“She wouldn’t have let me go,” Sophie explained to the Dola defensively. “She would have called the cops on you, you would have been hauled away, then you would have jumped in her and I don’t think I could have handled that, the way you make the people’s eyes dead, has anyone ever told you about that?”
“How the eyes look? Yes.” The Dola nodded. “It bothers people.”
“You really make people look dead. It’s creepy.”
“Well, it is best to be scared. You are more likely to change your ways.”
The pair walked down Heard Street, the baby in Sophie’s arms. Babies were heavier than you thought they were going to be. This one had exhausted herself crying and now was in a numbed state, drooling onto Sophie’s t-shirt, occasionally grabbing a snarl in her fist and refusing to let go. Babies were also stronger than you thought they were going to be. “What’s this thing’s name again?” Sophie asked shifting the child’s weight around in her arms.
“Right.” Sophie began to explain the controversy of this to the Dola, then decided it would be too exhausting. The being didn’t grasp evil, or maternal instinct. She probably wouldn’t get why naming your kid after a cheap wine cooler was tacky.
They approached the house where the boys gathered, their bikes still sprawled across the sidewalk. The scrawl of their voices on the air was tangible as they talked boisterously over each other. Cigarette smoke clouded lazily from the porch. The sound of them all shutting up in unison to watch the girls pass was even worse. Sophie’s face turned sunburned at the feel of their quiet eyes upon them.
“Hey, Laurie!” one yelled. The big one leaned over the edge of the porch and made a hand motion around his mouth while his tongue bulged his cheek grotesquely.
“What is that?” the Dola asked.
“It’s like—ugh. He wants Laurie to do something to his penis. With her mouth.”
“Laurie, Laurie!” another boy yelled, the one whose cigarette had been burned down to the quick. “Cute baby! You want another one?” He locked eyes with Sophie. “You want one, too?” He smiled and rocked his hips at her, while the boys behind him cracked up. One began to bark.
“Is it my destiny,” Sophie whispered, “to kill any of them? Or to turn them into frogs?” It thrilled Sophie to know that she could actually do this. She ached to do it right then, could feel her zawolanie inside her, a snake ready to strike. But the Dola was shaking her head.
“Not now,” she said simply. “And, not all of them.”
“That is good enough,” Sophie said. “That is actually better than I thought.” She glared fearlessly at the big one, the one whose bangs she’d touched. “I hope it’s that one,” she said to the Dola.
“What’d you say, bitch?” he hollered, stretching his arms wide so that his pecs strained against his shiny sports shirt.
Sophie bared her teeth and hissed like a cat. The baby burst into fresh tears.
“You are moving away from your destiny,” the Dola said.
“Fucking freak!” the boy yelled. “Did you see that? Did you see that shit?” He was smacking his friends in the arm. But he looked spooked. Sophie was happy to note it.
“I thought I was already off-destiny,” she said to the Dola. “How can I be moving away from my destiny if I’m already outside it?”
“There are layers and levels.” The Dola shrugged. “It was your destiny to move away from your destiny, but you’re breaking further away if you continue to engage with the boys.”
“I don’t know.” Sophie was skeptical. “This destiny stuff sounds like a bunch of crap, frankly.”
“It is advanced,” the Dola said. “Most humans can’t understand.”
“I’m only part human,” Sophie said proudly. “I’m also part Odmieńce. Do you know what that is?”
“Of course. They are the first beings. But, before there was Odmieńce, there was destiny.”
“I do,” the Dola agreed.
* * *
OUTSIDE HENNIE’S GROCERY store, the wind felt strange, both still and charged. Sophie paused at the door, gazing down Maple, to the overpass. Haunted, she realized in a rush, the place was haunted by the women who died there. If Sophie tried to, she could almost see them, wispy things that fluttered like tattered curtains under the bridge, sitting on dumpster lids, kicking around the train tracks. She blinked her eyes, but it was another sort of eye inside her that could see them. “Are there ghosts there?” Sophie asked the Dola. “Women?”
The Dola nodded. “They are the Naw I was telling you about. Try not to see them,” she advised. “Once you do, you see them everywhere. This world is crawling with Naw.”
“It hadn’t been their destiny to die?” Sophie asked. “If there are that many people going against destiny, maybe this whole destiny thing isn’t real.”
