The Witch House of Persimmon Point (26 page)

Next she bathed in witch hazel, primrose, and pennyroyal to help boost her fertility. Then she gave her mother an extra dose of medication. Then she waited until the full moon, when she knew she was at her most fertile. That night, she gave her mother an extra dose of medication and made sure Lucy was fast asleep, before Anne bound what little breasts she had with a coarse bandage, let her hair down, and put on one of Nan's old white nightgowns that was two sizes too big, making herself look even smaller.

She went outside under the poplar canopy in the moonlight, where she waited with infinite patience.

Jude was in bed trying to figure out how to stop thinking about little girls. But he didn't want to stop thinking about them. He was a monster, and he knew it. It was too hard to fight it. It was exhausting. He got out of bed and shoved the window open to get some air. And there she was, smack dab in the middle of his view, standing like a ghost. Just staring at his window. He knew she was older now—a woman. But she looked eleven years old again standing there, and he couldn't help it. He felt the monster get hungry.

“I know you're looking at me, Jude. Come into the night garden. We can talk. It's not good to be all alone. Let's let our monsters out together. Like old times, what do you say?”

“You're crazy. Why do I want to waste my time with you?” he said.

“Because, Jude, I'm the only one who ever really understood you. We were friends, did you forget? I loved you. Besides, I gave your sorry ass somewhere to live.”

“After everything I've done, you want to stroll with me in your yard in the middle of the night?” He squinted at her.

When she saw him turn away from the window she knew he would follow her, pursue her. She began to walk, moving faster when she heard the door slam, and then breaking into a run through the garden gate and into the Haven House fields. She ran and he chased her. He became all animal. Though she couldn't see him, she imagined him coming after her on all fours like a wolf, a great white wolf, and she was Red Riding Hood, all alone, running through the forest. But this was her fairy tale; she was in control of it.

She led him in a wide circle around the meadow, taking him on a tour of their violent past, and ending up back where they started. She ran up the back porch steps of the blue-and-white house and disappeared into her sanctuary.

He chased her right into the house and up the stairs. The doors, save one, were all open and candles were lit in every room. He found her in Nan's bedroom. Anne's birth room. Nan's statues of saints still held court over the room, and there were roses strewn across the bed, thorns and all. (What kind of Amore woman would only use the petals?)

Jude was surprised. “What the hell is this? What do you think I am?” he yelled, “your
boyfriend
?”

Anne stood near the bed. This was going to be the trickiest part of the whole plan. To avoid getting pricked by a thorn. She'd dipped them all in the jimson weed oil. It happened fast, so fast, and because he intended to kill her he didn't have to be careful, so he beat her and pushed her down, he scratched her and bit her, and flipped her over so he could take her from behind. Years of rage and lust and craziness had built up inside of him, and he was inside her before he even made a conscious decision on how to go about it. This was his mistake. He was kneeling on the thorns.

Before, when he stalked his prey, he was usually more thoughtful. He knew that this was going to end badly, but he didn't care, as long as it ended badly for both of them. How he hated this girl who he felt was his match.

When he finally came inside of her, he arched his back and slammed into her so hard that he actually forced her off of him. She fell forward and scurried quickly into a corner.

He walked toward her, and she didn't try to get away. She tilted her neck a little so he could get a good grip around her neck with his long graceful fingers that had delivered her so much pain.

As he began to squeeze, he started to hear a low hum that grew to a loud pitch: a deafening pitch, a growing cacophony of screams so loud and painful he had to remove his hands from Anne's neck and hold his ears. Hunching over, looking around desperately, Jude couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Not from her. Her lips were sealed in a silent, frightening, crooked smirk. She looked up and pointed at the ceiling.

“Look, Jude, look at my friends.” Anne's face broke into a grin.

