Chapter Nine
I have one memory of my dad.
It wasn’t my mom and her best friend Laura dragging a monster upstairs to the bathtub, glinting with scales, its neck slit with gills. I’d hear about all that later.
My memory of my dad is from the last time I saw him, his arms wrapped around my tiny three-year-old body in a crushing hug. He shook so hard, I asked if he was cold. Only now do I know it was because he was crying.
He moved away, and then he died. A car crash or something, my mom said, out in California. The end.
Except it wasn’t. He hadn’t – died, I mean. Unless my mom liked emailing dead people.
I caught her on my seventeenth birthday.
The fact that she closed the window on her laptop the second she registered my presence behind her was a dead giveaway.
But I’d already seen the email draft, the photo of the two of us from that day eating cupcakes with Elliott at his mom Laura’s house.
I waited a full two days before logging on to my mom’s email, where I found the message she sent to someone named Owen Morgan, along with a bunch of pictures of me from the last year: eating oysters in Alexandria, cuddling a dachshund dressed as a bumblebee at the dog parade in Capitol Hill.
And it wasn’t just this email – when I searched Owen Morgan’s email address in her inbox, fourteen more messages came up, all sent on my birthday, all with pictures of me from the previous year. Owen only wrote back once, just the day before, a simple, She’s beautiful.
I’d only been looking at his Facebook photos for thirty seconds when the light in the dining room flicked on, revealing my mom in the doorway.
Before I even asked, I knew. His face – I’d clung to that lone memory, his expression so sad it squeezed the breath out of my lungs every time I thought about it.
‘Is my dad alive?’
My mom merely blinked. Then the whole story came out.
She’d met Owen at a karaoke bar in Adams Morgan.
He liked the way she danced. She liked his Alanis Morissette T-shirt.
They slept together just the one time, and even though he offered to make her French toast the next morning, my mom was young and embarrassed, and they didn’t see each other again, not even when she found out she was pregnant a few weeks later.
‘I wanted to tell him,’ my mom said that night I caught her, sitting across from me at the dinner table and clutching a mug of cold peppermint tea. ‘He’d been so sweet, and I knew where he lived. But every time I got off at his Metro stop, I couldn’t bring myself to walk down his street.’
A few weeks later, Laura invited my mom to the open house her ‘coven’ was throwing.
‘Honestly, when Laura said “coven”,’ my mom rolled her eyes at the word, ‘she made it sound like it was how people say they’re in a book club, but really they just sit around and drink.
I figured this’d be like a witchy book club, except we’d go on the occasional yoga retreat.
’ My mom had always been interested in alternative medicine, various Eastern and Pagan religions, throwing herself into them wholeheartedly until she either got bored or realised they were just another front for a pyramid scheme.
‘And I wasn’t wrong,’ she said. ‘Everyone there just smelled like patchouli and talked about witchcraft in a spiritual sort of sense, not like it was real.’
It was Austin Taylor’s first experience there too.
He’d claimed he’d only really come to meet people, and had almost bolted from the community centre after seeing that someone had assembled rows of Tastykake honey buns in a pentagram.
But the sight of my mother sitting alone had compelled him to stay.
He took the empty chair next to her and they immediately bonded over the fact that he was the single parent of a nine-month-old boy and my mom was three months pregnant with me.
‘It went so fast from there,’ she said. They both ditched the coven, but hung on to each other. ‘It felt like the next day, we were together. Like we’d always been together.’
Bike rides along the Potomac, picnics on the Great Lawn – they spent every waking moment they weren’t working together.
Austin had just opened his first F’resh in Friendship Heights and was already planning another in Silver Spring.
It was perfect, he said – everything he needed to take care of her.
He, my mom, Max and me, once I was born – we’d be a family.
But then one day when my mom was six months pregnant and spending a Sunday morning at Eastern Market, she squinted at the man who was running the crepe cart. It was my dad. Owen Morgan. He’d already noticed her.
‘I could tell right away he knew it was me.’ Her head rested in her hand as she chuckled. ‘He kept staring at my stomach. I could practically hear him counting back the months in his head.’
He was so nervous, he dropped half her Nutella-and-banana crepe on the floor before asking if she wanted to eat with him and talk.
‘He asked if you were his baby and I said yes.’ Mom’s eyes welled with tears.
‘And then he said that even though we barely knew each other, he’d really love to be a part of your life, if that was something I’d be open to.
He respected the fact that I had a boyfriend – he just wanted to be near you. ’
Austin, however, was not convinced.
Mom knew Austin had been interested in magic when they met, but she’d thought it was play, like the way people were into Dungeons & Dragons. But once my dad was back in the picture, things started to darken.
‘Austin and I fought about him constantly,’ she said. ‘Conversations that had nothing to do with him would always somehow cycle back to Owen. Austin was convinced I was going to leave.’
Suddenly, every time my mom made plans to meet my dad, he’d call an hour before to cancel, saying he was too sick.
At first, my mom thought it was just an excuse, that he’d thought he wanted to make things work and be a dad, but the reality of it was starting to sink in.
After the third time it happened, she went to confront him.
He was so pale and sweaty, he could barely get out of bed to answer the door.
‘I had this feeling Austin had something to do with it. On a whim, I searched his office, then his bedroom. I know it was wrong, but – then I found the spell book in his wardrobe.’ Mom’s voice was a whisper.
‘I knew he had one, but I’d thought it was all just fun.
Not, you know – real. But then when I saw the spell, I just knew.
It wasn’t like he kept a bookmark in it – but I could tell it was the one he’d used just based on how cracked the spine was around that exact page, as though he’d looked at it a million times.
There were notes and coffee stains all over the margins. ’
It was a sickness spell.
‘Sickness of the Mind and Body,’ she said, her eyes glazed. ‘It all just sort of fell into place. The way Owen would get sick whenever we were supposed to meet. It was all designed to keep me away from him, to make him look unreliable.’
‘When I told Austin it was over, he pretended to be clueless, denying what he’d done, that magic was even possible, until he could see it wasn’t working.
Then he moved to apologising, crying, saying how much it’d killed him to see me with Owen, that he’d been afraid of losing me.
Didn’t I still love him?’ Her chin tipped up in defiance, as though Austin was there again in front of her, sunk to his knees with his arms wrapped around her middle.
‘I told him I couldn’t love a monster, because that’s what he was.
Making someone sick like that – it was monstrous.
That’s when he got angry. A monster?’ Her voice deepened to a snarl as she imitated Austin.
‘You think I’m a monster? If you ever really, truly fall in love with someone else – you’ll see. They’ll be the monster.’
And then, he cursed my mom.
My mom, and one fun little unexpected bonus – the baby in her womb.