Chapter 4

It was gently raining as I left the coffee shop holding my paper bag of savory scones. They have scallions and cheddar cheese baked into them and my father had decided that they were the perfect accompaniment to his morning egg. I did try to reverse-engineer them once in our own kitchen, but I am not a particularly good baker and my scones came out with the consistency of clumps of sand.

I looked up at the sky, a mix of dark rain clouds and thin wisps and decided that the rain would be short-lived. It's a two-mile walk back to Monk's House, but it was a warmish morning for April. I've never really known why humans are averse to walking through rainstorms. Why is getting wet on a walk less pleasant then getting wet on a swim? I suppose it has to do with clothes, of course, but, really, it's not so bad. The rain picked up as I turned onto the walking path that brought me across disused tracts of farmland. I spotted two crows, having their morning conversation, and wondered if they were complaining about the rain.

I was soaked when I got home, and my mother, walking gingerly since her fall, stepped out onto the front stoop as I came down the driveway. She was wearing a shirt I recognized as her favorite of her many paint-flecked shirts, and I remembered that her friend Brenda was coming over for lunch later. "Lily, you're soaked," she said as I came up the steps.

"It's a soft day," I said, not immediately remembering where I got that expression from, only that it annoys my mother.

"Are you quoting your father?"

"No, he wouldn't say that. I think it's some kind of Irish expression."

"Go and get out of those clothes and take a hot shower. Did you remember that I'm having a lunch guest today?"

"I did remember. Brenda the mosaic artist."

"And you got a phone call," Sharon said as I was halfway up the stairs.

I turned. "From who?"

"Let me get it. I wrote it down." Sharon walked lopsidedly back into the kitchen as I dripped on the stairs. I was trying to remember the last time I got a phone call from anyone. Of course, it helps that I'm not listed on the landline that reaches the house I am living in, and that even though I now own a cell phone, no one knows my number. A few names went through my head: Inez Garrett, my old boss at Winslow; Henry Kimball, although he usually just shows up announced.

"Martha Ratliff," Sharon said. "She told me she was hoping I had your phone number, so I told her you live here with us. Is that okay?"

"Sure," I said, my mind attaching an image to a name I hadn't heard in well over a decade. Martha's rather foxlike face, all thin features, and hair the color of a cardboard box.

"What else did she say?"

"Just for you to call her. I wrote down her phone number."

"Okay, thanks," I said, and continued up the stairs.

Martha Ratliff, when I'd known her, had been the closest I'd ever come to having a genuine female friend. We'd done the same Archival Studies Program at Birkbeck College in Maryland more than fifteen years ago. It had been a happy time in my life. I was relieved to have left my college years behind, along with my doomed relationship with Eric Washburn, and I was pleased to have identified a career that interested me. I'd always loved libraries but saw them as places that favored the new over the old. There was always that New Arrivals shelf situated front and center, while older books with cracked spines and beautiful cover art wound up in piles at library book sales going for three for five dollars. Why did people want new art? I understood why people created it, but why did other people want it? Why does someone read a brand-new romance novel if they haven't read all of Austen yet? So, when I discovered that the field of library science included archival studies, at its simplest the preservation of historical documents, I knew instantly that I had found my career.

We were a small group at Birkbeck for the two-year graduate program. Six women, one man. During orientation the other female students seemed giddy with the idea that we'd all be spending so much time together. They were all bookish and a little awkward, the type of girls who were told during high school that they would blossom in college, then told during college that they would be happiest in graduate school. The one man of the group—Larry Childs—was the true outlier. Not only was he a man, but he was Black, and slightly older than the rest of us, maybe late twenties. Like me, he was quiet during orientation, watching through the thick lenses of his glasses. The head of our department, a woman named Deirdre Jones who reminded me of my mother, led us in several activities during a welcome dinner, including an icebreaker activity called "Two Truths and a Lie." I remember that I went last and it gave me time to think about what I wanted to say. I made jokes to myself about what I might include as one of my truths: I murdered my college boyfriend with cashews, for example. In the end I said that I'd grown up on a farm named after Thelonious Monk, that I'd once kept a raccoon as a pet, and that I was an avid quilter. It was only Larry Childs who guessed I wasn't a quilter. I wish I remembered what he had said during that silly icebreaker, but I do remember his lie. He'd said that he was a direct descendant of Frederick Douglass. Most of us believed it.

I do remember what Martha Ratliff said during that orientation, only because it struck me as a strange thing to admit to people she'd just met. Her lie had been something silly like she'd once gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but one of her truths was that she believed she'd been cursed by a high school friend who practiced witchcraft, and that it was a love curse. Deirdre Jones had said, "Oooh, I can't wait to hear more about that," and then moved on to the next person.

