Homecoming (27 page)

“S
leep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite,” Dev said as she tucked the girls into bed. It was her turn tonight. Freddy had done it the evening before, and they liked to share the sweeter tasks of parenthood between them.

“Mommy,” Ginny said, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her fists. She was still young enough that exhaustion manifested itself in these adorable little quirks. “Will you sleep in here with us tonight?”

The room was lit by the glow of the bedside lamp, and in the semidarkness the girls seemed dwarfed by the shadowy overhang of Marji's canopy princess bed, making Dev want to scoop her babies up and hug them to her.

Not that they wouldn't have protested. Marji was already too old to be held or covered in kisses—and Ginny was just on the cusp.

Instead of smothering them with her mama bear love, she sat down primly on the edge of Marji's Little Mermaid comforter, her butt accidentally smushing the section that contained Ariel's tail. She quickly switched positions, but to her surprise, neither of the girls commented on this blasphemy. Usually, they were hard-core about Dev not sitting on any of the important parts of the Little Mermaid or her fish friends, but tonight her daughters were unusually subdued.

After the strangeness of the day, she didn't blame them. They were upset about Eleanora—not that she really thought either girl wholly grasped the concept of death yet—but she knew that only time could heal their wounds.

“If I sleep in here with you guys, who's gonna protect your daddy from the monsters under my bed?” Dev asked them, appealing to their sense of fair play. “You guys already have each other. Daddy would be all alone.”

Marji made a sour face.

“There aren't any monsters under the bed,” Ginny cried.

Dev sighed, realizing the girls were getting too old for her silly made-up stories—her babies weren't gonna be babies for much longer.

“Mama, please,” Ginny said, whining.

“Isn't having your sister enough for you?” Dev asked, in all seriousness.

Dev didn't mind the girls sleeping together in each other's rooms. They did it with some regularity, and she encouraged it, wanting them to be close. Like Dev was with her own sisters.

“No, Marji talks to the ghosts. It's scary sometimes,” Ginny said, shaking her head back and forth, her hair bunching around the pillow.

“Marji,” Dev said, teasing. “Please don't talk to ghosts while your sister's sleeping in here.”

Marji rolled her eyes at her mom and crossed her arms over her chest.

“They talk to me. I don't talk to them.”

“Well, just don't listen to them,” Dev said, enjoying their make-believe game. “Tell 'em to knock it off.”

Marji bit her lower lip, a habit she'd had since she was itsy-bitsy, and Dev realized that maybe this wasn't a game. That Marji and Ginny were being serious about the ghost talk.

“
You
tell them for her, Mommy,” Ginny said. Even though she was younger, Ginny was tougher than Marji, and it'd become a habit, her sticking up for her older sister.

Dev looked over at Marji.

“Is that what you want?” she asked, and Marji nodded.

Hauling herself to her feet, Dev stood in the middle of the room and lifted her arms in the air. She thought about what she could say to force make-believe ghosts to go away. She settled on something simple.

“Get thee gone, spirits, who are haunting this house!” she bellowed in a deep voice, turning clockwise in place, her hair flying in her eyes. “Be gone, I say—”

Both girls screamed.

“What in the world?” Dev cried as she stopped spinning and pushed her hair out of her eyes so she could see what had spooked the girls.

“What is it?” Dev asked, looking around the room.

The girls were cowering together in the bed, covers pulled up to their chins, two sets of saucer-wide eyes staring back at her.

“Mommy,” Marji whispered.

With a shaking finger, she pointed to a spot behind Dev's head.

“
Hair
is in my room.”

Dev noticed that the temperature in the room had dropped considerably. She began to shiver, the air around her heavier, too, somehow. Almost like it was pressing down on her, trying to grind her into the ground.

“Hair?” Dev said, her voice sounding foreign even to her own ears.

She slowly turned around.

“Oh, Lord.”

Her great-great-grandmother Lucretia's mourning hair wreath was leaning on the mantelpiece above Marji's fireplace. The memento mori was spooky enough downstairs above the living room fireplace, but up here in one of the girls' rooms, with no logical explanation for its presence, it was downright terrifying.

“Make it go away,” Marji cried, her eyes welling with tears.

Dev hurried over to the fireplace, plucking the frame from the mantel. She gasped. It was like touching something that'd just come out of a deep freeze. The cold bit into Dev's fingers with a burning sensation, and she dropped the frame. It crashed to the floor, one of the corners hitting the hardwood floor with enough force to split the frame into pieces.

The
crash
of breaking wood and glass made the girls shriek.

“Sweetheart,” Dev said to Marji, as she knelt next to the ruined memento mori. “Could you go get me the broom and dustpan from the kitchen, please?”

Marji looked uncertain, but the need to please her mother outweighed her fear, and she crawled out of the warm bed, leaving Ginny alone under the covers.

“And put your shoes on,” Dev added, pointing to a pair of Pepto-Bismol-pink Crocs someone had kicked haphazardly onto the floor beside the bed.

Marji did a little hop and slipped her feet into the shoes. Then she took off for the kitchen. Dev watched her eldest go, a fleet-footed
almost
adolescent.

“Mommy,” Ginny said, climbing out from under the covers so she could crawl over to the end of the bed. “Will they do that to my hair when I die?”

“Probably not, sweetie,” Dev said as she collected some of the bigger pieces of glass into a pile. “This was something people did a long time ago.”

Ginny nodded, splaying out on her stomach. She didn't seem the least bit scared now that Marji was out of the room. Instead, she rested her chin in her hands and watched Dev work.

“You were spinning, Mommy,” Ginny said, kicking her feet in the air. “And the tall lady brought it.”

