Page 61 of The Witches of Cambridge

Ava thought she’d seen Jack’s shadow, but she decided her eyes were playing tricks on her, for that was surely impossible. When she heard her name spoken, her expression was blank. She was going crazy here. That was the only explanation for thinking that the attendant in a white coat who was approaching was someone she knew. The attendant had pale hair and sharp little teeth. “Something’s wrong with me,” Ava said when the attendant came closer. “I think my father might be dead, but I saw him sitting on the edge of my bed. And there’s a wolf outside waiting for me.”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Lauren said. “Your father’s spirit is watching over you, and the wolf is your dog, Jack. People here make it all seem very complicated, but it’s not. It’s simple. We’re going to jump out the window and get the hell out of here.”

Ava blinked. She had begun to recognize the woman beside her. She was a friend or an enemy, or both; she was a person who had hurt her, but she was here for her now. “You’re Lauren,” Ava said.

“Like it or not.” Lauren nodded. “It’s me.”

The window was so covered with ivy no one had bothered to lock it or nail it shut. There would later be a hearing and the custodial staff would be blamed, and after that the windows would be checked more carefully. But for now, Lauren was able to open this window; she sliced through the meshing with her jackknife before beginning to hack at the vines.

“You first,” Lauren told Ava. “If you please.”

“I’ll fall. I know I will. They took something away. I have no power.”

“We’re only two stories up. We don’t have to fly, we can jump.” Lauren tugged Ava closer to the window. “You’ll be fine,” she assured her. “Just look where you’re going.”

It was true that Ava could see more clearly now. The tranquilizer was wearing off, and she realized that she was in a hospital and had been in a medicated trance. She’d been dreaming about apple trees; they couldn’t take that away from her. She used to fly off the roof of the house in Genesis, in the spring when the landscape was a shimmering green. Now everything outside was yellow and gold. She slipped out the window and held on to the vines. Her heart was beating so fast she imagined that it wouldn’t be possible to keep it inside her chest much longer. It would burst if she didn’t do something. If she didn’t make the leap, her heart would fly away without her, so she simply let go.

As it happened, there was an apple tree outside the window. The spirit of her father had disappeared into the falling dark, departing the way ghosts often do when it’s not necessary to see them anymore. Ava closed her eyes, forcing herself back into a waking sleep so she might see him again, but she couldn’t. She was awake and he was gone. The cellist who was in a car on an icy road, that’s who he’d been once upon a time. The cello was in the backseat, along with a baby. There were no car seats, so the baby was in a laundry basket, covered with a blanket decorated with sheep. And then it happened. The unexpected. The thing that had changed her life.

She saw it all now that her mind had cleared. How her parents had struggled to grab her, how the river water had rushed in, how her mother had floated, even though she’d done her best to go under to save her husband. Witches always rise, and mortal men can drown easily, falling deeper and deeper into the muddy tide, and despite his wife’s struggle to go after him, she rose to the surface every time she tried to dive after him, her child in her arms.

The rescuers found him too late, and the woman who’d saved Ava wept on the bank of the Charles River. Ava remembered all of it now. She could already talk and was so advanced she could read a few letters but she forgot all of that, and afterward she was mute for a year and read only when no one else was around. Now she remembered the cold water, the cold air, the cold heart inside her beating once more. They had to take her mother away in the ambulance by force because she wouldn’t leave her husband’s waterlogged body alone on the grass. She tried to fight them off, but they took her anyway, and when she ran off from the hospital, likely fearing an examination that would show what her bloodline was, the grandparents were called to come for Ava. She was in the police station when they arrived. She asked for her daddy and her mama, and when she was told they were gone, she stopped talking. She didn’t say another word. They brought her warm, dry clothes. They brushed her hair. They told her a story about a girl being rescued from an underground world where every day lasted for seven years and all the women were witches. She would be fine, they told her, but she knew it was a lie.

Not long after, at the courthouse on Third Street in Cambridge, Christopher Abbot’s parents were granted custody. By the time her mother recovered from the loss of her husband, the judge thought a woman who let someone else care for her child wasn’t worthy of claiming her. She became someone searching for the little girl she wasn’t fit to raise, who would be safer in the woods of Maine. She had been convinced of that, but she couldn’t stop looking for her child. Sometimes Ava’s mother would take the bus to Maine and walk through the orchards. Late at night she would stand outside the window that was double-locked and rest her hand on the windowpane, and the ice would melt and her daughter would hear something that sounded like brambles rapping against the glass. She didn’t fly to the orchard, she took the bus, then walked from town, so she looked like any ordinary woman in mourning. But she wasn’t ordinary in the least, and she was still someone’s mother. The girl on the other side of the window was Ava Bridewell Abbot, the love of her life, and she left black apples in the hope that her little girl wouldn’t forget who she was.

