But I was out of time. In the wee hours of the morning, from somewhere in the depths of the dream river, Dorothy whispered urgently, Wake up, mein Liebling. Hurry.
I felt Magda nearby, drawing me into the ice floe, begging, Chunsch, Lisbett, chunsch. Wachst auf. I had never heard Magda like that before. Weak. Tired. Pleading. The shock of it woke me thrashing in the sheets in Nick’s bed. He snored on gently next to me, oblivious.
Sitting upright in bed, I felt the ice floe rush in all at once. I closed my eyes and cast out for my grandmother’s steadfast amethyst-purple energy. As I soared above the river of energy between Minneapolis and home, over so many energies resting peacefully at that hour, my inner eye saw my mother’s ruby red and Mary’s warm, golden yellow nearby.
My heart dropped into my stomach. Magda’s energy was just a whisper of purple clinging to the house on Lake Street. Magda Watry was dying.
I panicked, thinking I had gotten it wrong, not trusting my abilities so far from home. There had to be an explanation for it. Mary hadn’t said anything about Magda being sick—but it could’ve been sudden. Maybe Mom had sensed something Mary didn’t when she sent Sam. I wouldn’t know until I got home.
I felt ill. Magda was dying, and there I was in some strange man’s bed. Disgusting. I felt bile rise in my throat. I rushed to the grimy first-floor powder room and vomited a stream of acid in violent heaves that left me gasping.
You are disgusting and Magda is dying, I told myself.
I slumped to the bathroom floor. The last few weeks didn’t matter. Magda casting on me, Solstice, the fire, running away—none of it mattered. I just had to get home. I had to see Magda.
When I opened my eyes, Sam was watching me patiently from the doorway of the powder room. He blinked once, twice, three times.
Oh, I thought faintly, holding back fresh tears. This is what you came to tell me. You knew. This is why Magda didn’t come for me herself. She couldn’t.
Time to go home, I told the reflection in the mirror after rinsing my mouth and face.
I crept around in the dark with Sam at my heels, dreading Nick waking up and having to explain myself. I cast a light sleeping charm over his sweet, limp form under the twisted sheets. With Magda on her deathbed, it didn’t matter if I used magic. Nothing mattered but getting home. I had to talk to Magda before … I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.
I dressed in a stolen T-shirt from Nick’s closet. Something to remember him by, I told myself. He wouldn’t mind. I hated myself for doing it, but I also took two tens—enough to get home—from Nick’s wallet. I gazed one last time on Nick’s sleeping form and turned to go.
I paged through the phone book in the kitchen and called a taxi. I loitered, debating if I should write Nick a note, but I ultimately thought it would be better if I departed from his life as quickly as I had come. He might think he had dreamed me. I could never give him what he needed, never let him truly know me. My heart was bound, promised elsewhere, not my own to give, and it was time to make good on that promise.
I replaced the phone book and stepped into the predawn Minneapolis stillness with Sam in my arms to wait for the taxi that would take us to the Greyhound station and the bus that would carry us home.
I waited until six AM to call from the bus station. The bus west to Kandiyohi County didn’t leave until nine.
Mary picked up after one ring, expecting me.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Magda had a stroke. They’re taking her to the clinic in Crichton. You need to come home.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m coming.”
“I know.”
“I have Sam,” I said.
“We figured,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to say, what else Mary needed me to say. She was clearly mad at me for leaving, for dumping everything on her. I would have to address that, but it would have to wait until I got home and made things right with Magda.
“I’ll see you soon,” I said, and hung up quickly before Mary’s fury had a chance to spark again.
In the quiet of the bus among the other drowsy passengers on the road to St. Agnes, I tried to sleep, to prepare myself for what lay ahead. I closed my eyes, and sheer exhaustion took me away.
But I kept jerking awake, realizing I was dreaming of Magda. In my dreams, she turned into a raven and flew away, always out of reach. I couldn’t talk to her, my anxiety about our reunion, about making it in time, pouring into my dreams. Magda always said to me, “There’s no use crying over spilt milk,” and I knew, deep down, that I couldn’t change the fact that I had defied her. I couldn’t change that we had fought, that she was furious with me. I had been angry with her too. I still was. All I could do was show up and hope for the best.
I closed my eyes to sleep again. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. What’s done is done. Rest, I told myself. This may be your last chance.
The next time I closed my eyes, though, I saw Magda’s beautiful amethyst light coming toward me in the spirit world. She was still half raven but looked at me through her own eyes, reaching a wing tip toward me across the dream river.
The next moment her spirit slipped away, sucked from the raven form as pure energy passing in front of me in the dream river, half in our world, half in the next. I surged forward through the ice floe, flailing wildly toward her, but her beautiful purple light blinked and went out.
