Chapter 17
17
IT’S NOT THE first time I’ve stood in front of the old Rivers house, set back from the riverbank but within walking distance of the ferry, feeling nervous and unsure of my place here. Zelda was always about warm hugs and obvious delight at the sight of me, but Zack tended toward gruff. I never quite knew what he thought of me back then.
I still don’t. I’m not sure this announcement of ours is going to help. Zander seems to be pinning a lot of hope on it, and I wish he wouldn’t. I feel like there’s a high probability that I’ll need to soothe away his tears in fifteen minutes, and nobody wants that.
I’ve glamoured all traces of tears off my face, and just wish that there were glamours for aching hearts too. Zander has his arm around me as we walk toward the house, and I know I should say something about that. I should point out that it’s not only too familiar, too intimate, but it’s definitely hurtling down a slippery slope at the very least , but I can’t quite get my mouth to do my bidding. Maybe because he hasn’t mentioned the crying.
I tell myself it’s because he knows that if he did I’d poof myself away. Immediately.
Why didn’t I think of that when the crying dam inside me broke wide-open?
Zander doesn’t knock at his father’s door. He walks right inside the house, calling out for his dad as he goes. He sweeps me along with him, straight back into the kitchen, so there’s not much for me to do but go along with him and notice that nothing much has changed since the last time I was here, over a decade ago. Like the place has been frozen in time, or in my memories.
Maybe because that’s when everything changed here and the house couldn’t keep up.
Zack shuffles out from the hall and the bedroom down that way, looking rumpled. As if we woke him up, but he offers a brave sort of smile.
“Everything okay?” he asks, scratching a hand through his beard. “It’s a bit late.”
“It’s nine, Dad.”
“Oh.” Zack squints over at the clock on the kitchen oven. “Well.” He looks at me, and though his gaze is puzzled, and sharpens at Zander’s arm around me, he doesn’t comment. “Did you two need something?”
“We need to tell you something.” Zander pulls me closer. So fierce and determined and sounding so sure , but I can feel the faint tremor of something else under it. Not nerves, exactly. Maybe the knowledge that this isn’t going to be easy .
No one ever says joy and happiness are easy, do they? What they say is it’s worth it.
“Tell me,” Zack says, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees the way he braces himself for something terrible.
Zander stands a little taller. He holds me a little tighter. “We’re going to have a baby. A girl. In March.”
He lays it all out. Quick. Simple.
Exactly how I should have done it, in retrospect—especially when I realize my dad didn’t even ask. Stephanie did. The girls did. When are you due? When can we have a baby shower? Those are the excited things they jockeyed to ask me while we were leaving.
But this is about Zander’s family now. As we stand there in a kitchen that seems cold and empty with Zelda’s absence, Zack’s eyes fill. Just fill right up .
This is worse, I think in a panic. Ten million times worse than my father’s nonreaction. This big, gruff man on the brink of tears.
I want to turn and run, but Zander is holding me in place.
I realize he’s holding on to me not only because he’s still giving me comfort, but also because he needs something to hold on to himself while we wait to see if Zack really will sob the way it looks like he might.
I had no idea that it would feel this good to be needed. To be someone else’s anchor when I’ve always been so bound and determined to be my own.
“A girl. In March,” Zack echoes. Like those might be his dying words because we’ve stabbed him through the heart.
Zander clears his throat. “Just like Mom.”
His father nods, a bit like I might expect a soldier who just crawled out of a trench to nod. Out of place. Bleeding out. Then he exhales, like it’s his very last breath.
I hold mine.
Zack clearly isn’t leaving us just yet, because as I watch, his mouth curves. Upward. Until it turns into the sort of smile I can’t remember seeing on him in ages. Ten years, at least.
“Isn’t that something,” he says, and when Zack says it, he sounds awed .
Like it’s a good something.
“A baby girl,” he says, out loud, with wonder. I don’t know what to call this fizzy, dancing reaction inside of me. Or the way Zander holds me, still. “Won’t that be something?” The tears are still there in his eyes, but he’s laughing now. “Now, who would have guessed that? Besides your mother.”
He doesn’t sober at the mention of Zelda, though his laugh softens. “She always hoped...” He shakes his head, and claps his hands together. “Enough of that. This is good news! We need to celebrate. A toast?” He starts moving deeper into the kitchen, then stops to spin back to us. “No alcohol, of course. Not for expectant mothers.” Then he lifts his hand in the air in a kind of excited fluster that warms me top to bottom.
I magic us all mugs of tea, even though it means Zander drops his arm from around me. And I miss it. “It’s called Celebration Tea.”
“Creative,” Zander says, and only grins when I lift a brow at him.
