Chapter Twenty #2
Ava began to have sessions with a psychiatrist, a nice enough man named Dr. Henry, who said she was safe in his office and could say whatever she wished.
“Really?” Ava said with a bitter laugh. “Anything?” I’m a witch, I lost my parents, I am lost, I’m in love with the wrong man, I could set this place on fire if you would stop filling me with drugs, I could jump out the window and fly. How can I be ordinary if that is my nature?
“You have to trust someone,” the doctor said.
But who would that be? It seemed now that the only person who had ever been truly honest with her was Lauren.
Lauren told the truth, even when it was hurtful, and she really listened, even though she mostly disagreed with Ava’s positive outlook.
Lauren saw the world as treacherous, and now Ava thought perhaps her friend had been right all along.
She shook her head and refused to tell the doctor anything about herself.
She thought of the first witch of Cambridge and how she’d always tried her best to create a world free of witch-hunters.
If Rose Bridewell were here, she would have fought back, but Ava had been trained to be polite and well mannered and the medication had humbled her, so that she was once more the girl who went to bed on time and never questioned anyone.
“Let’s start with this,” Dr. Henry said. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“Because my grandmother wants me to be locked up.”
“No. It’s because you’re seeing things that aren’t real,” the doctor said. “Your thinking is confused.”
“I hear a wolf outside.”
The doctor peered out to see that indeed a beast of a dog was there circling, for Jack had found his way to the hospital. “It’s a dog,” the doctor assured her. “That’s what I mean, Ava. You’re confused. There are no wolves near Boston.”
Ava would have leapt from the window if it hadn’t been locked with a key; she would have run into the woods with Jack and never returned.
Now that she was medicated she had no choice except to stay where she was, but all at once she could see herself as others saw her.
Ava Abbot, brought in by her concerned grandmother, a delusional Radcliffe student who believed in ghosts and was convinced she was a witch.
“As for ghosts,” the doctor went on, “that’s sheer fantasy. Has there ever been proof that such imaginings exist? Can you touch them, feel them, see their footsteps?”
Ava wondered what else she’d imagined. Had the black apples and the tapping on the window glass at night been real? She shook her head, defeated. “I might be confused,” she admitted.
The doctor nodded, pleased. They were getting somewhere. “I’ll ask again. Why are you here?”
“Because I need help,” Ava recited, knowing this was what the doctor wished to hear. “I’ll do my best.”
She thought of Jamie, and how he had never shown up for her.
How he always left when she needed him most. He was the sort of man who was charming but not dependable, who was so hurt he couldn’t even see how he hurt others.
She wanted to slap him, she wanted to wake him up, she wanted him to come for her and tell them they were the mad ones, but she had no idea where he was.
Likely in a bar, playing some stupid game like darts, more of a boy than a man, really.
The thing about you, Lauren had told Ava one night, is that you can really love someone. It’s not so easy for some of us.
Ava held out her hand and was given two blue pills along with two orange ones.
She already felt so empty she imagined she might disappear.
Maybe this was what people who couldn’t love felt like.
Breathe in and breathe out. Be invisible.
Never return. She thought of the women in jails in Salem at the time of the first witch, the ones who confessed in order to ensure a night’s rest, who would admit anything so they wouldn’t be tied to a stool and plunged into the river until they hadn’t a single breath left.
I am who you say I am. I have no choice.
I am mad. I am having visions. At night she dreamed that she was ascending over the apple orchard.
From high above she could see the house where she’d grown up.
Fly away, witch girl, all the girls in town called to her.
I’ll stitch up your mouth with black thread, her grandmother told her when she asked about the apples on her windowsill.
In her dreams, she lit a match, then sat in the branches of the tree outside the window of her hospital room as she watched every bit of it burn.
When days had passed and Ava hadn’t returned to Lilith House, Lauren realized that the scar in the palm of her hand was burning brightly.
When she asked around, the only person who had recently seen Ava was a next-door neighbor who had caught sight of her getting into a taxi, which was out of character, because taxis were expensive, and Ava usually walked or took the bus.
Lauren found her way to Jamie’s apartment.
Even though she couldn’t stand him, even though there were times when she thought they were too alike in always putting themselves first, she thought he might know where Ava might be.
He was sitting on the steps of the ramshackle house in North Cambridge where he rented a room, ignoring his classwork in favor of reading a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called Player Piano, a dystopian vision of an automated world in which the need for humans had been wiped away and life had become meaningless.
“Not you,” he said when he saw Lauren. In his opinion she was a clever, selfish girl who didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself. If a ship went down, Jamie was certain Lauren would manage to survive while everyone else floundered. “Are you here to torture me?”
“Do you know where she is?” Lauren asked.
“Do you think Ava gives me her schedule? She doesn’t speak to me.”
The sister of a classmate Jamie had known in boarding school arrived by taxi to tour Radcliffe.
She had told her parents that she would be bunking with a girlfriend for the weekend, but the truth was she thought the visit might be the beginning of a fling with Jamie, something she and every girl she knew in Sudbury had hoped for.
The visitor got out of the cab, dragging her suitcase behind her, a bright smile on her pretty, young face.
“Really?” Lauren said, disgusted as the obviously infatuated girl approached. “You’ve already got someone new? You couldn’t wait five minutes?”
“She’s here to look at schools. She’s nothing.”
“Is that what I am?” the girl said, taking offense and sadly realizing that what people said about Jamie being selfish was correct.
She made a snap decision to get back in the cab and go to stay with her friend, but it was too late.
Lauren had run over and already flung herself into the backseat, and now the taxi was pulling away.
Jamie stood in the road watching the cab disappear even though he could hear the girl who’d arrived shout for him to help her get another taxi.
“You are so rude,” she declared, and he couldn’t have agreed with her more.
He would have given anything to go after Ava, but if he did his family would ruin her life.
He knew that his ancestor May Mather had chosen to give up magic, but surely there had been times when she’d wished to disappear into the fields of hyacinth and let the magic of the world wash over her.
Standing there in the road, Jamie realized that he was no different. He wished he could do that, too.
Lauren questioned several drivers at the taxi garage and at last found one who remembered an old woman who had picked up a barefoot girl with red hair.
“She was a looker,” the driver said.
Lauren gave him a hard stare. “Just tell me where you took her.”
The older woman had asked they be driven out to Fairfield Hospital in a nearby suburb. Lauren immediately got into the taxi, demanding a ride to the same location.
“And don’t stop for red lights,” she told the cabbie, and since he was a Boston driver, he didn’t find this an unusual request and was happy to oblige.
Once they had set off, Lauren brushed her hair and dabbed on some lipstick so that she would seem presentable.
Just a visitor and nothing more. Her mouth was red, and she could taste blood.
She was in a fury already. That grandmother of Ava’s was most likely claiming that Ava was in the grip of a psychotic episode, imagining that she was a witch or a demon.
She likely would have said anything to have them lock Ava away.
“What are you staring at?” Lauren demanded when she caught the cabbie eyeing her in the rearview mirror.
“You,” he said bashfully.
“You wouldn’t like me if you knew me,” Lauren told him.
All the same, when she glanced at herself in the mirror, she saw that she had changed.
Her skin had lost some of its pallor. Her eyes were more gold than brown.
She’d heard that doing a good deed could change you, and that worried her.
She wanted to keep the cold, dark heart she’d worked so hard to create so that she would never be hurt again, but here she was, on her way to rescue someone.
When they arrived at the hospital, Lauren got out, having given the driver a twenty so he would wait for her. She entered the admissions office and asked if she could see her sister. Who could deny her access to a blood relation, and weren’t they sisters of a sort?