Spells by Jaime Campbell

When she’s in the living room, the bedroom or kitchen, Meredith feels just as alone as she did in the old house in Tustin—the flatlands her new neighbors call it. She goes out into the yard, though, and the hills have a presence she had not anticipated. The oaks and the wind chat her up, whisper an idea to her. She recognizes its smothering strength, its insistence to be heard right
away. It feels like what?

Company—an overly protective friend or mother, palming her chin, directing her gaze right at it. A fever, some call it, that returns swiftly, as if it never left her once she got pregnant with her daughter Cass so many years ago now. What will it do to her this time? What trade-offs will glimmer with new reasonableness, Meredith wonders, as she takes off her clothes.

She dives into the deep end with an Olympic splash. The pool is inhabited with frogs from the creek, but Meredith doesn’t mind. She swims to the rhythm of their ribbet-ribetting, crosses the pool one-two- three times and stops to take in the ridge line across the canyon from her house on the hill. Mark Ridge, the neighbors call it. She continues with the breast stroke, lap after lap—tries to swim the fever out of her. After an hour, she is tired and gets out. The towel warms her, and she still feels it—the fever, as she slaps a tiny mosquito against her arm and goes inside to call her ex-husband Homer.

§

Someone has abandoned a People magazine on the bar. It has that boy on the cover—the one who died a few months ago. Meredith sips her bourbon and flips the thin, waxy pages until she gets to the cover story.

He had a daughter. She had not known that, had not known much of anything about Kurt Cobain. And a wife, fine. But a daughter. Her name is Frances and Meredith cannot let the tragedy of this go. She finishes her drink and orders a shot, tries to throw back the way this information snags on her heart, compresses it into aching. Frances—what a name for a modern baby, she thinks. What a name.

She wonders how long it would take for her to walk home. Down the highway, over the windy, steep Grade Road, and into Modjeska Canyon—her new home. Too long, she decides. A bunch of her neighbors are probably amongst her. One of them might give her a ride, but she is shy even when she drinks. She can wait it out or drive drunk. She ponders that. Why not? Drive
drunk. It’s not far. She’s not pregnant yet.

Instead, she plays pool by herself. No one uses the table, so she racks them, placing the one ball at the apex, centering the eight. She and Homer used to play, make good money. She chalks her cue and then leans over the table, her loose fitting shirt riding high, revealing her bare stomach, which is soft but does not fold over her jeans. Her Calvins are from before Cass was born, but she pulled them out of a trunk after moving, slipped them on, her hips smooth bumps the denim glided right over without impeding the fit. How about that, she thought. She never really considered until then that she was the same size as she’d been more than fifteen years ago, no matter how far away her twenty-three- year-old self might seem. Running, swimming, vegetarianism all matter, she guesses.

“You content playing on your own?” Abram isn’t tall or short. Fat or thin. His entire physical presence is the mama-bear, middle of everything. Wavy brown hair. His skin a shade more golden brown than his eyes. A slight Mexican accent. Meredith feels it in that first glance he gives her, his middleness, his easy-to- be-around demeanor. She wants it right away—to be in the presence of this freedom from worry, this absence of rigidity and discomfort.

They play a few games, have a few drinks, and then he wants her to go to his place. She agrees, gets in his old Chevy truck thinking she’ll go anywhere with him; anywhere. He takes a right on the highway, and just as he builds up speed, he slows to take another right, onto Modjeska Grade Road. The engine works hard, hefting them through the steep curves and into her neighborhood. Just before the fire station, he veers to the left, eventually pulling into a driveway and getting out to open a wooden gate. He’s one of her neighbors and she laughs.

“What?” he says, returning to the driver’s seat and pulling the car forward past the horses—he has two of them. Goats, too. She sees a few turkeys, up in a tree of all places.

Abrams sees her eyeing the turkeys. “That’s how the gobblers escape the coyotes at night,” he says.

She takes all this in—this farm behind a small gated driveway she would never have known was here, and she says, “We’re neighbors.”

“I know everyone in this canyon. You musta bought the doctor’s house—the big one at the top of the hill with that,” he feels his front teeth with his tongue, “pool.”

“Yeah,” she says. She almost ignores his veiled judgement about the pool, but then says,“What’s wrong with the pool?”

“Is there something wrong with it?”

“It just sounded like maybe you thought there was.”

“Some people around here, they resist such overdevelopment of the land. It’s just one pool, though,” he says, picking up her hand and sliding his fingertips along the inner side of her forearm.

“Doctor’s house, you called it?”

“The guy who had it built back in ’74—he was a doctor. The old timers still call it that.”

They sit on the covered porch and jump right in—his breath, his mouth warm and inviting against her own. He is out of his jeans in minutes, and at the sight of him, Meredith wants out of her own. She slips them off and feels a stinging on her thigh.

