chapter 29
Decca, All Saints’ Day
I didn’t mean to create such an elaborate spell, but one intention had led to another and another, and pretty soon, all my spiritual knowledge sort of snowballed into this insane, foolhardy… kitchen sink thing.
I’d visited Jim earlier today, but Gus was there now, and regardless of how good Jim looked, it would hit my husband hard knowing his father had entered hospice. Gus would need support when he got home.
I’d made a mess of the kitchen table and the cupboards, taking down every mason jar and plastic baggie filled with herbs. I knew there was mugwort in one of these jars. Sometimes I couldn’t read my own handwriting. Sometimes I didn’t label it at all. But mugwort would sweeten Gus’s dreams tonight, so I had to include it somehow. Maybe I’d powder it and roll the candle around in it.
A tiny bottle tipped over. Lunar oil. Yes! I’d infused it two moon cycles ago. The positive energy of the full moon would double the efficacy of my intentions.
I pulled out the last of the beeswax candles I’d hand dipped with Granny when she’d gotten sick. They were soft and misshapen, and when I touched them, memories of her last days swirled around me. She’d told me I’d have to find new ways to be strong without her, and I had been strong. Now I was sharing whatever strength I had with Gus.
Then there was the string. Granny taught me to measure the afflicted body part with the length of twine or yarn. In the folk tradition, it was knotted a number of times according to a particular ailment before being used in a ritual. But Gus wasn’t here, and I couldn’t measure his heart, so I measured it around my own fist, and knotted it three times for the holy trinity. I put it in a bowl of holy water he’d blessed and placed the whole thing under his bed with some powdered asafetida, but not so much that it would make the room smell like kyarn.
Now, I needed to light the incense. Incense was vital. I found Gus’s church incense, hoping he wouldn’t mind me borrowing his church’s fragrance for a little witchcraft. This was all for his sake, anyway.
I was throwing in every last-ditch effort to help ease his mind and alleviate some of his guilt.
In the kitchen, the candle burned, the incense smoked, and all my energy and intentions for Gus’s visit with his dad—the one where he’d promised he would keep an open mind and try to respect his father’s last wishes—were sent into the atmosphere, directed at my husband.
Dinner was more kitchen witchery. I added a bay leaf along with the onion and apple in the central cavity of a whole chicken. Bay laurel for strength, wisdom, and guidance. Gus would need that in abundance. On second thought, I added two more bay leaves and whole black peppercorns for inner strength, before rubbing seasoned butter under the skin.
The carrots and fennel would caramelize in the oven as the chicken roasted, so all I had left to prepare was the green rice.
I needed nettle and dandelion greens, and those ingredients came from the garden.
The sky was gray. Rain had been pummeling the earth for days. Rivers of mud flowed between plants.
Now, there was only a fine mist in the air when I stepped outside, and the cool damp refreshed my oven-warmed skin. I raised my face to the sky and allowed myself to bask in the feeling for a few moments, letting the deepening drizzle reinfuse me with the energy I’d poured out into dinner.
The stone patio was slippery as I circled the firepit. I followed the pea gravel paths around the proliferous vegetable plots, toward the shed.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust after I opened the door and flicked on the overhead lights. I was used to living with half of the bulbs burnt out. Gus must have replaced them. Now it was bright and cheery—as cheery as the green-tinged lights could be.
I spun around and gasped. He’d also tidied up.
No, that wasn’t right. That didn’t fit the extent of his efforts. It was downright clinical with precision organization and cleanliness.
The overturned can of hinge oil in the corner by the door was gone. My hands always seemed to be full on the way to and from the shed, so it had become just another thing I hadn’t bothered to fix. The scattering of dirt, bone meal and blood meal, and stray seeds dotting the old linoleum had been cleaned up, too. You could practically eat off these floors.
Gus had even organized and labeled all the tools according to purpose and frequency of use. All the bins were uniform in design, thick white plastic, arranged from small to large, with little printed labels, letting me know where to find my shears, trowels, and snippers. Two large, wheeled bins under the potting bench contained organic fertilizers and garden soils.
My heart weighed nothing. My whole body was light as a feather. I could have floated out of here on just the thought of Gus toiling away, creating a better system for my silly little plants. Because he knew how much my garden meant to me. Just as I knew how much taking over its care had meant to him.
