Conversion (31 page)

“Danvers?” The Public Health Lady looked perturbed, like maybe I was more off my rocker than she thought.

“Exactly,” I said, sliding open the van door and stepping out into the damp spring afternoon.

“What’s so special about Danvers?” she asked, sticking her head out the van door after me.

I turned and gave her a withering look. “You don’t know?”

“No,” she said.

“Danvers,” I said, “changed its name in 1752. From Salem Village.”

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

Y
ou think Mr. Parris forced Tituba to confess,” Reverend Green says, clearly doubting me.

I shrug, looking down at my hands. “I know he’d been gravely vexed. In want of money. He felt there were forces aligned against him in the village. And it was true.”

Reverend Green runs a hand through his hair, and it falls handsomely over his eye. He knew what sort of contentious community he took over, at least I think he did. But the proof is stark.

The smell of supper comes drifting under the door, and my mouth waters. My hearth at home is cold, unless my sister’s kept it going. I banked the cinders before I left. It’ll be cold salted meat for our supper tonight, and some forage, and maybe pone I baked yesterday. The table’s been thin since my parents died.

“If she, a confessed witch, named the others, then he’d have a means to prosecute them. He’d have proof,” I insist.

Reverend Green eyes me warily. He sees that the adults had taken over our game. But he also sees that we did nothing to take it back.

A week and some passes, with the village talking of nothing but who the other six witches might be. Visitors come streaming into town, some who’d lived here and moved away, like our old minister Mr. Lawson, and some who venture in from nearby towns hoping to catch a glimpse of us girls. Wherever I walk now, I feel eyes follow me. The attention makes me squirm, but it enthralls me, too. Abby flowers under so many watching eyes. Betty Parris gets smaller and paler, but Betty Hubbard’s gotten more beautiful.

Tittibe has confirmed our accusations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, and they’ve been locked away at Boston jail. Some of us thought that with the witches removed from the village, our torments would lessen. But Abby and Betty Parris and Betty Hubbard and I continue to be vexed by invisible shapes in the night. Even Mercy Lewis, who’s been bound out to my parents in service, fell down screaming one morning near the fire. If anything, once the known witches were taken away, our torments worsened.

“The Devil knows we’ve found him out,” my father muses one evening, on March 19 or thereabouts. My mother is on her feet, pacing. “He must advance his game if he’s to keep ahold of the village. I hope Mr. Parris is prepared.”

“Oh,” my mother cries, wringing her hands. “But I can’t stand it. Thomas, I can’t. Two from Boston, Tittibe said. All right. And then the three we know. But that leaves four. Four, here among us! I can’t stand to think. I can barely look anyone in the face for fear of seeing the Devil.”

“It goes far to explain the envy, doesn’t it,” my father muses.

He’s moneyed. My mother’s clothes are well made and new. It’s a sin to be proud, she tells us over and over, but when Mrs. Parris inquires after her hood and topknot, I see my mother’s cheeks grow pink with pleasure. She talked once, and with covetous wonder, of a woman she met at Boston who wore pearls in her ears. That image haunts me still. I think sometimes of the holes in Tittibe’s earlobes and wonder if everyone on the Barbadoes wore pearls, too.

“Oh, but it would. God has blessed us, and yet we’re made to feel we should be ashamed of His favor. I try to pity them, I do, but it’s hard.”

“There’s no shortage of pride in the village,” my father growls. “You’re right about that. Annie?” He holds his mug out for me to fill.

“Let Mercy do it,” I complain, my head bent over my dinner.

“I asked you,” he says with a chill in his voice. “Mercy’s busy already.”

Grumbling, I get up and take the mug to the hearth. Mercy sticks her tongue out at me, and kicks my shin in passing.

“Oh, but you’re right,” my mother says. She’s been bouncing one of my sisters on her knee, and now sets her down to toddle away. “That Lady Martha, for one.”

“What, Goodman Corey’s wife?”

“The same.”

“He’s a rough one. You’d never know it now, but years ago . . .”

“Thomas. The children.”

“Oh, I think they deserve to know. Mercy, did you know Goodman Corey once beat one of his servants to death?”

Our servant Mercy Lewis doesn’t look at my father while she clears his plate.

“I did, sir,” she says, in a low voice.

“He was fined. Undue force. But even so. And his wife, well.”

“Didn’t she pass hard words at Annie at meeting last year? She did, didn’t she?” my mother asks me when I reappear with my father’s ale.

