The Witch House of Persimmon Point (12 page)

“It's different, isn't it? The way the world looks from these windows,” said Byrd, holding out a coffee cup.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“No, Byrd … really. Thank you. I think Crazy Anne was about to bite me.”

“Must you haunt everyone but me?!” yelled Byrd at the ceiling. Then she stomped out.

Eleanor leaned against the window and drank her coffee. She didn't know if it was the fact that the glass had been repurposed from an older, damaged home, or if it was some kind of message, but Byrd was right. Everything was stretched and rounded. The road, the walkway, the trees. Like being inside a snow globe.

*   *   *

As they went into the kitchen, Maj ran over to Eleanor and started bouncing again.

“Whoa!” said Eleanor, holding her cup high. “I don't want to spill any, there's no more to make. We'll have to hit the market in a little while.”

“I want to explore. Can I go, can I go?”

“I suppose. Hold on, I have to find my shoes. Can you wait ten minutes or so, honey? I want to finish my coffee.”

“I don't want you to come. I want to be shipwrecked on an island and starving for food. I have to draw a map of the whole yard because it is the island. And the house is the wrecked ship. And I have to find a good fort. And scavenge for food. And hide things.”

“Absolutely not. I haven't explored all the child hazards yet. Old wells, snakes. Cliffs. Strangers with guns.”

“Whole lotta imagination flyin' around this room,” said Byrd.

“I'll stay by the house. Right in the garden. Please, Mama? Pleeeeeeease?”

“How about we walk her out there together and we can set up some rules, and then you and I can keep an eye on her from the porch. The porch is the best place to tell Lucy's story anyway,” Byrd said.

Eleanor sighed. “Okay, kid. But don't leave my line of sight. I mean it.”

“Some of the plants are bigger than me. I may be in and out.”

“Just stay in one place and come when I call you.”

“Yes, Mama,” called Maj, already skipping down the steps and disappearing into the garden.

“Nan's story really got to you, didn't it? Good. Now let's talk about Lucy,” said Byrd.

“I saw her portrait on the stairs. She was beautiful. Like a movie star.”

“And crazy like a shit house rat.”

“My branch of the family likes to use the term batshit crazy thank you very much. Now, go get some paper, our notes will be important.”

Eleanor sat back and watched Maj dart in and out of the hedges surrounding the kitchen garden. She heard the phone ring, listened while Byrd chatted.

Leaning back into the porch swing, holding her coffee cup, Eleanor noticed her breathing was easy. Breathe in, exhale, inhale, breathe out … all her own air, all her own little molecules of sorrow and joy dispersing into the air around her. Not Anthony's or Nan's. Not Byrd's or Ava's. Just her own. And in that moment, she saw her own truth. Nan's story hadn't just “got to her” as Byrd said. It was changing her.

I will love him forever. And I will grieve, but what a gift it is, this pain.

She'd never before faced a day ready to enjoy all the pain and peace of life.

The house was unwinding her, she could feel it.

“You ready for Lucy? Because the world wasn't,” Byrd said, sitting back in her chair.

“Hit me,” said Eleanor.

9:30 A.M.

Maj walked through the side gardens, winding her way through a poplar grove, and tried to think of good things so she wouldn't cry. She didn't know why she felt like crying—she was brave and happy. But she knew that feeling, the heart-beating-fast, almost-throwing-up kind of feeling. She knew it well. She'd have no choice in the matter.

“Why are you sad?” piped up a little girl who emerged from behind one of the poplars.

“Ava!”

It had to be Ava. Anne had promised she'd play today.
But to be sure, Maj closed her eyes and counted to ten the way Mimi taught her. That way you could tell if the person was alive or dead. You do that when someone seems to appear out of thin air.

Ava was still there.

“Do you want to play sardines?” the ghost asked.

“What's sardines?”

“Backwards hide-and-seek.”

“I don't really like hide-and-seek.”