He looked up then and saw a sight no human should ever see, one that could make a sane person crazy. (Luckily for him, Jude was crazy already.) He saw Anne's eyes roll into the back of her head as the entire room seemed to shift around him. The walls bulged and wavered; the closet door was opening and slamming shut, opening and slamming shut. Anne focused back on him and opened her mouth. Her teeth appeared to grow into sharp, needlelike fangs as she unleashed an unearthly sound that began low and then rose, channeling all the emotion from the girls he had murdered; death screams made of the memory of so much pain he felt himself breaking from the inside out. He backed away, feeling for the wall; it rushed at him, like a magnet to metal.

Jude was pinned against the wall, wrecked and sobbing, trying to pull his hands free to hold them against his ears to shut out the piercing screams—and then, it just stopped.

Standing directly in front to him was a battered Anne, looking more fiercely beautiful than she ever would again.

It was time for her to finally win. She'd made him docile with the jimson weed, and now she could kill him.

She held out a handful of pills with a small smile. He tried to wrench his body from the wall to no avail. Trapped, he knew he had no other option.

“Take them,” she whispered, holding them closer.

“I won't.”

“Take them and sleep. Don't you want to sleep, be released from it all?” she asked.

“No. I won't.”

This time she hissed. “Take them, or I call the police and you will go away for life this time. How do you like it in there? All locked up. Do they hurt you? Rape you? That's called
karma
.”

Anne moved her hand closer and closer, until finally he chocked the pills down, pasty and toxic, eating them out of her hand like an animal at a petting zoo. And in a way, he was relieved as he fell into a hazy half sleep.

Each time he blinked, everything around him was distorted again. Blink. Anne sitting with her legs crossed and childishly playing with a tooth he must have knocked loose. Blink. Anne playing ring-around-the-rosy, holding hands with the air. Blink. Anne pressing her face so close to his that all he could see were her crossed green eyes. Blink. Anne kissing him. Blink. Anne laughing with wild abandon. Anne was enjoying this. She looked just like he must have looked to all those little girls, bigger than life—a monster. And in that moment he loved her, which scared him more than dying. And Anne? Anne watched him, hating him. And the ghosts? The ghosts were there, too, surrounding her, keeping her safe, soothing her as they always did and always would. Finally, he took one last tortured breath and was gone.

Now, what to do with him? Anne pulled off her torn nightgown and threw it aside. She was little, but her adrenaline surged. She pulled his arms over his head and dragged him out of the bedroom as best she could (and not without bumping into a few things along the way, but that served him right) and pushed him down the steps. He tumbled down, just as she had once. She ran down after him and dragged him by his feet out of the front doors, down the porch steps, and around the back of the house.

Outdoors, he felt even lighter. Anne alternated between dragging him while she walked backward and dragging him with her hands behind her back, facing forward so she could see her destination—the large raspberry patch by the tree line of the Haven House meadow. The closer she got, the bigger her smile was.

Anne felt strong.

Once she got him to the end of the property, she ran to the gardener's cottage to get a shovel. It felt so nice, running naked in the moonlight, the pine-scented breeze cooling the sweat on her body. The cottage glowed in the moonlight and offered her a comforting nod that she had done the right thing. You couldn't feel this good if you did something truly wrong, could you? She grabbed the shovel and ran back to the body and to the ghosts who were overseeing the whole adventure. She pushed back a section of the raspberry thicket. It scratched and scraped her, but she didn't even notice. When she found a portion of earth that was free of roots, Anne began to dig.

*   *   *

See Anne. See Anne dig. Her skin glistens in the moonlight, her small breasts, one with a bite mark, move as she throws the dirt over her shoulder.

*   *   *

Anne looked at his body in the hole. Such beauty wasted on such a monster. She sat, propped up against a tall pine with her knees pulled against her chest. She stared at the grave, into the night, into the forest. The ghosts danced in the meadow. She watched them. Gwyneth twirled, and Ava leapt at fireflies. Playful and laughing. Happy.

Anne got up. What is done is done, she thought. No looking back. She pushed the earth on top of him. It smelled so good and clean. Full of loam and pine mulch. She was finished. In truth, it crossed her mind that she had something inside her, something deep and dark, much like whatever demon Jude lived with. But in the end, she decided, it was all about survival.

