5. The Cartwright Witches
5
THE CARTWRIGHT WITCHES
SAYAH
G uilt is creeping up my bones again, settling into my marrow and severing all everyday thoughts, making processing this absolutely fucking tragic event nearly impossible. All the things I should have said, should have done, should have . . . Should have . . .
Should have . . .
The days have passed by like seconds and like years all the same. They’ve simultaneously been the slowest days of my life, and yet I look back to that dreadful phone call, and it’s been a blur.
The aunts arrived last night, and while we’ve been processing and grieving and going over funeral plans for my parents, we’ve tried to look for light in the dark.
Hilda and Maggie are both in their seventies, shrinking violets and fading looks; their faces don deep-set wrinkles and missing teeth punctuate their smiles. The two women are short and stout, Hilda with strawberry-red hair streaked with silver that she wears with bangs and always in a pony and Maggie with boy-short white hair forever in disarray, as though she sticks her head out the window of a car after a shower.
We’re going through an old box of pictures my mom gave me when I had Gauge. Pictures and her grimoires and other magickal objects she’d passed down to me once she stopped practicing the craft as much.
“And there she was,” Hilda goes on through tears and laughter, “in that little red car, moving to Colorado, and she takes off with all her stuff in the back and stalls the car ’cause she didn’t know how to drive a stick!”
Peals of wheezing laughter erupt from Maggie, Hilda, and me as we continue our reveries and funny stories about Mama.
“I’ll never forget it! I ran to her window and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to move across the country without anyone?’ And she said she was sure. She started that car back up and drove off into the sunset.”
It feels good to keep Mama’s memory alive. It’s keeping that monstrous cloud of destruction from ripping my walls down and flooding me with grief.
I have to keep going like this. For Gauge.
“How long do you guys plan on staying?” I ask, sifting through the pictures.
Maggie lifts her glasses to wipe the tears from under her eyes with a tissue. “We’re probably going to leave Monday morning,” she says, cleaning her glasses off. “We have to get back soon to help with the kids.”
After Aunt Janet died, Maggie and Hilda looked after my cousin Francine, Janet’s daughter. Since Francine had children, they have helped her look after them as well. They are doing what they think Janet would have wanted.
The fact that they’re leaving so soon catches me off guard. “Well, I can’t plan a celebration of life in two days,” I mention.
“You don’t have to, honey,” Hilda replies, tipping the cup to her lips and chewing on some crushed ice. “You can plan it for a few months out, and we’ll make sure to return for it.”
“You guys would come back for it?” I ask as I inspect an old photo more closely, deciding if it’s good to show at my parents’ celebration.
“If we can, we will,” Hilda answers .
“Well,” I add, putting the picture into the pile I want to show, “we can do something in the meantime. Like a balloon release or something.”
“Oh, that would be lovely,” Maggie responds. Her voice sounds strained, as though she’s trying to sound excited, but it’s taking every ounce of her to do it.
Hilda stands, putting the pictures she’s looked through into the box and grabbing a new one. “I’ve never done one of those,” she replies, sitting with her new pile. “I’ve always thought it’d be cool.”
We lapse into a comfortable silence, pictures sifting and a dog barking outside the only sound.
An emptiness in the shape of Mama that weighs heavier than anything I’ve ever lifted pulls at me, and I fight with every ounce of who I am to not be pulled down to wherever that force wants me to go.
I know once I fall apart, it will take me a million times as long to put myself back together.
Seeing a beautiful picture of my mom in her twenties, before my sister and I came along and left lightning in her skin and wrinkles by her eyes, sets my heart to the metronome of life without her. Ticking by and empty, drifting aimlessly and heedlessly into the unknown.
Tears accumulate and fall onto the table.
The chair squeaks on the floor as Hilda rises, grabbing a tissue before she hands it to me, enveloping me in a hug.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” I cry, holding the picture before me and letting my aunt rock me.
“So, let’s do some magick,” Hilda says, releasing me from the hug and playing with my hair.
Dabbing my eyes, I look up at her skeptically. “Really?”
“Yes, later tonight,” she says, combing my long locks with her fingers. “We’ll do a safe passage spell for your Mama and Dan and one for us for healing.”
“That sounds wonderful, Aunt Hilda,” I reply as she takes her seat, resuming her walk down memory lane with the pictures. “I found her runes and rowan wand in a box I had downstairs. ”
Maggie’s eyes grow inquisitive. “The rowan wand she inherited from Grandma?”
“I believe so, yes. It was with all the other magickal things she gave me when I got cancer. Since she didn’t practice much after she met Dan. I can grab the box if you want to see it.”
“Would you please, sweetie?” Hilda requests, pouring more tea from the glass pitcher into her cup.
“Of course,” I say, scooting my chair back to get out.
I bound down to the basement to retrieve the box and return, setting it down on the dark stone dining table. “She’s got a bunch of stuff in here,” I say, shuffling through the contents until I find the wand and velvet pouch of runes.
When my skin touches the wand’s wood, a zap of electricity moves through my body like a live wire, a flash of those crystal blue eyes and thick dark lashes take over my vision. It stuns me for a few seconds, and when I look back at the aunts, they stare at me as though I’ve grown another head.
“What?” I ask.
“You’ve just been staring at nothing for a few minutes,” Maggie says, her magnified eyes behind her glasses all the larger to stare at me strangely. “Wondering if you’re all right.”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m fine,” I stutter, trying to hide my confusion about what happened.
Sitting down to join them, I hand Maggie the red velvet pouch, and Hilda takes the wand.
As Maggie unties the pouch and pours the stone runes into her hand, I pick up the pictures I was looking through and pull out one of my mom and Janet.
Teenagers. Babies. At the beach in New Jersey. Mama’s curly golden locks are alight by the sun, and Janet’s fiery red hair burns just as brightly.
