I heard my mother’s voice in my ear, but I no longer saw the confines of Cousin Mildred’s dining room or Dorothy’s spirit form. As my mother spoke, narrating for us, it dawned on me slowly: Dorothy was somehow showing us Mom’s memories.
“It was the summer after I turned thirty,” my mother’s voice said in my ear.
Even as I felt the chair solid beneath me, I was simultaneously back outside our house looking in. It materialized before me as if in a dream, but it wasn’t exactly the house I knew. Magda had not yet painted the door plum, and my father had not yet tamed Grandpa Earl’s unruly hostas along the garage.
The hunched shape of a young woman peered over something fascinating in the side yard, where my father would later build the fire pit. The yard exploded with the muted pinks and yellows of the June lady’s slippers and prairie roses. The woman was soft around the edges, the fine lines not yet settled into a permanently furrowed brow. Her hair cascaded loose to her waist, streaks of darker tawny and honey tones in the sea of blonde. I knew that it was my mother, but it was like looking at a fun house mirror image of myself, right down to the muscular calves.
I was vaguely aware of my own thoughts beneath the surface—how am I seeing this?—but they came to me from very far away, filtered through two decades of my mother’s memories.
“Just watch, Elisabeth,” said my mother’s voice.
Young Helene stood, the object of her close examination in her arms: she scooped up a giggling, bright-eyed, chunky-legged toddler with a shock of blinding white-blonde chick’s fluff for hair. I recognized myself in miniature, the telltale heart-shaped face and sturdy shoulders. When Helene turned, her stunningly round belly in profile under a plain blue linen dress foretold Mary’s impending arrival. Another daughter, my young mother thought, in September under a harvest moon. I felt my mother’s hope in every fiber of my being as she shared the memory of anticipation growing inside her. Underneath, I sensed my mother’s fear.
This is the part Mary isn’t going to want to hear, I realized.
We were transported inside now, into a room lit by a single white porcelain lamp on the table next to an antique hand-me-down rocking chair. Young Helene rocked her limp toddler, passed out like a tiny drunk with heavy limbs and an open mouth. Helene tenderly laid her firstborn daughter in the crib, turned out the light, and left the door cracked. She hesitated in the doorway, listening one last time for her daughter’s steady breath, a sigh, the sounds of the nursery settling into sleep.
Young Helene’s attention wandered to the sunny yellow light within her, as unique to Mary as her fingerprints. I felt the gentle glow coming from within me, and it disturbed me to feel my own body’s empathic response to my mother’s memory. Mary’s energy wasn’t yet bright, dazzling like the emerald green radiating with every breath from my toddler self, but that ball of warm yellow energy, no larger than an apple at the time, was already a soothing presence to Helene. Helene ran her fingers over her belly subconsciously, smiling as she thought, She’s already reading me.
“Helene.”
Young Helene startled as Magda’s voice cut through the dim hallway. She turned slowly to face her mother, trundling around like a horse in a stall.
“Solstice is in two days. This has gone on for long enough,” Magda said quietly, plainly, gesturing to the swell of Helene’s stomach.
Helene glanced nervously to the cracked door behind her, then stepped urgently toward Magda.
“I have told you over and over, Mother. I’m not going to do it. It’s unthinkable,” Helene hissed, her stare formidable.
“I have given you too much free rein,” Magda said with a shake of her head. “I let you run around wild, and who knows what you would’ve done if I hadn’t put Jacob Ridder in your path. You have always known that this responsibility would be yours alone, and that you would pass it along to a daughter. To a single daughter,” she emphasized.
Helene’s hands flew instinctively to her belly as she enfolded herself and the light within her in the circle of her arms.
“It’s too late,” Helene said, unsure of herself.
Magda smiled that tight, close-lipped smile I knew all too well. “It’s never too late,” she said calmly.
I recalled involuntarily the pennyroyal I had given Mrs. Andersen, suddenly understanding what Magda intended.
“You just try,” young Helene said through gritted teeth.
Magda reached a hand toward Helene’s arm; her daughter flinched away.
Magda said quietly, firmly, “We cannot let the guardianship be split. Look how that ended last time.”
