Page 39 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE WHEEL OF FATE

THIRD YEAR

Summer 1952–Spring 1953

We can find you in the dark

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ava found she could manage to erase Jamie from her thoughts while working in the hot sunlight of the vegetable garden in Maine. She wanted to lose him, she wanted him to be gone from her life entirely, so that it would be as if she’d never met him. Hurt me once, and I will forgive you, twice and it will be hard to trust you, three times and I no longer wish to know your name.

Ava’s lack of memory could be brought on by a potion that was known as Nepenthe’s forgetting spell, a balm consisting of a mixture of chamomile, sage, and lemon, which Ava fixed in the kitchen while her parents were out buying new fencing. When she heard them returning from the hardware store, she rushed, and half the mixture spilled onto the floor, and so the spell worked only during the daylight hours. Once the dark came tumbling down and Ava went to bed, she still dreamed of him, and in her dreams, she was running after him, her feet bloody, the crows above her all turning white with grief.

The summer was long and intolerable, and Ava might as well have been a visitor from another planet. Her mother tried to engage her in conversation, asking for details about her life at school, but Ava gave short and to-the-point answers, making certain not to seem too influenced by her experiences at Radcliffe. I know who I am, she wanted to shout. I know why you tied me to a tree so I wouldn’t rise up. Why you told me to avoid the lake. Why you locked me in my room.

She escaped from her parents’ house whenever possible, spending stolen hours in the Genesis Public Library. In reading about their town, she discovered that many of the first settlers of Genesis were thought to have dealings with the devil before they moved north in order to practice their odd beliefs in what was then called the District of Maine, an area that belonged to Massachusetts but was considered to be the dark wilderness. The town was built by a group of nonconformist Puritans who were unorthodox in their practices and did not harshly judge those who weren’t members of their faith. But quarrels began over land, and those who were more traditional won out. After that, women were required to cover their hair under white caps as a sign of modesty, and they were no longer allowed to go out alone on the street, for their bodies were only for the use of their husbands.

Perhaps this was why Ava’s mother insisted she braid her hair and wear modest clothing. Soon the clothes her mother disapproved of went missing, the sleeveless blouses and shorts swiped from her laundry basket and dumped in a trash can behind the house. Ava brought the heap of clothing considered offensive out to the shed, where she folded it all into her backpack to take with her when she left. She was already counting the days.

“If we wished to, we could have you remain here at home and not go back to school,” Ava’s father said one evening. Her parents had obviously been discussing her corrupt behavior. Her mother had recently found her smoking a cigarette from a pack she’d bought at the general store. Another time her father spied her up in a tree with the twelve crows and he’d fired his shotgun into the air to chase them away.

“On what grounds?” Ava sounded sure of herself, but in fact she was trembling. Life in Genesis would be impossible for her now.

“On the grounds that you don’t know how to behave,” her father replied.

“I’ll behave.” A shiver went through Ava. This was the way it felt to tell a lie, as if you could turn the whole world upside down and say whatever they wanted to hear until you could run away forevermore.

“She’ll be a good girl,” her mother told Ava’s father. “She’ll make us proud.”

Ava nodded, but she counted the days until she could leave and for the rest of the summer was terrified that her parents would somehow manage to keep her in Genesis. When the time came, she packed and slinked away before daybreak, leaving a note of goodbye. She ran down the road with Jack at her side, barely able to breathe, wishing she could fly like the crows above her. She had spent so many years as a girl without a voice, but once she was back in Cambridge, she would say whatever she pleased. She would ask questions, no matter what the answers might be. She would go to the library each and every day until she found out more about the witches of Cambridge. She understood that finding the first witch’s letters had not been an accident. Someone wanted her to know her history.

Someone was watching over her.

Jamie slept with one woman after another in Wyoming, even though his actions only served to remind him that he was a cad who took no responsibility for his mistakes. If he spent one night with someone, it was likely he wouldn’t be spending another. He had a way of saying good-bye that made them cry, and yet they didn’t resent him, for he let them see how hurt he had been. It was only for a moment, but it was long enough for them to make no demands on him.

He had been stood up and humiliated. Ava had seen through him, so now he played the part he seemed destined for, that of a selfish brute who occasionally forgot the name of a girl he’d taken to bed and who could use his skill not to have to face what he was doing. He never brought any of these local girls home; they went out into the fields, and afterward he bunked in the stable to avoid his brothers and their wives. He pursued one woman after another, although mostly he didn’t have to do much, merely glance at them, even though he knew they would all wind up despising him, and when they talked about him to their friends, they’d cringe as they said his name. Even the few friends he’d had when he was a boy, guys he used to play baseball with, the ones he’d smoked his first cigarettes with, avoided him and blamed him for his family’s misdeeds, buying up land all around and forcing farmers out. In this summer of his regret, he decided it didn’t matter if his old friends gave him hard looks and didn’t return his greetings, not even with a handshake. He’d slept with their girlfriends and sisters and ex-wives and given them good reason to despise him, just as he despised himself.

