1.

Jamie has never known what to say to her mother. And now—when it matters most of all, when she’s on a rescue mission—she knows even less. What the hell was she thinking?

Somehow Jamie had imagined just marching up to the bright red door of her mother’s tiny house. She’d knock, and then proclaim: “Listen Mom, I’m a witch, and I’m here to teach you how to do magic.”

As if that was a thing a person could say to her mother, after years of barely speaking to each other.

So Jamie stands frozen. She tries instead to gather her thoughts, and stares at the ancient one-room schoolhouse where her mother, Serena, has hidden from the world for the past six and a half years, ever since her life fell apart.

The schoolhouse is a box covered with flaking red paint, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, suitable for educating half a dozen children. A narrow gravel path skirts a garden where pansies, carrots, basil and cilantro shimmy in neat rows, like spectators cheering a team that’s already lost the season. In the distance, past a row of trees and a sloping lawn, Jamie can just make out the mock-colonial pile belonging to the Fordhams, who let her mother live here rent-free in exchange for various favors. The air swims with grit in the late-August wind; smoke from the first burning leaves of the season turns the world into a fireplace.

Jamie breathes and finds her center. Time to be a witch about it, she tells herself.

Meaning: Time to put everything out there, with no control over the outcome.

She marches up to the windowless front door and knocks, then hears stumbles on the inside that seem to go on for a long time. The door yawns, and Jamie’s mother blinks at the unexpected visit. Serena is about to say something, some pleasantry.

As it turns out, Jamie doesn’t utter the words “witch” or “magic.”

Not just because of how ridiculous those things might sound—it’s actually that Jamie is convinced that the mystical energy, or whatever force she cadges favors from, doesn’t like to be spoken of so openly.

Jamie speaks before she can lose her moment.

“Mom. I have something important to show you. I can’t explain, but I know a major secret. And I think you need to know about it.”

Coming to see Serena wasn’t a conscious decision, not really.

A few hours earlier, Jamie was sitting in a cafe near Central Square, crafting a syllabus for her freshman composition class, and she found herself obsessing about her mother.

Back when Jamie was growing up, Serena used to stomp around and speak truth to whomsoever would rather not hear it, returning home an hour before Jamie’s bedtime full of curses, like the occluded front of an oncoming thunderstorm—but now here she was, rotting away in some stale box. Jamie has never visited, but every now and then she and her mother had the same blandly pleasant conversation over the phone.

Suddenly, with an acid shock, Jamie had realized that her mother was going to die: maybe in two years, maybe in twenty. And when that happened, Jamie would do all the funeral crap you’re supposed to do, and maybe go through some therapy, and maybe put up Serena’s picture somewhere on her desk—but she wouldn’t have a living relationship to mourn.

All at once, this situation felt unbearable. Jamie leapt out of her chair and bolted, leaving half a scone and most of a coffee.

Perhaps the downside of being a witch is too much awareness of your own feelings. You spend so much time trying to sink to the bottom of your own emotional lagoon so you can dredge up one honest want, you stop being able to hide your feelings from yourself. This is annoyingly therapeutic, and it’s ruined Jamie for Jacobean theater and Romantic poetry. Whenever Jamie experiences a strong emotion, she’s the first to know, which never used to be the case. And most of the time, Jamie has to act on it.

“Do you want to come in?” Serena shuffles backward.

Jamie can’t help feeling like a giant, towering over her mother in a fake-leather jacket and wide hiking boots.

The air in here smells like cedar, but with a musty undertone that prickles Jamie’s nose. Two corners of this tiny room are never properly lit by the sun or by the single overhead bulb. A metal bedframe supports a futon mattress and duvet, near a writing desk and a single dresser with one rod to hang things that need hanging. Jamie sits at a folding card table in the center of the room, her left leg jiggling—because now that she’s here, she cannot wait to get into it.

Let’s gooooo.

Jamie can’t untangle her feelings, looking at Serena’s bony white face: gray eyes sunk deeper than Jamie remembers, brown hair steelier.

