When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (12 page)

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Authors: Amy S. Foster

BOOK: When Autumn Leaves: A Novel
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Someone was praying, even if it wasn’t Stella.
Autumn was pleasantly surprised by the letter she found under her door later that day. There was no stamp on the envelope, only the word “Autumn” in loopy blue ink. The sender must have walked it over while Stella was in Autumn’s shop, when Autumn had been too distracted to notice.
Dear Autumn,
Just to be clear, I’m writing this letter to be considered for your contest. But before I talk about your contest, I want to be clear about something else, too. It’s this: I really do like and respect you a great deal. We’ve had our little tiffs in the past, and I have said some very strong things to you about who you are and what you do. It took me a long time to understand that maybe what you do isn’t black magic, that just because you are a witch doesn’t necessarily mean you’re evil, and that you are really a very spiritual woman. I know you don’t like that word, “witch,” anyway. But I don’t really have a better word to describe you. So that will have to do.
To tell the truth, I have to admit I’ve thought you were a good person for a long time. You’re so wise in the way of things, and I’ve seen you help so many people. I know God wouldn’t have given you that wisdom and power if you weren’t one of His creatures. But I’ve had trouble juggling what I understand of my faith, which as you and everyone else knows is faith in Jesus Christ, with the things I’ve always been taught are against the way of my Lord.
I knew about your contest from my good young friend Stella. When I heard she was entering, I was torn, because on the one hand I know Stella herself has some special gift of God’s. I’ve seen her use it on my own grandson, and on other people. But I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that she wanted something called a Book of Shadows. You have to admit, when you call it that, a person can’t help but think black magic kinds of thoughts. So I prayed for a long time about this, trying to understand my own feelings, and the funniest thing happened. In a moment of clarity, I remembered that there is no power on this good earth except that of the Lord our God’s, and that any power you or your book might have must actually be God’s power. On the one hand, it seems a little twisted. On the other, nothing else makes sense.
Autumn, I’ve spent my life trying to get closer to God. I’ve spent my life studying and worshipping. And I know my way of seeing God must be a little different from yours, but maybe you’ll agree with what I’ve just discovered, that they can’t be that different. If you decide that this old lady is your contest winner, you know that I will own your book and whatever is inside it respectfully.
Yours truly,
Dottie Davis
Autumn was very pleased to have this letter. Until she read it, she’d had no idea why Dottie Davis had been on her list.
Through the end of March and into April, Stella did what Autumn had suggested, and prayed for a reversal of the spell. She forced herself to be patient, to clear her mind and keep trying to connect with the earth, even when nothing came to her. She rose in the morning to pray before work, cleared her head and meditated every lunch hour, and cleared her mind every evening before sleep, trying to feel the pulse of the earth in her heart and stomach again. It was gone.
Stella willfully refused to give up, and reminded herself of the silver lining here. Not being able to summon healing energy meant she was forced to use all the homeopathic training Granny Pearl had drilled into her, and she loved reminding herself of home cures. Her columns for the
Circle
became even richer, and she started following other homeopathic journalists at other town and city papers, which widened her own knowledge. She had lost weight, and looked more like the person she’d always imagined she’d wanted to be. But to Stella, none of this was worth having given up her gift. She had to fight her temper and impatience every day, to struggle against the lightning in her belly that so wanted to dominate her personality. It was hard not to let it win.
When she prayed, Stella remembered her true nature: a person who wanted to help and heal others, who wanted to serve her community. She worked hard to keep doing these things, but they were no longer natural. She prayed to turn her brain off, and relied on a nightly mix of herbal tea and Klonopin just to be able to sleep six or seven hours. When it got really bad, she replaced tea with wine, or pot, or both. She paced her tiny house, trying to throw out the frenetic energy that had collected beneath her skin.
No amount of research turned her onto a cure; the fact that she couldn’t find one was so overwhelming she thought panic alone might give her a heart attack. She knew, without a doubt, that she could not go on like this forever. She had to reverse what she had done. The question was, how? How to undo such a thing?
Then, one evening at the end of April, while Stella was praying quietly in her kitchen, the answer hit her like, well, like a bolt of lightning. Sure, lightning was dangerous, fascinating, and powerful—but there was one thing that diffused it, that took away that power. Earth. The earth grounds and absorbs the phenomenon as if it were nothing. Such a simple and obvious answer, but it had taken her all this time to figure it out.
