“Your aunt Franny didn’t hide the fact that she was married,” he reminded her.
Yes, but that was after her beloved Haylin had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, and once there was no cure the curse couldn’t touch them.
“And Sally!” Ben had said. “She was married twice.”
And look at her, twice a widow and brokenhearted. And look at me, without a daughter, what I want most in the world.
To do their best to trick the curse, Gillian and Ben had wed simply and quietly at the courthouse and Gillian refused to have their marriage officially recorded. Whether or not they were legally married was up for debate; certainly Gillian refused to wear a ring. They lived in a two-family house in Central Square, where Gillian resided on the ground floor, while Ben took the upstairs apartment. Whenever he asked why they must live separately—neither earned much of a salary—Ben was a science teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and MIT didn’t pay lab technicians a fortune and clearly it would have made more sense to live in one apartment and rent out the other—Gillian asserted that too much togetherness was certain to ruin a relationship, especially in the Owens family. In truth, they spent most nights together, and when they didn’t Ben would often spy Gillian out in their small garden, sleepless and shivering, scanning the heavens, as if she might find an answer there in the night sky above them as to how the curse had found her despite her deception.
When she saw Antonia blooming in the last trimester of her pregnancy, her red hair pinned up, her freckled skin rosy and flushed, Gillian felt her heart jolt. Her one wish was to have a daughter, but now that she was forty-three she’d begun to wonder if her inability to have a child was the work of the curse. She had been to infertility specialists at Mass General and when that didn’t work, she’d begged the aunts for a cure. Franny and Jet had done their best, attempting any number of traditional botanical remedies. Myrrh, juniper berries, licorice, skullcap, pennyroyal, hemlock, chamomile flowers, unicorn root taken in small doses, butterfly weed, a tea of stinging nettle to strengthen the uterus, motherwort to bolster Gillian’s immune system. She had tried red clover and evening primrose oil, and the oddly named chasteberry, along with black cohosh. She ate pomegranates and olive oil, honey and cinnamon, and had even tried the ancient ritual of bringing a toad to sleep in her bed, all to no avail. Now, to explain her brimming eyes as they stood in front of the old house, Gillian told her nieces she was affected by the spring pollen in the air. Antonia and Kylie exchanged a look, for both had read that the pollen count on this day was zero.
Franny was out on the porch waiting, which wasn’t at all like her. Usually, she was the last to be ready for anything. “Come in. Come in,” she called.
Antonia held on to Kylie’s arm so she wouldn’t trip on the bluestone path that led through the falling shadows. “Why do they keeping turning off the porch light?” Antonia muttered.
“That’s your mother’s decision,” Gillian informed them. “No neighbors need come to call.”
“Call for what?” Kylie asked. The family had kept secrets from Kylie and Antonia, at Sally’s insistence. To them, magic was little more than a story in a book of fairy tales.
A small dog came out, yapping at them.
“What’s going on here?” Antonia wanted to know. “Who is this creature?”
It was explained that Jet was watching over Reverend Willard’s dog, and that she had gone to fetch Sally and would meet them at the inn. The tomato seedlings were left in the garden, and they all traipsed into the kitchen, where half a Chocolate Tipsy Cake sat on a platter on the marble counter.
“Why wait for dinner?” Gillian grinned, getting some cake plates from the cabinet. “We can have chocolate cake as an appetizer.”
“I can’t eat that,” Antonia scolded. “All that rum? It’s much too alcoholic.”
“Sorry.” Gillian felt like a fool. Of course, a pregnant woman couldn’t have rum, not the amount that was in this recipe. In many ways Antonia reminded her of Sally, so sure of herself, so logical and matter-of-fact, always wanting clear-cut evidence before she made a decision. “Of course you can’t,” Gillian apologized.