Burn It Down My Witches

They sit together on the back porch watching the evening sun turn the sky a shade of orange that reminds Annie of mango sherbet, but stops herself from speaking until the ball of light disappears behind the darkened rooftops and there is no more color shining through the maple tree’s long branches just beginning to fill the spaces between its sturdy limbs with hundreds of green leaves. “I miss the tree house, but the view is definitely better since we took it down,” Annie announces between taking puffs from the joint in her right hand.

“I love this porch, I’ve been sitting her enjoying my last cigarette of the day since the day we moved in. Feels like I’ve been a thousand different people since then, but always in this same place,” Dottie answers, picking up her unlit cigarette from the edge of the crystal ashtray.

“And I feel like I’ve been to a thousand different places, but never really changed from the girl that loved that tree house.” Annie feels the longing and truth of her words pull on her heart and sighs. “I want what you have, Mom. A place that makes sense to me and makes my life feel purposeful.”

“Mmm,” is all Dottie can think to say as she lights her cigarette and exhales a long wisp of smoke that disappears beyond the mesh screen. “I left Maine hoping to prove myself right and not hoping prove somebody else wrong. Other people thought I had no right to be this person, but here I am.”

Annie smiles at her mom and thinks of what is was like on those first nights in Cambridge when they’d left all they knew in Maine in search something better. “You were brave to come here, and Charlie did make you happy.”

“Happy enough,” she answers with a wink and a grin. “What makes you happy, honey? Besides weed? JP?” Dottie asks with her gaze on her daughter, the cigarette smoke lifting into swirls above her right hand.

Annie keeps her eyes on Dottie’s manicured fingers and watches the smoke of her lit cigarette twirl into small funnels above her head. “We’re still figuring out a way to move forward,” she answers with a slight catch in her throat.  “Says he’s been writing a lot with all the time he has now that he’s on the island, and I know that’s how he figures things out. He says a song is proof that people can do things together.”

“I don’t know what that means, sweet heart – but sounds like it’s a good thing,” Dottie answers before taking another long drag from her lit cigarette.

“It’s funny, you know, that we travelled the world but none of us really knew how to live outside ourselves. You know what I learned on the road? I learned  that I don’t really know much!” She laughs as she lifts the joint to her lips with a deep inhale and smiles as she watches the white smoke of her exhale float into the night sky. “But by seeing so many different places and people, I also could see that most of life’s experiences are universal, yet weirdly still unique and specific. We exist with the world but we believe, or act as if we believe, we are owed dominion over her. Maybe that’s the beginning of misogyny? Maybe that’s why so many religions make a concerted effort to control women?”

“You talk crazy when you’re high,” Dottie laughs, raspy from use and tobacco.

“I was hurt by Lorenzo, I wouldn’t have run away if I hadn’t been. And the shame, it burdened me. But I understand now it had nothing to do with me, it was his choice. And JP, he saved me.”

“You didn’t need saving, honey. You always knew what you wanted, and you usually got what you wanted but wanting Lorenzo, well, that was . . . unfortunate.”

Annie takes another hit of the joint she is holding, burnt close to the tip, as she thinks of how it had been with Lorenzo, before the night in the tree house. How they would spend their days together on their bikes, exploring the neighborhoods of Cambridge. She had learned that not far from their familiar streets of wooden two-family houses, close enough to see into each other’s windows, was a tunnel under a train track that led to manicured estates that were slightly hidden by fences or high hedges. They rode the winding hill up and around the empty tennis courts, past the mid-century modern structure made of cement and odd shaped windows, toward the stoic brick building that Annie thought looked like a medieval tower.

On the day he’d asked, she’d raced him up the hill and was ahead when she took a sharp left turn and stopped when her vision came upon the green-copper roof that looked like a soldier’s helmet, the observatory. Lorenzo was riding in small circles in the rectangular black-top parking lot, his eyes gazing upon the bell-tower of St. Peter’s across the street, getting his nerve to ask her.

Annie looks out at the full moon rising above the neighbors chimney. “It was a night like this,” she says, overwhelmed by the memory but drawn to remember it. “He asked me at the observatory. He wanted to meet in the tree house because Lorenzo loved that tree and said trees are better than people and that humans could learn from trees because they are generous, they share their branches for animals and give us shade and trees have deep roots that soak up water and do more for the earth on which they stand than any person. He wanted that tree house to be our sacred space.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” Dottie remarks with her eyes focused on the branches where the platform of the tree house had been.

“He’d wanted to, once before.” She breathes in deep bringing up the memory buried beneath so many others. “It was our last summer before college. We were at a party, we were pretty drunk, and it felt so exciting, I don’t think I’d ever felt that much expectation before, or after, until JP.” She laughs surprised by the sensation she suddenly feels of  their tingling bodies that felt otherworldly, like together she and Lorenzo were connected to the universe. “But we couldn’t do it. We fell asleep,” she laughs. “We fell asleep on the floor in my room holding hands and facing each other. The caps of our knees touching. That was it, and for almost two years we’d gone different ways and I just stopped thinking about him that way. But he wanted to know how it felt, just once. And when he asked again, I said yes.”

“That surprises me, you know considering everything with Nona.”

“Surprised, that doesn’t come close to the feeling I had when I agreed. And once I did he wanted everything to be perfect and I thought it should be a sort of ceremony, an indoctrination. I brought the candles,” Annie says casually lighting the tip of a joint that she pulled from behind her right ear, her mind filled with  visions from her past.

