Wild is the Witch (51)
I won’t make that same mistake.
“Ready?” Pike asks.
I take a deep breath. “Ready.”
He squeezes my hand. “Let’s go get him.”
***
“Did you know that crows can hold grudges against people?” Pike asks as we veer off the main trail and begin our hike up the rugged mountainside. In true Pike fashion, he doesn’t wait for me to answer and instead keeps talking. “They’re extremely smart birds. If they feel threatened by you, they can remember your face for years. Not only that, they can warn their crow buddies about you, and they’ll hold a grudge against you, too.”
“That’s pretty amazing.”
“It is. Leo thought if crows could hold grudges against people, they could also learn to like him, so he started to feed a couple of the crows behind our house. They were hesitant at first, but over time, they started to trust him, and sure enough, they stopped by our house every day around the same time, waiting for Leo.”
“I love that he did that,” I say, keeping pace with Pike, hope building in my chest with each step forward.
“Me too. One of my biggest regrets is that we forgot about the crows in the days after his death. I wish I would have remembered to feed them, but I didn’t, and they stopped coming once they realized he was gone. I still feel awful about it.”
“What happened to him?” I ask gently, unsure if I’m allowed to ask or not.
Pike doesn’t say anything at first, and I start to tell him he doesn’t have to answer when he finally speaks. “He got sick. Really sick, with a rare kind of cancer. By the time the doctors found it, there was only one treatment option available, and it would have made him even sicker with no guarantee of being successful.” Pike steps over a large tree trunk, and I hear him take a breath before he keeps going.
“Anyway, we tried it and it was terrible. It made him so sick, and after the course of the treatment, his PET scan was worse than before we started. It didn’t do a damn thing. My dad knew a woman in his rowing club who did alternative forms of medicine, and he asked her about it. She urged him and my mom to let her care for Leo, told them she’d had successes with kids in the past, even one who had the same type of cancer as him. My parents fought about it a lot; my mom wanted to keep Leo home and comfortable, and my dad wanted to try the alternative medicine. I’m not sure how he won out, but they went with the woman, and she ended up being a total fraud. They paid her thousands of dollars and completely depleted their savings to do it. As soon as she got the money, she left town, and Leo died not long after.”
“Oh, Pike, that’s devastating,” I say, my entire body hurting with the weight of his story. “I’m so sorry your family went through that.”
Pike stops and turns to face me. “Thank you,” he says, running his fingers up the straps of my pack. “It was a really difficult time for our family, and obviously something we won’t ever fully recover from. Mom and Dad were able to stay together though, after lots of counseling, and I’m thankful for that.”
I nod, thinking about what it would take to rebuild a marriage after that kind of tragedy. Pike looks at me, and I can tell there’s more he wants to say, debating with himself on if he should or not.
“You asked me once why I hate witches so much,” Pike says, my blood turning cold. “That’s why. The woman, she was a witch. She convinced my dad that magic was the only thing that could cure cancer as aggressive as Leo’s. That was her alternative form of medicine: magic. Nothing we could see or feel. We just had to trust that every time we brought Leo in, every time they wrote her another check, she was doing something for him. And when she got her final payment from them—the biggest one—she left. We found out later we weren’t the only family she did that to; she’d pocketed over a million dollars from families like ours.”
For a moment, I can’t speak. I can’t think. My legs start to shake and threaten to buckle beneath me.
All that bravado and joking in the office, rolling his eyes and making harsh comments, it was all to cover up this deep, gaping wound left by an unimaginably cruel witch who took advantage of his family in the most unforgivable way.
I should tell him. He has a right to know, but how can I tell him that the reason we’re out here is because I too am a witch, and I cursed him?
I cursed him.
My eyes sting and a lump forms in my throat, so big I can’t swallow around it. It’s suddenly hard to breathe, and I pull my inhaler from my side pocket, taking two long puffs.
“Are you okay?” Pike asks, searching my eyes, so much concern and care. So much honesty.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to steady my breaths. “I just… That’s horrible, what happened to you and your family. I can’t even imagine.” I wrap my arms around him and hold him close, not wanting to let go. He rests his head in the crook of my neck, then pulls back and kisses me on the forehead.
“Thank you for listening,” he says. “I haven’t talked about it in a long time. I think maybe I needed that.”
“Thank you for trusting me with it,” I say, hating myself with each word.
Pike kisses me once more, then begins hiking again. He tells me more facts about birds and the ones that were Leo’s favorites, and I listen to it all as a slow dread builds inside me, devouring all my hope and telling me over and over that this will never be okay. Even if we find the owl and Pike never knows I cursed him, we can’t be together.