The following morning brought the message Marianne stayed up dreading all night.
We need to talk. It glared at her from the lock screen notifications on her phone.
Her essentials were already all packed up. She could just leave, forget about the rest. Start over on her own, like she probably should have done from the beginning, when she came back from service. Why did you come back here? The internal debate was pointless, she had come back and made a life here. She owed it to that life to get some closure, even if it didn't come from the one person she needed it from the most.
Marianne made her way slowly to the house, but once she reached the sliding door, could not bring herself to open it as she had done so many times before. Instead, she went around to the front door and rang the bell.
Violet answered the door with a solemn matriarchal magnificence Marianne had long admired. She had a powerful build like Gabriel-Vital Dubray's Penthesilea from her years of competitive swimming, accented by her love of wearing clothing that always looked like she was either on her way to or from the gym. Virginia had told her that she and Violet were actually half-sisters from different marriages, to explain their 14 year age gap and little resemblance, the likeness between them only in their height and blonde hair. Where the younger's face was all sharp with 1980's androgyny, Violet's was astoundingly 1950's feminine with her rounded high cheekbones and arched eyebrows over grass-green eyes.
They silently made their way to the dining table where they every so often met for family dinners or to discuss business and took their usual seats. Marianne put her clasped hands on the wood so they were in full view of Violet, rather than obscured by the tabletop. It was meant to put the other woman at ease but the moment her skin touched its surface, she could feel every part of the house, like it and everything in it was one entity which resonated with each tiny imperceptible movement within. Marianne could feel Lily's feet at the top of the stairs, her hands on the railing, and gathered she was attempting to listen to their conversation. It felt like Marianne's intuition. Only she hadn't summoned it.
In fact, she was so distracted by the unfamiliar sensation that she momentarily forgot her reason for being in the house until Violet interrupted the onslaught.
"You know why I asked you to come here so before I get into that, is there anything you want to say?"
There were so many things but only one of them mattered. "I'm sorry about last night. There's no excuse." Marianne would love to have an excuse, to say it was Violet's fault for lying or Virginia's for leaving, but it didn't matter. Did she ask you not to tell me? Marianne had asked herself and realized it didn't matter either. It changed nothing.
Violet sighed, "I've thought it over and you're not fired or anything like that." Marianne could only reply with stunned silence. "That being said," she continued, making Marianne's stomach turn, "I don't see how you can keep living here." This she did expect. "You have to understand Lily is the most important person in the world to me. I would do anything to protect her..." the other woman inhaled deeply, "Even if it's from you." She regarded Marianne coldly, making her feel even more the outsider. "You can stay here until you find somewhere else to live and I'll keep sending you assignments. Maybe when Vee returns, we can revisit it."
Feeling herself dismissed, Marianne stood. She moved to exit through the sliding door when Lily ran loudly down the stairs, Huckleberry hot on her heels.
"So you're just kicking her out?"
"Lily, go back to your room," ordered Violet.
"No!" She clenched her fists. "I'm not scared of Marianne!" she shouted. "Are you scared of her? Or aunt Vee, or--or me?"
"Baby, of course I'm not," said Violet, attempting to take Lily's hand.
The girl wrenched it away. Huckleberry barked and jumped at an astonished Violet. "Why not? The only magic I can ever seem to do is by accident. I made one of Marianne's glasses explode the other day."
"That is hardly the same thing. Marianne has had years of training so that kind of thing doesn't happen, so no one gets hurt."
"No one got hurt! It was just an accident!"
"Calm down," pleaded Violet.
Marianne had never been in a mother-daughter argument before but knew instinctively this was the wrong thing to say. Lily exploded.
"Not until you listen to me!"
"I'm listening," she entreated, hands out in front of her.
"Then you'll let Marianne stay," Lily stated matter of factly.
"Lily..."
Marianne wondered if Violet was drawing out the name to buy time against her daughter's fervor.
"See? You're not listening. You're just like everyone else. You think that because we're witches, we're dangerous," she hissed. "Would you be telling me to leave if it was me?"
"Of course not. It's not--" began Violet.