Dev froze, a long shard of glass in her hand.

“What?”

Ginny started kicking her feet even faster, sensing she'd unsettled her mother.

“The tall lady, Mommy,” she said. “She was in the picture at Auntie E's house.”

Dev racked her brain, trying to think of what picture Ginny was referring to—and then suddenly she knew. Knew like the knowledge had always been there, nestled inside her brain.

Hessika.

“Not a drawing or a picture, Ginny,” Dev said, “but a photo? In the bookcase?”

Ginny nodded, enjoying the guessing game.

“The tall lady from the picture. She brought it.”

Dev felt a trickle of wetness on her wrist, and she looked down—she'd forgotten about the glass she'd been holding. She opened her palm, and the glass dropped to the floor, one of its razor-sharp edges smeared with her blood.

“Damn,” Dev said, staring at the line of scarlet standing out on the plane of her palm. She gently made a fist, and the gash split apart like a hungry mouth, more blood flowing down her wrist.

“Stay right there. Don't get off the bed,” she said to Ginny as she stood up and, holding her hand at waist level, headed to the door.

She almost collided with an out-of-breath Marji, who was carrying a broom and dustpan in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other.

“Don't try to clean it up,” Dev said to Marji, scooting past her daughter in the doorway. “I'll do it when I get back.”

Marji stood at the threshold to her room, grinding her jaw with tension, but she nodded.

“Okay, Mama,” she said, taking a step back into the hallway, leaving Ginny as the sole occupant of the bedroom.

“I'll be right back,” Dev called over her shoulder as she moved down the darkened passageway.

At the end of the hall, the bathroom door stood wide open as if it were waiting for her. She slipped inside, flipping on the overhead light.

“Shit,” she whispered when she saw how deep the cut was—deep enough she almost thought she might need stitches. Instead, she grabbed a hand towel from the cupboard and wrapped it around her palm.

Immediately, the blood soaked through the fabric, leaving a line of dark red in the material. She cinched the towel even more tightly around her hand, hoping this would staunch the flow.

“Okay, on my way back!” Dev yelled as she left the bathroom, turning the light off and shutting the door behind her.

She shuffled down the hallway, her woolen house shoes making
shushing
sounds on the polished hardwood floor. She could already see now that Marji hadn't waited in the hall like she'd asked.

“Marji!” Dev said as she rounded the doorjamb and found her older daughter kneeling over the broken glass. “What're you doing? I said not to touch it!”

Marji looked up, caught by the sharpness in her mother's voice.

“I found something,” she said, holding up a square of faded brown paper for Dev to see. “It's for you.”

Dev crossed the room and knelt beside her daughter, taking the folded paper from Marji's fingers. Its fragility and age were only noticeable once she had the note in her hands.

“Open it, Mama,” Ginny said from her perch on the edge of the canopy bed.

Dev turned the note over and was shocked to see her own name scrawled across its back in a flowing, calligraphic hand.

Dev looked over at Marji, who was trembling.

“What's wrong, Marji?” she said, slipping an arm around her daughter and pulling her close.

“I don't know,” Marji said, her brown eyes large with fear.

“Does this note upset you?”

Marji shook her head.

“I don't know,” she said, still trembling.

Dev slipped the paper into her housedress pocket, and Marji seemed to relax a little.

“Go get in bed with your sister,” Dev said, helping Marji stand.

“Sleep with us, Mama,” Ginny said as she crawled back up to the top of the mattress and slid under the covers, waiting for her sister to join her.

Dev guided Marji to the bed, and once she was tucked safely inside, Ginny was there, clinging to her older sister like a limpet. At first Dev mistook the action, thinking Ginny was holding on to her sister out of fear, but then she realized her mistake.

Ginny wasn't scared.

She was protecting Marji.

From the time they were infants, she'd instinctively known this about her girls: that Marji was her sensitive one, and Ginny was her scrapper. Still, it always surprised her how this disparateness manifested itself more and more as the girls grew older.

She knew it was both a blessing and a curse—as glad as she was that the girls could rely on each other, their strengths and weaknesses jibing so perfectly, she also knew that at some point, their relationship could become
too
symbiotic.

It was her job to make sure they were each their own person and they could survive without each other, creating their own separate lives . . . because one day the house, and possibly a role in the coven, would go to Marji, and she would need to be strong enough to handle it without her little sister's protection.

“How about we compromise?” Dev said as she picked up the broom and dustpan from the floor and began to sweep up the broken glass. “I'll take everything down to the garbage and make myself some tea. Then I'll come back up here and sit in the rocking chair until you guys fall asleep.”

Ginny and Marji conferred, whispering together.

“Okay, Mom,” Marji said, speaking for both of them. “But don't be gone too long.”

“I'll be back up here in a few minutes,” she said, picking up the bag, the broom, the dustpan, and the larger pieces of the broken frame. “Can I turn off the lamp for you guys?”

“Can we sleep with it on?” Ginny asked.

“As long as when I come back up here all eyes are closed.”

Both girls nodded vigorously.

“Okay, okay, I believe you,” Dev said, laughing. “Now close your eyes and I'll be back before you know it.”

When she left them, they were all snuggled up together like two bugs in a rug, the light from the bedside lamp casting a pale yellow glow over their entwined bodies.

*   *   *

She set the water to boil on the eye of the stove, a mug filled with chamomile tea ready to go on the counter. Then she pulled the piece of paper from her pocket and sat down at the kitchen table. Still feeling unsettled by the episode in the girls' room, she'd turned on all the lights in the kitchen—but now she felt vulnerable and exposed to whatever was lurking in the darkness outside the windows.