When My Heart Was Wicked Read online

  At first, of course, I turned on Anna, just as my mom wanted me to. I wore her dress and danced at the wedding, mostly because I didn’t want my dad and the Treehuggers to see me act out. But I would tell her I hated her whenever we were alone. I stole lipstick from her dresser and mashed it up to make fake potions that I fed to my dolls. I put sugar syrup in her perfume so she’d be followed by bees and wasps. I gave her a sleep sachet of dark herbs for her birthday. She took it so sweetly, and afterward I felt bad. I stole it back, afraid it would hurt her. I didn’t like her, but I didn’t want to seriously hurt her.

  My dad tried to talk to me, but he couldn’t reach me. I refused to change my mind. I was loyal to my mother, and I wouldn’t back down. The ideas were my own, and I felt proud because I knew my mother would be too. Anna never said a word about any of it. She tried to be nice, even though I was so awful. She told me once that she had lost the sleep sachet I made her. She apologized for her carelessness and asked if I might make her another. I considered making a real one, with rose petals and lavender, but in the end I never did.

  After they were married, we would always go to visit the Treehuggers on pagan holidays, like solstice and Brigit and Lammas. The Treehuggers are my dad’s friends from college — Jim, Miguel, and Grampy, who is the same age as the others. They’re all into backpacking and urban farming, and they try to live off the land as well as they can. They have their own property, where we used to live, and they have the teepee and they love making things like earth ovens and outdoor cob fireplaces. They just care about having fun and making music. And me. They care about me.

  They would take me hiking sometimes up Monkey Face in Upper Bidwell Park. Miguel has a huge dog named Bear, and with his big paws, he’d sound like a horse running up the trail. We would all eat homemade granola bars or trail mix and drink iced tea from a thermos, and they’d make up songs about me or we’d all fall asleep in the sun on top of the rock beside the face, which is just as high as the face but easier to fit on. They always wanted me to see the monkey in the rock, but I never really did. To me it just looked like rocks. From up there, Horseshoe Lake really is shaped like a horseshoe, and orange and green moss grows on the rocks and there are black birds with red chests and white wings. There is magic up there too.

  Once, during a meteor shower, they took me for a night hike. We climbed so close to the stars, it felt like maybe we’d uncrack all the secrets of the universe. Like maybe they really would come raining down on us and we could catch the secrets in our bare hands. Another time, while the Treehuggers were down at the creek, a tiny woman in an old-fashioned dress walked past me, carrying a basket of St. John’s wort. When I asked her what she was going to use it for, she smiled at me but didn’t answer. Then she disappeared down the trail. I sometimes wonder if she was the ghost of Annie Bidwell, the woman who gave the park to the city of Chico when she died. Like me, she was a botanist, and she worried about the future of the local Mechoopda Indians.

  The Treehuggers took me to Melody Records and Ital Imports and taught me which used tapes and records to buy. Dylan and Joplin and Radiohead. The Treehuggers were like my uncles. They didn’t care if I was a mean little girl or an ugly hard teen who stole bomber jackets. Maybe they just didn’t know. I was never mean to them, not once.

  Anyway, it was on those holidays with the Treehuggers that I started to like Anna, not that I would ever admit it. She would play my dad’s guitar and sing, and she’d laugh at herself and bite her lip and try again. She ran through the field like a kid, jumped in the creek with all her clothes on, climbed trees, and made forts with the littlest cousins. By that time, she’d stopped trying to make me like her. She was always pleasant, but she didn’t try to engage me anymore. I’d watch her in the firelight, the flames making her face shine while my father lay with his head in her lap. Then I wanted her to try again with me, but I knew deep down I would probably only be nice for the night, and in the morning the spell would be broken and I’d go back to being a mean girl again.

  At Cheyenne’s house, I water the houseplants. I gave them plant food over the weekend, but they still look sad and droopy. I take the watering can to the backyard, where I’ve planted my herbs. But the rosemary and lavender are turning the color of straw and the mint is turning black. The sage has weird white moldy spots and the thyme is yellow. Cheyenne’s plants are all dead or dying too, except one — a poppy plant with red blooms. I don’t know why this plant alone is thriving. Inspecting my herbs for pests or whatever could be hindering their growth, I find nothing and decide to cast a spell of protection for all the other plants.