"Then maybe Marianne should have called you a hypocrite instead of a liar."
"I am your mother, you will not speak to me that way!" Violet was now red-faced with indignation, but Lily was not backing down.
"Only if you admit Marianne and I aren't dangerous and she should stay," said Lily with perfect serenity as though it was the most logical conclusion to be drawn from the situation.
"You and Marianne are not the same."
And there it was... the truth. Even Huckleberry had ceased growling but the dead silence was only a precursor to Lily's next affronted outburst.
"Why? Just because she's better at magic than me? Because she didn't grow up with a family!? Aunt Vee said we were her family now and if she were here, which by the way, don't think I've forgotten this is all her fault 'cause where the hell is she? But if she were here, she would say you don't give up on family!"
It wasn't the most articulate argument but it seemed to work on Violet, who looked fit to burst into tears. Before she could say anything, Lily scooped up Huckleberry, took Marianne's hand, and pulled her through the sliding door after her, moving fast so Marianne was half jogging to keep up with her. She took them past Hometree, all the way down to the little copse of trees Marianne had made into her sculpture garden, and only when they were both obscured from the house by the trees, did she release her.
"I hate it when she does that. She talks about being a witch like she knows what it's like. Like she could ever know what this is like."
"She's just looking out for you, Lily."
The girl raised an eyebrow at her. "Please, I'm not afraid of you."
"Touché," conceded Marianne. "Either way," she swallowed, "thanks for sticking up for me back there."
"Somebody had to. You looked like a kicked puppy," she scoffed, petting Huckleberry.
"Your mom's right though. You and I are different. There's no point in denying it."
"Just 'cause you don't have a mom? I don't have a dad. Who cares?"
Marianne bristled at the unfeeling dismissal of her situation. "I cared. A lot. And so would you if you grew up like I did."
"So tell me."
"Tell you how I grew up?"
"Yeah. Everybody's always making such a big deal about it," said Lily in between holding up Huckleberry for a nose boop.
"You want to hear about my life?" asked Marianne, incredulous.
"Shut up."
"Now you want me to shut up?"
"Ugh, just tell me, I'm already getting bored." Lily collapsed on the grass in a slow-moving dramatic fashion, Huckleberry curling into her side.
"I was..." where to begin. "I was dropped off at an orphanage when I was three. Which means someone had me for a good while before they decided it wasn't worth it." She took a breath. Marianne was living this story but it was something altogether different to say it aloud.
"Do you remember anything from before?"
"Not really. No."
"Do you ever try to use magic to envision it?" Lily asked, to no reply. "I try to sometimes with my dad."
"Does it work?" asked Marianne more out of curiosity than interest.
"Not yet. I mean except for when I was running, I guess."
"Either way I have better uses for my intuition than try to remember things that won't make a difference. Not that I have anything from back then to try it on. It's not like the orphanage keeps a scrapbook for you."
"Don't they keep records? Wouldn't they have your birth parent's information?"
Not when you were abandoned. "They don't," was all Marianne was willing to supply, though it did nothing to staunch Lily's onward flow of questions.
"Did you always know you were a witch?"
"Yes. We had to be tested before they put us up for adoption so I knew."
"So that's it? You lived in an orphanage?"
Marianne had often wished it was something as quaint as that. "No, I was put in foster care, so I moved around a lot. Until I was 11 when I cast my first spell."
"What happened then?"
"Um..." Marianne didn't know whether she liked Lily questioning her along to proceed. It made it a little too easy to tell her the truth but still, there were things she could not bring herself to say. "Like most first spells, it was sudden and an accident. It scared everyone and for a while after that, they put me in a group home for girls." Marianne thought it best to leave out the little detail of it being a group home for troubled (or rather troublesome) girls. Or the memory of her foster brother at the time.