Here, in one frail body, is the person who held Jamie until the nightmares went away; who taught Jamie how to tie her shoes, skate and dance; who once accused Jamie of stealing; who crouched in front of tiny Jamie and said You will always be loved, you cannot mess up so badly that you will not be loved; who instilled in Jamie a deep paranoia about the world that still snags her when she’s trying to be generous; who walked Jamie home from school when bullies were after her. Jamie was all set to breeze in and drag Serena out of this psychic prison, and now a part of her regresses to early childhood, swinging her legs under the table.

But adult Jamie can’t help thinking about the trope in eighteenth-century lit where adults meet their mothers for the first time and do not know them. This gets downright squicky in Fielding’s Tom Jones and Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and the notion of mother-as-stranger is clearly a compelling one during a time where ideas of women’s roles in the domestic sphere are shifting.

Bleh.

Jamie’s brain will not stop churning, no matter how much she wants to be present.

“What’s this secret you want to tell me?” Serena heads for the little kitchen counter and pours coffee. “Why show up out of the blue like this? Is everything okay?”

Somehow Jamie forgot about Serena’s habit of tossing out questions like bombs with lit fuses. How is it that tenderness and annoyance go fist-in-palm? “I need to show it to you. I can’t explain. Let’s just say, it’s something that could turn your life around, or maybe turn your life sideways. Do you want to see or not?”

Serena pauses, coffee in hand. Her head swivels by instinct, as if to ask Mae what she thinks.

But of course, Mae hasn’t been available to ask such things for a long time.

So her head turns back, toward the one person who’s living and present. “Sure. Yes.”

Jamie takes a sip of bitter chickory and pushes the chipped mug away. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

“Where are we going?”

“I figured we could start with the woods out back.”

Serena thumbs through her clothing rack and digs out a magnificent blue pea coat, with a crushed dried flower pinned to one lapel.

The woods seemed an easy hike from the schoolhouse, but they’re farther than Jamie realized. The wind grows colder and Serena keeps griping, to the point where Jamie wonders when her mother last left the schoolhouse for any length of time. Jamie doesn’t have a plan exactly—maybe having a plan is a hindrance for the sort of thing she’s hoping to do.

Once in the woods, Jamie scans in all directions. A soda can flashes candy-apple red under the maroon of dead leaves. They’re close, she can tell.

“What are we looking for?” Serena sounds curious, rather than impatient.

“Hard to describe. It’s a ‘know it when you see it’ thing.” Jamie is low-key terrified that speaking out loud about magic will ruin it forever, and then where will she be? Still, she set out to teach her mom, and pedagogy is always at least partly a matter of providing a conceptual framework.

“I did a lot of trial and error.” Jamie chooses her words with care. “Back in Wardmont.”

“When you were in eighth grade?”

“Eighth through tenth.” Jamie nods. “I used to sneak off by myself and go to the warrens. I found it only worked in certain spots.”

There’s a whisper of a trail between birch trees with flaking bark and a few grouchy evergreens.

“Is that why you used to disappear?” Serena steps over a bulbous tree root with caution. “We never figured out why, and we couldn’t just ask, I guess.”

This land had once belonged to the Nipmuc Nation, but they were forcibly relocated in the seventeenth century, and this whole area was formally ceded to white settlers via the misleadingly named Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act of 1869. These grungy woods were mostly chopped down by loggers in the late nineteenth century, then slowly grew back. People have hunted, gathered, played and hidden among these trunks, but they’ve also sat empty for years at a time.

So this should be ideal, but Jamie can’t seem to find the right spot as they walk. You need someplace that’s halfway in between: neither wild nor tame, neither occupied nor unoccupied.

When Jamie was a teenager, she had found a community vegetable garden that had gone to seed—plants grown out of hand, rabbits chewing through everything, bugs all over the splintering sticks that once supported vines or saplings. That garden was the best magical cauldron a girl could ever wish for. Those neat rows covered by messy greenery brought Jamie her first guitar, the first blowjob she ever gave, her first kiss—which happened way later than her first blowjob—and her ticket to the best music camp in the state.

“You were a strange child, always rushing someplace, making up your own games.” Serena says. “Do you remember when you tried to give me an acorn of perfect knowledge?”

Jamie shrugs; she doesn’t remember that.

Forests don’t go on forever, not anymore, there’s always a development or a hunting trap, a clearing or a dirt road. People have carved up these woodlands so much, they’ve created an incalculable number of new magical places.

