The Witch House of Persimmon Point (32 page)

1988

Dear Anne,

I wonder if you ever guessed that I was the one who left you money and food all these years. I am not telling you now because I want your gratitude (if you are reading this, I am dead anyway) or because I need your forgiveness: after all, I am your aunt. I wasn't a useful one until I got sneaky. What with everything that happened, I didn't know another way. I just thought you might not have known it was me, and this would clear up the mystery. I don't like mysteries or surprises, which I suppose is ironic, given my son. I want you to know that I always knew what he was doing. What he did to you, as well as to the others, and there were many others. That is my sin. And I'd like to say I was able to help him, but we all know that would be a lie.

I did love him, Anne. And I wanted to protect him from himself. I didn't do a good job.

I am not mad that you killed him. You are family, after all. And for all the crazy on your mother's side, there's a homicidal gene pool on your daddy's side that you can't escape, I guess.

I don't know why or how, but you must have. You dispatched him, and I am grateful.… I would have gone back to my family straightaway, but then I saw you in the garden with your belly, and I knew I had to stay … stay and try to keep helping you.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that I feel I still owe you a debt, and I have nothing to give you but a secret. You will find a key with this letter. A key to a trunk in the attic of the gatehouse. Do with it what you will.

Please know that I am very sorry.

Opal was a lovely little girl, Anne. She reminded me so much of him. I'm sure wherever she is, she's happy. You were brave and right to send her away.

Best,

Aunt Lavinia

Anne turned the key over in her hand. It had been a long time since she'd thought of Lavinia. She thought about Jude. She thought too much about Gavin. But chubby, insipid aunt Lavinia, who never said much and should have showered more, wasn't on the top of her urgent thought list.

She gave Stella lunch and went directly over to the gatehouse.

Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic.

Time to enter the lair.

The attic Lavinia referred to was a tiny crawl space with exactly enough room for exactly one thing in it. A steamer trunk chock full of cash.

Filled to the brim.

She smiled a little and then, thinking maybe there could be more things hidden inside, Anne considered wandering around the gatehouse. She'd never spent too much time there.

But Lucy had.

And before her … Reginald Green had.

And before him … Archibald.

She had Nan's keys on the big silver ring. Keys to places in the house that would have been locked up since before Haven House was destroyed.

Anne knew the stories, and it occurred to her that perhaps she'd missed something quite simple all along. Some darkness that tainted all their lives.

*   *   *

She never spoke or wrote much about that day. All anyone knew was that she was seen nailing boards against the windows as if a storm were coming.

“No one will ever live here again,” said Anne. As if it were an opposite curse.

She didn't need the gatehouse for money anymore. She had a big old pile in a steamer trunk. And it was cheap, living just the two of them. Besides, that house never did well with renters anyway. There'd been a series of tenants, mostly people who were new to the area, but terrible things seemed to happen over and over again. It became almost comical to Anne. But not to Stella, who, as she grew, had much less of a sense of humor. She was delicate and very clever. But she felt the hurts of the world.

There was the university student who fell down the porch steps and, in the opposite of a miracle, broke his back, becoming paralyzed from the waist down.

There was the man who felt the house was suffocating him and the only way to loosen the pressure in his head was to put an ice pick in his ear and pound at it with a mallet.

There was one botched abortion, at least three lost limbs, and always, each and every time, a broken heart.

It was as if the property was spitting them all out.

Stella, who was just a tiny thing when most of the terrible gatehouse events were happening, used to say, “I do not think that our Witch House likes the way these tenants taste. It only likes you, Gran.”

“We don't have to worry about that anymore, Stella girl. No we do not.”

*   *   *

Stella and Anne were always seen laughing, skipping, and pointing at the sky. Stella was a happy child. She loved her house. And she loved her Gran.

Slowly, as the perfume of her past wore off, or at least grew fainter, Anne's status in the community improved again. Perhaps because the raspberry jam she made was so sweet, Anne became beloved.

Most agreed, however, that it was really Stella.

Her change could have been due to Anne wanting to give Stella the security she never had. It could have been many things. But mostly it was love. And fear.

She'd seen Stella's future in the girl's eyes. That she would die in childbirth. Anne convinced herself that the only thing to do was to keep Stella safe and sound at the Witch House. There would be no baby.

In some ways Anne actually took over Nan's role in the community; not the way she'd tried before, by acting the part. No, this time she became a sort of
strega
and wise woman. People would come to her for advice, at the markets, after church, in the schoolyard, but not to the house, never to the house. Sometimes, on New Year's Eve, people would ask her over to their houses to ring in the new year, and inevitably, once it was known that she was going to be there, a line would form in front of her, full of people wishing to have the
malocchio
(evil eye) taken off of them. Her grandmother had taught her how to do this odd trick, and somehow people seemed to know she had the “gift,” so she would hold bowls of water over their heads one by one and drop pure olive oil into the water to dispel the curses. It didn't matter to her if it really worked or not, but it seemed to matter to the masses, so she was happy to oblige. The people of Haven Port were falling in love with Anne, not just for what she could help them with, or how she taught their children at school, but also for what she could make.

Anne fell into a thriving seasonal business. Her raspberry jam was so popular she began putting up other things that her garden gave her. She had preserves, relishes, pickles, and all sorts of wonderful things to help bring summer to the table during their cold winters. The farmers' market, more popular than ever, was a place where she sold much of her canned goods, with little Stella in one of those old-fashioned aprons by her side.

