Chapter Seventeen #2
“If you don’t break them up now, you won’t be able to do so later,” Lauren told him. “She’ll be there at every holiday, and before you know it your house will be hers.”
“Just curious,” he said to Lauren, who didn’t seem the least bit nervous to go up against him. Her self-possession made him worry. “I thought you were supposed to keep your existence secret. What does coming here today do for you?”
It saves Ava from the likes of you, Lauren thought. But there was more; Paul Mather was right. She smiled then, and he could see her sharp teeth. “It allows me the pleasure of seeing that after all your family has done to us, you’re still afraid of me.”
The men of the extended family were waiting when Jamie arrived at the old summer house on the outskirts of Salem, which was used only for family get-togethers.
Uncles and cousins and brothers all stood together.
No one ever wanted to stay there overnight, not even on summer weekends, even though it overlooked the cold blue sea.
The sprawling homesite had once been an inn where Increase Mather and his wife stayed during the witch trials, and there were those who believed that the place was cursed.
There were occasional fires that started for no reason, and water rats lived in the cellar.
Still, there they all were, on a windy day, all of the male cousins and uncles and brothers.
They said it was a birthday celebration for Jamie’s brother Brent, but there was nothing celebratory about the gathering.
There was no cake or wine, no party at all.
The family had held interventions for alcohol and drugs and gambling, and now they were holding one for love.
They had come to a decision. If Jamie didn’t disengage from Ava, cutting off all attachments to someone who practiced witchery, he would be denied his inheritance, and his tuition at Harvard would no longer be paid.
At first when this was announced, as if it were a court sentence, Jamie had laughed, thinking it was a joke, but they were a legal family, and the disinheritance papers had been drawn up and no one thought it was funny.
When Jamie was told the conditions of his continuing at school, he shook his head.
“Go ahead. Do it,” he said. “Pull the plug. You’d be doing me a favor. I’ll quit school and get a real job.”
The family was prepared for his refusal. They always had a plan B. When they’d all had their say about his duty to his family, they left him alone with his father so he could hear the rest of what his punishment would be if he didn’t do as he was told.
“You clearly don’t care about your future,” Paul Mather said with a sneer. “But what about hers?”
Jamie’s father now informed him that Ava’s anonymous endowment could easily disappear if the Mathers began to question its legality. Jamie looked at his father as if seeing him for the first time. “Are you threatening Ava?”
“I’m just telling you a story,” his father said. “A story that can have many different endings. The choice is yours.”
Jamie stalked out in a fury. His mother had been distraught when she heard about the plan the family had hatched, and she’d driven out to the house, even though no women were ever included in family meetings.
Now she got out of her station wagon and followed Jamie down to the sea garden filled with lavender and bordered by white stones.
There were blood-red roses and sage that had been planted three hundred years earlier.
The place might be cursed, but it was beautiful all the same.
Jamie’s mother was crying as she begged him to do as his father asked.
Her husband had come up with the plan to discredit Ava that morning at breakfast.
“It’s best for both of you,” Louise Mather said to Jamie. “You know as well as I do that she will bring it out in you.”
“Bring what out? My humanity?”
“Your magic.” His mother’s face looked bleak.
“They’re not afraid to go after Ava,” Louise told her son.
“They’ll find a way to have her removed from school.
She’ll wind up back where she came from, and if that happens, she’ll never forgive you, Jamie.
Do you want to live with that?” Though a mother is never meant to favor one child over another, Louise had always loved him best. She knew he hid his true nature because he was so easily hurt.
Now he looked at her, unnerved, just as he used to when he was a boy and didn’t understand all that was cruel in the world.
“It’s better for both of you,” his mother told him.
“Let her have her life, and you have yours.”
“Why have you stayed married to him?” Jamie asked. “You should have left, and you should have taken me with you.”
The wind was stronger now, and the clouds were moving so fast they were sailing by like ships at sea.
Louise had been a fairly ordinary girl, pretty and kindhearted; it had been easy for the Mathers to mold her into the sort of wife they wanted for their beloved Paul, despite the fact that he, too, had been born with what they called The Sign, an unfortunate feature in their family that had to be removed.
Louise’s mother-in-law had patted her arm on her wedding day and said, You’re a good girl, and that was when Louise had almost turned and run, for she wasn’t so certain that was what she wanted to be.
She’d had a wild side; it was long gone now, though it was not forgotten.
“Sometimes you fall in love with the wrong person,” she told Jamie. “You just do the best you can.”
Jamie took his mother’s hand. He wasn’t particularly proud of the details of his life, but he was a good son. “I know one thing about Ava,” he assured her. “She’s the right person.”
Louise Mather was the one who had told him the story about how complicated love could be, so it didn’t surprise Jamie when she embraced him fiercely and said, “If it’s meant to be, it will be.
” The rest of the family would have been enraged to hear that sentiment, but she went on.
“Sometimes you don’t choose love. Sometimes it chooses you. ”
Jamie was driven back to Cambridge by his father, to ensure that the plan went as scheduled. After Jamie had packed for his summer in Wyoming, locking his apartment, he insisted they stop at Lilith House.
“Just make it fast,” his father told him. “Drawing these things out is never helpful.”
Paul Mather waited in the car, his window rolled down, while Jamie went up the path.
Ava had been waiting for him, lingering at the window.
She was worried and somewhat cross, for everyone else had already left for the summer.
This time she was to lock up the house. This was not like the summer when the other women shouted Last one out is a nanny goat as they left, and each and every one had kissed her goodbye.
Now Jamie had finally arrived, but there was the sleek black Mercedes at the curb.
She recalled the night she’d tied the strips of white fabric to the tree, when the keys had sounded like bells, but he’d never shown up.
They had sworn to one another that this time would be different, and yet, it certainly didn’t feel different right now.
Jamie wanted to embrace Ava but kept his distance.