Still no luck, but Jamie keeps pressing forward.

“If we get lost in the cellphone dead zone, I plan to be quite passive-aggressive,” Jamie’s mother says.

“We’re not lost yet. Still working on it.”

Serena starts quoting some Thoreau pomposity about losing yourself in the woods—as if getting lost is intrinsically better in the woods than in a suburban IKEA. The whole concept of “getting lost” implies that at some point we are in fact oriented, which flies in the face of everything Jamie has ever known about people.

Jamie finds it: an in-between place. A spot where someone had tried to build a shed, or a hut, or some kind of gazebo, but the wood rotted away and a few rusted nails splay on the peaty ground. The whole thing smells of mulch.

“Oh, this is perfect,” Jamie tells her mom. “It’s big but totally disintegrated.”

What Jamie can’t explain out loud—for fear of wrecking these perfect conditions—is that this is a spot where people tried to impose their will on the forest, but they failed, or gave up. A place between grown and built, where someone took care of things, for a while. A neglected place, Jamie calls it.

The ideal spot to do some magic.

“So we found it,” Serena says in her most patiently matter-of-fact tone (the one she used to use when Jamie was a kid who occasionally made up weird stories to explain her messes). “Now what do we do?”

“Just watch.”

Jamie had the whole drive down to the schoolhouse to think about what spell she could do in front of her mother, and luckily she already had the perfect thing in her rucksack. She pulls out an egg-white cardstock envelope with the Rugby College crest on one corner. Inside, a letter explains that due to changes in the college’s endowment, Jamie’s graduate-student stipend is being reduced by $5,000—leaving her to starve or take on more debt. (The college has wasted a small fortune on the Quantified Text initiative, using algorithms to identify patterns in classic works of fiction, so nobody actually needs to read them. A total disaster, and now belts are being tightened.)

She lays the stipend-reduction letter (“We regret to inform you…”) in the center of the decaying structure. On top of it, she places some dandelions she picked: a good symbol of abundance. And then she adds an offering, a cow heart that she bought from the butcher. Hope you like big hearts.

Serena peers over Jamie’s shoulder, puzzled.

Explaining a ritual is worse than explaining a joke—it makes Jamie’s skin itch. But she has to try. “It’s not about power. It’s not. It’s about knowing what you really want, in your fucking secret heart, and putting your wishes into the world in a way that can be heard.”

“Heard by whom?” Serena asks.

Jamie just shrugs in response.

“And now?” Jamie’s mom asks.

“Now, we forget we did this, and head back. I know the way to the schoolhouse from here.”

At least, Jamie’s pretty sure she can figure out how to get un-lost.

“So doing that makes you feel better?” Serena asks. “Or do you really think it has a material impact? Was I supposed to feel something? At my age, I’m used to dismissing my own sensations so I don’t turn into a hypochondriac. How do you tell if you accomplished anything? How often do you do this sort of thing?”

Questions, questions, questions, coming too fast for Jamie to answer any of them.

If Mae was here, she’d be saying, Stop giving our child the ninety-ninth degree—but of course if Mae was here, everything would be different.

Jamie stops and wheels around to face her mother.

“Look, I can’t really explain. Not properly. Maybe in a few days, something will happen—like the department secretary will tell me that they found some money for me in a research fund, or they’ll change their minds about this cutback. You never get help in the way you expect, and it’s best not to be too prescriptive. But I’ve already said too much. This thing only works if you don’t think too hard about it, much less speak of it out loud.” But Jamie keeps seeing the tiny schoolhouse in her mind’s eye.

“The woodland exercise that can be spoken is no woodland exercise?” Jamie’s mom only rolls her eyes a little.

“You’re half right.” Jamie turns and keeps walking. “There’s more than a small element of the Dao in this practice, but it’s also way too anchored on desire, want, craving, self. That’s the whole reason I wanted to teach you: you need to let yourself want things again.”

“Who says I don’t want anything?” Serena bristles so hard, it’s like a crackle of static electricity on the back of Jamie’s neck. “And what’s so great about wanting things?”