  In my room, I gather some dried herbs, comfrey, and patchouli and light a black candle. At my dad’s house, I wasn’t allowed to burn candles. This had to do with a very isolated incident in which I, as a little kid, lit a candle and let it drip its purple wax down the bathroom sink. They needed to hire a plumber to fix the sink, and after that, it was no more lit candles in the house.

  Also I think Anna and my dad were a little nervous about me because Cheyenne once set fire to our apartment. They never proved it was her, but I saw her. Burning old photographs and journals on the balcony.

  Anyway, Cheyenne couldn’t care less if I burn candles. My cell phone chirps. It’s Martin.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I ask.

  “Watching TV. But I thought I’d head to the Weatherstone for a while. You want to come?”

  “What’s the Weatherstone?”

  “Just a coffee place. You have a bike, right?”

  “I do!” I say. He gives me directions and I pack up my herbs. I can always cast later. I decide to leave the candle burning for ambience. But I’m safe about it. I’m not that same old Lacy who clogged the sink with purple wax. I put the candle on a glass plate and put the plate on my dresser so that it can’t catch anything on fire. I get the bike from the back and wheel it into the street.

  The bike is a rusty red five-speed that my mom probably got for free. The front tire is a little bit bent, so that with every rotation, the rim brushes the frame. I steer from side to side, making swivels with my tires.

  In front of me on the street, the cars and housetops are lined with snow. I pedal faster. There is snow everywhere — on the lawns of the houses, on the trees in the yards. The side streets are closed off with cones, and people stand around in crowds. There are lights and cameras. They’re making a movie.

  Even though it is all an illusion, it is beautiful to see. Snow in springtime. Snow in Sacramento. Once, when I was about nine, my dad and Anna and I took our bus to Arizona. In Flagstaff, we got snowed in. I had never seen snow before, and it was wild and terrific. We hunkered down in our hotel room. Anna walked to a bookstore and brought back magazines and chocolate turtles for us to read and eat in the hotel beds. In the morning we walked to a café. I pretended I was a girl from the town, one who was used to snow, and my own bed, and two parents. See them? Here they are beside me: one, two.

  When I get to the Weatherstone, I can see Martin sitting outside. I prop my bike against the gate and go in and order an iced tea before going back out onto the patio to sit with him.

  “Hey,” I say. “Thanks for inviting me out.”

  “My pleasure,” Martin says.

  “What’s that?” I point to a white frothy concoction with whipped cream in Martin’s glass.

  “White chocolate mocha.”

  “How sophisticated.”

  “I thank you.”

  I reach my finger into my iced tea and fish out a little black bug that has flown in. “Hey,” I say. “Did you know that the average person eats four hundred and thirty bugs by accident every year? Random science fact.”

  “That is truly gross. But also kind of awesome. Probably the reason I can’t lose these extra pounds.” He pinches his stomach fat and we laugh.

  We sit quietly for a while, watching people walk and bike by on the street. This is a nice neighborhood too, but it’s no Chico. It’s like, here you could be
anywhere in America. But Chico has this special hum to it. You could take me anywhere in the world, drug me and confuse me, then drop me off someplace random in Chico. I totally believe that, on waking, I would know right away that I was home.

  I glance at Martin. It’s hard to believe he’s that same kid I knew. He was so scared then, so timid.

  “So, Martin, how’s your dad?” It’s a dangerous question. I remember how terrified Martin was of him — how he used to hide from him beneath the stairs. I hid too, but it wasn’t serious for me. He only found us once, and he ignored me completely. But Martin he grabbed by the arm and shouted swearwords into his face. He dragged him upstairs to their dark apartment while Martin cried. His dad’s breath had smelled like the trash cans at the park across the street.

