Page 7 of Big Little Spells

Because time really has taken me home tonight.

We’re descending then, whooshing down from our impossible heights, and then we’re standing in front of Wilde House. The others are talking as if this is all ho-hum and boring, flying around as we please, because to them it is. The same way it used to be for me.

It’s funny, the little things you make yourself forget because that’s the only way to move forward. Because if you don’t move forward, you might drown.

That’s how I feel as I stare up at my childhood home. It looms as large in real life as it does in my memories, or those odd haunted moments over the years when the past caught up with me no matter how fast I was moving.

The old house sits in its place at the end of Main Street—judging everyone who draws near. At least, that’s how it always felt to me, forever on the outside looking in. It’s all ancient brick and gleaming windows, elaborate trim and turrets, bay windows and flower boxes. Showy, some would call it. With great disdain, here where the local Midwest Nice culture forbids any direct commentary when a well-placed sniff will do.

I’m forced to accept that I’ve missed the passive-aggressiveness, elevated to an art form in these parts, and always by those who would describe themselves as humble homebodies at best. Felicia Ipswitch comes to mind.

I should follow my friends and sister inside. Georgie lives here. Ellowyn has decided to stay over. I should want to catch up with them, and Emerson too.

But it’s too much.

The last time I was here, so were my parents. The last time I was here, my grandmother was alive. So sure I would make her proud.

Instead, I broke her heart. And my own.

But hearts mend. Forgiveness is a thing you can only give yourself.

I know this. I’ve spent years working on it. Still, I do not want to go into that house where my grandmother is not.

Emerson turns around. She leaves Georgie with Ellowyn as she comes and takes my arm again.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I just wish...” But that’s a dangerous road to start down, in the middle of a very long night and me without so much as a pair of flip-flops. I settle on, “I miss Grandma.”

“She’s here,” Emerson whispers. “When she needs to be.”

I know she means that to be comforting, but the unfairness of it bites at me. I lost everything when I was exiled. I lost my grandmother that night, and then for good when she died a couple of years later. I’ve only felt her since then when Emerson pulled me back here—against my will, even in our dreams—when she was trying to figure out how to save St. Cyprian.

All this time, I’ve been pretending that Grandma was here. That she was still here, right where I left her, in this town I wasn’t allowed to come back to.

I don’t know how to walk inside and face the fact that she’s not.

There’s a sob—maybe a whole lot of sobs—trapped inside me, but I don’t intend to let it out.

I’m afraid that if I start, I won’t stop.

I force myself forward. I try to tell myself that every step toward my old home is not a punishment in and of itself. I know Emerson will want to talk, to settle me in. But I can’t. I just can’t. And as we cross the threshold, I don’t let myself look too clearly at anything. “I’m very tired,” I say to Emerson. I don’t look at her. I don’t wait for a response.

I head up the stairs to the room where all these ugly feelings echo back at me the loudest, because they’re the same ones I left here with.

Because this is where they came from.

3

I’VE LEARNED A LOT of ways to make myself fall asleep over the years. Ways that aren’t magical but are still useful. Deep breathing. Finding my spiritual center. Certainly not contemplating dark, fathomless immortal eyes that spell nothing but betrayal and ruin...and too many heated dreams I pretend I can’t remember.

Or scrutinizing every painful memory from my entire childhood and adolescence, over and over again.

But despite the noise in my head, I find sleep or it finds me. It’s deep and strangely dreamless. It’s only when I wake up the next morning that I realize that someone must have charmed the room for restful sleep.

Not someone, I correct myself. Emerson. I should be thankful. I try very hard to be thankful, because I choose what I feel.

I sit up in my old bed and look around. Everything I could want from my bungalow in Sedona is already here, neatly piled on the large table by the window with its stained glass in the form of the traditional witchy representation of the wheel of the year. Yet instead of the many symbols and words that are sometimes included, some ancestress of mine kept it simple. Just the suggestion of the wheel itself, with its spokes, unobjectionable to any human eyes that might see it from below in all its colored glass glory.

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