t know about your family or where your people come from. But in my family, a powerful woman is a blessing, not a curse. We traceour heritage through the matriarchal line. A strong woman is a strong foundation on which to build a strong faith. You shouldn’t be ashamed of who you are, Judeth, because you are a wonder. And you’re good. Whoever taught you to fear yourself, they were wrong.”
I lean into the warm cup of his palm, feeling his sincerity, and try to imagine how it must be to grow up believing everything you are is worthy.
Levi’s eyes widen, his face brightening. “Wait! I just remembered there was this article that came out maybe a month after the fire. It was in theDaily Evergreen, our school paper. I was a coeditor for them at the time, so I read everything we printed. This junior reporter was questioning whether investigators rushed to close the case because of your grandfather’s notoriety. Hold on.”
He gets up and leaves the room. I can hear a bit of shuffling, what sounds like another door, and then he comes back, clutching a fold of faded newsprint in one hand. “My grandfather kept all the issues from when I was on staff. He’s a bit of hoarder, comes with job,” he says, signaling the shop.
Unfolding the paper, he finds the original article and skims through it. “Here it is!” he says when he finds the line he’s looking for. “Fire Investigators have been unable to locate a source for the blaze, but one investigator who wishes to remain anonymous says, ‘Something got that fire going, but it was something else thatkeptit going. It started in more than once place, then seemed to spread everywhere at once, as if it were coming from multiple angles.’ Unfortunately, authorities have been quick to shut down active investigation, citing a lack of resources and the sensitive nature of individuals involved. Many in the surrounding communities believe Macallister Bates is still wielding his power from the grave, with one young relative of victim Nina Gurin commenting, ‘He was a very private man, and private men have a lot to hide.’”
Nina’s name fills my heart with sadness and guilt. The relative would have to be her daughter, Mira, a woman I met only a handful of times. She and her mother must have known moreabout what was going on in that house than I realized. But it’s the words about the fire that shake me to my core.Something elsekeptit going…What continued to fuel it after I ran? After I was blown from the field of goldenrod like a cloth doll? After I saw the woman made of flames standing in the doorway, watching me flee?
Levi’s eyes hold mine, firm, convinced. “You weren’t the only one in the house that night, Jude Cole. Don’t carry what isn’t yours.”
He means my grandfather, my mother. But now I wonder who else might have been in there with us.
Carrying the shame of my ancestors—their magic, mistakes, and regrets—is what I’ve been doing my whole life. Carrying the legacy of my grandmother—her beauty and torment, the unwieldy reach of her witchcraft. Carrying the sacrifice of my mother—everything she gave to protect me from the demons infesting the hell she brought me to. Carrying the renown of my grandfather—the burden of his wealth and fame and insatiable hunger. And now, I am carrying Arla’s charge—her sordid and sundry group of bedfellows and even more apocryphal plan, the secrets she can’t keep without my help that have begun keeping me.
Guilt, rich and ruddy as let blood, seeps through my system. The bitter tang of personal truth, my own implicit independence and survival instincts driving me to emancipate myself from the burden of the other. Freedom, salty and sweet, courses overhead just within reach if I can let go, if I can set down what isn’t mine.
And I wonder how it must feel, burrowed in that rotten hole, the Fathom’s bulk grating against the rock sides, the walls of cursed words. How our weakness must rankle her, our ability to come and go.
The truth is, the Fathom changed me before I ever laid eyes on her. She gave something back to me. But if imprisoning the Fathom is the only way I can keep my power, then I’d rather let it go, leave it behind once and for all with Solidago’s ashes. Because I want the relief Levi speaks of, I want a life that’s mine and minealone. I don’t want to siphon my joy off another’s misery, like Arla, like my grandmother and grandfather.
