Conversion (33 page)

“All right,” Dr. Gupta said, a reassuring hand on my back. “Next time.” She started walking back down the marble hallway, and Spence and I fell in step behind her.

Anjali followed us to the front door. She struggled to hide her disappointment in me, but failed.

“Listen,” she said flatly. “It’s fine, okay? Emma knows you love her.”

“I’m worried she doesn’t,” I said in a low voice.

“Maybe talk to her about it,” Anjali suggested. “She’ll understand. She’s just having a really rough time right now.”

I could feel tears welling behind my eyes, in danger of squeezing out. Anjali knew they were there, I could tell, so instead of saying anything else, she drew me into a long hug. Some of her hair got into my mouth, but I didn’t care. I hugged her back.

“Let’s do something fun this weekend,” she whispered in my ear. “And no more crazy Emma talk. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Spence was already outside, unlocking the car.

“Bye, Spencer,” she trilled.

“Bye, Anjali,” he said. “Don’t let Rothstein give you any trouble.”

“Oh, he’s going to give me just the exact right amount of trouble,” she said, grinning.

I slunk into the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

“Well?” Spence said, climbing behind the wheel. “Are you convinced?”

Everyone was right. I was mentally ill. I had to be. Right? Occam’s Razor. The simplest answer is the one most likely to be true. And the simplest answer was that I had cracked under the stress of my life at St. Joan’s. Lost it. Been torn to pieces by my life.

But I didn’t feel like I’d lost it. I felt the same as I always did.

“No,” I said to Spence with new resolve. “Can you drive me to Salem Willows? I’ve got to talk to Emma.”

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

T
he next day was a Sunday,” I say. “March 20. Meeting day.”

Reverend Green is twisting his shirt cuffs in his hands. “So in that time, two more witches were named,” he says.

“Martha Corey,” I confirm. “And Rebecca Nurse.”

“Ah, yes.” Reverend Green looks pitying around his eyes. “I’ve heard tell of Goody Nurse. Her sisters, too.”

“Yes,” I say, looking down at my hands. “My mother’d complained of Goody Corey for years. Goodman Corey was quarrelsome with my father. And Goody Corey, his third wife, was well born. My mother felt it keenly.”

“How did Mary Walcott get a bite on her wrist?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps she heard about mine. She could have done it herself. She saw how people were treating us, and so she did it. Or perhaps the Devil sent someone’s shape to bite her.”

A shadow crosses Reverend Green’s face. “Is that what you think?” he asks me.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I just don’t know.”

We file into the meetinghouse on Sunday, as solemn a procession as I ever saw. The aisle parts before us as Abby Williams, Betty Parris, Betty Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and I, joined by my mother and Goody Pope, process in and take our ceremonial seats at the front of the meetinghouse. I can’t hear my own thoughts over the whispering. Goody Corey’s there with her husband, sitting on one of the benches off to the side, and there’s a strange dead space around them, as though no one wants to sit too close. Goody Nurse is absent, which is strange of itself. She never missed a Sunday meeting.

Reverend Parris sits with his wife, deep circles under his eyes, scanning the face of every congregant who comes through the meetinghouse door. Three more witches, still unknown to him, and they must be in the crowd. Old women, young matrons, worthy gentlemen, laborers, youths, children, frown and smile and whisper in each other’s ears, all gathered to come hear the word of God, some of them to receive the sacraments, and three of them devils.

The hymn is named and we stand to sing, lifting our voices to the heavens. I close my eyes, letting the music fill me. I think of Tittibe locked in Boston jail with Sarah Good and her sucking babe, and Sarah Osburn, too. I wonder if they’re praying to God. I wonder if the Devil is visiting them that very moment and telling them to be quiet, else he cut off their heads.

Or perhaps the Devil is here. The thought makes me shudder, and I open my eyes, surveying the singing faces all around me, eyes lifted to the heavens or on some faces closed in concentration, forming the hymn’s words. I think I catch a glimpse of a shadow ducking behind someone’s shoulder, and I whimper, clutching for Betty Hubbard’s arm.

“Shh, Annie,” she soothes me, but I’m beginning to tremble. I want to run away, I want to flee the meetinghouse and run to our barn, where I can hide in the hayloft and no one can find me.

