All-Season Edie Read online

  “Stinks,” I say, half lying on the table, trying to see into the pot. A flower and some barky scum float on the surface of the tea-water.

  “It’s not for you.” Grandma rearranges the folds of her mysterious clothes.

  “Is it a potion?” I ask.

  “It’s good medicine,” Grandma says.

  “Dexter has her period,” I singsong, and then they kick me out of the kitchen.

  I go to find Grandpa in the den. He’s in the recliner, sipping what looks like apple juice from one of Dad’s special chunky glasses and watching golf on TV. “Look at that chip,” he says, pointing at the man on the screen. He fiddles around with the side of the chair until it jerks him backward and the footrest pops up. The drink swings in the glass. We watch the little white ball fall a long, long way down and land in a lipped pool of sand. “Fudge,” Grandpa says.

  Mom and Dad say small strokes can give you memory loss. If I notice this, I’m not supposed to make a big deal out of it, but Grandpa just seems like Grandpa. When I tuck myself against his knee so I can rest against his chair and watch the screen over his big thick-socked feet, he reaches forward to pat my head. He leans back again with a sigh. The golfers hike over the links, keen as explorers. I think about what it would be like if Grandpa couldn’t remember me anymore.

  “Here you are,” Grandma says a few minutes later. “Look at the two of you. You’re both almost asleep. It’s time for supper. Honestly, Harvey, making poor Edie watch this nonsense. You’re probably hijacking her cartoons.”

  “Cartoons are over,” I say, quickly wiping my eyes. Grandpa still knows who I am. Crying is ridiculous.

  “That,” Grandpa says, pointing at the set with his thick finger. “Did you see that? Eagle.”

  “Bald or golden?” I say, squinting.

  “Nonsense,” Grandma says.

  “You old witch,” Grandpa says. “You’re making us miss the last hole.”

  I giggle. Then I look up and see Grandma’s face and stop. My heart starts to pound. I think, Oh.

  At supper, I stay quiet, watching. Dexter seems happier now, eating roast and rice and peas like everyone else. Grandpa seems kind of distracted and keeps staring at his plate like he’s forgotten what food is for.

  “All right, Edie?” Grandma asks. “You’re not eating.”

  Neither is Grandpa, I want to say. But before I can say anything, Grandpa sneezes. “Bless you,” we all say. But he isn’t finished. He pulls a big cloth hankie out of his pants pocket just in time to catch a second, even bigger sneeze, so loud it seems to shatter the air into icy fragments, deafening us. It takes a minute to realize he’s blown over his wine glass. There’s a big red stain on the tablecloth, spreading by the second; shards of glass are everywhere.

  “Harvey, honestly,” Grandma says.

  “Oh, hush up a minute,” Grandpa says. “I’m covered in glass.”

  He is, too, bright splinters and crumbs of glass in his clothes and on the table, in our food and all over the floor. “Nobody move,” Mom says.

  “Jesus, Dad,” Dad says. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t eat any more, Albert,” Grandpa says to me, ignoring him. “You might get a cut.”

  “You made Grandpa do that,” I say to Grandma.

  “Not I,” Grandma says, picking a piece of glass out of her salad. There’s ranch dressing on the glass.

  “If that had been a mirror, you would have seven years’ bad luck,” Dexter tells Grandpa.

  “Don’t you start,” Grandpa says. Mom and Dad are both up, moving gingerly around the kitchen, getting plastic bags and brooms. “I get enough of that superstitious claptrap from your grandma: black cats and lucky charms and garlic and I don’t know what.”

  “I’ve been using that herb book you gave me for my birthday,” Grandma says conversationally to Mom. “It’s very absorbing. The history and therapeutic properties of humble garden plants—weeds, even.”

  “She put dandelions in my food,” Grandpa says.

  “Let’s vacuum Grandpa,” I say. I jump up and feel something go crunch. “Oh, my foot.”

  “Why do you think people wear socks?” Mom snaps. I know better than to point out that this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  “Don’t eat any more, Albert,” Grandpa says to me. “You could get a cut.”