“Me either. Backward or forward.”

“When I came over here, I felt so sad, was that you, Ava? Are you sad?”

“And scared, Maj. I'm so scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

“I think I'm supposed to be somewhere else. But I'm scared I'll stop being me. I know I'm dead. But I don't want to be dead. And I don't want to disappear. I want my mother to come get me. I thought she was coming once, only she wasn't. She was scared of me. And I used to have Gwen, but then she left, too. I'm lonesome. But maybe you're just sad on your own. Could that be it?”

“Maybe. But I don't think so. Why are you lonely? Doesn't Anne stay with you?”

“She's bossy. And she's not here all the time.”

“Did she ever tell you where the secrets were hidden here? She won't tell me. All she wants to do is color. We have to find them all out by tomorrow and we aren't getting very far.”

“Anne's like that. Always playing tricks. I can ask her about the secrets, though.”

“Want to play pirates?”

“I thought you'd never ask!”

 

11

Nan in the Witch House with a Bible

1910–1940

The Witch House did not earn its name, it learned it.

Gossip-worthy from its birth, the Witch House teased its neighbors with its oddness, hinting at horrors that people began to talk about without fear. With Reginald and Gwyneth dead, rumors that had only ever bubbled below the surface broke wide. Missing people and devil worship. Poppy fields and infanticide. Gwyneth most certainly killed all her babies. Reginald must have had rows and rows of cages in the cellar for the people he experimented on. The monsters he made. Then killed. Then fed to all those who came to their soirees.

Any doubts Nan might have had about changing her life completely no longer mattered: now she had no choice. These were the types of verbal weapons she left Italy to avoid. Her baby would not grow up unsafe.

When word spread that she'd been left the deed to the property, the talk was about her affair with Reggie, and the baby she carried. She cried. And then she went to church and fed their fears.

“I will not speak of it. It was terrible,” she'd sniff.

“You were taken prisoner by them?”

“I will not speak of it!”

“They took advantage of you.”

“I will not speak of it.”

“You poor dear.”

She'd wanted to hex them all. But she wouldn't. She would accept the church. She would pay for her sins. She would speak her native language and shun the magic. She would raise her daughter right.

And as she'd been robbed of the time and space and luxury to mourn those she loved the most, she threw herself completely into creating a new home, a new value system, and to sharpening her hatred for the world. She'd make that house safe. She'd make certain she never lost anyone she loved ever again. First, she would avoid love. And second, if love happened, by accident or nature, she'd destroy anyone who tried to take it from her.

Her last act of magic from the book her mother sent was a dark spell of protection, cast under the full moon as she buried Reginald's pocket watch in the earth turned over for the foundation.

Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

*   *   *

Born from the rubble and remains of Haven House, the Witch House was constructed with aid from neighbors and other generous volunteers, as well as church groups who wanted to help. It was a mixture of styles but beautiful all the same. The foundation came from stones salvaged from the ruined east wing. Most of the lumber was new, but the porch columns and serpentine scrolling in the corners and eaves were taken and fixed and placed on the newer home as decoration.

Somehow one lone cupola from Haven House survived all damage. It was secured to the top of Nan's new home. Slightly off-center, like a paper party hat on a restless child.

It was a crazy quilt of architecture and design. The house had windows mismatched in both color and shape, strange ornamental flourishes used as foundational parts of the structure, and a majestic carved wood double door beneath the roof of the wraparound porch. It seemed unlikely that the house would end up beautiful, but it did.

If one were to think about the inside strictly in terms of number of rooms, the house would become very confusing indeed. Its internal structure was a mishmash. Odd, yet useful.

The kitchen had a large cooking fireplace, a deep porcelain sink, and hardwood floors, which were the easiest to keep clean.

And, there was, of course, a multitude of windows. A surprising amount of glass remained intact from Haven House, and the builders used every bit. There was a vast assortment to choose from: plain glass, stained, etched, leaded, milky … all sorts of panes to play with while building the new house.

