CHAPTER 12 
I wake in the late morning with Homer Honeycutt’s words in my head: Find a witch weapon or how to make one, and find out how your mom saved you the night you were born.
I know the first place I need to start, but it doesn’t fill me with much hope. I need to start with her.
Bleary-eyed from so little sleep, I tuck the Guide under my arm and head downstairs to make myself my first-ever cup of coffee. It’s bitter and I don’t like the taste, but it wakes me up. You’re gonna stunt your growth, sweetie, I think. I make my mom a cup and bring it to her in the attic, where she already sits, rocking and staring out the window.
She looks up at me and narrows her eyes. I glance around at all the things I’ve put up to help her remember me. I kneel beside her with the book. I slide The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe onto her lap.
Her eyes go from her coffee cup to the book, then to me. There is something there. A glimmer of a spark of memory.
“Mom, do you remember this book? It’s a book you helped to write,” I say, “full of secrets you helped to learn.”
She blinks at me, then stares back down at the cover. I slowly open it for her, and flip through one page and then the next, my heart beating in my throat with hope. When I arrive at the page of the Memory Thief, her eyelids flutter. She turns her gaze to the window.
I look hard at her. “Mom,” I say, low, because my voice falters. “What happened the night I was born? How did you protect me? What secrets did you know?”
She turns her eyes back to me. And that’s when I see it, or I think I do. Somewhere deep inside her eyes, something trying to get out, to reach me. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I don’t think so; it’s like the smallest pinprick of light still inside her. And then it fades.
“What are you asking me?” she says. “What is this? Why are you bothering me?”
I squeeze her hand tight. What did you expect? I think.
“I’m not giving up,” I say. “I’m going to find you—the old you. I’m going to rescue you from the monster in the fairy tale. I’m going to bring you back.”
She blinks at the book. She shakes her head a few times as if clearing it of a dream. “That would be nice, Rosie,” she says, and then she looks away as if I’ve already left the room.
I close the book and pull it onto my lap, fingering the edges, knowing that any help my mom could offer is not worth hoping for. I know she’ll sit all day staring at the sea, forgetting me, the book, everything, like a ghost herself. I’m on my own.
I call Germ and leave her a message, just checking in. And then I set my mind to the first thing I need to do. Booby traps.
There’s an old movie Germ left here once called Home Alone, about a boy who has to protect his house from thieves, and I rewatch it to see how he lays traps for the bad guys, taking notes in one of my school binders. Homer said no human weapon can hurt a witch—I haven’t forgotten that. But even he said he didn’t know everything about witches.
Based on what I learn, I get a shovel and a twenty-pound dumbbell I find in the attic. I turn broomsticks into spears; a jar of pennies, some soda cans, and some string into a homemade alarm system; and a box of nails into a gruesome paddleboard bat. There’s an axe that hangs on the wall down in the basement, but I decide to steer clear of the basement altogether. I just don’t have the courage to go down there now, even in daytime.
I break glasses in paper bags and place the bags by my window to use as bombs. Then I take a long tour through the fuse box and watch an online video about how to get wires to spark.
Once I’m finished with the traps, I turn to my mom’s bedroom, not the one in the attic but the room that is supposed to be hers. Despite her general indifference to most things, it makes me nervous to sneak in without her knowing. So I try to do it as quietly and quickly as possible.
Coming in here has always felt like walking into a museum of the person my mom once was. There are old photos on the wall of her standing on a boat or in front of the Egyptian pyramids, holding a bow and arrow aloft proudly at summer camp with a blue ribbon on her chest, riding a horse, gazing at my dad with a joyful smile—a wild, brave, happy person. There is her diploma for art history. A soft purple bedspread lies over her queen bed; all sorts of stained-glass baubles hang in the window to turn sunlight into rainbows. There are paintings she once made of flowers and statues and people, things she painted while traveling the world. (Though, now I realize, with a deep chill, she was traveling the world hunting witches.) All her subjects have personalities: a rose looks self-confident; a building looks tired; a statue of a man in robes, glimpsed through a painted window, looks curious and kind.