“Yes, Mama,” I say. “I cut in front of her, and she boxed my ears. Called me a vile imp.”

Mercy Lewis laughs through her nose, but a look from my mother silences her.

“And she’s always reading in strange books,” my mother continues. “I’ve no use for women who read.”

“It can start you down a wrong path, sure,” my father says into his drink.

My mother is ruminating, a fingernail between her teeth.

“Why, Thomas,” she says, staring hard at a memory and laying a hand on my father’s sleeve. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it.”

“What?” my father asks, lowering his mug.

“Last year. The children’s boils. Remember?”

“Boils?”

It’s true. Last year sometime I grew a hideous boil on my neck. The doctor had to lance it, and we were afraid it would fester. My brothers got them also. Mercy said it came from want of washing, that folks got them at the Eastward all the time. At the time, that’s what my mother thought, too.

“Ann. Are you certain?” my father asks my mother.

“Why, nearly so.”

“We should ask the doctor if he remembers. Annie, fetch Betty Hubbard down from the loft. We’re going to speak to her uncle.”

Within an hour my mother, my father, Betty Hubbard, and I have arrived at Ingersoll’s Ordinary down the street, where the doctor’s been staying, within sight of the parsonage. The tavern’s a busy place all hours, and that late afternoon’s no different. We enter a hall packed with people gathered around tables or sitting on benches against the wall, many of them strangers, all of them there to gossip and stare. We find Dr. Griggs at his supper, and he wipes his lips and bids my parents sit. They lean close together while Betty Hubbard and I drift off to the side to be nearer the fire.

“There’s Mr. Lawson,” Betty Hubbard whispers, pointing at our former minister.

“I heard he’s to preach on Sunday,” I whisper back. “That Reverend Parris’s too distracted with Betty and them.”

“No small wonder,” Betty Hubbard says. “If Satan were trying to tear down my ministry, why, I’d be distracted, too.”

Betty Hubbard, it seems to me, has forgotten how our ailments began. When she talks, I hear the force of conviction in her words. I know that she believes the adults. She believes them so fully that I almost believe them, too.

The door opens, and another girl about our age appears, her face looking pale and pinched.

“Who’s that?” Betty pokes me.

“Oh! It’s Mary Walcott,” I say.

Betty frowns, confused.

“You know Mary Walcott. Her father’s a captain?” I prod her.

Betty peers at Mary, squinting to remember her, but before she’s left the doorway, Mary opens her mouth in a wretched scream. Betty and I jump, clutching each other, and the room plunges to instant silence as everyone turns to stare.

“My wrist!” she wails. “My wrist! It burns!”

Some women hurry to her, clucking and soothing. One of them brings a candle. They pull her sleeve up, and underneath they find a perfect red semicircle of teeth marks, oozing blood. A crimson drop falls on the floor of the tavern.

“God in heaven, her, too!” someone cries, and Reverend Lawson leaps to his feet, rushing to Mary Walcott’s aid.

“Did you see whose shape did it?” Betty Hubbard asks me, her fingers digging into my upper arm.

“What?” I sputter. The room is roiling in confusion, people shoving past us to get a look at Mary’s wound.

“Why, it looks just like yours, Annie!” Betty Hubbard cries, and before I can say anything, my parents and Dr. Griggs have appeared from the throng, taking my arm.

“I was right,” my mother whispers to me. “Those boils came right after Goody Corey boxed your ears last year. And now her shape’s gone out to bite poor Mary Walcott, as she did you!”

“But Mama,” I start to protest.

“We’re going to the parsonage,” my father informs us. “We’ve got to let Reverend Parris know Martha Corey’s one of the nine.”

A half dozen people flow out into the street with us, Martha Corey’s name on all their lips. Her grandness, her elderly but violent husband, her books. Reverend Lawson’s among our number, with Mary Walcott tucked under his arm in tears, holding her wrist, blood oozing between her fingers. In a trice we’re at the parsonage, banging on the door, and Mrs. Parris opens it, her face already white with tension. Screams pour from inside.

Our mob crowds into the hall, and when we behold the scene unfolding inside, we flatten ourselves against the walls in terror.

There’s Abigail Williams, lit horribly from below by the flames in the hearth, her body twisted into fits. She’s hurrying with violence to and fro across the room like a trapped animal. Lieutenant Ingersoll steps forward and tries to catch her, but Abby stretches up her arms and flies out of his grasp.

“Whish! Whish! Whish!”
she cries at the top of her lungs. She flaps her arms like a bird, caroming around the room with her hair streaming behind her. All at once she stops short.

