Green Mountain Magic, Page 2

to drift. It did no good to think about the things she was missing. They were here now and would be for the foreseeable future.

  And thank the Goddess for that. It was a voice that came from nowhere and everywhere, both inside and outside her head, like somebody was speaking into her ear, or maybe she was having a loud thought. Siobhan gasped and sat up in bed.

  “Who’s there?” she croaked. It took her two tries to get the words out, but silence was the only answer. The branch of a tree outside rubbed against the side of the house and an owl called in the woods. Swallowing, Siobhan laid back down, burrowing under the blankets until only the top of her head showed. Okay, it’s a new, strange place. You’re tired. Who knows what weird things your brain comes up with when you’re almost asleep? But, ‘the Goddess’? When would her brain come up with that, ever? She glanced up again at the canopy. Definitely, protected.

  The next morning, the sun was out, reflecting brightly off the little row of icicles that decorated the edge of the porch roof. There were some crocuses up in the front yard and the creepiness of last night seemed far away now. They all piled into the car and headed back into Burlington to the hospital. There was an abandoned SUV with out-of-state plates mired in mud over its hubcaps on the edge of the road. They had obviously tried charging straight through the deepest ruts rather than skirting around them, with disastrous results.

  “Flatlanders,” Siobhan’s mother snorted.

  Dad glanced at her with fond amusement. “Your Vermont roots are showing,” he teased.

  They cruised through town and Siobhan scoped out the kids crossing the street, milling around in front of the bagel bakery and the pizzeria. Some of them were wearing flipflops, just like everybody back home, except that the temperature here was in the 40s. There was a funky little bookstore that looked interesting but no clothing stores, unless you counted the one on the corner that sold Carhartts and hiking books. No mall. No food court. And what the heck was a creemee stand?

  Her grandmother was in the intensive care unit, so only her mother got to go in. While her dad played a game of checkers with DJ using a set they had found in a toy box in the corner of the waiting room, Siobhan prowled restlessly. Going from window to window yielded the same view, which she had to admit was stunning -looking out over Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains rising in serrated blue rows beyond.

  She took a peek down the hall into the ICU unit. Her mom was listening to one of the doctors, a very serious expression on her face. Siobhan wondered if she’d seen Grandma yet. She wondered why her grandmother had never come to California to see them. Surely it wasn’t normal never to have met one’s grandmother, in 14 years? Her friends always seemed to have grandparents over for the holidays and some even came to stepdancing competitions, so what was the deal here? She could vaguely recall her dad’s parents, who had passed when she was 8 or 9, but she didn’t think she’d ever met her mom’s mother, unless she was too little to remember it.

  The hall outside the ICU was empty at the moment and Siobhan switched the song on her IPod to a reel. Might as well get in some work on her new step. At first she tried to be circumspect, stopping self-consciously whenever anybody came down the hall, but soon enough she was in the zone, rocking out to the quick beat, hearing her dance teacher’s voice in her head (Turnout! Posture!) like she was really in class. She had gotten to the end of the hall, turned and was headed back down the other way, when it happened – a wave of weirdness passed through her body, sucking the air from her lungs, and then the floor under her feet shook. Holy crap! Siobhan staggered, catching herself with a hand against the wall.

  A nurse was coming towards her, pushing an IV pole. “Hey, that looked cool!” she called cheerfully. “Is that like that Riverdance stuff?”

  “Yeah, Riverdance,” Siobhan replied, distracted. “Did you feel the building shaking? Was that an earthquake or what?”

  The nurse looked confused. “No, hon, I didn’t feel anything. Are you okay? Maybe you should take a break.”

  Siobhan grimaced a smile. She just felt so weird. How long had she been dancing for? Not that long – but she hadn’t eaten much for breakfast that morning. She was probably dehydrated.

  Taking a few deep breaths, she made her way back to the ICU waiting room. Dad and DJ had moved on to Candy Land. She edged up to the door of the ICU to see where her mom was and spotted her standing by a bed in one of the rooms, head bowed and shoulders hunched. Her hands were raised, the palms held downward, and the whole room was suffused with a strange, bluish light. What the heck?