“This baby is six months along. You will not take her from me,” Helene said, biting each syllable.
The scene changed again, and I instantly felt the energy of another Solstice. Toddler Elisabeth played in the corner of the kitchen while Helene with Mary in her belly drew on a primordial magic as old as life itself, serving Friedrich with a smile pasted on her face.
It was suddenly night, and the powerful Solstice moonlight—an auspicious sign, I thought automatically—poured through the windows of the house on Lake Street. Magda had begrudgingly gone to bed. Young Helene smiled to herself, knowing that her mother must’ve mistakenly thought it was safe to leave her irate, determined daughter alone under that Solstice moon.
We watched as Mom bound her whole heart to Mary. All love for Jacob Ridder, love for Helene’s toddler daughter, was wiped out in a flash of brilliant white light that I recognized instantaneously with a shudder.
“What are you doing?” Magda’s voice said from the darkness beyond the circle of white light.
“It’s already done,” young Helene said. She was smiling, triumphant, and filled with a light that would bind her to Mary forever.
My mother’s heart was for Mary, and Mary alone, from that moment on. Mary, in turn, was protected in a layer of Mom’s own ruby-red energy, an impenetrable defense of the strongest magic. Magda would never be able to touch her, born or unborn.
“Oh, Helene,” Magda said from the darkness. Her voice was sad, trembling. “You don’t know what you have done. I only want what is best for this family,” Magda said.
“So do I,” Helene said defiantly.
“Mary, honey, I would have done anything to protect you,” Mom said, breaking the spell. Her voice caught in her throat.
The room disappeared, and we were once again in the warm, mystical alcove of the in-between place with Great-Grandma Dorothy.
“But in protecting Mary, I lost you, Elisabeth, in the bargain,” Mom said, her voice barely above a whisper. Tears rolled down her cheeks like glass.
“I lost you to Mother, Elisabeth. But I knew you’d be okay.” Her face broke open with pride underneath the tears. “Your light was so bright, I knew you’d be okay. Even as I had to give you away to Mother.”
Take her, then. She’s yours.
My mother’s words from the dream world echoed freshly in my ears. My entire life, I had thought my mother had no interest in me. I had belonged to Magda whether I liked it or not. I’d thought my mother was weak or, at worst, cruel. I thought she had passively fallen into that silent, zombie state over time; I’d never imagined that my mother would have been exacting enough to choose it for herself.
I was speechless.
Mom said urgently, “Elisabeth, I need you to understand. I couldn’t do anything to poison you against Magda in her life, and Mother was right, in a way. There had to be someone to carry on when I bound my heart to Mary and refused the cedar chest. I am so sorry, honey. I gave you up to Magda because I couldn’t let her take Mary. My only purpose in this world has been to protect you girls.”
This was the secret my mother had buried beneath her silence. I had that feeling again like I was floating outside myself, the vague thought coming from far away that Cousin Mildred had hit on a treasure trove of gossip.
Dorothy addressed Mildred as soon as I’d had the thought.
“You are part of this now, too, dear cousin—an important part,” she emphasized, appealing to Mildred’s sense of self-importance. “You are sworn to protect this family’s secrets now. Or else—Elisabeth will charm you for the rest of your days.”
Mildred harrumphed again but acquiesced. “I don’t know why you all seem to think I can’t keep a secret.”
Mom’s gaze locked on Mary, who, like me, was unable to find the words, stunned into silence. Her face had gone pale beneath her vibrant summer tan.
“After that, Mother did things differently,” Mom said, turning back to me. “It was easier for me to say nothing at all, to stay out of the way, than to risk harm to either of you girls. Besides, she was different with you, Elisabeth. I knew you’d be okay, despite Mother being more determined than ever to preserve the sole guardian, one pure line to protect the magic.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I was quickly losing faith in anything Magda had ever done.
My daughter lost her way long ago.
Mom exchanged a knowing look with Dorothy.