Betty Hubbard grips my hand hard and pulls me down next to her as Reverend Lawson mounts the pulpit with the big Bible, opening it for the reading of the Word. He recites a Psalm, but I’m deaf to it. Everywhere I look, I see people staring at me. As soon as I catch them, they look away. Out of the corners of my eyes I keep seeing faint shapes moving, like mice scuttling in the shadows. My grip on Betty’s hand tightens.

Abby Williams is restless, too, in her seat. She doesn’t want to be at meeting any more than I do. Not for eight hours, when it’s starting to be spring outside. She keeps snuffling and shifting about on the pew, elbowing Betty Parris, scratching at her clothes and rearranging her skirts around her feet. Mary Walcott pokes her in the ribs to keep her quiet. All at once Abby lets out the loudest, rudest sigh I’ve ever heard. She stands, and stamps her foot.

“Name your text!” she hollers to Reverend Lawson, who is so shocked he can hardly speak.

The congregation gasps, and falls into appalled silence. Nobody has ever challenged a minister like this. No one. And certainly not a little nothing of a servant girl. It’s impossible. But it’s just happened.

“I beg your pardon, child?” intones the visiting minister, peering down at her from over the pulpit edge.

“Name your text!” she cries again.

He does so, but I can’t hear him over the whispering of the congregation. “Did you ever see such impudence? It’s the Devil’s doing, surely. She’s in her fits, so she is.”

Abby hears him, though, and rolls her eyes with drama and despair. “Ugh!” she sighs. “It’s a long text.”

“Sit down, you!” Reverend Parris shouts from his seat next to his wife, and Mary Walcott drags Abby back to her seat. “You’ll hear the Reverend’s doctrine.”

“I know no doctrine he had, and if he did name one, I’ve forgotten it,” Abby grouses, folding her arms over her chest and stamping her foot.

The villagers gathered in the meetinghouse can’t contain their shock and interest; conversation starts to rise among them. Reverend Lawson sees he’s lost our attention, so he clears his throat, beginning a long and meandering disquisition on the Bible passage he’s chosen to elucidate for us today. I can’t sift meaning from his words, so thick is the whispering from the villagers around me. All I hear is my own name, and Abby’s, and the other girls’, and talk of our marks, and the names in the Devil’s book, those that have been named and those that haven’t.

Across the room Goody Corey gazes steadily upon us, looking down her grand imperious nose, and then she rests her hand on her elderly husband’s arm and he inclines his ear to her. I see her mouth moving and she’s staring at us, but I can’t hear what she says over the whispering. My head is growing light. I’m swaying in my seat, and Betty Hubbard has to wrap her arm about my waist to keep me sitting upright. Abby notices my panic and follows my stare across the buzzing congregation. She spots Goody Corey talking of us to her husband, her fine brows drawn down over her eyes.

“Look!” Abby shouts, interrupting the interminable sermon.

She points into midair at nothing.

“What? Where?” voices around us cry out in baffling, overlapping waves.

“Look where Goody Corey sits on the beam, sucking her yellow bird betwixt her fingers!”

Goody Corey screams aloud and claps her hands over her mouth as the congregation bursts into angry speculation. “Where? There? She’s sent her spirit up to sit upon the rafters!”

Everyone sitting near the Coreys edges away as quickly as they can, and the imperious woman looks about her with a rising sense of panic and indignation.

“What? No. I’m here!” she cries, pointing a finger at her chest.

My vision is crowded with whispers and movement and strange shapes narrowing in. I feel my heart thudding in my chest, the sweat flowing freely in my hair, under my arms.

“I . . .” I’m stammering. My breath won’t come.

Betty Hubbard looks sharply at me and says, “Annie? Annie, what is it?”

Something inside me breaks. I close my eyes and open my mouth, and a piercing scream tears out of me. The scream relieves the pressure in my head, and it feels so good that I scream again.

“It’s there!” I jabber, lurching in my seat. “I see it there! Goody Corey’s yellow bird sits on Reverend Lawson’s hat! I see it plain as day, the Devil’s yellow bird sits on the Reverend’s hat!”

Hands are clapped over my mouth and wrap around my waist as I thrash, trying to hold me back, but I will not be held back. My words are loose.

