My heart feels permanently stuck in my gut. Anna looked even worse when I arrived to take her out after lunch and all she’s said since is “My bag, my bag, my bag, my bag” about a hundred thousand times. I’ve got it right here, but I can’t give it to her until we are out of sight.  I’m pushing this wheelchair as fast as is remotely safe and inconspicuous.

Finally, we are at a safe enough distance. I gladly offer it to her. She clutches it to her chest with both hands, like it is life itself.

“My bag, my bag, my bag, my bag…” she continues to repeat, only this time it comes out like a whispered chanting prayer of some kind.

I guess I didn’t think about what it would mean to her if I took it with me.  I just didn’t want Nurse Edna to see it. But of course it would be important. So I guess that’s about screw up number three thousand and ten for me today. I don’t know if she will forgive me. But showing up and taking her out has to count for something.

I head off the paved path and into the woods.  I’ll explain all I can in the short twenty minutes we’ve got, but first I want to get her on the ground.  It’s the least I can do with her sitting in her wheelchair in that building all day every day.

Once she’s settled—with no more elegant a drop those final inches to the ground this time than I accomplished the last time—I move to sit close to her and hand her the drug store glasses I picked up on my way.  I have no idea what 1.25 prescription does, but hopefully it will help. She looks around at a wide range of distances, checking them out, but makes no comment on them. 

“I’m sorry, Anna,” I say. “I couldn’t leave your medicine bag out, and I couldn’t put it back either.  The nurse would have seen it…”

“There are two reasons you must not let this bag leave me,” Anna says, her voice now as clear as the blue sky peaking through the tree tops. “First, it holds the little connection to magic I have available to me here. Second, if you travel with it and go anywhere near Bea, the resonance it will create with Bea’s medicine bag will be enough to lead Helene straight to my sister’s hiding place. That cannot happen.”

“Okay,” I agree readily. I’ll agree to anything, so long as I don’t disappoint Anna.

“Now, I know you want to talk about Michael, but first I must know about your meeting with Bea. Everything.  Every detail you can remember. It is all important.”

And so I tell her everything, from Scottie to Jake to my magic lesson to Mrs. Hamilton and my bowl breaking. I’m not sure why, but I’ve decided Anna is the one person in all of this I can trust, and the one person I shouldn’t hold anything back from.  Even the bad stuff.   Her responses as I speak include snorting, sighing, chuckling and outright laughter, but she doesn’t say a word.

“So then I came to see you this morning and found Michael here,” I say, waiting to go on until she says she is ready.

She ponders quite a while as I look at my watch. Already we don’t have a lot of time left and there is still so much to talk about.

“Mayden, we’ve come to a moment of truth,” she says abruptly.

“Okay,” I say, sitting up straighter to show her I’m on board.

“I invited you into our world and family life because I saw the potential for magic in you. Even so, you are an outsider. And while we desperately need an outsider, there are many risks to you and to us. Therefore, I’m afraid I will have to ask you to decide, here and now, if you are called to these risks. I realize it is a great leap to agree without knowing what you are agreeing to in specific. But I can’t go on to reveal more unless you do. It is classic to our ways, and the ways of magic, to take such leaps of faith. As an outsider, though, you wouldn’t know that, and so there is no way for you to find comfort in that knowledge. I can only ask you, therefore, to trust in your heart.”

She looks at me as if she is finished, then begins to speak with all the more sincerity. “If you are afraid, this is natural. Do not let it stop you. Fear is always with us and we can only learn when to listen, and when to move past it. What it comes to is this: If you are pulled, say yes.  If you are repelled, say no. It is as simple and profound as that, and the best wisdom I can give you.”

It seems to be my turn to be quiet for a moment, because I can’t think of what to say.  I know Anna will let me have a moment to consider and maybe even respect me more for it. But we are running out of time.

