The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 84
The warning is always there. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Sometimes it’s a shout. Sometimes it’s a scream.
For me it began as a prickle of unease that left me cold in the middle of a desert summer day.
I’d come to the hills above Sangre de Cristo to replenish my supply of lemon balm leaves. Made into a tea, lemon balm is a natural sleep aid and has anti-anxiety properties. A lot of my clients had been anxious lately. So had I. But I’d ignored the low buzz of discomfort and shook off the feeling that something was wrong and carried on as if there was nothing unusual going on in my little border town. But the warning was there. My unease intensified the higher I climbed into the hills. Still, I managed to tamp the feeling down, will the sensation away.
Until I saw the giant hogweed growing all over the hill, choking out the other plants.
Giant hogweed does not grow in Mexico.
Plenty of thorny plants send their twisted roots deep into the baked earth in search of water and nutrients but giant hogweed, also called giant cow parsnip, is not one of them. Regular hogweed is related to fennel and ground elder and can be used to treat running sores and the nasty rash associated with shingles.
Giant hogweed is not good for anything at all except causing blisters that leave dark purple scars that take years to fade. The sap is phototoxic, and that effect lingers too. When I saw the huge plants, their umbrella-shaped clumps of white flowers towering eight feet above the ground, I forgot all about lemon balm.
And suddenly I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head, “¡Ya nos cayó el chahuiztle!” My abuela has a penchant for hyperbole so I wasn’t always sure how seriously to take her admonitions, but this warning sounded serious. Things are about to go from bad to worse? And then get really bad? Even if you ratcheted that down a couple of notches, it still couldn’t be good.
And then I saw the ghost.
He was a white man, with long stringy fair hair, dressed in a blood-stained designer suit that hung off his skeletal frame He was barefoot and his feet were dirty and covered in a webwork of deep scratches and cuts, the kinds of wounds someone would get from running through inhospitable terrain.
I have tough feet, but even so, I never ventured up into the scrub-covered hills unless I was wearing my hiking boots. This guy’s feet looked like they might have been baby-soft at one point, the kind of feet that got a pedicure once a week with the special peppermint-rosemary scrub. His hands were probably soft too but I couldn’t tell. They’d been hacked off at the wrists by a ragged blade.
His face was also missing. What was left of it was a raw, red mess. Someone had burned it off with a welding torch. Just looking at it made me shiver.
This guy had died badly. No wonder his ghost was still here. I wondered if his body had been buried on the hillside or simply dumped there for the scavengers and the elements. I wondered who he was. I wondered who was wondering where he was. It was too sad to think someone could disappear without anyone noticing. Or caring.
“¡Ya nos cayó el chahuiztle!” my grandmother said again as the apparition faded.
When you live in a place called Sangre de Cristo, it almost goes without saying that sometimes not-so-ordinary things are going to happen. In the years I was growing up here, Sangre was mostly just a sleepy little town straddling the border between Texas and Mexico.
Americans crossed the line in search of cheap prescription drugs and cheaper booze and donkey sex shows, and Mexicans traveled in the other direction looking for jobs and opportunities and green cards.
We didn’t get many tourists in Sangre de Cristo, so while we weren’t entirely immune to the problems faced by people in places like Tijuana or El Paso, we were mostly insulated from the really bad stuff.
At least we were until 2006, when the drug wars exploded and the fallout left towns on both sides of the border radioactive with cocaine and machismo.
By then I was living in Austin, taking classes at UT, and trying to figure out how to create my own place in the world.
I am a modern woman, but I am heir to an old, old tradition of witchcraft that dates back to the eleventh century, back to the time of legendary Mixtec king Eight Deer Jaguar Claw. The power I inherited skips generations and each new bruja inherits the power of all the witches who’ve come before her. Or so I’ve been told. There’s no real way to know for sure. It’s not like you can go to the doctor and get something scanned and find out how powerful your paranormal talents are. If you ever even discussed something like that with your medical provider, she’d probably send you somewhere for a psychological evaluation.
Knowing that I’d be born a witch, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, my mother fled Austin, where she’d been living with my American father and returned home to Sangre de Cristo. She wanted me to be born in Mexico so I’d be a citizen of both nations.
A citizen of two nations and two worlds.
I wish I’d known my mother, but she died giving birth to me, which sounds like something out of a nineteenth-century novel and caused me no end of anguish as a kid. How could that even happen in 1989? I was never satisfied with the explanation listed on her death certificate—cardiac arrest—and had pestered my abuela for details she swore were unknowable. “No hay más,” she would say when I pressed her, “there is no more,” which was her way of saying, “It is what it is.”
My father, who had loved my mother very much, even by my grandmother’s grudging admission, never forgave her for leaving him and out of grief and anger basically abandoned me in Sangre de Cristo to grow up in my maternal grandmother’s house.
For my fourteenth birthday, my father sent me a present via DHL — a Bratz doll , which made me roll my eyes— and then two weeks later he showed up in Sangre de Cristo himself, knocking on my grandmother’s door with more presents and a sheepish smile.