Jamie can’t find a way to state the obvious: Serena has been unmotivated since she crawled into her box to hide, and it’s heartbreaking for anyone who remembers how alive she used to be.

The woods darken. Serena’s footfalls land heavier. Jamie decides to change tacks. “It’s not just about goals or whatever, it’s about self-knowledge. A person can’t really know who they are unless they know what they want. That’s a big part of why I do this thing: I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”

“Doesn’t obsessing over everything you crave just lead to bitterness, though?” Serena says.

“No, no, no,” Jamie hears her own voice go up, pushes it back down. “No, not at all. That’s the other part, see? You put your desires out there into the world, and then you can let go of them a little bit. I never know if anything will come of it, but I find I can obsess about something less once I’ve made an offering.”

Serena doesn’t talk for a while. Jamie glimpses the Fordham’s manor through the trees.

“So how often do you do…that?” Serena asks when they get back to the schoolhouse.

“Once in a while,” Jamie says. “Just finding the right locale usually takes forever. And then I have to get in the right headspace.”

“Hm. Do you need to find a new place every time?”

“Not always. But once I’ve disturbed a location, it’s no longer as untouched as before. So I usually can’t go back to the same spot too often.”

Jamie’s mother is being shrewd, avoiding any awkward questions that might stray too far into demanding an Explanation. And either it hasn’t occurred to her to think her daughter is delusional, or she’s giving Jamie the benefit of the doubt. (Why do we say “benefit of the doubt”? Why not “benefit of the belief”?)

Serena insists on making dinner before Jamie drives back to the city, so she texts her partner Ro that she’ll be home late. She hasn’t eaten her mom’s cooking in years, and of course food is basically pure nostalgia in chemical form. Soon Serena is whipping up her healthy versions of Midwestern comfort food, all cheese curds and veggie sausage.

Jamie keeps expecting to see Mae wander in the front door, shucking an oversized bomber jacket with a grin on her round craggy face, under henna-red bangs.

When Jamie’s clearing the table and getting ready to leave, Serena looks her in the eye and says, “Thanks for showing me. I think I’ve wondered for a long time.”

And that’s it.

 

She always knew something, and now she knows something more.

 

2.

Jamie keeps meaning to go back and check on her mother, to see if Serena was able to make anything out of the lesson in the woods. I’ll make the trek down to the schoolhouse in a few days, she tells herself occasionally. They can go for another walk and do another working, and Jamie can give Serena a few indirect pointers. Jamie’ll probably have to take Serena through it a few more times before everything falls into place. But meanwhile, she has a dissertation on eighteenth-century lit to finish, and Professor Zhang keeps nagging her for a chapter, and magic really can’t write her thesis for her.

(Though, on the bright side, the department did come up with enough money to restore the full stipends for Jamie and the other PhD students. As usual, Jamie tries not to wonder if her spell had anything to do with this windfall, because overthinking will ruin it.)

Each morning, Jamie revels in the abundance of a whole day, stretched out before her—a dozen hours in which to write epic sentences and accomplish great things—and she looks up, and suddenly it’s evening and she’s gotten nowhere. Somehow a month and a half pass without Jamie going anywhere near the schoolhouse.

One day, a sharp pain hits Jamie mid-chest, more an impact than a twinge, as she climbs the staircase out of the basement of the Banner Library. (She has a tiny makeshift office in the Goblin Market, the warren of converted storage cages down there.) She stumbles, she almost skids downstairs.

As if her mind has been working the problem in the background, Jamie suddenly knows what she should have said to Serena in the woods: “Remember when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I went to the Mercy school where I suffered a mild concussion every other week? I used to drift for hours, playing imagination games in the railyard and the abandoned garden and the old mall. I was looking for something, I didn’t even know what. And then I found it, and I was free and nobody could trap me anymore. Once I had my freedom, I could make space inside myself to want other things, and the more I could chase the things I wanted, the more I could understand what lay beneath them. Until I had a life and an identity and some of the things I had craved as a teenager, and I became too busy or too serious to want much of anything anymore, other than just safety and comfort. I became a grownup, after a fashion. But when I remember to covet, and I go back to the sort of places where I used to pine after unattainable wishes as a kid, then…something happens. I can make my life a little better. Other people’s lives, too. I can wake up my own heart.”