Stores and markets in the greater Haven Port area sold them as well. She needed to have a good way to get the jars safely from place to place, so she bought herself a truck, a 1950 GMC pickup truck, turquoise and chrome. It was a wonderful investment and quite a fun toy. Anne and Stella became fixtures driving it around town, dressed all in black, with their long black hair flying free (Anne's streaked with silver as the years wore on) and the windows down and jars and crates of something or another clattering and clanging in the back when Anne took a hard corner. And people liked her, they liked her style. Her black capes, her black combat boots (new ones that fit), her cigarettes. Her wild hair. Stella wore hers wild, too. And she was smiling, always smiling.

1990

“Gran! Gran! There's a letter for you. The postman came all the way up the road. He must be new, because he didn't look one bit scared, not one bit. I had to sign for it. Like a grown-up! Gran?”

Anne was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, afraid to touch the letter in Stella's hands.

She'd woken in the night, shivering. Knowing her father was dead. It seemed a cruel blow. She'd somehow thought that he'd come back for her, finally. She'd never stopped waiting. Finality is always hard, but harder for a witch. No spells are strong enough to raise the dead. Well, fine. There are those spells, but they are best left undone.

“Leave the letter there, darling, and go play. I need to be alone when I open it.”

“What is it?”

“It's bad news. And it's the ending of something that I never had a chance to start. Those are hard things to figure out. That's why I need you to go play and let me be brave here on my own. Gran will be fine.”

“I'll go study the big black book. I've almost memorized the reckoning spell. And now I want to find out what the house is saying when it's worried.”

“What the house says?”

“You know, Gran.
Tic tock tic tock tic tock. Tic
,” she said, singing its eerie beat as she skipped up the stairs.

Anne turned to the letter in her hands. She felt the outline of the folded paper under the triangle seal. She noticed another outline, too—a photograph, perhaps.

Lord, I'm not ready for this. She thought.

Dear Anne,

I am old now, and unwell. I guess my time is about up. I wanted to write you a letter, to give you the farewell you deserve. I don't expect you to come on down here; I'm probably already dead and buried. I just figured I needed to make my peace, and I hope you don't find all this too selfish. So here goes …

I never said I was sorry. At least, I don't think I did, and if I did, I didn't mean it, but now I do. I really am sorry, Anne girl. Sorry for what I did, for what I didn't do, and for who I was never able to be.

I don't say this to force you into a position to forgive me, I don't deserve it, I don't need it, and I don't even want it. I know what I did. I have to make some sort of peace with it on my next trip 'round this crazy place. I just wanted to give you something, maybe a little something to hold on to, to make whatever time you have left on this planet a little more bearable. (Am I giving myself too much credit? Probably, but I'm a goner, girl, so cut me some slack.)

The point is, I love you. I loved you the minute I saw you. I loved you each time I came back, and I loved you when you brought your crazy ole self here. I just love you. For real. Whether you know it or not, whether you will believe it or not, you have always belonged to me.

That is what I wanted you to know. That you have always been a part of me, living all on the inside of me. You. Belong. To me.

I tried to make my way back, but I just didn't get there. No excuses. I just didn't.

I shouldn't have left you there. I knew it that day on the stairs. Do you remember that day? I should have picked you right up and run away. They wouldn't have cared, would they? I don't think so. So that is what I am doin' right now, baby, right now as I lie in bed and write this, I am making up a pretend.

I am pretending that you ran down the stairs, and instead of promising you pretty things and skulking off, I stopped, and I held out my arms, and you jumped down the last two stairs right into them like a little kitten. I pack up your stuff, no one stops us. I promise them I will take real good care of you, and Nan packs up some food for the trip. When we get outside, I put you high on my shoulders and we walk on down that damn hill straight to the station. We are singing, baby, “Froggy Went a-Courtin',” do you remember that song? And we are just the two of us, the two musketeers.

Is that okay with you? Can I pretend that for a little bit? Just enough to get me through … is it selfish? Probably.

I missed you, baby, I missed you all the time. And I never wanted anyone or anything more than I wanted you, not my own mother, not the booze or the women, not even Lucy. Just you. You have always been the home I have been trying to find. Somehow, I just couldn't find my way. I didn't try my hardest or give it my best and for that I will be eternally sorry.

Try to do your best, girl, God knows I didn't.

Much Love,

Your Daddy,

Gavin

Anne wiped the tears off her cheeks. She hadn't even known that her eyes were leaking. She folded up the letter and put it back inside her apron pocket, along with the picture. Later she would find a pretty frame and put it up on the mantel where Ava's used to be. A prime spot.

That photo …

Anne didn't have a lot of photos of herself. You need a loving family, or celebrity status, or friends in order to collect pictographic images.

“How funny that the very moment my life turned weird and took a turn for the worse is caught here on film.”

She remembered that day. Not the circumstances, but the day. Gavin had taken her downtown. Anne had ridden on his shoulders, and he was so handsome and she was so proud. He had bought her ice cream, and she kept asking him if he was going to stay this time. He wasn't answering her. He would keep putting her down, taking pictures of everything with his fancy camera. When they got back home, they all sat out on the patio and ate a delicious lunch. Anne remembered eating tomatoes, how they would squish between her teeth, and drinking ice-cold lemonade. She remembered Gavin asking Lucy to take a picture of them together. Lucy must have, Anne remembered the flash.

Later, they had fought … Lucy and Gavin. There was a lot of yelling, and Anne had hidden herself on the back steps. Gavin came running from the yard, shooting by his daughter. He paused at the screen door to take a look at her, and she held out her arms and said, “Don't go, Daddy, please don't go? Promise you will come back?”

And Gavin had placated her with promises of more ice cream and rides on his big boat and even a camera of her own so they could take pictures together. And then he was gone.