For the first time since she pulled up in the driveway with Seth and Fable that afternoon, Salem was experiencing some quiet. She had spent the drive home from Atlanta drowning in her brother and cousins’ sympathy. Then walking into Blanchard House she’d had the rest of the family to endure with their consoling hugs and declarations of love. It had been exhausting. Added to her own family’s suffocating support came an influx of phone calls, voicemails, texts, and Facebook messages from everyone she and David knew in Atlanta. Salem stopped even looking at her phone. She was now experiencing the solitude of Blanchard House land. She sat on the wooden bench in the garden. She’d painted that bench its pale blue hue herself, years ago. Now only flakes of chipped paint revealing gray weathered wood gave any indication how much time had come and gone.

  She heard the screen door to the kitchen slam shut as someone came outside. Secretly, Salem hoped no one would find her in the garden. She had been through enough comforting for one day. A strange calm came over her once she saw it was her brother. Seth had stepped out to the lawn for a breath of fresh air, or perhaps just to step out of the heaviness inside. He did not see Salem at first, and she didn’t alert him to her presence when she saw him squat down in the grass and cry. He was hurting too. They all were. It had not really occurred to her that everyone else was suffering a loss as well. Her own pain was consuming her, and she had overlooked how much all the family loved David and Michael. She watched Seth for a few minutes. Her own anguish seemed to pause as she observed someone else’s. When he eventually stood back on his feet, she called out to him.

  “Sit with me.”

  Seth scanned the yard for the voice until he saw her across the lawn in the garden. Wiping his eyes on his shirt tail, he walked slowly toward her. “I didn’t know you were out here.”

  “I needed a break from everyone’s sympathy. I swear if one more person tells me how sorry they are or asks me if I’m okay, I am going to slap them. I know what they are all thinking. That I am going to lose my mind. But I’m not. David hated drama. And for some reason I don’t feel sad right now. I’m just angry. I’m so fucking angry.”

  “I know,” Seth said, placing his arm around her. “No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about what you’re feeling. I know what it’s like to lose the person you love, but Susan and I were kids still when she died. Not like you and David.” He paused and a tear fell from his eye. “Man, I loved David. It was nice having a brother. Another guy in the family. And Michael—I barely even had any time with my only nephew. I feel robbed of something, and I don’t even know what it is. And none of that, none of it, can possibly compare with how you feel.”

  Salem looked into her brother’s eyes—green like her own. “It’s just not fair,” she said angrily. “It isn’t fucking fair. We’ve lost too much in our lives already. The bullshit with our mother, then being left alone. You lost Susan. We have a father we never see.”

  Seth could feel the rage swelling inside her as she began talking. It almost vibrated from her.

  “Then I grew up and made something or myself. I educated myself. Found a good job. Found a good man. David was perfect for me! And he loved me. Finally, someone loved me!” she was shouting now. The anger seeping out of her every pore. “We had a baby. A beautiful boy who filled my heart with things I’ve never felt before. And all this gets snatched away from me. Why? I don’t understand why. Why would God be such an asshole to me? Why take everything from me all at once? Why not kill some abusive asshole in that crash? Or some geeked out drug addict? Why my husband and our innocent baby?! I want to know why God did this to me! Where the fuck does He get off doing this to us!”

  She couldn’t control the rage. It was bigger than she was. It was an entity with its own life and mind. There was just too much anger—too much power—surging through her body. The force inside her had to escape. Involuntarily, Salem found herself thrusting her arms outward as though let loose from a cannon. Fire exploded before her onto the lawn. It wasn’t enough. There was still more anger swelling inside her. Without a moment’s pause or reaction, she swiped her hand to the right and blew up the fence post. Seth fell backward off the bench. He had never seen his sister so powerful. She was shaking from that much energy. Suddenly she slapped her hands together with a force she’d never before demonstrated. Seth watched in utter disbelief as the earth in the meadow before them rose up in right and left sections, rising vertically as if being unhinged from the ground. The two sections, roughly 20 feet each, smashed together in the air with such intensity that it made a sound resembling a sonic boom. In its aftermath, dust, dirt, and little blades of grass filled the air. As it all settled to the now marred ground, it looked as if a bomb had exploded on that patch of land. One small pine trunk remained, stripped of bark, limbs, and needles—an empty shaft tilting to the side like a flagpole staking some obliterated battlefield.

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  The family heard the commotion from inside and rushed out to see. Artemis ran over to the garden to restrain Salem. Her niece was still shaking. Her power was still growing. Artemis could feel the surge like a tidal wave about to make landfall.

  “Stop, Salem! Stop!” Artemis screamed. “You’re going to hurt someone.”

