She shrugs. “How do you neutralize anything? Opposite forces cancel each other out.” When I clearly don’t understand, she says, “The blood, Jude. It’s all in the blood.”
Can she mean the magic, like Arla intended? The blood of thecircle? I want to ask her more, but another voice breaks through our dreamscape, deep and insistent. “Jude. Jude, wake up.”
Light streams from the sky, blazing off the water, breaking the view into shards. My hand juts out as if it can reach her, hold her, keep her here until I know more, but we are already drifting apart.
“You have the key now, small one,” she says, turning away, spilling back into the water at her feet. “Try not to lose it.”
“Jude, wake up,” the deep voice demands.
And then she’s gone.
The water rushes in, but it isn’t water at all, it’s light. And as my eyes flutter open, I realize the dawn has come—the sun, the day—and with it, the glistening white-gold promise of Solidago.
27MIRAGE
I never wanted to return to this land, the place of my undoing, but my blood sings with memory as we arrive. It is not a melodic hum or a bird’s trill, but the deep keening moan of a shattered woman. It is a song of loss, a funeral dirge, an incantation of ghosts. It rises to the surface like helium—the past, the trauma, the woman I was just becoming and lost, the power.
There is arightnessto return, to tidying up business left undone like clamping arteries after a piece of you is torn away. I have been bleeding all these years, I realize, as the car turns down the long drive, leaving a trail of abject misery from here to Seattle, wondering why I felt so drained, so lifeless, so lost. Maybe the attorney who visited me after the fire was right. Maybe there was no use in running. Where has it gotten me in the end?
The truth is, Solidago never left me, even if I left it. Who we were, what happened, all that passed in that house is enshrined in my soul like a marble plinth, erected in my bones, the framework over which the rest of me has grown, closing like a roll of bark across a downed branch.
I expect the waving grasses and shining flowers as my eyes settle on them. And I expect a woven parcel of trees, the cool, smooth slab where the house once stood like a shadow without itssource. I expect to find nature reclaiming the stain of us, washing the earth clean of our memory, drawing itself tight over our sins. I expect space and emptiness, the house plucked from the vista like a pulled tooth, the abscess purified by fire. I expect it to feel haunting and reflective, this grave where it all went down, where I once lay dying, but where the future has so clearly marched on, time the necessary antiseptic.
But what I see when we break from the trees is a field of goldenrod pooling like a dream. And something so impossible, I bark at Levi to hit the brake as I tumble out of the car and stare, the wind tearing at my hair.
The house—every board and brick and column; every erect chimney; every winking, sun-filled window; every exposed bone-like rafter. It’s just as it was the day before it burned, an alabaster prison, a nightmare hemmed in white. At first, I think it’s a mirage, that I’m hallucinating as I squint against the brilliance of it, a hard slap of cold water, the loss of air, the terrible understanding that one is sinking. But as I get closer—close enough to count the panes of glass, the slotted shingles, the wavers in the cross grain—I know that it is real and it is here and it is wrong.
Mr. Lampitt said these were my grandfather’s wishes, but I guess I thought that without an heir tolivein the house, he wouldn’t resurrect it, that by denying myself, I was denying my grandfather as well. The old bastard must be laughing from the grave. I take unthinkable steps to the unthinkable door, and I am five years old again, my mother’s hand sweating in mine, my grandfather staring down his nose in distaste, the house a palace for the dead.
Behind me, Levi is following, concern in his voice. “Jude?”
The doors stand black before me, a blight on our perfect image, hinting at rot within. My hand grasps the unthinkable knob and the door glides open, the grand foyer as I remember, a hollow at the heart of a tree, stairs curving gracefully away like wings, pendant lamp dangling overhead, an anvil on a gold chain. My lungs fill with unthinkable air scrubbed clean, the scent of bleach asanitized whisper in the room. At my back, the high-flying smell of salt water and fir trees threatens this sanctified bubble, fills it with the lowborn things of earth. There is a movement at the edge of my vision, and I turn, half expecting to see my mother on the stairs, her hand cupping the banister for support, the shock of her hair tumbling over her shoulders, eyes lighting on me like pale moths. But the room is empty. The stairs a promise I no longer believe.
