Chapter 39
I don’t even try to cook that night. We send Mr. Kelly on his way with lots of thank yous. We all agree it’s for the best, and Matt and Austin go to Mr. Dragon’s to pick up a complete over-order of Chinese food instead.
I find Sammie in the den. With the coffin.
I knock on the doorframe. She looks up from where she’s sitting on the couch. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I feel like we’re ignoring her. When Harrison came by earlier and said he was sorry to hear about her passing, again, I just felt like … we’re here for a funeral, and we’re not even really grieving.”
“To be fair, there’s a lot going on,” I say. Then, “Can we talk?”
She looks surprised. “Sure.”
“Maybe … not in here?”
She sighs and gets up, gesturing for me to lead the way.
We go out to the back porch, which is where we’ve always gathered. I’ve lit the candles in the hurricane lanterns and plugged in the string lights.
“I feel like you’re going to propose.”
“I think this funeral is weird enough without that,” I quip.
She grins and says, “I love it out here.”
Once we’re seated, I get up the guts to say what I have to say. “Do you remember when we did Halloween here? That one July?”
She furrows her brow. “Oh—that. I thought we were going to talk about what happened.”
“Oh—you mean … Dad’s funeral and … all that?”
“Yeah, all that.”
“Right … uh … we can,” I say, feeling suddenly nervous. “I was thinking more about trying to figure out how to get out of this time loop we’re stuck in.”
A series of thoughts passes over my sister’s face, and I swear I can read some of them. She’s disappointed. Hurt, even, that I’d rather talk about getting out of here than about the conflict that broke us.
“Yeah, okay. Yes, I remember the Halloween.”
“Do you remember what she told us?”
“About being witches?”
“Okay, she didn’t say we were witches.”
“She pretty much did.”
“Well, I always took all of that as being really more just like … a mom telling her daughters to trust their gut and to believe in themselves and to think about what matters.”
She screws up her face. “I think she was saying we were witches.”
I bite my bottom lip and look at her. “So you think you’re a witch?”
She shrugs. “Not like … full-on.”
“Oh, not a full-on witch. Just part-time.”
I see the amusement in her eyes. “Kind of.”
I laugh and then stand up. “I need a drink.”
“Me too, please.”
I check on Nora, who’s playing with toys in the living room. It gives me a start. The toys are our old ones. And Babe’s before that. One is an old farmhouse that opens on a vertical seam. There’s also a wooden circus trailer with all sorts of animals.
There’s a deep pang in me as I think about how not very long ago it was us that size, playing with the toys that were already a generation older than us.
“Doing okay, Nor?” I ask.
She smiles up at me. “Doing okay.”
Birdie pants at me too, from her protective position beside the little girl.
“Good girl, Birdie. We’re right outside if you need us, Nora.”
“Mm-hmm!”
I go back out to the porch with the wine. “Did you find those old toys?”
She nods. “In the garage. They were a bitch to get out, too, so I’m not looking forward to having to do that all over again tomorrow.”
“God, this is weird. Cheers.”
She holds her glass up to mine. “Cheers.”
“Okay.” I set my glass down after a sip. I have really missed a good glass of wine. “She said the thing about the one big spell.”
“Yes,” says Sammie.
I blink at her. “Well … I think that might be what this is.”
She blinks back. “Me too.”
“You…”
“Yeah, I do too.”
“Oh.”
We stare at each other another minute, and then I say, “Okay, so when you say you do too, you mean you already thought of this?”
“Yeah, obviously. I thought you would have too.”
“I forgot all about it.”
“Really,” she says. “I think about that conversation just about every day.”
“What?”
“It’s sort of how I gauge things. How important things are to me, stuff like that. Whenever I want something, I think, would I be willing to ask the ancestors for this, and usually the answer is no, and then I release it.”
“Right.”
My sister has always been more woo-woo than I have.
Before it was trendy, she used to say things like oh, she’s an Aquarius, well, no wonder, and she would collect pretty rocks and assign meaning to them.
Babe once told me Sammie based an entire life change off of a tarot reading.
I think that was the one where she quit her job as an administrative assistant and briefly moved to Hawaii.
“This is ridiculous, Babe was not a witch, she couldn’t do a spell, and neither can you, and neither can we for that matter.”
“You’re the one that brought it up!”
“I know I did, but it’s ridiculous, right?”
“Is an explanation more unreasonable than the fact that it’s actually very much happening?”
“Explanation feels like a big stretch of the word.”
“You know what I mean.”
