“I know that it’s important to you, sweetheart,” said Grace. “I’m not trying to dismiss what you do. I just worry that all this energy that you put into your
work
, as you call it, just takes you further away from really knowing yourself.”
Connie inhaled deeply, wrestling her rage into a jagged ball under her diaphragm, and exhaled silently through her nose. Darkness had spread through the dining room, swallowing the shapes of the table and chairs, even rubbing away the hanging planters. Arlo wandered over from where
he had been resting under the table and settled on the floor next to Connie, his furry chin in her lap.
“I know myself perfectly well,” she said, trying to wring the sound of anger out of her voice.
“I don’t mean to upset you, my darling,” her mother soothed. “Hold on, let me just pop these into the oven.”
Connie heard the clatter as the telephone was placed on a tile countertop two time zones away. A creak and scrape signaled the opening of Grace’s oven and the sliding in of a cookie sheet heavy with samosas. Connie pictured her mother briskly wiping her floured palms on her apron—that one that Connie really hated, that said
OM IS WHERE THE HEART IS.
The receiver knocked against something, and then her mother’s soft breath carried down the telephone wires and washed over her cheek. Connie felt her annoyance throb a little less.
“All I’m saying,” Grace said, “is that it couldn’t hurt to spend a little time looking into yourself and see what’s going on in there. You are a special, remarkable person, Connie, whether you find the book or not. At this point, I just don’t think you need it, that’s all.”
Connie felt her upper lip twitch and her nose and cheeks flush with salt water. She swallowed, reaching down to grab hold of one of Arlo’s ears. She tugged on the dog’s ear for a moment, saying nothing.
“Now,” Grace said, pretending to ignore Connie’s rising silence. “Are you ready to tell me about the boy yet?”
Connie breathed deeply, smiling in spite of herself through the tear that was snaking its way into the corner of her mouth.
“No,” she managed to say.
“All right, I suppose it can wait.” Grace sighed. “But we’ll have to talk about it sooner or later.”
Connie rolled her eyes. “Okay, Mom,” she said. And then she hung up.
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Somewhere around the Summer Solstice
1991
“
H
EY
, C
ORNELL!” A VOICE SAID, AND THE WORDS FLOATED IN SANS
serif script across the plane of Connie’s dreaming mind. They drifted over the image of Grace—or was it the woman in the portrait downstairs?—in a hospital gown, standing barefoot in the snow. The woman in the dream extended her arms, mouth open, screaming, but no sound came out. The sky overhead had a sun and moon in it together, and then the woman disappeared under a writhing coil of snakes, replicating and spreading out across the snow, coming toward her. Connie scowled in her sleep, limbs twitching.
“Hey!
Cornell!
” The words appeared again, the visual form of them breaking apart in little droplets of rainwater at the vibrating sound of something banging on the front door of the house. The dream dissolved into trailing skeins of thought as Connie was pulled upward toward consciousness. She became aware of the bed underneath her, of the pressure of dog feet against the back of her neck. She opened one eye.
The banging had followed her out of her dream and was now vibrating up through the floor, rattling the door latch. Connie sat up, hair askew, and wiped her eyes with one forearm. Arlo rolled onto his side with a yawn, legs stretching into the warm space in the bed that she had just vacated.
“What the
hell
,” she muttered, shuffling across the slanted attic bedroom. She made her way down the stairs, toes hanging over each narrow step. Scratching her hair midyawn, she opened the front door.
“Hold this,” said the voice, and a carryout cup of coffee was thrust into her hands. Behind the coffee cup Connie found Sam, in cargo shorts, Doc Martens, and a Black Flag T-shirt, holding a box of doughnuts. “Keeping grad school hours, huh?” He grinned, edging around her into the front hall. His arm brushed against her shoulder, leaving a tingling patch on the skin underneath her T-shirt.
Connie blinked.
“Ah, dining room!” said Sam, ambling into the old hall and setting the pastry box on the table. “You want a plate? Nah, you don’t need a plate.”
“Sam, what—” she started to ask.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said, offering her a chocolate-covered Boston cream wrapped in a paper napkin.
“Wow. Really?” she said, accepting the pastry.
“Drink some of that coffee, you’ll feel better,” he assured her.
“But how did you find—” she started again.
“Easy. Looked for the only house
totally
obscured by vines,” he said, settling in one of the shield-back chairs and propping one boot on the tabletop with a smile. “It’s a great one, by the way. Terrific shape.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “It’s a wreck. Every time I go upstairs I’m a little afraid it’s going to fall over completely.”
“No way,” he said, shaking his head.
“Look.” Connie dug a fingernail into one of the naked wooden beams crossing the threshold between the dining room and the entryway, and crumbled wooden dust spattered down from overhead. “Falling apart.” She lowered herself into a chair at the dining table, glancing at him as she did so.