  “He died,” Martin says, and he shrugs, as though talking about some unknown person, a basketball player or actor no one really liked in the first place.

  “He did? How?”

  “Vending machine. He really wanted that Dr Pepper.” I look at Martin to see if he’s joking, and he laughs a little, shaking his head. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m actually totally serious. It fell on him.” I widen my eyes, imagining it. Imagining Martin’s father putting money in the machine, and pushing buttons, and waiting for the can to drop. And then, when the can refused, him kicking the machine, attacking it, until it wobbled, then fell on top of him. In horror, I laugh too — I can’t help it. But Martin just shrugs again.

  “Good riddance,” he says. “I live with my aunt now. She’s got her hands full with work, so she mostly leaves me alone. How about you? You were living with your dad in Chico?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I leave it at that. I don’t really feel like going into it right now.

  On the street, a car door slams shut, and a girl I’m pretty sure I saw at school flips the bird to the driver as the car screeches away. Then the girl bursts into tears and takes off in the other direction.

  “Doesn’t she go to our school?” I ask.

  “Stacia Graham. She’s a freak.”

  “Martin,” I remind him. “We’re freaks too.”

  When I get home, Cheyenne is practically in hysterics.

  “You can’t just leave with candles burning in your room,” she says.

  “I’m sorry. I put it on a plate so nothing could happen.”

  “Nothing could happen? Something can always happen! What if it had started a fire? They’d put arson on me so fast your head would spin.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I didn’t mean to. My room just looked so lonely. I was trying to make it look nicer.”

  Cheyenne breathes slowly. “You have to be punished,” she says. I cringe, expecting her to hit me or lock me in the bathroom without food. Instead, her eyes dart around the room, and her gaze falls on my dad’s guitar.

  “No,” I try to get there first, but she wins, she always wins. She snatches the guitar and holds it behind her back. “Please, that’s not fair.”

  “You do not make the rules. I make the rules. I decide what is fair.” She backs out of the room. “Stop trying to fuck this up, or else things are just going to get worse. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.” She leaves with my guitar in hand.

  At my chest, the rose necklace glows hot for a moment, then stops, and I feel a certain lightening. Like maybe the necklace was able to take away a tiny piece of my anger.

  Even though I’d loved my bedroom at Anna’s house when I was seven, I grew to resent it over the years. It felt like a trap to me, someplace I had to go when I couldn’t be with my mom. And by the time I moved in full-time after she disappeared, I had grown to absolutely hate it. It felt false to me, like being inside a lie. It was painted pale yellow, and there was a patchwork comforter and stuffed tiger on the bed. They had taken down the fairy posters that had been up when I was younger, and the truth was, I wanted them back. But I wasn’t about to admit it.

  Anyway, I no longer believed in pretty painted walls and a bed to yourself. I believed in doing homework in the bathroom, of fleas in the bed you shared, blood on the sheets from scratching the flea bites on your back. I believed that smoking cigarettes felt good, that stealing was fun. I put my faith in the sharp tip of my mother’s paring knife.

  When I went to live with my dad and Anna, I brought the knife with me. But I didn’t use it the first day, and I didn’t use it the second day. I missed my mom, but nothing was so bad that I needed to hurt myself. The flea bites healed, and I began holding Anna to the light. They just wanted me to be a kid.

  Late at night, my cell phone chirps. It’s Anna.

  “I’m just lying here on the couch knitting a sweater and thinking of you,” she says, and I can see her there, in her gray-striped men’s pajamas with sleeves that seem to swallow her hands, a blanket on her lap, and her wooden knitting needles clicking in the candlelight. “Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I tell her. I don’t know what else to say.

  “Is Cheyenne behaving?”

  “Not really.”

  I can hear frustration in her sigh. “I talked to your dad’s lawyer. She says you need to stay with your mom, for now anyway.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I stare out the doorway of my bedroom, to the wax butterflies propped above the living room mantel. They look like candles. Maybe if I could melt away the wax, live butterflies would fly up to the ceiling. I could douse my hands in sugar water and let them live on my skin. Their tongues would extend and curl like yo-yo string.

