Devil House(21)

“Turkey on whole wheat,” he says. You laugh together, on equal ground or something like it. It’s amazing how they grow up right in front of you: kids when you meet them, little men when they leave. From the freezer case, you get fish sticks and a quart of strawberry ice cream; and then, waiting in line, you begin your weekly dance of resistance with the pocket-sized booklets nested in the rack above the chewing gum: Prophecies and Predictions; 50 Different Casseroles!; Strange Tragedies of the Silver Screen. And then, next to these, Everyday Witchcraft, the one that’s caught your eye today because its front cover seems so weird: a picture of a white cat sitting next to a crystal ball on a table draped in black velvet cloth—felt, most likely. The scene clearly staged in a photographer’s studio somewhere. It’s funny, in an out-of-place way. You drop it casually into the basket, as if it had been the last thing on your shopping list: fish sticks, ice cream, book of spells. It looks pretty hilarious among the vegetables and cold cuts. You smile, not too big, waiting your turn in line.

In your life, the rhythm of these little routines is like the gentle path of a ditch creek: predictable movement through unremarkable straits most days, but with enough small surprises in it to make it feel worthy of the space it takes up. For the creek, a surprising chorus of frogs on a summer night, or the sudden appearance of an improvised waterfall built with rocks by local kids; for you, an unexpected conversation, or a small purchase on impulse, a little byway brought to you by chance and peripheral vision. You learned these rhythms from your mother: where to hear them, how to spot the signs of their presence, how to honor the code by declining to name it. She’d always been like that, keeping to-do lists in her head rather than writing them down, never talking up the usefulness of her habits or trying to impose them on her daughter, speaking few rules aloud but making the ones she valued manifest in her manner. She left room in the routine for variation. The practice spoke for itself. It made home a place worth returning to every day.

This recipe made of you a person who could do as she wished, but whose wishes were usually modest; because even small wishes, once gained, seemed to make such lovely ripples in the life you’ve assembled for yourself. No fate but the one chosen lightly; no destiny but the present moment. In 1972, you were an early bloom in a hedge about to run riot, a deep red bloom with pastel accents at the edges of the petals. Not many in your own life noticed what you were; the first signs of dawn are reserved for those who keep watch. But the practice was enough for you. “I’ve always wanted just to be myself,” you might have said during the self-help craze of the 1970s, at some encounter group, say. “That’s always seemed like a pretty high calling, just the challenge of it, really,” you might have said to this imagined gathering, which came to be plentiful near where you had lived: in houses with wooden back decks and garden torches, some even with swimming pools and bars for four or five at poolside. “I feel like what I’m always doing is just learning what it means to be who I am,” you might have said as the evening wore on, the hum of conversation at poolside and tangy pink wine in a glass, good friends in the warm dusk, Central California on a summer evening like few places on earth: they say that the Greek islands feel like this. Or parts of Italy. Crete. Magic places whose names call out from deep in the imagination. Places everybody hopes to see someday.

People who’re lucky enough to be from such places sometimes lose sight of the blessing. You never did. You kept it at your fingertips, right there where you’d be able to call it up at any moment, in the slightest of circumstances. You held it right there near the surface all your life, right up to the end. And when the end came, they called you the White Witch: because of the beaded macramé plant holders hanging from hooks in your apartment, and the God’s-eye in the window, and the leaded crystal prism on the sill; and because of the bracelets you were known to wear to work, for example at the ends of the loose, long sleeves of your beige turtleneck, sometimes as many as six or seven bracelets all together on one wrist, jangling or rattling depending on the material: silver, or Bakelite, or amber, or jade, or plain plastic; and because of those small booklets you’d been unable to resist at the checkout counter, Fawcett publications that retailed for forty-nine cents apiece. There were always four small racks of them at eye level, just above the bigger tabloids, which you found gauche—who buys this stuff?—but the booklets were cute: Predictions 1973; Hollywood After Dark; Everyday Witchcraft. They found these three in the junk drawer of your kitchen during the preliminary investigation, on a chaotic afternoon when a reporter from the Telegram-Tribune, who had a friend inside the department, stopped by to see what he could see.

You weren’t there at the time. You were down at the station, answering questions patiently. They would hold it against you later, how patient you were with their questions, how forthcoming you’d been with the details when pressed. But you hadn’t been there to playact: to perform some ridiculous act of penance for what you’d done, to begin laying ground for extenuating circumstances. You weren’t there because you were tormented by your conscience and wanted to come clean, and you weren’t there to offer excuses or alibis.

You were there because of the tides.





2.


YOU’RE AT WORK. There are only three weeks left in the school year; there’s no single word in the English language precise enough to describe the atmosphere on campus when it gets this close to summer break. There’s electricity in the air, but it’s tempered by languor, the promise of lazy days ahead, of long warm mornings with no to-do lists attached; there’s excitement, but it’s checked by an impending sense of loss among the seniors; there’s hope, but there’s also suspicion.