Chapter 15
My stomach dropped. The fries I’d eaten felt like heavy pieces of greasy garbage sitting in my belly, gathering stress.
“That’s ridiculous,” I choked out. “Annabelle is dead. She’s not coming back.”
“Maybe she can, Gibson,” Miranda said.
“You believe in this, too?” I threw up my hands. “Come on, guys. I played along with your magic book and your witch stuff up until now, but this is just silly.”
But Yasmin pressed on, leaning forward in the booth.
She pushed the basket of fish and chips aside.
“My mother knows this book backwards and forwards. She taught me that this page was a mistake, written by an incompetent witch suffering from malnutrition and untreated gonorrhea. Whenever anyone tried it, nothing happened.”
“Because she didn’t have the complete text,” Miranda added.
“And because she wasn’t supposed to do it alone,” said Yasmin, seamlessly picking up again. The two of them were so in sync I wondered if they’d rehearsed this. “The ritual was meant for us. The three of us.”
“There is no us .” I shook my head. “I’m not a part of this. I’m not like you.”
“Read this.” Yasmin handed me a spiral-bound notebook.
On it, she’d compiled the passages from Agatha’s grimoire, her own volume, and Miranda’s tawdry paperback.
She had also scribbled notes all over the margins, drawing little hearts and flowers in several places.
I tried very hard not to find them endearing.
When a fall breaks; no foresight enthralls Cut and sew and pace and stomp, look far then near Only love outlasts us all
Sparks fly and sparks tame, a journey you’ll hear
The end of Caesar, thunder’s day
When three are one, they have no fear
A Bell rings seldom but clear and gay
Burn all burn one, burn thyself none
Jack and Lil need a place to play
Returned by the sea, while blood drips bright
To the sea, with love, her home by night
“Weird poem,” I said, squinting at the handwriting. I put down the notebook and grabbed another fry, shaking off the vinegar to disguise the shaking of my hand. “But I guess it rhymes. Who are Jack and Lil?”
Yasmin shook her head. “I have no idea. There are parts I still don’t understand and about five pages of instructions. But ‘Returned by the sea’ means Annabelle. What the sea took is Annabelle, because she drowned, obviously.”
“Obviously.” I sniffed, covering my surprise. I had my suspicions about Annabelle’s death but never wanted to dwell on them. She rarely wanted to talk about her former life, so I’d been content to let the past be the past, even if somewhere deep down, I knew things were never that simple.
“‘While blood drips bright’ means that for the duration of the blood moon—the eclipse next week—she’ll be returned. It’s only one night, but it brings her here.” Yasmin looked at me, totally serious. “This is your chance to be with her. I know you want to.”
I met her eyes and lied through my teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Yasmin sighed, leaning back in the booth.
Turning to Miranda, I asked, “Why do you want to do this?”
“Because when Agatha died, I lost my best friend,” she said simply. Her normally cheerful face fell. “Doing this won’t bring Agatha back, but it would honor her. It’s what she would want me to do.”
I swallowed. I kept thinking of Agatha in the abstract—even Annabelle was more real in my mind than Agatha was.
But she’d been a living person, one with a best friend who cared about her.
Agatha had been so obsessed with this magical nonsense that it consumed the last years of her life.
And all Miranda could do was stand by and watch while her best friend declined.
What would Agatha’s obsession do to the three of us? I remembered Annabelle’s visceral reaction to the opening of the shed in the backyard. She said she didn’t know what Agatha was working on. Had she lied?
I shook my head. “Even if you’re both not insane and there’s something to this, it isn’t my decision. If there’s a possibility that Annabelle can come back, she has to be the one to decide whether or not to try it.”
Both Miranda and Yasmin nodded. “You’re right,” Yasmin said. “That’s why you have to be the one to tell her.”
“What? Why me?”
They shared another conspiratorial look.
“Because you care about her, dear,” said Miranda gently.
“We all care about her,” I countered. “She’s been taking care of us since we arrived, and you called her your ‘old friend.’”
“Yeah, but you love her,” Yasmin said.
“I—” I sputtered but didn’t deny it. “What makes you think Annabelle wants to come back? Especially since you’re saying she would have to go back to being dead after one night!”
“Of course she wants to come back!” Yasmin said.
