Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (24 page)

That day Sophie didn't continue on to that abandoned block. She stopped at the corner, noting the way the dust yellowed the air down the way, like looking at a sepia picture from another time. The place that marked the crossroads was Hennie's Grocery. She turned and entered the store. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The bright sun outside struggled to cut through the layer of grime on the grocery store's windows. Sophie thought that probably some people didn't shop at Hennie's because they thought the place was closed. As for the rest, they just thought it was nasty. Sophie's eyes came to rest on the glass countertop. Arranged on its center, a carton of orange juice, a box of instant soup, a lemon, and a jar of amber honey. Behind it all, Hennie, her thin scarf containing her hair, her eyes lit like a magic piece of sea glass.

“Hello, Sophia,” she greeted the girl. “At last, my niece.”

* * *

HENNIE SWUNG A
bolt of rusty metal, locking the door of her shop. “Not that anyone comes.” She winked at Sophie. “Right?”

“I have always wondered how you stay in business,” Sophie admitted.

“I stay in business for you,” the old woman said. “I know when you come. I peek at your mother, I read what she wants, I make it be here for you.”

Sophie thought about the loaves of bread she'd brought back, eaten as baloney and cheese sandwiches at school. The ground beef her mother fried up with Hamburger Helper. The gallons of milk and fizzy liters of soda. All magical, conjured by Hennie. A glance around the shop and Sophie could see there was no deli case, no fridge stocked with colorful cans of soda. Even the glass candy jars she'd seen when she first entered had asserted their rightful existence as great glass orbs of dried herbs and flowers. Hennie eased up on her illusion, and the grocery store relaxed into the witch's workshop it really was.

“But the food,” Sophie insisted. “The food was real.”

“Magic is real,” Hennie said. “Illusions are, in their way, completely real.”

“Was it bad for me to eat it?” Sophie dug. “What
was
it?”

“I care very much about your growing bones,” Hennie said. “I make sure it have all the nutrition. Charmed food maybe the very best food.” She winked.

“Did it make me even more magical?” Sophie said hopefully.

“You don't need Hamburger Helper to make you more magic.” She chuckled. “Now, Sophie—where do I even begin with you?”

* * *

THEY BEGAN WITH
an altar. It was a relief for Sophie to lay her mother's heavy purse onto the counter next to the magical groceries. She unloaded the heavy white candle Angel's mother had dressed for her. A sweet smell filled the dusty room, a smell of flowers. The inside of the glass was dusted with what looked like glitter and pencil shavings, and Sophie thought she could see the letters of her name dug into the soft wax.

“Angel—you know Angel?” Hennie nodded. “Her mother made these for me. She's a curandera.” She tried to say it like Angel had said it, with a roll to the
r
, and felt embarrassed, like she was trying to sound like someone she wasn't. But she didn't want to disrespect the pretty word by butchering it with her rough Chelsea voice. “Are you a curandera?”

Hennie nodded, smelling the candles. “Yes, but we call it different. I am
znakharka
. That is how we say
curandera
. Here, you say witch. Is all the same.” She brought the candles to a low shelf already holding bundles of herbs, some rocks and feathers, what looked like a piece of an animal pelt, a chunk of fur. “Znakharka,” Hennie spoke the word like taking a chomp out of it. It sounded like a powerful
word. In general, Sophie liked words that began with z, because they were unusual. “You are znakharka,” she told Sophie, taking the candle from her and bringing it beneath her nose for a sniff. Sophie pulled a strand of hair into her mouth and began biting the split ends. Her hair tasted salty, and she realized that though she had bathed an entire flock of city pigeons, she had not taken a bath since puking creek water all over herself.
Gross
, she thought, and spit out her hair. She hadn't chewed her hair since she was a kid, anyway. But something about the way Hennie watched her made her feel like a child.