“It was their destiny.” The Dola nodded. “Naw are also people who died tragically. Most tragic deaths are destined. But they still become Naw.” She put her hands on Sophie and turned her away from that sad end of Maple Street. She looked down the other end, ramshackle homes housing people who struggled with their lives. Behind her, Heard Street and the obstacle course of asshole boys Sophie would need to dodge to get home. Then there was the dead-ended dirt road off Heard Street. The heat made the air shimmer, as if passing through it would lead you to another world. It always felt like time was stopped at Hennie’s corner, Sophie realized. She pushed open the wooden door, and the bell hanging from a piece of yarn jingled their arrival.
“Alleluia!” Hennie’s exclamation was joyful at the sight of Sophie, but her face quickly drooped in confusion at the sight of the baby in her arms. It deepened into a frown as she watched Laurie LeClair shuffle in stiffly behind her. Hennie nodded, her eyes wide. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I understand. The destiny of going against destiny very intense.” She smacked her hand to her forehead. “Oh, my. So much to do! Come in, everyone, please.” A wide table of treats appeared before them, and Hennie clapped her hands happily. “Please.” She motioned to Laurie. “You too little.”
“Hennie, it’s the Dola,” Sophie explained.
“So! Dolas don’t eat cake?”
“No, we don’t,” the Dola said flatly. “But thank you.”
“That girl you are inside needs food,” Hennie said scoldingly. “And this baby, oh, this baby!” Her tone devolved into the mushy voice everyone used to talk to babies. She reached her arms out and Sophie gratefully passed the baby over. The baby liked Hennie, giggling right away, pushing her face flat into the cotton of the woman’s dress as if looking at her was too much, and then lifting her face to behold her again, bursting into baby cackles. “You play hide and seek with me?” Hennie cooed. She lifted a bottle from the table and placed it in Alize’s hands. She sucked on it greedily. “So sweet, this,” Hennie said proudly, “But much nutrition! My own zagavory recipe.”
Hennie’s shop showed no sign of the disaster Sophie’s zawolanie had caused. Sophie noted the perfect glass jars, the white candle undisturbed on its shelf. The floor was clean of shards or muck or water or debris.
“I clean like that.” Hennie snapped her fingers and shrugged. “Sometime is better not to do things long, human way. Sometime magic really is best.” She gave Sophie a soft smile, and Sophie knew she’d been forgiven.
“I’m so sorry, Hennie,” Sophie said. “You were so nice to me. I don’t know why I freaked out—”
“Is much.” Hennie nodded with understanding. “Is very much, all of it. You are permitted freaking out. But only so many.”
“It’s true,” the Dola chimed in. “By your destiny, you are allowed a certain number of brief but intense mental breakdowns, but then you are destined to be over it. So don’t get too indulgent.”
“Thank you,” Sophie said, touched. The Dola was tight with her information. It struck Sophie as an act of generosity for her to share a bit.
“I put a spell on my mother,” Sophie confessed. “I used the powder in my pouch.” She hit the pouch where it swung around her waist, tied to a belt loop by its long strap.
“That is good powder.” Hennie nodded. “I mill myself.”
“What will happen to her? I don’t really know what I did. It was all happening at once—time, and the baby, and the Dola, and my mother was seeing everything, and the Dola was going to jump into her if she called the cops so I made the phone explode—”
“You see what happen when you go against destiny,” Hennie said. “Pandemonium.”
“I know.” In the safe quiet of Hennie’s shop, Sophie began to cry.
“Is okay, is okay,” Hennie assured her.
“Is this one of my mental breakdowns?” Sophie asked the Dola.
“No.” The Dola shook Laurie’s head. “I think you’re just crying.”
“What did you want for happen to your mother? When you do zagavory?”
“That she fall asleep,” Sophie said. “I just wanted her to go to sleep so I could come here, and do this, this destiny thing or whatever.”
“Is fine,” Hennie said, nodding. “Sleeping spell very simple. You go home, you sprinkle more powder, you wake her up. No big whoop. Now, you,” she addressed the Dola. “What do we do with you?”
“It’s up to you.” The Dola shrugged. “You’re back on track as far as I can tell, so I’m done. I’ve got a romance to haunt; someone is supposed to break someone’s heart but they feel so bad about it, they’re not doing it.”