He told me he’d come to get to know me, and although my first instinct was to tell him to fuck off and die, one look at his face was all I needed to know that he was already halfway dead. So I forgave him.
I don’t think my grandmother ever did.
She had been opposed to Tom Riley marrying my mother because she thought he was trifling with her affections. And since my mother had never told her exactly why she’d left my father, my grandmother decided it had to be because Tom Riley had mistreated her in some way.
My grandmother’s assumptions could not have been further from the truth, my father protested as he told me his side of the story.
He had met my mother when she was put on trial for killing a coworker. She been working as a teller at an Austin branch of Prosperity Bank when a loan officer developed a fixation for her. He’d stalked her for months, filling up her voice mail with declarations of love, leaving her unwanted presents in her car and at her teller window at the bank. She’d complained to Human Resources, but they’d not been responsive and before long the guy was showing up outside her apartment, banging on her door and pleading—then demanding—to be let in.
Her neighbors complained to the manager about the noise and she nearly got evicted for her “nuisance behavior.” She called the cops one night but the guy convinced them that she was just being hysterical—“hot-blooded Latina” was the phrase he’d apparently used—and told them the situation was nothing more than a lover’s quarrel. Texas in the 80s was not exactly a hotbed of feminism and the cops were white. They left. She barricaded herself in her apartment and called her best friend, who came over with her husband and two of his friends to move her into a spare room in their house. She quit her job over the phone and her supervisor gave her a bad recommendation, which was illegal, but he had never really liked Luz and was happy to see her gone.
My mother got a job working at a dry cleaner’s, and counted herself lucky to be away from the loan officer. And then one night not long before Christmas, he’d cornered her in the parking structure at Highland Mall where she’d gone to buy some last-minute presents.
He’d had a gun, handcuffs, and duct tape and they’d ended up wrestling for the weapon. The gun had gone off and the loan officer had died at the scene. It should have been an open and shut case of self-defense. Problem was, the loan officer was hooked into the “Good Ol’ Boy” network and they came out in force to make my mother the villain. Turns out my mother had been wearing what was described in court documents as “provocative clothing” and the prosecution painted her as a prostitute, as if she was just another Mexican girl come to El Norte to cause trouble.
My father was her court-appointed lawyer and he demolished the prosecution in court, heaping scorn on their attempts to define my mother as something she was not and attempting to make her would-be rapist the victim. I’ve read the transcript. You can practically see the disdain dripping from the words when the “provocative clothing” line came up. “She’d just come from a Christmas party,” my father said. “Was she supposed to wear sweatpants and an ugly sweater?” The transcript notes that there was laughter in the courtroom and that the judge called for order.
The trial lasted a little over a week and two months after the acquittal, my father married my mother. That had raised a few eyebrows at the time, he told me, but since he’d been nothing but professional during the court case, he’d kept his law license.
He had been crazy in love with my mother, he told me, and there hadn’t been any other women for him since her death. He told me he’d been thrilled when she’d declined his champagne toast and announced she was pregnant on their first anniversary. He’d thrown himself into turning their townhouse’s extra bedroom into a nursery, painting the walls a gender-neutral shade of yellow even though she’d been certain she was having a girl, and hiring a local artisan to make me a crib. “She was so happy she used to sing to herself,” my father told me. And then one night, he’d come home to find she was gone. “Without even leaving a note,” he’d said, and I understood that was the thing that had had hurt him the most as he searched for her—the idea that she hadn’t loved him enough to say goodbye.
My mother had come home to her own mother, hugely pregnant with me and curiously tight-lipped about why she had left her life and her love behind. “I don’t know why she left,” my father said. “I would have come here to live if she’d asked me. I would have followed her to hell.”
He had tried to get her to talk to him but she refused to answer his calls ore reply to his letters. When he showed up at Marisol’s house in Sangre de Cristo, she refused to let him in. “She doesn’t want to see you,” my abuela had said. “You should go home.” He’d stayed a month, he told me and then, having not even caught a glimpse of my mother, he’d gone home. And once back in Austin, he’d distanced himself from everything that reminded him of her, including me.
“I shouldn’t have done that mija, he said, the Spanish rolling easily off his tongue, though his accent was pure Texas. I’d hugged him and told him I loved him and surprised myself by realizing it was true though we had only just met. La sangre llama, blood calls to blood.
Before he went back to Texas, my father bought me a computer so we could keep in touch via email, and when he went into the hospital for the last time, he sent me a plane ticket to Austin.
There had been a driver waiting for me at the airport, and after I cleared customs, he had taken me straight to the hospital.
I didn’t bother stopping at the reception desk to get directions. I knew exactly where my father was. It didn’t occur to me to think that was odd.
His room was dark when I entered, lit only by the blinking green lights of the machines he was tethered to like some kind of Borg. There was a woman sitting in the chair next to the bed, holding my father’s hand and speaking softly. I assumed the woman was my American grandmother until I realized she was speaking Spanish and took a closer look.
It was my mother.
I’d seen my mother’s ghost off and on since I’d first started having my period, and so it didn’t seem all that strange to see her here, now.
