Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

What did you say over the body of a dead girl? There were no words for that.

Leoda delivered Emery in the dark bedroom of our house in the middle of a storm with the power out, and the first time I’d held my daughter in my arms was by candlelight.

The last time she’d looked little to me was almost a year after the fire. I’d woken in the middle of the night to a silent house. After months of Emery waking with nightmares, I’d gotten into the habit of checking on her. But that night, when I pushed open the door to her room, she wasn’t there. I pulled the blankets from her bed and searched the house, calling her name out in the woods. It wasn’t until I saw the faint light across the road that I realized. I let myself into the Salts’ empty cottage. It was freezing cold, but the little light over the sink had been switched on. I followed the hallway to the last room and there she was, tucked under the quilts on August’s bed. I pushed the hair back from her face and pulled her into my arms and when she opened her eyes, they were red and swollen. I carried her back to the house as she cried into my shirt. It wasn’t the last time I found her there.

When her eyes finally met mine again, I reminded myself to breathe. She was still so beautiful, in that kind of sea-swept way she’d always been. It hurt to look at her.

There were bad nights and then there were worse nights, but every single one of them, I was alone.

I could feel her, too. A heavy presence, like a stone thrown into the water, pulling down, down, down.

A little clay pot in the windowsill above the sink. August stood before the fireplace, where a pile of fresh-cut firewood was stacked, watching me remember it.

He paused. “My mom was worried about something happening to me.” “Happening to you?” “She got it in her head that we had to leave or someone was going to hurt me. That I just wouldn’t come home one night.”

It was the last day of school and the night before graduation. My last night with her in the world we’d grown up in together. The thought made my stomach drop a little.

I’d been in love with August Salt since before I knew what the words meant. I don’t know when it happened—the narrow space between seconds, when a spark like the birth of a hundred stars found a home in my blood. Since then, every day had been colored with the glittering light of it dragging me in its wake, pulling me beneath its surface. And I didn’t care. If this was what it was like to drown, then for the rest of my life, I didn’t want to take another sip of air.

She immediately reached for a sugar packet and tore open the corner, sprinkling it into her mouth.

She hadn’t been herself, that was true. But sometimes I’d thought she’d become someone else and she’d found a way to live with that.