“God!” Sophie blanched. “You’re going to go make someone break someone’s heart? Dola, your work is really awful.”
“It’s what I do.” The Dola sighed. “A lot of great things happen because of broken hearts. It puts a lot of things into motion on this planet. Sometimes I think heartbreak is the dominant active energy. People start things they wouldn’t have started, they go places they wouldn’t have gone, they meet people they wouldn’t have met. It’s actually one of my happier tasks.”
“When you go,” Hennie asked, “this girl, she be here?”
“I can walk her home, if you like,” the Dola offered. “And vacate her there.”
“And this baby?”
“She’d come too.”
Hennie shook head. “This girl, she sick, yes?”
“She’s a drug addict.”
“I think you bring her here to me, this destiny, yes?”
The Dola shrugged. “Everything is destiny,” she said.
“Argh!” Sophie cried. “You are driving me crazy! If everything is destiny then I can’t go off my destiny so why did you come to bug me!?”
“It was your destiny,” the Dola said.
“No quibble over destiny,” Hennie said gently.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” the Dola said, and to Hennie, “You want me to wait until you’re done and then vacate and leave the girl here?”
“Yes, please,” Hennie said. “Can I get you anything, is there anything you would like to have? Do you eat?”
The Dola looked wistful. “Not food. I’ll be home soon enough. I’d like to just rest if that’s okay.”
A straw-stuffed mattress appeared, fragrant as a clean barn on a spring day in another country in another time. The Dola collapsed on it with a grateful moan. The baby in Hennie’s arms was drifting to sleep as well. Hennie placed her on the bed beside her mother. “When I wake up,” the Dola said drowsily, “I’ll be gone. It’ll be Laurie.” The being squinted at Sophie. “It was a pleasure working with you.”
“Dolas feel pleasure?” Sophie asked.
“Not really,” the Dola said. “But isn’t that what people say to each other?”
“They’re supposed to mean it,” Sophie said, annoyed. “Goodbye, Dola.”
“We’ll see each other again.” The Dola said it as if to comfort Sophie, as if Sophie would miss the being. And Sophie realized that, strangely, she sort of would.
“No doubt,” Sophie replied, and the Dola closed its eyes, curving into a spoon around the sleeping baby.
“First, a toast.” Hennie held in her hand a great goblet sloshing with a deep, blue liquid. Sophie found one in her own hand as well. The liquid smelled like five hundred different smells, like the freshest burst of pure salt in your face while standing on the ocean shore; it smelled like a fat lilac blossom, the blossom a mosaic of tinier blossoms, its smell that faint, pastel smell that made her throat clutch. It smelled like a baby that had just been cleaned, been bathed and shampooed and laid down to sleep, the smell of the baby coming through the top of its head, through the warm hair fuzzing there, the liquid smelled like that. It smelled electric like pavement before a rain, and lush and round like a field of mown grass being heated in the sun. It smelled, thought Sophie, like the sun itself, a bright burst, and it smelled like the moon, cool and lingering, like a rich woman’s shoulders, and it smelled earthy in pockets, like the dirt that built the earth, like the heart of a cave. It tasted fruity and blue, like Caribbean waters, a smell that lapped at her, made her mouth water. Sophie wouldn’t have imagined that so many of these smells would strike her as good smells, or that together they would smell so magnificent, or that she would ever want to drink such a smell, but she did. She clinked her goblet with her aunt and let the potion wash through her mouth. “Wow,” she said.
“I bottled this in 1628.” Hennie smiled. “It’s been getting better and better all these years. I knew the perfect occasion would come to pop it open.” She took a gulp and closed her eyes in reverence to the taste. “Congratulations, Sophie. You broke the time zagavory. You have done other zagavorys as well, small ones?”
Sophie nodded. “I made fire, I made some glass break, I made my telephone explode, I made my mother pass out.” Sophie felt a swell of shame at the litany. None of it sounded very nice.
“All you do, you must do,” Hennie said, noting the droop of her niece’s shoulders. “And you do well, and you learn to do better. All is good. Cheers.” She hefted her goblet and they clinked and drank again. “Now.” She placed her glass on the tabletop, beside heaps of grapes and split-open figs, rounds of cheese, peaches and nectarines with their chunky pits exposed, dishes of fragrant olives, oily bowls brimming with garlic. And the bread, so soft and warm it seemed living. Sophie tore the end from a baguette and a delicious steam wafted across her face. She thought of butter and butter was upon it, melting dreamily.
