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I’m transported, with her, to a different time and place. We’re outside in the summer but ash is in the air, floating around the scene.
She clings to me as we watch a memory float over us.
“Don’t lie, you reckless child–what did you do?” a woman screams, shaking the shoulders of a little girl with raven black hair.
Lark.
Another women rushes into the yard as dark rain clouds cover the sky, rain pelting down on them, the sky cracking with lightning. “What happened, Tabitha?” Her face is stricken with fear, reaching for Lark, pulling her close.
Tabitha looks to the sky, broken, her heart bare, as rain falls over her face. She closes her eyes, replaying the memory. “Lark screamed for help when I was down in the cellar. I rushed up to the yard and saw Tennyson lifeless in the grass. I ran to her, but she wasn’t breathing, she was dead. Your daughter killed her, Deanna. She killed her own sister.”
“There must be more to the story,” Deanna says, the earth around them soaked with water as the rain falls in buckets, but it does nothing to wash away the pain. “Lark, what happened?”
Lark stands silent, in shock, tears in her big black eyes, her smocked dress sticking to her tiny frame.
Tabitha keeps speaking. “And then as I was holding my dead daughter’s body, someone … something … took her. Tennyson is gone. All at the hands of Lark.” The woman sobs, her daughter gone.
“Don’t speak that way of my girl.” The woman called Deanna lifts Lark from the ground, holding her in her arms. “They’re just children.”
“But my child is gone. She was dead on the ground, and then … something took her.”
“What do you mean, took her?” Deanna asks.
“A gust of wind swept through the sky and swept her away to the clouds.”
“You speak of a magic I’ve never seen, sister.”
Tabitha’s eyes go hard. “I pray to never see your demon child again.”
“Don’t say that,” Deanna sobs. “We’re family. Sisters.”
“Leave New Orleans,” Tabitha hisses. “Never return. I can’t bear to see your evil girl again.”
“What if you have it wrong?” Deanna asks. “What if Tennyson …” “Don’t you dare speak ill of the dead. I can’t even go to authorities and report her dead, missing–anything. These children were a curse the moment they were delivered.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You are a fool to think anything different. We don’t know where they come from; we just know they have a deep power inside of them. We believed we were here to protect them, but we were wrong.”
Deanna meets her sister’s eyes, heaviness between them as they say goodbye. And then she turns, she leaves, carrying her daughter.
Lark looks over her mother’s shoulder, at her aunt who falls to the floor, lost without her daughter. Lark opens her palm, clutching a ring. Then she folds her hand into a fist and a single tear falls down her cheek.
Lark wakes with a start, her fisted hands pounding on my chest.
“Shh, shhh, it’s okay, I’ve got you, little bird,” I tell her, holding her close.
She opens her hand, and I think we both believe she’ll find a ring hidden in her palm.
But it’s empty.
And all Lark can manage to do is cry.
22
Lark
Yes, I’m familiar with magic. I grew up around my mother’s crystal ball and her tarot readings and the spells she would cast around the house, claiming
they were for protection.
I always chalked it up to her mystic eccentricities. Her witchiness.
But what I saw last night wasn’t a magic I know.
I still can’t see every part of my story. There are pieces I’m missing.
A massive piece.
How did Tennyson die?
I come home after a night of broken sleep in Sawyer’s arms, my body different–I’m no longer a virgin. I’m a woman in every sense, and it is time to lay to rest the parts of my story that cause my heart to ache.
I drop my tote bag to the kitchen floor, rolling my shoulders. It’s not my body that hurts though, it’s my heart.
“It’s not the dancing, is it?” Mom asks, her eyes straining, as if desperate to understand.
I shake my head. “I’ve had two visions, Mom. Memories resurfacing.”
She nods. “I can’t protect you from the past when you don’t sleep here.”
My eyes fill with tears. “I don’t want you to protect me. I want to understand.”
Mom pulls me into a hug, and I inhale her lavender and clary sage essential oils. She is wisdom incarnate and I want her to bestow some of that on me.
“Come, have tea,” she says. “I’ll tell you the rest of what I know.”
After I explain my visions, Mom tells me that her and her sister Tabitha always understood that Tennyson and I were special. We were delivered to a pair of witches, after all.
But after Tenny died so mysteriously, and then was plucked from the ground and lost to the sky, they knew we were more than special.
