Page 51 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In Maine, with the woods all around and the world so far away, Ava was alone with her broken heart. She remembered that her favorite stories always featured stolen children, poor little souls who had been taken from their houses and hidden in the wild wood, never to be found again. They were locked in towers or trapped underground for decades or centuries. Should they ever manage to find their way back to the mortal world, they would speak backward rather than forward; they would no longer recognize their families and would wander the earth alone.

Be careful, never trust strangers, avoid the forest, run as fast as you can.

Ava had always known that all things ended; they disappeared before your eyes. Ever since she’d watched Jamie get into his father’s car, she’d felt as if she would be alone for the rest of her life. If that was true, then who was she? She had a reckless urge to figure out who she was no matter the cost. The time had come for her to find out the truth about the woman who had arrived in snowstorms, or in the first rush of spring, someone her parents always said she had imagined.

Ava waited for her parents to go to bed, and once they had, she searched the house. It was better than lying in her bed in the throes of lovesickness, crying over Jamie. She rummaged through drawers in her father’s desk, then vainly investigated the kitchen cabinets, sifting through jars of salt and allspice, thumbing through an old tin of recipes for corn bread and applesauce. She rummaged around in the barn and the shed, where Jack was hunkered down, then tramped along the dark trails in the woods. Ava found nothing to help her understand why someone had tapped at the window glass in her bedroom or why black apples had been left on the windowsill or why she had slept with her quilt over her head all through her childhood, terrified she might be carried off and never returned, although every morning she regretted that she hadn’t gone to see who had been tapping. Every day she wondered where the path might have led.

When she’d turned thirteen, the woman in the woods had stopped appearing. Ava thought she had done something wrong that made the woman stay away, for when she disappeared, so did the promise of another world. She went down to the edge of the road and waited. There were brambles everywhere. They were growing taller by the minute, blocking out the sun. That was when she knew that she would have to save herself.

Now that the house was quiet, she went down to the cellar to poke around. She lit a candle, then looked through the baskets in which turnips and apples were stored. Birdseed had been scattered by the field mice, and she swept it away. She spoke backward, asking to be led to what she was looking for. Who you love will appear before you. The one you’ve missed. The one who has evaded you, walked away, disappeared.

Ava felt the urge for one of the apples from the orchard, the sweet black ones that were sometimes left on her windowsill. They were out of season, but dried apples were kept in the cellar. It was a dank space filled with unwanted things that should have been thrown away, lamps in need of rewiring, worn boots any other family would have tossed out years ago, hurricane lamps to use when the electricity went out in a storm, threadbare linens. Behind the baskets for storage, there was a small door Ava had never noticed before. When she tried it, she found it locked, so she quickly recited an undoing spell. The clasp immediately fell away in her hands. That was when she hesitated. She had the feeling that once she opened the door, she might find something that would change her life. It was late August, and stifling outside, but down in the cellar the air was cold. Once you know, you can’t unknow. Learn the truth, you can never forget it.

The candle had burned down to a flicker, and in that dull illumination, Ava reached into the closet and drew out a small suitcase. Inside, she found several sheet music notebooks. There was also a stuffed white toy dog and a hand-knitted baby blanket in a pale shade of green. At the very bottom of the suitcase was an envelope, taped closed. Ava held it in her hands, and a chill went through her even though outside it was now so humid sparrows fell from the trees in their sleep, then gathered in groggy groups on the grass, losing their dappled feathers, not knowing what was a dream and what was real.

Open the door, light the lamp, turn away from all you’ve been told.

Once you know, you can’t unknow. Learn the truth, you can never forget it.

Ava’s hands shook as she removed the tape, then opened the envelope and withdrew several black-and-white photographs. The first photo was of a baby, the next a boy grinning at the camera, one hand over his eyes to block the sun, then there was a handsome young man with pale hair that might be blond or red with that same grin, a cello strapped to his back, standing outside Boston’s Symphony Hall. He had one eye closed against the sun, but all the same his handsome face was one no one could ever forget. At the very bottom of the envelope there was a thin strip of images taken in an old-fashioned photo machine at an amusement park: the young man and a beautiful woman in four poses. Laughter, the shelter of an embrace, a wave, and then a kiss. On the backs of the photos someone had written: Chris at four. Chris home for a visit. Chris the musician. On the photo strip taken of the couple who were so clearly in love, someone had written in a shaky scrawl: Chris and the witch.