Ava remembered it all now as she stood on the window ledge of the hospital. She stumbled and might have fallen if Lauren hadn’t grabbed her hand.

“You’ll be safe,” Lauren vowed.

It was dusk and the rising moon was silver. The air was still and thin, air they could disappear into. Be careful, be ready, beware, that’s what her mother had whispered through the window glass. Even when she couldn’t hear, Ava could read her lips.

We fly together.

It was the September equinox, the season when lives come full circle, when one journey ends, and another begins. There were women at the windows in the hospital buildings, locked in their rooms, who watched them escape. Some were writing poems about them, some were offering up prayers, all were wishing them the best as they leapt from the window. It was perfect weather, but anyone could tell it would be winter soon enough. Jack had been chased off by a gardener, but he was there in the bushes, waiting for her.

The ground was hard as they tumbled down. There were purple asters that looked black in the dim light. They rose up and, without stopping for a breath, they ran along, with Jack leading the way. The taxi driver was napping until Lauren and Ava tumbled into the car, with Jack jumping in after them.

“Hey,” the driver said, alarmed. “Is that a wolf?”

“He’s a dog,” Lauren assured the driver.

“I’ve seen dogs.” The driver was hesitant as he eyed the creature in the backseat.

“Well, now you’re seeing another,” Lauren said. She handed over a second twenty. That should be enough to shut him up. “Take us to Cambridge.”

The cabbie did exactly as he was asked to do, speeding off along the dark road. Lauren and Ava rolled down the windows and closed their eyes and imagined they were flying. All the trees were black, and the moon was rising in the sky. They weren’t ghosts locked away; they were very much alive. They called out with joy when they passed over the Cambridge city line and threw their arms around one another.

At Lilith House, they went into the garden and sat on the bench. They were all alone, and the house was dark. Lauren had forgotten to turn on any lamps.

“Did you do all this so I’ll forgive you?” Ava asked.

“Have you forgiven me?”

“I was always going to. No matter what.”

Lauren had the scissors given to her by the nurse, and she now carefully trimmed the ends of Ava’s hair so it would be less choppy and uneven. When she was done, there was Ava, still so beautiful she didn’t look human. She looked like a fairy in an underground world where she would always be safe from human cruelty. They might have cried, but they didn’t. Instead, they went into the kitchen, and Lauren fixed tomato sandwiches, and she watched Ava eat as if she’d been starved. Lauren thought of the poet outside on good behavior. She thought of the lawn where patients had once played tennis with their psychiatrists, then had tea parties inside large white tents that were set up beneath the darkening sky. Lauren wished the poet’s fate would change, but as they had sat together on the bench smoking cigarettes in the dim light, Lauren knew that it wouldn’t. Some people had the chance to fly away, and others didn’t, and it wasn’t fair, but it was true all the same.

“I dreamed of Jamie all the while I was there,” Ava told Lauren. It was a waking vision, one she had in hallways and in the doctor’s office and while she looked out the window. “He’d buried his heart under an apple tree, and I couldn’t find it. Then you came and we dug beneath the tree together. But the ground was bleeding, and we still couldn’t find it. Maybe he doesn’t have one after all.”

That was when Lauren knew she had a rare opportunity. She could undo what had been done.

“He has a heart,” she told Ava. “He broke up with you because his family threatened to have your scholarship ended if he didn’t. I was afraid to tell you. I thought you might get yourself thrown out of school.”

Ava didn’t have to think twice. “Go find him,” she said. She was owed that at least. “Get him back.”

And that was what Lauren did, returning to North Cambridge and knocking on his door. At first, Jamie didn’t speak to her; he tried to close the door, but she used all her strength to keep it open so he would listen. At last, when he was made to understand what had happened, he grabbed his coat. He and Lauren rushed to Lilith House together, not saying a word. They were two headstrong people who wanted the best for someone they loved. They didn’t even hate each other anymore. By the time they arrived, the hour was late. Lauren went to wake Ava, who had fallen asleep on the couch. They looked out the window together, and there Jamie was, wearing his black coat, his hands stuffed in his pockets. He looked worried as he paced back and forth. He was remorseful and nervous, but he had come for her, and it was true, he’d had a heart all along.