“Go on.”

“He surprised me, honestly. It was the first weekend in October, my first weekend home sophomore year. MIT wasn’t far in in distance, but when I was there I felt far from home. I was so happy to see him, be with an old friend. And he wanted my help.”

“Really?” Dottie answers, eyes squinted as she taps the tip of her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Yes, he said he was starting to think his years at St. Paul’s were a mistake and he needed my help. Honestly I was angry, at first.” She can see herself riding her bike fast past the symmetrical stained-glass-windows that dotted the yellow-brick walls of St. Peter’s church, and around the statue of Mary with her head bowed at the corner of the hill, as she rode down toward the river. “I took off after he asked, but he chased me to the river, yelling my name but I couldn’t hear him. I still beat him to the river and I dropped my bike on the bank and sat. I was crying when he found me, and he promised me nothing would change. That we would always be together. That he was considering carefully what it would mean to be a priest and he still didn’t know what he wanted, but that we would always have each other. I believed him, it was his idea.”

 “But you agreed to have sex in the tree house.”

“I don’t know, honestly, we’d spent so many days and nights in that tree house and that was our first,” she pauses, considering what she want to say, “romantic, I guess is the word, place.” She smiles.

 “I get it,” Dottie answers lighting another white cigarette, both quiet until she blows the gray smoke out the open sliding glass window.

“It was Halloween, but you knew that.”

Dottie nods her head and waves her hand without speaking a word.

“We met by the tree at midnight, after I’d finished walking the neighborhood with Maeve and divided up the candy between chocolate and everything else. I’d bargained with Maeve for a few extra pieces that I brought stuffed in my bra, a treat for after.”

Dottie’s eyes crinkle a little on the edges and she nods as she takes another puff.

“I climbed up the ladder ahead of him, and I let him look up my skirt.” She grimaces at the memory, but knows she must go on.  “When I reached the top, I turned my head and looked down and Lorenzo’s smile was sort of,” she thinks, “predatory but really sexy.” She laughs but feels the tightness of something else building in her and wonders how memories really work. “I’m pretty sure it was Lorenzo who laid out the mats and brought the quilt up, so all I had to do was set up the candles and begin the ceremony.” Annie glances up at the space where the tree house had been and considers how much more to tell Dottie. “I remember the first kiss, we sat on the mats facing each other and it reminded me of crisscross apple sauce, a stupid thing our second-grade teacher used to say, and I laughed.” She looks at Dottie who isn’t smiling. “He was looking at me and I felt seen, Mom. I felt sexy,”

“He wasn’t your first.”

“I know, but I felt sexy in a way that I hadn’t felt before. And I knew at that moment I was going to give him what he wanted and that I couldn’t, wouldn’t,  ask for anything in return. I could see he was grateful,” she says slowly. “But he had aggression issues, I can see that now. He didn’t know he could hurt me, but he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the obvious part that he abandoned me when I needed him, but of course that was after.”

Dottie nods and keeps her eyes on Annie as she inhales on the burning cigarette.

“We had condoms and he was really excited to try everything since, well, he thought that maybe that was his only chance. Three times, that’s how many times we had sex.”

“You don’t have to share everything.”

“I want to. I need to. There’s been too much shame and it’s hurt everyone.”

Dottie nods and waves her hand in a gesture for Annie to continue.

“But like they say, the third time’s a charm. In our case not sure who the charm was for, but the third time the condom didn’t work. I felt it slip, and when I pushed to get him out it excited him and he ejaculated, in me. And that’s how it happened.”

“Is that when you knocked over the candles?”

Annie shakes her head. “And you know what he said, after all the sex and the drama of almost burning the tree house down?”

“No, what did the Lorenzo say.”

“He said thank you.” Annie hangs her head in shame. “I loved him, he knew that, and all he could say was thank you. I’d thought he could love me, too. I thought the sex would change his resolve, but it didn’t. Turns out he couldn’t love me that way. It wasn’t possible.”

“Well we are all lucky that Lorenzo was a proper eagle scout and always insisted on having a fire extinguisher in the tree house just in case.” Dottie reminds Annie moving her chair a little closer to her daughter.

“By the time you and Charlie ran outside the fire was out and I took out my frustration on you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you to go away, I think I said ‘Mama go away! Which are the meanest words in the world when all you wanted to do was make sure I was safe. I’m sorry.”

Annie looks at her mom and sees she is tired and in the silence on the porch they can hear the hum of the humidifier in Charlie’s bedroom.

Dottie says, “You can’t change the past, baby, but you know what I’d love to hear you say.”

“You were right, Mom. You have always been right about Lorenzo.”

Dottie turns her gaze to the moon full in the sky and considers what she has heard.  “You know Lorenzo is the caretaker of Nona’s dreams, and his fear of making decisions comes from his fear of breaking her dream and breaking her heart. You always knew he couldn’t be yours. Lorenzo chose his own prison and broke his own heart. That’s his bitter pill to swallow.”

“Sometimes,” Annie says, “it felt like it would never be sunny again, that I’d never laugh again and was scared my life was over.”

“We do crazy things when we’re scared, but sometimes those crazy things work out.”

“I was scared,” Annie admits taking Dottie’s hands in her own. “Maybe that’s why I ran away with JP.”