Darker thoughts tried to creep in. Like, he was probably just trying to avoid spending time with his dad, or he had to work out all that pent up sexual energy since he wasn’t expelling it with me. But I ignored them. It felt right to bask in this for a while.
Even if he hadn’t done this for me, he’d done it for the space we shared together.
Our house.
The words sounded too nice, too cozy. For once, I didn’t fight to banish them from my vocabulary as quickly as they had materialized. I wanted to wear them like a thick sweater, wrap myself in the comfort that maybe this thing—this marriage—wasn’t such an awful idea after all.
I grabbed the scissors and gloves from the correct bins—making a mental note to replace them when I was done, instead of tossing them back onto the potting bench like I normally would have.
The rain was falling harder, now. As soon as I stepped out from the shelter, it soaked through my sweatshirt and chilled my skin. But I didn’t care. I opened myself to the downpour.
Icy drops fell heavy on my scalp and shoulders. It was a releasing rain, a cleansing rain. Like there had been forty-eight tabs open on my brain’s browser and someone accidentally closed them all. Shocking at first, but after releasing what wasn’t needed, there was room for so much more new stuff.
Water ran down my scalp as I harvested the dandelion greens, shaking the drops from their tender leaves. Donning my heavy leather gloves, I stepped around the roots of the old-growth trees to the nettle patch.
Stinging Nettle was a noxious plant. Fine hairs, tipped with acid, covered the leaves and stems, and if you even looked at it the wrong way, it would reach out and bite you. But once cooked, the leaves lost their sting and were as nutritious as spinach. I spoke to the plants, asking them to release their most potent magical benefits into the stems I cut.
Since I had hoped this meal would begin the process of Gus’s emotional release, I was pulling out all the stops.
I took the herbs inside and wiped the soaking strands of hair away from my face.
Across the living room, Gus stood in the open doorway, unmoving, his hand on the knob.
“Gus?”
He seemed to be in some kind of a daze. “I’m okay.”
Clearly, he wasn’t.
“How... was it? Seeing him?” I crossed the house only to stand in front of him, unsure of what he needed. I wanted to touch him, hug him. Instead, I shifted on my bare feet. God, I hated that it was always so awkward between us at the start of every encounter.
“It doesn’t seem any different. Except I kept repeating ‘He’s dying. He’s dying.’ to myself every time I looked away. George and I took him out for beers. No point in denying him his favorite beverage anymore.”
“New information always changes a relationship. He won’t be the same person he was to you yesterday, because you have knowledge that you didn’t have before. But it can still grow into a different kind of wonderful.”
He straightened his shoulders and slipped his mask back into place. “Dinner smells great,” he said, signaling the end of the conversation. He turned to the steps but stopped as his foot touched the bottom tread. “Did you light church incense?”
“Frankincense helps lighten the spirits.” I didn’t tell him about the magic floating on the air around us. The magic I’d designed to kick his denial and jumpstart his healing. It probably wouldn’t work anyway.
His mouth quirked. It wasn’t quite a full smile, but it was something.
“Okay if I take a quick shower?”
“Of course. Dinner won’t be for another forty minutes.”
By the time I’d finished cooking, I realized I hadn’t heard the shower run yet, and Gus still hadn’t come down. He often prayed alone in his room. Or maybe he was writing. I never knew what he was writing, but it was always something.
I tiptoed up the stairs, expecting to find a closed door.
I’d just knock. Let him know to come down when he was ready. Hopefully, before the meal went cold.
But the door wasn’t closed. The glow from his desk lamp illuminated a green streak on the hall floor, practically inviting me in. I followed the path of light into to find Gus sitting on the edge of his bed, his back to me.
“Gus?” I asked gently, hesitantly.
“Yeah.” It was a resignation. An acceptance.
It had hit him.
I’d been prepared for this. I padded closer, around the bed, my bare feet cold from a chill because I’d forgotten to dry my hair after it got drenched in the garden.
Gus’s shoulders were pulled down toward his chest, and his hands were nestled in the folds of the clerical robe he still wore, clasped between his legs. I didn’t think he was praying, though. He took a big, gulping breath and looked up at me. Tears streaked down his cheeks, his eyes so red and swollen, like he was crying out all his tears for a lifetime.