“These damn mosquitos,” she says.

“They aren’t mosquitos,” Abram says. “They’re smaller. Way bigger pains in the ass, though—they can fit though the holes on a screen. No-see-ums. That’s what we call them, anyway.”

“I used to live just fifteen miles away, but I haven’t seen these before.”

“The ecosystem is different out here. Wilder. These guys like the creek.”

She looks into the dark behind him and thinks it isn’t just the ecosystem, as she pulls off her shirt. It’s a whole different world, different culture, isolated in the middle of Orange County, and so few people know it’s here. She falls in love a little bit then. Not with Abram, but with the canyons as she slips off her panties, too, and lets her body share its rhythm with Abram’s.

In the morning, he walks her up the hill, and they go another round in the pool.

“You’re right—best thing about this place,” he says as he floats on his back, his semi- erect penis above water.

§

Meredith drinks a merlot as Cass comes through the door. She makes herself at home so easily even though it’s only her second time at the place, flipping the cabinets open until she finds the wine glasses and pours herself some.

“You’re listening to this?” she says, topping off Meredith’s glass.

“Yep.”

The speakers shed power chords, and they fall on Meredith so smoothly, so gently despite the hard sound, despite it not being music from her own generation—“Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Homer picks them up and they drive to the Dead show, the whole night a simulation of the past. She and Cass spin and spin as Homer smokes a joint and watches them, eventually joining in. The band breaks into “Morning Dew” as Meredith feels the spell of the familial reenactment, feels the pull into it, her consciousness, her body winding down the drain, into old, familiar roles.

That night, Cass sleeps in a bedroom that Meredith calls Cass’s room, the one with all her CDs and books and the winding road of Grateful Dead ticket stubs along the wall, even though Cass is only in town for the show. Most nights Cass sleeps in her car nowadays, following the Dead all around the country. Just like Meredith did in the 70s with Homer, and like they did in the 80s all three of them as a family. Now it is the 90s and Cass goes it alone, and Meredith hates it, wants her daughter home with her.

Homer and Meredith sleep upstairs in her room, even though it feels like their room for the night. But from the moment Meredith awakens, the room feels like hers alone again. They try and recapture the magic, go for a walk, come back and put on a bootleg from their early days. Something is terribly off, though. They cannot conjure the feeling of their togetherness.

After Homer leaves, Meredith hears humming, chanting down the hall. The door is cracked and Cass has the curtains drawn, candles lit in a circle surrounding that same People magazine with Kurt Cobain on the cover. Cass’s eyes are closed, but Meredith senses her daughter knows she is there anyway.

Cass stays through dinner and Meredith asks her, “What were you doing earlier, with the candles and the chanting?”

She expects Cass to be secretive, embarrassed. Instead, she is matter-of- fact, confident, as she sits across the dinner table from Meredith.

“I was trying to conjure Kurt’s spirit, or at least channel his artistic energy, his creativity—fill the house with it for you.”

“Do you think it worked?”

She takes a moment, closing her eyes and breathing in. “I do,” she says.

§

Meredith tells Homer first, even though this is the first time she’s seen him all summer. They play pool in her living room, by the picture windows that overlook the neighborhood and showcase Flores Peak, which had wild flowers on its backside when she moved in. The summer, though, has left it bare and brown.

She assumes Homer will be easier—he’s Cass’s father after all. She waits until he makes his shot—the six in the corner pocket.

He is judgmental in a way she’s experienced time and time again, yet still surprises her because he views himself as such a free spirit, such a breath of fresh air. Open-minded lightness.

“What?” he says, indicating not that he has not heard her, but that he cannot believe her.

“How many other possibilities are there?” He leans his stick against the wall.

“Just one,” she says. Meredith knows he has a right to be upset, but their entire past suggests that he owes her more understanding than this.

“This isn’t you,” he says, as if confirming it for the both of them.

She realizes then, though, “It is. It is who I am. This is who I’ve become—there’s no going back.” Is it the canyon, she wonders? Has this place changed her, conjured a more carefree, irresponsible Meredith? She sits on the edge of the pool table even though at the old house she never let Cass sit on it because it was important to keep the table level. Here, though, with the shifting floors, the movers spent an hour trying to fine tune it, but it was a lost cause. It would never be completely level—the balls always carrying a drag of extra momentum at the end of each shot.

“You know that’s not true,” Homer says.

“I want this baby,” she says. She wants him to leave so she can cry—his suggestion means she cannot cry in front of him. But then she does anyway. Is it the hormones? She cannot control the emotions, their push to get out. He pulls her close, off the table, and tells her, “It’s gonna be okay.”

She can feel his fury, though, and his pity for her. It’s right there in the way he pats her back and then pulls away.