“Oh, no,” Abby moans in horror, staring at an empty space on the floor.

“Who is it?” someone from our mob calls out. “Is it Goody Corey?”

“Goody Nurse!” Abby screams, pointing a shaking finger at nothing.

“Where?” someone else cries.

“Do you not see her? Why, there she stands!” Abby trembles.

We’re shocked. Rebecca Nurse is of very good name. I’ve never heard aught said against her, and I’ve heard things said about most everyone.

Abby shakes her head in a panic, holding up her hands as if to fend something off.

“No!” she screams. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t take it!”

“Take what, girl?” Reverend Lawson beseeches Abby. “What’s Goody Nurse giving you?”

“A book, a book.” Abby squenches her eyes closed tight and shakes her head.

“What book?” Reverend Lawson presses her.

“I don’t know, I don’t know what book it is. I’m sure it’s none of God’s book, it’s the Devil’s book for aught I know!”

Abby breaks away from invisible hands, running in circles as though she were going to go up the chimney. Then, eyes alight as with a fever, she falls to her knees at the hearth, thrusts her hands into the fire, and pulls firebrands from within, shrieking and cackling, the sparks falling around her like rain.

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

MONDAY, MARCH 12, 2012

T
he reporters once again stalked the upper school entrance, though half of them were following Bethany Witherspoon across the field hockey field, looking for the rumored glowing toxic waste. I reached the outer edge of the wall of reporters and started elbowing my way to the door.

“Excuse me,” I muttered, shoving aside someone in an ill-fitting pantsuit.

A light snapped on and beamed into my eyes.

“Young lady!” some guy hollered close to my ear. “What do you think of Bethany Witherspoon? Are you excited she’s here?”

“Excited?” I said. “No.”

Microphones surged toward my mouth.

“Don’t you think she’ll finally get the attention from the world that the Mystery Illness deserves?” someone else shouted.

“I’m not convinced it deserves any more attention. Excuse me,” I said, keeping my eyes down.

“Miss! Miss! Are you friends with any of the afflicted girls?” cried one voice.

“Do you think the church should try an exorcism? Could the illness be spiritual in nature?” bellowed another.

“Would you go away? Jesus!” I put my hand over the CNN guy’s camera lens and gave it a solid push. Then all at once I was through the doors and safe in the deserted upper school hallway. I paused, realizing I had been holding my breath.

The pain in my head was loosening. It wasn’t totally gone, but the corkscrew felt like it had twisted out partway. And when I yelled at the news guy, my words came out in the right order.

I set my jaw and hurried to Ms. Slater’s room.

Fifth period dragged on for five more minutes, and I had to wait while she finished with her freshmen. I peered through the pebbled glass of the classroom door, seeing the blurred outline of my substitute history teacher pointing to something written on the chalkboard. The classroom was less than half full.

My mind roamed to Mr. Mitchell.

Tad.

Tad and Emma. How did that even happen? I couldn’t get my head around it. Who started it? Was it just a matter of stolen glances over pop quizzes? Did a hand one day brush against another hand?

Did she really love him?

Did he love her?

I pictured Mr. Mitchell tipping Emma’s face up by her chin and bringing his mouth to hers, them leaning into each other. I thought about their mingled shadows in the alley behind the coffee shop. Maybe I was naïve. I mean, I knew I was. I wondered if her parents knew. I wondered if that was the real reason they’d been keeping her home.

The bell rang, and a dribble of freshman girls filed out of the history classroom, their heads hanging, whispering among themselves. A couple of them glanced at me and quickly looked away. God, there were only like eight of them.

“Colleen?” Ms. Slater called, spotting me loitering outside the door. “Are you waiting to talk to me? Is everything okay?”

I looked over my shoulder, nervous, and hurried in, closing the door behind me.

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not. I have to talk to you.”

It took only a couple of minutes to tell her what had happened with Emma. I watched Ms. Slater’s face as I talked. Ms. Slater was an outsider, and she was smart. She had that weird academic vibe that for some reason made me trust her. She’d understand. Maybe she even suspected it herself, but couldn’t prove it.

Instead she sat down, heavily, behind Mr. Mitchell’s abandoned desk.

“Um,” she said. She brought a hand to her forehead.

“It’s Emma, right?” I said, leaning my hands on the desk. “It has to be. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. But it’s got to be her, right?”