It’s perfect, and she only hopes she’s not too late to say it to her mother.

This time of year, fall creeps up on you and whacks you upside the head. One minute it’s hazy and bright and your collarbone itches with the sweat trapped under your shirt, the next—bam! The sky darkens early, cold mist fills the air, and everything feels weighed down with regret, or just damp. Five layers of wool cushion Jamie’s rangy, coltish arms and legs; she runs cold these days. Her shaggy brown hair, in need of a trim and some color, forms a net for snowflakes. She sets off for her mom’s twee cabin in the middle of the day, but by the time she arrives, the sky is graying.

    As soon as she gets to the schoolhouse, she can tell something is mesed up. The door is locked, but a crack runs from top to bottom, wide enough for Jamie to nudge the bolt out of place. Inside, Serena lies in the middle of the floor, wearing a frayed housecoat, the same one she used to wear when Jamie was little. She’s hugging an old throw pillow, and she’s tangled in a rug.

“Why did you teach me that?” Serena’s face presses against the floor, so her voice travels through the floorboards as much as the air. “Why would you teach anyone that, ever?”

“I wanted us to be friends. We’re both grownups now, more or less. We’re almost the only ones each other has left. And…I thought this could be good for you.”

Jamie was trying to soothe Serena, but only succeeded in pissing her off—which is almost as good.

“You thought it would be good for me.” Serena peels off the rug and staggers to her feet, flinging the pillow aside. “Ugh. Seems we’ve reached the role-reversal stage, where you know what’s best for me. I am not ready to be your motherfucking dependent.”

“Motherfucking” being, of course, one of those words that one uses all the time and seldom parses anew—until one hears it spoken by one’s own mother, whereupon it becomes an ouroboros of obscenity.

“I don’t want you to depend on me any more than you want to.” Jamie speaks with care. “Until a few minutes ago, I thought you were capable of taking care of yourself.”

Serena looks at her own dirty housecoat and the indentation of her body in the rug.

“Don’t make this about me.” The sharpness in her mother’s tone regresses Jamie instantly. All at once, she’s a small fry, in Trouble, looking over her shoulder to see if Mae will come to her rescue. She shakes it off: Mae is long gone, Jamie’s approaching the age Mae and Serena were when she was born, and Serena is no longer the boss of her.

“I didn’t teach you anything,” Jamie says in a painstakingly even voice. “Teaching implies structure, a syllabus, tests, a body of knowledge.”

“Didn’t realize your field was semantics.” Serena crosses to the tiny kitchen and starts making hot chocolate, the way she did when Jamie was a kid—one last gambit to infantilize her.

“I didn’t teach, I showed. I can’t talk about it without getting tangled up. I just wanted to share something with you.”

Some primitive yearning activates in Jamie at the scent of cocoa in progress. She can taste the first sip and the last, just from one distant whiff.

“I want us to be equals,” Jamie says. “Neither of us needs to know what’s best for the other.”

“That merely represents an intermediate state.” Serena has her back to Jamie, stirring chocolate and warm milk. “A changing of the guard on the way to you looking after me as if I’m helpless.”

“You’ve forgotten how tough you actually are.” Jamie takes the cocoa, breathes in the sugary steam. “I could never lord it over you, even if I wanted to. Those bastards did a number on you, but I wish you could remember yourself.”

“You want us to be equals, but you also want to be the one to remind me of myself.”

“That’s not even remotely a contradiction. Friends remind each other of who they are.”

Serena squints. “What if I don’t want to be friends?”

Jamie loses her grip on the mug, so it tumbles toward the scuffed hardwood floor. She catches the mug, but the cocoa is a puddle. Her heart is a techno song, or maybe house—the music Ro used to take her out dancing to.

“I’m your mother. We’re not supposed to be ‘besties.’ We didn’t join a study group together—you came out of me and I tried to teach you what you needed to know and now you’re teaching me and it’s awful and I can’t sleep, and everything smells weird and there’s clutter I don’t recognize, all over the place. Everything is dirty.”

Oh shit.

Never even occurred to Jamie that magic could go wrong. In her experience, either it works or it doesn’t. You try enough times, you get lucky. Now Jamie’s having a guilt spasm, staring at the cocoa-spill and tangled rug next to each other on the floor.

