Page 58 of The Witches of Cambridge

All at once, Ava feared her grandmother’s announcement that her father was alive was a blatant lie. “He’s not here, is he?” she asked, but instead of answering, her grandmother looked away. Ava hurried over to speak with a nurse at the check-in desk.

“Can you help me?” Ava was in a panic; cold as ice and yet sweating as if in the grip of a fever. How mad did she look with no shoes and her hair in tangles? She didn’t even have her purse. “They said my father was dead, but he isn’t. They printed an obituary and pretended to bury him, but he’s alive. And they won’t tell me where he is or who my mother is. She may be a witch.”

Ava was stuttering as she spoke, her fear causing her to be almost incoherent. The nurse gave her a skeptical look, particularly when she mentioned that her mother was a witch, a not uncommon delusion. The nurse signaled to two orderlies, who approached and stood on either side of Ava.

“Okay, let me understand,” the nurse said flatly. She gave the impression that she was someone who’d heard just about everything. Every excuse, every fear, every fantasy. “Your dead father is alive, and your mother is a witch. Is that what you’re telling me?”

The nurse had begun to take notes, and she spoke to Ava as if she were a four-year-old, and that was when Ava knew she shouldn’t have said anything at all. This was some form of punishment. Sure enough, she looked over her shoulder to spy her grandmother being let out the locked door.

“Wait for me,” Ava cried. She tried to follow but was grabbed from behind, her sleeve pushed up so she could be injected with a tranquilizer. “Don’t you dare,” Ava said. But it was over and done. She fell to the floor amid a haze of muffled voices, and the world turned dark.

Ava awoke to discover she’d been carried down the hall and was in a room with more locks on the door, locks she couldn’t open with an incantation because the shot they had given her, a large dose of Thorazine, took away her power to escape. She begged and pleaded and told them who she was, and the orderlies snickered, laughing over how she claimed to be a witch. Miss Witch, they called her. Abracadabra, they said.

Night fell before Ava realized she’d best stop fighting. She stayed where she was, in a chair overlooking the vast lawn, waiting for the light. There were the crows on the grass, or were they only black stones? She felt dead inside, dead and buried, without memory or magic. The idea of her father being alive had been a trick to get her here. Did her grandmother think this was what she needed? To be shocked into being normal, drugged into forgetting the secrets she’d stumbled upon? That talk about her father had been a lie told for only one reason: to get her into the taxi. The nurses assured her that her grandmother just wanted her to get well and not think she was a witch and not believe in black magic. She had always wanted her to be an ordinary girl, hadn’t she? Didn’t they all?

One of the nurses who had a kind nature came to brush her hair after it had been clipped short. She claimed that many people came here and improved after treatment, some of them brilliant and creative, professors and students and artists. She vowed that Ava would get better, too, but Ava still had enough of the sight to see inside other women in the common room; she saw the tragic stories they carried in silence, the children they’d lost, the men who had threatened them. Maybe the Lilith Society had only served to inflame what was nothing more than a troubled mind. Apples on windowsills, white paper crows, leaping from trees and never falling, black blood, a love that would last beyond time—all of it seemed like a story to her now, a fairy tale spun into a web of lies. A wolf on the lawn was howling and she could sleep only when they gave her the shot.

“Close your eyes,” a nurse said to her. “Have sweet dreams.”

But her dreams were a dark jumble, red boots in the mud, women being chased across the Cambridge Common, apples that were rotten when you cut them in two, men who walked away without looking back, an eleventh finger chopped off in a doctor’s office. Don’t cry, the doctor in her dreams said in a stern tone.

Ava began to have sessions with a psychiatrist, a nice enough man named Dr. Henry, who said she was safe in his office and could say whatever she wished.

“Really?” Ava said with a bitter laugh. “Anything?” I’m a witch, I lost my parents, I am lost, I’m in love with the wrong man, I could set this place on fire if you would stop filling me with drugs, I could jump out the window and fly. How can I be ordinary if that is my nature?

“You have to trust someone,” the doctor said.