It did make me curious about Martha. She was from Missouri, awkwardly tall, with long brown hair. Her eyes were always blinking rapidly and you could tell that she had a bad habit of chewing on the inside of her cheek. I decided after the icebreaker that she was the only woman in our group that I was interested in getting to know, and it turned out that I was right about that. A week into our first semester, the most social member of our class, Cecily Makouns, had a dinner party at her apartment just off the Birkbeck campus. I was living a few miles away, having found a room for rent in a two-hundred-year-old house on the edge of a salt marsh. The room had been listed at the Student Housing Department, and when I'd asked the student worker there about it, she'd made a face and said that it was a very good deal but that the woman who rented the room was a little bit strange. I went to look at it anyway. It was a wooden house that hadn't been painted for years and had faded to the color of an oyster shell. There was a wide porch that fronted three sides of the house, and my room came with a small portable stove and its own bathroom.

The woman who lived there was named Ethel Watkins. She was a foul-tempered eighty-year-old who had been born in the house and never lived anywhere else. During our interview she asked me if I had a boyfriend and I told her I was done with all that. She must not have believed me, because she scrunched up her face into a scowl. I stared back at her, purposefully not saying anything, and she moved her head back like a dog that had just been batted on the nose by a cat. I told her I'd take the room and she reluctantly agreed.

At the dinner party at Cecily's house I told them all about my living situation while we ate vegetarian enchiladas that were served with plain yogurt instead of sour cream. After dinner we drank wine in the living room and I found myself chatting with Martha Ratliff, who asked me multiple questions about my new landlady. "She sounds like a witch," Martha said.

"She looks like one," I said. "Her hair, anyway."

"Could I visit sometime? I made the mistake of getting a room in the graduate dorm and it's like a prison cell."

"Of course," I said. "Unless you're scared of witches. You've already been cursed, right?"

She laughed, and I decided that she was pretty when she showed her teeth. "I have. I had a love curse put on me by my high school nemesis, Eve Dexter. I actually caught her doing it to me. It was Halloween night, but she wasn't dressed in a costume or anything. I was in my bedroom at about midnight and something made me look out the window. She was standing on my lawn in the moonlight staring up at my window."

"Why did she curse you?"

"Because I kissed her boyfriend. Not even while he was her boyfriend, but after he broke up with her. I didn't even particularly like him, but I hadn't kissed anyone yet, so I didn't feel like I could turn it down."

"You weren't one of those girls who wanted a perfect first kiss?"

She rolled her eyes. "God, no. I didn't care."

"So, she found out."

"Exactly. Eve found out. We'd sort of been friends, but that was the end of that. She got her posse to shun me at school and call me a slut in the hallways. I thought that would be the worst of it, but she must have looked up how to perform a love curse on me. It actually made me respect her a little more, except that the curse worked."

"How do you know that's what she did to you?"

"I didn't know at the time. But my senior year at college I went to a friend's home for the weekend, and her mother, who was a part-time psychic, I guess, took one look at me and said that I'd had a love curse put on me. I immediately remembered that night—it just flashed through my mind. And it all made sense. Every guy I hooked up with in college turned out to be awful in some way."

I was nodding, listening to her story, and she said, "I know what you're thinking, that every guy everyone hooked up with in college was awful—"

"No," I said. "I believe you. You're probably cursed. What are you going to do about it?"

"Avoid men," she said.

But Martha Ratliff didn't avoid all men that first year at Birkbeck. First, she became friends with Larry, both of us did, but it was clear to anyone with half a brain that Larry was smitten with Martha. We all thought something was going to happen between them, but then, at the beginning of our second semester, some of us were having drinks out at a bar that primarily catered to college students called the Hideout. Larry was there, I remember that, and so was Martha, and Cecily brought along someone none of us had met. His name was Ethan Saltz and he was a visiting writer in creative nonfiction. Cecily made the introductions as Ethan loomed over the table. He looked like an Ivy League quarterback. Blond hair and a lantern jaw, and one of those bodies that formed a V, wide shoulders and a tiny waist. I watched his eyes scan the table, resting on each of us and putting us in categories (same as I was doing to him, to be honest), and then his eyes landed on Martha. Her pale midwestern skin reddened considerably. Ethan asked us what we were all drinking, then bounded off to the bar like a dog playing fetch. I looked over at Larry, sitting next to Martha, and saw that he had seen the same thing I had, that Martha had fallen in love at first sight, or something like it, with this handsome stranger.