“You light this candle. You pray for clarity and protection.” Hennie gave Sophie a box of wooden matches. Of course Hennie wouldn't have a damp pack of paper matches, or a plastic Bic like the ones Kishka lit her cigarettes from. Her matches were hardy little torches from another place and time. Sophie pulled the tip down the rough wooden wall, and the tang of sulfur filled the shop. She lit the candle, wondering who she was praying to. She recalled what Angel had said about
lineage
. Teresita, Gandhi, Jesus. Was it blasphemous to pray to Teresita and Jesus at the same time? She knew the nuns at school would think so. But the nuns would have a lot to say about Sophie hanging out with Hennie, an actual znakharka. Sophie hadn't ever paid much mind to the nuns and wasn't about to begin now.
Hi, lineage
, she thought inside her head.
Please look out for me, okay? Please help me pay attention and not space out
. She thought for a moment.
Is that it? I don't know. Thanks
. She opened her eyes. Hennie, who'd been clutching at her own hands, reached out and clasped Sophie's.

“Sophie,” she said. Sophie flinched, but did not pull away her hands. It startled her to be touched by the woman. She realized she was still a little bit scared of her. Even though everyone had said she was good—and she
was
good, Sophie could feel it—she looked so much like a witch from a fairy tale, it was hard for Sophie not to think about Hennie pushing her into an oven when she wasn't looking. Her nose even had a mole on it, for god's sake. A mole sprouting a hair. If you did an internet search for
witch
, Hennie's picture would pop up.

“Sophie, when I say you are my niece, I mean, you are my niece. You are my blood. I wait to meet you a very long time.”

“But—but I've come in here before!” Sophie exclaimed. “I bought hamburger meat and soda and butter. You have met me before. You could have—you could have met me then.”

“It was not time,” Hennie said, simply. “Now is time you know all. There is much to know, I tell you everything. Much is bad. There are many bad things to know, I am sorry to tell you. But maybe good, too.” She tightened her grip on Sophie's hand, giving it a squeeze. Hennie's hands were cool and plump, like a mound of dough being chilled for cookies. Sophie squeezed back.

“I am your aunt,” she said. She tugged a copper-colored necklace out from her blouse, a strand of thin links. For a moment Sophie anticipated sea glass, but it was an oval-shaped locket on the end of the chain. A disk of porcelain painted with faded roses was affixed to the metal. Hennie pulled it over her head, taking care not to knock off her head scarf. “Oh, my babushka,” she laughed. Hennie had a big
laugh when she laughed, a big smile when she smiled. Sophie could see a missing tooth at the edge of the woman's mouth. She held the locket in the palm of her hand and flicked it open to two tiny pictures of two tiny babies, one on each side, mirror images.

“That's me?” Sophie asked. She recognized the photo, her mother had copies of it stuffed into the plasticky photo albums. The joke was that Sophie, whose unruly head of hair taunted Andrea with its wildness, had been born bald as a marble. The nurses had to stick a pink bow on her head with a piece of Scotch tape.
I don't see what the big deal was anyway, who cares if I'm a boy or a girl, I was a baby!
Sophie would grumble, slightly humiliated by having a bow taped to her head. In the photo on the other side of the locket, Sophie wore no such demeaning bow. In fact, she had hair on her head, a dark little cap. Sophie blinked and peered closer. The picture was small. The face was hers, but like she was wearing a wig, a baby toupee.

“What's this?” Sophie asked. She tapped the photo with a grubby fingernail. “How'd I get so hairy? That's me, right?” She laughed a stilted laugh, like she was foolish. Her head was buzzing with questions.
One thing at a time
, she thought, trying to calm herself. She cleared her mind. The heat of the burning wax intensified the scent of the oil the curandera had dressed the candles with, and the smell of warm, white flowers was thick inside the room. She stared at Hennie. She still couldn't trust this woman, but she trusted the pigeons and she trusted Angel. “Will you explain to me how you are my aunt? Why you have these pictures of me in a locket?”

Hennie grabbed a couple of lumpy mugs that looked to be made from the mud of the earth. She filled them with a steaming beverage that
tasted
like the mud of the earth. Sophie made a
blech
face, sticking out her tongue, sputtering. “This tastes like dirt.”

