“I’m the proof,” I say.
His eyes dart to where I am. Where, to him, my voice comes from.
“Yes.”
“What happened?” I ask. “Why did he curse me?”
My father shakes his head mournfully. “It wasn’t you he was cursing. Or me. I hadn’t even met your mother yet. It was her, Stephen. You have to understand. This was done long before you were born.”
Elizabeth takes hold of my hand. As if she knows that will require some of my concentration. As if she knows I need to let my father speak on.
“Tell us,” she says.
My father sees the way her hand shapes itself around mine. He knows. “As I said, Stephen’s mother’s childhood was not a good one. Cursecasting is a powerful ability—but it doesn’t actually pay the rent. So Maxwell rambled from job to job, getting angrier and angrier, which made him more inclined to lay down curses.
“When your mother was young—seven or eight—she tried to run away. As a result, your grandfather laid a curse on her, so she couldn’t leave him. She had to be within a certain radius of his presence at all times, like an invisible leash. She would try to run, or would try to stand still while he was moving away, but it wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t feel pain—she would just be unable to get very far before her body made her follow him.
“I don’t know why he wanted her around. Partly, I guess, to take care of him—make his meals, manage their squalor. And I imagine he was lonely. If I’m in a generous mood, I may even try to believe he was grieving over the loss of his wife. But at heart, he was an evil, tortured man who used his evil to torture others. His talent was cruelty. If a shopkeeper made him wait too long, he could cast a spell so that the shopkeeper would go home and start to forget his wife. Her name, her existence, everything. Or he could curse a politician into a weakness for female campaign workers, or a judge into a weakness for a certain casino. There was a limit to the power he had, but he used it when he could.
“Eventually, he loosened the leash on your mother so she could go to school, but she could never really go more than a town’s distance away. The only bright side of the curse was that he couldn’t do anything else to her—you can, apparently, only cast a single curse on anyone at a given time. He tried to pretend this wasn’t true, and tried to threaten her with others. But she started calling his bluff. She started acting out—refusing to make his meals, refusing to do his bidding. It infuriated him. And while he couldn’t curse her outright, he certainly wasn’t afraid to use his fists or his voice. She couldn’t go to the authorities, because even if they’d tried to put him away, she knew that she was bound to him, and that there was no way she could avoid going wherever he went.
“She didn’t want you to know any of this. I feel—well, I feel I’m telling you a story that isn’t mine. I know you don’t think so, but I miss her every hour of every day. I couldn’t stay—she understood that—but I still miss her. Some people are given relatively fair lives. But others—they carry the burden of the unfairness of the world. That was your mother. Until you were born, she could never get a break.”
“But wasn’t I the worst thing of all?” I can’t help but ask. “I mean, that’s what this is leading up to, isn’t it?”
“No. You were the best thing. Even if you were . . . born the way you were. She loved you unconditionally.”
“But what happened with her father?” Laurie asks. “I mean, obviously the curse was broken and she got away, right?”
“Yes. I’m getting to that. Somehow, she managed to make it to high school. She didn’t have many friends—there were always places they wanted her to go that she couldn’t, and she was afraid to bring any of them home, lest her father appear. She started to become obsessed with the source of the cursecasting—she tried to follow her father, to see if he met up with any other cursecasters, but he never seemed to. She ransacked their house when he wasn’t there, looking for books or journals or any other record of how the cursecasting worked. But there wasn’t anything, not even a stray word to go by. She had no idea how it worked, only that it kept her trapped.
“Without telling her father, she started to work after school, to save up money. When she got to senior year, she applied to colleges and got into some of them. She brought up the subject with her father, and he told her absolutely not—she was never going to leave him.
“Desperate, she resorted to what she called playing the curse—that is, giving in to it completely, and taking it to an extreme. If he wasn’t going to let her go, she wasn’t going to let him go either. She stuck by his side. She followed him everywhere. He’d yell at her, and she’d yell back. He’d push her, and she’d push back. For the first time, she started to see weakness on his part. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t cast another spell without negating the first one.
“He tried to make her promises. He told her she was born to be a cursecaster too. That he would teach her. That she didn’t need college—she had another, greater calling. But she wouldn’t relent. She stopped talking to him. She would still be there, wherever he looked. But she wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t acknowledge him. It drove him crazy. She wouldn’t let go. She played the curse harder. And eventually he broke.”
My father takes a deep breath. I am still holding mine.
“I don’t know exactly what happened. I don’t know what led to the fight that ended everything. Your mother never told me; she said it wasn’t important, that it was the accumulation of things that caused the break, not any one in particular. All the anger, all the resentment—it built and built, and your grandfather didn’t have any other way to release it, except as a curse. A cruel, cruel curse.
“Your mother wanted her freedom. He said fine, she could finally have her freedom. But it came at a price. No longer would she or anyone she loved be able to see him. He would be invisible to her for as long as he lived. There would be no going back. And just as he would be invisible to her, so too would her children be invisible—not just to her, but to everyone. The old curse was over. This was the new one.”
“Why didn’t he just make her invisible?” Laurie asks.
“First, I’m not sure cursecasting works that way,” my father replies. “But second—and more important—he knew what he was doing. He knew that it would be much harder to watch her own child suffer for her actions than it would be if she suffered herself. And so it was.”