Her first period had triggered her first-- well, 'spell' seems like the wrong word for something that was more of an accidental magical outburst. The older boy had taunted Marianne relentlessly, constantly showering her with abuse over what he perceived to be her defect, he kicked her under every table and pushed her into every wall, laughing all the while he called her names, his delight plain on his pasty acne laden face. The chair that flew out of her grip when she yelled "Stop!" that broke his nose ensured he would be laughing down a bloody stump if they were kept together any longer. "After that happened, it was harder to place me so I lived there until I was 14." Marianne thought back to that place with its barred windows and constant surveillance as a prison. "My last fosters had a daughter that was a witch too which would have been pretty cool if they weren't so... religious."
"Eww."
"You can say that again. I was either at school or in church and they kind of hoped I would renounce my magic."
"Could you even do something like that if you wanted to?"
"No. If we could, people would do it all the time, but I guess they thought if I could learn to control it, I could just stop doing it. Which made no sense since the more I learned to control it, the more freaked out they got, like controlling it meant stopping it."
"So what happened?"
"There was an incident at school when I was 16."
Lily's eyes lit up. "Yes. Juicy. What kind?"
"I accidentally melted part of my locker door. Fire is like the number one most common spell you can cast by mistake but they suspended me and kicked me out of the gifted program. My foster dad was so pissed."
That hardly described it. Once Marianne had been brought home she vaguely remembered even now that she must have eaten or drunk something, because the next thing Marianne remembered was waking up on the ground, muscles sore. She wore the gag they had so lovingly introduced her to on previous occasions, the metal bar pushing the skin at the corners of her mouth painfully, humiliatingly. Mrs. Sloan knelt in prayer, tears in her eyes while her foster father assured her that Marianne could be cleansed of her sin. That he would do everything in his power to save her. Her hands had been gloved and bound behind her. This is Texas, I wasn't chained to a radiator, was it a bedpost? The images get so jumbled up after that, but before long there was fire.
"Anyway. I was sent back to the girl's home and one of the ladies there introduced me to Virginia." 'One of the ladies' happened to be Marianne's lawyer, who argued that there was plenty of evidence to support that Marianne had acted in self-defense and that her power should have been nurtured by the state since it was going to serve the country in the near future. Furthermore, she found Marianne a tutor of some prestige. "She had just come back from the military and she and your mom hadn't gotten the company up and running yet."
Lily narrowed her eyes at Marianne. "She just happened to be there? She's not a saint, why would she tutor you?"
"You'll have to ask her that." Marianne was not inclined to supplement Virginia's part in this story to Lily any more than she had to. Virginia had stayed an extra year over her required two-year military service and did not like to talk about her time there or shortly thereafter. Almost immediately after coming back from service, a minor traffic violation had gotten her sentenced to community service, which she served as Marianne's tutor.
"So she started tutoring you and that's it? That's the story?" Lily was propped up on an elbow now.
"Well, you were kind of there, do you really need to hear the rest?"
"Not about now, about then. That literally told me nothing. It was like a list of ages."
"You asked about my life," Marianne reminded her, "it's not my fault you didn't find it interesting."
"Wow, it actually is. I can tell you're leaving out the good stuff. You didn't even say what your first spell was. Where's the drama? Or the-- you didn't even mention Miller."
Marianne raised an eyebrow. "Is that what this is about?"
Lily raised an eyebrow right back and lifted her chin, "Fine, you met aunt Vee and then you got good at magic. The end. But she's not here so how are you gonna teach me how to make animals do my bidding and raise the dead or whatever?"
"Dude, what is your obsession with arcane magic? Are you secretly a withered old hag after my firstborn or my finest cabbage?"
A little snort escaped Lily. "If I'm an old hag, what does that make you?"
"I'm sorry to disappoint you Lily but studying magic isn't dancing around a fire under a full moon in your nightgown or eating apples with snakes during a solstice or something. It's all about reading and practicing. Didn't she make you go through the reading list?"
The girl scrunched her nose distastefully. "I was actually kind of hoping you would never bring it up."
"I take it that means you didn't read much of it." Lily only averted her gaze. "Well how about The Theory of Magic, an Introduction?" No response. "I'm realizing now that you and I had very different educational experiences with her."
"Is that your slick way of saying she went easy on me because I'm her niece?"
