Page 50 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
But as I turn back to the shop, back to the small slip of a space, to the walls and shelves and dust, I can’t stop the smile spreading through me. I can buy this space from Cora and Howard and make a living in Woodsmoke. I can paint and create and live in that cottage under the watchful eye of the mountain, finding my way through every season of the year. I feel like I’m starting more than a new chapter. It feels like a new book, a fresh story all of my own making.
Chapter 39
Carrie
He wasn’t at her wedding day. She pulled the flowers from her hair, desperate tears in her eyes, and under that same sickle moon, she went searching for him. She searched for him everywhere, all across the mountains, calling his name to the spring.
—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929
I’m staying, and I want you to stay too.
The words thump to the rhythm of my heart as I walk, run,flyto the cottage, hoping he will be there. Now that I’ve spoken it out loud to Cora, saying it like a spell in that dusty, crooked little shop, I know it’s true. I want to stay. As soon as I said it, as soon as I visualized my artwork filling that space, I knew I wanted Matthieu to stay in Woodsmoke with me.
And just like a spell has been either broken or cast, the frost begins to thaw.
As I cross the field, the grass no longer crackles like splintered glass. It’s softening, rolling over and curling in a languorous wave as the sun spears great holes in the clouds, setting the world on fire. Spring has come and is shivering over everything, the landscape waking up with the kiss of heat and light. I laugh, breathless and dizzy, as memories tumble around in my head. Moments flash through my mind—the midnight picnic, his mouth on mine, paint flecking his features as we finished the last room. Eachmoment, each memory, turns into a molten haze and lights up the winter as I crash through the cottage door, calling his name.
“Matthieu! Matthieu, I have to tell you something! Where are you?” I pull off one boot, hop on one foot as I pull off the other, then scurry through the lounge, into the kitchen—
He’s not here. He was here, just an hour or so ago. We woke up together, made coffee and toast. He didn’t mention going anywhere. I turn, rush back through the lounge, cross the hallway to thump up the staircase, one tread, three, five, and burst into the main bedroom.
“Matthieu?”
Silence. Deafening, ringing silence. I drop down in a sigh on the four-poster bed, allowing my heart rate to slow as the light trickles across me. I turn my head to the window, the panes filled with a soft glow, and wonder what it will be like to wake here each day with the sunlight streaming in. Every day I have woken up since returning, I’ve struggled in either gray light or complete, velvet darkness until I’m already up and ready. I draw in a breath, allowing it to fill every inch of my lungs, the words still beating like a promise through my veins. I want to say it aloud. I want to say it tohim.
I want you to stay.
My phone rings downstairs, the distant tinny tune breaking into the warm fugue of my thoughts. I get up and move quickly down the stairs to find my coat and dig into the pocket for my phone. As I draw it out, it rings off before I can answer, and I’m sure, so sure, it was him, telling me he popped out, asking if I want him to pick up something for dinner—
But it’s a missed call from Cora and Howard’s house phone. Probably Cora phoning to remind me I’m expected at eleven tomorrow and to bring shortbread or cake. Or maybe it was Howardphoning to apologize, in his shuffling, roundabout way, for Cora’s sharp manner.
I walk into the lounge and sit next to the Wi-fi router I’ve had installed so that the call will be as clear as I can get it. I return the call, slumping in the armchair by the front window, knowing one of them will pick up on the third ring and not a moment before.
“Carrie,” Howard answers on an exhaled breath. “Cora isn’t herself. I don’t know what to do. The doctor said this might happen, but I can’t get through to her...”
My whole being deflates. “What do you mean?”
He hesitates, as though he’s watching Carrie, wondering how much he can impart. “She just got back from town, and she’s—she’s saying the frost has broken. She just keeps repeating that. And she’s talking about her baby, she’s been going through each room, trying to find her baby... you know we never... Carrie?”
“I’m still here,” I say.
“Can you... come over? Talk to her? I can’t, I don’t know if she can even see me, hear me...”
I begin to move, casting one last regretful look around the empty cottage, as though I can summon an absent Matthieu from the walls. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Hurry.” He hangs up abruptly, leaving me in stewing silence.
I try Matthieu’s number five times, and five times it rings out and out and out. On the drive over to Cora’s, I stare at the landscape, seeing only green and brown. The white has melted away, retreating for another year and leaving the mountains bald and bare. As though they are ready to be reborn.
I chew on my lip, drawing pinpricks of blood, and the copper taste swills in my mouth. I’m trying to pin down the details of our ice-skating trip in my memory. Did he speak to anyone? DidI collect the skates, or did he? All of Cora’s warnings worm their way into my thoughts. In each of my memories now, Matthieu seems transparent. Ghostly.
When I pull up at Cora and Howard’s in a spray of gravel and haste, Howard is already hobbling out, his creased face bent low, his chin tucked into his chest. For a handful of heartbeats, I don’t get out of the car but sit there, wondering. If the magic is real, hasCora done something? In her twisted way of trying to protect me, has she banished the frost from the mountain? What baby is she searching for?
I glance at my phone screen once more, as though I can conjure a message from the silence. But the fact is I haven’t seen Matthieu since yesterday. Haven’t heard from him at all today. And the shiver running through the fields finally reaches inside me, all the way into my bones. In this new spring light, I finally feel the cold of winter.
“Where is she?” I ask, my voice strained and reedy as I step out of the car. “Where’s Cora?”
“Now, before you go after her—”