Jamie couldn’t believe he’d been fool enough to wait for Ava all night long. She’d never even bothered to respond to his letter. But then who could blame her if she’d decided he was too much for her, too damaged, too reckless, a sinner by nature with a history too dark to accept. He hated that he had turned out to be the very creature his ancestors had loathed more than all others, a being who couldn’t even be properly drowned. He tried again and again in Wyoming, first in a river an hour away, where he did his best to keep his head underwater, which was utterly impossible; he came up sputtering each and every time. He went to the edge of the lake on the Mathers’ property, where he drank a fifth of whiskey before filling his boots with stones to weigh him down. He approached the water like a wild man, running and whooping until he was waist deep. But when he tried to dive in headfirst, the boots fell off his feet and he rose from the water like some gasping, damaged fish, and one of the men who worked on the ranch, an older fellow named Cyrus, linked his arms around Jamie and pulled him out and said, “Man, you really are an idiot. We’ve had two drownings here in the past year. One was drunk and the other was a child, and it seems to me that you might be both.”

When he returned to Massachusetts, Jamie went home to Sudbury for the last weekend of summer and tried again to face his fear of the water. Already swarms of bees were massing as they always did at this time of the year, maddened by the last of the season’s heat and the sweet pollen pooling on flowers and leaves. The asters had begun to bloom in shades of purple and violet, their plum-colored petals trembling in the bright streams of sunlight. Summer was over, but the longing for it remained. Jamie had wandered around the property, past the lawns where his brothers still played soccer, roughhousing with each other as if they were boys and not married men, attorneys who worked for their father and did their best to please him.

Jamie went into the woods with his parents’ Labrador retrievers following along, and as the dogs splashed through the shallows, he thought again about drowning himself. He’d need iron and ropes, just as they used in the old days. He stood by the pond, having decided that his halfling nature would do him no good, and on impulse he unknotted the rope swing from an old oak and tied it around his waist. The dogs raced after ducks, and Jamie stepped into the water after them. He tied himself to a log in the middle of the pond, but the rope frayed and shredded as if bewitched, as if he were meant to swim back to shore, where he cursed himself for being unable to accomplish anything at all, not even drowning.

He returned to the house and traipsed through the rooms, spattering damp earth onto rugs that were three hundred years old, woven from dyed blue silk in China. At dinner he felt as if he were a complete stranger; everyone else had their lives mapped out, aimed toward success. When dessert was served, Jamie excused himself, stating that he was feeling ill, but rather than retreat to his room, he sneaked into the library and had a whiskey, and then another, fairly certain that his father was listing his flaws at that very moment. Yes, he was a failure at school, and at sports, and at love, and at life. But perhaps he was something else as well. Something they didn’t want him to be. He’d taken to stabbing his fingers, to see the ooze of blood that gave him hope he might be more than his father declared him to be. He thought of Ava in the cemetery, how she said they were more alike than he might have imagined. He didn’t feel any magic inside him, but it was there all the same, he simply had to find a way to uncover it. Now he remembered a time when he was a boy and had found a rabbit torn apart by the dogs. It was lifeless, but when he held the poor bloodstained creature, he could feel its heart flutter beneath his touch. It could come back, he thought. What was dead wasn’t necessarily gone. He’d been so astonished, he’d dropped the rabbit on the grass, and when he went to touch it again, it was too late. It had grown stone cold. The scar on his left hand had been throbbing then. It was nothing, a mere bump, just as his mother had reassured him, yet it didn’t feel that way. It felt as though part of him was missing. It felt that way still.

Lilith House was quiet and dark when Ava took Jack out in the morning. That was when she found the paper crow on the porch stairs. Jack was madly yelping, which only served to further confuse her. “What is wrong with you?” Ava asked, following the excited dog down the street. Jack continued trotting before her, headed north, and that was when Ava realized where he was going. She had to run to keep up with him.

The bartender at O’Malley’s remembered her, the girl with glossy red hair accompanied by a dog that was assuredly not like any German shepherd he’d seen before. The dog ran directly to the young man who was drinking himself into oblivion at the end of the bar.

“You drink scotch,” the bartender said to Ava, taking pride in the fact that although he often forgot his wife’s birthday, he never forgot a customer’s drink and he certainly would never forget a redhead.

“I’ll have a Coca-Cola,” Ava said politely. Make us proud of you, her parents had said when she left to return to school. Be a good girl. “No ice,” she called more roughly.

“I see. You’re on the wagon.” The bartender nodded to Jamie, who was watching her through narrowed eyes. “You might want to have a talk about that with your friend.”

Ava claimed the stool beside Jamie’s. There were only two other customers at a rear table, old friends from the neighborhood who were playing checkers and drinking bitter coffee. “It’s eleven in the morning,” Ava said to Jamie. “Apparently, you have no sense of time whatsoever.”

“Meaning?” They exchanged a fleeting look, but that alone was enough to cause Jamie to feel overwhelmed. He ordered another drink; it was a good reason to look past Ava and break away from her judgmental gaze. The deeds of the summer came to him with a rush of guilt. Who did he think he was to treat women as if they were there for his use and nothing more? He’d proved himself to be a Mather through and through.