Sam looked up, then shrugged. “Powder post beetles. You expect that in a beam that old. Probably came in with the wood, back when it was built. About 1700, right? Then they’ve been gone for two hundred years, easy. It looks bad, but inside, that beam’s like steel.”
He bit into a jelly doughnut, leaving a white smear of powdered sugar around his lips.
“When they built it,” he continued, “they used green wood for the pegs to hold the posts and beams together, so it would go in soft around the joint and then harden into place. The only thing that’s going to take this house down is a bulldozer.” Sam grinned, wiping slowly at the powdered sugar with the back of one wrist. “Nothing beats old hardwood,” he said, watching her.
Connie swallowed, her ears blushing, and hastily pulled her gaze away. She bit into her own doughnut, not looking at him.
“There are women who would find this pretty weird, you know,” she said presently, sucking crumbles of chocolate off her thumb.
“Yeah,” he conceded. “I’ve gone out with a few of them.” As Sam chewed, Arlo materialized under the table and sniffed at his leg. They ate for a moment in silence, Connie slurping her coffee. She became acutely conscious of the fact that she was sitting in front of Sam in faded plaid pajamas. Why that felt more intimate, more embarrassing, than swimming in her underwear with him in the dark she could not say. Their night swim, obscured as it was by darkness and fog, felt almost as if she had imagined it. They had passed several hours together, splashing and playing in the water. When they tired of swimming they had stretched out side by side on the raft, gazing up at the sky as the fog parted just enough to reveal a sprinkling of stars overhead. They lapsed into silence, not touching or speaking, Connie intensely aware of Sam’s proximity, but frightened of letting her fingers take his hand, afraid that if she did so the unreality of the night would vanish. Now in the clarity of daylight she knew that it had been real. The warm blush on her ears started to creep down from her hairline onto her cheeks, and she crossed her legs without thinking.
“So,” Sam said. Wagging, Arlo reared up and put a pair of happy front paws in his lap. Sam rubbed the animal’s cheek and turned to Connie. “What are we doing today?”
“What?” Connie said through a mouthful of cream filling.
“I have the day off,” Sam explained. “I’ve been thinking about your mystery witch. I figured you probably have a lot of research to do, and I’m kind of invested in your topic now. So…” He spread his hands out, shrugging. He waited for a beat, and when she did not respond immediately, said, “Of course, if you don’t feel like working today, I could always just show you around a little. Whatever.” He plucked another pastry out of the box, not looking at her.
Connie felt a shiver of pleased excitement vibrate in her middle and wander down her arms and legs, and she smiled. “Just give me a minute to get dressed,” she said.
A
SMALL CHILD RAN UP ON QUICK FEET, AN OVERLARGE BLACK WITCH HAT
covered in purple spangles balanced on its head. “Abracadabra!” she said, hands splayed for maximum effect, and then scampered to hide behind an ivy plant next to a woman seated at a café table who, Connie assumed from her beatific smile, could only be her mother. Sam, meanwhile, had tumbled to the brick walkway, arms and legs cartwheeled out at an angle.
“Ooof!” he cried. “She got me!”
The hat poked up from behind the ivy, shading a pair of anxious eyes.
“Get up!” Connie whispered to him. “You’ll scare her!”
“You have to say the magic words!” moaned Sam, rolling his head back and forth in false pain and anguish.
“‘Please’?” guessed Connie.
“No, the other magic words!” He clutched at his imaginary wounds. “Quick!”
“‘Get up, doofus’?” Connie suggested.
Sam raised his head. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” he asked.
Connie sighed. “Abracadabra?” she said.
Sam sprang to his feet in triumph. “Oh, thank goodness! I am saved,” he whooped, and the hat shook with giggles. The woman smiled at them. Connie cast her eyes heavenward.
“That was a close one,” said Sam as they moved into the shade of a nearby tree. “I thought she had me.”
“It’s based on a wimple, you know,” Connie said, offhand. “Or a hennin.”
“What is?” he asked.
“The witch hat that the little girl was wearing. The tall pointy part derives from a fifteenth-century headdress called a hennin, and the wide brim is a simplified form of an English wimple. Common middle-class women’s headgear in the late Middle Ages, basically. Nothing inherently witchy about it.”
Sam laughed, throwing his head back and wrapping his arms around his middle. “Hoo,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You still haven’t come back from orals-land, have you?”
The open-air passage where they were walking wound through the old city center of Salem, from the empty wharves, past the old hotel, around a small museum full of Chinese porcelain and model ships, all the way to the graffitied commuter train station, moving as it did so through each successive stage of Salem’s community life. Knots of tourists strolled at a holiday pace among the vendor carts that dotted the walkway, perusing tie-dyed
WITCH CITY
T-shirts, “lucky crystals,” iced lemonade, bonsai trees.
“And what about all the other stuff?” he asked.
“What other stuff?” she said, picking up a Witch City snow globe, examining it with a shake, and setting it back down on a nearby cart.
“Brooms? Black cats?” he teased. “You know. Witch stuff.”