“Thank you,” Sophie said. “For all of this.”
“You deserve all, and more,” Hennie said. “You deserve magnificent send-off.”
The soft bread felt suddenly hard as it passed through Sophie’s throat, she looked at Hennie, alarm bursting like fireworks across her face. She swallowed hard, so as not to choke. Hennie’s hand shot up, palm out, universal for stop.
“You not talk this time. You listen. Drink, eat, listen.” Hennie snapped her fingers, and a shuffling of feet filled the room. Or paws. A German Shepherd came out from behind a tall shelf of dimly lit jars. Its eyes were bright and darting, alert to command, ready to obey. Its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth. It seemed both keenly intelligent and wholly dumb. Hennie patted its head, then looped her arm around its neck and gave it a squeeze. “This is Carl.”
“My grandfather,” Sophie said.
Hennie looked at Sophie critically. “Not sure to let you speak at all. Never know what you say, or do.”
“I’ll be good,” Sophie promised, though she didn’t even know what that meant. Not when she’d just sneezed a spell onto her own mother and left her conked out on the kitchen floor.
“You must. Otherwise, I put quiet zagavory on you,” Hennie threatened. She looked at Sophie, and looked away. They both knew that Sophie would be able to break out of whatever spell Hennie cast upon her. “Call your grandfather,” the woman said.
“Papa?” Sophie called uncertainly. “Carl?”
“Dog name is Carl,” Hennie said simply. “Dog respond to Carl.”
“Carl!” Sophie called brightly, trying to insert some cheer into the moment. She clapped her hands together briskly. “C’mere, Carl! C’mere!”
The dog’s tail wagged, responding to the excitement in Sophie’s voice. He loped around the table and came to her, panting. His big damp nose sniffed at her, and she petted the wiry fur of his head awkwardly. The animal quickly grew bored and edged over to the table, dragging a round of cheese to the floor with its teeth. He ate the cheese in large, wet-sounding chomps.
Sophie drained her goblet, and it was instantly refilled, this time with a stronger essence of seaborne, salty breeze.
“You like more ocean?” Hennie asked, and Sophie nodded. “I thought so. Never too late to play with ingredient. Me, I like the lilac best.” She took a sip, and sighed. “Sophie. Your story. You are ready?”
“Yes.” The Dola twitched in her sleep. What, thought Sophie, does a Dola dream of?
“Your mother, Kishka think she will be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“When your mother baby, Kishka think she is girl with power. Most magic girl. She almost kill your mother, with salt.”
“That myth, that thing!” Sophie cried, excited to have a piece of the puzzle.
“Yes,” Hennie said. “It is real, and it is tragic. Real that a girl will become powerful girl, and she will crave salt, and salt will make her strong, never hurt her, even as baby. Real, true myth. But, tragic, so many people want baby to be theirs.” She sipped her lilac potion. “Especially in this place, Chelsea. And more places like it, where people poor, confused, not knowing how to make better. They think, Oh, my baby magic, will save me, and they hurt, even kill baby.”
Sophie pointed to Alize, asleep with her fingers in her mouth. “That happened to her,” Sophie whispered. “She did that. Laurie, not the Dola.”
Hennie nodded. “Very sad, very scary. Happen to your own mother. After that, Kishka not love her.” She paused. “Maybe Kishka never love her. Maybe Kishka not able to love.”
It made Sophie feel terrible to imagine her mother, a girl, unloved. “Did Kishka love her at least a little?” she asked desperately. “Did she at least pretend to?”
Hennie sighed. “Kishka very cruel. She do zagavory on Andrea just to scare her, make her see things, send her nightmares. She call the Poludnica, make her faint in the summer always. She invite Naw to stay in Andrea’s room. If she could put Boginki in bathtub, she would. Very terrible.” Hennie petted Carl, sitting beside her, posture still and classic as a statue.
“Andrea grows up, is bad girl. Always in trouble. With the cigarettes, with the alcohol. She run away with boy she love, he like the alcohol, too. Ronald. Is your father.”
“Ronald.” Sophie turned her mind back to the information. “Ronald who works at the dump?” The man was a clown, a sad clown. “The drunk?”
