The Witch House of Persimmon Point (27 page)

“What?” Lucy asked, duly horrified. “What do you mean? You can't
really
think that.” Her voice trembled; Anne had scared her.

“No. Not really. I was just kidding, Lucy.” But the way she patted Lucy's knee did not make Lucy feel any better, not better at all. “Here, I brought you another bottle. I know you were swearing off, but you've been so good, I thought you needed a reward.”

“That was thoughtful of you. Is there a glass?”

“But of course!”

Anne left the bottle and the glass for Lucy and waited until she was fast asleep to leave her alone.

*   *   *

Later that night Lucy wanted, needed, her tea. Her head was pounding, her eyes watering. And, as she'd been frightened by her talk with Anne, Lucy thought some sleeping medication might be nice, too.

“Anne! Can you bring me some tea? Now! I need my pills, too. You and your talk of bugs. I don't want to talk about that ever again. It wasn't very nice! You know how I feel about bugs!”

But Anne did not come. The light next to Lucy's bed was on, but outside it had grown darker as she slept, and the rest of the room was pocketed with shadows. She didn't like this feeling … this feeling of falling asleep in the daylight and waking at twilight. Everything felt … off.

The walls looked like they were—she shook her head, trying to blink it away—breathing. In. Out. In. Out. A tiny buzzing sound filled her ears, a low unnatural hum. Lucy twitched, slapping at her ears.

She heard Anne whispering from behind the closet door. Wait, was that Anne? Suddenly she wasn't sure. There was a little hollow giggle.

Then a clear voice. Anne's voice.

“It's almost done. I'll almost be sorry when it's over.”

“
Shhhh
, I think she's waking up,” said a second voice, Anne's when she was a little girl. No. Impossible. Something was wrong.

Lucy had to get out. Something bad was going to happen here.

She got up and went to the door. Her hand shook as it reached for the doorknob. She pulled it back a few times, scared it would open, scared it wouldn't.

“Get it together, Lucy!” she hissed.

“Get it together, Lucy!” the voices echoed.

She turned the knob. It opened. Lucy didn't hesitate: she jerked the door open and ran down the front hall steps and out the doors (which she'd expected to be locked) and then around the house, escaping into the back gardens.

She fell to her knees, gulping in air. She was still dizzy, but the air felt good.

“I'm free. She tried … I know. Laced my rum. And the house … But I'm out now. She can't cast that dark magic here.”

“Miss Lucy,” Anne called out from nearby.

Lucy scrambled up, her feet flying across the slate stepping stones of the vegetable garden and then over the low fence into the meadow. If she could just get across, just make it to the trees, she could take the cliff steps and get to the docks where there would be people. She just had to get to the beach.

She made it over the fence, but the hem of her white nightgown caught. A piece tore off, a flag of surrender.

Once in the meadow, Lucy could hear the trees. They whispered and danced. They laughed at her.

“Just keep going,” she told herself, her breath hitching, “just keep going.” As she stepped into the high grasses, the light changed. She was caught between some time and space she didn't fully understand. Haven House was in front of her. Whole again.

Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

A man and two women, one fair and one dark, appeared out of the dusk. They were tossing a large red ball back and forth between them, like children in a schoolyard, and laughing. There was a little girl, too. Lucy knew her. It was the girl from Nan's photo. All four were dressed in old-fashioned bathing outfits and laughing together. The man looked up, and shielding his eyes from the sun, called out to her.

“Why, Lucy, darling! We have been waiting for you. Come now, don't keep us waiting, we must get to the beach!”

Time and light stood still. The earth stopped rotating, trapping the clouds motionless in the sky. The two women and the child all looked up at the same time. She heard their whispers in her mind.

“Yes, Lucy, we waited and waited and waited.” Lucy blinked. The little girl was no longer a girl but a body shining in the stagnant sun, a prism of melted glass.

“Lucy!”

Startled, she turned around to face the back of the Witch House. Anne stood there. The house rising behind her.

