There was nothing to do except wait for August. I slept a lot, ignoring calls from Annie until she stopped trying. Mary bided her time at the beach or around town with Tim or mindlessly stocking the armoire with herbs and rainwater and what have you. I had a singular focus: not to lose the ice floe before it was time to finish the binding. I cast out obsessively, feeling for the river of light that hugged every fiber of me.
Are you there, Dorothy? I asked a thousand times a day.
Yes, child, she answered dutifully.
One day, an unfamiliar Chevy pulled up in front of the house. I watched out the kitchen window from where I had been refilling my black coffee for the umpteenth time that day. It was about all I could stomach with the nerves that flooded me with the waiting, waiting, waiting. The coffee mug slipped from my fingers, clattering into the sink, when I saw a figure emerge from the driver’s side door, unfolding into a leaning stack of a man in a faded flannel shirt.
I staggered out the side door, not bothering to close it, and crossed Dad’s meticulously manicured lawn to the driveway.
“You sure are a hard girl to find, Elisabeth,” Nick declared loudly, drawing out the syllables of my name like he hadn’t tasted them in a while. He stood stock-still at the end of the driveway, waiting for me.
I barely registered the pins and needles of the crushed-rock driveway digging into the naked soles of my feet as I stumbled toward him. I felt my jaw hanging wide open to the world. I stopped a few feet away from him, my arms instinctively crossing over my chest.
“What are you doing here?” I said, barely above a whisper.
“I had to make sure you were okay,” Nick said, dropping his swagger. He held my gaze, waiting for a sign, waiting for me to come to him.
Nick looked tired and thinner than when I had left him in July.
When I didn’t say anything, he relented. “You left in the middle of the night,” Nick said. “I didn’t know if you were okay, or hurt, or got jumped walking down the street … or if you couldn’t stand me anymore.”
I softened a little at that, taking a step toward him. I’d left like a thief in the night, and Nick had still worried about me.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
His face cracked into an easy grin at that, that achingly beautiful dimple appearing in his cheek. “The sisters at St. Kate’s really go by the book. They wouldn’t give me your address, so I stole it. The whole book, in fact, when the penguins weren’t looking. Imagine my surprise when I pulled up to the Holbrooke residence and some loud brunette had no idea what I was talking about. Lucky we finally put two and two together, and she pointed me this way.”
Thanks for the heads-up, Annie, I thought. I suddenly became very aware of the broad daylight and the inquiring eyes of neighbors driving down Lake Street, ogling the unfamiliar man in front of the Watry-Ridder house.
“Well, you better come inside,” I said, with a glance around at the neighboring houses. I motioned with one hand for him to follow me.
“Hey,” Nick said, stopping me in my tracks.
I turned back to find Nick’s outstretched arms waiting. I tentatively stepped forward into his embrace, and any anxiety about watching eyes melted away. Nick’s arms felt like home.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he whispered into my hair, arms around my waist.
“Come inside, Nick,” I said, stepping back.
“You’re the boss,” he said.
The house—still crooked, but less so after Mary and I had put everything we had into fortifying charms—was blessedly empty: Mom had gone to Juba’s, Dad was at the mill, Mary was God knows where, an otherwise normal weekday except for the sudden appearance of my illicit lover in my family’s kitchen that was still clientless. Without a word, I poured Nick a cup of coffee and sat wide-eyed across the table from him. The room felt too small, too warm. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the world for Nick to be sitting in the same room as me, or even in the same town.
“I had to make sure you were okay,” Nick repeated into his coffee.
“But what are you doing here?” I said with a sigh.
“I tried to call,” Nick said. “I tried your number from the sisters, and that loud girl answered and I was scared it was you somehow for a minute, but it wasn’t, and I couldn’t make myself say anything,” he finished with a deep exhale. I thought again how tired he looked.
“Annie,” I said with a laugh. “I gave them my friend’s number. So you thought you would just show up?” I felt myself starting to scowl at him and attempted to soften my face.
Nick was amused. “And here I thought I was being valiant driving all the way across the state to make sure you were safe. No?”
I shook my head, about to argue with him, but thought better of it. I had left him in the middle of the night, after all. I owed him some explanation.
“My family needed me. My grandmother died, and I … I had to get home to take care of things,” I said.
Nick stared at me.
“What?” I said defensively. “It’s the truth.”
“Elisabeth,” Nick said quietly, rolling my name around in his mouth in that way of his. “You don’t need to lie to me. If you got bad news when you called home, you could have told me that, instead of sneaking away in the middle of the night.”
I didn’t call home. You’re not going to believe this, I thought. But this is what I wanted, after all—the chance to show Nick all of me, my whole self. What the hell? I thought.
“You’re not going to believe me,” I said out loud. “Nick, I need to show you something.”
I stood and opened the armoire, then set one of Magda’s crystal chalices on the table between us.
I closed my eyes and cast out the ice floe in a tight energy field. The gateway to the other side had cracked open a hair when we communed with Dorothy. I prayed silently that it would be enough. I felt the water molecules in the air shiver under my poised hand, then refuse to budge.