Magda was gone.
In the ice floe, I saw my family nearby. Mom sighed and swept her mother’s eyes closed. Mary hovered, waiting to be called to be useful, casting over and over for Magda, her fingers working in midair as if pulling yarn from a skein, as if she could pull Magda back from the edge.
I awoke with a gasp. I would learn later that Mary too had doubled over with shock when Magda’s amethyst light blinked out and evaporated into the whirlpool of white light between the worlds of the living and the dead. A few fellow passengers roused from their dozing and shot me curious looks. I buried my face in a perplexed Sam’s neck to muffle my anguish as hot tears streaked down my cheeks.
I tried to cast out the ice floe for her again and again but was unable to access it. Magda’s gone, I knew then, with absolute certainty. When her heart was no longer bound to the cedar chest, our power went with it—our magic was untethered, unprotected, exactly what Magda had feared. I recalled with a shiver what Nick had said about his dad, gone from earth. I doubted myself for a moment, but I knew deep down that what I saw was real. It registered faintly that my abilities, that itching in my fingers, had been as strong as ever every time I dared to cast, even so far from Magda’s cedar chest.
The shock of Magda being gone—How can she be gone?—and the fact that my grandmother, my teacher, my guide was gone—dead?—I could barely think the word—knocked the breath out of me.
The weight of Magda’s absence settled around me like a fog. I was too late. I should have left the minute Sam showed up. I could’ve made it in time. The grief and shock and guilt washed over me in waves. I would never see Magda again in this life. We would never reconcile. She would never pat the floor next to her for us to go through notes from the cedar chest again. And I would never hear her side of the story, what she thought happened on Solstice, what exactly had happened between Magda and my mother.
I couldn’t change what I had done. I couldn’t change that I hadn’t been there for Magda at the end, even if she didn’t need me—I was sure that Magda would find her way into the light on her own, unlike the very young or the ill, who were sometimes afraid to go. Magda had ferried many other lives there; she knew the way.
Feeling gutted, I alternated sleeping and crying as I hurtled toward home and the dark clouds gathering there. I was too late, by mere minutes. I would carry the guilt of not being there with Magda for the rest of my life.
I called again from the bus station. The stolen bike was long gone from where I had stashed it. I was relieved to hear Mary’s voice.
“She’s gone,” Mary said tearfully. “We just got home from Crichton.”
“I know. I felt it.”
“I wish … I wish you had been here,” Mary said.
I sighed. I didn’t know how to respond. I wished that too, and it cut me to the core.
“Can you come get me?” I asked finally.
She hesitated. “Can’t you call John? There’s so much to do here … and now without Magda …” Her voice was flat, ambiguous.
“Can’t you borrow the station wagon? It won’t take long,” I begged. I thought briefly of asking for Dad to come, but I wavered, remembering Dad with his head in his hands on that sidewalk in Minneapolis. I wasn’t ready to see him.
“Mom needs me. It was a long night …” Mary trailed off. I wasn’t ready to face my mother either.
I sighed and rubbed my brow in frustration. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll figure it out. Tell Mom I’ll be there soon. And … I’m sorry.”
I hung up and stared at the pay phone on the hook. Annie crossed my mind, but at that hour, her mother and her car would be in Paynesville at her mom’s latest job. I was terrified of how John would react, however justified, but I knew it was time to confront that thorn. I needed him for the moment.
I dropped my actual last dime in the pay phone and asked the operator for the Weseloh residence.
Mrs. Weseloh answered. “We haven’t seen you around here since Solstice, Elisabeth,” she said with an edge in her voice when I asked for John.
“Yeah, it’s been busy,” I mumbled. There was no way the entire town didn’t know about my disappearing act. John might have kept mum about it at home, but Mrs. Weseloh certainly knew.
“Sure,” she said. “I guess I’ll go hunt down John in the yard. You hold tight.” Deeply ingrained manners won out over whatever ill feelings Mrs. Weseloh was harboring.
“Hi,” John said after a long pause. His voice was devoid of emotion.
“John,” I said. “I know you must be mad right now, and with good reason, but I need you. Magda died this morning. I’m at the bus station, and I … I need a ride. Mary won’t come. She’s even madder than you …”
John hesitated long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to come.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I’m coming. And I’m sorry about Magda.”
When I climbed into the cab of the El Camino, it felt like a year had passed. The radio was off, the silence oppressive. Sam played dumb and made himself comfortable in a sunbeam on the dashboard.
John gaped at Sam, perplexed.
“Don’t ask,” I said with a sigh.
“What the hell, Elisabeth?” John said quietly, without putting the truck into gear.
“I’m sorry,” I said automatically, prepared for it to be my new refrain.
