“Doug asked me to keep quiet,” I said, my stomach going sour. My son made a good point, and I was grasping at straws. Never a good place to be with a teenager.
“But is Dad a witch? Or a druid like these guys?”
There had been whiffs of magic in the shadowed corners of the Flechettes’ palatial estate. But Doug’s parents weren’t the warm and fuzzy type, and they made it clear I wasn’t going to be the daughter-in-law representing the family on the various boards they cycled through. When Doug’s mother put him in charge of all the realty offices on the Salish Sea Islands, I was relieved to be out of their daily orbit. Until the move began to feel like an isolation tactic.
“I don’t recall ever seeing Doug call on magic,” I admitted. “Only denigrate mine. And the little bit my aunt used when you two were babies.”
Oh, this was so much for my child to process. And the more Harper was feeling, the more his face went blank. “Why would Dad do that?”
“I assumed his parents had been the same way.”
“But why didn’t you insist, Mom? Did you even try?”
I could only shake my head and try to not cry. Of course I had tried, until trying and failing dried up my self-esteem. Years ago, I’d stopped asking myself why I wasn’t more insistent, and eventually the pain of staying silent dulled until it was small enough I could wrap it up and pack it away.
“Letting go of my magic seemed less important than keeping our household running smoothly and keeping your dad happy. We were young when we got together. We both changed after we were married and after we had the two of you. Changes which had nothing to do with either of you.” I made it a point to plant a kiss on Harper’s troubled forehead.
When he asked me to elaborate, I cut him off. I hadn’t forgiven myself for the neglect, and the sourness in my stomach was spreading to my heart. “He’s my ex-husband, but he’s still your father. We’re both to blame for our marriage not working out.”
Harp took a long swallow of the juice, a challenge in his guarded eyes. “You’re not going to forbid us to explore our magic, are you?”
“Absolutely not. Your skills and talents are yours to develop as you’re ready, and I will help you in any way I can.”
“And you’re going to study too right?”
“Absolutely.”
He nodded. “I’m glad. For all of us. What do you think about Tanner?”
“I only met him two days ago. I like him so far.”
“I do too. I’m excited and a little scared and…”
I waited as my oldest struggled to articulate.
Thatcher was awake and listening, ready to jump in with the brotherly thought-sharing and sentence-finishing they’d been doing their entire speaking lives. “And we shouldn’t tell Dad, right?”
I handed Thatch his glass of juice, extended my legs and crossed my ankles, and waited for the voices from both sides of the fence to flood my head in one…two... “I think we keep this amongst ourselves while we’re figuring it all out.”
Both nodded their agreement and dove in to speculating about how their magic might manifest and what they could do to boost their abilities. The phrases they tossed back and forth sounded like they’d been pulled from a discussion of their favorite online multi-player game. I scooted backward out of the tent, my work for the moment done. Overhead, the aged crabapple tree’s leafy branches carried a smattering of misshapen fruit. My older cousins and I had played battle games with the apples we found on the ground, and the trunk and lowest branches were already gnarled when my mother and I first arrived at the house.
Mama.
Moments of intense mothering left me wanting a mother of my own. I ran my fingertips over the nearest fruit. Tears blurred my vision, and I gave in to the invitation to step closer and closer still, until my sternum fit snugly over the place just below where the trunk separated into two main branches. I rested the side of my face against the bark and reached my arms up as though to partner in a dance with this steadfast friend.
The Old One had a lot of life coursing under its scabby surface. And it had a heartbeat, slow, so very, very slow. The dappled sun warmed my back, and my feet reached below the uppermost layers of sod and found a groundwater aquifer—sandstone and siltstone; shale and conglomerate, glacial sediments, fossils and mudstone.
I hugged the crabapple more tightly, close to full-on crying. My breast bone became spongy, like living wood. The whoosh of blood through my veins matched the capillary-like action taking place beneath the bark, a drawing up of water from the roots all the way to the leaves and fruit.
Interspersed with those same, nourishment-seeking roots was a whole other network. I followed the mycelial layer past the boundaries of my property, coursing faster and faster, to other apple trees and orchards until I crash landed at the base of one of the oldest trees in the Pearmains’ orchard.
A laugh—rich, resonant, and feminine—rolled through the flexible underground plexus and flooded the porous spaces in my bones.
“Mom.”
I ran. Or I tried. But my feet and toes were rooted to the ground at the base of the ancient tree and my arms were wrapped around the crabapple’s trunk, and every morsel of awareness was caught somewhere between the far section of Cliff and Abi’s orchard and my lone malus Rosaceae companion, miles away.
“Mom!”
The worry in my sons’ voices, helped along by firm hands shaking my shoulders and gripping my wrists, gave me a route back. Honing in on the beacon of their touch, I crashed into my body and slumped to the ground.
“Mom.”
“I’m
