Page 31 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
I march back into the lounge to clean up the spilled tea and drag my mind back into the present, back to Matthieu. I eye her, this woman with her stories and her curses, and I draw in a breath. Cora is old. And in light of what Howard told me about her, and what the man in the hardware store said... I pause, stilling any retorts before they burst out of me. It would do no good to upset her by letting them out. It would just be noise.
“Cora, I respect all of it, truly. But this is different. I’ll go and find him—tomorrow, at first light. He lives in the first cabin up the mountain trail from Ivy’s field, the Vickers cabin. I found it with Jess and Tom when we were younger. It’s not far,” I say to her quietly, decisively. “Thank you for the tea.”
“Be careful, Carrie,” she says. “Please, my girl, if you must go there, don’t stray from the path. Don’t follow any shouts or calls. Don’t... don’t believe everything you see and hear.”
I don’t wait for her to say anything more. I don’t wait for her to tell me I’m wasting my time, or that I shouldn’t go looking for someone who is not even real. I don’t want to hear her tell me that he’s some vengeful spirit, the mountains made flesh. I don’t want to hear any more curses fall from her lips, or any more stories of broken hearts and lost loves. I pull on my boots and set out into the gathering night, making my way back through the mud-slicked fields to the caravan.
Chapter 25
Jess
Jess’s life is a series of moments. The precious, solitary moments before she drags Elodie to school in the morning, her time spent in the hushed library stacks, then the moments afterward when she collects Elodie from school and Tom gets home from work. She can divide up her days into sections, compartmentalize them like her to-do list. And right now she knows which moments in her day she prefers.
It all began with the chicken. After her shift, she stands in the line at the butcher’s in town, one street down from the library. The thawing snow has left streams of water running through the square, and now it pools in the heel of her boot, soaking her sock. She can feel a cold coming on, a thickening in her nose and throat, an itching in her ears. And her limbs, her very joints, ache and fizz, every fiber of her longing for a bath and a mug of hot chocolate to hold in her hands. It’s the same every December, in the run-up to the festive season, when everything seems to get so busy, when she can hardly find a moment tobreathe.
She has already canceled on Gillian, sending a quick text to let her know she can’t meet for coffee after the school run tomorrow. The very thought of carefully deflecting Gillian’s attempts to gossip about Carrie for half an hour leave her wrung out and irritated.
When she reaches the front of the line, Adam Monks, with his white hat and striped apron, has only chicken thighs and lambcutlets left. She sighs through her nose, eyeing them both before pointing to the chicken. She hands over her bank card, listening for the high-pitched tap that signals her account being drained just that little bit more.
Then she smiles a vacant half smile at Adam, the boy who is now a man. She remembers him picking his nose in year three, when he sat on the classroom carpet next to her. That’s the thing about staying in your hometown into adulthood: each day and every conversation is layered with memory upon memory. Some days she feels like she’s wading through a stream of them.
After Adam bags up the chicken, she leaves the shop and hurries to her car, dodging the rivers of meltwater and being prodded by umbrella spokes as she brushes past people. She dashes across the main square, feeling the damp squelch in her left boot, and unlocks her parked car with a whispered “At bloody last.”
She doesn’t usually drive, since she’s always thinking about getting her steps in for the day. But just like the past few days, she woke up this morning with a bone-deep weariness. She has fought against it—swimming against a current of fatigue—but this morning it tugged her under. She hustled Elodie into the car, warmed her hands on the hot air choking out of the vents by the steering wheel, and decided to sign up at the gym instead of battling the dwindling minutes to squeeze in her usual walk to school and then to the library.
Now Jess rummages in a shopping bag and pulls out a paper packet, shiny with grease. She dips her hand inside, breaks off a piece of cinnamon bun, and exhales as she chews. She has a full twenty minutes before she has to pick Elodie up from school. She dusts crumbs off her hand and reaches into another bag on the passenger seat, then pulls out the hardback that’s just come into the library. The latest in a series she loves, it’s a book she’s been waiting for. She takes another bite of the bun, settles into the carseat, and loses herself contentedly in the first chapter, the heat still blasting out of the vents, the chicken still sitting on the passenger seat.