When I couldn’t make more words come out, John sighed heavily and pulled onto the main drag of St. Agnes toward home.
I gazed into my lap as John drove slowly, responsibly. The bright, cloudless afternoon was a shocking contrast to the gloom that hung between us.
“I had to get out of here,” I said finally. “I know that’s not a good excuse. I just needed to make a point. I didn’t mean for Solstice to get so out of hand, but Magda …” I trailed off. Anything else I could’ve said sounded trivial to my own ears. It felt wrong to blame the dead.
I couldn’t be silent and accept it like my mother, I couldn’t say.
John jumped in. “You burned down Harry’s. You left. Without a word to your family or Mary or anyone. What if something happened to you? What would I have done then?”
His voice trembled with an icy rage that made him barely recognizable. He was like a snake coiled to strike, and I was scared. I had pushed John Weseloh too far.
“John,” I said, urging him to make eye contact. “I’m sorry. For leaving you, for Harry’s. I’m so sorry.”
“You made me look like a fool,” he said, refusing to look at me as he squeezed the steering wheel with both hands.
I looked away, staring out at the heat-scorched farmlands. What happened to this place? How did things get so bad? Minutes ticked by in deafening silence as John pulled off the highway into Friedrich.
“I needed to get away for a while,” I said filling the dead air. I hadn’t known what would happen after Solstice. “I needed some time away from Magda, and now she’s gone. I can’t believe I wasn’t here with her.” That was the truth, at least.
John sighed. “Well, that’s what you get for taking off.”
“I know,” I said, a sob rising in my throat.
“Hey,” he said, watching me anxiously out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry. I … I just love you so much, Elisabeth. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
John pulled over on the side of Rose Street, kitty-corner from the VFW. He reached over to take my hand, and it took every ounce of strength in me not to flinch as I remembered Nick’s touch just hours prior. Nick would be awake and wondering where I had gone, another name on the long list of people I’d hurt.
“Don’t you ever do something like this again,” John said, squeezing my hand in his. “If we’re going to be together now, it’s going to be different. There will be rules.”
I was too stunned to say anything, too afraid of the wild look in John’s eyes. Does he mean to just take me back? He pulled me across the bench toward him and bent to kiss me. I wanted to dodge his mouth, but his big hands, strong from years of hauling feed and muscling machinery through clay-packed earth, gripped my arms on either side. I shut my eyes tight and let him assault my mouth with his, hoping it would be over soon. I had to get home.
“John,” I said quietly when he drew his mouth away from mine, leaving saliva around my lips and chin. “I have to go.”
“I’ve given up so much for you, you know?” John said, ignoring me. He gripped me tighter, mashing my breasts against his chest, his big arms around my frame. “I’ve given up everything to be with you, and then you run off and disrespect me like that? I won’t stand for it.”
John shook me suddenly by the shoulders so hard my teeth rattled. From the corner of my eye, I saw Sam with his hackles raised, growling from his perch on the dash.
“Do you hear me?” he screamed as I saw stars. “You may be a Watry, but I’m a man too. I won’t be disrespected!”
I tried to nod as tears streamed down my face, but I was afraid to move, to push John over the edge. I didn’t know what he would do next.
“You’re not going anywhere,” John said, eerily calm once more. He pulled me against his chest, digging his chin into the top of my head. “No, you’re not going anywhere,” he repeated to himself, whispering into my hair.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” I croaked to make it stop. “I’m sorry, John, I’m sorry.”
In the back of my mind, I knew it was my fault. I had always wanted to get a rise out of John, and I’d finally pushed him too far. I’d felt so guilty for saddling John to a Watry woman’s half-heart, so guilty that he had no future of his own. But when his shiny prize disappeared suddenly, it had been too much for him to take. I had thought John worshiped me, but it turned out that he wanted to possess me.
In that moment, I knew I would never tell John the truth about what I’d done, where I had been those couple of weeks, and I would absolutely never tell him about Nick. It would break John if he found out, and God only knew what he was capable of. Nick would be my private shame.
I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe.
“Never again, Elisabeth,” John said coolly, and pushed me roughly away from him. I didn’t recognize the look in his eyes as I slid back across the bench. Sam stepped down into my lap, putting his fourteen pounds between me and John. He didn’t take his eyes off John, glaring in that way that only a cat can.
I turned away to see a figure watching us from the front steps of the VFW. Even from a hundred yards away, my father’s tall, thin silhouette was unmistakable. Ashamed, I dropped my eyes and pretended I hadn’t seen him as John drove off, oblivious.
It was shocking how easy it was to let John hold my hand again on the seat between us, pretending nothing had happened. There goes the Watry-Ridder girl and that Weseloh boy, together again like always.