“The herbs and powders will be easy to find, but I don’t know where we’ll get some of the other things on this list,” Embry said once the invisible hand finished writing out a list of ingredients that had to be combined under the light of a waxing crescent moon. “We can manage something from each of the Crescent Moon Bearers who came before you, but stuff from your mother and father… I don’t even know who he was.”
“I thought you were friends with my mother?” I looked from one to the other.
“I checked in on them, but your Grams only wrote to me after you were born, and he was already out of the picture by then,” Gabriel explained.
“I knew he broke her heart, but she didn’t want to talk about it,” Embry added.
“Charlie knew,” I admitted, pulling the envelope from my backpack. “My grandmother kept in touch and wrote letters to him.”
“I’ll go find us a car while you read it,” Gabriel decided after a student looked in to see if the room was occupied.
“We’ll meet you out front,” Embry said, nodding for me to open the envelope.
Inside was a collection of letters between Charlie and my Grams. I read them while we walked to the front of the building to wait for Gabriel. The first one was sent a couple of years before I was born. “It’s just my Grams explaining to him that my mom wouldn’t be visiting him that summer as planned.”
“When is it from?” he asked, coming closer to put a hand on my shoulder.
“Two years before I was born,” I checked the date again to confirm.
“She needed to stay home and get more chemo,” he said, like it still hurt.
“She only got cancer after I was born,” I argued, even though it was there, blue on white, in my Grams’ handwriting.
“Who told you that?” he was genuinely confused. “Your mom was dealing with leukemia since she was a kid. She was the bravest little girl I ever met, fighting it with everything she had, beating it, then starting all over again when it came back.”
“I always assumed it was new; that she wouldn’t have a kid if she knew she was dying,” I explained. It was weird, talking about her like this. I tried to distance myself, to talk about her like she was someone I didn’t really know or care about, but at the same time, I didn’t. She was my mother, and I loved the idea of her, of what she would have been for me. Her death left a terrible void in my life and in my heart, but I didn’t know her at all.
“I think we were all surprised, but it also made sense. I went to see her in the hospital when she was maybe twelve, and she told me the one thing that really sucked about dying young was that she wouldn’t get to be a mother.”
“The one thing?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
“She got good at resigning herself to the other things,” he defended her statement.
“This one mentions a boyfriend,” I said of the next letter. “It sounds like Charlie knew him. Grams is worried because no matter what, someone’s heart gets broken.”
“Does he have a name?” he asked me.
“Brian. No last name,” I handed him the letter.
“Brian Sherwood?” he suggested, scanning it.
“Who is Brian Sherwood?”
“He moved in with his grandparents on the other side of the swamp when he was eleven. He worked for me a few summers, trying to get money to cover his grandmother’s hospital bills. When Charlie and I found out what he needed the money for, we covered her hospital expenses, and he kept working as a thank you. One day he said he didn’t need our help anymore and I don’t think I saw him again,” he shared.
“Why would you think of him? Is it just the name or do you think he could be my father?” I asked.
“I know he met your mother when she came to stay one summer. He’s in some pictures from the album I gave you,” he remembered. “They got along, but she had to leave mid-July because they accepted her into a drug trial.”
“Did it work?” I asked of the trial, getting a nod. “Was he nice? A good guy?” I wanted him to say yes. “But I guess if he was nice he wouldn’t be my dad, because no good guy would abandon his pregnant girlfriend, then not see his daughter after her mother dies of cancer.” I crossed my arms and huffed. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find out, because the outcome would be the same. Good guy or bad, he wasn’t here.
Embry looked at me like he was surprised I had this pent-up anger at my father. I didn’t seem like I had daddy issues. The truth was, I had so many other issues to worry about that my heartless father wasn’t usually worth mentioning.
I grabbed the next letter, but only had time to make out the first tear-smudged line in my mom’s handwriting, asking if Brian’s family still lived nearby, before I was back at the manor…
“Can I see her?” a man, roughly my age, was standing in front of me, holding my blanket. It wasn’t monogrammed, so I couldn’t be positive, but it had a pink heart in the corner. There was so much pain and regret on his face, but every fiber of my being, of my mother’s body, was tense. She was both on high alert in case he tried to get past her to the bassinet in the corner, and to make sure she stayed strong instead of falling back into his arms. Looking at him, I did not understand how he could have left her.
