Page 91 of Big Little Spells

In fact, as I stand there with my mouth open, she holds out her hand to me. The way she always did. “Come, child. I don’t have all day.”

I blink. It’s not a voice in my head. It’s the creaking, decidedly cranky voice from my childhood. Out loud in the night air.

Something like muscle memory takes over. I walk toward her because she told me to. Because I don’t have it in me to disobey Grandma, especially this long after missing her funeral. She sits on a little stone bench, settling herself there the same way she did in her favorite chair, adjusting herself with a little song I find I still know all the words to.

I sit down next to her and I can feel her. Actually feel her body next to mine. I can smell her, the lotion she loved, the earth that was always on her hands, the flowers she grew. She smells like spring. And maybe she’s not quite as substantial besides me as a human being filled with life, but she’s not simply a spirit either. There’s a sense of the woman she was—she is—as she takes my hand in hers. I can feel the heat of her papery palms.

My eyes want to close. The tears want to fall. But I don’t want to miss a single moment of this, whatever it is. I already miss too much I can’t get back. “Grandma,” I whisper.

“My Rebekah.” Her voice is soft and rough and undeniably her. “Finally.”

As if I deserve to be here, with her. When I know better.

“I...” I don’t know what to say, how to wrap my mind around this. I understand spirits and leftover magic. I understand no one we love really leaves us, and that as witches we get the great privilege of witnessing lives long after death. I have seen her before.

But only ever with Emerson, and only as a vision. A shadow of the grandmother I remember.

This is something else entirely.

“I’m afraid we don’t have time to ease into this,” she says, and she pats my hand the way she always used to. When the tears or the whining or the drama had gone on long enough, by her estimation, and it was time to buck up. Not one for a wallow, my grandmother. Her gaze is direct. “Things must be said, so things can be done.”

But I shake my head. “I ruined everything. That night... It’ll always haunt me.”

“Only if you let it.”

“Grandma...”

“You think I don’t understand.” Her gaze never wavers. Her hands are old, but strong on mine. “You underestimate me that way. But the true crime is that you underestimate yourself. Rebekah.” She says my name the way she did before. Like it’s the song she sings to herself. Like she wishes I knew these words too. “Darling child, why did you run away?”

“I was exiled.”

“Yes, but also no. That isn’t the why of it. Not really.” I feel very small, very young. And yet aware of every one of my years, especially the ones I spent too far away from here. “You were running away before that. You were burning down everything behind you so you would never have to turn around and deal with who you are.”

This part I know. This part I know all too well. “I’m so sorry I disappointed you,” I tell her solemnly. “I’m so sorry, Grandma.”

“This is the lesson you refuse to learn, to this day.” Her frustration is familiar, but also laced with love. Always love. How did I miss that before when it’s so clear to me now? “You can make mistakes, Rebekah. You can disappoint me. But you have never and will never lose my love. Or my belief that you can do better and be better.”

“I know,” I manage to say. “I don’t deserve—”

“Making mistakes doesn’t make you worthless, Rebekah,” my grandmother tells me, her voice as steady as her gaze. As her grip. As her love, across all these years and death besides. “It makes you alive.”

Everything in me shakes at that.

Grandma keeps going. “Running from your problems doesn’t solve them. It can’t change who you are. You take yourself with you, but leave those who would help you behind.”

“It’s better that way.”

She looks impatient then, which is more her than any wise words or sweet, familiar scents on the night wind. “You fled to avoid any possibility of absolution, not because you were afraid you wouldn’t get it, but because you didn’t think you deserved it. So you left. You hid where I could only reach you with breezes and signs and the occasional crow.” I think of the crow who used to sit outside my bungalow in Sedona and croak me awake, the one I used to tell Smudge was following us. Goose bumps shiver all over my arms. “And your sister couldn’t reach you at all.”

I ignore the goose bumps. “I was exiled, Grandma. Officially. And Emerson was mind wiped.”

“Those are excuses.” This doesn’t feel fair, but it does sound like her. And the way I bite my tongue to keep from defending myself feels familiar too. “But you came back anyway.”

“I was dragged back,” I correct her. “Against my will. Twice.”

My grandmother smiles her old, special smile. The one that was just for me when she was being mischievous. “Not such a bad thing to be dragged hither and yon by a handsome man, I would have thought. Besides, you stayed.”

“The Joywood—”