When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (9 page)

Last year, Stella had recalled her grandmother’s Equinox spell, and she realized that she felt exactly the way Dolores McDonald had described herself all those years ago: disconnected, somehow, like her life was happening to someone else. Lightning had worked for Dolores; it would work for Stella.

Looking at Pearl’s book these thirty-odd years after she’d first seen lightning collected, Stella ran her fingers over her grandmother’s words and almost heard Pearl’s lively cadence in her head. She closed her eyes and smelled, faintly, Pearl’s scent of mint and lavender, as though her grandmother had just walked by and was sitting in another room. She felt her grandmother close, her spirit watching and guiding her through the steps.

Stella’s cellar was a small space, but far more organized than the rest of her house. Between the washer and dryer were two tall bookshelves. One held the results of hours of canning, everything from jams and jellies to peaches and cherries. On the other set of shelves were rows and rows of small glass bottles, carefully labeled, full of roots, herbs, and flowers she always kept on hand, even though she seldom used them for anyone other than herself. Now, she found she needed many of them, and she said a silent prayer of thanks to Pearl, who had taught her this very thing by example.

Stella, who could feel the storm drawing nearer, began mixing the ingredients with her mortar and pestle feverishly. It was a curious combination, everything from goldenseal and blue cohosh to ginseng. She mashed it all together, Lucy and Ethel watching with obvious boredom. She then went to a small cabinet in which she stored extra bottles. She moved them around noisily until she found the one that matched Pearl’s description of what was required. It stood about ten inches tall, with a fat, round neck: an old milk bottle.

After bulldozing up her narrow stairs and dumping these things on her kitchen counter, Stella flew to the backyard. There were a few ingredients that she needed fresh, and she had all of these growing in her small garden. With a small pair of cutting scissors she took early spring cuttings of elder flowers, marigolds, chamomile, and rose hips. Stella looked up to the sky and noted the gathering clouds. The air smelled musky and sweet and there was the metallic taste on her tongue again, but much stronger. The storm was moving in more quickly than she had thought.

Back inside she added the ingredients to the granite bowl and began to pound them together. She spat in it twice, and added water gradually. With a funnel she poured it into the bottle. That part of the preparation accomplished, she moved outside. Birds called to one another, and Stella hoped it wasn’t some kind of animal warning system. She tried to dismiss the thought from her head. It wasn’t like she knew exactly what she was doing.

For her circle, she would use a flowerbed that she had been planning on turning into a pumpkin patch. Mentally she calculated the diameter; the space was just big enough for her to throw the circle. She began to dig smack in the center. The hole had to be large enough to fit the bottle completely, so that not even the neck was visible.

In her dirt-covered frenzy, Stella suddenly began to laugh. If anyone could see her now, digging frantically at nine o’clock in the morning, still in her nightgown, her hair unbrushed—even Lucy and Ethel were eying her like a crazy person. Stella gently covered the bottle with earth so that it stood upright without any chance of moving, the open neck visible only when she stood directly above it.

Stella took a moment to glance at Pearl’s book where she’d left it on a little wrought iron table. She took a large wooden bowl filled with salt and an old walking stick about half her height. Walking clockwise, she outlined the perimeter of the circle with the salt. She had never thrown a circle before, had never needed to. But she knew that this was more symbolic than anything else; she needed to feel safe in order to open herself up to the energy. Then she stood square in the middle, over the bottle, and began to speak in a loud, somber voice.

“I call upon the four directions to be present in this circle. North, the element of earth, be with me here, Mother, let your properties ground me and guide me. East, the element of air, I have called you to my purpose, bring forth your charge.” Stella tried to ignore how ridiculous she felt. “South, the element of fire, join me in this circle, feed it with your power. West, element of water, I ask you to come inside, nurture this place, help me direct the storm.”

Stella closed her eyes then and drew down the power. She visualized the sky, the purple-gray clouds gathered above her. She imagined a thread, made from the atoms of the cosmos: atoms both she and the clouds shared, atoms they traded back a forth. She pictured this thread winding around the sky and then down to the earth to her hands, curling about them like a snake. With her arms extending outwards and her head thrown back, she began to call to the storm.

The ritualistic aspect of calling lightning had intimidated Stella, but not this part. Like her Granny Pearl had said, she was born to do it. She felt like she knew what to do in the same way you know your address or phone number, an unconscious knowing you don’t think about. It was earth magic, and Stella imagined herself at the end of a long chain of ancestors who had been working with it since the beginning of time. Stella was made hollow, an empty vessel for the energy to consume. To her, it felt like a dance. She swayed in the directions of the heavens, charming the energy down to the place she wanted it to go. When she opened her eyes, she saw the daylight had almost entirely disappeared. The clouds above her spun violently, the color of a new bruise. With her stick, she cut a doorway through the circle and walked just outside it. She could not be too close when the lightning struck.

