Chapter 2
I try not to stumble into more thorns.
Maybe she hadn’t heard me. “Is there someone here with you, Mama?”
Just as quickly, the sparkle comes back into her eyes. “Oh! Come on in. I’ve got a surprise for you!”
I start to follow my mother into the house but throw one last glance over my shoulder at the red car. Bobby’s old, repainted Crown Victoria hadn’t been as bright or as clean. The color had been more brick red than scarlet. The twelve-year-old version of me had written the words WASH ME in the dust caked on the rear windshield.
I had hated that car and what it represented: my dad’s much-admired stepbrother, Robert. Every Sunday afternoon, like clockwork, his red car appeared in the front yard, and every Sunday afternoon, like clockwork, he would bang on the front door. My dad would send me to greet him and invite him into our home, the one place that should have been a safe place from predators, even for young daughters of raging monsters. Inside my home was never safe, but the woods, the pastures, even the swamp held all my secrets growing up. That’s where I called on the Old Gods for the first time, and where They claimed me. It’s where They, when no one else would, protected me from Bobby.
Every single time I heard that knock at the front door, I would hope that our visitor would be someone else, anyone else. Every single time, I would find a man ancient to me then—but close to my age now—standing on the top step with a revolting grin. He would stride through the front door without a hitch in his step or a glitch in his grin, arms open wide, wisps of gray hair circling his bald head, bony arms and legs sticking out from under short sleeves and knee-length shorts, and a midsection that caged an enlarged liver. No sooner would he walk through the door than—
I shudder.
“Lauren? What are you still doing out there? Come on in and shut the door. You’re letting mosquitoes in.”
Inhaling the musty air, I step over the threshold into the large family room that I know is full of floor lamps, table lamps, ceiling lamps, and even an assortment of emergency lanterns with dead batteries. None of those lights are on. Not a one. The sole source of light in the room is the large flatscreen TV that my little brother bought our parents when they were forced to transition from analog-to-digital and get rid of the forty-year-old console that had been their first color television.
In the waning sunlight from the door behind me, I can barely discern my mom’s movement as she feels her way to a recliner so old that it has molded itself to the memory of her frail body. My eyes don’t adjust quickly enough. I trip over something—a scatter rug or maybe clothes left on the floor—and catch myself on the corner of the sofa. I feel my way to the lamp on the end table and find the switch. Light floods the room.
“Mama, why are you sitting alone in the—Oh!”
Across from the sofa and recliner, two men I don’t know wait expectantly in the two wing chairs. Both smile pleasantly back at me.
“Surprise!” my mom chimes from her recliner, a blanket over her lap. In the light, her wrinkles appear like the grooves on a worn record—prolonged exposure, deeper grooves, and an artist completely at the mercy of the composer. She beams at me, obviously proud of some accomplishment I don’t understand.
I stare at the two men. Something about them is both familiar and unfamiliar, as if I knew them in a previous incarnation. Nothing threatening, just off-putting. The one on the left smiles up at me. Forties, face unlined except for the crinkles around his eyes. Long silver hair pulled back in a knot, a short-cropped beard, and the iciest blue eyes I’ve ever seen on a grown man. I knew a child once, when I was a young teen, with eyes that color.
The man in the chair beside him looks enough like him to be his brother or possibly father, but without the same hue of eyes or color of hair. He’s probably a decade older than I am, but looks worn for his years. His hair is thin and wispy on top, with a deep crease in each earlobe.
He grins up at me. The wing chair’s leather seat creaks under his weight as he shifts nervously.
My heart skips a beat.
“Well?” my mom asks in the giddy voice of a child. “I told you I had a surprise for you.”
I gawk at the two men but don’t say anything. They blink wordlessly at me.
Finally, the older one pushes himself to his knees, lopes toward me, and gives me a crushing bear hug before sitting back down. His cologne is familiar, but no longer popular.
Oh, I know that scent!
I can still picture the thick green bottle with the polo player on it. I used to joke in high school and college that it reminded me of rolling around in tall grass to make love.
“Well, I declare! Lauren! You don’t know who these two fellows are, do you?”
I cringe. This isn’t the first time she’s done this to me. She likes to pick out people she remembers from my past—old classmates I haven’t seen in decades but whom she sees every week at the grocery store—and let them know that they’re not remembered. I usually try to ignore this game of hers. I actually prefer to be embarrassed this way than her more common habit of befriending some sales clerk in town who knew me in high school and telling her the embarrassingly intimate things that I’ve confided to my mom. I’m always horrified to learn that the person she considers my friend, merely because she remembers the name, was actually one of my bullies when I was a kid.
No wonder people back home still gossip about me, about my failed marriages, and even about the gynecological surgery that turned out not to be cancer, thank the Gods. All the local gossips swear it’s the truth. Of course, they do—they heard it all from my mom!
Mama presses one palm to her mouth. “I never thought I’d live to see the day you forgot these two boys. You know them. You do. Guess who they are. Guess!”
I cough to fill the awkward silence. My mom truly doesn’t need to test me with these awkward situations. There’s a part of her that, I’m sure, thinks it’s either funny or all in good fun. For me, it’s neither.
“Come on, Lauren. Guess!”
The man with the pale eyes pushes to his feet and takes a faltering step forward. The cane he left leaning against the arm of the chair falls to the floor with a loud clack as its antlered head strikes the hardwood floor. He barely notices it as he reaches for my hand. On the inside of his left wrist is a tattoo that bears some military significance though I can’t say what. The tattoo on the inside of his right wrist is one I’ve seen before. A Walking Lightning bind rune. I haven’t seen one of those since the night I received my Third Degree Elevation in the Dragon Hart Grand Coven.