Nobody makes any move to clean up. Jamie is seeing her mother new: a sixty-year-old dyke whose skin clings too tight to her bones for wrinkles to form. She was unnervingly beautiful in her twenties (more beautiful than Jamie could ever aspire to be), with her frost-gray eyes, pale hawkish face and sleek chestnut hair. Jamie heard the stories—Serena tore through the lesbian scenes in a few cities, and people lined up to date her long after she had a reputation for breaking hearts. Jamie can still glimpse that fierce glamour through the pall that despair has cast over her.

Jamie doesn’t know what to say. She can’t ask Serena what went wrong, because that might make things worse. It’s frustrating for someone who swims in words for a living to find herself in a situation where words are counterproductive.

At last she says, “Show me.”

Serena hesitates, then leads Jamie to her cracked front door.

They trudge through the woods, on a different trajectory than last time. Serena wears a dour look, and her arm slaps against her leg as she walks. She’s always been excellent at projecting wordless anger, even back when she was mostly happy.

Jamie keeps thinking they’ve reached the spot where Serena did her working, but she’s wrong each time. There’s a rotted birdbath that Jamie might have expected a novice to choose, but nope. Ditto for the decaying plot full of rusted tools, which looks fairly promising.

Serena was half-supine back at the schoolhouse, but out here she’s vigorous, bloody-minded. They march until Jamie’s feet ache, after which they come to a spot that looks like nothing at all. Jamie’s mother gestures at some faint indentations in the grassy pine needles and whispers, “This was a road.”

At this moment, Jamie begins to suspect her mother has an actual gift.

“I thought I should find the loneliest place, or rather the place that felt the most lonesome,” Serena says.

Not at all how Jamie thinks about it, but Serena’s way obviously works.

Once Serena locates the exact spot in the overgrown road, where somebody went to a lot of trouble to clear away the brush long ago, she peels the bracken to reveal Mae’s favorite hat. Jamie’s other mother.

“I just miss her.”

On top of the hat rests a gently putrefying slab of smoked salmon, the kind that comes in vacuum-sealed pouches.

Seeing this woolen cap, sort of a beanie, with faded stitching that reads “brain cozy,” Jamie feels so much tenderness, she wants to give her mother the first hug anyone has given her in several years. But Jamie is also horrified, revolted, furious—she has a powerful urge to run away, screaming and windmilling her arms.

Why in a million years would you leave a dead woman’s hat in the grass of an overgrown road? What was Serena even asking for: Mae back from the dead? Some long-deferred justice for her death? Something else?

You can’t do magic unless you can clearly express your profoundest craving, without equivocating but also without being greedy.

What did Serena think would happen?

And what did happen?

Jamie can’t imagine the answer to either of those questions.

Serena wants nothing from the living. That’s the unmistakable message of this dirty hat. Nothing from Jamie, nothing from the Fordhams, nothing from Ying, Spotty Dobbins or any of her other old friends.

“You have to ask for something that is possible,” Jamie whispers, deathly afraid she’s going to ruin things for both of them.

“I do not know what’s possible for me.”

Jamie picks up the hat, though she’s sure it’s too late, and folds it carefully before placing it inside her messenger bag. She stares at her mother’s unexpressive face and gropes for something to say.

She settles on banality. “Mae would have wanted you to go on living.”

Serena rolls her eyes. “Okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘Okay’?”

“Doesn’t that seem like a small ask? I could be in a coma on life support and that would satisfy what you seem to think Mae would have wished for me.”

“Being alive and living are two different—”

“I thought I raised an interesting person.” Serena snorts and walks away.

Jamie almost claps back, but she can see the fragility below the salt. Serena has always had a huge asshole streak, but she (almost) never insults her own child. She’s clearly still rattled and anxious, though she’s hiding it better now. So Jamie walks quietly beside her, figuring she’ll lead the way back to the schoolhouse. Maybe the two of them can drink cocoa instead of drizzling it onto the floor, and figure this thing out.

They get lost. Really, really lost this time.