She tells Abram the next morning. She makes him coffee, and they sit by the pool.

“The other guy is Cass’s father?” Abram wears a tie-dye shirt not befitting the style Meredith expects of him.

“Yes,” she says.

“That white guy who was here with you walkin’ around a few weeks back?”

“Yes,” she repeats. A flock of doves rises from one of the oaks, and the sound and sight of it marks the moment for Meredith. That’s right, she thinks. Get away, fly away.

“Well, if she comes out white, we’ll know she’s his.” His left eye falls in a gentle wink the rest of his face does not participate in.

§

The new moon hides in darkness and the Santa Ana winds blow the clouds away, allowing the stars to shine in the crisp night sky. Meredith leaves all the lights off. Her clothes are off, too, and her knees are dry and ashy, like a child’s. Her legs haven’t been shaved in who knows how long.

Her toes curl over the pool’s edge as the wind pushes against her and she dives in. Something is wrong, though, with the pool. What’s on her? She has a frantic, heart-racing response to the seaweed-like feeling against her skin.

It’s those bugs—hundreds upon hundreds, maybe thousands, of those no-see-ums float, dead in the pool, which is cloudy. She pushes her palms into the cement that borders the pool and gets out, the bugs stuck to her wet skin. She shivers her way to the filter, opens the lid, where there are so many more of them, they’ve clogged the thing.

She should go inside, shower off, but she remains there in the night air, growing colder and colder. The winds have lost their heat from earlier that day, and her flesh rises in goosebumps. Her jaw tightens against chattering, but still she remains outside, staring at her bug-covered flesh. She looks diseased, she thinks. She glances over at the oversized towel on the chaise lounge, thinking she doesn’t deserve it, imagining she has pneumonia. Hypothermia? What would it take? How could she literally embody the internal cold that bewitches her?

She reaches for her abdomen—bloated but not yet grown. She wants to feel a kick, a hiccup, anything, but it’s too early. The wind really picks up then, gusts of it pushing against her, against the house, which rattles and shakes so much she thinks there could be a ghost in there making all that racket. Maybe that dead boy—the rockstar. Maybe Cass’s spell, resurrection—whatever—maybe it worked. Meredith understands her own deep-down belief in spirits, in ghosts.

She laughs at herself—why would he bother with her? The question, at first, is rhetorical but then becomes serious, worth asking. Meredith imagines a divine connection between him and her baby, his spirit drawn to this fresh, new body growing inside her.

She sprints inside then, slamming the door behind her and continuing upstairs where she turns on the shower—hot. She steps in, holds her face up to the water, and drinks some of it. The warmth brings her physical relief, but she pretends it is a larger erasure of distress.

§

Abram runs his fingers along her belly, which has finally grown into the definitive form and size of a pregnant abdomen. “It has such a nice shape,” he says. “So supple yet strong—protective.” He smiles at Meredith, whom he hasn’t seen much of since she broke the news. But here they are in her living room lying on the couch together. Snuggling. He gets the urge then, and his hands feel her skin, inching here, inching there.

She doesn’t want him to stop because his touch feels like absolution. She turns and climbs on top of him, and she wants his forgiveness as he slips himself inside her. She has so much guilt, even though she knows it is a double standard—who knows who else Homer or Abram slept with that month. She never even asked them. She sets aside her shame then, and it becomes this thing that watches her, vexes her as it remains curled up on the floor, her body insisting it’s way into orgasm anyway.

Afterward, she slides her hip toward the couch, and they lie there, her belly against his side.

He breaks the silence. “Hey—what’s wrong with your pool?”

“It’s those bugs, those no-see-ums. A bunch of them died and clogged the filter.” Meredith realizes then that she hasn’t seen another since the incident, as if the entire local population died off, committed mass suicide in her pool.

“I’ll come back tomorrow, in the afternoon.” He gets up, gets dressed. “I can fix that for you. You should be able to swim out there,” he pats her bare belly one last time, “in your condition.”

He leaves and she wonders if maybe she shouldn’t get the amnio—verify paternity, even if it puts her baby at risk.

Indignation floods her. No, she thinks. They can wait. She stands, gets dressed. They can all wait. She doesn’t need anything she isn’t already getting. She’s one hundred percent fine.

§

Meredith swims through the typical Southern California fall, which is a windier version of summer with slightly longer, slightly cooler nights.

When winter finally arrives, her pregnant body embraces its relief, and she is pleased to find that Modjeska stays about five degrees cooler than the flatlands. She pulls out the yellow pages and flips it back and forth until she finds the list of chimney sweeps. The realtor warned her not to use the fireplace or wood burning stove until they were cleaned.

Ralph the chimney sweep from Dana Point pulls up in his truck, gets out, and stands there looking at the hills, which mesmerize everyone their first visit to the top of Olive Hill.