Yes, precisely. "I'm saying I've read it and it breaks down the main categories of magic further like breaking up intuition into past, present, and future. It also talks about archaic classifications of magic like influence and animation so it might interest you."
"If I read it I'll be able to talk to animals?"
"If you read it you might see how people's perception of magic has changed over time from crazy rumors of our baby eating man-stealing ways to realizing through conducting numerous studies what things we are actually capable of with our powers. And I'm sorry to have to break it to you but talking to our furry friends is not one of them."
"Oh, so the only powers that are real are the ones you can do? Just because some guy in a lab coat being paid by the government says he tested 100 witches and none of them could raise the dead?"
"See, now I'm not even sure you know how science works."
"I know enough to know that scientists don't know everything. How come there's no perfect formula for spells then? Every place, every person has their own style."
"Just because everyone's voice is different doesn't mean there aren't notes that no one can reach," countered Marianne. "And that's okay because that's how we figure out another way to make those notes. That's what technology is."
Lily still looked adamantly unconvinced despite what Marriane thought was a good analogy.
"Think about the most powerful witch we know. She's a master of intuitive, elemental, and physical magic. It's very rare to exhibit skill in all three classes of magic. Most witches are only able to conjure basic intuition and some elements and even with the gift of natural ability, you need to hone those skills."
"So? You're just saying she's awesome. Everybody knows that. What's it got to do with us learning something she just maybe hasn't thought of?"
"The thing is people have thought of it. They have tried it, that's what the studies are for and it doesn't work."
"Yeah but they're not us. We haven't tried it. And queen stick up her butt definitely hasn't tried it."
"Let me get this straight. Instead of getting better at the magic that you will actually be tested on in order to become a successful non-chemically-lobotomized adult, you want to..." what exactly? "dance around a fire under a full moon and hope that works?"
"Exactly!"
... My God. "I'm starting to realize that I may have skipped a few steps in your education."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I am really starting to buy into this nepotism theory. I was wrong to assume we even had the basics down. How am I supposed to help you get better?" Marianne wondered aloud to herself.
"It's not like you and aunt Vee want me to get better."
"What makes you say that?"
"It's just the feeling I get from both of you. With her, it's like she just wants me to be normal. I don't know what your deal is though. Afraid I'll be even better than you?"
Marianne let the truth of that sink in. "Oh Lily, how could you possibly think that? Especially when you could never... in a million years... be better than me."
That earned her two fistfuls of dried leaves thrown at her by Lily, which she flinched and sputtered at, sending them both into girlish peals of laughter.
"So that's why you suck so bad at teaching. You're afraid I'll get so good, aunt Vee will forget all about you."
"Ouch." She regarded Lily curiously. "You really want to try those old rituals?"
"Yes, please! No more of your little assessments," she said, the last word slithering out of her mouth with sarcastic distaste.
Marianne shook her head, amused. "I can't believe I was trying to teach you the way she taught me when it's devastatingly obvious you're no me."
"And you're definitely no aunt Vee."
"But if I'm going to teach you anything you're going to have to trust that I have a little more experience in this than you do and maybe listen to me from time to time. Deal?" Marianne held out her hand.
"Deal. Don't think it makes us friends though," she said, tossing more leaves on to Marianne and scampering just out of reach of retaliation. "This place gives me the creeps. Let's go."
"You realize I made these," pointed out Marianne as she brushed dead leaves out of her hair.
"You realize they're creepy."
"Well... that was kind of the point, I guess."
Lily and Huckleberry sauntered off, leaving Marianne alone with her work. The crystal figures looked like they were growing out of the earth, or rather struggling to be free of it. They were two women, one being pulled, body hip-deep in the dirt made of obsidian by another made of jasper, free up to her ankles. Limestone hands surrounded them, rising from the dirt, pulling and clawing into their crystal skin. The idea was for there to be more of them coming out of the ground or from the trees, different materials all connected in a writhing inhuman chain of placid faces.
People would likely never see it, and her first unofficial review from Lily did not show much promise but Marianne knew the value of art was not in how many people looked at it but what it told you about yourself when you experienced it.