The Witch of Belladonna Bay (7 page)

This was no bird I was dealing with. This was a mountain lion. And I liked her.

“Who's this?” I asked, reaching my hand out for her dog to smell.

Byrd put her fingers protectively inside the dog's black leather collar. “Her name is Dolores.”

“My,” I said, a bit of laughter slipping into my voice, “what a creative name.”

“It means ‘sorrow,'” she said, her green eyes, my mother's, staring right into me. Daring me to say
one more thing
about her dog or she'd sic it on me.

Then I noticed a book—
my
book—
The Little Prince
peeking out from the top of an oversized apron pocket and found the key to her heart.

“Je suis heureux de vous rencontrer ainsi et je suis heureux d'être à la maison. Merci de prendre un tel bon soin de mon frère.”

I watched her eyes soften slightly. A clue that the sharp edge of her guard was coming down.

“
De rien,
” she responded, making a graceless curtsy. Then she was gone, skipping down the steps barefoot, and down the drive, with Dolores at her heels. She started muttering as she passed me. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed…”

I turned to Jackson, confused, ready to ask what in the world she was doing, but he was already ahead of me.

“It's like a nervous tic or somethin'. She repeats it whenever she's nervous. Seems your arrival has her a bit undone.” He smiled after her adoringly. I fought down an unexpected bit of jealousy.

And then I watched as some redbirds flew down from the trees. Dolores snapped and jumped at them, but they kept flying up and down in loops around little Byrd. Ahead and then behind, a surreal game of tag.

“Please tell me I'm imagining that,” I said.

Jackson put his arm around me and laughed a little. “Isn't that a prerequisite of bein' a princess? Birds followin' you all around? Besides, it's been happenin' since the day she was born. That's why we call her Byrd. Used to be Bird with an
i
till she was big enough to change it herself. She revels in bein' odd, that one.”

I looked at the apron's muddy hem and her unkempt black hair hanging down as she walked. “That's one unlikely princess, Jackson. Gypsy queen, maybe, or queen of the wild things … but princess? I think not.”

“You ain't lookin' hard enough, little darlin'. Princesses come in all shapes and sizes.” He squeezed my shoulder, and turned to walk back into the house. I knew he was holding back a tugging pain, because it was tugging at me too, making my eyes water.

I'd been his princess a lifetime ago. Not Byrd's kind. I was the tea party, dress-up kind of princess.

“Jackson”—I turned around to follow him—“we really need to talk about Paddy.”

He stopped on the steps but didn't turn around. His hands tightened into fists at his sides. “Don't call me that, Wyn. While you're here, you call me daddy. You understand?”

A small, defensive voice came out of my mouth, BitsyWyn Whalen's voice, “You let Byrd call you Jackson.”

He stayed with his back turned to me; he never could look at any of us when he was feeling sorrowful. “Byrd ain't my daughter,” he said. “And Paddy's in prison. Ain't nothin' we can do about that now.”

“That can't be true. I won't believe that. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it,
Jackson.
I swear it.”

“Good luck with that,” he said, walking into the Big House, letting the heavy door shut with a bang. It wasn't long before I heard the ice clinking in the glass through the open windows of the front study. If my memory served, he'd be incoherent by noon, thank God.

I'd never been able to find a “middle ground” of feelings for my father. It was desperate love or full-on rage … interchangeable and triggered by the smallest sigh or sidelong glance.

I stood there not knowing what to do next. Plain awkward is what it was. My ward was gone, and it was too damn humid to look for her. So I sat down on the steps and took a deep breath. It felt good, breathing. “Breathe in, Bronwyn … that's it … deep cleansing breaths,” Ben used to say as he taught me yoga in our old apartment, guiding me gently into each pose.

Thinking about Ben turned on a worry I'd felt lurking ever since I got on the plane in New York. A tiny crack in the calm he'd fostered inside me. I'd grown so used to a steady hand, what would happen … who would I be without it?