“Yes, Sophie.” Hennie nodded. “Ronald your father. Andrea quite young, too young, she become pregnant. Is very scared. Was very drunk when she allow herself to become pregnant, not thinking well. But, it happen.”
Sophie tried to remember what she knew of Ronald. His face, dark from the sun. His eyes half-closed always. She wasn’t even sure how tall he was, as he was always stopped with liquor. He was an empty man. He was no one’s anything.
“They talk of marrying, yah,” Hennie continued. “Kishka say no way never. She lay energy onto Andrea—all her rebellion gone. She sink zagavory on Andrea, kill a bit of spirit. Numb it. You go to dentist? You know they numb you with the needle?”
Sophie nodded.
“Kishka do like that to your mother’s spirit. To her heart. She not have the joy to fight anymore—to fight for love, for herself. For Ronald.” Hennie’s face turned tender. “For you. “
For a moment Sophie felt like Hennie could see all her secret loneliness, and the sensation of being known so deeply was too much. She stuck her head quickly into her goblet and felt the spray of the sea against her face.
“Is there a zagavory on Ronald?” Sophie asked into her mug. The man was clearly under a terrible spell.
“No.” Hennie shook her head sadly. “Ronald just alcoholic. Ronald very sad. Kishka keep Andrea away from him, but she keep Ronald close, to watch him. Give him job, pay him good for teenage boy.” Hennie laughed a mean laugh. “She pay him same now, grown man. He don’t care. She buy him alcohol all the time.”
It made Sophie want to cry. She thought of her mother, so cold to Ronald, indifferent. “And the zagavory on my mother, it makes her not care about Ronald?”
“Yes, Sophie. Like I said, part of your mother’s heart is gone.”
“Forever?” Sophie cried. “Can’t I remove the spell?”
Hennie shook her head. “Some spell, the longer they happen, the more damage. For Andrea to be under spell so long, it not reversible. It hurt her spirit permanent.”
Sophie thought about her mother—overwhelmed and overworked, neglectful. Not there, Sophie realized. Some crucial part of her mother had never been there. She felt a flare of rage at the injustice. “What about you?” Sophie demanded. “With all your good magic, what good is your good magic if you can’t undo a spell like that! Why didn’t you help her?”
“Oh, I did,” Hennie said wearily. “I did what I could. I think I ease it, some. For you and for your mother. Could be worse, my belief. But, yes. Still bad.” There were tears sparkling in the corner of Hennie’s eyes. They stayed there, shining like diamonds, while Sophie’s liquefied and slid down her face. “Once Kishka know your mother having baby, she make her power very strong. She know magic skip generation. She want magic baby for herself.”
“She knew I would be magic?” Sophie nervously chugged her oceany drink, then watched the elixir rise back to the top of her glass. You can’t nervously eat magic food, Sophie thought. It just keeps replenishing itself. She put her goblet down and fiddled with a snarl instead.
“Well, love. Yah, Kishka know you come now. But there surprise for Kishka, for everyone. You not alone, love. You have sister. Twin sister. You come together. You come, and only one is magic baby.”
Sophie reached for her goblet with a compulsive hand, and buried her nose in the cup of it so she would not have to face Hennie. A sister. Her heart was racing. A twin? Twins were magic. Even regular, non-Odmieńce humans thought there was something uncanny about twins, something extraordinary. Sophie thought of television shows she’d watched, where one twin would sense another twin’s feelings. The thought both charmed and scared Sophie. Had she been feeling her twin’s feelings and thinking them her own? How could she be so connected to another and not know it? Was there a hole inside her where her twin had been pulled away? Sophie often felt lonely, but it seemed to her, living in Chelsea, that most everyone did.
“What, what is her name?” Sophie brought her face out of the goblet. “My sister.” I have a sister.
Hennie shook her head. “She have no name.”
“Everyone has a name.”
“Is she dead?” Sophie was suddenly struck by a million possibilities. Where was she? Why was she taken? Was she drowned in the creek by Polish Boginki?
“She alive.” Hennie nodded. “When you babies first born, Kishka enraged! She think she know everything, she so mad to not know something like two baby instead of one. Something simple, many witch could see. Kishka not thinking, though. Now, both you baby, which is magic baby? Huh? How does Kishka know?”