But who would that be? It seemed now that the only person who had ever been truly honest with her was Lauren. Lauren told the truth, even when it was hurtful, and she really listened, even though she mostly disagreed with Ava’s positive outlook. Lauren saw the world as treacherous, and now Ava thought perhaps her friend had been right all along. She shook her head and refused to tell the doctor anything about herself. She thought of the first witch of Cambridge and how she’d always tried her best to create a world free of witch-hunters. If Rose Bridewell were here, she would have fought back, but Ava had been trained to be polite and well mannered and the medication had humbled her, so that she was once more the girl who went to bed on time and never questioned anyone.

“Let’s start with this,” Dr. Henry said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Because my grandmother wants me to be locked up.”

“No. It’s because you’re seeing things that aren’t real,” the doctor said. “Your thinking is confused.”

“I hear a wolf outside.”

The doctor peered out to see that indeed a beast of a dog was there circling, for Jack had found his way to the hospital. “It’s a dog,” the doctor assured her. “That’s what I mean, Ava. You’re confused. There are no wolves near Boston.”

Ava would have leapt from the window if it hadn’t been locked with a key; she would have run into the woods with Jack and never returned. Now that she was medicated she had no choice except to stay where she was, but all at once she could see herself as others saw her. Ava Abbot, brought in by her concerned grandmother, a delusional Radcliffe student who believed in ghosts and was convinced she was a witch.

“As for ghosts,” the doctor went on, “that’s sheer fantasy. Has there ever been proof that such imaginings exist? Can you touch them, feel them, see their footsteps?”

Ava wondered what else she’d imagined. Had the black apples and the tapping on the window glass at night been real? She shook her head, defeated. “I might be confused,” she admitted.

The doctor nodded, pleased. They were getting somewhere. “I’ll ask again. Why are you here?”

“Because I need help,” Ava recited, knowing this was what the doctor wished to hear. “I’ll do my best.”

She thought of Jamie, and how he had never shown up for her. How he always left when she needed him most. He was the sort of man who was charming but not dependable, who was so hurt he couldn’t even see how he hurt others. She wanted to slap him, she wanted to wake him up, she wanted him to come for her and tell them they were the mad ones, but she had no idea where he was. Likely in a bar, playing some stupid game like darts, more of a boy than a man, really. The thing about you, Lauren had told Ava one night, is that you can really love someone. It’s not so easy for some of us.

Ava held out her hand and was given two blue pills along with two orange ones. She already felt so empty she imagined she might disappear. Maybe this was what people who couldn’t love felt like. Breathe in and breathe out. Be invisible. Never return. She thought of the women in jails in Salem at the time of the first witch, the ones who confessed in order to ensure a night’s rest, who would admit anything so they wouldn’t be tied to a stool and plunged into the river until they hadn’t a single breath left. I am who you say I am. I have no choice. I am mad. I am having visions. At night she dreamed that she was ascending over the apple orchard. From high above she could see the house where she’d grown up. Fly away, witch girl, all the girls in town called to her. I’ll stitch up your mouth with black thread, her grandmother told her when she asked about the apples on her windowsill. In her dreams, she lit a match, then sat in the branches of the tree outside the window of her hospital room as she watched every bit of it burn.

When days had passed and Ava hadn’t returned to Lilith House, Lauren realized that the scar in the palm of her hand was burning brightly. When she asked around, the only person who had recently seen Ava was a next-door neighbor who had caught sight of her getting into a taxi, which was out of character, because taxis were expensive, and Ava usually walked or took the bus. Lauren found her way to Jamie’s apartment. Even though she couldn’t stand him, even though there were times when she thought they were too alike in always putting themselves first, she thought he might know where Ava might be.

He was sitting on the steps of the ramshackle house in North Cambridge where he rented a room, ignoring his classwork in favor of reading a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called Player Piano, a dystopian vision of an automated world in which the need for humans had been wiped away and life had become meaningless.

“Not you,” he said when he saw Lauren. In his opinion she was a clever, selfish girl who didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself. If a ship went down, Jamie was certain Lauren would manage to survive while everyone else floundered. “Are you here to torture me?”