The Coven

CHAPTER 15 Who I Am

September 1, 1982

Today we're moving out of this hellhole, to a town about three hours north of here. It's called Meshomah Falls. I think Meshomah is an Indian word. They have Indian words all over the place around here. The town is small and very pretty, kind of like home.

We already have jobs—I'm going to waitress at the little cafe in town, and Angus will be helping a local carpenter. We saw people dressed in queer old-fashioned clothes there last week. I asked a local man about them, and he said they were Amish.

Last week Angus got back from Ireland. I didn't want him to go, and I couldn't write about it until now. He went to Ireland, and he went to Ballynigel. Not much of the town is left. Every house where a witch lived was burned to the ground and now has been razed flat for rebuilding. He said none of our kind are left there, none he could find. Over in Much Bencham he got a story that people have been telling about a huge dark wave that wiped out the town, a wave without water. I don't know what could cause or create something so big, so powerful. Maybe many covens working together.

I was terrified for him to go, thought I'd never see him again. He wanted to get married before he left, and I said no. I can't marry anyone. Nothing is permanent, and I don't want to fool myself. Anyway, he took the money, went home, and found a bunch of charred, empty fields.

Now he's here, and we're moving, and in this new town, I'm hoping a new life can begin.

— M.R.

Late that afternoon I decided to hunt down my Wicca books. I lay on my bed and cast out my senses, sort of feeling my way through the whole house. For a long time I got nothing, and I started to think I was wasting my time. But then, after about forty-five minutes, I realized I felt the books in my mom's closet, inside a suitcase at the very back. I looked, and sure enough, there they were. I took them back to my room and put them on my desk. If Mom or Dad wanted to make something of it, let them. I was through with silence.

On Sunday night I was sitting at my desk, working my way through math homework, when my parents knocked on my door.

"Come in," I said.

The door opened, and I heard Mary K.'s music playing louder from inside her room. I winced. Our musical tastes are completely different.

I saw my parents standing in the doorway. "Yes?" I said coolly.

"May we come in?" Mom asked.

I shrugged.

Mom and Dad came in and sat down on my bed. I tried not to glance at the Wicca books on my desk.

Dad cleared his throat, and Mom took his hand.

"This past week has been very… difficult for all of us," Mom said, looking reluctant and uncomfortable. "You've had questions, and we weren't ready to answer them."

I waited.

She sighed. "If you hadn't found out on your own, I probably never would have wanted to tell you about the adoption," she said, her voice ending on a whisper. "I know that's not what people recommend. They say everyone should be open, honest." She shook her head "But telling you didn't seem like a good idea." She raised her eyes to my dad, and he nodded at her.

"Now you know about it," Mom said. "Part of it, anyway. Maybe it's best for you to know as much as we know, rut not sure. I'm not sure what the best thing is anymore. But we don't seem to have a choice."

"I have a right to know." I said, "it's my life, lea at I can think about. It's there, every day."

Mom nodded. "Yes, I see that So." She drew in a long breath and looked down at her lap for a moment. "You know Daddy and I got married when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four."

"Uh-huh."

"We wanted to start a family right away," said my mom. "We tried for eight years, with no luck. The doctors found one thing wrong with me after another. Hormonal imbalances, endometriosis… it got to where every month I would get my period and cry for three days because I wasn't pregnant."

My dad kept his gaze on her. He freed his hand from hers and wrapped his arm around her shoulders instead.

"I was praying to God to send me a baby," said Mom. "I lit candles, said novenas. Finally we applied at an adoption agency, and they told us it might be three or four years. But we applied anyway. Then…"

"Then an acquaintance of ours, a lawyer, called us one night," said my dad.

"It was raining," my mom put in as I thought about their friends, trying to remember a lawyer.

"He said he had a baby," my dad said. He shifted and tucked his hands under his knees. "A baby girl who needed adopting, a private adoption."

"We didn't even think about it," Mom said. "We just said yes! And he came over that night with a baby and handed her to me. And I took one look and knew this was my baby, the one I'd prayed for for so long." Mom's voice broke, and she rubbed her eyes.

