Chapter 8
Neither of us mentioned it the next morning.
When Annabelle handed me my coffee, she did it with a sweet smile full of innocent, ghostly warmth.
My cheeks warmed when my fingers brushed against her insubstantial ones around the cup.
I looked away first, now unsure if I had really seen Annabelle as a ‘normal’ ghost on the rocks.
I was also unsure if I should apologize for what I had done when I encountered her afterwards in my bedroom, especially since I wasn’t sorry it had happened.
We drank our morning beverages in a comfortable silence. Well, I drank and Annabelle watched, inhaling and sighing every now and then.
Was this what it was like to live with someone you actually liked?
The thought came, and instead of immediately reproaching myself for it, I entertained the idea.
What would it be like to wake up, come downstairs, and have a coffee with someone who knew me?
Someone who had seen all sides of me and still smiled like I was an important part of her world?
The thought filled me with an exhilaration that bordered on panic.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“Oh, Marley, that’s Yasmin, can you ...”
Annabelle heaved a put-upon sigh, but before she disappeared, she gave me a cheeky wink.
Yasmin, on the other hand, pursed her lips and looked around the kitchen warily when she entered. Her long hair was braided, but so many strands escaped that the braid was barely intact. She was carrying a large book.
“Coffee or tea?” I got up to put the kettle on while my unknown-until-yesterday cousin sat at the table.
“Tea.”
“I should have known.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you look like you’re late for Harry Potter school, so of course you want tea.”
Today she was wearing a similar outfit to yesterday’s: swishy skirt and a blouse with long lace sleeves. I’d be damned if she managed to make it through the entire day without sweating through that shirt.
She sank down in Annabelle’s chair and put her elbows on the table. She looked tired. That made two of us.
I put a tea bag in a mug that said “Four out of five Great Lakes prefer Michigan,” feeling like an asshole. Yasmin ignored me and cracked open her gigantic tome.
“What’s that?” I asked. When the water boiled, I poured it in the mug and handed it to her, then sat down at the table.
Yasmin looked at me like I was a child playing a prank by pretending not to know the colors or the alphabet. “You’re kidding, right?”
I scooched my chair closer and peered over her shoulder at the book.
It was old and thick, with sections bound together and sewn into the spine with a kaleidoscope of colored thread.
The worn cover had an intricate drawing of a tree that had faded over time.
As Yasmin flipped through the pages, I saw a dizzying variety of handwriting and drawings, plus magical symbols that looked like they had been copied out of a video game.
Some of the pages were lists of ingredients, complete with introductory text like you’d find on the internet.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a diagram that looked like a pentagram with a snake coming out of one of the points.
“You seriously don’t know? Don’t you have one of these?”
“A freaky old book full of fruitcake recipes and demon exorcism diagrams? No. I do not have a freaky old book full of fruitcake recipes and demon exorcism diagrams.”
Yasmin sighed. “There’s no fruitcake.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Although I did find a recipe for scones from 1895 that rise better than Betty Crocker’s.”
She let me flip through the pages at random.
Some of the entries were dated, but most weren’t.
They were clearly written and drawn by several different people, but the handwriting was similar, with pretty loops and swooping lines.
One of the pages was taken up by a giant circle with a series of symbols drawn inside it and three points of the perimeter marked and labeled.
Underneath it was a paragraph written in text that was too small for my tired eyes to decipher.
“This shit is wild.”
Yasmin scoffed. “This ‘shit’ is my family legacy.”
“What do you mean?”
She gave me a cold look. “I’m not sure I should tell you. If you were really a Cartwright woman, you would already know.”
At that I rolled my eyes so hard it was almost painful. “Never been great at being either of those things. Whatever. Keep your secrets, see if I care.”
Yasmin angrily turned the pages until she found one with a family tree.
It looked like the one a teacher had made me fill out as an assignment in elementary school.
On it, I spied Agatha’s name, along with Yasmin’s, her mother Helena’s, and my mother’s.
My original name, Veronica, was nowhere to be found.
“See? The women in our family are connected by our books, which hold the practices handed down through generations. We all have these. The fact that you don’t have one means you’re not really a part of this family.”