“That’s . . .” Ms. Slater trailed off. She blinked once, twice. Then she leveled her gaze at me. “That’s not what I expected you to tell me. At all.”

“But you must have thought something like that. Why else would you have pushed me to work on Ann Putnam for my extra credit?” My voice sounded fragile.

“Honestly? Because I thought you needed extra credit.” She rubbed her forehead with a wary eye on me.

“Oh, come on!” I picked up a piece of chalk from her desk and chucked it across the room.

“What do you want me to say, Colleen?” Ms. Slater got to her feet and stalked over to the lectern at the front of the classroom, gripping it with white knuckles and leaning her head down between her arms.

“But Ms. Slater,” I started to protest.

“Christ, Colleen. I thought you’d figure out that they were all faking. Okay? That’s what I thought was going on.” Ms. Slater’s voice rose. “I thought for sure you’d see it, too. I thought you’d learn about Ann Putnam’s apology, and you’d figure out that all the girls were doing this for attention and to get out of working, just like they did in 1692, in this same goddamn town. Frankly, I thought you were smart enough and popular enough and had been at the school long enough and knew the girls well enough to get the administration to listen to you. I thought the only way to get this under control would be if an insider, like you, made an objection. And then this ridiculous outbreak would come to an end without anyone else getting fired, or sued, or sick, or any of that crap. That’s what I thought, okay? That’s why I steered you to look at Ann Putnam. That’s why I pushed you, and pushed you, and sent you text messages to keep after you about it. Okay?” Her voice broke, and her fist rammed down onto the lectern.

“But I’m just a kid!” I protested, my voice rising. “Nobody’s going to listen to me! You’re a teacher! If you thought they were faking from the beginning, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you go to the board of trustees? Or the media?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said with a bitterness that shocked me. “Sure. That’ll fly. ‘Hey, rich and powerful private school board of trustees, I’m an unemployed adjunct professor with thirty thousand dollars of credit card debt and six figures of student loans who’s taken a substitute high school job ’cause I’m desperate, and guess what? I think all your daughters are full of it.’ Yeah. That would totally have worked.”

“But . . .” I didn’t know what to say. It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t have respected her.

“‘Hey, I’m the sub who’s been hired at the last minute with no secondary teaching experience because your last history teacher was basically a statutory rapist, and guess what? I have some negative opinions about how your school is run.’” She threw her hands up in the air in hopeless rage.

“Why would they all get better when they were on television in New York, then?” I demanded. “You saw them. Clara wasn’t stuttering at all. It’s like the farther away from Emma they got, the better they were. Like me today.”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Maybe it’s site-specific. Maybe it’s being here, in this context, among their classmates and parents and everything. How should I know? But it doesn’t prove Emma’s responsible. Only that it’s only a problem while they’re here.”

“But Ms. Slater,” I said, fear making the words come out shaky and wet. “I’m not faking. It really happened. It happened to me, too.”

She looked up at me with tired eyes, and I realized that Ms. Slater was probably not all that much older than me. I was fooled by the glasses and the serious dresses and the kitten heels. But right then she looked like an overwhelmed girl wearing a woman costume, as afraid as I was.

“I know it did, Colleen. I believe you. And I couldn’t be sorrier for you, I really couldn’t. But I’ve already talked to the Department of Public Health people.”

“You did?” My certainty crumbled.

She wasn’t going to believe me.

“Yes. Have you heard what they think?” She eyed me carefully, as though she were nervous that I was going to freak out.

“Yes,” I whispered.

I lowered myself into one of the desks near the front of the classroom.

“It happens, sometimes. This conversion disorder stuff. I checked.” Her words sounded gentle. Not judgmental, like the Public Health Lady’s.

“It sounds made up.” I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“It’s not. It actually happens pretty frequently, and all over the world. Most commonly to adolescent girls. Girls who are under intense amounts of pressure and stress.”

There was that word again.
Stress.

“But why would it happen to so many of us? If it’s just that we’re all so stressed out and our bodies can’t take it, why would it look so much like a disease?”

“Speaking frankly? Mental illness can sometimes spread among people like that. It’s weird, but it happens.
Folie a deux
is one term for it. But there’s another that we don’t use as much anymore.”

I stared at her with horror. “You think I’m hysterical. You actually think I have hysteria. What is this, 1896?”