“How can you be so sure?” I pressed.
“Because she loves you too, you dork.”
Her words hit me like I had jumped off a cliff and my body slammed into the water. I wasn’t even sure exactly what I was feeling, but there was anger and shame and the very real fear that she might be right.
“This is ridiculous.” I stacked my empty basket on top of Yasmin’s and scooted out of the booth. “I’m leaving, anyway. The house is practically already sold. Seymour Anderson offered me two million dollars and I’m taking it. The paperwork is in my email, and once I sign it, this is all over.”
“Gibson!” Yasmin raised her voice. Her eyes were shiny, and she sounded like she might actually cry, which just pissed me off even more.
I took the note with Annabelle’s grocery list on it and slammed it down on the table. “You do the shopping.”
I squeezed out of the booth and weaved in between sweaty tourists waiting for their orders. I shoved past them, wanting to run as fast as I could away from the women who dared to dangle hope in front of me like a lure.
***
As I biked back to the house, the wind took any tears that might have fallen on my face. I rushed inside.
Annabelle was reading in her wingback chair. She stuck her tongue out, concentrating, and marked her place with her finger. The afternoon light bathed her in a golden glow. If I didn’t know better, I’d have called her an angel.
She looked up as I entered, and a smile lit up her face.
“I’m not here for long,” I said. “Just grabbing my guitar.” I didn’t wait for her response. If I stayed, I wouldn’t leave, and I needed time to think about what had just happened.
Was I actually considering doing a magic ritual? Seriously?
Of course I wasn’t going to do it. Yasmin was just my batty cousin who was about to find the harsh truth about freeloading from relatives—it doesn’t last forever. And Miranda was a crazy old lady who missed her friend.
But they could bring Annabelle back.
I shook myself to banish the conflicting thoughts. Then I grabbed my guitar and waved to Annabelle as I rushed back out the front door.
“Bye, Gibson,” she called after me.
Wanting to be alone and unhappy, I walked through the maze of trails that made up the Mackinac Island State Park.
I found a dark, secluded spot and flung myself down on the hard ground and pouted.
There was no one to pout at, however, so after a few minutes, I sat back against a tree, wishing I’d brought a chair or a blanket on which to sulk.
I opened the case and put the guitar in my lap, then strummed absent-mindedly, letting my thoughts drift and my hands determine the rhythm.
I propped my phone up on the guitar case in front of me and pulled up Brooke’s notes.
I would work on the song and I would not obsess over the absurd idea of bringing Annabelle back to life.
It was already ridiculous enough that I seemed to have fallen for a ghost. Getting involved with magic spells was exactly the kind of behavior my mom was trying to prevent all throughout my childhood.
What she could never seem to understand was that I never wanted to do magic, I just wanted to live my life.
Brooke’s lyrics weren’t terrible, but when I sang them, I couldn’t hear anything but my own voice in my head.
There was no soul behind it. I tried a few different chord progressions, but none of them sparked.
Sitting back against the tree, I tried rearranging the chorus and adding some verses, but that didn’t do much.
When I thought about adding verses, they just sounded .
.. shallow. The kind of nonsense you might hear on pop radio, which wasn’t a bad thing, but it didn’t mean anything to me.
Why did I think I could write a song? I wasn’t a songwriter and I definitely wasn’t a witch. I was just a useless guitarist from the desert pretending to be a big-city player.
I closed my eyes and remembered Annabelle’s smile as I entered the house.
It made warmth spread through my body—despite my insistence that I was a piece-of-shit impostor posing as a cool adult, I knew what she would say: “I think your songs are lovely, dear.” Or “I’m sure it’ll come to you when it’s ready. ”
The Annabelle in my mind was right. I was punishing myself for no reason because I didn’t want to think about the decisions I had made or the possibility Yasmin had presented to me.
Without opening my eyes, I strummed a basic rhythm and sang the first things that came to mind, forgetting Brooke’s lyrics and making up my own.
standing here, scissors and a match in my hand
so baby won’t you fly-y to me
can’t make it across, sometimes can’t find you at all
baby, won’t you come back down to me
gonna burn that bridge when I cross it
gonna burn that bridge
gonna burn that bridge as I cross it
gonna burn that bridge when I get to you
“That’s ... crap,” I said out loud. “But it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”