“Witches are born with only half a heart,” our mother used to tell us. “That is why you will never love anyone completely, and why your heart will break so easily.”
She was right. My sisters and I were unable to commit whole-heartedly to anything we did. This included our long-standing estrangement from each other—those of us who remain still met once a year, without fail. We did it at Thanksgiving. It’s not the proper time for a coven of witches to meet, but it suited us well enough. The meetings were always at Syne’s house, though Morta half-heartedly offered to host them every other year. But it was Syne’s right as the eldest sister, and the rest of us didn’t care enough to squabble for it.
And so every Thanksgiving, Syne’s husband was packed away to his sister’s family and the seven of us converged. We cooked, made the awkward conversation of family members who have been too long apart, and shared stories of those who are gone: our mother, young Megaera, and dark-eyed Nona. We didn’t quite mourn for them—witches aren’t built for mourning—but we recounted the tales in the same way an ancient tribe might have told their legends—with pride and the slightest hint of awe.
“It was ten years ago,” Morta began, “When Nona left us.” Morta always began this story, though she only came in at the end of it. “She stepped through a door, and out of our lives.”
“It happened the summer she was watching the twins,” Morta continued, her voice murmuring by rote now, following the lines of the story as they had been laid out over the last ten Thanksgivings. Morta was not a natural storyteller, and she became uncomfortable if her telling deviated too far from familiar paths. “I had gone to pick them up, deliver them back home, and nobody met me at the station.”
Morta had a basket of roses with her. They had remained miraculously unwilted over the three-day train ride. She’d taken a cab to Nona’s apartment, once she’d been certain that no one was coming to meet her. When she arrived the power had already been shut off, taking the lights and the AC with it. The apartment was stifling, even with every window thrown wide open and the twins running constantly in and out of the open door.
“We should never have sent the twins to her,” Morta said.
It happened every Thanksgiving; we sisters agreed that it had been a mistake to make Nona take the twins for that summer. They had been quicksilver children, fickle as flames, with silver hair and green cat’s eyes. In those days they seldom spoke, and when they did it was usually in the mysterious cadences of their own language that they had invented along with their first words and never given up.
“I should have kept them,” Syne lamented. But no one blamed her, no one could. She’d taken responsibility for the twins when our mother left, just as she’d taken on so many other responsibilities. But she’d been in the hospital that summer, sick with her second pregnancy, and everyone had agreed that someone else needed to take the girls for awhile.
“It should have been me,” la Alba added. Even as the words passed her lips she preened, running perfect blood-red nails through her white-gold hair. She lived alone in a Californian beach house. She was incapable of keeping a cactus alive without the aid of a professional gardener. None of us could imagine her caring for children, even children as fey as the twins.
The rest of us didn’t bother to blame ourselves. Decima might have watched the twins—but she’d been away that summer, researching her thesis. Morta had been newly married, to a husband who had never met our mother, who saw the beauty of Morta’s face but not the visions in her eyes.
“We should have known when Alecto painted her portrait,” Syne mourned, “We should have sent help.”
Alecto didn’t say anything, but her thin lips went even thinner in her face. She was our oracle, seeing in paint what the priestesses at Delphi had once seen in the fumes of sacred fires. She’d painted more than one portrait of Nona that summer, she confessed to me years later, after Nona was no more than paint and memory. She’d destroyed them all, save the first, which she’d mailed to Austin. Now it hung on the wall of Syne’s house. It was a portrait all in ocher and red, but looked strangely like our sister. It hung beside several blurry black-and-white snap shots of our mother, wherein she was no more than a blur of movement and a curtain of dark hair.
“I should have come sooner. Syne had spoken to Nona—she mentioned the dandelions on the phone. I should have known,” Morta said, though her voice was cold and cutting and unashamed. When she finally arrived, the yellow flowers had been everywhere in the apartment, clogging sinks and cereal bowls and scattered across the floor. The twins had crushed dandelions beneath their feet when they showered, had tangled them in their hair when they slept.
