The Invited(68)

There were stories, she knew, about people who led double lives. Spies. People who had affairs.

Everyone had secrets.

Everyone told lies.

She comforted herself with these facts. She told herself she was not alone.

Her husband, he knew nothing about her. Not really. He called her a good girl. She had told him she was an orphan and he had taken pity on her, said, “How terrible to have no one in the world.” And she had cried. It wasn’t just for show. She had cried because she knew he was right.

She missed Mama.

She missed her with the dull ache of a phantom limb, like some basic part of her had been ripped away.

    And almost every night, in the darkest hours, she was back in that old root cellar in Hartsboro.

She would remember, with chilling detail, how she’d hid in the root cellar for what felt like days, though surely it was only hours. Time moved slowly in the dark, when you were alone with just your own grim thoughts and spiders to keep you company.

Crouched down on the bare dirt of the root cellar floor, listening carefully for the scuttle of a rat, she went over everything that had led her there to that moment. The root cellar was the only thing left from her mother’s family home, which had burned to the ground, killing Jane’s grandmother years before Jane was even born.

“Someone from town started that fire,” Mama told her once, when Jane had asked about the fire that had killed her grandmother, destroyed everything her mama knew and loved, leaving nothing behind but a cellar hole lined with rocks, some charred wood, lilac trees in the dooryard. And the old root cellar off behind the house. The fire didn’t damage that at all. Over the years when she was growing up, Jane would go there and just sit, look at the jars of canned goods her grandma had put up long ago. It was like going to a museum. The museum of What Came Before. Of the Breckenridge family house. Of glass jars full of applesauce and string beans labeled in her grandmother’s careful hand. She never stayed long and never closed the door, because there were spiders and rats living down there.

“Why did they start the fire, Mama?” Jane had asked.

“It was me they were trying to kill.”

“But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to burn you up?”

“Fear is a funny thing,” her mother said.

“Why are they afraid of you?”

“People fear anything different, anything they don’t understand.”

Jane knew this to be true, even at a young age.

Her mama had a gift, but not everyone saw it that way. It was funny, though—even the people who spoke ill of her, called her a witch and the devil’s bride, they’d come sneaking out to the bog, asking Mama for love charms, healing spells, asking her to tell them their future or looking for a message from a spirit who had passed. People were afraid of her mother, but they also depended on her, sought her out in times of need (though they would never admit this out loud).

Jane herself had been ridiculed, called the devil’s daughter. She’d been held down in the schoolyard, stuck with pins to see if she would bleed. Jane had none of her mother’s powers. The spirits did not speak to her. She did not see signs of what was to come in tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. She longed for the voices, the signs, but they did not come. What she did have, what she held on to fiercely, was fury. Fury that she had not been born special like her mama. Fury at the way she and her mother were treated. Fury at what the people in town had done to her grandmother.

    All her life, she carried a box of matches in her pocket, waiting.

Earlier that morning, when the children had circled her in the yard outside the school, Lucy Bishkoff had pulled up her dress and pulled down her underthings to see if she bore the mark of the devil on her skin. Jane felt something breaking inside. A dam letting go, her fury pouring through, overtaking her. And then, for the first time in her life, she heard a voice, loud and clear: not the voice of a spirit, but the voice of her own rage. Punish them, it said. Punish them all.

When everyone was still outside, she went into the schoolhouse, snuck back to the supply cupboard, made a nest of crumpled paper, lit the edges with a match. Then she went back out and waited. Once everyone was inside, sitting down for lessons, she used the strongest branch she could find to bar the door.

Crouching in the root cellar hours later, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, she smelled the smoke on her clothing. Heard the screams of the children. They screamed and screamed and screamed in her mind. But she told herself they deserved what they got. The whole town deserved to be punished.

She waited in the dark root cellar, listening to the echoes of the screams, waiting. But Mama did not come for her.

Eventually, she grew tired of waiting; her legs had turned to pins and needles and she was cold all over. She cracked open the door, stepped outside, the afternoon sun blinding. She staggered, squinting like a mole-girl, and moved toward home, willing herself to be slow and cautious. Where was Mama?

When she got to the bog, she saw that what was left of their little house was smoldering. Gone. All gone. There was a crowd gathered at the opposite end of the bog, by the big white pine. She moved closer, stealthily, and saw what they were all looking at.



* * *



. . .

    At first, when she ran away from Hartsboro as a girl of twelve, she didn’t know who she was without Mama.