“She used to tear down the stairs in a fit after one of her sleepless nights and rave about the ocean come to life, calling her, molding itself into the shape of a woman, then a fish, then a dragon. Your grandmother loved the water, so my mother thought it was a delusion born out of that. She would stand and stare out at those waves for hours. Could walk into a rainstorm and come back dry or predict anything from a drizzle to a downpour.
“But then she would beg my mother to drive her north to Seattle, to make the screaming stop. Said only she could right such a terrible wrong. And my mother never knew if she meant the dreams or her marriage. That’s when she decided it was a fantasy built around her own desperate need to escape the suffocation of her predicament.”
I choke on air, the Fathom writhing through my grandmother’s dreams as surely she has now writhed through mine, calling her as she later called to Arla. My grandmother, who had an affinity not only for fire but for water. A fire roveranda water diviner, the vestigial traces of magic in her DNA greater than mine or my mother’s, than the other women of our line.
“But she didn’t jump,” Mira says now. “I think many people around here suspected, but no one was going to point a finger at Macallister Bates. My mother always insisted he loved his wife, but even she had to admit it wasn’t the love of a normal man. It was too powerful, gushing forth to clear all in its path like a tidal wave, and tainted by the vessel that carried it.”
She eyes me now, her lids creasing. “I only tell you because my mother is dead, and the truth can’t hurt her anymore.”
“Yes,” I say, nodding. “I understand. I won’t tell anyone anyway.”
Mira softens, looks convinced. “They say that’s how she cameup with the mantelpiece to begin with, your grandmother. That she dreamed it the first night she came here, and when she found she couldn’t leave, how she had the dream enshrined inside the mantel, bringing it to her instead of the other way around.”
I’d heard some semblance of this before, but without knowing the whole story, without knowing the Fathom, I never could have understood its significance then. “Thank you,” I tell Mira. “For sharing all of this. I know it’s not easy to talk about.”
She nods. “Yes, well, I guess there’s only one question left.”
“Oh?” I worry she’ll ask about that night, the fire, how it started, how I got out. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she looks at me and says, “Now that you’re back, what are you going to do with all this?”
WE DON’T SLEEPin my old room, or the one my mother slept in. We don’t choose Nina’s or my grandfather’s. Instead, we choose one of the nameless guest rooms, one with no past and no future. Levi, who drove most of the way, is passed out beside me in under half an hour. But I don’t sleep at all. I wait until I hear the crying, and make my way to my grandmother’s room where it all started in one way or another.
Inside, it is vacant. The soft whimpers hushed the second I open the door. But it is identical in every way to how I remember. The same gauzy curtains and collection of perfume bottles, the same oversize bed and mirrored vanity. But the drawers are empty, the candle I found consumed long ago in the fire I started.
I wait on the chaise longue, eyes trained out the window as the moon sails over the water, stars winking into existence like beads on a grand dress, until I see her pale form gliding along the bluffs, pacing in the dead of night, looking to the horizon. She is white and billowing against the pitch of sky. And I don’t run and hide, don’t cower under the blankets in my room. I take a breath, rise from my seat, and go to meet her.
The night is unseasonably cool, and the winds are high. I crossmy arms against them as I walk, barefoot in the grass, to the place where she stands. I wonder if she will waver, blow away on a gust before I can reach her. But she is constant in her cradle by the sea, her back to the house where she was murdered, her gaze on the water where her body was found.
When at last we are side by side, I tell her, “I know what happened to you.”
She blinks, soulless eyes reaching through the dark, and then she looks at me. “And I know what happened to you.”
She is softer this way, so much easier to take in than the portrait, without the hard lines of flesh and blood, without the years of misunderstanding, of secrets and lies between us. “Mother said you cast a love spell on a man with no heart, and it brought us all to ruin.”
She smiles. “Your mother spoke the truth. Part of it, at least. My Winnie was always a smart girl.”
“Why?” I ask her. It is what I have wanted to ask since the day I arrived here.
“Why does anyone young do anything foolish?” she responds. “Because they believe they can get away with it. I was infatuated and incorrigible, but I never wanted to hurt you or your mother. I couldn’t see what it would become inside him. And by the time I did, it was too late. The die was cast, my hand played. The magic spiraled out of me and punched a hole through my future, then kept on going.”
“We shouldn’t have it,” I tell her, casting a baleful glance at my own hands. “This power. It’s dangerous.”
“Power is always dangerous,” she agrees. “But the magic is not to blame. That lies solely with me. Wisdom is the antidote. Temperance. Compassion. And you have need of them all now.”
It’s an eerily similar refrain to what the the Fathom told me herself.
“Can we ever truly be free?” I look to the house, so perfectly restored. “Or will this place, this legacy, continue forever? The spell passing into eternity?”
“You will free us,” she says confidently, “when you free yourself, Judeth. You are not bound by my mistakes, especially now. Stop living in my shadow; start casting your own.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her.
“Give me up,” she says easily. “Look around; there is no one else holding me here but you.”
I shake my head at her. “No.Ididn’t do this. I didn’t take the money. The house, having it rebuilt—that was allhim.”
She smiles again. “It’s not Macallister’s money anymore. It’s no one’s unless you claim it. Do something better with it than he ever did. Stop running from what is yours.”