Meredith watches him climb the outdoor stairs, and when he sees her, he smiles and says, “I’ve lived in Orange County my whole life, and I never knew this was out here.”

He checks the fireplace in Meredith’s bedroom and the wood burning stove in the living room and says, “Both of them have hardly been used.”

Meredith uses them both, though, through the winter and into spring. Even once her belly is huge, she hunkers down in front of the potbelly stove and adds logs, which Abram chops for her. He carries them up the stairs, too, and teaches her how to use dryer lint for kindling. She is warm all winter, despite the broken furnace. It even gets hot sometimes, when she has both fires going at once. That potbelly stove makes it feel downright tropical if you feed it enough wood. She falls asleep on the couch one night and wakes up sweating, has to crack the windows even. The cool air filters in, and the relief is sensual, breathtaking.

§

Birth this second time is different, of course. Her body hasn’t forgotten the widening, the pushing it did with Cass. Labor is only a few hours. Frances is born in the canyon at the top of the hill, in Meredith’s pool. They cranked the heat up for weeks, waiting for the spring baby.

Frances’ face is red, her hair dark—just like Cass, just like Meredith, who cannot really tell if her daughter is Mexican or not. She has no stronger inclination of who her child’s father is than she did when Frances was inside her. The motherly love she has for Frances is so singular, exclusive.

The midwife cleans them up, cocoons them in bed. After she leaves, Cass is there and no one else, and the three women are an immediate family. Meredith doesn’t care who the father is because she foresees how peripheral either man will be in Frances’ life. Even Cass will probably be a bigger influence.

Cass who says, “I want to hold her,” and then when Frances rests in her arms, “I hope she’s dad’s. So we can be a whole family.”

Meredith feels the afterpains then, which remind her of the initial contractions she had with Cass, who is still so young, so naive when it comes to her daddy. She wants to tell her they will never be a family again, not like they were when she was a kid, no matter who Frances’ father is. Instead, as her body tightens, fighting contortionistic pain in her abdomen, she says to Cass, “She looks like you,” which seems to satisfy all three of them.

§

The night is continually interrupted by feedings and more afterpains, and what she’s done shines with permanency. A person. She is relieved the next eighteen years at least have been accounted for—she will always have something to worry about, always have a valid reason to ponder. And who will she be? Meredith is so excited to find out, to let Frances’ personality roll out, unfold into inevitable traits, markers, and ways of being. She resents Cass for being who she is—a roamer more like her father than her—but she’ll be ready this time. She won’t resent Frances no matter who she is. She could be anyone, our children can turn out to be anyone, she knows that now.

Is it her age? She has already woken up so many times tonight, sat up to feed Frances. Her well of patience has barely been tapped, though. Poor Cass, she thinks. The older ones always get cheated in this way.

§

Meredith must hold Frances down as the lab technician sticks a needle in Frances’ arm, taking blood to determine its type, to determine which man is her father. Frances shrieks, screams, quivers. Meredith cannot believe where her hands are—pressing down on her baby’s shoulders while another lab tech has her legs.

Still, she savors this time, these last few hours when Frances is fatherless and hers alone.

She has no preference for either man, none at all.

They go home and sleep and nurse and ignore the phone when it rings. She lets the machine pick it up, lets the machine hold the answer for them for a little bit longer, for a day, even. Why not?

She opens the window for the breeze, and one of those bugs lands on Frances’ forehead. The first one of the season. Meredith shoos it away, but it circles back. She sets Frances down, who begins to cry. Meredith claps her hands together and kills the no-see-um when Homer walks in, like he used to live here, or like he still does. Like she hasn’t moved to this other world in the
middle of strip mall, tract housing Orange County that is her home, not his.

“Did they call yet?” he asks. And then he looks at Frances—his maybe daughter. She diminishes the worry from his face, and he picks her up. Meets her. This is how we meet babies—hold them in our arms. Bounce them, recreating the jostling of the womb.

Meredith remembers how good he was with Cass when she was this little, and she feels the familial spell creeping up on her again, dragging her toward its apex as she imagines deleting the message on the machine, telling them both Frances is Homer’s girl, just like Cass, just like her, as Frances responds to Homer’s sway.

Meredith steps toward the answering machine, looks down at it—a flashing red number one blinks at her over and over, steady rhythmic pulses.

She hits play and the result that is announced echoes through the room, up its vaulted ceilings, as if it is a chant or a song of its own, power chords and all. It breaks the spell, maybe for good this time, perhaps casting a new enchantment as Meredith lets Homer hold onto Frances, lets him pretend she’s his for a moment longer.

Jaime Campbell is a writer who lives in Modjeska Canyon, a rural oasis tucked within Southern California’s suburban Orange County. Her fiction has appeared in The Ear.