Page 93 of Big Little Spells

“But...” I’m still looking at Nicholas. And I see. I see so many of the things he did. I know how he felt. I know all the whys and hows, and I’m not excusing them. Even if I think he’s not that man any longer. I love him anyway. Not despite what I see, but because I see it and I also see him now. But I’m used to visions. Of knowing private sorrows and secret shames. “But Grandma, they all saw.”

And the good thing about having conversations with my long-dead loved ones is that no explanations are necessary. She knows what they saw. Just as she knows who showed them.

She slides her arm around me. “Then, child, let them see you, for a change. Let them love you. I’ll let you in on a secret. They already do.”

I turn to her then, and as I do, I let go of so many things I’ve held on to for far too long. They rush out of me like a river, like I’m giving them back to the St. Cyprian sky above us. Fear. Shame. Grief. I gripped them all so hard I made marks. I dug in. I called myself an addict to everything I refused to let go of. I wrapped them tight around me and built a new life on top of them and letting them go makes me feel...almost tipsy.

But free.

Grandma smiles and it is warmth personified. It is love. I feel it in all the places that I just swept clean. And I know I ran away from this because I was so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to feel her—this—anymore.

I didn’t deserve to.

“You should have come to me then, but you did not. You weren’t ready.” Grandma looks at me with only love. Only kindness and hope. And faith, I understand, that I might be better tonight than I was ten years ago. Because she loves me. “Can you come to me now? Of your own free will? And ask me for help at last?”

“Yes,” I say, and it’s more a vow than confirmation. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask before. That I ran, when you never gave me any reason to believe you wouldn’t love me, forgive me.” I suck in a deep breath, and it feels like all that peace I struggled to grasp out there. All those retreats, all those yoga challenges, all those tarot cards, and it was just this. Just love. “I don’t know if I’m ready to forgive myself for my mistakes, but maybe I’m ready to stay and face them. And I need your help. We need your help. What do we do?”

My grandmother nods, and she closes her eyes briefly. When she opens them, I can feel her magic pulsing around us. Her brown eyes glow gold, as Emerson’s do with her magic, as mine do too, when I let them. “The Joywood are a powerful enemy. They will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

“What do they want?”

Her eyes, so much like mine and Emerson’s, cloud. Her mouth turns down. “Everything.”

A cold chill snakes through me. I’ve always seen my end at the Joywood’s hands. Too many ends, too many times to count. And I never really thought beyond that—beyond me.

But that’s one of the lessons here tonight. It might involve me, but it’s not about me.

I’m reminded, suddenly, of what Nicholas said when I asked him what he gave up for immortality.

Everything, he said.

The echo sits in me uneasily.

“Pain is coming,” Grandma tells me. “Grief. It is not happenstance. It is not accidental. It is purposeful, Rebekah. And when it comes, don’t let it change who you are. Who you all are. Let it bind you. Let it fuel you instead, because grief is love. And love is magic.”

She sighs then, and it’s like a breeze across my face. I can feel her getting weaker. It’s powerful magic, she is powerful magic, but she can only sustain this for so long.

But I understand now. She’s always here. Even when I can’t feel her hands on my face, or her breath in the breeze, she is here.

With me. Always.

The ring on my finger pulses.

“Do not stand in your mistakes, seek to fix them.” Her voice is getting quieter and quieter, and it’s happening too fast. I knew it would happen and still, the sense of her fading into an image and then an image into mist...hurts. But I don’t cry. I try to honor it, the way she would. She was always a gardener, and the first to remind us all that there are seasons for a reason. “Remind him, Rebekah. Don’t let him...”

But she’s gone before she can finish that sentence. And I’m sitting by myself on a stone bench in a graveyard in the moonlight, looking at a headstone with my grandmother’s name carved in neat letters that do nothing at all to capture her. With a stone fox standing guard.

“Don’t let him what?” I ask, my voice desperate.

Touch him, her voice urges me, from deep inside.

I look up at Nicholas. And even though I know she said touch him in my head, I swear I can hear her voice carrying on the breeze. I wonder if he can hear her too.

He stands there at the entrance to the graveyard, his long coat whipping in the wind I didn’t feel while my grandmother was here. I stand up on legs that feel shaky, like they’re new. Like I’m new.

And as I approach him, I find I feel the same.

Hollowed out. Clean. Loved.

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