The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(62)

April dissolved into tears. “I’m giving her the best life I can. She’ll grow up, I know that much, and really, who knows how much time anyone has?”

“What will you tell her?” Vincent leaned forward into the last rays of yellow light. “About me?”

“I’ll tell her you’re a very special cousin.”

Vincent nodded. His grief was in his expression.

“It’s too late to have regrets,” April said. “Maybe I should have told you, but you were hardly interested in such things. You were a boy. Life is a mess, that’s what Isabelle told me when I decided to have the child, but all we can do is live it. She was right. I’m glad at last you fell in love.”

“You know that’s impossible for us,” Vincent reminded her.

“Bullshit,” April said, for she had been in love with him that summer. Her first and only true love as a matter of fact, and nothing horrible had happened. Instead, something wonderful had occurred. Their daughter. “We just have to fight harder for what we want.”

William and Regina approached the patio, holding hands and singing their own version of “I Walk at Night.” William carried the bunch of cut flowers with their purple-red blooms.

I had a garden, I had a dove, I had a tree, I had your love.

“Let’s bring out dessert,” April said. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have made Auntie Isabelle’s tipsy chocolate cake. Instead we have a raspberry mousse.”

“I thought you were making macarons,” Regina said, for those were her favorites. “Vincent and William would love them.”

“Not enough time,” April informed the sad little girl.

“Someday we’ll have macarons from Paris,” Vincent said to cheer her. “But tonight we’re having a moose for dessert and I want the antlers.”

Regina laughed as she climbed onto his lap, a child who was completely comfortable with who she was. “Sing to me,” she said. “I want to remember you when you’re gone.”

Vincent smoothed down her hair. It was black, like his, straight as sticks, and her smile could undo a person, at least it had done so to him.

“I’ll send you a tape,” William assured the little girl. “Or even better, I’ll have it made into a record.”

Regina clapped her hands happily and said, “Then I’ll play it every night when we get a record player.”

“We’ll send you one of those as well,” Vincent told her.

“Do me a favor,” April said. She had reappeared with their dessert and some coffees and had overheard his promises. She knew Vincent as well as anyone, and she knew how easy it was for him to forget something that was terribly important to someone else. The smell of the dessert’s berries and sugar was so intoxicating bees gathered round and April had to bat them away with her hand. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”



Jet took the bus without telling anyone. It was the first of March, Levi’s birthday, and the forsythia was blooming. She wore her black dress and tied a scarf over her head. She had her purse and nothing else. She had discussed coming here with Rafael when he’d surprised her by reserving a room at the Plaza Hotel for a night. When the elevator opened at the seventh floor Jet realized he had asked for room 708, and she said she would prefer if they could have a different room, one that was their own.

“What we are is separate from Levi,” she’d said. “Even if I go to visit his grave, it has nothing to do with us.”

When she got off the bus she walked to the west, stopping in a field to collect some daffodils that were the color of new butter. She tied a bunch together with blue string. The sun was pale and the air was cool and fresh. It was two miles out to the cemetery and she walked quickly, ducking behind greenery each time a car passed by.

At the cemetery gates a waiting hearse idled, which gave her pause, but the funeral that had taken place had ended, and there was no one in sight when the hearse pulled away. There were many surnames she recognized in the older section of the cemetery: Porter and Coker and Putnam and Shepard. People had been called Wrestling and Valor and Worth and Redeemed, for it was those virtues their families hoped they would possess. When Jet neared the graves of the Willard family she came upon an angel marking the resting place of a baby named Resign Willard, who had lived for one day.

Levi’s grave was in a newer section beyond a huge field of grass. She set the daffodils in front of the simple stone that had been placed in the ground. He had been eighteen. Barely a life. Suddenly exhausted, Jet lay down on the grass beside him. She still wore the ring Levi had given her, even though the moment when he told her to close her eyes so he could give her this birthday gift felt so far away. They had likely been together twenty times, an entire world created in just days. She imagined Levi next to her, in his black jacket. Many of the Hathorne family had been buried nearby. They were her family as well as his, a fact that was terribly uncomfortable. No wonder the Owens family had kept this secret. No wonder so many had fled Massachusetts. Even the witch-hunter’s own relation Nathaniel Hawthorne had placed the w in his name to distance himself from his cruel ancestor, his writing driven by his desire to make amends for all the evil his great-great-grandfather had done in the world.

Not far from here was a tree where the witches were hung, sentenced by the man who had been the father of Maria Owens’s child. In 1692, he had been appointed chief examiner of the witch trials. He had sentenced and overseen the hanging of nineteen innocent people, convincing the court to accept spectral evidence, which meant what was said was gospel without any proof. Women could turn into crows. A man could be the devil’s apprentice. His cruelty was legendary. He refused to hear recanted testimonies, concluding those accused were guilty before they were tried, badgering the accused, causing them to be murdered, thereby setting upon himself, and all that followed him, the curse they now shared. After a conviction, property could be taken and distributed as the judges saw fit. Hathorne had married a Quaker girl of fourteen years of age, built a mansion, and fathered six children. He did as he wished to Maria Owens, who was without parents or guardians, using her as he saw fit, and in her youth and inexperience she believed she loved him, but it was as a crow loved his cage.