La Alba was apparently finished with guilt, “There was nothing we could have done,” she said, tossing back her corn silk corona of hair, “It’s just how Nona was.” She had been the first of us to use the past tense—she’d started using it almost the moment she’d heard Nona was gone.
Our mother had called herself Circe, though the birth certificate Euphrosyne unearthed after she left contained a much more prosaic name. She was a witch, maybe the only one of her kind, maybe part of a secret sisterhood that she temporarily left to give birth to the nine of us. Circe had eyes like globes of olive-green glass, eyes that all nine of her daughters, save Nona, inherited.
Nona’s eyes were an ordinary brown that darkened to near black as she got older.
Our mother married three times, once in court, once in church, and once simply in her bed. She bore three daughters to each husband. Some time after the birth of the third child—days or months or years later—the man would leave and Circe would celebrate her new freedom by having a feast. She would poach pears, bake fresh bread, and stuff dates with almonds and mint before basting them with spiced honey. She would feed us grapes and olives and salty cheese, and in the center of the table would be the main course—a roast pig with an apple clogging its mouth.
I think we actually believed her powers were so great that she’d really tired of her husbands and turned them into swine. It wasn’t until years later, when Decima’s father died and left her his house, that we knew differently.
“Nona refused to eat at the feast after her father left,” our mother used to say. “That’s why she grew up differently.” When Nona was young those words made her cry, but Circe didn’t seem to notice. Our mother had the cutting indifference of the truly beautiful, and she was nursing the twins then, which left her luminous and cruel.
For whatever reason, feast or design or the simple vagaries of genetics, Nona was the only one of us not to inherit our mother’s magic. In its absence, she developed an indomitable will, a mind as hard and sharp-edged as a steel trap. She could see through illusions and peel aside glamours, and it left her dark-eyed and bitter. She moved away just after her eighteenth birthday, as far from Circe as she could. She left suddenly, at night and without goodbyes, leaving behind only a note which was fearful and as harsh as Circe at her worst. It was three years before we heard from her again, and even then it was only after our mother left and Syne broke the unspoken familial taboo and tracked her down. Nona had answered the phone with sharp words and a southern drawl, but had agreed to come back to Minnesota to discuss things.
Nona was different from the rest of us, but even her estrangement was not complete.
That summer Nona was living alone in a two-bedroom apartment, having recently ridden herself of a boyfriend. She played bass guitar in clubs after dark, drank shots of tequila rimmed in salt, and smoked cigarette after cigarette. She had money, but it came from elsewhere, from mysterious internet investments that the other sisters knew little about. Nona slept late, and awoke to syrupy golden light. Once it became apparent that Syne would be spending the summer in a hospital bed, the sisters called a meeting to decide what should be done with the twins. Syne’s husband couldn’t take care of them; he spent most of the summer out on Rainy Lake, tossed about in a too-small boat, and they were too old to live in Syne’s hospital room. Nona had recently resumed communications—calling and writing her sisters with apparent good will. Her situation allowed her to take the twins, if she were willing. The sisters agreed to ask Nona.
“All right,” she said, to everyone’s surprise.
The twins were bundled south, with many thanks and black bags full of herbs sewn into the collars of their shirts. Nona met them at the Austin airport, and they scarcely recognized her. She had grown thin and brown over the years, had bleached her black curls and dyed them the color of rubies. Her skin was patterned all over with colored inks. Only her eyes were the same.
The twins should have been thirteen then. Their mother, Circe, had disappeared three years before, and since then they had refused to age with the same tenacity that they refused to speak English. They should have been on the verge of womanhood, but instead they had the bodies of children and lamp-lit eyes. For three years the only part of them that had changed was their hair, which had grown long and faded from black to silver—as if it were growing old more quickly to make up for their ever-youthful bodies. They flickered in the harsh airport light. Alecto had taken one look at them and decided they had fairy blood, but the other sisters thought they just had too much of their mother’s magic, captured in too small a space.