Anne's hair, a mass of black, whipped around her face and—were those spiders? Dear God, spiders crawled out of her hair, her mouth as she called.

Anne stretched her arms out to Lucy, and the house wrapped itself around her, warping everything near it and reaching out from Anne's fingers in an impossible semicircle of gloom.

Lucy screamed.

She turned back to the mirage. It was still there. She tried to break sideways to avoid both fates but fell, scraping her palms on gravel left over from a long-forgotten driveway. Tears ran down her cheeks as she gazed at her hands, bleeding as though they bore stigmata. With choking cries, Lucy began to claw at her face and body, pulling at her hair and nightgown.

She would not remember anything else from that night besides the red ball bouncing toward her.

*   *   *

Anne hadn't realized how scared Lucy would be. The terror on Lucy's face as she pulled at the door made Anne stop the creepy mimicking. When Lucy flew down the stairs and left the house, Anne found herself worried that her mother might actually hurt herself. Might fall and break her neck. Which wasn't the plan. Lucy was supposed to drink the jimson-laced glass of rum, hallucinate just enough for Anne to call the doctor and get Lucy committed. She would never hurt Lucy. Not really. Lucy was her mother, after all.

But as Anne followed Lucy out into the garden, something felt out of her control. The plan had taken on a life of its own. Anne had never felt guilt before, and she sure as heck didn't aim to ever feel it.

“Mama?” she yelled, trying to bring Lucy back to the house. “It would be just like you to pitch yourself over the cliff. Don't you dare!”

Lucy didn't turn around. So Anne tried, “Miss Lucy!”

And that was when Lucy turned around. And she looked at Anne with such disgust, such horror, that Anne felt the way she had when she was in that bathtub after Jude … and when she found that telegram to Gavin … and right before Lucy pushed her down the stairs. Every horrible, sad, angry, unforgiveable moment crashed into her all at once.

Anne turned away and went back to the house. She called the doctor and sat in the dark kitchen. Alone.

*   *   *

The arrangements were already made. Everyone had known that though Lucy once held such promise, though she had been well-loved, she would one day succumb to mental illness. No one questioned Anne's assessment of her. Lucy was crazy; it had been only a matter of time. And time was now up.

Lucy watched the house recede in the moonlight through the back windows of the ambulance. She was calmer now. Then her breath caught in her throat.

A black bubble was emerging from the chimney. Lucy tried to sit up on her gurney, straining against the straps. The bubble was narrow at the bottom now, and then, pop! It was free. A black oval floating in the sky, with a long string attached. It followed the ambulance, dancing through the violet clouds. A balloon. The house was celebrating. Lucy opened her mouth in a silent shriek against the night.

*   *   *

With Lucy gone, really, truly gone, Anne thought she would feel some sense of loss. But she didn't. The guilt lingered, of course, a teeny layer of filth that needed to be washed off, but really, Anne thought, being alone is better than being lonely, and it is much lonelier to be around people who can't stand you than it is to be alone in a house that loves you, with a family, however ghostly, to keep you company.

Anne went to her mother's record player and put on one of Lucy's favorites, as a tribute: “La Vie en Rose.”

And then she danced. She spun and danced and touched everything in the Witch House that Lucy had touched or used or called her own, trying to connect with her. To feel a little bit human. To feel the loss she should have felt. While Edith Piaf sang about love, Anne danced around the kitchen. She danced through the gardens. She was free.

She danced through her mother's bedroom.

*   *   *

Oh, her mother's dressing table. So lovely with its frilled fabric skirting. So lovely with its piles of soaps and oils and creams and sweet-smelling things. How amazingly difficult it must have been to remain so lovely. In one great, sad, and wonderful afternoon, Anne began to understand her mother, to forgive her—to become her.

Anne sat at the kitchen table and made a list.

How to become my mother:

1. Curl my hair.

2. Take medicine.

3. Smoke cigarettes.

4. Drink coffee and wine and bourbon.

5. Play solitaire and laugh and cry all at once.

6. Be beautiful and interesting and tragic (how?)

6a. Ask Gwen.