“No. If I have my way, you will never see her. Ever. So when she asks about you, I can pretend it didn’t work out and you left without knowing about her instead of having to tell her the truth; that you never wanted her. That you asked me to get rid of her.”
“Will you let me explain?” he pleaded like it was the one thing in the world he had to do.
“I don’t want your lies and trying to get me to forgive you.”
“You will hate me a lot more than you’ll want to forgive me,” he admitted.
“Then why bother?” she asked. I could hear her thinking that she didn’t know if she could handle another heartbreak from him.
“Because you need to know,” he said with an intensity that had her nodding even though she didn’t really want another reason to hate him. “My mom had this friend, a guy who would come by and see me every once in a while, even after she died. When you went back home that summer, he came to me and offered to bring me here with him. He said I could work for him and pointed out that I needed to get out of the house, away from death and watching her suffer and… I couldn’t do it anymore,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t be happy with him because she was dealing with cancer like his grandmother had.
“I never asked you to come.”
“He did.” I could feel that her heart was breaking more than ever with those two tiny words.
“He did?” she repeated, hoping she had it wrong, or that he was referring to his heart in the third person. Anything other than what he was confessing to.
“My mom’s friend. When I went to work for him, he told me it wasn’t necessarily a real job, but that you really enjoyed your summer, and as long as I hung out with you, he would cover my tuition and an apartment down here for school.”
“He paid you to spend time with me? Who the hell was he?” she let the anger take over so she wouldn’t start crying.
“I didn’t know who he was, but at first I thought it was sweet that he wanted to take care of you like that.”
“You liked the money, and it was pathetic, not sweet.” I could tell that she didn’t believe the first part, no matter how much he hurt her, but he was looking at her like it got worse.
“It was neither. It was selfish and despicable and horrible,” he admitted. She was about to ask what he meant, but he launched into a confession. “When I found out why, I wanted to stop. To leave, but I was in it too far by then. Not just because of the money I owed him, or the threats he started making, but I cared about you, and I knew that if it wasn’t me, he would find someone else.”
“I’m a human being, Brian, I don’t just like people because some guy wants me to. And why would he care who I hang out with?”
“He didn’t. He wanted you to fall in love with me,” he looked disgusted with himself, but he said it anyway.
“Why?” she asked.
He explained, starting with Annabelle, about the copies, about one of her descendants being crucial for some ritual, how Henry hunted them through time and didn’t have what he wanted yet.
“I don’t get why he sent you. Did he want me to trust you so you could kidnap me and take me hostage?” I could tell my mom was only pretending that this was all news to her. Grams must have shared bits and pieces with her about the two guys who stopped by every once in a while.
“No, he wanted me to make sure you would continue the line,” Brian said, the guilt plain on his face, but he didn’t look away from her. He looked us straight in the eye and took what was reflected at him, knowing he deserved it.
“He sent you to sleep with me?” she was horrified, and I didn’t blame her. I felt dirty, betrayed and disgusted, not just because she was, but because my dad just admitted that someone paid him to impregnate my mother…
I was sitting on a bench outside the library when I came back to the present.
“What did you see?” Gabriel asked, kneeling in front of me.
“My mother,” I admitted.
“And?” Embry asked. He was sitting beside me on the bench, his arm around my shoulders, probably to hold me up when I passed out, but I wiggled away from him. I didn’t want anyone touching me right now.
“The blanket I packed… it was my father’s,” I only told them what they needed to know.
“That’s it?” Embry pressed.
“The blanket was his,” I repeated, handing him the letter to put in my backpack, that he was now carrying, before walking out to the parking lot.
“Lucy…” they called after me.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I turned and put my hands out, grateful I didn’t accidentally blast people anymore.
They looked at me, then at each other. They must have decided the conversation could wait until later, because they shrugged and followed me out.
Gabriel got us a black SUV, so I tried to go into the back row where I could be alone.
“I’m exhausted, if you wouldn’t mind navigating,” Embry asked me, a clear ploy to prevent my solitude, but I was too drained to argue.
“Sure,” I sighed, taking the passenger’s seat. I could feel both of their eyes on me, even as Gabriel watched the road and Embry pretended to sleep, but I couldn’t face them right now. My insides were in knots and all I felt was shame. It wasn’t just the Henry parts; all of me was rotten.