Nona knew them at once.
“Hey there,” Nona said.
The twins looked at her and giggled, muttered secret words to each other. Their teeth were unexpectedly sharp. On the ride home they hung doglike out the windows as Nona drove down the highway at the top of her speedometer; she did nothing to stop them.
Nona’s home was on the ridge of a hill, part of a long apartment complex that snaked against the landscape, looking always as if it were about to fall. Each building had its own tiny courtyard, connected to the others by a series of plastered archways and broken iron gates. Nona’s apartment faced north, across the river and towards the downtown skyline. She liked to turn off the lights, open the windows, and play music in the dark.
The twins, born enchantresses, were enchanted. They spent that entire first day dashing from one end of the courtyards to the other, chattering to each other in their secret language—which sounded like the cries of the great-tail grackles. One of the courtyards had a giant pecan tree, another a twisted live oak, a third had a peach tree with hard green fruit already on the branches. There were crape myrtle with candy-colored flowers that looked like cascades of tulle, and Texas mountain laurels that had only a few indigo petals remaining. They’d come from International Falls, a town snuggled against the Canadian border that was only now throwing off its blanket of snow. Austin was already hot enough that the air shimmered over the blacktop, even though it wasn’t yet full summer.
“It’s like time travel,” Megaera, the elder by less than a minute, whispered to her sister.
Tisphone nodded, her eyes wide with delight.
That night, when the sun went out and the downtown lights sparkled like earthbound stars and Nona let them swim in the illuminated turquoise pool, the twins decided they would stay there forever. They waited until it was late and Nona had tucked them into her king-sized bed to tell her.
“We’re going to stay here from now on,” Megaera informed her solemnly, the first words of English she’d spoken since their plane had landed.
Nona chuckled, a bit unkindly, and picked up her bass. She was playing a show that night in a downtown club whose name was written in lights above its door, “We’ll see,” she replied, though it was obvious she meant no.
The twins took it as a challenge.
They began their campaign the next day, with handfuls of peaches. They plucked them from the tree in the far courtyard, clinging to the branches with clever monkey feet and long whips of hair that seemed almost prehensile. The peaches were green, hard as the pits inside them, but Megaera picked and Tisphone concentrated and slowly the peaches turned yellow and orange in their hands, blushing and perfectly ripe. Juice ran down their fingers. They didn’t taste a single peach.
“We picked these for you,” Megaera said, offering Nona the bowl of fruit.
“You should be careful climbing trees,” she replied, not looking up from her newspaper. The fruit trembled, tiny but perfect, and the twins smiled triumphantly at each other as Nona bit into one. Juice ran down her chin and her tattooed forearm.
After that they bought her pecans, sweet and cooked in honey. It was a summer of unlimited fruit. The twins ran wild through the courtyards, plunged fully-clothed into the pool and collapsed like cats to nap in any convenient sunbeam. They unwound the amulets Euphrosyne had sent with them and lined the courtyards with the black threads and their own whispered spells. Nona was not just childless; she lacked any maternal instinct that might have warned her. She treated the twins with the same friendly indifference that she bestowed on everyone. And carefully, carefully, they wove their spells around her with small presents and bits of thread.
The other sisters, distracted by their own concerns, didn’t think to check in on Nona as the summer passed. Syne called from time to time, but she took Nona’s murmured assurances at face value.
We don’t know when Nona first realized the twins were weaving a spell around her, trapping her deep in a spider’s web of reciprocity. They gave her bits of youth. They gave her bass guitar a soulful voice, so that Nona’s band was in more demand than ever. They may have even meant well. They were too young to remember the violence and finality with which Nona had ripped herself from the family bosom. But when Nona, alerted perhaps by some unrelated childish magic, some mischief with the neighbors or the stray cats, opened her dark eyes and focused her will—she saw herself caught like a moth in the center of a jewel-bright web.
“We want to stay here,” Megaera said. It had been half a summer since she’d first said it.