“I’m sorry, Decca. I’m so sorry.” His voice broke as he reached out for me, scooping an arm around my waist and pulling me tight to him, crying into my body. Clinging onto me like a buoy and he’d been cast overboard in a storm.
This wasn’t what I’d expected.
My heart broke for him as he wept. It was the worst feeling in the world. To do nothing while someone you loved was having their heart ripped out.
“Gus. I’m here.”
I’m so sorry, he muttered into my sweatshirt again and again. He didn’t have anything to be sorry about, but me telling him that wasn’t going to make a difference. So I said nothing. I stayed there for him. Let him use me as a Kleenex, a pillow, a doll, anything he needed.
“Dec.” He looked up at me, though he wasn’t far below me on the bed. Carefully, he pushed back the wavy strands of hair that had fallen into my face. “Thank you. For being here. For staying. For searching for the bones. Even when I wasn’t.”
Something shifted in his eyes. His mouth opened like he was about to say something. It looked like shock. Or like he was seeing me for the first time.
His hand moved up to clutch my face. I leaned into his palm as his thumb skimmed across my mouth. “You’re so beautiful. It’s hard to look at you sometimes.”
My eyelids fluttered closed as he worked his thumb across my lips, slowly, until my lips parted and his thumb dipped into my mouth. I sucked until he let out a rasping breath, hooking my jaw and dragging me down until our breaths met. “Decca. I need you,” he begged in a ragged whisper.
I could only nod. I couldn’t think of the words to explain how long my body had been craving his. How much I wanted to be his.
“Please, let me kiss you.”
“You can always kiss me. You always could,” I breathed before threading my fingers into his hair and pulling him to me, pressing my lips against his sweet, soft mouth as it yielded beneath me. The salty taste of his tears made me all the more ravenous. I needed to breathe him into me. I needed him to absorb me.
His hands gripped the backs of my thighs, bruising them as he kneaded up from my knees to just under my cheeks, grounding me to him.
He broke off the kiss and pulled back enough that I could see his wild, black eyes, his sensual lips, reddened, wet, and plump from our kiss. “This is how you looked the night you proposed. I had a dream...” he said to my mouth, as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to get the words out, or kiss me again. “I took you upstairs to dry you off. Only,” he smirked. “I made you even wetter.”
Somehow, I let out a squeak. My knees softened.
“It’s okay, Crow. Let go for me. I’ve got you.”
Then I was plummeting off some high place. Headfirst. Dizzy. Swirling skies flashing around me as I fell. Nothing existed but him and me. The world had disappeared. We weren’t in his bedroom, but in a garden in the rain. With only each other for company. But like the first day of Adam and Eve in the Garden, all we needed was each other.
“What did you do?” I asked. “In your dream.”
“I peeled off your sweater. Water trickled out of it in streams when it hit the floor.”
I nodded. Telling him it was okay to do that now.
He looked down at my UT sweatshirt, like it was vintage lingerie instead of my common cleaning day garb. He looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. His jaw firmed under his beard as his hands found their way underneath, skating over my belly as he lifted the thick fabric off my body.
I waited for him to take in my thin, small body in my high-waisted black jeans and my favorite sheer bodysuit with the embroidered snakes slithering up from my waist and encircling my nipples.
“I think I even envisioned this underneath. I can’t remember now. You’re so much better real.”
“You can touch me.” I had startled him. It was as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him until I gave him permission. “Please touch me.”
The glint of a smile played on his lips as his thumbs, first one, then the other, traced the body of the snake, from the waistband of my jeans, along the bottom swell of my small breast and around the side to end at the snake’s tongue in the center. He was mesmerized, and I sank into his touch, my skin growing more and more sensitive with every inch he covered.
I opened the top button of my jeans and wiggled them down over my hips before stepping out of them. I knew he could see all of me beneath the sheer fabric, and I wanted to give him everything.
“What did you do then? In your dream.”
“You’re asking me to remember too much with a gorgeous semi-naked woman standing in front of me.”
“Then do what you fantasize about now. You can have all of me.”
His eyes shot to mine. “Crow. He smirked. God, he was hot when he smirked. “You’re fucking right, I’m going to have all of you. I just haven’t decided where I’m going to start.”