“Thanks.” She clearly intended that as an insult, but I smiled sweetly, flattered to be cut off from the family I never wanted.
I pointed to a page that showed women doing various things, including stirring a big black pot and reading out of a book to a crowd of anxious people. The only thing missing was a broomstick. And a stake to burn them at. “Your family are witches?”
“Duh! This is the family business. Even if your mother didn’t teach you anything, didn’t you figure that out when you got here?”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. “It’s not like there was a cauldron sitting outside the front door, no. Besides, I don’t believe in that crap. Spells and spirits aren’t real. It’s all bullshit that bored housewives put on throw pillows and sell on Etsy. Or multilevel marketing schemes.”
Never mind that an actual, honest-to-god ghost saved my life.
“Believe it or not,” Yasmin said, “but I can’t believe you don’t know your own family tree.”
“I jumped off my family tree at the first opportunity,” I shot back.
“They wanted me to be radically different than I am, so I left as soon as I could.” I turned the book over, revealing the cover with its worn, faded tree.
I traced a finger down one of the branches until it ended.
“The branch of my part of the family tree broke when my parents veered off the highway in a storm and wrapped their sedan around an actual fucking tree . No more branch, no more family. So, what do you want from me?”
“This house!”
“Well, you’re not going to get it!”
“Why not?” Yasmin threw up her hands and sat back in her own chair—Annabelle’s chair—and stared me down. “This house belongs to my mother. She made me come here as her representative, and I’m not leaving until I get an agreement from you that you’ll concede it.”
“That’s not going to happen. Also, she didn’t ‘make you come here.’ You’re an adult, you get to make your own choices.” I purposefully didn’t dwell on the fact that I had similar thoughts about being stuck on the island when I first arrived.
“That’s not the point. You have no connection to this house. You had no connection to Agatha; you didn’t even know her!”
“Did you?”
“Well, no. My mom said she always meant to bring me here, but she never did.”
“Aha!” I pumped my arm in the air, not actually sure what I had won but glad to see her angrily sticking her chin out. Arguing with Yasmin was annoying but also a little exhilarating. It felt like I could do it all day. “What would you do with the house, anyway?”
“I wouldn’t sell it, that’s for sure!” Yasmin crossed her arms angrily. “Agatha mentored my mother, and they built their spiritual bond in this house. It’s meaningful to this family, and the fact that you don’t know that means you don’t deserve it.”
“I don’t even really want the house!” I heard the whine in my own voice too late to do anything about it. Like it or not, I was also an adult, older than Yasmin by a decade.
Then I shut my mouth and glanced around, hoping that Annabelle hadn’t heard me say I didn’t want the house. It was true, I didn’t want the responsibility of owning a disaster house on a 1950s American fantasy island. But if I was being truly honest with myself, I liked being with her .
It didn’t matter, though. It’s not like I was going to stay here.
This was a temporary reprieve from my usual life, which consisted of getting through the day so that I could play the night away, losing myself in the cacophony of a sound system and the smell of an audience sweating through leather.
Punk music, the queer scene of the city, and being alone—that was my life, not this.
I took in a surreptitious breath, waiting for the smell that usually accompanied Annabelle, but I couldn’t feel her. I hadn’t offended my ghost, at least not yet.
“Then give the house back,” Yasmin said, smiling as if the answer was really that simple.
“Give me two mil.”
“No way in hell are you getting two mil for this house. Have you even been on Zillow?”
“Two and a half.”
She huffed, then turned her head, not dignifying me with a response.
I stared at her until she relented, unable to let me have the last word.
“Even getting featured on HouseTok would not net you that much for this house the way it is.” Yasmin folded her hands and looked at the table, taking a deep breath.
“Gibson, you need to be realistic about this—”
Her tirade was interrupted by someone pounding loudly on the door. The doorbell must’ve given up the ghost. So to speak.
“Hold that thought.” As I left Yasmin to answer the frantic knocking at the door, I felt a sense of déjà vu.
This time it was for an actual memory of mine—it was the third time in as many days that I’d said “hold that thought” to an unexpected person to go open the front door to my “new” house. I shook myself and opened the door.