Page 22 of The Witches of Cambridge

And that was that. As far as her parents were concerned, it was as if Ava had never been gone, but she had been, and she was more wary of them now. It wasn’t outsiders she feared, those people with evil intentions she’d always been told might come to her window and spirit her away, it was her parents.

At night, Ava dreamed of Jamie Mather, and in her dreams, she could never catch up to him. He was always free, and she was trapped in a maze of hedges, running over stones, feet bleeding, utterly lost. He’d told her that he was spending the summer in Wyoming with his family on the day they rescued Jack from drowning. They’d both been drenched and shivering, their clothes slick with mud, yet they were both burning. He’d walked her back to Lilith House, then had stood there awkwardly. “I’ve heard rumors about this place,” Jamie had said as he peered past the gate. “My father told me I should never go near this house.”

“Your father is wrong,” Ava told him, and so he leaned down to kiss her, and once he did she wanted him never to stop. That was when she knew that no matter what the old stories said, witches did fall in love. When Jamie took a step back, he looked at her searchingly, as if trying to solve a puzzle.

“Girl of my dreams,” he said before he turned and left her. It made perfect sense that Ava would dream of him that night. That they were underwater together, and that they could dive to the very bottom of the river, where the fish were silver, and the reeds were black as night.

Ava was quieter than usual that summer, spending all of her free time wandering with Jack. She often went to the pond, where she stripped off her clothes, then lay in the grass to sunbathe before wading into the water that had always been forbidden to her. Her mother had frightened her with warnings of drowning, but now she easily paddled past lily pads and water weeds. Every time she tried to dive, she found herself unable to break the surface. If the witch-hunters had come for her, they would have known what she was as soon as they tested her. It would have been impossible to drown her unless they tied her to a dunking bench with ropes too strong to break, unless they placed stones in her boots to weigh her down.

Ava hiked through the woods until she found the black apple tree. She sat beneath it, wishing she were a thousand miles away. She wished the woman who had brought her fruit from this tree would appear in the woods and spirit her away. If her parents noticed she’d changed, they said nothing, although sometimes when she finished her work in the garden and came in for dinner they stopped talking, as if an outsider had wandered into their midst and she was only pretending to be their obedient daughter, as if they knew she no longer locked her window at night, and that she counted the days until she could return to Cambridge.

A farm stand was set up at the end of the driveway so that customers could leave rolled-up dollar bills in a tin can in exchange for lettuce and beans. Ava sat there most afternoons when it was too hot to work in the garden. On Fridays, she walked into town to pick up the groceries and the mail at the post office. Each day was like the one that had preceded it, except for Sundays, when they didn’t work and Ava escaped into the woods. She went to sleep early, while the sky was still light, just to escape. Most days she spoke to no one, other than cursory conversations with her parents over supper. She and her mother spent most of their time weeding the garden, down on their knees, hands flecked with dark soil.

One hot day as they worked, Ava made the mistake of chatting about her life in Cambridge. When her mother heard she’d been invited to join a club, Mrs. Abbot had sat back on her heels, hands in her lap, as though she were praying. “It was a mistake for us to let you go. Your father told me so and he was right. Please tell me you didn’t join some private society,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.

“I couldn’t afford the fee.” It was an outright lie, there were no fees; when a student moved into Lilith House both room and board were free, funded by previous members of the society. The lie tasted bitter in Ava’s mouth. “And I don’t have the time,” she added. That much was true. “I have too much schoolwork.”

“That’s as it should be.” Ava’s mother sounded greatly relieved. “I worry for you, Ava. Those Radcliffe girls are all out for themselves. They’re not to be trusted, so beware of their intentions.”

Ava continued weeding, eyes downcast. She felt a chill, even though the sun was beating down on her shoulders. Her mother had made it sound as if she would wind up in prison, or somewhere underground where the years passed in a matter of days, should she dare to trust a Radcliffe woman. The temperature was 97 degrees, sunstroke weather. Jack was waiting for her in the shed, smart enough to remain in the shade, knowing not to come near the house, careful to avoid Ava’s parents.

“What about the boys?” Ava’s mother asked. “Have they been giving you trouble?”

“I stay away from them.” Ava flushed to think of the way she’d followed Jamie into the river, how she’d all but thrown herself at him. “You don’t have to worry about me,” Ava told her mother, fingers crossed behind her back. Liar, liar, her mouth felt as if it were on fire. “If I have any free time, I’m reading.”

