says the witch is weird, I’ve always loved her. Loved how Ted still brought her out in my teens, my twenties, even on my wedding day. He’s a man of science, after all. Has no time for playing. So the witch from Forest Near is special. She’s someone Ted becomes to make me laugh, to show he cares. And right now, she’s an apology.
“But to be serious,” he says, sitting back in his chair, just a man again, nothing magical about him. “I couldn’t tell you I was leaving because when the ideas are swelling, I can’t speak. It would be like puncturing a balloon!”
My smile wilts, but there’s still a bit of laughter in my voice as I humor him. “Okay, Ted. But a few words don’t make too big of a hole.”
He shakes his head emphatically. “I can’t expect you to understand. Maybe you would if you’d chosen psychology over”—he grimaces like some cheesy B-movie actor—“social work.”
I stiffen. Ted’s pulling out all his favorites tonight. The witch from Forest Near. A crack about my profession, which he believes is basically slumming it.
“And I was right, wasn’t I?” he adds. “Cooper gave you a ride.”
“Cooper creeps me out. You know that.”
Ted reaches into the Nilla Wafers box, pops one into his mouth, and talks while he chews. “What, that business with his tattoo?” A spray of crumbs shoots out. “Really, Fern, I would have thought you’d outgrown that by now. No?”
Ted was always fascinated by this particular fear of mine. Once, I came home crying about Cooper’s latest attack, how I’d practically been able to taste the honeycomb on his arm as he shoved it against my tongue, and Ted immediately steered me into his study. He made me sit in the corner—the chair is still here, the rickety interview chair with a missing spindle in its back; my body aches just glancing at it—while he pummeled me with questions to pinpoint the exact source of my fear. But I already knew the source. It was Cooper. His cruelty and one-sided games.
Now a thought slides into me, sharp and sudden as a blade.
“Wait,” I say. “Was leaving me with Cooper some sort of Experiment?”
Ted chuckles. “No, Fern.”
“But you’re all fired up,” I insist. “You’re excited about a new project. You’re working, Ted.” When he doesn’t say anything—only stares at me, unblinking and interested—I continue. “You better not be doing Experiments on me while I’m here. I’ll leave tomorrow, I swear.”
I don’t know where this threat comes from. It isn’t one I’ve ever made before, and even as I say it, I hear how hollow it sounds, as if the center of each word were scooped out.
“I’m not doing Experiments,” Ted says. “My new ideas don’t require them.” He swivels back and forth. His chair squeaks. “I recently had an epiphany about some past projects—a brilliant way to tie them together—so that’s what I’m doing. I’m connecting all these threads I thought were totally separate. It’s exhilarating. Groundbreaking! Brennan Llewellyn can eat his five-hundred-page doorstop for breakfast. And yes, I’m dipping into the notes from Experiments I’ve done with you and Mara in the past, but I don’t need to perform any new ones yet.”
Yet. My skin prickles with fresh sweat. The room reels.
“Are you telling the truth?” I ask.
“Fern.” He stamps my name into the air. “Can’t you see how busy I am?”
As he turns back toward his typewriter, he scratches his psoriasis. There are patches on the back of his neck, right at the hairline, but the one on his arm is particularly bad, the skin so red I wince. He refuses to use creams or lotions or to see a doctor with any regularity (“The itch is an affliction of the mind,” he used to say). So instead, he scratches. The sound grates against my ears, like it always has, and as I watch him scrape the scales that sprawl along the inside of his wrist, it makes my own skin itch.
I look at the inside of my arm. It would be so easy to dig my nails into last night’s marks. Keep troubling the skin without treating the cause.
“Did you ever take me to Foster?” I blurt.
Ted’s already typing. Even after decades, he still uses his pointer fingers to punch out words on his old Underwood.
“Foster?” he repeats. His voice is dim with distraction, even as he pauses, hands hovering over the keys. “Foster, New Hampshire, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Clack. Clack. Clack-clack. “No,” he says. “We never went