The storm hummed through her teeth. She was no longer scared, no longer wary; she had become part of the violent process. “Now! Now!” she screamed. She slammed the stick deep into the earth, and at that very moment, the clouds shifted and a bolt of lightning struck the bottle. The force brought her to her knees, and she felt the strings of atoms flying from her body as she cut the mental cord connecting her to the storm. Still on all fours, she crawled back into the circle. When she stuck her hands into the earth, relief washed over her. It was the same feeling as that you get when you cry for hours: a calm exhaustion settled into her bones. Stella grabbed the bottle, covering the neck with a cork stopper she had stuck in one of her boots. Her body released the four directions with gratitude, thereby banishing the circle.

It was done. But had it worked?

Back inside the house, Stella put the bottle on the kitchen table without looking at it. She filled the kettle again and lit some candles. The rain had come in an angry downpour, blocking the sun and rattling the windows. Stella went to her bedroom to get dressed in an old flannel and loose jeans. She removed her muddy boots, replacing them with fleece slippers.

She padded back out into the kitchen and made tea. Both Lucy and Ethel had crawled up onto the table, sitting erectly on either side of the bottle, reminding Stella of an Egyptian hieroglyph. She was scared now, scared it hadn’t worked, and a little scared it had. Still without looking, she took the bottle in her hands. There was something in it. The heat bled into her palms. Gingerly she held it up to the dim light. Apart from the herbal concoction she had mixed, something swirled in the bottle. Iridescent sparkles danced throughout the liquid and leapt up to the neck.

Stella had no idea what lightning in a bottle was supposed to look like, but whatever was inside her bottle seemed to be alive. There was only one sure way to test it, though, so she carefully lifted off the cork top. A few of the sparkles escaped and landed on her skin. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was shocking, like being splashed with ice water. As Stella’s breathing grew more rapid, she lifted the bottle up to her lips. “Ohh shit,” she muttered. Hardly poetic, she knew, but what else was there to say? She closed her eyes and drank the liquid in one swift gulp. Her head swam, the room began to pulse, and Stella Darling rather ungracefully fell off the chair and passed out.

Autumn felt the storm gathering that morning. She had been up early, but Stella’s loud, rather obnoxious spell-casting would have woken her up anyway. She’d had no idea at the time that Stella was capable of calling the storm.

Autumn wished she had been given some warning so, at the very least, she could have monitored the situation. It was wild magic, and possibly dangerous. But it was better this way; Autumn needed to get a sense of how things would be in Avening when she was no longer there to put out every fire. She needed to see how whoever had worked the magic would deal with its aftermath without her help. It was part of the vetting process, however much she disliked it.

She looked up at the stormy March sky, churning as it was with electric clouds, and sighed. She wondered if Stella Darling had any idea what she’d gotten herself into.

When she came to, Stella wasn’t sure of where she was, or what she was doing on the floor. It wasn’t until she stood that she noticed the difference. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she felt the swell inside of her. Her body was calmly indifferent, even though her mind raced. She felt dangerous and powerful. The spell, the lightning, had pulled her together. She had been a puzzle, scattered, pieces everywhere. Drinking from the bottle had made each piece of her fit, had kicked and punched and fused them into place. Deep down inside, this fierce woman had always existed, but had been smothered and hidden out of duty and sacrifice. No longer.

When Stella looked in the mirror, she saw with sad efficiency how the weakest aspects of her personality had been allowed to make almost every single one of her choices. Her environment was that of a woman of a certain age who lived alone. Stella, who felt she was at her best when she was helping others, had tried to create a home that felt warm and inviting, but which in fact did the total opposite. It was stifling in there and claustrophobic.

Stella was a whirling dervish, a tornado. She cleaned and gutted. She threw things away that she didn’t need or want, or could no longer bear to look at. The clutter was overwhelming, it hurt her brain, made her clench her eyes and fists together. She wanted space, clear, empty space, to breathe. In the kitchen she got rid of every bit of food that contained fat or processing. At the end of it, it looked like Old Mother Hubbard’s. Oh well, she thought. I’ll just go to the store later. The thought of an errand with such purpose thrilled her.

In her bedroom, she went through every article of clothing she owned. What on earth possessed her to buy such things? Sweatshirts with cats on them, sweaters with sequins, leggings . . . with stirrups! In the end, her closet was barer than her kitchen. She resolved to go into town and buy new clothes that actually fit.

When the cleaning was done, the garbage bags were taken out and sorted as actual garbage and charity shop giveaways. Better, much better. At the kitchen counter, she ate a sandwich out of the few tolerable things that were left in her refrigerator and made a list while standing. She tapped her toe on the hardwood and wrote out all the things she wanted and needed in two categories. She would repaint the house—pink simply no longer applied to her. Eventually, she would need all new furniture, but she couldn’t buy it all at once. She would do it room by room, until the house was completely made over. “I mean really,” she said out loud. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking.”

Bullshit, she thought to herself. She knew exactly what had made her furnish what was essentially a lovely old house with cheap, ornate furniture; if ever anyone had come for a visit (which they hadn’t so far) they would have thought she was living the high life. Pathetic. She shook the thought out of her head and focused on how to fix it. Years of growing up in poverty had made her a hoarder. She had a chunk of money saved up, and could easily find $10,000 to use on redecorating. But at that rate it would take her years to finish the whole house. She would have to find a way to make extra money. She wrote “money” down on her list under the category of “needs.”