She unwound string from a tangle of sticks and sat down on a pile of other sticks and began to make a spider web, part God’s eye, part dream catcher. It was obsessive but she couldn’t help herself; when Siena found string she had to make something out of it. Something more or less circular to hang in a tree. Siena told herself she was making magic; it was a witchy thing, not a dream catcher but a daughter catcher. Still the objects never seemed beautiful and powerful as she’d intended when she was done but rather sad and lonely as she felt, and possibly mad. And yet consciousness glimmered on, and Siena survived the spring’s windiest gale in her makeshift lean-to. Her shelter looked a little like an igloo from a distance, the water rounded white slabs piled into circular walls. The Styrofoam had good insulation value.
The geese flew overhead several times each day, and at last Siena broke down and cried, missing her husband so badly she couldn’t give the pain a name. Geese mated for life, as she’d always felt she and her husband would. As the years passed and Siena outgrew her youthful restlessness, the boredom that came after the first thrill of marriage was replaced each year by joy at discovering its yet undiscovered riches: for each year there were more. She should’ve gone with him. Then they could’ve still had a kind of happiness, if not the ridiculous happiness they’d had before. Now she was alone without any of them, cleaning up after people who scorned her.
But he’d left, and their son had gone with him, although the young man was old enough to go out on his own now, seek a wife and a fortune. But he and the old man got along well. Any wife the lad found would have to make herself part of their life more than they’d ever make themselves part of hers. She could do the books and mind the clutter; they had never been high on organizational skills, Siena’s men hadn’t. They liked the same things: military history and beer. They worked together now, she’d heard back when she still spoke to people, in some faraway town, setting up a shop selling memorabilia of oh, so many wars. But between them they knew most of their facts, would be able to back up each piece of begged or borrowed or stolen or scavenged bit of merchandise with a story, quite likely to be true. Siena missed them desperately. Twice in the woods she had found old old guns, and saved them for her men, should they ever pass back through. But why would they?
And so she talked to herself, and performed her forest cleaning tasks, even though there was always more to do; it was an obscenely endless job. Sometimes she realized she’d thought she was talking to her daughter, and then Siena would start to cry again. She and Noelle had been as close as the old man and the young man, in their way. They’d liked the same things: poetry and painting and witching. It got you every time, that witching. They should’ve chosen different professions. A witch would always have stones thrown at her, at one time or another in her life, it was true. Her own mother, a witch also, had told Siena that, trying to herd her to a gentler occupation. But for Siena the witching was the gentlest task she knew, and the most necessary. And so she’d turned her back on her own mother’s words, her own mother’s tears, sure she and her daughter could together change things, together change the world’s view of what a witch was. She longed for the days her mother had told her about: the days when witches were well paid and cared for with kindness, invited to good parties and not forgotten but necessary, and not ostracized in the ragged woods at the bottom of the gardens. Her mother had been right of course, except that Siena herself had avoided the stoning her entire life; and the gossip she’d inured herself against. It was her daughter who hadn’t found the strength of will to turn the stones back in midair, or as Siena herself was able to do, before they even flew. She’d been too young, the girl had, and too full of fun and too full of love; that had bothered people.
Siena herself had always been a quiet unassuming sort and so people had largely left her alone even though they knew what she was. And if anyone ever pointed a finger right at her and began to speak of what was wrong with her witchery, how ungodly it was, she knew how to deflect them with a joke, or flattery, or a spoonful of hope for their poor little brokenhearted souls, and so they put down their pebbles and unkind words. But all that had been before they’d stoned her daughter, and Noelle had gone mad or missing or maybe both, and the mildly, as most everyone’s are, broken hearts of her men had broken further and they’d left. They’d asked Siena to go with them, but she hadn’t.
If she moved and her daughter returned to find her, Siena had to be there, didn’t she?
She knitted, wondering as always why her burrowing and her knitting didn’t coerce the villagers to give her daughter back. It was witchy magic, after all. It was supposed to work. Her mother had taught her that, taught her how clear intent poured into the creation of an object would amplify its power to heal.
But they hadn’t worked, not one of them, and there were thirty or forty spider webs now, strung here and there in the woods. No wonder no one came down here much anymore, not even the dog walkers. Siena’s daughter catchers were disturbing, never mind unsuccessful. Perhaps she’d take them all down. And so she wandered the woods with a new purpose, ostensibly to find and detach and burn all her creepy hanging things. She found and detached and bagged six, and where she thought she’d hung the seventh, she instead found a tall boy with wild red hair, stuffing it into his pocket.
“Why do you want that?” Siena asked.
“Want what?” he asked, his hand covering the bulge in his pocket.
“My spider webs. I made them.”
“Oh!” he said. “We thought Noelle made them. They bring luck in love.”
“How could Noelle make them if she’s gone?”
“Maybe she’s a ghost,” the young man offered. How old was he? Had he known Noelle, or did they just talk about her, like everyone else? How old would Noelle be now, if she were here?
Siena began to stare and stutter, as if to prove everything he’d heard about her was true.
“You look cold,” he said. “Come to the fire for tea?”
“Okay,” Siena said, surprised. And she did. There were four or five of them, sitting on logs and stumps and one broken chair arranged around one of her stick piles that they’d set alight. They made tea and gave her some, and when they poured a little rum in their own and asked her if she wanted any, she didn’t refuse.
“Just don’t break the bottles, okay? I cut my fingers when I clean up down here.”
“I wouldn’t,” the boy said. “What’s your name?”
“Siena. You?”
“Peter.”
“Hello, Peter. Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
“Because you’re Noelle’s mother.”
“Maybe. But I’m evil. And she must’ve been evil too, or they wouldn’t have stoned her.” It was only saying it aloud that made Siena realize some small part of her believed it to be true.
“You’re not evil, you just went crazy because you lost Noelle. That would happen to anyone. But don’t stop making those weird string things. They’re magic. They’re infallible.”
“Who do you love?” Siena asked.
“I don’t like anyone in that way, and no one likes me. Although Liz has been my best friend since kindergarten, so I’m not exactly alone either.”
One of the girls in the circle smiled at Siena. She had black braids and wore a little skirt that in better light Siena would’ve known wasn’t made of leaves, and striped knee socks and sneakers. “But they’ve worked for lots of us,” the girl said.