“And the beauty of it is,” he continued, “you don’t even have to say yes. All you have to do is not tell me no. For a little while, you might think you’ve dreamed this. Oh, you’ll try to convince yourself. Or you’ll think I was a madman in the woods. You’ll think, sometimes, that you’ve caught a glimpse of me — in a window or on a busy street. But you don’t have to worry. I won’t be checking up on you.” He tugged his earlobe. “No need.”
Greta’s fingers tightened around the shovel. The day, she realized, had grown dark, and the sky now seemed to be threatening rain.
“What are you going to do?”
“I told you. Or did I?” The man frowned. “It’s just a simple trade. I take a few things that you don’t need — a few things I’d like to have — and you get something in return. Something you want very much. Doesn’t that seem fair?”
A drop fell from the sky onto Greta’s cheek. The stranger looked up at the clouds.
“You’d better hurry,” he said. “There isn’t much time to decide.”
“All right,” said Greta. Before she knew what she was doing.
“Really?” The man scraped a nail along the edge of his bottom lip. “You’re sure?”
Greta nodded. Another few raindrops fell on her shoulders, a few on the top of her head and her hands.
“Well, good then.” The man turned and walked towards the woods, then looked back at Greta. “I won’t see you again, you know.” When she didn’t reply, he stepped into the trees, picking his way through the underbrush until he was gone.
A moment passed and the rain began to drum against the ground in earnest. Then Greta’s heart wrenched. The baby. He’d taken the baby with him.
“Wait!” Greta tried to pull herself out of the hole, but the dirt was turning into mud and she slipped and scrambled against it. “Wait!” she cried.
But her voice echoed into nothingness. When she finally managed to get out of the grave, the clearing was empty. There was no one in sight, no matter which direction she turned. Just trees, which looked spindlier and more identical as they receded. Her shawl lay empty on the earth.
Greta sat down and sobbed into her hands. Her whole body was covered in mud, and it slurred into her eyes, so everything looked brown and dead. She waited. Time passed and nothing changed, except that she blinked out the mud and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
The man was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.
Little knowing what else to do, Greta filled in the hole she’d dug. And as strange as it was, with every shovelful she threw down, she felt her fury recede. As if she weren’t lifting dirt from a mound but from her own shoulders. A weight from her mind. When she was done, she marked the place with a cross of stones and paused to appreciate it. No one would ever know the difference. Maybe, she thought, I’ll forget too.
But she never did.
9
“Lulu.”
Over the phone I can hear my mother light a cigarette, take a drag. Pause and spit a flake of tobacco off her tongue. She doesn’t say anything but my name, and that’s enough. As always, her voice sounds like it’s kept on packed ice. Winter breathing off the water, ice crystallizing on your eyelashes as you stroll the last block home. A Billie Holiday voice, scratchy muslin that touches your skin even before it reaches your ears.
“Mama, I—” My own voice catches. “I was just. ”
On the other end of the line, she shifts. I can see her lifting her arms to the lights in the jazz bar. Sipping a glass of wine with her legs crossed, dainty, at the ankles. All the poses she made in my childhood, flitting in front of my eyes like a deck of cards. So many of the cards are blank though. Black.
“Lulu,” she says again. “What?”
A fair question. I cast around for common ground: history, geography. “I’m near the Green Mill,” I say. The bar is, in fact, close by. “I was just thinking of you.”
I’m surprised to hear her laugh.
“Well, first time for everything, isn’t there?”
This is fair too — or almost. And it hurts. The bookstore is quiet around me — I can hear the scratching of the man’s pencil behind the counter, the occasional flip of a page, but I’m the only real disturbance. Kara has settled down and blinks, her nose rooting around my collarbone. I should feed her soon. I keep forgetting that my time is not my own.
“Don’t be mean,” I say.
“Am I?” Sara laughs again. I can feel it in my body, like a punctured lung. “If I’m not very much mistaken, you called me. I don’t see how that obligates me to all the pleasantries.”
My good sense tells me to hang up, make some excuse. But somehow I can’t do that, any more than I could walk into St. Boniface and stand on top of Ada’s grave.
“I had a baby,” I say at last. “A girl. Kara.”
“You think I didn’t know you were pregnant?” Another deep inhalation, smoke swirling between my mother’s teeth. “Your grandmother still calls me sometimes. Which is more than I can say for you.”
I catch on the present tense — I make the same mistake too, often enough. God knows, today has been that kind of day. Before I can mention it, though, my mother speaks again.
“Should we pretend something, Lulu? Something fun? For old time’s sake.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, let’s say magicians. Children trained by their next-door neighbor in the art of sorcery. To everyone else, the neighbor’s just a shabby old man, but to us, he’s twenty feet tall, dressed in silk the color of the sky just before everything goes really black.”
“Mama,” I say. I can’t quite picture her expression. Is she having fun with this? Does she really want to play, the way we used to? It’s been ten years since I saw even the shadow of her, the edge of her dress. During my debut run, I thought I spotted her at a matinee of The Magic Flute, but whoever it was turned a corner and disappeared too fast for me to be sure. Trick of the dark witch. Poof. Gone. Probably I had Ada to thank for that too. I’m surprised to hear they were in touch.
“Okay.” I pull Kara closer to my neck and breathe in the soothing scent of her hair where it meets the cap. “Magicians. What’s my special power?”
But my mother has lost interest.
“Is she with you right now?” she asks.
“Who?”
“This baby. Did you say Clara?”
I shake my head uselessly. “Kara. Of course. Where else would she be?”
“I don’t know,” says Sara. “I don’t know anything about it.”
There is no one in the world like my mother for saying something hard, and then sitting in the ringing silence that follows. I hear her pour a drink: no more than half a glass. I remember how she used to do this, asking for just a splash, and then drinking splash after splash. Ignoring the arithmetic.
“We’re having a christening,” I say before I can stop myself. “Next Tuesday. Saint Mary of the Angels.”
“And you called to invite me? Well. Aren’t you a thoughtful girl.”
This is too much. Sara hasn’t changed at all. Why don’t I hang up? My mother seems to be wondering the same thing.
“Was there something else you wanted?” she asks. “Really?”
And just like that, I remember there is. She has always had that ability: to make things true about me with a word, a glance. I sit deeper into my chair and look at the spines of the books nearby. I’m in the Ps. Poetry. Postmodernism. Poltergeists.
“Do you think I should be worried for myself?”
“About what? About me?”
“No.” I wipe a strand of hair off my forehead — it’s still wet from the snow, starting to coil up in the heat. “I — you know, because of Greta. The curse.”