Zack laughs, and it might be the most tickled I’ve ever seen him. “Celebration is right.” He lifts the mug. “To the mother and father of my grandchild.” He points a finger at us before clinking his mug to ours. “This girl better call me Grandpa. None of that cutesy bullshit people do nowadays. No Grampy, G-dog, Big Z —Grandpa.”
“No, sir.” Zander says, grinning at his dad over the rim of his mug. “Grandpa it is.”
This is exactly how it should be. This is right . So much so I can’t even feel sad about Bill in this moment, because we have Zack. We have my mom and our coven. We have Stephanie and my sisters. We even have Zelda too.
I know I’m not the only one who feels her now, right here with us.
We sip at our tea for a few minutes, all grinning at each other until my cheeks start to ache from such unnatural activity, and then Zack puts his mug down on the counter.
“Hold on one second,” he says, before disappearing down the hallway he originally appeared from.
I mean to scowl when I look at Zander, but that grin seems stuck on my face. Maybe that’s why he grins back. “Told you, baby.”
I tell myself to file that away so I can be mad about it later. The told you so as well as yet another baby . I get the feeling Zander knows exactly what I’m doing and doesn’t much care.
When Zack returns, he’s holding something in his hand. As he comes closer, I see it’s a necklace—a lot like the one I’ve been wearing since Zander gave me his for protection. It has the same design, though it’s smaller and the chain more feminine than a band of leather.
“I know you’re wearing Zander’s right now for all that coven garbage,” Zack says, holding it out to me. “Take this one instead. It was Zelda’s.”
I try to step back, to refuse, but the Rivers men have me surrounded. “I don’t think I’m the right one—”
“That baby you’re carrying is part Rivers, which means so are you. She’d want you to have it. You know she would.” Zack sounds definitive. Without waiting for me to agree, he places the necklace over my head with his own two hands. Then he mutters a few words that magic Zander’s back to his own neck.
“It has Zelda’s magic in it,” Zack says to me, putting his hands on my shoulders and giving me a little squeeze. “When the baby is born, it can be hers.”
To my horror, I realize I’m going to cry again.
I could stop it this time. I could zap myself back to my stock room, but I don’t. This feels like the kind of moment that deserves tears.
As if tears aren’t always a sign of unbearable weakness, like they are when you’re half human in a world of full witches. As if maybe, sometimes, they’re no more and no less than a sign of too many things to feel at once and no words for them.
I sniffle as I look up at Zack, who is already so excited to be my baby girl’s grandpa that it makes everything in me feel...different.
“I hope you know, I loved her too,” I manage to choke out.
“Who didn’t? No one worth a damn.” Then he pulls me into a kind of one-armed side-hug, because he’s using his other arm to pull Zander in. He squeezes us tight to him—something I don’t think would have happened if Zelda was here. Or maybe she would have pulled him right in too.
“Oh, she’d be so happy,” he says, his voice cracking.
I hate crying, I do, but these tears aren’t so bad. “She is,” I tell him, not even caring that someone is hugging me against my will. “She’s delighted.”
Because I feel it. Because I know.
When my gaze meets Zander’s, I know we all do.
Zack holds us close a moment longer, then huffs out a breath. “Well. Enough of this.” He releases us, wiping at his face. “I’ve got to tell everyone I know I’m going to be a grandpa. You two probably have work to do. Just promise me you’ll take care of yourself—and my granddaughter—while you kick some Joywood ass.”
I nod, but then it occurs to me what this moment needs. I close my eyes, think of what I want, and when I open them I hold out the mug Zack was using. With its new design.
#1 Grandpa
He barks out a laugh. “I’ll use it every morning.” He beams at me, holding that mug like it’s a pile of precious jewels. Then he does that thing men do when they clear their throats of emotion. Or try to. “We’re proud of you,” he tells me, his voice raspy.
He and Zander share a hug. A real one, not just a manly approximation of fist bumps.
“See you soon, Dad,” Zander murmurs.
Then he leads me back outside, his fingers threaded through mine.
I know as we hit the fresh air, the dark with autumn crisp on the breeze, that everything is changing. It has been for a while, I guess, but it keeps shifting on me. There’s no sturdy ground.
Except Zander’s hand in mine. Except the way he keeps to my side, matching his athletic stride to mine. This thing between us like steel girders, the architecture beneath everything else, no matter what I usually tell myself three hundred sixty-four days of each year.
I should freak out about that. I’m sure I will—but maybe tonight is not the night. Maybe tonight I can just...hold on.
He stops at the passenger side of his truck. “Now that we’ve gone through the fucking emotional gauntlet, what other wounds should we poke at?”
He’s joking, I think, but I suddenly see clearly exactly what we have to do. Not only because it’s what I want to do.
Something inside of me insists upon it. “Let’s take a walk down by the confluence.”
