The Witch of Belladonna Bay (36 page)

I put some ice in a glass and filled it with lemonade, splashing some bourbon on top before handing it to her.

Aunt of the year.

She got right up, poured some off the top of her glass, brought the bottle to the table, and topped off both our drinks. Significantly. “I do believe we might want to get a bit silly, Aunt Wyn. I got a
bad
feelin' about what these here cards are gonna tell us.

“Wait! My favorite song is on! Let's dance too, Aunt Wyn. Just for a bit, one song before we sit and read these
evil
cards,” she said, even though there was no music playing. She pulled a wooden stool over to the refrigerator, where an ancient radio sat perched on top.

“The electricity's out, darlin',” I said.

She scoffed, rubbed her hands together and then switched the oversized knob to On. Just like that, Patsy Cline came pouring out of the radio.

Crazy, I'm crazy for feelin' so lonely.… I'm crazy.… crazy for feelin' so blue …

We danced together all over that big country kitchen. Its huge windows black against the rainy night showing our reflections. We sang at the top of our lungs, letting our lemonades splash onto the floor as we twirled, twisting and dipping each other. And every time Patsy sang, “Crazy for lyin,' crazy for tryin',” Byrd shook her hair back and forth with her eyes closed. My gypsy queen.

As soon as the song was over, she turned off the radio.

“Why not leave it on, honey?”

“This ain't no time for music. Time we got serious. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, sitting at the table. I lit a few more candles and gave Byrd the cards to shuffle and hold. “Give them back to me when you feel you've told them the whole thing, okay?”

She took it seriously. She must have told a thousand stories to those cards. Her eyes were closed, tears silently falling.

When she gave them back, I took one of her hands and held it as I placed my other hand on the deck, connecting us both to the cards.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“I am, but remember. I'm not going to talk. So you'll talk and you can ask me yes or no questions, and when it's over? I don't want to talk about it again.
Ever.
Okay?”

“Deal,” I said, laying the spread of cards on the table.

I did a full twenty-one-card storyboard. Those are difficult. But as each card turned over, I saw the truth. Three cards in particular were all I needed to know about what happened. The others colored in the gray areas, telling me how terrible she felt. But those three cards were clear as day.

The beginning: the priestess

“So you went into the mist and you were happy, but confused, right? And you saw many different ways you could try to help Jamie and everyone else.”

She nodded.

The middle: the alchemist

“But something happened. Didn't it, Byrd? Something happened that led you to believe that you needed to do something right then and there to keep everyone safe. And it had to do with mixing things together.”

She nodded again, her lip quivering

The cards that came between were the saddest and most confused set of combinations I've ever seen. My heart was breaking for her. But when I turned over the last card, I knew why she'd been so adamant about never speaking about it.

The Ten of Swords. The card of intellect, and creativity. In this case, a bad sort of creativity. The card of winter. Death. The card of air and spirits. The card that told me she'd killed him.

“You made him something to eat. Something with belladonna in it…”

She nodded yes as she took a shuddering breath.

She'd poisoned her prince.

“You were afraid he'd hurt other people, too.”

She nodded, moving across to my side of the table and sitting on my lap, her small body shaking with silent sobs.

“I love you, Byrd. And I bet that Jamie knew what he was eating. He knew that island too well, so don't beat yourself up forever. Some people need a reason to hurt themselves. You didn't kill him, honey. You gave him permission to kill himself.”

We were quiet after that, and I just held her tight as the storm raged around us. Sometimes what's right is wrong and what's wrong is right. And we have to figure it out as we go along.

It was done, and the only thing that mattered to me was in my arms.

*   *   *

The old-fashioned phone on the wall in the kitchen rang, at the same time the lights came back on, startling us.

“You jumped first,” she said.

“Uh-uh. You did,” I said.

We laughed a little, both knowing that our solemn, magic evening was at its end.

“I'll get it,” said Byrd. She was sounding like her old self.

“Hello, this is the Whalen residence,
whom
may I ask is speaking?”

“What the hell is that?” I said, looking at her funny.

“I'm tryin on a new pair of manners. I'm growin' up and I think I need some.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

“Anyways, it's for
you,
” she said, almost teasingly. She held the receiver out to me and then, when I took it from her, said: “Don't do nothin' I wouldn't do.”

“Hysterical,” I said to her, then put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Wyn?”

My heart stopped dead.

Grant.

He'd called me after all.

*   *   *

It wasn't a long conversation. He asked to come over. Said he was broken up over Jamie. “Well, I'm kind of in the middle of something,” I said. But Byrd was shaking her head like a madwoman and already gathering up the cards.

I held the phone to my chest. “You sure, honey?”

“I think we both know this is the best it's gonna get … it is what it is. Plus, the storm's over. So there's that.”

She shrugged at me, finished gathering up the cards and was gone.

That damn girl. “I guess it's fine,” I said.

“See you in a few,” he said.

I hung up the phone and banged my forehead against the wall a few times.

Do what feels right,
I thought, and went out onto the front porch to light candles and the lanterns. The ones Naomi used to love, all strung up, colorful and warm.
Oh, Mama. I miss you
.

He didn't drive. He came walkin' up the stairs just like he always did. Like fourteen years hadn't even gone by. And he was soaked through, too.

“You okay?” I asked.

He didn't answer me.

“Want to stay here or go to my cottage? Byrd fixed up my old playhouse.”

“Walking sounds nice,” he said. “I got the lowdown at Sam's. I needed some air.”

“Seems you've already had a good walk. Maybe you should dry off…”

He knows his son is dead. He knows.

“I'm okay,” he said. “Better now. Just lookin' at you always made me feel better.”

He was nervous. His hands tucked in his jean's pockets. His shoulders up to his ears, like he was ready for someone to hit him.

