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By Root 1108 0

Jackson, too. Her mother had called Reseda and said to come quickly. She had. Before that, however, Molly’s mother had come to the house and retrieved her own daughter. The first thing Garnet recalled seeing when she emerged from the seizure was Molly leaning against her own mom, sobbing, as Mrs. Francoeur stood in the front hallway and ranted about what a mistake she had made letting the girl stay here. Only when Mrs. Francoeur saw Garnet’s father bleeding on the kitchen floor did her rage dissipate. She went from railing about how Emily clearly was part of something evil to crying that the house was cursed and Emily was merely a fool to bring her family here. Meanwhile, Garnet’s mom simply kept pressing dish towels against her dad’s abdomen. Then the ambulance arrived, and Mrs. Francoeur finally went home—though not before making it clear that Molly was never going to be allowed over for a playdate again.

Before her mother left, she had told Garnet that she would be back soon. She had said that Daddy would be just fine. He would get some stitches and be as good as new. But whether soon meant within hours or the next day, Garnet didn’t know, and when she asked, her mother just repeated that one word: soon. So, now she sat beside the window in the living room and gazed outside. The yard was dark once more now that all the cars had driven off and—other than murmured voices—the only sound was the occasional rattle of one of the windowpanes in an early spring breeze. Yet the house felt full. Reseda and Holly and Ginger were in the kitchen, discussing how best they could help the family, and it had already been decided that Reseda and Holly were going to spend the night.

Eventually Hallie sat back down beside her. “They’re about to have us get in our pajamas and go to sleep,” she said, her chin in her hands.

“You were listening.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You hear anything else?”

“Not really. They knew I was by the door.”

“They did?”

“Yup.”

“How?”

Hallie shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, Reseda wasn’t mad or anything. She just tapped on the door and teased me about it.”

“I don’t want to sleep upstairs.”

“Me, either.”

Garnet sighed. “When we were in the woods, do you think he was there?” she wondered aloud.

“Dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t think so. Do you?” Hallie asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

“There was one second when I thought I saw something. Someone,” Hallie admitted.

“If it was Dad, he must have been there to protect us,” she said.

“Yup,” Hallie agreed, but Garnet had the sense that her sister—like her—wasn’t completely certain of that.

Reseda had spent very little time in the Southwest, but one night in Taos she had been part of a fire ceremony. The shamans had burned juniper branches they had soaked in water, and the result was a blaze with hypnotic purple smoke, the air alive with the aroma from the juniper’s essential oils. A woman had played the violin while sixty or seventy of them sat or stood around the bonfire and contemplated the colors of the flames against the night sky.

Tonight, with the two girls haunted by the power outage and the image of their father’s blood, she was using sage. In her experience, sage cleansed the energy in a space in much the same fashion as juniper: It helped clear away fear and worry and violence. And this was a space that had experienced all three that evening. She added a few more drops of sage oil to the diffuser and lit the tea candle beneath it.

“Candles make me think of blackouts,” Hallie said from the couch, her voice slightly petulant.

Reseda knew this was the child’s way of asking her to blow out the candle. She sat down on the armrest beside the girl and wondered what it meant that her father had actually cut the breakers: This had been no wind- or storm-triggered blackout. She had gleaned this when she said good-bye to him and to Emily as they left for the hospital. She honestly wasn’t sure what to do with this information and, at the moment, had no plans to share it with anyone. “This candle really offers very little light,” she said. “It warms the oil in the shallow