Dorothy made a small noise. “I suppose I had something to do with that. She was obsessed with the Clara story. I told Magda her grandmother’s version of events, ignoring what I had seen my mother do with my own eyes. I meant it as a cautionary tale, but my bullheaded daughter took it another way. I tried to subdue the same darkness in Magda that I had seen as a little girl in my own mother, a self-reliance turned to obsession. But Magda did things her own way, especially after I crossed over.”
Mary spoke suddenly. “That’s why Great-Grandma Dorothy protected you, Mom. She couldn’t stop Magda from … from … trying to get rid of me.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “You couldn’t stop Magda from the other side, Dorothy, but you protect us how you can.”
Dorothy nodded. “Always. I didn’t do enough to change my daughter’s path during my life, but I’ll be damned if I can’t protect her daughter and granddaughters in my afterlife.”
The fire in her voice reminded me ironically of Magda.
Mom nodded. “When you were almost two, Elisabeth, after Mary was born, Magda made you her own. She bound your heart on the fall equinox, seventeen years ago, to make sure you would always be hers and couldn’t go rogue like me. She’s held a tight grip on your future ever since. Until you stood up to her on Solstice.”
The white light in the room dimmed further, and a persistent buzzing, like a chorus of bees, filled my ears.
“Dorothy,” Mom pressed. “We don’t have much time. Elisabeth needs the binding spell. Without Mother here to do it …”
“You’ll be fine,” Dorothy said. “Give me your hand, mein Liebling,” she said to me sweetly.
But the distance between Dorothy’s ethereal form and my earthly one suddenly seemed enormous.
“I … I can’t,” I stuttered, straining toward her across time, space, energy.
I no longer heard Dorothy’s voice but felt it pulsing at me, pure energy. The room between the spirit world and ours began to collapse.
Your mother and sister have led you here. Take my hand, Elisabeth.
I had felt only a fluttering of connection to the spirit world since Magda had crossed to the other side. It was like feeling in a dark room for the light switch. I knew it was there—it had to be—but I couldn’t find it. Where the onionskin-thin veil had once divided the realms, an impenetrable steel curtain closed the spirit world off to me.
I can’t.
The candles on the table reappeared before me, and my eyes bore into the red wax, concentrating.
It’s not working, it’s not working, it’s not working. I can’t do it.
But as surely as my own thoughts played on a loop, I heard a tiny voice beneath my own doubt from somewhere deeper. From the nothingness where the ice floe should have been, a pinprick of white light illuminated in the back of my vision field from somewhere behind my right ear, so small that, at first, I doubted its presence. But it glowed steadily, small and warm, and brighter by one long second after another as the murmur grew stronger in my ear—Fiir und Wasser, Wasser und Fiir.
I saw from my peripheral vision that Mary’s lips were unmoving beside me, but her voice became clearer in my mind, my sister breaking through the energy field first when the channels of light were darkest.
Mary’s voice grew with the pinprick of light, which spread from the right side of my vision field across to the left. Mary reached across to Mom, a thread of light skating between them. I felt more than saw a hesitant bridge of light from my mother. My mother reached for me, and I felt her voice joining Mary’s. Even Cousin Mildred’s voice joined in. We were rebuilding our connection to the ice floe fiber by fiber, light by light.
Fiir und Wasser, Wasser und Fiir.
I felt nothing but my pulse in my throat. Fear seized me, and I spiraled. What if I never see the spirit world again? I felt sweat pooling under my arms, soaking the delicate silk of Magda’s robe, my breath short in my chest.
Through my panic and the buzzing growing louder, I heard Dorothy as if from far away. Take my hand, Elisabeth. We are here for you.
The buzzing grew louder in my ears; the room grew hazy. I heard Dorothy’s voice growing closer but light as birdsong.
Take my hand.
Light pulsed at me from all sides. I reached for Dorothy, and I felt a pinprick of light open in my chest. The curtain began to lift between the worlds as I reached out a hand in the spirit realm, and as surely as I held Mary’s hand on my right and Mom’s on my left, I felt Dorothy’s thin, elegant fingers—so similar to Magda’s—grasp my forearm, and lightning jolted through me.
My heart split open, the invisible river of pure rainbow energy swept me away, and the room went dark.