After picking up Elodie, after listening to the other mums complain about the number of sweets their children were given on Halloween—about how it’s become such atoxicpart of our culture—she drives home, listening with only half an ear to Elodie talk about the boy called Phillip in her class who stole her seat at lunch. What Jess is really thinking about is how long it’ll be before she can settle into a bath and read the next chapter of her new library book. Reading a new book is the quiet place of joy she’s slipped into ever since she was little. The rustle of the pages and the tug of the characters’ lives feel so vivid, so real. When she finds a good book, a gripping story, it’s like winning the lottery. She hopes Elodie will find that same joy when she starts choosing books of her own.
Sometimes Jess wishes that Tom would pick up Elodie from school. That it wasn’t always her job to race from the library, pick up dinner, and then rush over to the school to collect their daughter. She wishes he could be the one who remembers to send a birthday card to his aunt, or the one who packs the rucksack when they go out for a day trip as a family.
After she hustles Elodie inside, Tom arrives home earlier than usual. He has that wild-eyed look he gets nowadays, as though his thoughts are forever wandering across the fields to a certain cottage, to a certain person. Jess wants to say something. She wants to open her mouth and let it all pour out—all her feelings about Carrie, about him, about how he never picks up his damn socks off the bathroom floor when he showers, about knowing he’s looked up Carrie on Facebook. He’s probably stalking her Instagram account as well, seeing all the pictures of the renovation,her morning walks, her perfect existence. Not that Jess scrolls her feed at all. Obviously.
But she doesn’t say any of these things. Jess just sniffs at the chicken, forehead dimpling slightly. “Does this smell okay to you?” she asks, turning to him. She places the thighs on a baking tray, intending to roast them and make a rice dish on the stove with some veggies. But something smells off. And even now, twenty minutes after getting out of the car, she still has a feeling of motion sickness. As though she is still traveling forward, propelled in a way that her body is revolting against.
It has to be the chicken.
Tom bends over it, his forehead pinched like hers, and breathes deeply. “Smells normal to me. Do you want me to do dinner? Maybe go up and take a bath, or—”
Jess is gone before he finishes the sentence. Soon she’s wallowing in a cloud of marshmallow bubbles, ducking her head under the surface so she can no longer hear the rumbling of her husband’s voice or the tinny notes of the TV program Elodie is watching. She drifts, imagining a weekend of being totally alone, answerable to no one but herself. Then she dries her hands, carefully turns to the next chapter of the library book, and loses herself once more in the pages.
She lingers too long in the bathwater. Finally admitting defeat, Jess pulls herself out of the tepid water. She brushes her hair back, pulls on joggers and a hoodie, and breathes a sigh of relief when she catches the scents of garlic and chicken. At least Tom is actually cooking dinner. At least there’s that.
Jess goes downstairs, idly searches through the fridge for the half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc, and, spotting it, pours herself a few inches in her favorite wineglass. Tom is thumbing through the TV channels, and Elodie has already tucked into a plate ofchicken and pasta with a few circles of cucumber on the side. Elodie won’t eat rice, so they always have to cook pasta separately for her. Just one of the many Elodie-isms Jess half hates, half loves.
“I’m going out in a bit,” Tom says to her, not even bothering to turn around. Not even bothering to offer up an explanation.
Jess tenses and takes a measured sip of wine. It’s sharp on her tongue, all ice and crisp citrus. “Right.”
“Don’t be like that.” Tom sighs, abandoning the remote control next to Elodie, who still sits glued to the TV, her dinner on a lap tray, her little legs poking out like sticks.
“I’m just tired, Tom. Just tired,” Jess says quietly.
Tom says nothing for a moment as he gets up, stretches, then looks at her. “I went to see her. When she first got back.”
Jess’s heart stops. “What?”
“I thought it would help. I didn’t think she would stay this long, to be honest—”