Serena stops and says, “Let me get my bearings.” The sky goes black, and she appears more disoriented. Either she knew how to find the overgrown road, but not how to get back, or this is a consequence of her failed spell—or maybe Jamie made things worse by removing the hat. They’re in unknown territory, in both senses.

They stand in the gloom, while Serena tries to orient.

Jamie turns her phone into a flashlight, while all her energy goes into not griping at her mother. Her phone’s GPS is all over the place, but she has plenty of signal, so she texts Ro: lost in the woods with my mom. gps borked. Ro sends a bunch of heart emojis and asks if they need to call 911. Jamie says nah, fuck that. I just need a clear sense of direction.

Ro responds by texting Jamie a link to a star-gazing app. A moment later, Jamie knows which way is south. Her phone battery is at twelve percent.

“This is horrible.” Serena groans. “Is it always like this?”

“It is never like this.” Anger leaks into Jamie’s voice at last. “I’ve literally never had anything like this happen to me.”

Serena nods, with a brittle formality. “Thank you for sharing this with me, even if it didn’t come out the way you hoped.”

They find the edge of the woods, two miles down the road from the schoolhouse.

“I know you’ve been lonely,” Jamie says to her mom’s back. “Living in that schoolhouse by yourself with nobody to talk to but the Fordhams.”

No answer. Trudge trudge trudge.

Jamie is ready to stop regressing around her mother. Which ought to make her punch the sky, triumphant—instead, she feels as though she’s let go of something precious. This shift goes hand in hand with the role-reversal thing Serena keeps dreading, where Jamie starts looking after her mother. At least Serena still has the power to drive Jamie to scream-town, same as ever.

“I miss Mae too,” Jamie says.

She has paperwork to complete, and she promised Ro she’d clean the bathroom and there are five episodes of Real Housewives that the two of them haven’t watched yet.

But she cannot leave until she figures out what went wrong with her mom’s spell. Or rather, what was the fallout from it going wrong—other than being bad enough that Serena was in a fetal position, spooning a tassel-fringed pillow.

They straggle back to the schoolhouse. Serena doesn’t want to let Jamie back inside, even to use the bathroom. “You’re going to judge me.”

Jamie looks down at her shrunken mother. “I already went in earlier, when I first showed up.”

“It’s different after dark.”

Jamie doesn’t argue, just pushes past without actually shoving Serena aside. As soon as she stumbles into the schoolhouse, she chokes on a terrible smell. She can’t place this stench at first, but she can’t escape it. She nearly throws up.

What sort of smell is it? Barfy, rotten, sour, soiled. Now Jamie knows exactly what smell this is, or rather what combination of smells.

It’s Mae’s filthy bandages, from when she started to get bedsores. It’s the black bile she vomited up in her last days. It’s the adult diapers. It’s the stench of her cadaver when Jamie and Serena found her that last day, neither of them quite managing to be there in her last moments. The burnt stir-fry she made when she was trying to convince her family that she still had it together and nothing needed to change.

“I sprayed. I opened all the windows. I cleaned and scrubbed every inch.”

Jamie looks at her mother and thinks: Imagine what you could accomplish if you tried something constructive.

No clue how to fix this. Jamie has always told herself a good spell is one where you are never sure if it worked—even if you get the exact thing you asked for, it could just be a coincidence.

How do you clean up a category error?

They already removed the hat, but Jamie doubts that will suffice on its own. She can’t help thinking of this as a haunting, or some sort of infestation, which needs to be expunged. But that’s pop culture speaking through her, not her actual understanding of magic and how it works.

So…what???

Solving this mess is going to require Jamie to think more deeply about magic than she ever has—deeper than she’d usually consider wise, or sane. This could ruin her spellwork forever.

Serena stares. As if she can’t decide whether she’s more worried that her daughter is going to think ill of her, or that Jamie can’t clean up this mess.

Okay…Serena asked for something impossible, or just unexamined. What she got was all the horrible memories, Mae the way they both swore they wouldn’t remember her. Mae on her way out.

Not Mae when she was fully alive, in her long and glorious prime. Smiling, singing, doing math in her head while also reciting a Romantic poem. Turning every odd and unlovable leftover in the refrigerator into a miraculously tasty stir-fry or casserole. Mae had her own kind of magic.