"That was you," Dad said unnecessarily. He smiled at the memory. "You were seven months old and just so—"

"So perfect," Mom interrupted, her face lighting up. "You were plump and healthy, with curly hair and big eyes, and you looked up at me… and I knew you were the one. In that moment you became my child, and I would have killed anyone who tried to take you away from me. The lawyer said that your birth parents were too young to raise a baby and had asked him to find you a good home." She shook her head, remembering. "We didn't even think about it, didn't ask for more information. All I knew was, I had my baby, and frankly, I didn't care where you had come from or why."

I clenched my jaw, feeling my throat start aching. Had my birth parents given me to someone to keep me safe, knowing they were in danger somehow? Had the lawyer been telling the truth? Or had I just been found somewhere, after they were dead?

"You were everything we wanted," said Dad. "That night you slept between us in our bed, and the next day we went out and bought every kind of baby thing we'd ever heard of. It was like a thousand Christmases, all of our dreams coming true, in you."

"A week later," Mom said, sniffling, "we read about a fire in Meshomah Falls. How two bodies had been found in a barn that had burned to the ground. When the bodies were identified, they matched the names on your birth certificate."

"We wanted to know more, but we also didn't want to do anything to hurt the adoption," said my dad. He shook his head. "I'm ashamed to say, we just wanted to keep you, no matter what."

"But months later, after the adoption was final—it went through really fast and finally it was all legal and no one could take you away—then we tried to find out more." Mom continued.

"How?" I asked.

"We tried calling the lawyer, but he had taken a job in another state. We left messages, but he never returned any of our calls. It was kind of odd," Dad added. "It almost seemed like he was avoiding us. Finally we gave up on him.

"I went through the newspapers," Dad went on. "I talked to the reporter who had covered the fire story, and he put me in touch with the Meshomah police. And after that I did research in Ireland, when I was there on a business trip. That was when you were about two years old and your mom was expecting Mary K."

"What did you find out?" I asked in a small voice.

"Are you sure you want to know?"

I nodded, gripping my desk chair. "I do want to know," I said, my voice stronger. I knew what Alyce had told me and what I had found out at the library. I needed to know more. I needed to know it all.

"Maeve Riordan and Angus Bramson died in that barn fire," my dad said, looking down as if he were reading the words off his shoes. "It was arson—murder," he clarified. "The barn doors had been locked from the outside, and gasoline had been poured around the building."

I trembled, my eyes huge and fastened on my dad. I hadn't read anywhere that it had definitely been murder.

"They found symbols on some of the charred pieces of wood," said Mom. "They were identified as runes, but no one knew why they were written there or why Maeve and Angus had been killed. They had kept to themselves, had no debts, went to church on Sundays. The crime was never solved."

"What about in Ireland?"

Dad nodded and shifted his weight. "Like I said, I went there on business, and I didn't have a lot of time. I didn't even know what to look for. But I took a day trip to the town where the Meshomah police had said Maeve Riordan was from: Ballynigel. When I got there, there wasn't much of a town to see. A couple of shops on a main street and one or two ugly new apartment buildings. My guidebook had said it was a quaint old fishing village, but there was hardly any sign of it or what it had used to be."

"Did you find out what happened?"

"Not really," Dad said, holding his hands wide. "There was a newsstand there, a little shop. When I asked about it, the old lady kicked me out and slammed the door."

"Kicked you out?" I asked in amazement.

Dad gave a dry chuckle. "Yes. Finally, after walking around and finding nothing, I went to the next town—I think its name was Much Bencham—and had lunch in the pub. There were a couple of old guys sitting at the bar, and they struck up a conversation with me, asking where I was from. I started talking, but as soon as I mentioned Ballynigel they went quiet 'Why do ye want to know? they asked suspiciously. I said I was investigating a story for my hometown newspaper about small Irish towns. For the travel section."

I stared at my dad, unable to picture him blithely lying to strangers, going on this quest to find out my heritage. He'd known all of this, both of them had, almost all of my life. And they'd never breathed a word to me.

"To make a long story short," Dad went on, "it finally came out that until four years earlier, Ballynigel has been a small, prosperous town. But in 1982 it had suddenly been destroyed. Destroyed by evil, they said."

I could hardly breathe. This was similar to what Alyce had said. My mom was chewing her bottom lip nervously, not looking at me.