  Then her mom looked up, met her eyes, and the moment passed. Siobhan blinked; the light was gone. She refocused on Mom’s face; she looked exhausted, and also like she’d been crying. Biting her lip, Siobhan turned away, to give her privacy. Seeing her mom cry made her feel like crying, too.

  Shortly afterward, her mother came out of the ICU, walking briskly to the door and leaving the rest of the family to scramble in her wake. Siobhan left Dad and DJ putting away the games, and followed her mother into the hall.

  “So, Mom. How’s Grandma?”

  “Unconscious.”

  Well, duh. “I mean, what did the doctor say? “

  “Not much.” Mom had gotten out the car keys and was jingling them in one hand, while she shifted from foot to foot, like she’d had about ten cups of coffee. She stared straight ahead at the elevator doors. Dad and DJ came up just then and Siobhan decided that now was not the time to get any answers.

  After dropping her dad off at the grocery store in town to get some supplies, Mom detoured into the driveway of the high school. “So – you go in and register for classes while I take DJ over to the elementary school,” she told Siobhan, her fingers tapping out an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel.

  “Mom – it’s Saturday.”

  “That’s okay, the office is open because it’s Spring vacation next week. They’re expecting you. Go ahead in and we’ll pick you up in about 15 minutes.”

  Siobhan eyed the piles of dirty snow at the edge of the parking lot as she slouched out of the car. Spring vacation. Were they kidding or what? Gathering herself, she made her way down the brick path to the front door. There were some kids from the track and softball teams hanging around outside after practice and she could feel their stares, knew she was the reason for the sudden buzz of conversation as she passed them by. She tried to keep her back straight and her eyes forward, but it was hard. She huffed out a breath as she opened the door to the lobby. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe she would make friends. Yeah, right.

  By the time they got home that afternoon, Siobhan had a headache from exposure to her mom’s hyperactivity. Dad was the sensible one, she thought. Having had his offer to help make dinner rebuffed, he had gone into the den to work on his laptop. Siobhan stayed in the kitchen, just taking in the sight of her mom buzzing around putting away the groceries, banging pots and pans, and rearranging the stuff on the counters. She’d never seen her mother like this.

  “So – do they think Grandma had a stroke or what?”

  Her mother threw a pan into the sink where it made an ungodly clanging noise. “They don’t know,” she answered shortly. “They didn’t see one on the brain scan, but they don’t have an explanation for her condition.”

  Well, there went her hope that Grandma would make a quick recovery and she could get home in time to do the competitions she’d signed up for. She decided to change the subject. “Did you feel the building shake when you were in there? I didn’t know they had earthquakes in Vermont.”

  Her mother’s head snapped up, a scary, intent look on her face. “When? When did you feel the building shake?” She strode forward until she and Siobhan were face to face.

  “When you were in Grandma’s room. And when I looked in, I saw a blue light. What was that, anyway?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no light.”

  “Mom, I saw it. And you were doing this” – she imitated her moth
er’s palm-down stance. Mom was shaking her head and irritated, Siobhan pressed on. “Yes – Mom. I was dancing in the hall and then I felt funny and the building shook and I came in and there you were -”

  Her mother made a slashing motion with her hand. “It was nothing. There was no light, the building didn’t shake. And I don’t want to hear any more about it right now, okay?”

  “Fine,” Siobhan retorted, mystified and annoyed. “ I’m going for a walk.”

  Siobhan slammed out of the house and set off down the road heading for just anywhere, to get away for a while. She passed one or two houses and then a farm set back on the hill, with some brown cows grazing on the sparse grass in a pasture fenced in with barbed wire. So there were neighbors, of a sort. Just past the farm was an old logging road that wound through the woods and disappeared around a corner. Perfect.

  Siobhan followed the path as it led through a cathedral of pine and fir trees that smelled like Christmas. The crescent tracks of deer decorated patches of snow along the trail, along with a serpentine of large dog prints.

  She wound her way up through twisted roots and boulders, coming to the top of the hill where the sunset captured her with its pink and purple hues, and she sat on a rock to watch the rainbow of colors flare and then fade from the sky as her anger slowly