“Welcome home,” Minerva said from behind me. Her lavender and bleach scent hit me before her words did. A comfort from days long gone. She'd always sensed when I needed her, I guess some things never
do
change.

“May I sit by you?” she asked.

I stood up and gave her a real hug. It was so damn good to see her.

She still had her signature red hair. Maybe she dyed it, it didn't matter. I wanted to stare at it forever.

We sat down side by side.

“You look good, Min,” I said.

And she did. Older, sure … thinner, too. But her eyes were still that same steel blue that always made me think she'd stared at a stormy northern sea too long.

“Congratulations on your marriage.” I said, trying to sound light and airy. “Carter seems like a fine man.”

That's when I noticed that he'd slipped away at some point … quietly, like a cat.

“He's a good egg,” said Minerva. “And he's been a godsend for Patrick. I guess you could say he's ‘fine' … for an old man, and a Southern cracker.”

“Oh hell, Minerva, you still fancy yourself a Yankee?”

“Sure I do. Nothing will ever change that. I'm too ornery to be one of these frolicky people.” Her eyes flicked to my left hand. I could feel her tense up next to me, but she didn't say anything.

“Yep, I'm engaged. I was going to tell everyone later,” I said softly.

“Well, isn't that nice. I mean wonderful! Never mind me. I'm just so happy to see you. We'll talk about that pretty ring and your fiancé later.”

“Minerva, are you all right? You seem upset.” She'd gotten colder, further away from me somehow, but I couldn't understand why, when a minute before she'd seemed like the same old Minerva. Maybe she was harboring some anger against me for leaving, and it just found its way through cracks in our small talk.

“Don't worry. I'm just happy to see you. Getting used to looking at your face all grown up. We need to readjust, that's all,” she said, patting my arm.

“Minerva?” I asked, taking her hand.

“What, honey?”

“Why didn't you write to me? I mean, I know I didn't write to you, either. But why not drop a line when you were getting married? Or when Paddy first got in trouble? For Lottie's funeral? Or even just to try and convince me to come home after Byrd's mother died?”

I thought she'd pull her hand from mine. No one likes to be accused of anything, but she didn't.

“Well, I should have. So why don't we just chalk it up to ‘out of sight out of mind.' I hope that doesn't sound cruel, Bronwyn. I just think my whole family—the Greens—we're wired that way. It's not that I ever stopped loving you or thinking about you. It's just that if you aren't here in front of me, it's hard to remember to sew you into the quilt of the present. No one should understand that better than you, sitting here, right now.”

Minerva always had a way with words. And she sure loved the hell out of that quilt analogy. She always told Paddy and me that each new day in our lives was a new story square for the quilt that would be the history of us when we were gone.

I pulled her hand to my face and rested on it for a bit. Sometimes a grown woman needs to feel like a little girl again.

“And anyway,” she continued, rubbing my cheek with her thumb, “I wasn't sure you wanted to be found. Or called on, even. You left. Sometimes that's the best thing for a person. No one was going to convince you to come back until you were ready. And now?” She pulled my face up, cupped my chin in her hands, and looked at me. “Now I know you
want
to be here.”

“There's so much to talk about, Minny. I have so many questions. What happened that night Lottie was killed? Why did Paddy confess? Was her funeral nice? Did anyone bring sunflowers? Lottie loved sunflowers.” My voice broke.

She patted me on the head and rose from the steps.

“Why don't you just sit here for a while, and then, when you're ready, you come in and I'll make some tea and we can have a nice long chat, okay? Lost people always need a moment or two before they decide to be found. It happens
all
the time … where I come from, that is.”

I nodded but couldn't seem to speak. Reciting the Declaration of Independence was starting to sound like a mighty fine idea.

“I'm sorry that I used to call you names when I was little” was what decided to come out of my mouth. Mouths can be so unpredictable.

“Old and ugly if I recall correctly,” she said.

“I was somethin' back then, wasn't I?”

“That's one way to put it. You come inside on your own time.”