This time Nona was not coy. “No,” she said.
“You owe us,” Megaera replied.
“No,” Nona said again. She left them half-tucked into bed and went into her office, where she’d been sleeping that summer. Her eyes—dark, brown, human—were wild in her face. Her features were stern and sharp-edged. Nona had been away too long. She’d almost forgotten what witches were like. With trembling fingers, she pulled a stick of chalk from her pile of disused art supplies and drew a blue-edged door on the white wall. The lines were ragged—Nona was no artist—but strong. The chalk broke from the pressure of her grip, but she continued drawing with the halves. There was blue dust beneath her fingernails. When she was done, Nona threw the chalk aside. It rolled forgotten into a corner. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the blue door and began to stare with narrowed eyes.
At first, the twins were fascinated by her strange behavior. They sat with her, though she ignored them. There was no magic in this that they could sense, no sparkle of the senses or fae slide of glamour. There was no voice whispering desire and secrets. There was only their staring, dark-eyed sister and the wall.
Eventually, they tired of it and ran to their normal pursuits, eternal ten-year-olds in an eternal summer.
Nona still went to clubs at night, still played her bass, but she stopped smoking and she stopped tossing down tequila. She left gigs as soon as the music was done and tiptoed through Zilker Park collecting armloads of dandelions. Every morning the twins woke up to more of the yellow flower-weeds, heaped everywhere in the apartment until they spilled out the door, coating the courtyard in fading yellow blooms and dusty pollen.
“Dandelions grant wishes,” Morta said. Among us all, she was the best at herb craft—the only one who could hear the whispering of flowers. “Nona stared at her wall and wished free, she stared at the chalked outlines of her door and wished away. And still the twins felt nothing, no hint, no whisper of the slightest magic.”
At this point in the story la Alba always broke in. “They could have missed it,” she said.
But Syne shook her head. “They wouldn’t have.” Of us all, she knew the twins best, and so even la Alba’s certainty must falter.
“They were too young when Nona left,” Decima pointed out in her slow-voiced way, her words seeming to wander around hidden eddies before finding their meaning. “They didn’t know what she is like.”
“Was like,” la Alba corrected tartly.
Decima just smiled. She is the most patient of us sisters, and even now has not decided if Nona will return someday.
Morta made plans to abandon her new husband and visit Austin during the dog days of August. Euphrosyne’s baby had been born, and she was ready to take the twins back. Morta picked a basket of many-colored roses from her garden, leaving out the herbs and more potent blossoms she might have brought to any of the other sisters, and bought a train ticket. It was a three-day journey. She slept in a bed that folded out from her seat and watched the landscape grow dry and strange. Three days to reach the edge of the Hill Country, and her roses didn’t wither.
No one met her at the station.
Here Tisphone took over the story, with a shadow of regret in her green-glass eyes. It’s eerie hearing her tell it, almost as if the tale were being narrated by a ghost. When she finally allowed herself to grow up, Tisphone looked a great deal like Nona. She pushed back unruly curls from her lean, clever face. “Nona didn’t sleep the night before. We still didn’t feel any magic, but we could feel a certain anticipation in her.”
“Her lap was piled with dandelions. Some of them had gone to seed, so that whenever she shifted her weight they blew up in clouds around her. Nona was almost crying, but she didn’t let it interrupt her concentration. Fighting our magic must have felt to her like wading against a riptide—a nearly impossible endeavor. Her ruby-dyed hair had become tangled and faded. She hadn’t gone out to drink or gather dandelions in days. Dust had settled on her knees and on the flowers she held.”
“And then,” Tisphone continued, her voice gone low and whispering, “Her eyes changed. They went from brown—a dark brown sure, but brown nonetheless—to pitch black, tar black. You couldn’t see her pupils. And she stood. Dandelions cascaded off of her. She walked across the room to the wall, to the door she had drawn. Nona took long steps. And she opened it.” Tisphone looked down, toyed with the china cup of tea that she’d held for some time but not yet tasted. “There was just a glimpse of some other room, a room with whitewashed walls and round windows. Then Nona walked through and closed the door behind her.”
