Beautiful Darkness

Burnt Waffles

Four eggs, four strips of bacon, a basket of scratch biscuits (which by Amma's standard meant a spoon had never touched the batter), three kinds of freezer jam, and a slab of butter drizzled with honey. And from the smell of it, across the counter buttermilk batter was separating into squares, turning crisp in the old waffle iron. For the last two months, Amma had been cooking night and day. The counter was piled high with Pyrex dishes -- cheese grits, green bean casserole, fried chicken, and of course, Bing cherry salad, which was really a fancy name for a Jell-O mold with cherries, pineapple, and Coca-Cola in it. Past that, I could make out a coconut cake, orange rolls, and what looked like bourbon bread pudding, but I knew there was more. Since Macon died and my dad left, Amma kept cooking and baking and stacking, as if she could cook her sadness away. We both knew she couldn't.

Amma hadn't gone this dark since my mom died. She'd known Macon Ravenwood a lifetime longer than I had, even longer than Lena. No matter how unlikely or unpredictable their relationship was, it had meant something to both of them. They were friends, though I wasn't sure either of them would've admitted it. But I knew the truth. Amma was wearing it all over her face and stacking it all over our kitchen.

"Got a call from Dr. Summers." My dad's psychiatrist. Amma didn't look up from the waffle iron, and I didn't point out that you didn't actually need to stare at a waffle iron for it to cook the waffles.

"What'd he say?" I studied her back from my seat at the old oak table, her apron strings tied in the middle. I remembered how many times I had tried to sneak up on her and untie those strings. Amma was so short they hung down almost as long as the apron itself, and I thought about that for as long as I could. Anything was better than thinking about my father.

"He thinks your daddy's about ready to come home."

I held up my empty glass and stared through it, where things looked as distorted as they really were. My dad had been at Blue Horizons, in Columbia, for two months. After Amma found out about the nonexistent book he was pretending to write all year, and the "incident," which is how she referred to my dad nearly jumping off a balcony, she called my Aunt Caroline. My aunt drove him to Blue Horizons that same day -- she called it a spa. The kind of spa you sent your crazy relatives to if they needed what folks in Gatlin referred to as "individual attention," or what everyone outside of the South would call therapy.

"Great."

Great. I couldn't see my dad coming home to Gatlin, walking around town in his duck pajamas. There was enough crazy around here already between Amma and me, wedged in between the cream-of-grief casseroles I'd be dropping off at First Methodist around dinnertime, as I did almost every night. I wasn't an expert on feelings, but Amma's were all stirred up in cake batter, and she wasn't about to share them. She'd rather give away the cake.

I tried to talk to her about it once, the day after the funeral, but she had shut down the conversation before it even started. "Done is done. Gone is gone. Where Macon Ravenwood is now, not likely we'll ever see him again, not in this world or the Other." She sounded like she'd made her peace with it, but here I was, two months later, still delivering cakes and casseroles. She had lost the two men in her life the same night -- my father and Macon. My dad wasn't dead, but our kitchen didn't make those kinds of distinctions. Like Amma said, gone was gone.

"I'm makin' waffles. Hope you're hungry."

That was probably all I'd hear from her this morning. I picked up the carton of chocolate milk next to my glass and poured it full out of habit. Amma used to complain when I drank chocolate milk at breakfast. Now she would have cut me up a whole Tunnel of Fudge cake without a word, which only made me feel worse. Even more telling, the Sunday edition of the New York Times wasn't open to the crossword, and her black, extra-sharp #2 pencils were hidden away in their drawer. Amma was staring out the kitchen window at the clouds choking the sky.

L. A. C. O. N. I. C. Seven across, which means I don't have to say a thing, Ethan Wate. That's what Amma would have said on any other day.

I took a gulp of my chocolate milk and almost choked. Sugar was too sweet, and Amma was too quiet. That's how I knew things had changed.

That, and the burnt waffles smoking in the waffle iron.

