To understand the darkness that lives in my veins.
And I feel betrayed by her: her silence when she’s home, her refusal to talk about Grandma or about the Walkers who came before us.
I prefer it when she’s away, when I can be alone in the old house.
Mom has never been one to worry about me anyway—she knows I can take care of myself until the road thaws. I could take care of myself even if she never came back.
Inside her room, I kneel down on the floor and reach my arms beneath the bed, past a discarded, half-burnt candle; past dust bunnies that skitter away; and past a pale-yellow sock missing its mate, until I find the wooden box she keeps hidden.
I slide it out, resting the box on the floor in front of me, then quietly open the lid.
Inside rest an assortment of keepsakes: old photographs and family letters kept safely inside their envelopes, my grandmother’s pearl necklace, an old music box once owned by Henrietta Walker. Family heirlooms tucked away beneath a bed where they will eventually be forgotten. Things that remind me of who I am—that make me feel less alone.
And under it all, I find the book.
I touch the faded words handwritten on the front: Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine. And sketched below it is a compass with the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.
But I don’t open the book—not here in my mother’s room, where I fear she might sense it once she returns, sense that I sat on her floor with the book fanned open in front of me. So I tuck it under my arm, the weight of my family history inside its pages, and leave the honey-scented room before I leave too many clues that I was here.
With the fire roaring downstairs, my own room is sweltering when I return, and I push open one of the windows—letting the snow spiral inside and settle on the floor. I grew up in this room, in this loft overlooking the lake. I was born here too, seventeen years ago under a watery full moon while a rainstorm flooded the banks of the lake and turned the shore to mud. All Walkers are coaxed into the world when the moon is brightest. As if our birthright were calling to us.
I place the book on the bed, feeling like a thief.
The spellbook will belong to me one day, passed down from one Walker woman to the next. But for now, it belongs to my mother, and she never opens it, never pulls it out to sift through its pages. It’s a burden to her. Our family history like a disease she can’t be rid of.
When I was younger, when my grandmother was still alive, she’d bring the book into my room when my mother was away on a delivery. Your mom wants to forget the old ways, she’d say. Who we really are. Grandma Ida would settle onto my bed and turn through the pages of the book like she was sifting through dust, revealing artifacts from the past. Her wrinkled, unsteady fingers knew the pages by heart.
The memory causes an ache in my chest, recalling the kindness in her graying eyes. The soft, knowing tenor of her words.
She’d read me passages in a hush, as if the walls might tell on us. Pages and pages of notations and recipes and hand-drawn sketches. There were instructions on how to decipher the spiderwebs built by peppercorn spiders to predict the weather. How to locate the precious thimbleberries that were used during pregnancy to know if it was a boy or girl stirring inside the belly. Grandma would read to me old recipes written down by Scarlett Walker and Florence Walker and Henrietta Walker, women who seemed more like characters from folklore than real women who lived in this house and strode through the forest gathering primrose and hemlock. Who had more power, I fear, than I may ever have.
Some recipes were innocuous enough: instructions for baking spiced prickly pear pie or a particularly tricky recipe for rutabaga-and-parsley stew. The best method for steeping juniper berry tea, and how to harvest yarrow root in the fall. But others were for conjuring up things that were more witchcraft than forest medicine. How to trick a bat into hunting a common house mouse. How to grow wild strawberries and sword ferns and wax myrtle for protection and divination. How to see the dead wandering among gravestones.
There was no index in the back of the book, no rhyme or reason to the order of recipes and spells. Things were merely written down in succession, from one Walker to another. The book is tea-stained and chocolate-smeared, and the first few pages are completely unreadable, the ink having faded to nothing with time. And every few pages, a brief history has been written down—the story of a Walker who once lived, and how she died—recorded like a family ledger, so each tale, each woman, would never be forgotten.
But after my grandmother passed away, only a week before my fifteenth birthday, my mother took the book and shoved it inside the wooden box beneath her bed. Like she didn’t trust me with it, like she was trying to blot out the memory of my grandmother and all the Walkers along with it. But she can’t erase our past, can’t scrub clean the moonlight in our veins. Mom only ever wanted to be normal. To leave the past where it belonged. To no longer be called witches or weird or be forced to avoid sidelong glances when we went into town, catching the last of a muttered word about how spiders lived in our hair and beetles under our toenails.
We are Walkers. And our ancestors have lived in these woods since long before the first miners set up camp along the Black River. We came from this forest. From the roots and brine and weather-worn stones.
We are the daughters of the wood.
One cannot survive without the other.
I sit cross-legged on the white bedspread. Snow floats into the room, catching in my hair, landing on Fin where he’s curled up on the floor, nose tucked beneath his tail.
I flip open the front cover of the book and am met with the musty scent of burnt amber and jasmine. Just like the nights with my grandmother. A thrumming begins in my chest—a peculiar sort of ache. The thrill and also the fear leaping through me. If Mom found out I took it from beneath her bed, she would be angry. She’d hide it where I wouldn’t be able to find it ever again. Maybe she’d even destroy it.
Still, I bend over the pages and my hair falls loose from its braid—fine and inky-black, just like my grandmother’s. Even the sturdy slope of my nose, the dark storm resting behind my eyes, the melancholy curve of my lips—it’s all her. The reminder of my grandma always hidden in my own face.
The weight of the moonstone slides the gold ring around my finger as I skim over recipes and drawings outlined in charcoal, until I find what I’m looking for. A simple concoction—a crease folded down the page where the book has been fanned open countless times. The recipe isn’t true witchery. But Grandma used to make it during the cold months of January, to warm chilled bones, to calm a cough, to bring circulation back into numb fingers and toes.
Silently, I descend the stairs to the kitchen.
The ingredients are easy to find. One whole cupboard is lined with glass jars filled with dried herbs and powdered roots and fragrant liquids with descriptions handwritten on the lids. There is even a jar labeled lake water, in case a recipe needed to be made in haste and there was no time to walk the few yards down to the lake itself.
Mom has kept the cupboard stocked, never throwing anything out, even though she doesn’t use the herbs—not like Grandma did.
I pour the few ingredients into the same copper bowl my grandmother once used: ground cloves and powdered cardamom, a dash of fawn lily and burdock root, and a pinch of a reddish-rose tincture labeled bero.
I sift the mixture into a small cotton pouch, then cross the living room to Oliver. His hair is now dry, dark and wavy, and he doesn’t stir when I slide the cotton pouch beneath the blankets beside his bare ribs. His chest rises, the slow measured weight of his lungs expanding. A shudder runs through him and his eyelids flicker, his body tensing briefly—spurred by some dream I can’t see. He reminds me of an animal near death. Fighting it, struggling. I could crawl beneath the blankets and wrap my arms over his chest, I could feel the beat of his heart against my palm, I could wait for the heat to return to his skin before I went back to my own bed.