Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,84

hag now. Oh, it’s all right,” she said at the look on my mother’s face. “No harm in calling me that. You weren’t wrong. It’s what I am. Nothing at all wrong with being a hag.” She gave me a look. “Nothing wrong with being smart that way. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to think again.” She held out a hand to me, which I took. “I’ve come to help Ellie. Who is also a hag, you know.”

And I, in that moment, became an oak. A snake. A bright bird.

But then Samuel said, “Why can’t I be a hag?” and I was a girl again, just like that.

She smiled at him. “I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“What’s a hag?” he said again, just days after Esther had answered with a witch.

“I’m a hag,” she said.

“Oh.” Samuel looked at her for a long moment. “Is there some other kind of hag I could be?”

“Of course,” Cate said. “But you might need to grow up for a while first.”

He shook his head. “You said Ellie’s a hag and she’s only twelve.”

At which Cate nodded. “Well, some people are born to it. Others, like me, need to work at it for a long time.”

When she struggled to rise from her chair, I held out my arm and Larkin came to help. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to meet your father, Ellie.”

So we slowly made our way back to the bedroom where my father lay sleeping no matter how hard the jonquils outside the window blew their yellow horns.

Cate stopped in the doorway.

I thought she’d been brought up short by the sight of my father.

But after a moment she started forward again, leading us not to him but to my mother’s mandolin.

Which Cate picked up carefully. Tenderly.

She smiled at me, my mother. “My son made this.”

She hadn’t needed to look inside to know that.

I nodded. “Larkin told me.”

Cate looked at me, amazed. “Do you play?”

“A little,” I said. “My mother does.”

Cate turned to her, holding out the mandolin. “And will you?”

“Oh, perhaps later,” my mother said, taking the mandolin and setting it aside. “It needs tuning and—”

“Oh, it’s all right. I understand,” Cate said. I’d never heard her sound so sad.

I pulled the rocking chair close to my father. Larkin settled her in it carefully.

The rest of us took up stations around the bed.

My father was as he’d been. Pale. Still. Thin enough to break.

“You said he’s been asleep since January?” Cate said.

“He has,” I said.

“Then where’s his beard?”

“We shave him, every day,” Esther said proudly.

“You shave him?” Cate looked at my mother.

My mother nodded. “Should we not?”

“Oh, it’s not a matter of should or should not. I just don’t know why you’d bother.”

My mother looked confused again. “He has always been a clean-shaven man,” she said. “In the beginning, when we didn’t shave him, he began to look too—”

“Dirty?” Cate said.

“Wild,” my mother said.

Cate shrugged. “Nothing wrong with wild.”

It was odd to be in the room with so many people, all of us clustered around the bed looking at my father, as if he were a bug in a jar.

Esther put the big book on the bed. “What do you want to try first?”

But Cate shook her head. “Nothing written down.”

She turned to Larkin. “Thank you for taking such good care of me for so long.”

And there, in those twelve words, I heard the beginning of some kind of goodbye.

Larkin must have heard the same thing. “I didn’t take care of you,” he said, his voice trembling. “You took care of me.”

She nodded. “Then we’re even.” Her lips twisted. “But now I wonder if you would go home and look after your mother for a while. I have some things to do here, and they are things best done alone.”

Larkin looked stricken. “Without me?”

“I think so.” And the tears she’d been holding spilled down her cheeks all at once.

“But I can help.”

“Not this time. But, oh, my sweet boy, don’t you ever forget how much you’ve already done. And so much more to come.” She held her little doll out toward him.

He took the doll. Thrust it into his pocket and left his hand there with it.

The others must have heard the goodbye now, too, since they all, even Samuel, looked much as Larkin did, though we were not all kin. Though we were.

Then Cate said her old blessing. And again. And a third time, her tears like rain.

Which was when Larkin began to cry, too, bending to hold her in