  “You just said that,” I tell him.

  “Albert could get a cut,” he says to everybody else. He looks uncertain, like he doesn’t know who he’s supposed to say it to.

  I look at Grandma. Her eyes are as bright as the piece of glass she’s still holding. Dad and Mom and Dexter have gone still, like Dusty when he’s trying to be invisible.

  Tonight, after my bath, I go straight to bed. For once it’s not because I’m in trouble, but so that I can read. I have the tiniest room in the house, with a creaking wood floor and a ceiling that slopes because it’s right under the roof. Before I was born, this was the attic, but Mom and Dad fixed it up for me when I was little. There haven’t been spiders up here for years, despite what Dexter says. I can handle the occasional spider anyway, if it means not having to share a room with my sister. Three of the walls are butter yellow, one with a deep-silled window where I keep my cactus and my Venus fly-trap. The fourth wall is lined floor to ceiling with shelves for my books. It’s a warm, friendly place and it’s all mine. If I still have a night-light, it’s not because I’m scared, despite what Dexter says. It’s so that if I have to use the bathroom in the night I won’t trip and go down the steep, narrow, attic stairs like a basketball, bump, bump, bump, breaking my neck and waking everybody up.

  Tonight I want a book about magic and witchcraft, but the best I can find are a couple of kiddie books about Halloween. “Throw your own Halloween party!” “Super costumes to make at home!” “Spells for kids!” That sounds interesting, but when I turn to that page I find the ingredients are things like Kool-Aid and marshmallows, which doesn’t sound genuine at all. Next to the Kool-Aid spell, a cartoon of a goofy witch stirring a pot full of bubbling pink liquid reminds me of another book, one I rarely look at, that Mom and Dad gave me for my birthday.

  There’s a scratching at the door. Dusty’s bed—a wicker basket lined with old beach towels—is down in the kitchen, but as often as not he ends up in my bed instead, which is strictly against the rules. When I open the door, he doesn’t come in right away. Instead, he lowers himself into a long, luxurious curving stretch— paws down, bum in the air—and then he starts to wash. The book I want is shoved down on the bottom shelf. It’s called Shakespeare for Children, with complicated poetry and drawings of fairies and Romans and crazy old men with beards and this one guy with a donkey’s head. I skipped the poetry when I first read it; it’s the pictures—one specific picture—I remember. And here it is: three hideous crones crooked over an enormous black cauldron. One of them is holding a frog, and in the soup they’re making floats an eyeball.

  “This book is GROSS,” I tell Dusty informatively, and then I start to read.

  “‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’” I announce at breakfast the next morning.

  “‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble,’” Mom responds, smiling and pouring milk onto bowls of sliced bananas and granola. I gape.

  “Whatever,” Dexter says.

  At school, before class starts, I ask my teacher, Mr. Chen, if I can borrow the big dictionary that stands on his desk.

  “Sure, Edie,” he says, setting it down for me with a satisfying chunk. “What are you looking up?”

  “Newt,” I say, frowning over the tissue-thin pages.

  “Edie is a newt!” yells Timmy Digby, who is in my class—why? why?—for the third year in a row. “Edie-Snow-Peadie!”

  “Settle down, class,” Mr. Chen says. “Time for French.”

  Reluctantly, I go to my seat. Then I pull out my French/English dictionary. Newt: triton. “Triton,” I whisper. “Oeil de triton.” The rest of the class recites the alphabet.

  Already scho
ol seems to go on forever, and it’s only the second week of September.

  At lunch, I eat my sandwich and carrots with my friend Sam. When we’re bigger, we decide, we’ll go to Africa to see the wildlife. We’ll rent a car and drive alongside the zebras and the antelope. We’ll take a cooler of food. I’ve decided not to mention witchcraft to any of my friends just yet, but it’s hard to concentrate on other subjects. After lunch, Mr. Chen makes us line up so we can walk neatly down the hall to the library. I squirm with impatience. MY GRANDPA IS LOSING HIS MIND, I think. BUT THERE MIGHT BE A WAY I CAN HELP. My thoughts feel as bright as fluorescent lights. I wonder if eventually they’ll start glowing through my forehead, searing the words and sentences for everyone to see.