“It’s Goody Corey for certain,” the village around me is saying. “Goody Corey’s one of the nine. Ann Putnam said so. She sees it. Goody Corey’s bewitched Ann Putnam!”

SALEM WILLOWS, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS

MONDAY, MARCH 12, 2012

A
lmost seven. I didn’t remember what time Emma said she was meeting Tad at the Willows, but I knew I’d find her there.

The Salem Willows was a park, kind of. It was an amusement arcade on this peninsula that stuck out in the water between Salem and Beverly Harbors. It had been there since forever, at least the nineteenth century, and it was kind of the place where people went when they wanted to feel comfortable. Guys fished off the pier. Skee-Ball and saltwater taffy and spooky fortune-telling machines that described the man we’d marry for a dime. A carousel with these horses with bared teeth and their eyes rolling back in their heads that played organ music and had brass rings for us to grab as we went whirling by. We’d try to chuck them into a clown mouth, and if we hit it, bulbs lit up and bells went off and everyone got an extra spin. The carousel was from the 1860s and had been worn thin by generations of Salem kids sliding on and off the backs of the horses.

Salem Willows took its name from the willow trees that dotted the lawn, drooping their branches in curtains around the gazebo. They were two hundred years old. When the wind kicked up over the harbor, curling the waves into white ripples and rushing through the willow branches, it sounded like whispering. In the wind we could almost hear the echoes of old ragtime bands, and children laughing, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s scratching pen.

Emma and I loved to go there when we were feeling down. It reminded us of when we were kids, and Emma and I would wrap ourselves in the willow branches, coiling them around our bodies and hanging from them, dangling our feet. My mom would drop us off with five dollars each and come back two hours later to find us both sticky and exhausted, ice cream down the fronts of our shirts, with fistfuls of arcade tickets that we wanted to trade for Pixy Stix and rubber spider rings. Emma’s mom didn’t really drive, so it was usually mine who ferried us to and from the Willows in our station wagon, the one that was now speckled with rust in our driveway.

Spence and I rolled past the gate, squinting for a parking space. The evening sky was pale over the water, and the arcade lights had come on, fat glass bulbs flashing on the outside, interior lit by dull fluorescent lights. I think it was probably prettier in the nineteenth century.

“You know she’s meeting him here?” Spence asked. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How come?”

Spence wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know. It seems kind of . . . seedy.”

I frowned out the window, not answering.

We climbed out of the car, and a breeze from off the water wrapped around me, peeling away my warmth and making me shiver. Spence pulled me to him in an embrace while the wind lifted my hair, tangling my curls into a thicket around my head.

“I can’t believe I ran away,” I whispered into his chest. “Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s go find her.”

The arcade stretched along a sort of midway, with rolling doors open to the outside forming a pavilion, and we peered into the succession of gaming rooms, dodging kids who chased each other around the whack-a-mole, stepping over an errant rolling Skee-Ball. Emma wasn’t there. I checked the old dancing monkeys game—it wasn’t really a game, we just put a dime in and these grinning stuffed monkeys beat castanets together while a Dixieland jazz bit played for a few minutes. When we were kids and I lost her, I could always find Emma by the dancing monkeys. But she wasn’t there either.

“Gazebo?” Spence asked from a position of safety near the door. His hands were in his pockets, like he was afraid he’d get tetanus if he touched anything. I shot him an irritated look. I didn’t want him to be a fancy boy all the time. He ought to be able to be just a normal person sometimes, instead of an Andover kid in a button-down.

The monkey castanets were deafening, and everywhere I turned, lightbulbs flashed on and off, leaving blue-red afterimages behind my eyelids. The fluorescents bathed everything in a sick green haze. I brought my hand to my forehead, pressing my thumb between my eyebrows in an effort to push away the ache that was burrowing in there. I heard a scream and I jumped, my heart in my throat, but it was just a kid running past me with a balloon in her hands. I reached for the corner of a pinball machine to get my balance.

“Colleen?” said a voice by my ear.

“What?” I was confused. It was Spence. God, my head was killing me.

“You okay?”

“Um . . . ,” I said. “She’s . . .”

Spence frowned, taking me by the elbow. “She’s not here. Come on. Let’s go outside.”

