Chapter 72 For How Long?
Molly stood in the kitchen and looked at her mother, waiting for the part where it turned out she'd misheard something.
It didn't come.
Her mother stood on the other side of the kitchen with her hands loose at her sides and the kitchen light still on, like nothing out of the ordinary just happened, the same light that had just gone on and off and on again at the movement of her mother's fingers.
Molly’s mom stared at her with an expression that was waiting to see the aftermath of what had just happened.
Molly's mouth was open, she became aware of this and closed it. Then she opened it again because there were several things trying to come out at once and none of them could find the right order.
"I'm a witch," she said finally. The words came out flat and stunned, like she was reading them off a card someone else had written.
"Yes," her mother said.
"And you're a witch."
"Yes."
"And you've—" Molly stopped, she looked at the light fixture above her mother's head. She looked at her mother's hands, which looked exactly the way they always had. She’d watched those hands cook and clean, fold laundry and sign school forms even hold cups of tea, ordinary hands, hands she'd known her entire life. "You've always been a witch."
"Yes, Molly."
The yes landed differently from the other two yeses. It landed with a weight that the others hadn't quite carried because it contained an implication that the others hadn't quite made explicit, and once Molly let it land properly she felt something move through her that was not just shock but something sharper underneath the shock. Something that had an edge.
"Always," she repeated, and her voice had changed, her lips pressed in a thin line. The flatness had gone out of her voice, replaced by something tighter. "You have always been a witch and you didn't tell me."
Her mother's expression shifted slightly. "Molly—"
"That's what you're saying." Molly heard her own voice climbing and made a deliberate effort to keep it below the level at which Grace, upstairs, wouldn’t be able to make out actual words through the floor. The tap was still running, still covering them, she was grateful for it and furious at the need for it in equal measure. "You're standing in our kitchen telling me that you are something, that we are something.” Molly looked at her mom, “Something that changes everything about what I thought I understood about our family and you are just saying it. Right now. Like it's—like it's something you just remembered to mention."
"I know," her mother said. She said it with a quietness that was not defensive, which somehow made it worse. Defensiveness would have been easier to push against.
"How long?" Molly said. "How long have you been able to do that? To just—" she gestured at the light, the gesture carrying all the wordlessness of someone trying to describe something they still hadn't fully accepted they'd witnessed.
"My whole life," her mother said. "Same as my mother. Same as hers."
Molly pressed her fingers against the counter behind her and leaned back against it because her legs had decided they needed assistance. Her whole life. Her mother had been walking through every ordinary day of Molly's entire existence carrying something like that, cooking dinner and watching television and sitting at school concerts and grocery shopping and being in every way the version of herself that Molly had always known, and underneath all of it there had been this other thing, this real and significant other thing, and Molly had never had an idea of.
She hadn't known, she had had no inkling. And the not-knowing felt like a different thing now than it had thirty seconds ago. Now it felt deliberate. Which meant it felt like a choice her mother had made, repeatedly, every day, to keep her outside of something that was apparently hers by inheritance.
"What is Dad?" she said.
The question came out differently from the others. It was quieter and more careful, because the answer mattered in a way that she hadn't anticipated mattering when she'd walked into the kitchen to get biscuits.
Her mother's face did something complicated. The composure that had been holding through everything else shifted slightly. She looked at Molly with the expression of a woman carrying something she'd been carrying for a long time and feeling its weight more than usual.
"Your father is human," she said softly. "Completely, ordinarily human. He has no abilities, no bloodline connection. Just a person." She paused.
Molly absorbed this.
"And Daniel?" she asked, and her voice was careful around her brother's name.
Her mother's eyes closed briefly, then opened again and she held Molly's gaze.
"Daniel was human too," she said. "It passes through the female line, Molly. It has always passed through the female line in our family. Your father, your brother…" She stopped and found the continuation. "…they never had it."
Daniel had never had it. Daniel, who was gone now, who had lived and died as an ordinary person entirely outside of the world his mother and his sister had been living in without knowing they were living in it. Molly thought about that for a moment and found it was something she'd have to put down and come back to, because picking it up fully right now would take her somewhere she couldn't afford to go in this kitchen, in this conversation, with Grace upstairs and her mother looking at her from across the room with that expression.
"He wanted you to live normally," her mother said. "Your father. When you were born, when we knew you were a girl and that you would have the abilities, he asked me." She hesitated, choosing the words. "He asked me to give you the chance to be ordinary for as long as possible. To know a normal life before any of this became part of it."
Her hands moved slightly at her sides, it was a small helpless movement. "There is a spell. A binding, more accurately. It suppresses the abilities until the person is old enough, it's not permanent, it was never meant to be permanent. It keeps things dormant until—"
"Until when?" Molly said.
"Until you turn eighteen," her mother said quietly. "Which you will in a few weeks."
The kitchen was very quiet except for the running tap.
Molly looked at her own hands.
She looked at them the way she'd looked at her mother's hands thirty seconds earlier, searching them for something that wasn't visible, some mark or difference that would make what she'd been told legible in physical terms. They looked the same as they always had. They didn't look like hands that could turn lights on and off.
But neither had her mother's.
"You should have told me," Molly said. The anger in her voice had changed in quality, she sounded more hurt. "You should have told me a long time ago, when I turned sixteen, or I don’t know, there were a hundred moments when you could have said something and you didn't, and now you're telling me in our kitchen at—" she checked the time and found it was mid-morning which somehow made it more absurd, "in our kitchen in the middle of a completely insane week, and you want me to just—"
"Molly." Her mother took a step forward, her voice was soft, not pleading but close to it. "I know. I know I should have told you sooner. I have known that for longer than you might think. And then because it became easier not to disturb things, and I was afraid of exactly this." She gestured slightly, at the space between them, at Molly's face. "I was afraid of this. Of you looking at me the way you're looking at me."
Molly opened her mouth.
"And I was wrong," her mother said, before she could speak. "I was wrong to wait this long. I know that. I'm not asking you to be fine with it right now, I'm only asking you to let me explain it properly, everything, all of it, when we have time to sit down and do it the way it deserves to be done." She paused, and something appeared in her expression, it was determination. "But right now there is something that needs to happen first. And I need your help.”
Molly looked at her and pushed off from the counter. She left the biscuits where they’d fallen, forgotten entirely now, and she took several steps backwards still staring at her mom.
"Molly…” her mother said, taking a step towards her and holding out her hands, her expression pleading.
Molly shook her head slowly as tears began to spill from her eyes as her mom took another step towards her, Molly turned and ran, she went up the stairs.
She got seven steps up before she stopped.
Molly stood on the seventh step and let the tears fully fall, she balled her shirt in her fists and silently cried.
It felt like a full hour to Molly but it was only just six minutes, she stopped crying and started up the stairs once more.
At the top of the stairs, she stopped again, outside her bedroom door. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and pressed her eyes with her fingers, she breathed slowly through her nose and told herself to hold it together for thirty more seconds, just thirty, just long enough to get her face into a condition that wasn't going to announce everything the moment she opened the door.
She managed to do so before walking into her room. Grace turned to her and noticed first that her face wasn’t the way it was when she left, she noticed she took a long time and her hands were empty, meaning something must have happened downstairs.
"Molly." Grace shifted towards the edge of the bed and put her feet on the rug. "What happened? What's wrong?"
And there was something in Grace's voice, maybe it was the pure and genuine concern she had, and the worried way she looked at her that made Molly's face crumple.
She stepped forward and Grace opened her arms without saying anything else because sometimes that was the right thing to do.
Molly was fully bawling now as she walked into the hug and held on to Grace.