"They said that Ballynigel had been a town of witches, with most of the people there being descendants of witches for thousands of years. They called them the old clans. They said evil had risen up and destroyed the witches, and they didn't know why, but they knew you should never take a chance with a witch." Dad coughed and cleared his throat. "I laughed and said I didn't believe in witches. And they said, 'More fool you. They said that witches were real and there had been a powerful coven at Ballynigel until the night they had been destroyed, and the whole town with them. Then I had an idea, and I asked. Did anyone escape? They said a few humans. Humans, they called them, as if there was a difference. I said, What about witches? And they shook their heads and said if any witches had escaped, they would never be safe, no matter where they went. That they would be hunted down and killed, if not sooner, then later."

But two witches had escaped and had come to America. Where they were killed three years later.

Mom had quit sniffling and now watched my dad as if she hadn't heard this story for many years.

"I came home and told your mom about it and to tell you the truth, we were both pretty frightened. We thought about how your birth parents had been killed. Frankly, it scared us. We thought there was a psycho out there, hunting these people down, and if he knew about you, you wouldn't be safe. So we decided to go on with our business, and we never spoke of your past again."

I sat there, interlacing this story with the one Alyce had told me. For the first time I could almost understand why my parents had kept all this to themselves. They had been trying to protect me. Protect me from what had killed my birth parents.

"We wanted to change your first name," Mom said. "But you were legally Morgan. So we gave you a nickname."

"Molly," I said, light dawning. I had been Molly until fourth grade, when I decided I hated it and wanted to be called Morgan.

"Yes. And by then, when you wanted to be Morgan again, well, we felt safe," Mom said. "So much had changed. We'd never heard anything more about Meshomah Falls or Ballynigel or witches. We thought all of that was behind us."

"Then we found your Wicca books," said Dad. "And it brought everything back, all the memories, the awful stories, the fear. I thought someone had found you, had given you those books for a reason."

I shook my head. "I bought them myself."

"Maybe we've been unreasonable," Mom said slowly. "But you don't know what it's like to worry that your child might be taken from you or might be harmed. Maybe what you're doing is innocent and the people you're doing it with don't mean any harm."

"Of course they don't," I said, thinking of Cal, and his mother, and my friends.

"But we can't help feeling afraid," said my dad. "I saw a whole town that had been wiped out. I read about the burned barn. I talked to those men in Ireland. If that's what witchcraft entails, we don't want you to have any part of it."

We sat there in silence for a few minutes while I tried to absorb this story. I felt overwhelmed with emotion, but most of my anger toward them had melted away.

"I don't know what to say." I took a deep breath. "I'm glad you told me all this. And maybe I wouldn't have understood it when I was younger. But I still think you should have told me about the adoption part earlier. I should have known." My parents nodded, and my mom sighed heavily. "But I can't help feeling that Wicca is not connected to that—disaster in Ireland. It's just—a weird coincidence. I mean, Wicca is a part of me. And I know I'm a witch. But the kind of stuff we do couldn't cause anything like what you described."

Mom looked like she wanted to ask more but didn't want to hear the answers. She kept silent.

"How come you were able to have Mary K.?" I asked.

"I don't know," Mom said in a low voice. "It just happened. And after Mary K., I've never gotten pregnant again. God wanted me to have two daughters, and you've both brought untold joy into our lives. I care about you both so much that I can't stand to think of any danger coming to you. Which is why I want you to leave witchcraft alone. I'm begging you to leave witchcraft alone."

She started crying, so of course I did, too. It was all too much to take in.

"But I can't!" I wailed, blowing my nose. "It's a part of me. It's natural. It's like having brown hair or big feet. It's just—me."

"You don't have big feet," my dad objected.

I couldn't help laughing through my tears.

"I know you love me and want what's best for me," I said, wiping my eyes. "And I love you and don't want to hurt you or disappoint you. But it's like you're asking me not to be Morgan anymore." I looked up.

"We want you to be safe!" my mom said strongly, meeting my eyes. "We want you to be happy."

"I'm happy," I said. "And I try to be safe all the time." The music went off across the hall, and we heard Mary K. enter the bathroom that connected her room to mine. The water ran, and we heard her brushing her teeth. Then the door shut again and it was quiet.

I looked at my parents. "Thank you for telling me," I said. "I know it was hard, but I'm glad that you did. I needed to know. And I'll think about what you said, I promise."

Mom sighed, and she and my dad looked at each other. They stood, and we all hugged each other for the first time in a week.

"We love you," said Mom into my hair.

"I love you, too," I said.