  Salem was trembling. She looked at the lawn, now a misshapen crater. Shards of broken limbs, disintegrated plants, broken soil, and falling dust covered the patch of ground. In a moment of recognition, she fell into her aunt’s arms and wept.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Artemis soothed her. “Everyone go back inside, and leave us alone out here.”

  The family, shocked from what they had witnessed, returned indoors. Artemis said nothing to Salem. She simply laid her niece’s head upon her chest and rocked her. She rocked her as she had when Salem was a little girl. Whenever Salem had felt frightened or alone, Artemis had rocked her in her arms. She never thought she would be doing it again. The garden fence was still burning from the explosion Salem sent it. Artemis closed her eyes and envisioned a tiny rain cloud over the rail. It doused the flame.

  “I didn’t know you could start fires,” Artemis remarked while still holding Salem. “And what was that thing with the yard? You just lifted up two patches of land and smacked them together! I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Salem glanced up. A mildly astonished smile broke the facade of emptiness in her expression. “That’s never happened before. David would have enjoyed seeing that.”

  “It’s your emotional state. We can do a lot of things we don’t know we can do when our emotions are high. I used to get the hiccups when I was nervous and every time I hiccupped; a window shattered.”

  Artemis reached her hand down under the bench and lifted a loose clump of grass. Under the grass was a small plastic box. She lifted the box and opened it. Inside were a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  “Thought you quit a long time ago,” Salem remarked.

  “So does Demitra and Mother. But you won’t tell on me, will you?”

  “No,” Salem smiled. “Give me one.”

  The two of them sat together in silence, smoking their cigarettes and listening to an orchestra of crickets playing their well-rehearsed symphony. A small cluster of fireflies hovered a few feet away, the light from their tails diluted amid the haze of smoke from the cigarettes and the still-smoldering fence.

  “You see Salem, grief is like a firefly. It burns and burns, and then it looks as if it stops. But if you wait long enough, it fires up again. Like the smoke, time passes and passes and builds up a fog to slowly cover the pain. The pain will still be there, but it won’t burn so brightly anymore.”

  “Bad analogy,” Salem quipped.

  “Okay, then look at the cigarette,” Artemis directed her niece. “Think of life like a cigarette. As soon as you light it, it begins to fade. You can smoke it fast, taking all you can get from it, but using it up sooner. Or you can leave it to stand and burn its course slowly, never enjoying or savoring it—trying to make it last a little bit longer. Or you can just put the cigarette out early, wasting all that is unused because you’ve just had enough of it.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Every object has meaning if we want to attribute any to it. And every event carries a lesson or a purpose if we need it to have one. But then we spend our time trying to figure out what that purpose was—and that is just too much room to go crazy in. You can smoke fast, or slow, or extinguish it all together, but while you are waiting to figure out the meaning, just inhale. Sometimes just inhaling is all there is.”

  “My two cigarettes are gone. I don’t have anything left,” Salem said.

  “No, they aren’t gone,” Artemis said. “Like with your cigarette, there will be ash left, and a little stub. The memories. And those aren’t nothing Salem.”

  “It’s not enough,” Salem said resentfully. Her face hardened, obscuring some of its delicate beauty.

  “Sometimes ‘not enough’ is all we have to hold onto.”

  “But it isn’t fair, Aunt Artemis.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Artemis said as she kissed the top of her head. “There is nothing about any of this that is fair. You deserve to have many more years with David. You deserve to see your son grow up, fall in love, give you grandchildren. Life has a crazy way of being very unfair to the ones who deserve fairness most. And there’s nothing we can do about it, except deal with it however we can. It sucks, and it hurts like hell sometimes. But no one gets promised fair. Not even a witch.”

  Salem sat quietly. She felt like crying again, but tears didn’t come. Only a sense of loss and burgeoning desire to understand why it was that she was destined to endure as much loss in her lifetime as she had.

  “I just want to see them again.”

  Artemis held Salem close to her, giving her arms a gentle squeeze. “Their energy is still out there, you know. Maybe it’ll be reborn, maybe it won’t. Maybe it will mix with the energies of someone loved and lost by others. Maybe it stays one whole, but simply moves on to Heaven or some other plane of existence. I don’t know how it works exactly, but I do know you will cross their energy again one day.”

  “How will I know when that happens?”

  Artemis sighed and looked skyward as if searching the clouds for answers. “I don’t know. I like to think it’s when we are remembering them. Perhaps you’ll be walking through a park—or maybe a store--and suddenly they’ll cross your mind for no reason at all. I like to think at those times maybe they entered my mind because I just passed a little piece of their essence inhabiting someone else now.”

  Salem liked the idea. If she could know for sure that somewhere out there in that great big world a piece of her little boy or her husband might end up a part of someone else—someone she might one day encounter—maybe she’d feel it. Maybe for a solitary second she might sense them again. For now, that was the only thought she could take comfort in.

  “Give me another cigarette.”