A thousand questions jam at my brain. What will it mean? What will they want? What shouldn’t I know and what will happen if I know things I shouldn’t?  I guess it all boils down to one thing. “Are you asking me to sell my soul?” I question, surprised to hear my voice tremble. I mean, I never really thought you could sell your soul. But now, with magic, maybe…

“Never!” Anna says, her hand grasping mine.  That electricity jolts through us. “Any kind of magic which asks you for that—and there are many forms that will—is not our magic. Your ultimate power is in your freedom. There will be sacrifices, many and great. That is as true as true gets. But we will never ask you to put the power of your life force in a cage or to hand it over to any of us. This should have been your first lesson in magic, and I would take it up with Bea that it was not—if I could.”

“I agree to go on,” I say, not really thinking about it, more just hearing the words roll out of my mouth. I guess you could call that a pulling.  Sure wasn’t a repelling.

“Good then,” she replies, as though she knew the answer all along and was just waiting for it to be official, “now, on to Bea and Jake. Let me say first off that the idea that I would give you all of my magic and be left with none is ridiculous.”

I suddenly feel kind of jilted, but not really.  I mean, I didn’t want it, right? Anna needs it, after all. She must.

“Seriously, dear, when you sneeze on someone and give them your cold, does that mean you lose it? Bea was being dramatic, and I assure you, that is just her style.  I was the one in theatre as a young woman all those years ago, but she’s always outdone me just by being her own outrageous self.”

Anna says all this like she’s disgusted with Bea, but her distant smile gives her away. She misses her sister terribly. I imagine a young Anna in the theatre and realize another reason why I like her. It was probably a pretty risqué thing to do back then. It must have taken a lot of courage.

“As for your magic lessons, she should never have taught you to take in the earth energy without giving some guidance on control or protection. You’ll have to tell her I fully disapprove. Not that it will matter to her what I say—she has her own style of teaching and I’ve never been able to tell her anything she didn’t want to hear. So you’ll have to insist out of your own integrity. You must insist that she teach you protection before you break something more important than a covered bread bowl. Lucky your Mrs. Hamilton didn’t break an arm, as furious as you must have been with her.”

“I will insist,” I say, already liking the idea that there will be more magic lessons. In fact, a good kind of chill went up my spine when she talked about the next time I see Bea, like it is a done deal.

“So do you see that Mrs. Hamilton was poisoning Scottie, like Jake did?” I add.

“No,” she says flatly.

“No, you don’t see it, or yes, you see but no she didn’t do it?”

“No in that I am not going to let you cheat on your first test. The question is, did you see that Mrs. Hamilton poisoned her?”

I recall the vision I had, short but clear. “I think I did. But it might have been my imagination.”

“The imagination is the same portal used for a vision, but there is a distinctive and qualitative difference.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure which it was.”

“Well, then, you’ll be as sure as you are that you saw it and no more sure than that. You’ll have to test your magic again and again, and not trust it until you know exactly what you know. If I were to tell you, you’d still wonder, wouldn’t you?”

I smile sheepishly.  “I guess so. I don’t usually take anyone else’s word for anything. Though I’d be more likely to take your word than Jake’s, that’s for sure.”

“Good for you. Relying on someone else’s truth is not a trait to admire. And yes, we must now speak of Jake.”

“And Michel?” I ask, looking again at my watch. Five minutes, at best.

“You are right. So right. They go together, hand in hand. One cannot explain Jake without explaining Michael. But now we enter the territory of what it is dangerous for you to know. You must agree to keep this between us and only us.”

“I agree,” I say again, already wondering how I’m going to keep things from a guy who is living at my house. But one thing I do know how to do, and have always known how to do, is shut up. Just part of my personality, I guess. So I’ll do that, even with Michael, if Anna says so. Again I look at my watch.

“Don’t worry about the time, dear.  I’ll shapeshift it today. We can stay as long as we want. Our family began…”

What? She’s going to drop a bomb like that and just go on? If I don’t get her back on time, these walks will be totally nixed.  But if she can “shapeshift” time, whatever that means, we have a whole new world of options out here.  

“Don’t let your mind wander, Mayden,” Anna insists.

“Sorry,” I say, immediately wondering how she knew that it was wandering. However she knew, I can’t help it. This excites me, every bit of it, all the way down to my tingling toes.  But I have to listen.

“My family began, for all intents and purposes, with my father.  Of course, we had grandparents and great grandparents, and they serve us even today, especially our maternal line of ancestors, as you have heard me speak. But our father was the beginning of both the good and the trouble we now face, so I’ll begin there.”

