Page 2 of Spellbound
My great aunt Rosalyn was the youngest of my grandma’s siblings and more than twelve years younger than my grandmother, who was the eldest sibling at age seventy-seven. But Gran, who was blessed with good health so far, felt the need to go and spend time with her, “because you never know when the cancer will come back, and she may not be as lucky next time,” she had ominously informed me. “When you get older, allkinds of things go wrong.” I guess she was right, though having cancer twice in five years didn’t seem particularly lucky to me.
When Gran had first brought up this idea of me “convalescing” in North Carolina, she’d made it plain she was going to visit her sister Rosalyn, regardless of whether I decided to come along or not, but she wanted me to go with her so she could keep an eye on me too. And she’d layered on that extra guilt about “when you get older,” to convince me to go, even though the extra persuasion hadn’t been necessary. As much as I liked to bitch about going, the area nearby was mountainous and beautiful—and quiet, so it was perfect for my writing. Besides there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for my grandma, whom I loved dearly and who had taken me in and raised me since I was fifteen.
So, I would have gone anyway, because I was already finding myself at some loose and very frayed ends because of yet another personal drama with my now ex-boyfriend. It all started after my accident, when I’d had to cancel a long-anticipated spring break trip to Paris. That helped to precipitate the final, bitter breakup fight with my boyfriend, though I think we were on the verge of breaking up anyway. I had saved up to take Brent with me on the trip, but then I’d had to cancel, and he’d been terribly disappointed. We had broken up only days later, which made me wonder if he’d only been hanging on long enough to go on the damn trip.
I couldn’t stand the idea of staying on in my old apartment—even if I could have afforded the rent and utilities after he moved out. Which I could not. I’d heard that Brent, who also worked as a TA, had moved on with his life sufficiently to have a new boyfriend now. Within a month of our breakup, he’d begun dating a former student in one of his professor’s classes. It was probably forbidden, or at least frowned upon, but he was not one to let such a minor consideration dictate to him. Since springbreak was coming up soon, he’d be living it up on the beach with his new boyfriend, while I languished at home with a broken leg to match those broken hopes and dreams.
I’d heard that he had plans to go to one of the beaches along the Gulf Coast, infamous for the large number of unsupervised college students who descended during spring break every year, particularly those from the metro Atlanta area.The various police chiefs on the coast issued warnings to parents about the problems caused by this influx of young, unruly, drunken spring-breakers each year, for all the good it did.
Such a thing would no doubt appeal to my ex and his new boy toy. In fact, it would be right down Brent’s trashy little alley. Did I sound bitter? That’s because I was.
I really needed to distance myself from thoughts of him as soon as I could. On top of everything else, though, I was angry at myself for being such a terrible judge of character when it came to Brent—plus, I may as well say that deep down, even though I hated to admit it, I was a little bit heartbroken. I’d thought this relationship with him had been the real thing. Sure, I knew he was immature, and an asshole, but I didn’t think he was a cheater on top of all that.
I’d made excuses for Brent over the months we were together and thought maybe I had always been just a little jealous of his popularity and easy rapport with the students. Much easier than mine, certainly. As a TA, my interactions with students were the one thing I struggled with the most. I was a graduate student at a small college called Georgia Northern University, in a suburb of Atlanta. Or I should say, I had been.
My focus was American History, or to be more specific, the American Civil War. I had loved my occasional lecturing in the low-level classes I was sometimes allowed to teach in, and I really enjoyed the research I tried to immerse myself in, just in case of questions, which mostly never came. I was only allowedto follow my professor’s dry lesson plans if he had to be out of class, and rarely, if ever, did any of the students muster up enough interest or attention to be able to form a question on the material.
What I really didn’t enjoy, however, were the jocks in the back of the room trying to catch a few extra winks while I droned on at the front. Or the girls who wrote diligently in their notebooks, ostensibly taking notes, but if I happened to walk past their desks and glance at said “notes,” I’d see only a lot of little pink hearts and blue stars, each one carefully colored in, surrounding some boy’s name. I struggled not to snap at them when they asked their lame questions—which they did, if they had anything to say at all. But I’d been lucky to even have that TA position, and I kept hoping that I’d remember that and find a way to enjoy it a little more. Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened, and now it was over.
Between the surgery and the painful recovery, not to mention those fucking migraines, I just couldn’t manage it anymore. My therapist was concerned, but she said it was nothing that a few months rest and some good rehab wouldn’t cure.
However,they stipulated that I actually needed todothe rehab andtakethe rest and stop fighting all of it. My grandma had found me an excellent rehab facility in North Carolina, near Asheville, which would be about a bit of a drive from the cottage, but not too bad. My first appointment with them was early next week.
I just wished I felt better about this whole thing and didn’t have this feeling of impending—what was it, exactly? Not doom, though it felt like it sometimes. Change, maybe. I hated change. It filled me with apprehension.
When my grandma arrived, I left my key on the kitchen counter for the landlord to pick up. I’d given him my notice andthere wasn’t any lease, thank God. This apartment had come fully furnished, and I had already shipped the few personal household items I owned to the new place in North Carolina, so there was nothing left to do. My gran had one of her neighbors watering her plants at home and looking after things for her while we were gone. So, we were all set and off we went. We pulled out of the driveway and headed for the interstate.
