The weather was warming, yet Franny had on her winter coat and her red boots when she went out to walk. It was a tradition among the Owens women to wear such footwear, and the wearing of red shoes had a long history. Louis XIV favored red heels to show his right to be king, and Kings Edward IV and Henry VIII were buried in red shoes. Dyed with madder or cochineal, they were worn by Roman senators as well, but it was women who dealt in magic who were best known for donning red shoes, and the idea of a scarlet woman who did as she pleased made wearing red shoes an act of defiance; they might just take the wearer places she would not otherwise go.
Though she was warmly dressed, Franny continued to be chilled to the bone. She was stuck in the past and she didn’t care to go forward. She wished there was a door to open so that she might step back through time. The best she could do was to make her way into the woods, past the tangled saplings, down to Leech Lake, which was vast and blue, aglitter in the brilliance of the afternoon light. Franny and Jet and their brother, Vincent, came to swim here when they were young, splashing each other and dissolving into laughter when the toads followed Franny, gathering round as if she were their queen. Vincent was as brash as he was charming. He always dared Jet and Franny to leap from the highest ledge, and when his sisters refused, for they’d been warned by their mother to always avoid water, Vincent dove off the cliff by himself. Filled with courage and youth he would make a mad swan dive even though he knew he would land hard on the calm surface of the water, for the Owens bloodline didn’t allow them to sink. They floated no matter what, as did all witches, which was both their salvation and their downfall, for it revealed who they were.
In their youth, only Vincent had been drawn to magic, why, he was made for it, while his sisters were still alarmed by their heritage. Now Franny understood that you must be yourself no matter what; anything else was a lie, and a denial of who you were would always cause grief. What you put out into the world came back to you threefold. If you could not accept yourself, you would be reviled and cast out, adrift in the world.
One afternoon, Franny had finally accepted Vincent’s dare. She still remembered Jet calling for her to stop before she made her own wild leap, long arms and legs flailing in the blue summer air, her narrow shoulders pulled in as if to protect herself. It had indeed hurt to land on the surface, and her body ached from the force of impact, but even though she could not sink, the unfolding sensation of feeling the water against her skin was numbing and utterly delicious. When you couldn’t drown, water was the element you were drawn to, and Franny had floated on her back all that afternoon, getting a wicked sunburn in the bargain, still, it had been worth it. Jet jumped in as well, a water nymph gliding through the lilies. “This is the most fun,” she cried out, for she took to swimming immediately, vowing to never adhere to their mother’s rules again.
“You should listen to me more often,” Vincent had said as they tromped back to their aunt Isabelle’s house, towels thrown over their shoulders. That year Franny had been seventeen, Jet sixteen, and Vincent fifteen. They were perfect and they didn’t know it. They laughed at each other as they slipped and sank into the mud, making their way through tall weeds strung with spiderwebs. Franny tied her long hair in a knot and let the water puddle in red pools that stained the ground. Did she think then that she would ever see an old woman when she gazed into a mirror? Perhaps that was why the mirrors in the house were covered by white cloths, so that those among them of a certain age wouldn’t have the shock of spying their own faces.
Franny recalled a story that the locals told which vowed that a sea monster of some sort had made its home in the lake. It had arrived at the docks on a wave from the harbor during a huge squall hundreds of years earlier, dazed and in need of water, and had managed to find its way to this deep, blue-green pool. Franny used to crouch on the water’s edge with an offering of salt, which was said to draw such creatures to the shallows. Like was attracted to like, after all. She was eager to see something miraculous, and when she was married to Hay and he came home from Vietnam after losing his leg, they would sit here together in the evenings on canvas chairs, a picnic basket beside them. Hay was never impressed by the notion of wondrous beasts. “I’ve already seen monsters, another one doesn’t interest me,” he told her. “All I want to see is you.”