And the morning after their midnight purges, Siena thought bitterly, they could go to church and talk about how disgusting she was: now so solitary, and untrustworthy because of it, and because she wove things she found out of old string she gathered; she knitted spider webs out of the dirty old string, and hung them from the trees. They were frightening, like things spiders on LSD might have made, and there were more each year. Siena made them painstakingly; each intricate piece of webbing took at least a month to make. It was especially because of the spider webs, Siena thought, that they could face the day pretending they were clean nice decent people. But she couldn’t have stopped making them even if she’d tried. They were a compulsion, like her paranoid and vengeful thoughts. She was sure the villagers looked the other way when their boys bent to reach for stones, even though they knew not one would ever make its mark; Siena knew how to deflect stones even before they flew.
Aside from taciturn little boys, the only other person the witch saw early on Thursdays was a woman who combed the streets looking for things others had thrown away that she might drag home to sell at her weekend yard sales. “Looks like rain,” the woman said this morning.
“Yes. Have much luck today?” Siena asked.
“Some old shirts, and two nice lamp stands.” She gestured at the lamps, missing shades. Siena had hailed from the city once, and knew the lamps would sell for a hundred dollars each at a trendy retro boutique. But how would the woman get to the city? And how much would the store owner give her for the lamps? And so she just smiled and nodded, and only said, “The lamps are nice.” They’d already spoken more than they ever had. Speaking to a real person was actually quite hard.
“Do you want to buy them?” the woman asked, startling Siena out of her reverie.
“No.”
“I guessed not,” the woman laughed.
Was there a touch of derision in her laugh? Siena couldn’t be sure. “Why’s that?” she asked, a little belligerently.
“They say you sleep under a heap of odds and ends, other people’s garbage and sticks.”
It seemed hard to believe she’d survived winter doing that, but maybe she’d been so damaged by trauma Siena didn’t even know where she slept anymore. The rag picker looked at her, and Siena waited for the verbal spasm of hatred she knew must be coming, either from herself or from the woman. But they just looked at each other, and finally Siena pointed at the lamps and said, “You’ll get twenty dollars for them when the cottagers come to open up.”
The woman looked immensely pleased. Siena looked at the black hooded sweatshirt draped over her arm. “My son would’ve liked that,” she said, suddenly not wanting to end the conversation, challenging as it was. She thought it might be the first one she’d had in years.
The woman stared. “You used to have a family once, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” Siena said.
“Your daughter was very bad. She sold drugs at the high school and was killed by the bikers who supplied her when she didn’t pay. They cut up her body and distributed it in many places, so they could never be caught.”
Siena figured then the woman had been so poor for so long it had driven her crazy, and forgave her this new assault. Besides, Noelle had been loud and unkempt and never did anything anyone asked, laughing at them instead, or crying, but that had been the extent of it. “That was Paul Hubert,” she said. “I heard that story too. It wasn’t Noelle, not at all. And even with Paul, why didn’t someone help him, teach him to love himself enough so he wouldn’t have to turn to drugs?”
This last line she knew came out of the witch wisdom her own mother had taught her. She hadn’t said anything like that in years, was surprised at herself. After Noelle’s disappearance, what had any of it mattered? She couldn’t believe in it anymore. If her magic hadn’t been able to protect Noelle, it was worse than useless.
The woman looked startled. “They said you couldn’t even really talk anymore.”
“I couldn’t. But I had to defend Noelle. Usually I don’t hear the rumours. No one says them to my face.”
“That was so long ago,” the woman said, memory dawning like daybreak on her creased face. But she didn’t continue, and Siena didn’t know whether she was referring to Noelle, or to Paul Hubert, or to her own demise. “We’re not any of us as young as we used to be,” she continued, peering into Siena’s face. She looked familiar, as if they’d once sat on committees together. They’d baked for the same fundraisers, surely. “Sally,” the woman said, stretching out her hand. “Sally Fish.”
Ah, the minister’s wife. What had happened to her? Siena must’ve heard, and then forgotten, just as Sally had mistaken Noelle’s story for Paul Hubert’s. Even in a village, memory was fickle. And what about Siena herself? Did she really sleep under sticks? The village had watched her lose everything, and grow prematurely old because of it. Whatever her life had become, it sure wasn’t what she’d planned. Siena shook Sally’s hand. “Siena Straw.”
“I know who you are, Siena. You had the most beautiful gardens, flowers and vegetables both. You were a really good herbalist and you always looked elegant.”
“I was just born with skinny genes, is all. And I was good at putting together outfits from thrift stores. If I had money for new clothes I gave it to the kids.”
“It was always so important to them,” Sally said, “the right kind of sneakers and jeans at school.”
“Yes.”
They parted, and the next Thursday Sally wasn’t out, nor the next. Siena went back to piling sticks and talking to herself. “The paths through the cedars all grown over with brambles and garbage. The slabs of Styrofoam and piles of old shoes replicating each night so that in the morning there were even more. Why always this bleak blackbadness, inconsolable beyond hope at the core, at the bottom, collecting at the fallen logs. The beads of dirty Styrofoam, disintegrating. Siena thought she might die under the weight of it. But she couldn’t; what if her daughter came back and her mother wasn’t there? Siena knew at one time or another she’d felt a little of what Noelle might’ve felt when she’d run through town shouting obscenities at the minister and the principal and the constable. Perhaps what Siena could not speak, the girl had. And so the stones they threw at Noelle had in their way been meant for her.
“Maybe they’ll give Noelle back if I take their garbage as well as my own. Heaping it into a higher and higher mound each night after spending hours and hours and hours collecting it. And then burrowing beneath it to sleep, in spite of it smelling rather badly. There, I’ve just admitted it, even to myself. I’m looking for my daughter’s body,” Siena muttered, piling sticks. She’d misplaced it somewhere, she knew. “My daughter isn’t dead, only mad or missing. Maybe she’s not out here at all. I bet they’ve got her in a basement somewhere.”
The week after that the geese were flying overhead in pairs, looking for nesting spots, just as Siena and her husband had come here from the city, looking for a quiet pretty place to raise their brood. The geese flew over her piles and honked derisively, and Siena built herself an actual lean-to out of deadfall and Styrofoam instead of burrowing under her shame pile that night, and tried not to talk to herself so much. Her conversation with Sally had been so short, and now weeks old, but still it had reminded her of the difference. Her husband had often made fun of her constant mumbling. She’d done it even then, when he was still around. But that too had been different. Mumbling to a person didn’t get you called crazy; it was just a little rude.