Is this man a witch? Or is that tattoo meant to represent something mundane, maybe cover a scar?
“Hi, Laurie.” He squeezes my hand as he lightly kisses my cheek. “I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. I was maybe eight years old, and you were only a few years older. It’s been a lifetime since you last saw me, and I couldn’t have been any taller than your waist. I’ve grown a beard and grown old and retired since then.” When I respond with a blank stare, he adds, “Virgil. You used to babysit me.”
My mouth drops open, and I swallow a giggle. For a second, we are back in time. I am a shy but brainy teenager in thick glasses, and he’s a sweet, chubby, lonely little boy but we’re playing together in his mother’s garden, herding same-colored polished river rocks into families fleeing the pharaoh’s orders in some Bible story we’d heard at church.
I hadn’t really liked babysitting, but I’d been fond of Virgil. Babysitting was just an excuse so I could get closer to his big brother. I lift my gaze to the man in the other chair and recognize Dixon Caine’s shit-eating grin, the same he’d had as the star quarterback and homecoming king.
“Dixxie?”
He laughs. “Just Dix now. I haven’t been Dixxie since I headed off to college.”
College. Hundreds of miles away. I still remember the heartache of seeing him leave town. My hope that he would actually notice me had finally dwindled then, especially since, unlike him, I didn’t have a scholarship to Dix’s university of choice and was stuck with finding a more affordable school within a hundred miles. That was the last I had seen Dix.
Most popular boy in school, and the hottest, too. He could’ve had any girl he wanted, and did, but I wanted him to have me.
The paradox of our ill-fated romance was that the night that launched it also ended it. A week after he graduated from high school, Dixxie came home early from a date with one of the high school mean girls. After I put Virgil to bed, Dixxie and I sat on the front porch swing and talked for hours. The conversation ended in a long kiss, which was interrupted when his mom came home to relieve me of my babysitting duties.
The next day, his mom put her house on the market and hauled Virgil to Nashville with her to pursue her country music career and packed Dixxie off to college. She hit it big after a couple of years, and then I lost track of her, but in the time I had known her, she had been a wealthy hippie with her daddy’s money, a twelve-string guitar, and a penchant for 1960s protest songs. Before she moved to Nashville, she liked to open every gig by singing her favorite song, one she’d named both of her sons after but years apart.
I have a lot to thank her for, but I’m only now realizing it. The summer I was eleven years old, Mama paid her to teach me the basics of guitar, but I wasn’t very good at it. Instead, I spent all my time asking her questions about the strange knickknacks around her house—the beaded curtains, the always-burning patchouli incense, the crystal skull—and convincing her to tell me the story behind some of her possessions. Her straight blonde hair made her look more like a teen than a woman close to my mom’s age, and she was scandalously cooler than anyone else in our quaint little town.
I almost told her about my Uncle Bobby and how he wouldn’t stop putting his hands down my pants, but I backed out at the last minute. She asked me repeatedly what was wrong, and when she finally gave up, told me that if I ever needed help and no one was coming to rescue me that I should call upon the Old Gods, which is what I did the next year. I haven’t thought of her in years. Like so many other memories, I’ve shoved that one down deep. It’s funny how decades after the fact, you can realize someone who was mildly eccentric was all along a witch.
“See?” My mom shrills from behind me. “I knew you’d remember Dixxie. You had such a crush on him when he was a senior. He’s all you talked about for pretty much every day of your freshman year of high school.”
Heat rises in my cheeks. “Um, so Dixxie? Virgil? How’s your mother?”
I don’t say it aloud, but I’d love to know how she managed to live in such an intolerant community and still be so happy.
Dixxie—Dixon? Dix? What do I call him now that we’re all grown up? He bites his lip and shifts in his chair.
Virgil, on the other hand, stares at an imaginary spot on the floor. He smiles, but the energy around him quiets. Virgil’s bright eyes are dull now, and it’s as if his entire face is full of clouds blocking out the sun.
“She passed last year.” He speaks with a Southern drawl, like warm honey and whiskey. Southern with a capital S, the way everyone in the South thinks of their home.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”
Virgil glances up at me. “It’s okay. Really. I still talk to her all the time. Sing to her. All her favorite Bob Dylan and Joan Baez songs. She lived a full life, and it was a happy one. She managed to manifest everything she ever wanted, including bringing me back home.” His words sound like a soft patter of rain on a porch, a slow drizzle of water droplets. There is emotion in his voice, yet acceptance.
Dix nods from his seat. “Yeah. She brought both of us back home. Bought up property around here. Made us promise on her deathbed that Virgil and me would come back here to live when we got ready to retire. Virgil doesn’t mind it so much, Nature Boy that he is, but this place isn’t exactly what I’m looking for in a social life. Every unmarried woman in town—and a couple who aren’t—is dead-set on baking me pies and fattening me up.”
I raise one eyebrow. “Noted.”
My mom scrambles out of her recliner as fast as her fragile frame will allow and half-runs to the back door. “Whose car is that?”
I follow her. “Oh, that’s mine. Remember?”
“No. That red one.” She points at the car I asked about earlier.
Virgil leans over her for a better look. “The red one is mine, ma’am. Dix has one just like it in black. We have a work truck, too.”
My mom presses her palm against the windowpane and leans close enough for her forehead to touch the glass. Confused, she shakes her head. “Lauren, you sure that’s not your Uncle Bobby’s car? I’ve been seeing that car around here a lot lately. It reminds me of him. I’m afraid he’s come back.”
“No, Mama. Bobby’s not coming back.”
But I don’t tell her how I know.
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