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STEPMAMA REMEMBERS
I drove off and felt free—free at last—of that burdensome child. I’d tried my best with sweetness and with pain to bring her to the Craft. But you cannot make someone do what they will not do and expect them to thank you for it. Master knew that. Told me so often. I was the first and only apprentice he’d ever kept. The rest he sucked dry of their seven years and threw them out. But I had wanted what he had to give, wanted it passionately, and the years I gratefully gave him were the best ones he’d ever had.
Snow was no such creature. She had to be gotten rid of. I do believe if I’d tried to take her years, they’d have poisoned me.
My plan in place, I knew I’d a few weeks’ grace before she’d be missed. A few weeks to take her fading father to the hospital to die and to play the grieving widow. A few weeks till I could collect my widow’s pension. And a few weeks after that to sell off the land to the railroad bosses and go sorrowfully back to Charleston to start my life anew.
Charleston? Why, with the money I’d be getting, I could go to Ohio. Or even California, where the hankering after magic is mighty strong. It made me smile to think of all those movie folk, untouched by the recessions, ready for fleecing.
I made it back to Lemuel’s house—I’d never thought of it as mine—and there took a long bath with candles set out all around, the water freshened with rose petals and lavender from the garden.
Free.
Free!
The next morning, as I was brushing my hair a hundred strokes, I twitched the drape off the mirror.
The mirror’s dark mask of a face swam into view.
“Mistress,” it said.
Never Master, I thought, grinding my teeth in frustration.
“What is your question?”
“No question at all,” I told the thing. “Just wanted to let you know that the girl Snow is gone. Finished. Her heart cut out and stewed. Bones scattered. What do you think of that?”
The mask turned, became sharper, the edges of the black more defined. Then it said,
“Oh, Mistress, that she’s lost is true,
But still she’ll have the best of you.”
“Best of me, you stupid mirror, no one has ever gotten the best of me. Not the Master, not lovesick Lemuel, not that puling Nancy, and certainly not the girl. She’s dead and gone by now. I’ve made sure of it. Besides, I didn’t even ask a question of you.”
I threw the brush at the mirror as hard as I could. Even as it hit and shattered a corner of the glass, I realized that in fact I had asked. And the mirror had answered.
Only the answer made no sense at all.