Chapter 20
Chapter 20
They came for Rose just before noon. A blue Cadillac pulled up out front, so glossy it reflected the Home in its sapphire hood. Fern, Holly, and Zinnia were working in the kitchen when they saw Rose come out of the Barn dressed in her going-home clothes. She didn’t look fallen, or fast, or like one of them anymore. She looked like any girl you might see on the street.
Fern drifted to the kitchen door when she heard Rose’s parents coming down the hall. They were walking fast like they already wanted to be gone, then they burst into view, Rose’s dad wearing a tan suit and looking like a game show host, Rose’s mom with her hair pinned up and huge sunglasses like a movie star.
“You’d better get back to peeling those potatoes,” Hagar growled behind her.
Rose came into the hall from the side door, wearing sunglasses, and their lenses slid over Fern’s eyes and skated off her face. She looked like a stranger. She stepped into Miss Wellwood’s office and Fern heard smooth adult voices coming from the open door. Fern realized that this wasn’t Rose anymore. She was whoever her name had been before.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Miss Wellwood,” she heard the girl she’d called Rose say.
Fern wiped her muddy hands on the apron draped over her belly and crept into the hall.
“In the future,” Miss Wellwood was saying, “I hope that you shall strive to lead a more moral life.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a docile Rose said.
Fern poked an eye around the corner. Miss Wellwood looked down on Rose, beaming in triumph: another girl rescued and redeemed. Rose’s mother pulled Rose to her with one arm around her shoulders, while her dad grinned a Colgate smile: a perfect all-American family, saved from shame. They started to leave and Fern retreated to the kitchen door.
They came out of Mrs. Deckle’s office and headed for the front door, but the girl she’d called Rose saw Fern hovering. She broke away from her parents and came back until she was standing so close to Fern their foreheads touched. Fern saw herself doubled in the lenses of Rose’s sunglasses, and realized they were standing in the exact spot where they’d met nine weeks ago.
“Don’t let me down,” Rose whispered.
“I won’t,” Fern said.
“I’ll send money for Holly,” Rose said.
Fern nodded.
“Jo—” Rose’s mother said, and her dad touched her forearm. Her mom corrected herself. “Sweetheart, let’s not linger.”
Fern understood. Now that Rose was their daughter again they didn’t want her associating with wayward girls like Fern anymore. Rose met Fern’s eyes. An emotion flickered across her face like the shadow of a bird flying over water. Then she leaned in close to Fern’s ear and filled it with her hot breath.
“Make her pay,” she whispered.
She pulled away and walked up the hall without looking back, and Fern heard the girls sitting on the stairs cheer, “Fingers and legs! Fingers and legs!”
It was what they said whenever a girl left the Home: keep your fingers crossed for good luck, and your legs crossed so you don’t wind up back here.
They kept up the chant until Rose got into the Cadillac, then they pressed against the front windows, watching it pull away. Fern thought about Rose’s real name. Jo something. Joanne? Josephine?
“You want me to snatch you bald?” Hagar said behind her. “Get back to work.”
But Fern wasn’t listening; she was heading up the hall, around the corner to the stairs, finding Jasmine, who was going back up.
“Can you do the thing?” she asked her. “With your necklace?”
Jasmine nodded and she and Fern went up to the Cong and Fern lay down on the sofa, swollen belly raised high, and Jasmine held her necklace over it and they both waited. It hung, motionless, and Fern studied that stone harder than she’d ever studied math. Her eyes drilled right through it. She was ready to wait as long as it took.
It didn’t take long.
At first it seemed like wishful thinking, then she realized it really was trembling, then swaying, nudged by a nonexistent breeze. It picked up speed, then settled into a pattern, swinging from side to side, harder and harder, back and forth, like a pendulum marking time.
Fern wasn’t having “the baby” anymore.
She was having a boy.
***
The July sun cooked Wellwood House. Girls took cold showers in the middle of the day but started sweating again as they toweled themselves dry. The days felt endless, every movement felt impossible, gravity dragged their pregnant bellies down. Fern hadn’t known she could sweat so much—from her wrists, from her earlobes, from her elbows. Mopping the bathroom floor took forever because she had to keep mopping up drops of her own sweat that plopped onto the linoleum.
The days crept by, each tick of the big iron clock whittling down the moon, slice by slice, shaving it toward full dark, toward the thirteenth day, toward the twenty-second, when Fern had to poison Miss Wellwood and finish the spell for Rose.