7. Curse more than usual and be generally hateful.

8. Go crazy.

Anne went to bed with her hair pinned up with bobby pins and curlers. In the morning, she sat up and stretched out and looked around. Lucy's room was like a foreign country to her now. She remembered it from when she was a very little girl, but she had not spent any real time in here for so long. She thought of her mother crying in the meadow. Anne felt a twinge. It passed quickly.

The sun was filtering in through the curtains, a soft yellow, and a not unpleasant smoky smell mixed with perfume hung in the air.

It was her mother's scent. Smoke and Chanel No. 5.

Today she had important things to do. Important things to be. Anne needed new clothes if she was going to be Lucy. She went to the attic to dig through two old steamer trunks in the back she knew were filled with clothing.

“Those belonged to me, and Reggie, and Nan.” Gwyneth said, hovering close. She had taken to following Anne almost everywhere lately. Anne liked the attention.

“And me, too,” said Ava.

“Yes, my darling girl, and you, too.”

“Look, Gwen! It all fits, and it's all pretty!” She twirled in front of the chevalier mirror. There were piles and piles of skirts and blouses, colorful and flowing. None of it looked right on Anne, it looked too forced. And her hair, springy with irregular curls from the pins, mixed with the oversized clothing made Anne look more unstable than usual. But she felt beautiful.

“Her shoes don't fit, though. And I have small feet, too. Hers must have been really tiny,” Anne said with a frown.

“Evolution of the species, my dear,” said Gwyneth.

Anne shuffled through the men's clothes and pulled out a pair of black boots. She put them on; they were a little big but comfortable.

“How about these?”

“You look fantastic.” Anne thought she heard a placating tone in Gwyneth's voice. Maybe she was lying? It didn't matter. Anne thought it was all perfect.

Anne decided to try out her new look. She took the black silk shawl with the embroidery on it that her mother always wore, wrapped it around her finished outfit, applied some dark red lipstick, and went down the hill to the corner grocery to buy some tobacco and rolling paper.

She looked in the front hall mirror before she left. A success, she thought. She looked just like Lucy. Except … she didn't. She was Anne, and she didn't enjoy the same social standing that Lucy once enjoyed. Society didn't simply accept Anne as odd. It never had much patience for her.

When Anne walked down Grand Street Hill, she made her debut, and it did not go well. Everyone was staring at her. The grocer asked her if she was all right. She looked at him and gave him a smile. “I am absolutely
fine
,” she said, quickly trying to shove all the tobacco and rolling papers into one of Lucy's satchel bags. Things kept dropping everywhere, and she was tripping on the shawl.

By the time she returned to the Witch House—it was obvious to Anne that she wasn't going to make it as Lucy. She took a pill.

“You are not alone,” Gwyneth reminded her gently. But she felt alone. She missed Nan. She missed William. Anne took another pill.

Weeks went by. Anne began to descend into a state of malaise. And no one stopped by to check on her. The house was legally hers. Nan had left everything to Anne in her will. But, house or no house, with what money would she buy food? How would she survive?

She found the answer on the back porch, waiting for her the next morning in the form of two covered dishes of food with envelopes taped to the top. Anne took the dishes, one stacked on top of the other, inside.

One dish contained a meat pie, and the other, a whole mess of cookies. Anne ate quickly; she didn't realize how hungry she had been. Those pills she'd been taking, how did Lucy function on them? Once she was full, she opened the envelopes. Nan would have told her that it was rude to eat the present before opening the card, but Anne did not care. Nope, she did not care one bitty bit.

But they weren't cards. They were cash. Each envelope had cash inside.
Well, that'll do,
thought Anne.

And it did. For years, there would be food and money left at Anne's back door, even after she didn't need it anymore. There never was a note, only money. When she was saner, when the haze of being Lucy was a memory, when the baby grew strong inside her, Anne would discard the food. But the money was lovely. It gave her freedom. Almost.

 

28

Eleanor in the Library with a Pencil

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015