“No, Colleen,” Ms. Slater said, leaning an elbow on the lectern and her cheek on her fist. “I think you guys are all just really, really stressed out. And I think the school has done a terrible job of helping you. That’s all. I think as soon as we can get rid of these reporters and this Bethany Witherspoon person, and once everybody gets their college choices squared away, and spring finally comes and you realize that high school is about to be behind you forever, and only getting further away the longer you live, this will all become a weird, distant memory. Then one day, it will be a funny anecdote. And then eventually, it’ll feel like it happened to someone else. Someone you used to know.”

I rested my head in my hands. I trusted her. I trusted Ms. Slater more than the Public Health woman. Maybe they knew better. I wavered, torn between what they were telling me and what I was telling myself.

I rose to my feet, bringing my bag to my shoulder.

“All right,” I said, doing my best to make my face look resigned.

She watched me, to see if it was sinking in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you more. Pulled you aside at the beginning and told you my doubts about Clara. But they’re quick to fire people around here, as you’ve probably noticed. And I’m totally new here. I need to pay my rent like everyone else.”

I realized I was disappointed in Ms. Slater. I wanted her to be better than that.

“It’s okay. I understand,” I said. “I would’ve done the same thing, probably. But there’s one thing I’d really like someone to explain to me.”

“Anything,” Ms. Slater said.

I gave her my steeliest stare.

“How is hysteria making Anjali vomit actual pins?”

Ms. Slater’s mouth opened to object, but no words came out. I frowned at her, but I didn’t wait for a response. While I was talking, my phone had vibrated with an incoming text. Spence was waiting.

“You know, it’s pretty weird to go to boarding school only a forty-minute drive from your parents’ house,” I remarked as I slid in next to him.

“Colleen!” he breathed, pulling me to his chest, his fingers in my curls, and knocking me into the steering wheel as he did so. “I was worried.”

“Ow,” I muttered into his shirt.

“What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened?” Spence pulled away just far enough to look into my eyes and smooth a curl off my forehead, touching my face with his fingertips as though to make sure I were really there, and safe.

“I’m okay,” I whispered.

His fingertips brushed down my cheek, lingering at the corner of my mouth, and his eyes searched into mine for a long minute. I swallowed.

“Colleen,” he started to say, but before he could get anything else out, I took his face in my own hands and pulled his mouth to mine.

He resisted for a second—surprised, I guess—but then his resistance fell away and he kissed back, hungrily. He moved a hand to the small of my back and the other threaded into my hair. He leaned into me, pulling me to him, my knee knocking into the gearshift, and my hands moved to his waist, fumbling under his shirt until they found his skin.

He tasted perfect.

Salty and sweet and male and perfect.

It took real effort on my part to remember that we were sitting in an illegally parked car in my high school parking lot, the self-same parking lot that had been taken over by dueling protesters and a good percentage of the national news media. Shouts from a protester erupted from the steps of the school, and a guy with a camera on his shoulder jogged past the car, followed by a reporter in an overcoat. I broke away from Spence, smiling. I wiped my lips with the back of my wrist.

“Thanks for picking me up,” I said.

Spence looked short of breath, and his eyes were blinking rapidly. “I had to skip basketball. What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“Okay.” He fumbled to start the car, collecting himself. “Where are we going?”

“Anjali’s house.”

“Anjali’s house,” he repeated. “I’m AWOL, just so you know. If I’m not back for check-in at ten, I’m getting written up.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m serious. Two more write-ups and I get suspended.”

“Okay, okay.”

Anjali lived in a sprawling mansion in Pride’s Crossing, which looked kind of out of place in New England because it was made of stucco and had these Spanish tiles on the roof and, like, a five-car garage. I always forgot how to get there, and had to use the GPS on my phone. We spent fifteen minutes lost in downtown Beverly before I finally got everything squared away and pointed us in the right direction.

While that was happening, Spence tried to come up with a gentle way to tell me that he thought I was losing my mind.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he insisted, turning down a side street for the second time that carried us past a graveyard full of leaning death’s head tombstones. I looked away. Sometimes, I’m superstitious.

“You don’t,” I countered. “I can tell.”

“Colleen. Listen. I do. Okay? It’s just . . . I don’t know. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s even possible for a second, why would Emma do that? I thought she got along great with everybody.”

“Maybe she can’t help it,” I said, peering at my GPS. “Turn left.”

“Here? Wait, here?”

“No, we missed it.”

Spence rolled his eyes and did a quick illegal U-turn.

“Look,” he said. “There’s no physical way anyone would be able to hurt people that way. Right? And she wouldn’t have any reason to do it. So doesn’t it make more sense, what the Public Health Department lady said?”