And now there would be a baby. A bright spot amidst all the horrible. Nothing would rob her of this second chance. No one would rob her of anything ever again.

She'd sacrificed a little bit of her humanity. It was a fair price.

 

27

Anne in the Field with Spiders in Her Hair

The very next day, Lucy came storming into the kitchen, yelling, “They won't stop screaming! I have to cut them out!”

She grabbed a knife and ran back to her room, wild-eyed. It took Anne an entire afternoon of sitting next to her mother's locked bedroom door to convince Lucy not to kill herself. And even then, Lucy opened the door just enough to throw the knife out into the hall, then locked the door again and said, “I hope there's something good for dinner. Also, I need another bottle of rye.”

Anne rolled her eyes, then went and made fresh linguini with a quick sauce, just like Nan taught her, and left it next to the knife in the hall and pounded on the door.

“I didn't put the knife back, you know, just in case!” Anne called. “And don't choke on the pasta.”

*   *   *

On the back porch Anne sat with Gwyneth on the swing. They watched Ava play near the juniper. Anne wondered if Ava was stomping on Jude's grave.

“Gwen, I didn't think this whole thing through properly. I can't bring a baby into this house with Lucy. It wouldn't be safe. She's unfit.”

“Oh, and
you
are the model of sanity?” Gwyneth smirked.

“
Shhhh
. I'm serious.”

“So am I, child, so am I.”

“Maybe she went ahead and cut herself to shreds.”

“I don't think so, honey. It's more about attention than anything else. Your mother, she's just a sad old drunk. You, on the other hand…”

“A witch can hope, can't she?”

Anne climbed the stairs that night with two worries. That Lucy was dead. That Lucy was alive.

Lucy was alive.

There had to be a way to suspend her mother between both of those two states. Not dead (because who kills their own mother?) and not quite alive—something not unlike the bourbon-soaked purgatory Lucy herself had chosen years ago.

Anne had to plot.

It wouldn't take much to make her already crazy mother fall off the edge of reality. First, Anne just needed to get her mother to really, truly trust her. She could do that. At least, she thought she could. Lucy's defenses were long gone. Her backbone had died on the streets of New York with her husband, and whatever was left to prop her up had died in the garden with Nan. Lucy was just a ball of near madness now. This would be easy.

*   *   *

Lucy began to respond to Anne's plan almost immediately. This Anne wasn't scary at all. She was clumsy and still looked like some sort of odd sick bird, but she had taken care of Nan's funeral, as well as all the cooking and cleaning and worry. The first thing she did was ask Anne to call her Lucy.

“If you want to be my friend, then be my friend. I don't want a daughter. Call me Miss Lucy and I might like you better.”

Crushed, Anne managed a fake smile and simply said, “Yes, Miss Lucy.”

And Lucy's fate was sealed, because until that moment, Anne hadn't
really
meant to get rid of her mother. It was more theory than fact. An idea that amused her and helped her make the best of a bad situation.

But everyone has a breaking point, and Lucy was our Anne's weakness.

And that was how it went. Anne made Lucy depend on her. She fed her, washed her clothes, picked up her prescriptions from the Woolworth, and even had long philosophical talks with her, when she had been drinking, about love, life, and even death. Each of those talks specifically manufactured to erode Lucy's sense of safety one neuron at a time.

“Well, smarty, what do
you
think happens when we die?” Lucy asked one day after Anne dispelled the notion of reincarnation.

“Well…” It was time to push her mother's sanity right off the cliff. “Well, Lucy, I'm not sure I believe in that whole ‘heaven is a warm cozy place where the ones you love come and get you' idea, whatever that means.” Anne paused for effect. She glanced at her mother. Lucy was beginning to squirm uncomfortably under her pretty bedclothes. Despite Lucy's hard edges, she had a rather old-fashioned idea of horror, and Anne knew exactly what to say next. “I think there is nothing when we die. Just blackness … and bugs. Bugs crawling all over us and eating us clean through.”