No one mentioned the unforgivable crime, the leaving of two ten-year-old girls alone. Nona had gone; what was the point of blame? Instead one of the sisters leaned forward; always leaned forward at this point of the story, and asked, “Did she say anything before she left?”
This time it was la Alba who asked, and she did so with an arched brow and a slightly mocking tone. She knew the answer; we all did.
Tisphone nodded. “She said: I’m going away. This time, there will be no more witches.” Her brows furrowed, and for a moment she looked very young.
“We tried to go after her, tried all the tricks we knew, but the door Nona had drawn wouldn’t open for us. We were left alone with all her things, even her guitar, and thousands of flowers. We considered what to do, considered despair, considering calling International Falls to ask for help—but in the end we decided that we had won, that we would get to stay in Austin forever. We tried sips of Nona’s tequila, smoked her cigarettes, and broke the strings of her guitar trying to make it play.”
And then Morta had arrived, escorted by a yellow taxi and a cloud of worry. She’d left her luggage at the station, forgotten in the frantic haste that ensued once she realized that no one was coming to get her, that something was wrong. She’d remembered the basket of roses, though, and it preceded her into Nona’s apartment. Morta found the twins there, asleep in a litter of dandelions, spilled tequila, and half-burned cigarettes. She woke the sleeping girls with jerks at their thin shoulders and long hair.
“Where is Nona?” she asked, her many-colored roses trembling.
“She’s gone,” Megaera said, after a long moment of conspiratorial silence.
“Gone where?”
The girls shrugged and wouldn’t speak again. Morta wandered through the apartment in increasing anger until she saw the office with the door scrawled on its wall. She stared at the door dumbly for a few moments. Eventually she remembered to put down the basket of flowers.
“Is Nona coming back?” she asked later that night, after she’d hauled the last black plastic bag filled with rotten dandelions to the trash and made the twins bathe. Their long silver hair, snarled and ratted with a summer’s worth of knots, had been impossible to save. Morta had cut it off with a pair of kitchen shears, leaving the twins with coronas of dandelion fuzz.
The girls looked at each other. “No,” Megaera finally said. “No, she’s not.”
So Morta called Euphrosyne and told her she’d be home with the twins in a few days, and she called la Alba and told her to catch a plane to Austin: Nona’s apartment needed to be packed up.
The three of them went home the next day.
The other sisters hadn’t seen Nona since. When asked, only patient Decima still shrugged her shoulders and said, “We may. The future is long.”
The rest just laughed, or frowned, or smiled cruelly and said “No.”
I didn’t say anything.
Tisphone left first, picking up her guitar and heading outside to her rental car. Family gatherings made her uncomfortable, though she still attended them faithfully. I think she hoped that Megaera would come to one of them, as an adult or even as a silver-haired child, but by now we’ve lost Meg, too. Maybe we’d tell that story tomorrow, while our dinner of cherry-studded ham and pumpkin bread cooked in the oven, before Alecto had to fly back to New York. Maybe not.
I was the last to leave the table, I always was. The others knew I didn’t like them to watch me walk. The process was awkward enough, painful enough, without their perfect cat-green eyes on me. My room was the only bedroom on the first floor; it gave me some space from Syne and the children. The door was tall, and in the evenings the room was shadowy.
Nona was waiting for me, as she sometimes did. “How’re you?” she asked. She’s thirty-one now, and getting old before her time—life must be harder, wherever she ran to. Her voice was getting rusty as she aged; her dark hair was fading in places to gray.
I smiled lopsided at her. Well enough, my fingers signed. You should tell them. It was what I always told her.
As always, she just shook her head.
Nona never really left us, but she can’t come back to us, either. She sees Circe in every shadow, and fears her. Our mother never left us either, she replies whenever I ask.
I’m the only one who knows, I think.
Witches do everything with half a heart.