We’re silent for a moment, the storm raging on, rain coming in sheets outside. I decide to just ask the thing I’ve been wondering in the back of my mind all day. “So,” I start. “What did Johnny want?”
Her face darkens. “Same as ever.”
“To get back together.”
They’ve been in an on-again, off-again, Sid and Nancy (without the drugs) relationship for far, far too long.
“He’s moving to Mexico and wants me to come.”
“Of course he is.” I lean back in my chair and take my ponytail down.
“That looks so pretty,” she says. “You should really wear it down more often. We’ve been here days and I’ve seen nothing but your freakishly small ears.”
I laugh and kick her gently in the shin.
“Okay, so I was talking to Matt earlier, and he told me what’s going on with Beau.
I think…” I lift my shoulders to my ears and then drop them.
“Okay, let’s just say we’re going with this.
Suspension of disbelief fully engaged. Babe trapped us all here together.
We just have to make it through the weekend.
Time stands still at Birdsong, blah blah blah. ”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why would she do that?” I ask.
“Because she wanted us to be friends again. Knew we needed each other.”
“Maybe, maybe,” I say. “Or maybe it’s because we’ve all got something going on, some habit we’re supposed to break. Maybe Matt needs to figure out his marriage. Maybe you need to stop messing around with Johnny. Maybe Austin needs to stop being such an asshole.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“And what’s your thing?”
“Oh,” I say. “Right. Um. I’m having trouble cooking since being here, so it must be that.”
“Were you having that before?”
“No,” I say.
“It’s probably something deeper than that,” she suggests.
“Cooking is deep to me,” I say.
“You don’t have anything you need to work through? Something that stopping and slowing down would help with?”
A slew of options runs through my head, but I just say, “I mean, I’m an impatient asshole who has completely isolated herself and will evidently never find love or friendship again. But besides that.”
She rolls her eyes and just then the guys arrive back at the house, bringing with them the warming, familiar scent of Mr. Dragon’s Chinese food.
Austin brings out four Tsingtaos, and opens them with a heavy brass opener from the junk drawer that must have been here decades.
The food is as good as I remember. The orange chicken isn’t over-battered and over-fried like it is in most places, and the sauce is zesty.
The chicken fried rice is buttery and bursting with garlicky flavor, not needing any soy sauce.
The noodle of the dumpling has the perfect bite and tastes freshly made, each imperfect and clearly done by hand.
The egg rolls are crispy and mysterious, just as they should be, with delicious sticky sauce in a plastic ramekin, different from the gel you receive at most places. This is zippy and sweet and has a hint of spice.
As we eat, Sammie tells them our theory.
“I can see you two being witches,” says Austin.
“We are not— Oh my god,” I say. But my impatience makes everyone else laugh and I can’t help but find myself laughing too.
“All right, look, it’s a great, big, unknowable universe out there—”
I interrupt Austin with an “Oh, here we go.”
“And,” he goes on, a flirtatious sparkle in his eye, “we just don’t know how all of it works. Unless you do, sweetheart?”
I squint at him. “Go on.”
“So we know she wanted us here. She wanted us here together. And she wanted us here for longer than a minute. Because what would have happened if we’d just arrived on Friday and then left on Sunday like we all expected?”
“Nothing,” I say, eventually.
“We’d have gone back to our lives,” says Matt. “And our jobs. And our husbands.”
“I’m not exactly eager to get to the other side of this weekend, if I’m honest with you guys,” says Sammie. “For one thing … I kind of don’t have another side. And for another, once we leave here, it’s really all over. Mom. Birdsong. Us.”
Another elephant.
“I say we try staying up, or at least going into town and being there past midnight, seeing what happens when we’re among the masses,” says Austin.
There’s a pause, wherein Matt looks between Austin and me, then to Sammie.
“Sammie, will you come into the kitchen with me, real quick?” Matt asks, suddenly.
“Sure,” she says, not missing a beat.
Austin and I watch them go, and then look at each other.
“So that’s probably about us, right?” he asks.
“I’m guessing they’re sending us on this mission.”
Matt and Sammie return a few moments later, and Matt says, “So where were we?”
“We were descending upon the masses,” I say.
“Right,” says Matt. “So, I have to stay here because I have to put Nora to bed. Sammie?”
She yawns. “I’m exhausted.”
“You guys are pathetic,” I say.
“No, you two are pathetic,” says Matt. “You guys need to go be alone and talk about Texas. And if you don’t, I’m going to sit you down like the two idiots you are, and I’m going to make you talk about it.”
His words are such a surprise that I’m stunned into amused silence, my eyebrows raised.
“Welp,” says Austin. “Pretty hard to argue with that.”