Cursed be the Wicked (18 page)

Intentions count in your actions.
—
Abu Bakr

I imagine how every time she set foot inside this tiny space, she would have seen that quote. I question whose intentions she might have wanted to remind herself about. Was it Dad’s? Or her own?

A wooden chair and what resembles an end table are the only pieces of furniture in the room. A lamp sits on the table, with a red lampshade covering the bulb. Next to the lamp is a candle. It’s been long burned down to the bottom. Only the wick remains. Somehow, she hung shelving from the floor to the ceiling and they are the length of the entire wall.

I imagine the time it must have taken to get this room together. I wonder if she did it herself or if she had help? And if she did have help, who would have done this for her?

There’s a musty smell, worse than when Finn and I entered the house and it’s no wonder. This room has been boarded up for years, not months.

The stench is quickly forgotten when I turn the lamp on and see what my mother has been hoarding in here. Volumes upon volumes of books are stacked on the shelves. The books don’t look like they were borrowed from the library or purchased in bookstores. They’re more like journals. All are the same composition book, some with different designs on the front, most are the standard black and white.

I pull one off of the top of a random pile and examine it.

It’s dated on the binding and it’s signed inside the cover.

By Mom.

I pull another one off, same thing.

Another, and another, I look around at all the journals she must have written over the years and I want to know what’s in them. What was she writing that needed to be hidden?

I realize I’ve just found a gold mine of information and I feel myself smiling at the potential within this room.

I haven’t bothered to notice that Finn’s in here with me and she’s found some things I didn’t notice until now. Like the boxes stacked neatly in one of the corners with my name on the outside of them.

“Your mom sure was a huge fan of yours, Coop,” she says as she leafs through some papers. “Did you write all these?”

“What?”

I tuck the books I’ve confiscated under my arm and look to see what Finn’s talking about.

“Holy. She kept them.” I’m practically whispering as I flip through the old school papers I wrote.

“All of them, it seems like,” Finn agrees.

She pushes aside the box she started with and opens another. As she does, I pull one of my old writing assignments out and read through it. I laugh out loud at the horrid grammar I used back when I was in third grade and then I see the teacher’s note at the end, telling me what a good job I’d done. The potential she thought I had as a writer.

Clearly, the woman was just humoring me.

I’m having a private moment when I notice something taped to the bottom of the page.

“That’s rosemary,” Finn says and my brow pinches together.

I’m curious. “Why rosemary? And why tape it to my papers?”

She shrugs. “It’s a pretty typical protection item.”

More pinching.

More thinking.

“Protection? From what?”

“I don’t know,” she tells me. “But between the nazar, that rosemary and the wind chime? I’m thinking she was covering all her bases with you.”

The mere thought strikes me as odd. Why would she need to protect me?

And from whom? Herself?

“I think she cared more than you’ve been led to believe, Coop.”

Finn’s hand is on my shoulder, her head against my arm. She’s reading the paper I’m holding, silently, and when she giggles, I can imagine the part she’s reading.

Her next thought confirms it.

“I think your teacher was humoring you.”

“That’s so weird, I was just—”

The distinct sound of a window breaking crashes into the room at a decibel level so high it makes me cringe and stops me from finishing that thought. After a quick look between us, Finn and I fight our way back through the opening in the closet wall to go see who or what had caused the noise.

I see the tail end of the curtains blow from a breeze but as it comes into full view, that wind dies down instantaneously. When I look for the window that broke a few seconds ago, I see nothing. No cracks in the glass no shards on the floor even. In fact, there isn’t a broken anything anywhere in the room. The window isn’t open. So how in the hell were the curtains blowing?

“You heard that, right?” I ask Finn while I’m still in a state of where in the hell did that noise come from. She nods, then walks over to the window then she looks down at the yard. It’s almost as if she’s watching someone. When I join her, it’s clear there’s nobody there.

“I’m losing my mind,” I muse to the window but Finn shakes her head at me.

“I don’t know about that.”

“It must have been kids outside or something,” I tell Finn. I want her to agree. I want her to make what just happened make sense. She doesn’t give me the satisfaction though, she refuses to comply.

I tell myself it’s the house. That being here is getting inside my head and I leave it at that as I head back inside the cramped room of my mother’s. I scan the journals and find that she was apparently a very organized woman because the books all seem to be stacked in chronological order, based on the dates they have scratched into the bindings.

It’s not difficult for me to find her early ones and I gather what I can carry, then start back out to leave when I notice—Finn’s not leaving with me.

I turn to see why but it’s not like her attention is on anything else. She’s just standing there, staring at me like she can’t understand something. “What?”

“I thought you grew up here?”

“I did.”

“And all you can say to the things that have been happening here . . . what
just
happened here was some
kids
?”

“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn,” I chide and start to leave again, with or without her.

This time, she follows.

“You
don’t
?” she asks, sounding surprised a little but it’s not occurring to me why she might react that way.

“I stopped believing in the Boogie Man a long time ago,” I tell her as we head down the stairs.

“There aren’t even any kids
outside
right now, Coop.”

I shrug and head down the stairs. “Then maybe someone was playing their afternoon soap operas too loud, Finn, I don’t know. Clearly the window is not broken.”

At the bottom of the stairs, she grabs my arm and stops me.

“So you won’t even entertain the idea of—”

“Of what? That some entity is here with us? Why should I?” Suddenly, I’m growing irritated with the way she consistently makes me question my entire past, and the way she makes me question what I believe to be true.

“Because you’re here, doing a story, on exactly this kind of stuff. On
Salem.
I just assumed you’d have an open mind about the supernatural.”