I held out my hand and he took it.

Jumping in the ocean off the docks, just us. On a day when Paddy and Lottie weren't taggin' along. Running like the wild things we were. Running against time. We jumped so, so high and then held our breath for so long amid all those reeds and weeds and brackish grasses. “In all the world, there ain't never been a love like I feel for you, Wyn.”

The memory was a feeling more than anything else, a warmth that spread from my hand to his.

“It wasn't you, Grant. It wasn't ever you. I—it was my mother. And not just her death, the day she died. Remember? I told you a little bit when I ran to your house that night. I understand now why I left and never came back. I was hiding. And I found a wonderful, safe hiding place. To be honest, I could have probably lived there happily for the rest of my life. Only I never would have really lived at all, I guess.”

“Did you really think I did it, Wyn?”

“All I wanted was Paddy out of prison. You have to admit, you were a great suspect. If I'd traded him in for you, I would have been obsessed with getting you out next. I know it.”

“I know it, too,” he said.

We walked farther along the path toward my cottage. Still holding hands.

“I never got to know him, Wyn. My own son. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe if I'd taken responsibility for him, he'd have turned out different.”

“You tried, Grant.”

“A day late and a dollar short, I tried.”

“Sometimes we just have to accept what we've done and forgive ourselves. Byrd's teaching me that. Sometimes people are just born bad. Not a thing you can do about it. And sometimes bad things happen. They just happen. And that's the way you can tell when really lovely things happen. And they are—”

“You always talked too much,” he said, pulling me to him fast, and then pushing me up against a tree, kissing me like we were seventeen again.

Every cell in my body opened to a new sort of oxygen. I was alive for the first time since the night my mother died. I didn't die with her. I came back to life right then and there with that kiss.

“I died when you left, you can't leave again,” he said, pulling away breathlessly.

“Let's get outta here,” I said, trying to shake off the passion building inside of me.

The moon, set free from the storm clouds, was full and misted over, framed by the magnolias. The lightning bugs dotted the landscape.

He stopped me again and held me close, Spanish moss swayed above our heads. “Let's stay here a second, Wyn.”

“It's beautiful, isn't it?”

“You're beautiful, Wyn. As if you'd swallowed light.”

He cupped my face with his hands and leaned in for another kiss. A sweet, long kiss that could have ended with one of us pulling away again, but didn't. A kiss that grew into a frenzy of kisses, our arms entwined, my fingers tangled up in his hair.

His hands moved down under my cotton shirt, finding their rightful place on my breasts. I couldn't stand it.

“Now, Grant, please,” I gasped, and he set me gently on the grass, pushing up my skirt.

Sex
is a word. It doesn't mean anything. There are some things that don't have words. They're only experiences. Language-less. Grant and I didn't have sex under the wide green leaves of the magnolia. We did something that has no words. But we moved together, forgetting everything around us, all our troubles, sorrows. Arm over arm, legs entangled, thoughts clear … Grant, Grant, Grant, like a heartbeat. My body glowed next to him as it should have been from the beginning, now it was.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love
you,”
I said. “And I'm never leaving again.”

“Do you think we can make it to the cottage, or are you gonna molest me again in the grass?” he asked.

“No more grass,” I said. “I have mosquito bites where they ain't oughtta be. Let's get inside.”

*   *   *

We made love all night. “Makin' up the lost years,” Grant said. But I was living in the moment, without worry, without fear.

As the sun rose, we went out onto the porch and saw, for the first time, the entire island of Belladonna. Forested and lovely. No mist at all.

“He's not there. I know it. You don't have to say anything, but nod if I won't have a chance to get to know him,” he said.

I nodded.

He looked off at the rising sun for a bit.

“I can't reconcile it in my heart,” he said. “Maybe I won't ever be able to make it right.”

“Right and wrong are two sides of a coin, Grant. Flip it over in your head. If you can't forgive yourself, who will?”

“Damn, girl, what happened to you? You're different. Nah, that ain't right. You're you, only … the best possible you. I want to learn how to do that. How to become the best possible me. You're gonna teach me, okay?”

“How?”

Byrd and Dolores came bounding up onto the porch. Dolores ran inside the cottage, surprising all of us. Byrd curled up in between me and Grant on the porch swing.

“You're gonna do it like you did it with me, Aunt Wyn. You're just gonna love him like crazy.”

*   *   *

A week or so later, Stick drove up to the Big House with Paddy in the backseat.

We'd all been eating a late breakfast together on the side porch and not one of us could believe our eyes.

When Stick got out of the police car and let Paddy out, Byrd ran like a girl possessed and threw herself into her daddy's arms.

I don't know how long they stayed like that, but it didn't matter. The rest of us were watching a miracle. We were watching two people heal right in front of us.

He carried her up onto the porch and we all took turns hugging him, welcoming him home.

“Stick, you son of a bitch,” said Grant, laughing. “How the hell did you manage this so quick?”

“Well, we got a man here,” he said, giving a nod at Jackson, “who knows a shitload of people in this state.

“Son, it's good to have you home. I—I'm sorry I even thought for a second you did this thing.”

“Daddy? You don't have to worry about nothin',” said Patrick. “I felt it was my fault. And in a way? It was. I'm still cheatin' if you look at it. Carter lied. I was there that night.”

Everyone looked at me. “What?” I said.

“What nothin', Wyn,” said Paddy. “It's a good thing that old man ain't gonna serve too much time because I woulda told the whole truth and nothin' but if he'd gotten a second more.”

Minerva leaned over Paddy's shoulder and kissed his cheek. “You're a good man, Patrick. He's fine. Trust me. Your mother would be so proud of you.”

*   *   *

Later, Paddy asked if I'd walk with him, show him the cottage. We needed a moment alone.