  My classmates arrange themselves on chairs. I jiggle. Ms. Conklin, the librarian, who has red hair and a red face and speckled reddish skin on her arms, tells us today we’re going to start Projects. The class groans. We’ll have to find our own books, make notes on index cards, include maps or drawings or something with colors and create a title page and a bibliography. Today is for Brainstorming: we each have to come up with a subject. At the end of the hour, we’ll tell our teacher our topics.

  I run right over to Mr. Chen. I’m first. “Yes, Edie,” he says.

  “Witchcraft,” I say.

  “You have an hour to think about it,” Mr. Chen says.

  “Witchcraft,” I say.

  “Edie Snow,” Mr. Chen says, shrugging and making a note in his folder. “Witchcraft.”

  “YES!” I say.

  Everybody frowns and tells me to shush.

  “I must go to the public library,” I announce to Mom when I get home from school.

  “Must you?” she asks. “Well, maybe this evening. I can’t drive you right now because I have to take Dex to the mall for shoes. Coming?”

  “No!” I say, shuddering.

  “Don’t answer the phone and don’t answer the door.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I know you know, but it makes me feel better to say it anyway,” Mom says, giving me a hug.

  The big difference between me and girls in books is that they’re allowed to go outside. Those girls live in small towns surrounded by hills and babbling brooks and red-gold deciduous woods. Coquitlam, the suburb of Vancouver where I live, is paved as far as the eye can see, and the trees are huge, lone, unclimbable firs and cedars dripping rain. Those girls live in towns that have one of everything: one church, one school, one haunted mansion, one movie-house, one street of stores, one zoo, one library, one museum. You can get anywhere you want by walking, and you know everybody, and you can go places all on your own, even if you’re only eleven. In Coquitlam there are three Safeways and a Save-On-Foods, five swimming pools, three skating rinks, ten schools and two shopping malls, but nobody walks anywhere. You don’t walk home from school; you get a ride in somebody’s car pool. You have to take the car to buy a Popsicle or mail a letter. In those storybook towns, in the fall there are apple trees with crispy leaves, and mysterious strangers arriving at dusk, and candlelight flickering in the windows of abandoned houses. In winter there’s snow and ice-skating and caroling and sleigh rides. In spring there are flowers, and in summer there are more flowers and swimming holes and homemade lemonade.

  In Coquitlam, it rains or it doesn’t. Those are the seasons. And even if it’s sunny, eleven-year-old girls absolutely do not play outside by themselves. That’s just how it is.

  I wait until after supper, when Mom has done the dishes, tidied up the living room, put on a load of laundry and sat down in front of the TV, to remind her about the library.

  “Oh, Edie,” Mom says. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  I think I’m going to explode.

  “I’ll take you,” Dad offers.

  That’s just ridiculous. “You have never been to the library, and you don’t even know where it is,” I object.

  He frowns, like I’ve made a good point. “You can drive.”

  “This is serious!”

  “It is?” he says. “Okay. If we’re not back in a week, send a search party.”

  “Better make it two weeks,” Mom says. “If it’s serious.”

  They’re laughing at me. Now, if I were a witch, what would I do with them? I would point my finger and—what?

  “What?” Dad says, because I’m standing still, staring at him, struck by a whole new idea.

  Going places with Dad is different from going places with Mom. He plays the radio in the car, for one thing, and he’s always trying to be funny. Sometimes I’m in the mood for this, but sometimes, like tonight, I have more important things on my mind.

  “What did the elephant say to the gas-station attendant?” he’s saying now.

  “Yes,” I say, distracted. If Grandma is a witch, doesn’t that make me at least one-quarter witch? Or is it one-eighth? And even one-eighth ought to be enough for a spell or two, oughtn’t it? There was that Great Scientists book on the guy who grew sweet peas, Mendel, who figured out whether you would have blue eyes if your grandparents did, or something. Genetics that’s called. I’ll have to find that book too.