I should have been on my way to school, but instead I turned onto Route 9 and headed for Ravenwood. Lena hadn't been back to school since before her birthday. After Macon's death, Principal Harper had generously granted her permission to work at home with a tutor until she felt up to coming back to Jackson. Considering he had helped Mrs. Lincoln in her campaign to get Lena expelled after the winter formal, I'm sure he was hoping that would be the day after never.

I admit, I was a little jealous. Lena didn't have to listen to Mr. Lee drone on about the War of Northern Aggression and the plight of the Confederacy or sit on the Good-Eye Side in English. Abby Porter and I were the only ones sitting there now, so we had to answer all the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde questions in class. What prompts Dr. Jekyll to turn into Mr. Hyde? Were they really any different after all? Nobody had the slightest clue, which was the reason everyone on Mrs. English's glass-eye side was sleeping.

But Jackson wasn't the same without Lena, at least not for me. That's why after two months, I was begging her to come back. Yesterday, when she said she'd think about it, I told her she could think about it on the way to school.

I found myself back at the fork in the road. It was our old road, mine and Lena's. The one that had taken me off Route 9 and up to Ravenwood the night we met. The first time I realized she was the same girl I'd been dreaming about, long before she ever moved to Gatlin.

As soon as I saw the road, I heard the song. It drifted into the Volvo as naturally as if I had turned on the radio. Same song. Same words. Same as it had for the last two months -- when I turned on my iPod, stared at the ceiling, or read a single page of Silver Surfer over and over, without even seeing it.

Seventeen Moons. It was always there. I tried turning the dials on the radio, but it didn't matter. Now it was playing in my head instead of coming out of the speakers, as if someone was Kelting the song to me.

Seventeen moons, seventeen years,

Eyes where Dark or Light appears,

Gold for yes and green for no,

Seventeen the last to know ...

The song was gone. I knew better than to ignore it, but I also knew how Lena acted every time I tried to bring it up.

"It's a song," she would say dismissively. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Like Sixteen Moons didn't mean anything? It's about us." It didn't matter if she knew it or even if she agreed. Either way, it was the moment Lena usually switched from defense to offense, and the conversation veered off track.

"You mean it's about me. Dark or Light? Whether or not I'm going to go all Sarafine on you? If you've already decided I'm going Dark, why don't you admit it?"

At that point, I would say something stupid to change the subject. Until I learned not to say anything at all. So we didn't talk about the song that was playing in my head, same as it was in hers.

Seventeen Moons. We couldn't avoid it.

The song had to be about Lena's Claiming, the moment she would become Light or Dark forever. Which could only mean one thing: she wasn't Claimed. Not yet. Gold for yes and green for no? I knew what the song meant -- the gold eyes of a Dark Caster or the green eyes of a Light one. Since the night of Lena's birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, I had tried to tell myself it was all over, that Lena didn't have to be Claimed, that she was some kind of exception. Why couldn't it be different for her, since everything else about her seemed to be so exceptional?

But it wasn't different. Seventeen Moons was proof. I'd heard Sixteen Moons for months before Lena's birthday, a harbinger of things to come. Now the words had changed again, and I was faced with another eerie prophecy. There was a choice to be made, and Lena hadn't made it. The songs never lied. At least, they hadn't yet.

I didn't want to think about it. As I headed up the long rise leading to the gates of Ravenwood Manor, even the grinding sound of the tires on gravel seemed to repeat the one inescapable truth. If there was a Seventeenth Moon, then it had all been for nothing. Macon's death had been for nothing.

Lena would still have to Claim herself for Light or Dark, deciding her fate forever. There was no turning back for Casters, no changing sides. And when she finally made her choice, half her family would die because of it. The Light Casters or the Dark Casters -- the curse promised only one side could survive. But in a family where generations of Casters had no free will and had been Claimed for Light or Dark on their own sixteenth birthdays without any say in the matter, how was Lena supposed to make that kind of choice?

All she had wanted, her whole life, was to choose her own destiny. Now she could, and it was like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.

I stopped at the gates, turned off the engine, and closed my eyes, remembering -- the rising panic, the visions, the dreams, the song. This time, Macon wouldn't be there to steal away the unhappy endings. There was nobody left to get us out of trouble, and it was coming fast.