He steered me through the walls of pinball machines, edging warily around a big guy in a sleeveless metal band T-shirt who was swigging a beer and looking disinclined to make room for us to pass.

“Hey,” said Beer Bottle Guy, folding his arms to make himself bigger. “Watch it.”

“Dude,” Spence said, running his fingers through his flop of hair. “It’s my girlfriend. She’s kind of faint. Okay?”

Beer Bottle Guy took one step forward, and for a second I thought things were about to get really, really ugly. “Emma,” I said weakly. “Here. She’s . . .”

Beer Bottle Guy looked me up and down, and then without saying a word stepped aside for us to pass. I must’ve looked pretty bad. But then a little girl said, “Daddy,” and held her arms up to Beer Bottle Guy, who hoisted her to his hip and turned his back on us with a glare.

“Come on,” Spence said, his jaw tight. He propelled me outside to the gazebo, away from the cloying stench of cotton candy and ice cream and boiled peanuts. The wind was stronger out there, and the willow branches brushed together around us as I wrapped my arms around myself against the cold.

“Feeling better?” he asked, looking into my face, smoothing a curl from my forehead.

The corkscrew of pain was back. I shook my head.

“Are you sure she was going to meet him here?” Spence asked. “I think we should go. You can talk to her tomorrow.”

“Here,” I said. “Definitely.” I craned my neck, scanning the faces of people strolling past the game rooms, moving in and out of the carousel, pausing to sift through tickets to see if there were enough for a ride on the kiddie elephant train. My eyes settled on each face, measuring, hunting. Emma, I’d see immediately. Her hair was so pale, it almost glowed at night. But Mr. Mitchell wouldn’t look like Mr. Mitchell. No tie and button-down on him tonight. At Salem Willows, meeting his former student lover, he’d look like Tad. And I’d only seen Tad twice.

“Colleen,” Spence said. His hand hunted along my hip, and it felt warm and dry as it found and closed around mine. Solid. Reassuring. “Come on. You’re exhausted. And I’ve got to get back. Please let me take you home.”

“Wait,” I said.

I spotted a rangy young man hip-deep in a crowd of children, silhouetted against a backlit sign advertising
FRESH SEAFOO
D LOBSTER ROLLS SCAL
LOPS FRIED TO ORDER
. A familiar slouch, a mess of hair that I recognized. He was just there for a second, his shadow sliding over the wall. Then he was gone.

“There. Tad,” I said. I pulled on Spence’s hand, whispering, “Hurry!”

He started to protest, but I shushed him, steering him with me into the stream of people shuffling along the midway, making our way through the confusion of noise and lights. I caught a glimpse of the back of Tad’s head before he disappeared behind a group of twentyish guys, one of whom spotted me and let out a low whistle.

“I’d hit that,” he said straight to me as we passed.

I ignored him. It happened so fast that Spence missed it, not that he would have been able to do anything anyway.

The crowd thinned as we neared the end of the midway, and sure enough, there he was. Tad walked with his head down, shoulders up, hands in his pockets. Washed-black band T-shirt. No jacket. Today looked warmer than it was, and he was probably freezing. New England fools us that way sometimes.

I touched Spence’s shoulder to get him to hang back.

“But—” Spence objected as I put a finger to my lips and indicated that we should watch where Tad was going. I hadn’t seen Emma yet. But the corkscrew dug in deeper. The pain in my head made the lights brighter, surrounded by coronas of glare.

I knew she had to be there.

Tad paused, backlit by the funnel-cake stand, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and stared down at it for a second. He texted something, and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He looked around, spotted what he was looking for, and continued on. He was heading for a dark corner of the park, past the reach of the bulbs and lights and music. Over by the water.

When I guessed he was far enough ahead of us, I tugged on Spence’s hand, and we followed. The lights fell away behind us. As we moved closer to the water, I felt the wind chill cut deeper into me. I huddled closer to Spence, who whispered, “Even if that is him, I think we should go.”

“No,” I said. “Soon. Promise.”

Presently I saw that we were heading for the older of the two fishing piers, the one out over the rockier water. This one wasn’t as good for the stripers, so hardly anyone went on it, mostly just teenaged kids like us who wanted a private place to make out away from prying adult eyes. But the ocean breeze was too cold that night, and only one figure stood on the very end of the pier, her back to us, pale blond hair almost glowing in the dark.