At night, Fern stared at the lava lamp, grateful Rose had left it behind. Nothing zonked her out like the lamp. Nothing else took her mind off the folded page of Southern Living hidden under her mattress with the powder inside. She’d already made the mistake of telling Zinnia.
“You’re not going to give it to her, are you?” Zinnia asked. “Because that would be crazy, and I know you’re not crazy.”
“But I promised Rose.”
“Rose isn’t here anymore,” Zinnia said.
“If Miss Parcae gave it to us, it can’t be poisonous. She wouldn’t make us kill someone.”
“She’s a witch,” Zinnia said.
“We flew! We—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Zinnia said.
“But you did it, too,” Fern said. “You cut your finger. You signed the book.”
“They’re witches and they lie,” Zinnia said. “We don’t need to be playing at spells. We need to figure out how to actually help Holly.”
“We could ask Miss Parcae,” Fern said.
“Good doesn’t come from bad,” Zinnia said. “She wants you to poison Miss Wellwood.”
“It might not be poison,” Fern said.
And around and around they went.
Fern watched the blobs in the lava lamp ooze over each other. She had made a promise. But she might be poisoning Miss Wellwood? But maybe she wasn’t? She roasted in the heat and her indecision and wished she could throw the powder in the trash. But she had to be loyal to Rose, because she was part of her coven.
At night, girls cracked their bedroom windows to let in a breeze. Most of them slept in their underwear now, pulling on a T-shirt when they had to go to the bathroom. During the day, they sweated through their bras, and when they got up off the sofa in the Cong they left damp spots behind. Fern got a rash between her thighs where they chafed together, and it spread all the way down to her knees. And she wasn’t the only one. The house stank of cornstarch and baby powder.
Fern’s little boy ripened and grew in her stomach. Now when he kicked she stroked and soothed him. She started calling him Charlie Brown because he had a big bald head and nobody wanted him. She rested one hand on his head when she hid from Zinnia in the front parlor to read Groovy Witch , desperate for it to tell her what to do.
“?‘In the practice of our Craft we have a saying,’?” Fern read. “?‘Three is greater than one, five is greater than three, nine is greater than five, and thirteen is the greatest of them all. I won’t discuss the power of these numbers here but only tell you the larger meaning: no witch walks this road alone.’?”
Fern couldn’t abandon Rose. She kept reading.
“?‘Everything must be faced,’?” the book said. “?‘You cannot hide from your problems nor can you rely on witchcraft to solve them. In fact, witchcraft will create more problems for you, because a witch is responsible to her coven and their problems become her own. But so does their will. And no obstacle can stand in the face of a witch’s will, or the will of her coven. Nothing can resist them. No problem remains unsolved. No wrong goes unavenged.’?”
Fern felt like the book was telling her that she had promised Rose, and a promise made between members of a coven was sacred. Wellwood House was the end of the road for all of them. They were the only ones who knew what this felt like, the only ones who saw each other, the only ones who wouldn’t forget. If they didn’t have each other, what did they have?
Fern kept reading.
***
A short girl named Willow arrived to replace Rose. She didn’t get a work assignment because she had heart trouble. She’d brought a chess set from home and kept asking other girls to play, then she wouldn’t let them win a game. Pretty soon, no one would play with her.
“Typical Aries,” Jasmine observed.
The heat made Laurel get headaches and see double. Arguments broke out over what stitch should be used to properly hem a bib, and who was taking too much time in the shower, and what rerun they were going to watch next on TV.
There was nothing left in the sky now but a thin wedge of moon. Then the big iron clock ticked once more and it was the twenty-second. Thirteen days. It was time for Fern to poison Miss Wellwood.
***
Maternity dresses didn’t have pockets, so Fern hid the folded page of Southern Living in her left sock and tried not to limp on her way to dinner. She sat at the far end of the table from Zinnia, crunching through her frozen salad with cranberry and pineapple, convinced Zinnia could see through her sock with X-ray vision.
She’d promised Zinnia that she wasn’t going to put the powder in Miss Wellwood’s coffee, and she still wasn’t 100 percent sure she could go through with it, so she wasn’t exactly lying, but she was still kind of lying.
Fern ate her deviled-ham-and-spaghetti scramble while she watched Miss Wellwood eat her cottage cheese salad, convinced her ankle had a spotlight trained on it, convinced that any minute Miss Wellwood would lift her head and say, “Fern, what is that in your sock?”