There are empty spots on her shelves where her books used to be, empty spaces left where I’ve stolen her knickknacks—retreating to my room with treasures in my arms, trying to steal bits of my mom, I guess.
Mostly she has either not noticed what I’ve taken, or not cared, but a few books she has stolen back: Where the Wild Things Are, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel. I go to them now, flip through the pages—which are full of witches and monsters, faeries and magic. Does she keep taking these books back because the secret to finding and killing witches is hidden on their pages? A witch getting pushed into an oven, a monster being tamed when you stare into its eyes?
But if there are clues in these books about how to fight a witch, I can’t find one. I doubt I could push a witch into an oven or tame one with my eyes.
As quietly as I can, I search the rest of the room. It’s disheveled and disorganized. I find Mom’s wedding ring in a ceramic mug next to a chewed piece of gum; I find Mom’s bank card in a pile of receipts, and an engraved pendant with her birth date on the floor. I look through folders, boxes, plastic bags.
And then I find, amongst a pile of blank postcards from places she must have visited once, my birth certificate.
It reads:
State of Maine Certificate of Birth
Place of Birth: Saint Ignatius Hospital
Date of Birth: September 1, 2010
Name of Child: Oaks, Rose Kristen
Sex: Female
Weight: 6 lbs, 8 oz
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
I’ve seen the sign for Saint Ignatius Hospital many times. It’s just at the edge of town, in a patch of woods at the start of a long empty road through the trees, the sign rotting away so that now it only says SAINT IGNAT SPITA. I don’t even know if the hospital is still open, but I do know it’s been displaced by a new, shiny hospital downtown. The new one I know really well because every time Germ breaks a bone doing something daring, we go there.
I gaze at my birth certificate for a while, at the date, wishing I could read more into this simple piece of paper than a few meaningless facts. And then—just as I’m tucking it back amongst the postcards—I notice there is something. Because on the back of the certificate, in a loose scrawl that is still my mom’s, only messier than usual—are these words:
Swimming.
Swimming.
Swimming.
Waiting.
Where is he????
Where they hide from me.
As I stare at the words, my body prickles with chills.
Questions rise one after the other. Who is “he”? Does “where they hide” mean the witches?
Swimming, and the night I was born, and how I was saved, and where the witches hide—the great secret my mom supposedly discovered. They’re linked somehow; they have to be. But how?
Just as I move to put the birth certificate away, I hear my mom stirring in the attic, then creaking down the stairs. I hurry out right as she comes to the landing. She looks at me for a moment, as if suspicious, and then brushes past me into the room.
By the time I fix dinner, the day is dimming to dusk. My heart begins to thrum a little faster, to know the night is coming, and all the strange things it brings with it. I can barely eat, I’m so nervous. I try Germ again on the phone, but she doesn’t answer.
After I eat, I turn to The Witch Hunter’s Guide again. I fight off sleep as I flip through the chapters, glancing at the legends. (There are plenty about the Moon Goddess and her ladder, and just as Ebb said, one about a whale who can swim through time, and some about ancient ghosts who tried to mount a rebellion against the witch Hypocriffa and lost.) There’s a long description of the moon and gravity that I decide to come back to later.
Under “The Invisible World and Its Beings,” there’s a disclaimer that there are plenty of magical beings left to be discovered, followed by a list with drawings and descriptions of the ones that are known. The Moon Goddess. Ghosts. Witches. Witch familiars. Cloud shepherds. Curious, I zero in on this last one.
Made of mist like the clouds they guide, the cloud shepherds watch the happenings of the world from above. They are rain keepers, snow spillers, wind blowers. They are restless observers. They climb high over towns, wrap themselves around forests, whip over the waves. They’ve seen dinosaurs thrive, Atlantis sink, and Pompeii fall under ashes. And all the while, they watch the world, and listen, and see all. With a bird’s-eye view and a vast memory, they know almost everything about human affairs and have memories of each person on earth.
They will sometimes share their knowledge if only you can reach them, but they are extremely elusive—only touching earth in fog: grazing mountaintops, lying over the water, and they will dissipate and disappear when approached. Like the Moon Goddess, they do not interfere.