Connie snorted. “Well, the cat is just a stand-in for a familiar. But they weren’t always only cats.”
“Familiar?” he said, toying with a crystal on a long leather thong on the cart.
“A devil or spirit in the guise of an animal, that did the witch’s bidding. In one of the Salem trial transcripts I’ve read they accuse some poor woman of having an invisible yellow bird perched on her shoulder. A little girl who was accused told the court her mother gave her a snake for a familiar, which she suckled from a wart between her fingers.” Connie frowned. “I don’t know why popular culture pairs witches exclusively with cats at this point. Maybe cats have their own folklore that just got mixed up with witches. And the broom I only know about because Liz showed me a woodcut in a book that she had to read for
her
orals.”
“So tell me,” he said “The broom stuff is crazy,” she said. “So a medieval witch on her way to a sabbath would strip off all her clothes.” She laughed as Sam blanched. “Then smear her naked body with flying ointment, straddle her broom with the
straw end up
, which is important, because that’s where the candle goes so that you can see when you’re flying in the dark, then say a spell and be swept up the chimney. Isn’t that nuts?”
“Mmmm. Flying ointment,” Sam said, one eyebrow arched.
“Shut up,” she teased, smacking him gently on the chest.
A group of middle-aged women with cameras shuffled by, clad in shorts and feathered witch hats. They clutched bulging plastic shopping bags advertising a witch trials–themed trolley tour. A teenage girl in heavy black eyeliner posed, lip curled, before a shop front wax museum that advertised
DUNGEON AND BURNING-WITCH DIORAMAS.
“They really play up all this witch stuff, don’t they?” Connie reflected.
“Summer solstice today,” said Sam. “If you think this is bad, you should see it at Halloween.”
“Yeah, but it speaks to how alienated we all are from history,” Connie grumbled, blue eyes darkening. “For generations the witch trials were such an embarrassment that no one would discuss them. A proper history of them wasn’t even written until the end of the nineteenth century. Now look at it—it’s a carnival.”
Connie looked around at the relaxed people milling about the esplanade,
gazing into the windows of costume shops and card readers. She tried to imagine other violent, oppressive periods of history that had similarly been transformed into a source of amusement and tourism but could not think of any. Did Spain have Inquisition wax museums, showing effigies of people broken on the rack?
“There’s something fascinating about violent death,” Sam remarked, sensing her disaffection. “Especially if it happened to someone very distant from you. Look at the Tower of London. The tours there are all beheading, all the time. Generations of kings and queens in chains, getting their heads lopped off. And while you’re there, be sure to admire the Crown Jewels! Their wealth and privilege is what makes them distant from us, in addition to their place in the past. And so we don’t feel guilty reveling in their suffering.”
“It’s horrible,” Connie said. “The people accused in Salem were just regular, everyday people.”
“It’s not all bad,” said Sam, leading her away from the stoop of the wax museum. “One weird offshoot of all the witch stuff is that Salem has become a huge magnet for modern-day pagans. They come from all over the place.” He gestured to a verdant shop front in a narrow alley off the main walk. Its hanging sign read
Lilith’s Garden: Herbs and Magickal Treasures
in looping, hand-painted letters.
Connie sniffed with disapproval. “That’s almost worse. Real pagans coming here to make a buck off of tourists with a morbid curiosity about people who were persecuted three hundred years ago. And the dead people weren’t even pagans! They were Christians who just didn’t fit in.”
“Feeling cynical today, are we?” asked Sam. “You should have a little more faith in people, Cornell. C’mon.” He took her by the elbow and pulled her, protesting, into the little shop.
As the door opened, a soothing gong sounded in place of the bell that usually rang over souvenir shop doors, and Connie was met with a waft of unplaceable scent—incense, but she could not tell what kind. Dark and spicy. Soft pan flute music played from a tape deck on the counter, its sound
made slightly tinny by a dribble of hardened purple candle wax melted into the speaker mesh. Under the glass counter ranged crystals and jewelry of various kinds attached to black leather strings, and pewter figurines of wizards and fairies holding opalescent marbles aloft on their thin metal arms. A rack of wind chimes adorned one wall, and they released a torrent of clanking and tinkling as Sam’s shoulder brushed against them.
“Merry meet!” piped a smiling woman, leaning on her elbows over an almanac open next to the cash register. “A joyous summer solstice to you both.” Her hair was gathered in two lush pigtails over both of her shoulders, and half-moon earrings dangled from her ears. On her chest, peeking out between the ruffles of her blouse, lay a tattoo of a pentacle entwined with roses and lilies. Connie muffled a snicker between her lips, and Sam pinched her to keep her quiet.
“Hello,” he replied to the smiling woman.
“Can I help you find anything?” she asked. “We have some special events today, just so you know. Tarot readings start in half an hour, and at five we’ll have someone doing aura photography.”
“We’re just browsing,” said Connie at the same moment that Sam said, “Can you tell us where the books are, please?”