Someone would discover her, Zinnia would stop her, but dinner ended and Zinnia said she’d see her upstairs, and Fern helped clear the table, and then she went to the kitchen, trying so hard not to limp on her left leg that she wound up limping on her right.
Hagar stood at the stove pouring coffee into the china pot. She didn’t look up when Fern came in. Ginger stepped into the kitchen right behind her.
“Miss Wellwood asked me to bring her tray tonight,” Fern said.
“When?” Ginger asked.
“Just now,” Fern said. “She didn’t want to wait on you.”
“But I’m here,” Ginger said.
Hagar put the lid on the coffeepot and picked up the tray.
“I don’t care who takes it, but you’d better get moving before it goes cold,” she said, and shoved it into Fern’s hands because she was closest.
Fern turned, the tray almost clipping Ginger’s stomach.
“Excuse me,” Fern said, and felt a pang when she saw how sad losing this tiny privilege made Ginger.
Fern edged around her and stepped into the hall, but now she didn’t know how to get the powder into the coffeepot. There was nowhere to set the heavy silver tray down.
“I always take Miss Wellwood her coffee,” Ginger said, coming out of the kitchen.
Fern didn’t know how to shake her, so she walked toward the office.
“Everyone keeps changing their minds about who’s doing what around here,” Ginger complained, following her.
She had no choice but to go forward. Fern stepped into the office and used her foot to close the door in Ginger’s face. The air conditioner rumbled in the window and gooseflesh raced up the back of her arms and circled her stomach.
She placed the tray on Mrs. Deckle’s desk. She didn’t have to do it. She could just take Miss Wellwood her coffee and Rose would never know, but this was the end of the road for all of them, and everyone lied to them, and they were in a coven, and she’d made a promise.
“In here, Ginger,” Miss Wellwood called from her office.
Fern fumbled the packet open, spilling powder onto the scarlet carpet. She got the lid off the pot, careful not to bump it or make a sound. She scraped the remaining brown powder in and it floated on top of the coffee, making a beige scum. Fern stuck one finger in and stirred.
“Ginger?” Miss Wellwood called. “I’m waiting.”
Fern stirred her finger faster and the powder slowly sank into the coffee and disappeared. She pulled out her finger and almost stuck it in her mouth to clean it, then remembered she had no idea what this powder did and wiped it on the seat of her dress. She replaced the lid, left the page from Southern Living on Mrs. Deckle’s desk, picked up the tray, and walked into Miss Wellwood’s office.
“Where’s Ginger?” Miss Wellwood asked.
She knew. She could see it in Fern’s body language, in her face, in her not-dry-yet finger, because she knew everything that happened in her home, because Fern had stupidly stirred the poison into her coffee barely eight feet away.
“She asked me to do it,” Fern said. “She wasn’t feeling well.”
Fern placed the tray on Miss Wellwood’s desk.
“What were you doing out there?” Miss Wellwood asked. “I heard you in Mrs. Deckle’s office.”
Fern’s heart kicked into double time. She picked up the silver sugar spoon.
“I dropped your spoon,” she said. “It took a moment to pick it up again in my condition. Would you like me to get another for you?”
Miss Wellwood considered Fern, from the spoon to the top of her head then back again.
“Well, how else am I supposed to put sugar in my coffee?” she asked. “With my hands?”
Fern got her another spoon, and on her way out she dropped the page from Southern Living in the trash.
Upstairs in the Cong, Zinnia asked, “Where’d you go after dinner?”
If Fern could lie to Miss Wellwood, she could lie to anyone.
“I had to take Miss Wellwood her coffee,” she said. “Ginger asked me.”
Zinnia’s eyes zoomed into her.
“And?” she asked.
Fern made her decision. This was between her and Rose.
“I said I wouldn’t,” she told Zinnia. “And I didn’t.”
For a long moment, she didn’t know if Zinnia believed her.
“Good,” she finally said.
***
The sun entered Leo. Briony went to the hospital the day the Manson trial began, leaving like she was off for a little rest and relaxation. She didn’t need to pack her things in a paper bag from Hagar because she’d brought her own overnight case. It matched her purse.
“I’m sure everything inside is perfectly folded and pressed,” Zinnia said.
Daisy woke up on Saturday to a soaking wet mattress. Flora made fun of her for wetting the bed until it turned out her water had broken, and they had to pry her hand out of Flora’s when Nurse Kent put her in Miss Wellwood’s station wagon to go downtown.