Emma.

I was about to call out to her, but the pain twisting in my head made it hard for me to focus, and I realized from his gait that Spence was practically holding me up.

“Emma,” Tad shouted. The wind carried his voice to where Spence and I were hidden by the darkness.

“Wait,” Spence whispered, pulling me with him into the sheltering branches of the willow nearest the water.

The pain in my forehead blistered so hot that all I could manage to say was “Okay.”

From inside the sheltering willow branches, I saw Emma turn, her face a twisted mask of anguish, her features smeared by grief. The wind coming in off the water gathered her hair and blew it up the back of her head, standing it straight on end, a white-blond halo on an angel of death.

“Tad,” she choked, bringing her hands to her cheeks. Emma was weeping. She started to run to him, but his hands stayed thrust deep in his pockets and she stopped short, her arms wrapping around herself in the embrace that she wanted to find in him.

“Emma, listen—” he began, approaching her slowly, one hand extended.

“Why?” The word tore out of her, the sound of a soul ripped asunder, and the pain forced itself deeper into my forehead. I gasped and sagged against Spence, willow branches blowing against my cheeks.

“Why would you leave me for HER?”

With a guttural scream Emma hurled herself at Tad, a screaming banshee of rage and despair. He tried to fend her off, raising his hands to protect his face, cowering, backing away down the pier.

“Emma,” he cried, his voice breaking. “You don’t understand!”

“She has EVERYTHING,” Emma screamed, scrabbling at him. “Why? Why her?”

Blows tumbled down on Tad’s head, and he was sputtering, choking back tears of his own, his handsome face contorted in pain. His hands flailed for her wrists, but the wet sea breeze made her slippery, and they couldn’t get ahold of each other. Their shadows struggled together against the stars, Emma wailing in anguish, Tad grunting with the effort of fighting her off. Tad took another step nearer the edge of the pier.

“Clara,” I moaned. “Oh, no.”

“She thinks he threw her over for Clara Rutherford?” Spence said.

I nodded miserably, my hands on my cheeks, tears streaming down my face, and dropped to my knees in the mud.

“I loved you!” Emma screamed. “I would’ve done anything for you! Do you understand? Anything! Why did you leave me for her? Why? I don’t understand!”

“Emma!” he cried. “Emma, please!”

Through her tears and the willow branches and the wind between us, I could somehow feel Emma’s eyes burning red. She shoved Tad in the chest with both hands, and he took another step backward.

And then another.

“I—I didn’t—” Tad stammered, and he couldn’t get a grip on her hands to stop her. The wind kicked up stronger, drenching them with spray torn off the tops of the waves, and he took another step, cringing away from the enraged girl in front of him.

He stumbled one more step back, but there was no more pier.

He lurched.

His heel slipped over the edge.

For a long, sickening moment, Tad’s body swayed in space, one hand grasping Emma’s wrist, the other cartwheeling in the dark, silhouetted against the starry harbor night. Below the pier, whitecapped waves curled and broke across jagged tips of granite.

“He’s going to fall!” Spence shouted.

“EMMA!” I screamed. “DON’T!”

Emma spun around to see who was yelling, and when she moved, she pulled Tad along with her. His weight shifted forward, and Tad flung his free arm around her waist, hurling himself into Emma. They tumbled away from the pier edge and he got a better grip on Emma, dragging her screaming, spitting, fighting from the end of the pier and wrestling her to the grass in front of the willow.

“Is that what you think?” Tad shouted, tears streaking his face, straddling Emma with her wrists in his hands, pinning her to the ground like a wriggling fish. Her head thrashed back and forth, her feet churning in the mud. “You really think this is about someone else?”

Emma sobbed, gasping, “I loved you, I loved you, I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

Tad leaned over, placing his hands on her cheeks and forcing her to look him in the eye.

“Emma,” he said, his voice breaking. “Listen. Listen to me. I love you.
I love you.
There isn’t anyone else. There’s only you. There only ever was you.”

I clutched Spence, who’d wrapped his arms around me. I felt the corkscrew of pain moving in my mind, like a living thing, burrowing in. Black mist started creeping into the corners of my vision.

“But—” Emma sobbed. “Clara! You dumped me for Clara!”