Stella went out to her garden, and almost without thinking unleashed her garden hose on the small space that once was the circle she had thrown to call the lightning. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, but it was long enough to turn the hard-packed soil into a small field of mud. She walked into the middle, bending down to feel the mud between her fingers. It was smooth and silty. Then she stripped down naked, indifferent to the crispness in the April air, or to the fact that anyone might see her small, round body.
Stella centered her breathing, trying to calm herself by telling herself if it didn’t work she could try again, although she knew that wasn’t true. She outlined a circle with her foot and then stood in the middle again to call down the elements. She could not pin down the energy, though, not like before. Instead, she felt it race through her and over her, slipping around her thoughts. Stella was frustrated, but let it go. She had to stop fighting with herself; she had to empty herself of thoughts and plans and fears.
Stella felt herself fall to her knees, compelled by some greater force. The next thing she knew, she grabbed a handful of mud, closed her eyes, and stuffed it into her mouth. The taste of iron shocked her. The aware part of her certainly hadn’t intended to eat mud, but there she was, unable to stop herself. She had to concentrate on the earth, on grounding herself, on being restored by the greatest healer of them all. She pleaded and begged and choked out a cry for help, covering the length of her body with mud, rolling around in it and working it into her hair. She kept on eating it and then, remembering Autumn’s words, began praying to someone, anyone, for the return of her gift.
It could have been five minutes or thirty-five minutes. Time did not move normally inside the circle, and once again she relied on her instincts to tell her when to stop. Her body hummed. Stella got to her knees, feeling heavy and slow, and then she threw up. Her stomach heaved and heaved until it felt like it had turned itself inside out. She didn’t really want to look, but she had to. Here and there in the mess of vomit, gold flecks caught the sun. She was sure of it. Stella, giddy with gratitude, banished the circle and pulled herself into fetal position under a giant fir that stood in the farthest corner of her yard.
More lost time. More black and brown and deep purple instead of dreaming. Stella opened her eyes. She had passed out, sort of, her face pressed into the earth at the roots of her garden fir tree.
The first thing she felt was worn out and hollow, but then she immediately realized she was hungry; that was a good sign. The mud had dried on her skin, leaving a tight and unmovable case. She let herself into the house and went directly to her bathroom to run the shower. Under the deliciously warm spray she tried not to think of anything at all, concentrating instead on watching the mud rolling down her legs and ringing the drain, which carried it away in a red-brown swirl.
When she was finished she wrapped herself in a towel. In her bedroom, she let the towel slip to the floor and examined herself in the full-length mirror. Her hair fell in damp clumps around her face and she saw that some of the old softness in it had returned. She felt calm, so unlike the anger she had felt toward herself in the last few weeks. Why had she had so much contempt for herself, for her life? Stella drew her arms up to her chest in a gesture of forgiveness. Everything she had done, every choice that she had made had led her to this exact moment. She was right where she was supposed to be.
She felt her gift come back, the slight tingles under her skin, the awareness of something making her hands want to reach out to connect. It had worked; the lightning was gone. But so were her feelings of being inconsequential. She had kept the new ability to see through her past, through her pain, and recognize that there was so much more to her, more for her, than she had allowed herself to believe. And in that split second, she felt it: happiness. Then she let it go, let it back out into the universe where every other perfect moment lives, stretched out across the stars, hovering, just there.
Autumn was relieved to feel it all coming to an end. She could have undone the spell in two seconds, but she did-n’t experience much regret about having lied to Stella about that. She had known Stella was powerful enough to pull off a reversal of the spell herself. She wanted to see how Stella handled crisis. She wanted to check her problem-solving abilities. And she had to admit Stella had done a pretty good job. There was no way on this earth (or any other) she was eliminating Stella Darling from her list.
May 1: Beltane
A
NA BECKWITH LAY UNMOVING ON THE FARTHEST reaches of her bed. Turned to one side, she watched the numbers climb on the clock beside her. All through the night she had felt a fist push through her chest, squeezing her from the inside until her breath fell out of her mouth, quick and strained. Ana listened to the steady rhythm of Jacob’s sleeping, wanting nothing more than to escape to the couch downstairs. That would only have added to his suspicions that something was not quite right with her, though, and today of all days she needed to assure him that despite her moodiness as of late, she was fine.
When the first birds began to call outside her window, something inside her softened. The morning had finally come. She turned over and watched her husband’s profile as it emerged dimly through the shadows. Guilt and excitement surged through her, strong enough to make Ana flex her toes. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how to get through the day, only able to visualize her actions in the most basic of verbs. She would find a way to charm the hours left, to own them, before the moment when she would give up everything entirely, including time itself.

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