“Finn.” I let out a frustrated sigh. “I’ve spent,” I pause to try and really drive my point home, here, “an
enormous
amount of my adult life trying to forget all the crazy ass bedtime stories about spirits watching over us and how we only get what we give and all the other bullshit that goes along with mediums and psychics and witches and warlocks.”

I look into her eyes, silently pleading with her to believe what I’m telling her. To drop all this
paranormality
she’s become so accustomed to and jump on my anti-believer bandwagon. When she doesn’t respond, I add a few more words for her to think over. “It’s not real, Finn. None of it’s real.” I breathe, finally. “And it will never
be
real.”

She hesitates, and looks a little hurt.

I may have gone too far and part of me feels bad about that. I don’t want to offend her but she has to get it through that thick skull of hers that I’m not that guy. The one who wants to make some sort of connection with his dead mother and find out why she did what she did. I know why she did it. She hated him.

She hated both of us.

I’m tired. And done letting some sort of hope slide into my life that maybe she wasn’t who I thought she was.

“I’m not so sure you’re convinced,” she tells me.

I let out a sarcastic laugh and hold my ground, stubbornly. “Well I am.”

“How can you still be so close minded about this when there are so many signs telling you different?”

“Because it’s,” I search for the right word and when I find it, I blurt it out. “Ridiculous.”

Finn’s brow raises exponentially and I realize what I’ve said.

“Well you must think I’m a complete idiot, then,” she says flatly.

“What? No,” I tell her. “Not exactly.”

God. That was stupid
.

“Wow.” She waves a hand as she starts to leave. “And all this time I’ve been
rambling
on about Salem and its history and magic and,” she laughs, refusing to finish her thought.

“Finn, I didn’t mean that.”

“Well what
did
you mean then, Coop?”

I shake my head and speak the truth.

“I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t expect to,” I take a breath and let some air out. I’m not sure what it is I’m trying to say here. I didn’t expect to what?

“Go on,” she urges.

“I didn’t expect to meet you, or Geneva, and think maybe,” I lose my words because I’m not a hundred percent sure what it is I want to say here. But Finn knows what she wants to say.

“That you might actually be
wrong
?”

That’s exactly what I meant.

“Yes,” I tell her, then I finish my own thought on the topic for once.

“And if I’m wrong about her, then I’m wrong about me.”

“Well isn’t that a good thing?”

“I don’t know what it is,” I mutter.

That might be the most difficult thing to try and come to grips with. Because this whole time, my relationship with her, even since years before I left, was based on my thinking she was fucking nuts. If she wasn’t, then, “Maybe I am.” If Finn heard me, she’s not letting on. Or maybe she’s just letting me answer my own damn questions.

“What is it you’re really here for, Coop?”

I swallow down the doubt and fear, then I make an attempt to be as honest as I possibly can.

“I don’t know. My initial plan was to get in, get out, and get back to normal.”

She arches an eyebrow. “And now?”

“And now,” I hesitate because I hadn’t really thought it through. I’ve just been trying to see where things lead me. Where Finn leads me.

“I’m just trying to survive this trip.”

She nods, but she’s not letting up on me completely. Not yet. Maybe she doesn’t believe me. Maybe I don’t blame her.

She walks toward the front door and stops to tell me one last thing before she goes.

“Poke and prod something long enough, Coop, and at some point, it’s gonna poke back whether you
believe
in it or not.”

She leaves me standing alone at the bottom of the stairs as she heads for the car and I think about what she said. It’s quite obvious she thinks ghosts
are
real and better yet, that my mother is one.

I glance up the staircase again, half waiting, half hoping, and maybe even needing her apparition to appear there. When she doesn’t, I chastise myself for entertaining the idea, then I head out and lock up, and go after Finn.

I might find out some new truths about my mother throughout this trip but that doesn’t mean I have to become one of those crackpots that think she’s still “with” me.

The ride back to Geneva’s place is silent, although I can tell Finn’s thinking about something, the way she chews on her fingernail, bounces her knee and peeks over at me every once in a while.

I give her space while taking some for myself because I’m not exactly ready to jump into a debate over all things supernatural with her.

I’d obviously lose that argument. In her eyes anyway.

“I’ll walk you up,” I tell her after I throw the car into park when we pull into Geneva’s driveway.

“No need,” she tells me.

“Finn.”

I get out of the car to follow her. Just as I’m catching up, we both stop short when the front door opens.

Danny Moss is laughing at something I’m assuming he said, since Geneva, who’s right behind him, isn’t even smiling, much less talking or laughing. I’d venture to say, she looks pretty solemn. Maybe even annoyed.

“Oh, hey, Finn,” Dan says when he sees her glaring at him. Then his eyes find me and he loses the laugh.

“Coop.”

“Danny.”

He breathes in, ready to correct me and I save him the bother.

“Dan.”

He nods, then turns his attention back to the person he’s really here for.

“I was just telling Geneva here about how I’m planning on wining and dining you to the hilt this weekend.”

“Dan, I didn’t—”

“Now, I know, I know, we didn’t settle up on an exact day or time yet, but—”

She tries to be nice. “We didn’t settle up on anything.”

“Yet.”

“At all,” she shoots back with her irritation showing this time.

“Don’t be stubborn, Finn,” he starts to tell her. And this is about when I’ve had it with the ping pong match.

“Finn’s busy all weekend Dan, sorry,” I inform him before he can get another word in. I can’t help myself. I smile at the bastard.

“Excuse me?” he says, and he’s genuinely confused. I smile wider.

“Yeah she promised to show me some sights,” I tell him. He stares blankly, like he doesn’t believe me. So I get confirmation for him.

“Right Finn?”