I look left and see sunlight filtering down the hall. That accursed door ajar at the end, still stained a rich, rosy brown. I walk toward it slowly, every unthinkable step as real as the one before. The tiles at my feet the very same I remember—a striking mosaic of white on white, punctuated by the occasional black.
I pass other doors blankly, fixated on my destination. Because it cannot be. It simply cannot be. The stairs, the tiles, the doors…Fine.I’ll swallow that. I’ll choke them down alongside my memories. Maybe they sprouted like weeds, an invasive vine that cannot be purged even with gasoline. Maybe they grew from the dark magic of this place, the secrets spilled into the earth like blood. Maybe they sprang back of their own accord, the way a starfish regrows its arm or a lizard regrows its tail. But some things cannot be copied. Some things cannot come back.
I reach the door to Aurelia’s room and push it open. A slow squeal echoes in the cavernous shrine. Across from me, the fireplace mantel twists and contorts in its aquatic dance, a roiling of waves and shells, fins and scales, tentacles looping back on themselves. The flourish on the note cards and the lid of the well is unmistakable in it. It is a behemoth of briny energy, an effigy to a creature I know and have seen before, a paradoxical depiction, cold and unfeeling. Inside it, no wood rests, no fire glows. At least that much has changed.
My eyes lift and meet hers over it. The portrait of my grandmother hangs proud as ever, overseeing all that happens in this house, her gaze unshrinking from the truth. Her smile issuggestive, lips parting over bared teeth, a glint of ferocity. Her jaw, her cheekbones, the point of her nose—everything defined in a clash of angles. A beauty so rare and savage, it steals your breath.
I put a hand to my chest, disbelieving. What did I do? What was it all for? If it can be so easily restored, so gracelessly reconstituted. If the evil can live on forever, the root remaining no matter how many times you tear it out. I should have stayed dead that night, my body rotting in the flowers. I should have taken the pills when Arla planted her little invitation, left them lingering in the park alone. I should have hurled myself from the cliffs. They taunt me through the window. Maybe I still can.
“Hello, miss? You can’t be here.”
The voice strikes through my dark reverie. It’s not the soft resonance of Levi’s questions that followed me into the house. It’s female.
I turn and see a familiar face, one I never expected to see again, one I thought was lost to time. “Nina?” I whisper, eyes wide and stinging.
She drops the basket she was carrying, golden flowers scattering across the floor, her hand flying to her mouth. “Judeth.” It is an exhale, a swoosh of fleeting fear, a prayer or a swear. “Oh my god,” she says, crossing herself. “You’re back.”
Every inch of the kitchen is how I remember. Painted wainscoting, blue-and-cream tiles, the yawning basin of the farm sink, the enormous gas range, the double ovens. Mira—Nina’s daughter—makes our tea with the deftness of her mother, their hands similarly shaped, though Nina’s were strong where hers are narrow. She pats at the low twist of brown hair over her neck, passes me my cup with a small spoon inside. Levi has gone out to take stock of the grounds, giving us some space. The sugar sits in the middle of the table in the same crystal bowl I recall. Nostalgia washes over me. Beside it is a plate of muffins, though I couldn’t possiblyeat. The kitchen was always my favorite space in the house, the closest I came to feeling safe, Nina mothering me in ways my own mom had forgotten how to.
She sits across from me. “He said you might return one day, but I’ll admit, I didn’t believe him.”
“He?” I hear my voice bounce off the tiles, older and lower than it used to be.
She nods, sipping her tea. “Mr. Lampitt. He said you would probably come back once you ran out of money or curiosity got the better of you. I don’t think he suspected it would take this long. He said you knew about the house.”