In the kitchen, there was a rounded breakfast nook where a long narrow oak table began and then extended into the middle of the room. The nook itself had a bay window with stained glass along the upper portions, which bathed the room in dancing colors on sunny mornings and then again in the afternoon. And a conservatory was added, because even though there would be no more dabbling, there would be healing ways. It was income, after all. So Nan needed a potion kitchen, and a potion kitchen she received.

The two halls off the kitchen ran parallel to a front hall that was never used much. Nan understood its importance but found it a waste of space. The stairs curved down, the banister gently swooping to allow for wide bottom steps. The front door was carved with mermaids and mermen and flanked on both sides by stained-glass windows of every color, leaded in the shape of flowers and gardens.

And there was the doorknob in case she forgot her penance. And in the library, the grandfather clock.

Nan hung up a picture of the pope in each room. Each exactly the same size.

Upstairs in the bedrooms, the beds all shared crisp white linens and heavy drapes to keep things warm in winter and cool in summer.

*   *   *

There were deep-red velvet drapes on the windows of her own bedroom, creating an almost theatrical backdrop for the altar adorned with statues of Catholic saints and little colored glass candleholders that flickered with candlelight prayers.

There was a suite of rooms on the third floor that Nan wanted arranged for Vincent. But when she wrote to him, he refused to come.

“I have a life all my own now. I don't need your charity,” he'd said.

Nan knew what he meant. It was too little, too late. He was punishing her for leaving him to fend for himself all those years ago.

She would pray for him.

She loved the kitchen the most. It was full of light and warmth and space to practice her own sort of magic—her cooking. She didn't need much else. There was a pantry that was eventually turned into a wash closet and then a full bathroom as the years passed, and she was always quick to upgrade the house for ease.

The living room housed a beautiful piano, though. The centerpiece was the fireplace and on the mantel Nan kept mementos taken from her life at Haven House. Scavenged treasures. Colorful bottles and pretty glass vases to catch the sunlight. And charred photographs in fancy frames.

The house's extremities, the attic and basement, were opposing spaces, not just because one was at the very top and the other at the very bottom, but because the basement was damp and dark whereas the attic was dry and bright. The basement was gloomy, as most basements are, and it would flood every spring, bringing panic and chaos. Finally Nan gave up putting anything at all on the floor and chose instead to use the cellar of the gatehouse.

She bottled wine. She went to church. She made fresh pasta. She worked her fingers raw.

And she never forgot, not one time, that she was already dead.

 

12

Lucy in the Gatehouse with a Gun

1911

After the house was completed Nan gave birth to Lucia, who would grow up beautiful and wild and would demand to be called the Americanized version of her name, “Lucy.” Nan tried not to compare Lucy to Ava, but it was impossible. Each breath Lucy took invoked a river of regret in Nan.

Nan fell swiftly and deeply in love with her new baby, and the more her love grew, the more the guilt grew. This guilt tempered her outward affection toward Lucy. She would find herself wanting to fawn over her darling girl, but instead, Nan was full of discipline, and when Lucy was grown, she would tell stories about her childhood. “That woman has
ice
in her blood,” she would say. Lucy would never know the love Nan had for her, the love that lived on the inside of Nan's skin, the love that came out in the food she cooked, in the gardens she kept, in the priests she served at church. Everything she did was for Lucy, simply everything.

Lucy was irresistible. And she was naughty. She learned early to lie, often and well, and if caught … to smile and be charming.

“You think too much about the past,” Nan's priest told her. “Lead a simple life in both thought and action. Each day, make a list of tasks, and follow it. Do not color outside the lines. Sorrow lives there.”

Nan listened, and she listened well. One of her tasks was to find tenants for the gatehouse in order to make ends meet. So as she left the church she went straight to the newspaper office to post an ad, and though many prospective renters came to view the gatehouse, no one rented it.

*   *   *