“Couldn’t we both be magic?” Sophie asked hopefully. A magic sister! To play spells with, to have a forever best friend, a magic one of her own blood.
“No, only one girl magic girl, that certain. Kishka feed you both salt, see how you take it. Very scary moment. I here, in my workshop, I in deep trance, I inside baby you and your baby sister. Like how you go into hearts? Sad to do it to baby, baby so defenseless, feel very wrong. I light so many candle after, I do many spells to be pure, to align with the good. But, I do it for good, Sophie. I have your sister eat the salt. I have her eat so much she almost sicken. I try to take the toxin out of her, is complicated magic, like, like, surgery in operating room. I so scared I kill baby.” Hennie shudders with the memory, her tears finally trickling from the corners of her eyes. “And all the while, I in you too. I stop you from eating salt. And you want so much salt! And your little baby will, so strong! No doubt you are the one, Sophia. Even in you as little baby, you like, like bucking bronco!” Hennie laughed, full of affection for her niece. Sophie was stunned. Hennie was inside her heart as a baby. Hennie knew her so well, and in a way Sophie could not understand. She could not understand what she meant to Hennie, and she was humbled by it.
“It work,” Hennie said, her voice a mixture of sadness and relief, pride and regret. “It work well. Baby not die. I stay with baby long time. I keep purifying. Kishka believe she the one, Kishka take the baby. She tell Andrea baby wicked, evil, spelled. She tell Kishka baby sick from alcohol in the belly. Kishka tell Andrea all sort of thing but it doesn’t matter, Andrea so broken now, Andrea has no fight. She let Kishka take baby. She never even ask what happen.”
“She let Kishka take my sister.” My sister, my sister. Sophie was shocked at how she had so recently had no one, no sister at all, and now an allegiance burned sharply inside her.
“Oh, Sophie. Try not to be mad at Andrea. This—all this so crazy, yah? What would you do? Try to understand Andrea.”
“What would I do?” Sophie flared. “I’d fight Kishka! I wouldn’t let her take my sister! I’d do anything! Anything I could, I’d make the biggest zagavory—”
“Sophie, Andrea not have magic. Andrea have nothing. Kishka hurt Andrea Andrea’s whole life. Andrea, she was defenseless.”
It could have been me, Sophie thought. Her mother just as easily would have let Kishka spirit her away, gone. Sophie felt cold at the thought, cold and small. She turned on Hennie.
“You let her?” she accused. “You had a part in this! You let Kishka take my sister!”
Hennie nodded, crying freely now. “Yes I did, child. It is what was meant to happen. One of you would go. One would stay. I did like Boginki, I make switch. So that you stay free. So that you grow powerful to do what you are meant to do.”
“What am I meant to do, Hennie?”
“All the sadness upon the humans is like a deep spell from the bad, the source Kishka takes her power from. Over time it grow and grow and grow, you know. Humans not used to be so sad. Everyone on the sad pills or happy pills. Everyone scared inside and no one know why. People fighting, people so mean, not used to be so. You will take it all, child. You will take it all out of everyone. You will make the world so different it will be as if you had recreated it.”
“Me?” Sophie was sickened with dread.
“Yes. There will be others, other girls. You will have help.”
“Where are they?”
“You will find each other when time is right. You are all growing, all training, all magic. Part human, so you can feel the zagavory of sadness yourself, it is in your heart. But magic, too. Magic you can find it and take it away.”
“Hennie,” Sophie said. “Where is my sister?”
“She is with Kishka.”
Sophie remembered the plants, the wall of plants in the trailer, a fortress of greenery. The tiny hello.
“In Kishka’s trailer,” Sophie said. “In the plants.”
“Yes, child.”
“Right there. She’s just right there, right here in Chelsea, at the dump, and no one is helping her?”
“Sophia, the plants. They are so poison. Kishka raise her inside a poison garden, now the only air she know is air of poison flowers. Her air would kill anyone. She live inside it since two, three days old. She maybe poison now, herself.”
“It wouldn’t kill me,” Sophie asserted, though she remembered the dizzying affect of being so close to the plants, the way her breath had turned leaden in her lungs. “I could do a zagavory, so could you— we—could take her—”
“Take her where, Sophie? She does not breathe air like we do. She cannot leave the plants. Our clean, healthy air is poison to her. She would die, love. And we would sicken from her closeness. She is a poison flower.”