She smiled at me but turned back to the conversation she was having with my father. I tried not to be hurt by that. It wasn’t really surprising. She’d never had a chance to get to know me and my father had been her last love.
Feeling like an intruder, I’d backed out of the room and run straight into a tall woman with a silver-gilt bob, her thin frame wrapped in a severe blue Jason Wu dress that matched her eyes.
She was smoking a cigarette in the hallway in defiance of the bilingual “no smoking” signs posted everywhere. “Aixa,” she said, sounding relieved. “I was afraid you wouldn’t get here.” The unspoken words in time hung in the air.
We didn’t hug. I’d only visited her a couple of times since I’d reunited with my father, so she and I weren’t really on hugging terms. Plus I was a teenager and pricklier than most.
Grace Riley was sunk deep in her own misery, but she must have seen something in my face because she said, “Is your mother still in there?”
I looked at her in shock and then reached for her cigarette. She handed it to me without protest. I took a shaky drag and handed it back.
“You can see her, too?”
“Red hair like yours, blue dress with roses embroidered on it?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“Luz was buried in that dress,” Grace said. “It was your father’s favorite.”
I reached for the cigarette again, and this time I smoked it all the way down to the filter as Grace leaned back against the hospital wall and closed her eyes.
After that, we went back into the room together, and although my father was still breathing, it was obvious he had already stepped halfway into the shadows. My mother’s ghost was gone.
My grandmother and I each took one of his hands and just stood there silently, offering what comfort we could, bearing witness to his passage. His breath was so shallow that only the machines could count them.
“I wish you’d had a chance to get to know him better,” my grandmother said.
“Me too,” I said, but not in a mean way.
Even without looking at her, I could tell she was crying.
“Do you want to be alone with him?” I’d asked her, “to say goodbye?”
She’d looked at me with the kindest smile. “No darlin’,” she’d said. “This is a time for family.” I loved her for saying that, but I still didn’t feel like family—“family” meant Marisol to me—and I didn’t stay for the funeral. Afterwards, Tom Riley was cremated and then interred in a niche next to his father in the mausoleum at Assumption Cemetery.
Grace sent me a portion of my father’s ashes in a small metal box via U.S. mail. The customs form said it was “a collectible” worth $100. I wondered what would have happened if some over-zealous postal inspector had insisted on opening it.
Grandmother Marisol refused to let me keep the ashes in the house, so I sprinkled him over my mother’s grave so my parents would be together in death as they never really were in life. At least, I liked to think they were together because after that, I never saw my mother’s ghost again.
Every year, on the Day of the Dead, I tended their grave and left marigolds and roses from our garden. My grandmother must have known that during these visits I was stealing sips of tequila from the bottles left on nearby graves, and the reason I went straight to bed when I got home from the cemetery was not that I was overcome by emotion, but that I was afraid she would smell the liquor on my breath.
She must have known that—my grandmother knew everything—but she never busted me for it. I was basically a good kid, but adolescence hit me hard. I felt very, very sorry for myself. She indulged my moods a lot more than most people would have, and I was grateful for that.
My abuela disapproved of me romanticizing my parents, but how could I not? I had no childhood memories of either one of them and so I’d made up fantasies to take their place. I wasn’t the only orphan in town and I had a grandmother who loved me, which was more than some kids I knew, but I still felt my parents’ absence keenly. In particular, I coveted other people’s mothers. I used to pretend my friend Connie’s mother was my own and I courted Lourdes Alvarez with little presents and birthday cards I made myself. Connie thought that was weird and told me to cut it out.
It had broken my heart when I stopped seeing my mother’s ghost. When I finally admitted I’d lost her, my grandmother admonished me for my selfishness, telling me I should be glad to know that she had moved on.
But I don’t want her to move on, I wanted to say. I don’t want her to leave me behind. It never occurred to me until I was much older how deep my grandmother’s own grief must have been.
I inherited enough money from my father that I could go to college without taking a job to pay the bills. There’s more money in a trust that will come to me when I turn thirty next year. It’s a lot of money and I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. Grace set me up with her broker years ago so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. He manages everything for me, and sends me paperwork and keeps me in the loop. He encloses friendly notes with the bank statements, always signing his name with a flourish using an old fashioned fountain pen. No disposable ballpoints for John Jay Johnson.
John Jay Johnson was originally from Roanoke, Virginia, but had ended up serving at Fort Sam Houston during his army days. He told me he was always vaguely surprised to find himself still in Texas fifty years later, but I suspected one of the reasons for his continued residence was Grace. He was in love with her and everybody knew that was why he had never married.
I’d asked Grace about that once because I knew she was fond of him, and she’d gotten a sad look on her face. “I’d have driven him to distraction,” she said.
“He might have thought it was worth it,” I’d said, but she’d just blushed, so I’d dropped the subject. It made me sad that she was alone. The man I’d dubbed “Triple J” in my teens was surrogate grandfather to his sister’s grandkids and he was crazy about them. He and Grace would have been good together.
