We cleared the vines, yanked and salted the roots, and burned everything we could carry. It didn’t cross my mind until we were done that interfering with the tree could’ve been dangerous. In the pale blue snow light, working beside my determined daughter, I’d been unafraid.
“What exactly did you dream?” I asked her later.
She shrugged. “I told you. I saw the tree, and I knew where to find it.”
“Have you had dreams like that before?”
Another shrug, and a nonanswer. “I don’t remember all my dreams.”
There was something so solemn, almost druidical, in Ivy’s hearing the call of a suffering tree. Thinking about her accessing magic that ancient gave me the feeling of a swimmer drifting past the place where the seafloor gives way to the deep.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Ivy wasn’t even ten and I could no longer fathom the contours of her abilities. Nor did I trust her to tell me the whole truth if asked. Where did the borders of her lucid dreaming lie? Could she spy on other people’s dreams? Walk through them? Shape them the way she did her own?
She wouldn’t, of course. I knew she wouldn’t. So did it really matter if she could?
The question kept me up until morning.
* * *
“I could just do it.”
Ivy at ten, fists balled in frustration because I’d told her she would not, under any circumstances, hex a classmate.
“But you won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” I said, willing my words to be a protective net, an ordinary kind of mother’s magic. “I trust you, and you trust me. And I’m telling you what you already know: hexes are dark magic. They don’t come free.”
“Of course she wants to curse her enemies,” Fee told me later. “What ten-year-old wouldn’t?”
“And she wants to scry,” I said sourly. “Or as she puts it, ‘spy on people to see what they really think of me.’”
I knew what Fee was gonna say before she said it. “You have to tell her about Marion. Give her a chance to understand why. Right now she thinks you’re holding her back for the hell of it. Don’t let her set you up as an adversary, not with this.”
She’d said it a dozen times before. And I replied like I always did.
“Of course I’ll tell her. When she’s a little older, we’ll tell her everything.”
It was my shame that was really stopping me. Fee and I both knew it.
* * *
She’s a good kid.
I repeated it to myself like it was gospel. And it was true, but that didn’t alter the fact that Ivy was drawn to morally questionable magic like a bee to the lip of a Coke can. She was curious, heedless, troublingly fearless. And she was stronger than me. Corralling her abilities into small workings felt increasingly like trying to direct divine fire through the claustrophobic tunnels of an ant farm.
Working magic had set her apart from other kids her age. She was too self-possessed, too immune to other people’s influence. She had soccer friends, camp friends, school friends, but she didn’t really have friend friends.
Until a family moved in across the street the year she turned eight. A single dad, a toddler, and a freckle-faced seven-year-old cannonball named Billy.
I hadn’t actually realized Ivy was lonesome until he showed up, and they merged like two raindrops meeting on a window. She nodded with great seriousness when I reminded her that magic was a secret even Billy couldn’t know. Months became years and there were no explosions but I wasn’t an idiot: the little boy from across the street knew something.
I looked out the window once and saw them in the grass at the end of the yard. Both were keeping an eye on the ground between them, with an absorbed stillness few grade schoolers possessed. I couldn’t see what they were looking at.
Then Billy’s face opened up into startled delight. Ivy grinned at him and he grinned back. I knew how pride looked on her and I knew she wasn’t showing him something ordinary.
I upgraded my assumptions. The boy from across the street knew everything.
* * *
My appendix burst at the worst possible time. Rob was on a work trip, Fee and Uncle Nestor were visiting family in San Antonio. Hank was going through some kind of emotional upheaval he refused to talk about, and Ivy was being an adolescent nightmare. I didn’t have loads of mom friends, so I turned to Google. Twelve-year-old daughter incredibly defiant normal?
The next day Ivy came into the kitchen, brandishing my laptop. The search was pulled up. “First of all,” she said, “learn how to erase your search history. Second, I’m not defiant, I’m assertive.”