The Accidental Witch (2 page)

“Yeah,” he said.

“Do you want to make your daughter feel like you feel now? Do you want to leave her all alone?”

“No, I can’t do that,” he said firmly.

“Then you gotta get it together and accept that they are gone. You gotta play cards with Kara here today and keep your mind on the positive. Focus on everything good you got left in your life.”

Wayne nodded and I wrote a few notes before I looked at the next person in the circle. It was Brenda Belhaven’s turn to talk. Morning group is supposed to be a time for patients to set daily goals and discuss their feelings, but as soon as Brenda Belhaven launched off into an unfortunate tirade, I knew there was gonna be no therapy for her.

“Ya’ll need to let us smoke,” she began. Shit. Brenda had been on the floor fourteen times and she kept coming back, so she obviously liked it. But all she ever did was yell about the no smoking policy.

“And let me tell you that nighttime nurse, Shaquella, is an evil bitch from Hell. I couldn’t sleep last night and I told her I was going to lose it if she didn’t call the doctor and get me something and she said she was gonna call the police on me if I didn’t go back to bed, so I had to sit up all night long in that damn bed. I haven’t slept in four days and that bitch won’t do a damn thing to help me …”

I cut her off. That’s my job. “What coping skills can you use to deal with this situation?” I asked.

“I can kick her ass,” Brenda said.

“And will that get you what you want?” I asked.

“No. But it sure will feel good.” The group laughed.

“Will it be worth it?”

“Hell no!” Brenda said.

“So what positive coping skills can you use to make this work to your advantage?”

The group went on in this manner. Sorrow and complaints lay at my feet like so many discarded socks. It was going to be a long day. I snuck into my office after group and took three ibuprofen. I put my head in my hands. There were three patients waiting for me in the ER and we had no beds. That meant I had to try to find someplace to stick them or try to sucker them into signing a no harm agreement, so we wouldn’t be liable if they offed themselves. I took a deep breath and sucked down a little more diet cola. The animal crackers had mixed with the pop in my stomach to form a kind of cement. I felt sick, but that was an everyday thing. I should probably eat better.

I grabbed my clipboard and made my way down to the ER. I looked at the screen. Half the beds taken in the ER were psychiatric beds. I often found myself wondering what was wrong with the world. Why did everyone seem to want to die? People said it was the economy or tough times, but it just seemed like it was deeper than that. People in our little town were just getting sadder. Dismal wasn’t much, but it was my home and always had been and it broke my heart to see the people I’d grown up with giving up on life. Not everyone here was from Dismal. Beds were scarce and when there are no beds in their own towns, people go to where they think there might be beds, so oftentimes we had people from all over Alabama and parts of Tennessee, but that was even more depressing, because that meant the problem wasn’t just with Dismal.

Dismal sounds like a terrible place to live. The name speaks of sorrow, but it wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, Dismal was a tourist destination. People came from all around to see Dismal’s Gorge just a mile north of town. They came to see the largest canyon east of the Mississippi where the Dismalites lived, wrapped in a kind of supernatural infamy. At night, the canyon lights up with glowing creatures that line the canyon wall like stars. The Indians thought the Dismalites were like fairies that brought magic and good luck. In truth, they are the bioluminescent larval stage of a rare bug that only lives in Dismal’s Gorge. At one time, they brought Dismal fame and travelers, but no one cares about bioluminescent slugs anymore and Disneyland is much better than Alabama, so Dismal has slowly choked to death until it looked like its name, dismal.

I sighed and leaned onto the nurses’ station’s desk.

“Hey, girl,” I said and I winked at Diane.

“Hey. How you doing?” Diane, the charge nurse, asked.

“The usual,” I answered.

“That bad?”

I laughed. I’d known Diane forever. She and I had been friends in high school. She was a tall, thin woman with high cheekbones and bright green eyes. Her skin was clear and white and her straight, black hair was cut short. She always wore bright red lipstick and scrubs with Halloween decorations on them. She wore the Halloween scrubs all year round. Even at Easter she’d be wearing cute little witch scrubs or black cat scrubs.

“Your boyfriend’s here,” Diane whispered.

“Would you shut up,” I said in a hiss.

“Oh, please, like everyone here doesn’t know you would kill to go out with Dr. McHottie.”