  “‘Yes’?” Dad says. “The elephant said ‘yes’?”

  At the library, I ditch him immediately and go straight to the computer terminal to check the online catalogues. Then I hit the shelves, list in hand. It’s a great relief, finally, to be where the information is, getting some real work done.

  Fifteen minutes before closing, I stagger over to Dad with a stack of books that comes up to my chin. He’s sitting in the Mr. Grasshopper Reading Corner, reading a newspaper. “Help,” I say.

  “You’re kidding,” he says. I drop a few books and he picks them up, glancing at their titles. “Macbeth?” he says. “The Salem Witch Trials?”

  “School project,” I say.

  “Is that a cookbook?”

  “It’s a herb book,” I say warily.

  “Can you check my book out on your card too?”

  His book is a hardcover, about four inches thick, with no pictures. It’s called Disraeli. Almost all of my books have a green dot on the spine, meaning they’re for younger readers. His book has a fancy letter B on it.

  “Am I allowed?”

  “We’ll just slip it in with these others.” Dad squints and shifts his eyes around like a spy. “Tell no one,” he says. “If I am captured, eat your library card.”

  “Dad,” I say.

  “They won’t take us alive!”

  “Dad!” I say.

  At the counter, the librarian says, “Wow.”

  “Act normal,” Dad says, winking and waggling his eyebrows.

  “What are you doing?” the librarian says.

  “Research,” I say grimly, pushing Dad through the security arch.

  Eye of newt, I decide, is going to be a problem.

  Fillet of a fenny snake,

  In the cauldron boil and bake;

  Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat and tongue of dog...

  On second thought, maybe I should start with something easier than a “charm of powerful trouble,” which makes me feel queasy anyway. I get into enough powerful trouble without dragging dismembered amphibians into it, and I like dogs—even their tongues.

  I sit on my bed, surrounded by books. So far, the herb book seems the most promising. It tells you how to cure a headache, ease a cough and purify the skin with things like peppermint and marigold. Fine. But it doesn’t tell you how to make things happen— how to cause a headache, for instance, not to mention how to break a wineglass. But then, if you could find out how to do it from a book, surely people would be casting spells more often. So there has to be some secret element, something I’m missing. Not knowing what else to do, I keep reading. I read about gathering plants by midsummer moonlight. Well, that’s out— it’s September, and my bedtime is nine o’clock sharp. I read about the town in America where they burned witches at the stake four hundred years ago. But the book thinks the
y weren’t real witches, just smart annoying women who got on people’s nerves, and what killed them was not fire so much as smoke inhalation. “Come on,” I say, impatient. I read about curses. That seems more promising, but the books are maddeningly vague. There’s something about burying the hair of your enemy in a secret place, along with a cherished object, and whispering a secret formula.

  I look up “cherished” in the dictionary. Then I go to the bathroom.

  Dexter’s hairbrush lies on the counter next to the sink. People think Dexter is pretty, and Dexter thinks so too. She spends hours in front of the mirror, brushing her hair and looking at her teeth and watching herself blink and breathe. She leaves grungy spots on the mirror, that’s how close she stands. Normally this is very aggravating, especially when I have to pee, but the advantage for an apprentice witch is that it leaves an awful lot of useful pale yellow hairs in the brush. I pick out a few long ones, wrap them in a piece of toilet paper and put them in my pocket.

  My thinking is, I can’t make any mistakes on Grandpa, but I can practice on Dexter. Isn’t that reasonable?

  The next step, a cherished object, is trickier. That means a dangerous journey to a dark, forbidden land: Dexter’s bedroom. I slip from the bathroom, stealthy as an assassin, and glance up and down the hall. The coast is clear. At the entrance to the Cave of Doom I pause, pressing my ear against the door, but all is silent. It’s now or never.

  BRATS AND CATS KEEP OUT!!!!!!!!!! The sign on the door is plastered at Edie-height. I ignore it. I turn the handle as quietly as possible, in case Dex is lying on the bed with the headphones on, oblivious to intruding witches. But the light is off and the room is empty. She must not be home from school yet.