She went back into the house but didn't let the door bang the way Jackson had. It wasn't her style. We'd had a lot of fights when I was growing up. That woman could yell without even having to raise her voice.

I knew from experience that arguments with Minerva were like small firecrackers. Fierce, then over in a second. I loved her absolute readiness to forgive. Her loyalty, too.

It was always obvious Minerva missed Fairview. But she wouldn't return. Not even after Naomi died. She'd said, “Her body's in the ground here, so it's by this ground I stay.”

It was an angry statement because Naomi wasn't supposed to be buried. She was supposed to be burned. There were an awful lot of rules and regulations regarding the Green family of Fairview, Massachusetts. All families have their traditions, but the Green family's were the oddest I'd ever run across. Especially the one I witnessed the night my mother died.

Most of those strange Green Ways were hard to carry out in a place so far removed, both culturally
and
spiritually.

Though I couldn't remember much of the fight Naomi and I had mere hours before she died, I did recall the scene that took place after she was dead.

It was night, and Minerva thought Paddy and I were fast asleep. She'd given us sleeping medicine (a mix of herbs: valerian root, chamomile, and cannabis) “to calm us,” but it didn't work on me. Jackson was passed out drunk, with good reason for a change.

A soft singing floated up the stairs from the kitchen that night. I'll never forget coming down into the dark foyer. I'd never felt smaller. I was seventeen but felt like I was six years old. I crept down the hall and peered into the kitchen. The air was heavy with “you're not supposed to be here.”

Minerva had my mother laid out on the long kitchen table. Naomi's nude body glowed, thin and white like a marble statue. I watched as Minerva washed my mother, gently, with a white piece of cloth. She dipped the cloth in a glass bowl filled with cloudy water. Salt water. Minerva had used the same milky water on Paddy and me when we were feverish, as she told us stories about these rituals. “
Chun na farraige,
” she sang as she carefully wiped down each part of Naomi.
To the ocean.
Minerva got a kick out of teaching us certain words and phrases when we were little. I learned them all. I've always been quick with languages.

When she was done with the water, she laid the bowl aside and anointed my mother with pungent rose oil. “
Chun an domhain.” To the earth,
she sang.

I sat in the shadows and watched Minerva wind flowers into my mother's hair as she sang. Wild roses with leaves, thorns and all.

Gracefully, she wrapped my mother in crisp white linen sheets. “
Chun na gaotha.
”
To the winds,
she sang. All the corners of the earth were part of their past lives in Fairview. Only one rite was missing.

Fire.

But there would be no fire.

The traditional funerals of the Green family of Fairview, Massachusetts, demanded that the dead be delivered into the afterlife (or the In-between, as Mama and Minny used to call it) much like the Vikings. Placed on a large pyre and sent floating on a barge of light and never-ending life.

But Jackson wouldn't have it. He asked that she be buried. And buried she was, so Minerva stayed.

I didn't really think Naomi would mind being in the ground.

The ground. The earth itself was a bit of an obsession for my mother. All of the natural world, really.

Besides her garden, Naomi loved trees.

Sitting there, on the steps, steeping in the heat and a tidal flow of memories, I looked out across the sprawling front gardens where the plum trees and oaks leaned together making an inner circle, a barrier of sorts holding back the taller pines. Naomi used to run from tree to tree, crying and holding them.

“Why do the trees make you cry, Mama?” I'd asked her once when I was still little, before I shut her out of my heart. Before I stopped being curious about her strange ways.

“Oh! Can't you hear them, Bronwyn? They're screaming at me!” she'd say.

I was six, or maybe seven, and I'd caught her between trees. I could tell by her frantic, tearing eyes that she wanted to break away from my questions so she could go soothe another one.

“I must calm them or else they get so loud. But it's hard, you know? Because I don't have the answers they want. What do you want?” She'd already turned away from me and was talking to the trees again.

“What are they asking you, Mama?”

“Not just me, darling. Everyone. They're asking everyone. Only I seem to be the only one who can hear them.”