I sit back. What I would give to find a cloud shepherd and talk to it. But I suppose the likelihood of catching a cloud is about as high as the likelihood of pinning down the edge of a rainbow.
My eyelids are heavy, and none of this is helping me to uncover the secrets of killing a witch. I lay the book down, then walk up to my room and watch out the window as the sun sets. As it does, the magical world comes into focus.
Up in the sky, the cloud shepherds—now that I know what they are—move about, changing shapes as they go. The phantom ships materialize on the horizon, and the moon rises at the lip of the sea, its ladder dangling.
A light fog drifts up from the ocean and across the lawn. And then the ghosts begin to arrive. They emerge from the wispy edges of the fog—there must be twenty or more, and I catch my breath as I watch them.
Five peel off toward the house: the knitting woman I saw last night in the parlor, and the washerwoman from this morning (the two appear to be friends). The starfish-covered sailor in the yellow rain slicker, the lady in white. And—I shiver—the Murderer. As if he feels my eyes on him, he looks up at where I stand, and I go still with fright. For a moment our eyes meet, and his bore into mine with hatred.
Then the group drifts below and out of sight, no doubt floating into the rooms below.
After watching for another minute, I’ m just about to turn away from the view when I see Ebb. He’s standing at the edge of the trees across the lawn, apparently obeying my request not to come into the house, which makes me feel a pang of regret. (I’d much rather have Ebb here than the Murderer.) He doesn’t notice me, though. For some reason he appears to be whispering to a cluster of fireflies.
I don’t realize I’m being watched until I hear a strange dripping sound. Someone is standing behind me.
“It’s the tragic ones who linger the longest, ain’t it, little one?”
My arms swim with gooseflesh at the raspy voice. I turn to see—not the Murderer but the starfish-covered sailor standing in the hallway, dripping luminous water that doesn’t wet the floor.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to ghosts.
“Tragic?” I manage to say.
The man shrugs. “Nothing cheerful about how the boy died. There’s a reason he’s called Ebb,” the man says. “Used to be Robert when he was alive. Loves animals, that boy. Even bugs, always drawn to them.”
I wait for him to say more.
“He’s looked after you since you were a baby, as much as a ghost could, which I suppose isn’t much. Kept you company even though you couldn’t know you had company.”
I stare out at Ebb, trying to reconcile the boy he’s describing with the ghost I’ve met—angry at me one minute, melancholy the next, sometimes kind and sometimes not.
“Don’t mind his moods,” the man in the slicker says, as if he’s read my thoughts. “You’d be moody too if you were tied to earth while your parents had moved Beyond.”
I turn. I want to ask about Ebb’s parents, and what happened to them, but before I can summon the words, the man floats through the wall and is gone.
I swivel back to the window and watch Ebb move from tree to tree, whispering to tiny insect ghosts. He must sense me watching him, because he turns and looks toward the window, then lifts his hand in a half wave. I half wave back, blushing with shame for being so mean to him. And then I turn away.
I look around my room, feeling defeated. The first day is already gone, and I’m no closer to finding anything that could help me fight a witch, except for the cryptic note on the back of my birth certificate. I will go to the hospital tomorrow, I decide, though I have no idea what I’ll look for. Hopefully Germ can come with me.
I nervously fiddle with my mom’s knickknacks on my shelf—the matchbox, the shell-engraved whistle, an old wrinkled Playbill, and then my fingers move to a few of my worn, faded books: The Wind in the Willows; Aesop’s Fables; M.C. Higgins, the Great; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; all the Harry Potter books; and on and on.
My books have sheltered me from the moments that are hard, and whisked me away when I needed to escape. They’re like wool that keeps you warm in the cold and cool in the heat. On days when I find it especially hard not to crumple up because I wish I had a different mom or a different life, I escape to them.
Now I read my favorite, well-worn chapter in the whole Harry Potter series, where Ron, Harry, and Hermione make an escape on the back of a dragon they once feared. It’s my favorite because I like how by saving themselves, they save the beast, too. I love most of all the moment when they rise up, and fly.
And like always, even in the face of witches and curses, it works. It calms me. It saves me the way it always does.
And I sleep deeply afterward.
And the witch doesn’t come.