People always say Be careful what you wish for, as if anyone ever really chooses their own wishes. A person who could wish with care would be an irredeemable monster.

If this were a horror movie, or some gothic romance, the key would be to accept that Mae is gone and she’s not coming back. But that’s ridiculous: Jamie and Serena are adults who live in the real world, and they understand the nature of death and irrevocable loss perfectly.

No, the trouble here is that Serena was sloppy, because Jamie taught her sloppily. Jamie should have supervised her mother’s first attempts at spellwork.

“What do you actually want out of life?” Jamie asks her mother.

Serena gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs the floor. “I want this terrible smell gone.”

“What do you want that’s not just a negative? What would make you happy?”

“Why are you asking me? You’re my daughter, not my therapist.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

How to explain without saying too much? Maybe this is it. Maybe Jamie has to ruin magic for herself to save Serena from the mistake Jamie led her into. Jamie doesn’t actually know that magic will fail if she speaks about it too freely, she just feels it, in some organ deeper and more obscure than her heart or stomach.

“The only way to repair this is to want something new,” Jamie says slowly.

Serena looks up from scrubbing.

“You know as well as I do that the thing you did with the hat caused this—” Jamie struggles to find a word that fits. “This infestation.”

Serena doesn’t try to deny it. She’s always been a pragmatist, where Mae was more of a skeptic—and yes, pragmatism and skepticism are opposites, as Jamie learned the hard way whenever she heard the two of them argue. A pragmatist is up for whatever works, but a skeptic wants things to make sense and have a reasonable explanation, even if that leads to nothing but trial and frustrating error.

“You had a chance to ask the universe for something,” Jamie says. “But instead you chose to register a complaint.”

Serena pulls herself up into a sitting position. This foul odor is getting to her, even more than it’s getting to Jamie.

“Everybody reaches a point where they have more past than future. Some people are aware when that happens, and at that point your fondest wishes are liable to become retrospective,” Serena says.

“You could live another twenty—”

“Don’t threaten me with longevity.”

“I’m just saying. You have a future. Same as anyone who’s not imminently dying.” Jamie sucks in a breath and the smell of Mae’s deathbed throws her.

Serena looks weary, grief-beaten, ashamed. Frightened to want anything new, after what happened to her wife and her career.

“Okay, get up.” Jamie puts on her briskest speaking-to-freshmen voice.

“Where are we—”

“We’re going to find another spot out there, and you’re going to put down something forward-looking and hopefully plausible.”

“I’m not a good judge of plausibility anymore.”

“Just try.”

For a moment Jamie is sure Serena will refuse to follow her back out there. But Serena is desperate enough that she gets her coat and tromps out the door.

They don’t go back into the woods. Jamie doesn’t much want to fall and break her neck or get bitten by something. Instead, they get in the dirtmobile and follow the unpaved back roads, until they find a road that dwindles to a hiking trail that they only follow a few yards before discovering a makeshift shrine that someone put a lot of work into before leaving it to crumble. Mossy candles, a porcelain figurine, handwritten notes gone illegible.

“Perfect.” Jamie turns to her mother. “You got something?”

“I think so. I hope. Let me try.”

Serena jots a few words on a paper and wraps it around a small cardboard box. She leaves this tiny bundle under a layer of moss at the center of the ruined shrine, along with some chocolate from Jamie’s bag. “Uh, thank you and please and I hope this meets with your, uh, approval.”

Neither of them talks on the crunchy bumpy drive back to the schoolhouse. Jamie’s already dreading the longer haul back to Somerville.

When they reach the schoolhouse, the smell-cluster is gone. Slight bleach-Febreze scent, but other than that, nothing. Jamie hugs her mom good night. Serena feels like a sack of twigs. She yawns and sobs a little. Maybe she’ll sleep now. Jamie hopes so.

Jamie doesn’t know what Serena’s new spell aimed for, and she doesn’t want to know. But it was something that she dearly wanted, or it wouldn’t have been enough to cancel out the earlier demand.

The next morning, Jamie decides: her mother shouldn’t do any more spellwork without Jamie’s direct supervision, or maybe assistance. At least until she’s gotten a bit more control over it.

© 2025 Charlie Jane Anders