Sophie cried tears of frustration. “There’s nothing we can do?” she wailed. “I’m able to save the world and swim with mermaids and talk to pigeons but I can’t rescue my own sister?”
“Just because many things are possible does not mean all is possible, Sophie.”
“She has no name,” Sophie said.
“No one has named her. She is like, little flower creature. Like little animal girl.”
“Is she… happy?”
“Go inside her! See if she’s happy!”
Hennie held a hand up in front of her. “No more go inside that child. That a promise I make to the good.”
“Well I will, then.”
“That fine, Sophie. You do as you will. But I ask you, you must focus on what is your duty here. It is bigger than you, than your sister, than me. You must not be distracted by this, this tragedy.”
“Why did Kishka even want her?”
“Kishka for bad. She enjoy humans being sad, being angry. Sad people easy to control, yah? She have power, it feel good to her. She make many people do her will. She want to make sure no good magic girl come and mess it up for her. So she make this flower jail.”
“Why is she controlling people, does she take their money?”
“Earthly wealth means nothing, any Odmieńce can make wealth, here—” Without even sounding her zawolanie, Hennie produced a giant bar of gold. She placed it on the table with a thunk, smooshing a stray grape.
“Oh my god,” Sophie breathed. “That’s real? It’s not, like, counterfeit?”
“Is real,” Hennie said.
“Could I do that? Could I make, like dollars, like a big wad of cash?”
“You do what you like, sure. Is not point of your power. Do as have to do. My point is, Kishka have such things, yah. Have own cave in Poland, full with jewels, with gold, what you say, wads of cash. Such things, who cares? You live so long with such power, you stop to care. But, Kishka care. Gives her much power over humans.”
Sophie didn’t know what felt more unreal, that her grandmother was a gazillionaire, or that she had the power to make herself a gazillionaire. Sophie had often daydreamed that maybe she was really the child of some other family, one with money, money like a key to unlock the door to the world. Sophie could go to school, travel, eat delicious food. Now she had the means to such a life, but it didn’t seem like such a life was available to her. When all this is over, I’m going to boarding school, Sophie decided.
“Does Kishka know?” Sophie asked. “Does she know she has the wrong girl?”
“Yah.” Hennie nodded. “Yah, I think she is figuring it out.”
“Why is she so stupid?” Sophie asked snarkily. “How come she couldn’t figure that out if she’s such a big deal?”
“Kishka not stupid,” Hennie warned. “Do not endanger yourself to think that. Witches powerful, but imperfect. All beings imperfect, all creatures. Only the good is perfect, perfect good. And the bad, too. The bad is perfect bad.” Hennie sighed. “You could be Harvard professor now, child. You be philosopher. I know this all confusing for a small girl.”
“I’m not small,” Sophie challenged. Though she had felt tiny only moments ago, her anger, this injustice, it had filled her heart. She felt giant with feeling and with purpose.
“No, dear,” Hennie agreed. “You not so very small. Your heart very, very big. You must care for it, keep pure. You must eat much salt. You go with Syrena, the mermaid, she live in the salt, she teach you very much.”
“So, I guess I’m not going to high school,” Sophie said.
“Oh, no, child. You will have to go to high school! Cannot be— what you say—drop-out! You spend summer with Syrena, you come back for school.”
“Hennie,” Sophie said. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
“No worry now,” Hennie brushed the topic away. “You go, do what you must do right now.”
“Can I take this?” Sophie’s eyes had continued to catch on the gleaming bar of gold on the wooden table. It looked like a candy bar made to look like gold, a fat bar of chocolate wrapped in foil. “I want to give it to my mom.”
“I think that would be fine.” Hennie nodded. Sophie picked up the thing, which weighed as much as she thought it would, and slipped it into her magic pouch. The bag sagged with its heft.
“Okay, then,” Sophie said.
Beside them, on the straw mattress, Laurie LeClair twitched in her sleep, coming awake slowly, then quickly. She felt the foreign room around her, the strange, rough bed she slept upon, and sat bolt upright, her eyes flashing like a cornered animal. Carl growled a low growl and moved closer to Hennie. Laurie looked the witch square in the face, her face alive with the absence of the Dola.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, and Alize began to cry.