I feel him stiffen, because that’s what his mother used to do. “El—”
I ignore his resistance, squeeze his hand, and begin to walk. Down the hill the big house on stilts is settled on, along the pathway Zelda took every morning before she got sick.
Zander isn’t happy about it. He’s grumbling as we go, but I know this is right.
We walk, closer and closer to the confluence, and then I see her. Just where she should be. Standing, looking out toward the confluence. “Don’t you see her?”
“Who?” he mutters irritably.
I grab his hand and squeeze it tight as we walk toward her. I don’t think, don’t plan. I pour some of my magic into him so he can see as she turns, as she begins to walk toward us.
I feel his whole body go rigid. Instantly.
Then the breath goes out of him on an exhale that forms the word “Mom.”
He stops walking, and I can’t pull him along. He’s too big. But it doesn’t matter because Zelda is floating across the ground to meet us.
Her smile is wide. Her eyes glisten. She’s not like Elizabeth and Zachariah—not as fully formed as they are, but she moves for Zander and wraps her ghostly arms around him. I can tell he feels it. That the touch of her spirit shudders through him almost as if she’s really here. Body and soul, instead of soul alone.
“You don’t know the work it takes to make this spirit body thing,” she says to him, pulling back and placing a hand on his cheek. She struggles to do all this, I can see it in her face, though it’s easier here, close to the confluence and its magic.
“They say I’ll get better at it. Stronger. And I will.” She looks from Zander to me and then back again. “You know I’m right here. Whether you see me or not. You know.”
There’s a kind of arrested look on his face, like he’s shocked to see her. Hear her.
Then Zelda turns her silver gaze to me. “She’ll know me too.” She reaches out, that ghostly hand moving against my stomach. I feel it like a breeze, not an actual touch, but it’s enough. It’s more than enough.
Then she lifts her fading hand up to the necklace that was once hers around my neck, and she smiles at me. “As it should be.”
She’s getting quieter, disappearing right in front of us. I grip Zander’s hand, knowing he’ll feel it like another loss no matter how much he believes she’s here, just out of sight.
“You did the imperative,” she whispers into the wind. “Take care of each other.”
Then she’s gone, but I realize in her wake that her insistence I tell Zander wasn’t only about wanting her son to know. It was about all this. He had to know, my coven had to know, for us to make the choices that have brought us, slowly and carefully, here.
Where we might win. It’s imperative that we do.
Zander sits down, heavily, on a bench that looks over the confluence, St. Cyprian, and where we won our Litha head-to-head with the Joywood on the other side. His whole body is shaking, so I magic us a blanket and wrap it around him. Around the both of us, because I’m still here, holding on to him the way he held on to me.
“Ellowyn.”
He doesn’t say anything else. Just my name, ragged and pained.
“She’s trying so hard,” I assure him. “She’ll get there.”
“I know. I could tell. I just...why?”
“So you’d know. Really know. No doubts.” I understand why he might have had doubts about Zelda visiting him. He was worried she would blame him. Worried that he’d been wrong.
Even though he doesn’t cry, it’s my turn to stroke his hair. To press a kiss to his temple. To comfort him. While the stars and moon shine above us, like they’re watching out for us too.
I can hear the sound of birds roosting, likely an eagle and an owl. Maybe even a raven. When I lift my head, I see the glowing eyes of a huge buck I can feel is Jacob’s familiar, Murphy.
Everyone’s keeping track. Taking care of us even on this side of the river, far off the bricks.
“Emerson’s going to be pissed if we stay much longer,” Zander finally says.
“Yeah,” I agree.
Neither of us moves.
He looks down at me.
I turn in to him.
I think maybe we’re both going to speak, but our eyes meet, and no words come out. Not because I want to lie, for once, but because I don’t .
I don’t know how to speak past all this longing. All this dangerous, revolutionary pining for something good. Something safe and hot and mine .
Something that feels the way joy should, too close to tears and brighter than the sun inside me.
He lowers his mouth to mine. Slow, when I’m not sure we’ve ever been slow about anything unless we were trying to torture each other.
This isn’t that. It’s not hesitation either. Zander seems absolutely sure.
It’s like he’s giving me a choice.
A choice I should turn away from and don’t, but this isn’t a surprise. Choices aren’t my strong suit.
But I make one, don’t I? I lean into him.
His mouth touches mine. A touch . I wouldn’t even call it a kiss.
The brush of lips.
Our breath mingles for a second before he pulls me closer.
He hasn’t kissed me like this in over ten years. I wouldn’t have let him if he’d tried. I shouldn’t let him now. There’s too much up in the air. Too much I’m almost certain to mess up to let myself be kissed with tenderness .
Still, I don’t pull away. I don’t put a stop to it or turn it wilder, like I could. Like I would have even a few hours ago.
I sink into the soft, into the gentle.
Into him.
Into all that love we won’t admit but can’t leave behind.