In the end, I was forced to admit I needed my little sister.
“Okay,” I said to Mary early the next morning.
I stood in the doorway of our bedroom, which was now Mary’s, really. I had claimed Magda’s room as my own without argument or protest from anyone, trying to absorb her essence through osmosis. I ventured upstairs only to fish a forgotten shirt from the closet or scavenge for clean underwear.
“Okay, what?” Mary said, peering up at me from under a corner of the quilt pulled up tight around her face.
I realized how early it was, only the faintest signs of light reaching around the edges of the curtains. But I had been up all night thinking about it after Nick’s sudden appearance in Friedrich.
“Okay,” I said again. I stepped into the room and knelt in front of Mary, my eyes telling her everything, asking her to understand.
I saw her eyes register what was happening.
“Say it,” Mary said. “I need you to say it.”
I was surprised by how sure she sounded, how grown-up. Her voice sounded more and more like our mother’s—now that Mom had reclaimed hers—and less like an echo of Magda’s. I supposed we all sounded like Magda to an extent, for better or worse.
“I need you,” I said, reaching under the quilt to squeeze her hand. “I can’t do this without you. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be like Magda.” The words burned across my forearm like scar tissue caught the light, the silver script shining there. “I need you to do this with me. I need you to let me keep my heart, what I have left. I thought I was protecting you from losing your heart too. But I get it now—you’re letting me keep half of mine. You’re offering me the chance at something I thought was impossible.”
Mary was giving me the chance to be my full self—fully magical, and open to the possibility of love with what remained of my heart. Nick had shown me that possibility, and Mary was giving me the chance to make it real. I had to take it.
I felt Dorothy light up like a pinball machine on the other side. So this is what you wanted, then? I asked her silently with a smile.
“I know,” Mary said, her own sly smile blooming. “I knew you’d come to your senses eventually.”
As always, Mary was three steps ahead of me.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “So this is because of Nick?”
I shook my head and squeezed her hand again. “No, Mary. No,” I said with emphasis. “This is because of you. You were born to this, like I was. You’re stronger than me too, in a way. Whatever happens with Tim, I see now that you haven’t needed me to protect you. You can choose for yourself. We were meant to carry this together, like Dorothy said it used to be.”
I don’t want to be the version of myself that is afraid to ask for help.
Her glare lightened. “Good,” Mary said, satisfied. “We have a chance to do things differently, to do it our way. The way it should’ve been all along.”
It was high time I accepted that my little sister was the balance I needed. Mary pushed me to be a better version of myself, the version I wanted to become. I had been told my destiny from early on, but Mary was giving me a chance to change it, to be different from Magda or Clara or even my mother. Mary was choosing her future for herself and giving me mine back in the same fell swoop.
Mary rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “You should still call him. There’s something there.”
I rolled my eyes right back at her and stood up. “Later, Mare. We have things to do first.”
“You’re sure about this, honey?” Mom asked over her shoulder from where she stood in front of the stove on the morning of the Lion’s Gate. She was nervous in a way I had never seen her, bustling between cabinets, opening and closing doors, fussing over breakfast.
“I’m sure,” Mary said.
Mary, for her part, was watching the breakfast preparations with a cool and unburdened gaze. Mickey, Mary’s white-chinned shadow, purred furiously in her lap, unaware of the monumental day ahead. Mary nodded as she trailed a finger over the curve of his whiskered jaw.
I stood rinsing blueberries in a colander in the sink. My mind wandered, and I let the water batter the fruit longer than necessary. It felt like a holiday, like the Fourth of July, all of us with nowhere to be except preparing a too-large meal that no one was hungry for. But instead it was the morning of a full moon, Thursday of the Lion’s Gate. While the town went about their business as usual, our family was preparing for a seismic shift.
Mom ran out of gas suddenly, freezing in front of Mary at the table. The spatula in Mom’s hand jutted out at an awkward angle as she stood with her hands on her hips. “What about that nice boy Tim?” Mom asked, the hesitation clear in her voice.
Mary’s eyes darted from me to Mom, betraying only the slightest hint of fear. “It’s okay, I swear. Tim is like Dad. He’s in it for the long haul.”
Tim is like Dad. Those words cut me. I thought John was like Dad too, and see where that got me. But a small part of me knew Mary wasn’t like me. As she approached her seventeenth birthday, Mary was stronger, wanted less, needed less. She would accept the curse of the Watry women staunchly, like Dorothy had, accept that she would never be able to love fully, her first devotion being to the family. And in so doing, Mary was giving me the incredible gift of keeping half of my heart open. She was giving me a chance at love.
“Thank you,” I said to Mary with tears in my eyes, overcome with gratitude.
Mary understood immediately, nodding once casually as Mom took in the scene.
“This has to be shared between sisters, like it used to be,” Mary said. “Women bound by sibling ties are closer than any other, even mother-daughter. No one’s powers more closely mimic each other’s than sisters’.”
Mary watched Mom to gauge her reaction, knowing as well as I did that Mom had never had the chance we would. Whatever burden Magda had intended for Mom was meant for her alone, and Mom had blown that future wide open by choosing a completely different path for herself. She’d chosen Mary, and Mary, by her own free will, had chosen me.
“Well, okay then,” Mom said quietly, turning back to the range.
Her voice was shaky, but the look I glimpsed on my mother’s face before she turned away was one of pure pride.
The spell was ancient, the words passed down for generations.
The full moon lit Magda’s room as bright as day, light pouring in the windows at the back of the house. Mom and I dragged the cedar chest, Magda’s old cache of secrets and ancient magic, from the foot of the bed to the center of the room. We prepared with measured movements to dampen the sound of silver spoons clacking together and the whisper of salt on the naked wooden floor. No one dared break the reverie.
If Mary was nervous, she showed only the slightest hint of it, her lips pressed together in a tight line, looking for all the world like our grandmother.
Cousin Mildred made herself useful by placing thirteen new candles in a precise circle around the cedar chest, stooping at an angle that made me cringe, given her age. She had arrived just before midnight and proudly presented the bag of homemade tapers, hand dipped for the occasion.
“Who knew that the talented baker was also a candlestick maker?” I whispered to Mary.
Mary barked in unexpected laughter but stifled it quickly, flicking her eyes up the ceiling. Lisbett, please, she pulsed at me.
Her serious demeanor, split with sudden laughter, reminded me of so many nights of whiskey-fueled philosophical conversation with Nick and the guys. What a world away that was.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” Mary said, nodding. My sister, my balance, stepped into the cedar chest.
I nodded back once, then laid my hands on my sister’s chest above her heart—from dark, light.
I nodded to Cousin Mildred and my mother on either side of Mary.
Past and present.
I closed my eyes and reached for the ice floe, that beautiful, familiar source of magic and energy.
Fiir und Wasser.
The words of the binding spell flew from my mouth for the first time. Mom and Mildred joined in, our voices blending into one—one family, one coven—magnified by the sister star rising high in the night sky.
Mary opened her heart to the light of the cedar chest, to the mysteries of generations of magic—and then we truly began.