Ava dropped the photos as if she’d been stung. Here was the stone out of place. The marker that led to the trail through the woods. The clue she had always been looking for. The woman in the photographs had dark eyes, like Ava’s, and a wide mouth. The photo was black and white, but the woman’s hair was shining and likely red. Ava let her nerves settle, then repacked the suitcase and shoved it back in the closet, keeping the photographs and the notebooks for herself. Her breath was burning in her chest. For some stupid reason, she had begun to cry. She went upstairs and hid the photos in her purse.

Early the next morning, she walked into town with Jack at her heels. The mother of the owner of the general store, Mrs. Petrie, was close to a hundred. She’d been in town forever, and if anyone could recognize the people in the photos it would be her.

“Hey, Mrs. Petrie,” Ava said. She did a good job of sounding completely normal, and why shouldn’t she? She’d been practicing all her life.

“Hey, college girl,” Mrs. Petrie said. “Good to see you.” Mrs. Petrie noticed Jack stretched out on the porch. “Nice wolf you’ve got there.”

Ava laughed. “He’s a German shepherd.”

“If you say so,” Mrs. Petrie conceded with a shrug. “But I know what I know, and I see what I see.”

“I’d guess you’ve known everyone in town,” Ava said.

“More than I ever wanted to. When people buy their groceries, you know them better than they might think. I know who likes pickles and who likes cheese and who buys more beer on Fridays than most folks can finish in a week. I know who’s miserable in their marriage and who doesn’t talk to their mother-in-law and who’s come down with cancer. I know them better than they know themselves.”

Ava handed her the photo of the young man. “Did you know him?”

Mrs. Petrie slipped on her glasses. “Of course I did. That’s Chris. Your folks’ son. Sad what happened to him.”

Ava felt her knees buckle. She grabbed the counter to steady herself. Count to three, she told herself. Speak as if nothing is wrong. “They didn’t have a son,” Ava said.

“Well, they did, and he was a musical genius of some sort. He was only a young man when he died. I always figured you were his replacement, if you don’t mind me saying so. He died and you arrived. I’d say you were about two. I always figured you were a cousin or a foundling, but they said you were theirs, and who would dispute that? Here you were, after all. You with your lovely red hair, but they always clipped it short and they had you wear a scarf even when you were just a little bitty thing.”

Ava didn’t know what she minded or what she believed, so she simply nodded, waiting to hear more, her heart pounding.

“Nice kid,” Mrs. Petrie said thoughtfully. “He wasn’t even twenty-five.”

When Ava left the store, she felt even more confused, so she decided to go to the library. She left Jack beside a bench and went inside, where it was cool and quiet, and she felt safe, the way she always felt when she entered a library. “Just here to look through some newspaper articles,” she told the librarian. Ava was directed to the second floor, where she began to sift through the obituaries. She found what she was looking for in The Weekly Reporter, a local paper that had stopped publishing a few years earlier. There he was on January 12, 1936, fourteen months after she’d been born. Beloved son, we will never forget you. There’d been a car crash, and his old Ford had been forced off the road by a drunk driver on icy Storrow Drive, his car hurtling into the frigid water of the Charles River. A wife and child had survived, but he had drowned.

Ava tore out the obituary and wedged it into the envelope with the photographs. She left the library and walked with Jack along the empty road beneath a canopy of tree branches. Her head was filled with wild, precarious ideas that were hatching one after another. She didn’t realize she was headed to the town cemetery until she was already at the gate. It was a neglected place, rife with thatches of wild grass, and Ava had never been there before. Hold your breath, her alleged mother had told her every time they drove past, insisting that going past a graveyard was bad luck. Ava found the headstone beneath an apple tree. Of course that’s what they would plant to remember him by, something from their own orchard.

Christopher Abbot 1912–1936 Beloved Son.

A tin vase left at the gravesite contained early-blooming asters, along with a small black branch from an apple tree. There was no mention of a wife or a child on the headstone, but that didn’t matter. Ava knew who he was to her now. She lay down beside her father’s grave, placing her ear against the ground. She could hear the heartbeat of the earth, the insects moving through the dirt and the growing grass, and the roots of the trees. Love is love and it always would be, no matter how near or how far. Anyone who has lost someone knows this to be true.