I am completely and utterly sucked in to her words. Without knowing where it comes from, I have a realization. Anna’s magic is in her storytelling.

“Try not to let this offend you,” she begins, “but Bea and I are indeed twins. We were born on the same day, within minutes of each other, and neither of us knows who was first, though we both insist we are the elder, as sisters are likely to do.”

I find it pretty hard to imagine why her being Bea’s twin would offend me. “You don’t look anything alike,” I say. “Like you’re not even of the same nationality.”

“This is the crude truth,” she replies, nodding. “We shared the same father but we have different mothers.”

She eyes me for my reaction, and I remember she is old school. It’s practically normal to have things like that happen these days.  At least the two mothers part. The same day is kind of strange.

“It is also possible,” she continues cautiously, “but not certain, that we have a third sister. A triplet, also born within minutes of the same day. We don’t know for sure, father always kept from positively confirming it. But we sensed it in the same way Bea and I sensed each other long before we met.”

They weren’t raised together?  I guess I just assumed they would have been. “How old were you when you met?”

“Eighteen. We were not allowed to meet before then. The magic between us would have been too powerful. We would not have developed independently and we would have had too much power, too soon. Both, in the end, would have stunted our growth.”

“Your father must have been pretty powerful,” I say.

“Powerful, brilliant, and as good as he was bad. I inherited his goodness and Bea got a little of both. She’s channeled the dark well, though, to her credit. Mostly she’s mischievous, and there is no real harm in that. For example, her playing with you and the bread bowl.”

“No real harm done,” I offer.

“You understand, I hope” she says, trying to lean up on one elbow, but failing, “that this is not pride speaking, saying I’m good and she has both the good and the bad. It is far more a matter of the inheritance of traits, like the color of hair or being of a quiet or loud nature.  I’m not proud to be good, I’m just good. Do you understand?”

“Not really. You mean if we are good or bad, that’s inherited? Like part of our biology?”

“Think of it more like a path of energy within you. Some people cling a little more to the positive, some a little more to the negative.  If there is a great imbalance—and this is a challenge if you lean too far either way, good or bad—there will be much work to do to turn towards a clear path.”

“Am I good or bad?” I ask. “I mean, can you see that?”

“Oh dear, I see you so very clearly. But you know the answer already, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure.  Others would say…”

“No. You cannot possibly go by what anyone else would judge.  You know the pulse that is in you. You may try to fool yourself or cover your true nature up. But you know.”

I think for a moment. Not because I don’t know, but because it seems too real if I say it out loud. But this is Anna, and she is trusting me.  Surely I can trust her.

“I’m good,” I finally say, “but I want to be bad, so I pretend I’m bad.”

“Do you know why?” she asks with a cocked eyebrow.

I shrug. “Good is kind of boring, I guess.”

“True enough,” she says with a light laugh, “and completely out of vogue in this day and age. But you have yet to see what good can do and the power it holds. Good is no small thing, I assure you. In any event, that is not the only reason, or even the most potent one, for your wanting to appear bad.”

I try to think of another, but can’t. “What is?”

“You are seeking balance. You are too positive, deep down, and in a world like this you will be hurt if you don’t develop some of the negative aspects to protect yourself. The ‘bad girl’ you pretend to be is your protective cover, isn’t it?”

Well, there it is…an 88-year-old lady nailed my whole persona in one swing. “Yes,” I admit. “But what does it mean to be good? I mean, by your terms?”

Anna smiles in a far-off kind of way. “Life is up and life is down.  Life is left and life is right. Good defines bad, as sick defines well and hot defines cold.  You can only be what you are. In this case, you are good. I’m sorry if that disappoints you.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” I ask, then realize after a split-second how unlikely that is.

“You are safe with me,” she says.

Yes, that’s just it. I am safe with her. And now I know why I’m feeling such an allegiance to her, even more than Bea. We are the same kind of good. I could never have figured that out without her saying it just that way, but it’s right on. Two on the side of good, like it or not.

But what about Michael?  What side is he on, and how will I know?

“Now, on to Jake and Michael,” Anna says, smiling like she knew that’s just where I was going.