“His name is Dr. Becket, thank you very much, and everyone here does not know that.”

“Fine,” Diane said as she rolled her eyes at me.

At that moment, Dr. Becket stepped out of one of the ER rooms. Dr. Becket was perfect as far as I could tell. He was very tall and lean. He ran marathons and did triathlons and his build was sculpted into perfection by his religious physical regime. He had sandy blond hair that fell over his blue eyes, making them seem even bluer. His skin was dark from the sun and when he smiled, my heart skipped a beat. He wasn’t just beautiful. He was perfect in every way. He was nice when the other doctors were snarky. He cared about the patients. He was the medical director of the hospitalist group, which meant he made a pretty good living. He liked to read. He was born in Wales and moved to the States when he was a boy. He had the subtlest hint of a Welsh accent that just drove me crazy.

Of course, every single woman in Dismal knew that Dr. Becket was perfect, and they swarmed him whenever he was around. They fluttered around him like groupies. They hung on his every word, perpetually hoping that they would become Mrs. Dr. McHottie. All the pretty blonde nurses lingered where he walked, hoping he would look their way.

I had no hopes and I hated swarms, so I had no part in the other women’s behavior. I was realistic about myself. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I’d been slim enough to be moderately attractive. I certainly had managed to attract the biggest losers around and managed to marry one of them. I’d never been beautiful and after a horrible marriage and a terrible divorce, I’d let my butt sag and had given up my exercise routine for a routine of TV and Cheetos that seemed much less complicated. I also had no intentions of getting involved with any more men. I’d dated enough to know that I had no sense when it came to men and if I started dating again, I would surely end up with a serial killer or child rapist.

Diane threw a chart at me, pulling away from my gawking. “You can wipe the drool from your face now,” she said.

“Ha ha,” I said.

“Bed three is hearing voices telling him to kill his mother,” Diane said. “Bed four will kill himself if we don’t give him hydrocodone and he is allergic to tramadol and buprenorphine. Bed six is a homeless fellow who wants to hang himself or find a warm bed.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“I swear the crazy is contagious lately,” Diane said.

“We prefer the term
mentally ill
,” I answered.

“When’s your shift over?” she asked.

“Six,” I said. “Bob’s working the night shift.”

“You wanna get drinks when you’re off? “

“I think I’m going to need a beer or seven,” I said.

“Finnegan’s?” Diane said.

“Is there any place else?” I answered.

“Not that I would be caught dead in,” Diane responded.

I smiled at Diane and took the first chart from the pile. I drew a deep breath and walked in to room 8.

* * *

It was seven before I finally sat down at Finnegan’s. The greasy bar looked like it always did. There was an assortment of college kids from the university campus and a few old bikers playing pool in the corner. There were the locals sitting at one side of the bar looking like they would catch on fire if they mingled with any of the others.

I had a large Belgian ale in front of me. I went almost entirely unnoticed in my smoky corner of the bar until Diane walked in. Diane was gorgeous and not a single man in the bar missed her appeal. She was wearing a skin-tight tank top and skinny jeans that fit her so closely, she might have been naked. She had big breasts and a tiny waist. She looked like a gothic porn star. She smiled and sat down next to me and ordered a beer. She had her nose ring back in and in the tiny tank top, you could see all of her tattoos.

“You look like you’re in a funk,” Diane said as she lit a cigarette.

“How can you smoke those things? You’re a nurse. You should know better,” I said.

“How can you live on Cheetos and animal crackers?”

I shrugged.

“So, how’s the house warming going?” Diane asked as she exhaled smoke.

“Okay,” I said. I had recently bought a house. It had been the largest commitment I had ever made in my life and I had chosen the house with the same wisdom I had used to choose my ex-husband. The saddest thing about it was that I knew it was a bad decision even as I’d made it. It was like I just couldn’t help myself. The house was old. It was so old, it had a name. It was called The Black Magnolia and ghost stories and legends hung off of it like the Spanish moss in the trees around it. The ghost stories and the disrepair hadn’t mattered, however. As soon as I had stepped into The Black Magnolia, I knew the house had to be mine. It wanted me and I wanted it, and as there really wasn’t much else permanent in my life, and as I had self-destructed in every other semi-reasonable way, I couldn’t think of a reason not to drive another nail into the coffin.