The car came back from the hospital with Briony inside, and she looked as smooth and unrumpled as ever. The only thing different was that she lived in the Barn now. Fern overheard her in Ginger’s room that night, sitting on her bed.
“I was so confused,” she said, genuinely upset. “I forgot to give him his blankie. I just left it in my room and forgot all about it. Now he doesn’t have anything to remember me by.”
She sounded unsure of herself and on the verge of tears, not at all like Briony anymore. Because she wasn’t Briony anymore. She had another name now.
Flora went to the hospital Sunday morning, four days early.
“They may as well put a bus stop in the front yard at this rate,” Zinnia said. “It’d sure save them on gas.”
Ginger went to the Barn on Monday morning to see Briony, but she was gone. She’d packed up and left before any of them were even awake. Fern had always assumed there’d be a brass band and speeches on the day Briony went home, but she’d snuck out without telling anyone, like she was ashamed.
***
At first, Fern didn’t notice anything different about Miss Wellwood. Then, on Wednesday morning, they were in the kitchen making cheesy tuna bunwiches when Fern looked up and saw Miss Wellwood standing in the door, trembling with rage.
“Where did you get that tuna?” she demanded.
Fern had never heard her talk like this about the food before, and she didn’t know what to say, so she looked at Hagar.
“Out of a can,” Hagar said.
Miss Wellwood’s face twisted with disgust.
“It’s gone bad,” she said. “I can smell it all the way in my office.”
Hagar leaned over the bowl of tuna and sniffed.
“Smells all right to me,” she said, not loving the idea of throwing out work.
“Then you clearly have no idea what proper fish should smell like,” Miss Wellwood said. “This fish has gone bad. It is rank. Putrid. Throw it away and make something else. Am I clear?”
The girls all stared. Miss Wellwood had never dressed Hagar down before.
“Yes, ma’am,” Hagar finally said, jaw tight.
Miss Wellwood left. Hagar stared at the bowl of tuna like it was her worst enemy, then grabbed the refrigerator door and yanked it open.
“Put that tuna fish in the trash,” she snarled at them. “You don’t even know what bad fish smells like.”
That night, they trooped into the dining room for dinner and waited at their seats for Miss Wellwood to come in. Instead, Mrs. Deckle entered and stood behind Miss Wellwood’s chair.
“Bow your heads,” she said.
A hot prickle ran down Fern’s sweaty spine.
“Lord God, Heavenly Father,” Mrs. Deckle prayed as the girls looked at one another. “Bless us and these gifts which we receive from your bountiful goodness, through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.”
They mumbled “Amen” but stayed standing as Mrs. Deckle sat. She looked up, annoyed.
“Be seated,” she snapped.
“But where’s Miss Wellwood?” Iris asked, electing herself spokeswoman.
“She’s ill,” Mrs. Deckle replied.
A cold hand shoved itself into Fern’s stomach. Zinnia stared at her from across the table so hard Fern thought she’d leave a bruise.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ginger asked.
“She’ll be back as soon as she’s better,” Mrs. Deckle said. “And that’s all you need to know.”
Thursday morning, Mrs. Deckle took Miss Wellwood’s seat at the breakfast table again, and by lunch everyone felt like they were on vacation. Hard work became easy, they all had something to gossip about, and Mrs. Deckle had no interest in lecturing them. She barely came out of the air-conditioned office.
But Fern burned. She had thought the powder would make Miss Wellwood sick like Dr. Vincent, but now she was home…dying? Losing her hair? Turning into a frog? She lay on her side and stared at the lava lamp and wondered how everything had fallen apart so fast. She’d been a normal high school student who was bad at math and good at English and the lead in The Miracle Worker and she was supposed to graduate in two years and go to Mount Holyoke and nothing bad was supposed to happen to her yet.
But all of a sudden she was expecting a baby and playing hooky and shoplifting books and getting thrown out of her aunt’s house, and being sent to a Home where no one knew her real name, and she was doing witchcraft, and she’d poisoned Miss Wellwood. Of course she was unfit to be a mother.
“What’re you crying about?” Zinnia asked from her bed.
“Nothing,” Fern said.
But she had to know: Was she a criminal who was poisoning someone because another girl told her to, or was she a witch helping her coven work a spell?
She had to talk to Miss Parcae.