  “Beltane is Friday,” Anna says. “Are you doing anything?”

  “Oh. I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you could come up to visit? The Treehuggers are having a celebration. You could invite Shell and Mechelle. We could spend the night in the teepee.”

  “I don’t know, I’ll ask. She’s mad at me right now, but I’ll ask when she’s feeling better.”

  Anna’s voice sounds so far away over the cell phone. There’s nothing she can do for me. She’s in Chico, and I’m stuck here. “Lacy. Are you okay?”

  I hear a thump at the sliding glass door and go to look. A dove has flown into it. Her little body is still on the back patio.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  I bring the dove into the house and lay her on the kitchen counter. She isn’t dead, but she’s hardly moving. In Cheyenne’s closet, I find a shoe box with shoes still inside — the ones she bought in San Miguel de Allende when she was pregnant with me. I carefully place the shoes on the top of her closet, but when I get back to the kitchen counter, the bird is dead. I pick her up, and her heart is still. I grit my teeth until they hurt and some ancient memory returns. Silver and blood. My mother at the mirror. I breathe, feeling almost faint, almost sick. I pull the bird to my chest.

  With my incisors, I bite a chunk of skin from my thumb. Tears sting at my eyes as the blood pools, and I smear it on the dove’s head. “Bring this creature back,” I whisper aloud. “Bring her back to life.” I run her to my room and open the box beneath my bed, the one with the mermaid’s eye, and from it I take the bottle of silver calligraphy ink. I tear the cork stopper with my teeth and smear the bird’s feathers with silver. As I chant, she begins to stir. I take the bird to the backyard and toss her toward the pool, but she flaps her wings and flies over the gate, across the neighbors’ backyard. Her wings shine silver, lit by their patio light. I expect to feel relief, but I don’t. I look at my hands. They are covered in blood and silver, and I feel ashamed. I have committed an act against science and nature. I should feel happy — I saved the bird, but instead I feel I’ve crossed some line. Dead things aren’t meant to come back. Again, the necklace feels warm against the skin of my chest.

  The spells were real, they had to be. I can no longer believe I may have dreamed them. My mother and I stood beneath the moon at night while that slippery thing moved in its hole. She chanted while the mild night turned stormy. She yelled at the
sky and lightning lit up her face. I clutched her dress as she took out a knife and cut her fingertip. She bled into the hole. She taught me spells. Revenge spells, curses, binding spells. It is all coming back, and I hate it.

  In the bathroom, I scrub at my hands, remembering the play Macbeth, which I saw at Shakespeare in the Park last summer. No matter how hard Lady Macbeth scrubbed, she couldn’t believe the blood was ever washed from her hands. But the blood and silver come off easily, trailing in rivulets with the soapy water down the sink. I return outside, to look for the bird or just to get my bearings, and I notice something, but it takes me a moment to realize what it is. Then it dawns on me: silence. Not one croak from a single frog.

  I dream that I am descending into madness. Burning cows in a field. Death beneath my feet. I stand on a sidewalk somewhere, flowers growing up through the cracks. I am an old woman. I cover my face with my hands and cry out as lightning flashes in the field. Then I am there in the field, I am tied to the tree. I open my mouth to scream, but only candle wax drips out. My chest opens, and my heart flies away. I try to catch it, but my hands are bound behind me.

  When I wake up, I expect to find my heart beating wildly. But there is nothing, not even a dull thump.

  My phone alarm (set to ROOSTER) crows, and the sound is excruciatingly shrill in my brain. I squeeze my eyes closed. My head won’t lift off the pillow. It feels heavy and full of sand. My mouth tastes like cotton balls and socks. I drag my body to the other side of the mattress so I can snatch the phone off the floor, and my entire skull throbs. It feels like I’m growing a unicorn’s horn, pressing itself through my forehead.

  “Cheyenne,” I call, but my throat is hoarse. And I know she sleeps like the dead.

  “Mom,” I try again. No answer. I fall back to sleep.

  The next time I wake up, my mother is pulling off my sheets.