“You’re a good girl,” her mother said appraisingly, sounding as if she herself were surprised. “I know you try. But don’t forget books can do damage. They can make you believe all sorts of nonsense.”

Ava’s mother had always feared what might turn up in a book.

“I study at the Divinity School library,” Ava assured her, knowing this news would ease her mother’s worries. “All the books are about religion.”

Ava often skipped dinner with her parents. She complained of headaches and went to her bedroom, where she sat by the window. She knew that there was something out there that her mother feared, which made her all the more curious. Truth was like that. When you got a taste of it you wanted more. You wanted it no matter the cost.

In the woods Ava gathered blueberries, with the crows and Jack her only company. The ripe berries were boxed and sold at the farm stand for fifty cents a box. Sometimes Ava would sit on a bench, the old, tattered umbrella above her and Jack at her feet, waiting for tourists to happen by, hoping to talk with someone other than her parents, but no one stopped. Passersby spied a beautiful young woman with long red hair and her black dog there beside the rickety stand, and most thought they’d do better elsewhere. The dog looked fierce, and the girl might have stepped out of a fairyland, her head down as she read a book and paid no attention to the cars that occasionally passed by.

At the end of the week, Ava would bring the blueberries that hadn’t sold to the general store in town, where they’d be bought for half price. She’d known the owner, Jack Petrie, all her life, and he always insisted she take a Fudgsicle or an ice cream pop from the big freezer, as if she were still a kid.

One evening, as Ava was coming into the house after weeding in the garden, she overheard her parents deep in conversation. She hid in the hallway, as quiet as a mouse.

“She’s the image of her mother,” she heard her father say. “Unfortunately. That witch.”

Ava stayed where she was, back against the wall. Her heart felt pierced right through. That was how she knew the truth. That was why she could no longer overlook the fact that she looked nothing like the woman who had raised her, who had blue eyes and sharp features, and if that was true, who on earth was her father referring to?

As a child Ava had been neglected in some deep way and now, hidden in the hallway, beside the closet where the brooms and mops were kept, she abruptly realized why. She had never belonged here in the first place. The person she resembled, the one they were speaking about in the kitchen, was someone she had never known. She became dizzy, and though she tried to take even breaths, she knew if she wasn’t careful she would fall. Ava couldn’t help but wonder if the woman who left the black apples on the windowsill was more than a stranger. She had once spied a woman she hadn’t recognized out in the cold. The woman wore a gray scarf, a black coat, and red boots. She had waved and Ava had waved back, and for one wild moment she thought she would slip out the window and join the stranger. She thought that if she did, her whole life would change, but the window was nailed shut, and try as she might, Ava couldn’t escape.

In the morning there had been footprints in the snow that had been made by a pair of boots.

Those are the marks of crows’ feet, her mother had told Ava, and right then and there she stopped believing anything she was told.

At the end of August, when it felt as though summer might stretch on forever, and Cambridge faded as if it were a dream, Ava stopped at the post office to pick up her parents’ mail. When she was young, she would mail-order books that she would all but devour in the woods, then, after she’d read them, she disposed of them in the book donation basket outside the library before her parents could discover them. The postmistress knew Ava and had always felt sorry for her. She grinned as she held up a small brown envelope. “Wyoming,” she said. “Always good to get mail from another state.”

Ava could hardly contain her delight. She thanked the postmistress, then raced to the bench outside the general store. As she quickly tore open the envelope, her heart was reacting strangely, pounding against her chest. She was desperate to see what Jamie might have written to her, but as it turned out, it wasn’t a letter. What she had in her hands was a thin piece of paper, one that had been folded twenty-seven times. It was a white crow. It was better than a letter. It was a declaration.

In her hands the paper fluttered. Concentrate, they’d been told at the Lilith House Sunday meetings. Wish what you want into existence. The paper bird rose into the branch just above her, lifted by a gust of wind or by her own desires. Ava ran all the way home, past the farm stand, past the surly sheepdogs that guarded the driveway, past the rabbits hiding in the grass. The crows followed her and waited in the branches of the trees while she packed up. She told her parents that she had to get back to Cambridge to register for classes. She said she’d forgotten about the deadline, and there was no time to lose. Her parents had never taken an interest in her education; they accepted what she said. The summer was over, they could tell from the brightening of the leaves and the scent of smoke as people in Genesis built bonfires to burn their trash. They didn’t notice that Ava went to pick a black apple to take with her, any more than they noticed that when she left, she didn’t once bother to look back.