It was late in the afternoon by the time we made it to the area, and the weather had been bad all the way. The skies were leaden and ominous as we followed I-85 north and then turned off onto the state roads to finish our journey. My grandma was driving, because the meds I’d taken before we left had made me a little loopy and the effects still hadn’t worn off.
By that time, it had begun to rain and become steadily worse. Shortly after we got into Transylvania County itself—no shit, that was its name, which wasn’t portentous at all—the rain had reached the levels of a biblical plague, and we could barely see the road ahead of us. The fog was even more intense than the rain. It felt as if it were deliberately trying to mess with us and convince us we were taking the wrong road, though the GPS insisted we were headed in the right direction. It had been a few years since my grandmother had been there after all, so she was relying heavily on the GPS.
Or maybe, I thought, as I gazed out the window at the downpour in my drug-induced haze, I really was on the wrong road, at least metaphorically speaking. Maybe I shouldn’t have left Atlanta and everything I knew to go stay in some cottage in the woods. Especially considering my previously mentioned and intense aversion to change?
It was a little hard now to remember much of anything, including why I’d ever thought this might be a good idea in the first place. Maybe I should have at least taken some of Brent’s calls before I left or answered some of his texts asking me toreconsider. But no, I’d definitely missed the boat on that one, which was really too bad, because we were going to need a boat if this rain got any worse. I heaved a sigh and reached over to give my grandma’s knee a little pat and express a reassurance I didn’t really feel.
“Do you want to pull over and let me drive?” I asked.
She glanced over at me. “Are you kidding? You can still barely bend that knee,” she said, “Not to mention still being high as a kite from those pain pills. So, thanks, but no thanks.” She was hunched over the steering wheel and going the way the GPS told us, so she really was doing all she could do to get us there. We’d been on the road for six hours, and she’d done a great job so far, but I knew she must be getting tired. I just hoped we’d catch a break in the weather soon, or we’d have to stop somewhere to buy some oars and see if this big old bitch of an SUV would float. It was kind of ridiculous when this was only supposed to be a four-hour drive, but like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects the apocalypse either.
We had put the address to my great aunt’s house in GPS when we first left Atlanta and had felt confident that we could find the place easily enough, though it was way out in the country. It wasn’t like my grandmother hadn’t been there before. We had planned on getting there in plenty of time for dinner, but that was before these nasty weather conditions had set in.
We turned left off the highway onto a narrow state road just like the GPS had instructed, and we then took a right on an even narrower, dirt track. But after traveling down that track for over a mile, I knew we had to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. It seemed to be well-traveled, and I thought it looked kind of familiar, but surely this wasn’t the driveway to her house. It couldn’t have been this long or this muddy. I mean, you’ve seen one dirt road, you’ve seen them all, but still, this couldn’t be right. To make everything worse, as we traveled along it, the fogseemed to grow exponentially denser, until it felt like we were driving inside a cloud.
The GPS was still confidently proclaiming that Rosalyn’s house was straight ahead, so my grandma kept the car crawling forward, even though I was complaining loudly and the road was getting narrower, and the wet afternoon was getting darker and drippier. I knew the sun was sinking too, but I still didn’t expect the sudden cessation of all light as it apparently sank down all the way below the horizon, and we couldn’t see a damn thing in front of us. Darkness closed in around the car like a shroud, and the fog billowed over us in waves. Huge puddles were all over the road, though we couldn’t see them until we’d already splashed through them, so it didn’t help that the car windows were a mess and impossible to see out of.
Not only that, but we kept coming to these forks in the road, nameless, narrow dirt trails leading off to the sides. I thought they were probably logging roads because they were too narrow to be driveways, but why were there so many of them? It seemed really odd. Rosalyn’s house had a long driveway my grandma said, but she remembered there being a gate, and we’d seen no gates. We kept going the way the GPS insisted, but I still wasn’t sure about any of this.
“I think we should turn back,” I finally said. “This fog is ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything so dense, and we had to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or we’d surely have been there by now. You should find a place to turn around and we’ll see if we can make it back to town. We haven’t passed a driveway or even a wide spot in the road for a while. Where are all those damn logging roads when you need one?”
“This road is too narrow for me to turn around here, Asher. Besides, the fog is so thick I’d be afraid to try it. I might fall in a ditch or whatever.”
I gave a nervous laugh. “I know. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Do you think I should call Rosalyn and tell her what’s going on? Maybe ask for directions? Or the number for Triple A?”
I blew out a long breath. “I don’t think directions or even Triple A can help us at this point since we can’t see a foot in front of us or even tell anybody where we are. I doubt you can get a signal out here anyway, with all these big trees and the mountains around us. Let’s keep going until we can find another one of those side roads that keep popping up. There’s bound to be another one soon. We can go back to the highway then and then you can try your call. And speaking of Triple A, I’m just glad we haven’t had any car trouble out here in the middle of nowhere. That would be exactly what we don’t need.”
And with those words literally still echoing in my ears, the gods proved they had warped sense of humor after all, as the car suddenly spluttered to a stop, coughed a few times, and died.