“Come, sit with me,” Hennie said. She was reclining on the floor, on a pillow stuffed with straw. Beside her was a fireplace, alive with a glowing orange fire. Sophie knew there hadn't been a fireplace when she'd arrived at Hennie's. She was also fairly certain that outside of the shop Chelsea was in the throes of an insufferable heat wave. To drink a hot drink before a roaring fire was insane, but Hennie's shop felt cozy. “I make like winter in here, sometime,” the woman explained. “I miss my old land. I am winter witch. I feel most powerful when there is snow, and cold.” She regarded her niece as she settled down into a puffy hay pillow, folding her legs beneath her. “You, I think, are summer witch. You are most powerful now. Kishka too, is summer witch. When she was a girl like you, maybe little older, in Poland, she run around with
Poludnica
. Nasty girls. Very beautiful, like Kishka. Poludnica wear pretty dresses and walk around fields where farmers work, make them sick with heat and sun, make them crazy even, sometimes.”

“Were they were, like, a gang?” Sophie asked. “A Polish girl gang?” The thought sounded sort of cool.

“No, no girl gang, not real girls. Poludnica are, how to explain— ghosts? Not real. Magical girls. Their magic bad, like Kishka.”

“Is Kishka a znakharka?”

“Yes, dearie. Bad znakharka.”

“Did she learn magic from the… Poludnica?” The heavy Polish words felt cumbersome in Sophie's mouth.

“No,” Hennie laughed. “Poludnica probably learn from your grandmother. She is much more powerful. She was, how you say,
slumming
, running around with the Poludnica. She being rebellious. They are small magic, but mean magic. But, Kishka is summer znakharka, big magic. As are you.”

Sophie listened to Hennie talk about Kishka as a young girl, in Poland. Hadn't Kishka come over as a baby? Who was Kishka's mother? Why didn't Sophie know
anything
about her family? In Hennie's eyes she saw a shard of Kishka's blue; in the hair beneath her babushka, a streak of Kishka's yellow. “Are you my grandmother's sister?” she asked, and Hennie nodded.

“Yes, we are sisters, and enemies. We hold opposite magic. We do not speak.”

“Does my mother know? That you are her aunt?”

“Yes, Andrea knows me. I loved Andrea very much. A little baby, I watch over her. I babysit when Kishka and Carl go dancing.” Hennie sighed. “Those were nice time. Kishka very beautiful, more so than the Poludnica. With red lipstick, and she make her eyebrows like so,” Hennie moved her finger in an arc above her eye. “She wear such good dresses. But still, she have her powers always, she run with the bad ghosts, she become
mora
very young, she leave her body and fly around. That's
mora
, ones that fly. She do it without out the flying herbs, without
zagavory
.”

“I don't know what you're taking about.” Sophie was overwhelmed.

“
Zagavory
is magic spells. But Kishka need nothing to fly. We were children, she just leave body, she fly around, she come to America, she come back to Poland. Whatever she like. In the morning, she tell me wild story, and I believe.”

“Who is older, you or Kishka?”

“We are same,” Hennie said. Sophie was shocked.

“I know, you shocked,” Hennie said. Sophie quickly drew up her shield around her emotions. “No, no, I do not read you, dumpling. I know you shocked because every person shocked. Also, your mouth hung very open. Kishka look very younger than me, no?”

It was true that Hennie looked like a very old woman, her face folded with wrinkles, while Kishka, though old, had a spry youthfulness about her. Her skin was tighter, it caught light and hurled it back at you—a miracle really, considering how much the old woman smoked.

“One of her powers,” Hennie said, with a tone of acceptance. “She has the glamours, I do not. But still, I look good when you think. How old am I to you?”

Sophie hated these questions. There would be an insult buried in whatever answer she gave.

“No, for true, please tell me. I throw away my vanity long time ago.” Hennie smiled, and the dark space where a tooth once was seemed to wink from the cave of her mouth.

“I don't know, my grandmother is, what, fifty? So you must be, too? But I guess I would think seventy.”

“You are very good,” Hennie smiled, nodding. “You could feel a seven. I think I am seven hundred years old.”