“Is it haunted?” Diane asked casually.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I replied.

Diane cackled. She threw her head back and laughed like a witch. I had no idea what she was laughing about.

“What’s new with you?” I asked.

Diane stopped laughing and took a drink of her beer. “Same old, same old. I got a date with that radiologist.”

No surprises there. “Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. He asked me out for Friday night. He’s gonna drive me to Huntsville and take me to a real restaurant.”

“Isn’t he married?”

“If she were taking care of him right, he wouldn’t be leaving town with me, would he?” Diane said.

“Diane, if I didn’t love you so much, I would call you the biggest bitch I’d ever met.”

“I am the biggest bitch you ever met,” Diane said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Diane laughed with me. She put her hand on my hand and her laughter faded to a smile.

“You know,” she whispered, “someday you are going to have to start loving yourself as much as you love your patients. You are going to have to take some of that good advice you give them.”

“Where did that come from?” I asked.

“You can’t stay out there in that old house by yourself forever. You have to forgive yourself and move on. There are other men.”

I laughed again. “I’m too old for that and I’m not pretty enough to keep up.”

“First of all, you are 33 not 63 and second of all, you are just as pretty as any other woman in this town. You just hide it under shaggy hair and baggy clothes.”

I shook my head. “You don’t understand,” I said.

“Listen, honey, if you had been as happy with old Johnny Boy as you think you were, you never would have cheated on him in the first place.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“You know it is. If you stop and think about it, you know it is. He was an ass and you deserved better and still do. He was just another surgeon with a god complex and you are just another woman with a doctor fetish.”

“I don’t have a fetish,” I said.

“Yes, you do, sugar, and it is time to get over that, too,” Diane said.

I smiled and put my hand on Diane’s. She didn’t understand. How could she? She still looked like a twenty-year-old goddess. Time had been kind to her. I didn’t blame myself for anything. I wasn’t wallowing in my guilt. I sure as hell wasn’t punishing myself. Being married to that cheating bastard, John, for ten years had been punishment enough. He hadn’t waited for the ink to dry on the marriage certificate to find another woman to spend his evenings with. As far as my Dr. Fetish, well hell, I had always worked in hospitals. Of course I wanted doctors. They’re what I saw every damn day and if I ever met a nice engineer, I certainly would give up doctors forever. But that was about as likely as my head spontaneously combusting, seeing as there were no nice engineers in Dismal.

Sure, my hair was shaggy, but that was just my hair. I could spend two hours on it in the morning. I could wail on it with the straightener, but it would still look like a frizzy wedge of brown fluff, and tying it back just seemed to encourage it to frizz even more. I wore baggy clothes because I’d put on fifteen pounds since the divorce. I put on fifteen pounds because I ate bricks of raw cookie dough when I was depressed and drank at least two beers every night. We all have our negative coping skills.

Still, I smiled at Diane. I smiled at her because she meant well and I loved her. I loved her friendship and the fact that she thought her little intervention might change everything for me. It might make me decide to get my hair done and buy new clothes and date an electrician. She wanted to help me see the light. The problem was there just wasn’t any light to be seen and I was really looking.

“Shit,” Diane said looking at her watch. “I gotta go. I got a date.”

“Of course,” I said.

I stood up and paid the bill. I always paid the bill. I got in my BMW and headed home. The car was the one good thing John had given me. I got it in the settlement and I wasn’t going to pretend like I didn’t love it. I also got some money and I got to keep the engagement ring, which I hocked to pay the down payment on my house.

The house was outside of the city limits, down a lonely stretch of country road that meandered through the woods and into the mountains. Dismal was located in the foothills of the Appalachians. The mountains were small and old. In the mornings, fog hung on them like tinsel on a Christmas tree. The tall stately trees overshadowed the gravel road. I turned left into my long driveway. I owned all the land, too. The Black Magnolia, my house, sat on more than one hundred acres that had once been farmland. I pulled up to the front of my house and stepped out into the moonlight. Home crap home. It was a blessing that the lawn was overgrown and strangled with vines and kudzu. The overgrowth hid the ruined mansion that sat in the shadows of a forest of magnolia trees. There was no such thing as a black magnolia, but the shadows that hung over the ocean of magnolias wrapped them in darkness and made them appear black.