“What are you doing?” Mary said, suddenly over my shoulder. Her calm, clear voice reminded me for all the world of Magda for a split second.
I turned to see Mary in the open doorway between the living room and kitchen, staring down Nick with a mixture of curiosity and blatant amusement across her face. I ignored the question she asked silently with a raise of an eyebrow: Who’s this?
“What are you doing home from the beach?” I asked reflexively.
“Closed for milfoil today. Nasty stuff. Sheriff has to come to clear it out, since I can’t …” She gave me a pointed look, then offered a hand to Nick.
“I’m Mary,” she said cheerfully, shaking Nick’s hand. She was clearly enjoying the situation.
“Nick,” he said. “Sisters?”
Mary straightened up beside me to allow the obvious comparison of our features—our matching blue eyes, swimmers’ shoulders, and heart-shaped faces.
“Yep,” she said, sliding into the chair between Nick and me at the table. She swiveled her gaze from the crystal chalice on the table back to me. “What exactly were you doing?”
“I was about to show Nick what we do here,” I said, punctuated by a pleading look to Mary. Go with it. Please.
Mary’s eyebrows asked me another silent question, but she conceded and grasped my hand on top of the table. Our palms pressed together in unity, despite the strange energy lingering between us.
“Together,” Mary said.
I felt it before I moved, the gateway to the other side opening wider, buoyed by Mary’s sunny yellow energy, earth and fire. With Mary’s hand in my own, I was able to conjure a water charm, calling the water with a downward pinch of my hand and lazy turn of the wrist, for the first time since Magda’s death.
Chunsch Wasser, Wasser chunsch.
I opened my eyes to see Nick’s mouth open in surprise and the chalice full of clear water drawn from thin air on the table between us. I could see it on his face: he was not scared. Just surprised.
“We’re witches, Nick,” I said, refusing to shy away from the word. “My mother sent her familiar, the cat, to tell me when my grandmother was dying, and I felt it happen. This is what I had to get back to. This is where I’m supposed to be.” I squeezed my sister’s hand as I said it, sharing a sideways glance and a smile that neither of us could suppress.
Mary squeezed my hand back once and dropped it. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said, delighted as she gave Nick one last once-over.
“Whoa,” Nick said quietly, after Mary’s footsteps had receded to the top of the back stairs. “I knew there was something different about you.”
I nodded in acknowledgment. “But it’s … complicated. My family needs me. I have to straighten things out since my grandmother passed,” I said, fighting off that old urge: He’s not family.
To hell with secrets, I thought, preparing myself to be disappointed. “There’s been a disruption in our power,” I said, “and I need to fix it. My family is depending on me. This town is depending on me.”
My words didn’t seem to register. A dreamy smile spread across Nick’s face. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.
I pressed his hand gently. “Go home, Nick. I’ll call you, I promise, when I get through this with my family.”
I won’t burn through you too.
“I can’t imagine living without you now that I’ve had you.” Nick’s smile dropped as he cut his eyes at me. “I’ll go, but you bet your ass I’ll be back for you, until you turn me into a toad or chase me away.”
I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. “I’ll be here,” I said, standing to show him out.
Nick shook his head and sighed as he stood. “I can’t believe I found you, only to be chased away.”
Impulsively, I rounded the table and grabbed his shirtfront in both hands. “I said I’ll be here,” I said firmly, hovering mere inches away from his sly sexy smile. “Give me time, Nick. I’ll be right here when I’m ready for you.”
If I’m ever ready for you.
He kissed me, more gently than I remembered, then drove away in his borrowed Chevy.
Mary didn’t wait to descend with a million questions. She cornered me in Magda’s room, where I had been spending many of the long, quiet hours waiting for the Lion’s Gate. I retreated there quickly, unable to watch Nick drive away.
“So?” Mary said, climbing into Magda’s bed beside me. “Who in the world was that?”
It felt like a normal day, a normal chat between sisters, teasing about boys. I sat with one knee hugged to my chest, gazing out Magda’s window at the woods beyond Dad’s shed. I didn’t answer right away, unsure of which truth to tell. That’s the man I found in Minneapolis when I was cheating on John. That’s the man who makes me feel like a person with a whole heart.
Mary read the silence between us easily. “I don’t know who he is,” she said, “but I saw something there. He’s certainly something, Lisbett. This makes so much sense now.”
In spite of the turmoil in my gut, I couldn’t stop smiling, my face half-hidden from Mary behind the sheet of my hair. Nick had come looking for me. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I could barely let myself consider the possibility—I didn’t need a man, but what if I wanted one? What if there was still some tiny chance of me finding happiness, or something like love?
I turned to face Mary, unfolding and refolding myself into a cross-legged position. “It doesn’t matter who he is,” I said, trying to shake it off. “He’s gone, and there are other things I—we—need to take care of.” It would take a while for me to break that habit.
Understanding registered on Mary’s face as she furrowed her brows at me thoughtfully. I was relieved that she dropped the questioning about Nick so easily. I had been waiting for the sulky teenager to fade after Magda’s funeral and for this wise creature to reappear. I was glad to have some inkling of my sister back for the task at hand.
The smile returned to my face unbidden.