“They were so beautiful,” I say, turning the picture to show my aunts.
Maggie moves her glasses to her head and squints at the picture. “ They were,” she says, her mouth turned upside down in concentration. “Otherworldly.”
“I wish I had a sister I was close to,” I reply, adding the picture to the Yes pile.
“Well,” Hilda says, switching with Maggie to look at the runes, opening the pouch with her knobby, arthritic hands, “you have a sister. Just not one you’re close to.”
“Understatement of the year,” I add, shuffling to the following picture.
It’s hard not to acknowledge Laureya when the box is filled with pictures of the two of us as kids. Although there are more pictures of me smiling and laughing with my longest friend, Ayris, than there are pictures of Laureya among them. Always scowling, never smiling. It’s as if she was born with a dark soul and succumbed to the darkness.
“Have you heard from her at all?” Hilda asks, pouring the runes onto the table and flipping over the ones that are face-down.
“I tried calling her earlier today,” I reply, coming across another picture of a younger Mama. “It took five calls for her to finally pick up. I was so frustrated that when she answered I blurted out, ‘Our parents died.’ She said, ‘Cool, gotta go, bye,’ and hung up.”
“Do you think it’s because she doesn’t care?” Maggie asks inquiringly, setting the wand carefully back down on the table. “Or is it something else?”
“Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me if she cares. She’s had so many chances to be a part of our lives. And somehow, she always seems to fuck it up.” I wrinkle my nose at the way she blisters me. “You know she’s never met Gauge, right?”
“Yeah. We knew that,” Hilda replies.
“I’m at the point where it wouldn’t bother me if I never saw her again.”
“It’s too bad,” Hilda says soberly. “There were five of us, so we always had a friend. Maggie and I have always been together since we were the eldest. And your mom was best friends with Janet and Pricilla, though not always at the same time, since Janet and Pricilla never were close. ”
“I knew Mom and Janet were close during their teenage years,” I say, setting down my pile of pictures. Shifting in my chair, I say, “So, when did you all get into magick?”
I think it’s a good segway into the topic I’m intrigued to learn from them. I have known some from my mom but never got to talk about it with my two eldest aunts. My cousin, Francine, isn’t too keen on the whole witch thing, so the aunts keep it under wraps around her.
“We all came into it at different times,” Hilda states, picking up a rune and looking more closely at it. “Our mom was Wiccan, but our father was Christian, so we never got to see her practice much. She did her spells in private. But it’s funny how the path picks you because no one ever told us about it; we all happened upon it.”
“I started in high school,” Maggie says, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Just with tarot and herb magick. Hilda got more into the crystals, and your mom was into all of it. Janet was into altars and seasons and celebrated the solstices. But Pricilla never got into it much. Your mom and Janet were the two of us most into the magick.”
“So, you don’t come from a long line of witches or anything?”
“Not that we know of,” Hilda says, gathering the runes and funneling them back into the pouch. “We knew Mother had a gift. She was able to talk to spirits and see the dead. It was enough to scare her, but she never talked about that or if her mother was a witch.”
“And what is it with the fire?” I ask timidly. I’ve been hesitant to bring it up.
Maggie and Hilda exchange looks then glance elsewhere, avoiding my eyes.
“What? What is it?”
“We believe a curse was put on us,” Maggie replies tersely, shifting in her seat. “Every witch with a child in the Cartwright line seems to die by fire.”
“But that would mean . . .”
Is that what the dreams are trying to tell me? Are they foretelling my end?
“This is why we didn’t want to bring it up,” Hilda says, reaching for my hand across the table. “Please don’t think that way. ”
I take her hand, but it doesn’t quell my fear that the fire will come for me too. “That means I have the same fate?”
“It’s not set in stone,” Hilda says soothingly, grabbing my other hand. “Don’t scare yourself thinking like that, okay?”
“But if it’s a curse, who placed it? And how do I break it?”
Maggie looks at me with consternation. “We don’t know. We think it was placed on us before Grandma’s time.”
I let go of their hands and hug my chest. “She died by fire, too, right?”
“She did,” Hilda answers solemnly, her voice a low whisper. “Her sister and their mom also.”
Nox, my black cat, bounds into my lap, purring as though trying to comfort me.
“And beyond that?” I ask as I pet his soft fur.
Hilda swirls the ice around in her glass. “We’re not sure. It’s in her journals at home. We’ll bring them when we come back for the celebration.”
Nox stands and stretches, jumping on the table.
“That would make me feel better,” I reply, picking him up and setting him on the floor before he can knock anything down.
“The Cartwright sisters,” Maggie says maudlinly, holding up a photo of the five of them.
They’re young and carefree in the photo, posing by a sign that says No Loitering , laughing at something one of them had said. A moment frozen in time.
“The Cartwright Witches,” I correct, leaning on Maggie’s shoulder and gazing at the picture.
The wind blew their hair around in a soft breeze, the Pacific Ocean at their backs. The three shorter sisters were Hilda, who had strawberry blonde hair in a pony, Pricilla with dark long hair and bangs, and Maggie, who had short, spikey dark hair. The two taller, skinny women had wild curls of fiery red and the other with golden blonde.
While admiring the picture, I absentmindedly pick up my mother’s wand from the table. An invisible shockwave blows through the house, causing my hair to rush off my shoulders. It feels so real I swear my mom’s hair moves in the picture as well, her eyes glittering like a cat’s in headlights. I hear a phantom voice in the wind : There is light in the dark.
Shaking my head, I look at my aunts; Maggie’s holding the photo still, unfazed by the sudden blast of wind, and Hilda is staring off into space, oblivious as well.
I must be exhausted.
That picture didn’t move.
Did it?