The Witching Hour

It was after midnight when the sound of shattering glass woke me and brought me to my feet in a matter of seconds. Was there someone in the house? What was Caylie doing up in the middle of the night? At times like these I wish I had a significant other who would be the brave one to investigate the sounds that startle me from a deep sleep, but as a single, widowed mother of one child, it is up to me to get out of bed at this late hour.

"Caylie, it is not playtime," I began, as I walk towards the kitchen. "You should be—" I didn't even finish what I was going to say when I realized there was no one in the kitchen. I searched the house up and down, looking in every spot she would hide when we played hide-and-seek, and there was no sign of her. I went back to the kitchen to clean up the glass, and when I stood up to empty the towel I had wrapped it in, I caught a glimpse of a dark shadow race across the backyard.

"Caylie!" I whisper to myself in shock, realizing I hadn't checked her bedroom. I rushed to her room and opened the door quietly, just in case she was still sleeping. I crossed the bedroom floor trembling in fear that my five-year-old daughter would not be in her bed. Her blanket draped the bed in a messy way, as if it held the shape of a small child's body underneath. I pulled the blanket down where her head should be, and there she was, sleeping soundly. I breathed a sigh of relief and brushed her hair away from her face. 'I am so blessed to have such a beautiful daughter', I thought to myself.

Now that I knew my daughter was safe, I began to wonder who could possibly be lurking outside my house. I don't have any neighbors, considering I live in a country home. Most of my family are deceased, along with my husband, and my two sisters reside in other states. It is just my daughter and me in a very quaint and quiet small home.

I cleaned up the glass and went back to bed, but I did not sleep. Every creak of the old house sounded like a footstep. When morning finally came, I told myself it must have been a jar slipping off a shelf, and the shadow must have been a deer. Country houses make country noises. That was all.

Caylie, however, had her own explanation.

"Rosie says you stayed up too late worrying," she announced at breakfast, spooning cereal into her mouth with great seriousness. "She says worrying doesn't fix anything. It just makes your eyes tired."

I paused, milk carton in hand. "Who's Rosie, sweetheart?"

"My friend." Caylie said it the way children say things that are obvious. "She comes at night. She sits on my bed and tells me stories."

I smiled the way mothers do when a child invents a friend. "Well, tell Rosie thank you, but Mama is fine."

Caylie nodded solemnly and went back to her cereal, and I filed Rosie away under *imaginary* and thought no more about it.

But Rosie kept coming up.

Over the next week, Caylie mentioned her the way she might mention a classmate. Rosie liked the color purple. Rosie thought Caylie's stuffed rabbit needed a name, and so the rabbit became Mr. Buttons. Rosie didn't like it when Caylie left her shoes in the middle of the floor, because "somebody could trip in the dark." That last one sounded so much like something an old woman would say that I laughed out loud.

Then came the drawings. Caylie brought me a picture of a lady with long silver hair, a long dress, and a basket. "That's Rosie," she said proudly. "She carries herbs in her basket. She says the garden tells her what it needs."

I felt a small, strange tug in my chest. My mother had carried a basket in her garden. She had grown herbs along the back fence of the house I grew up in — rosemary, lavender, mint — and she had talked to her plants as if they could hear her. The neighbors had called her a witch, half joking and half not, and she had only ever smiled at that. "Let them call me what they like," she used to say. "A woman who knows her herbs is a woman who never has to be afraid."

My mother died before Caylie was born. Caylie had never met her. I had never even told her much about her, because it hurt too much to say her name out loud some days.

So when Caylie came inside one afternoon with a scraped knee and told me, "Rosie put green stuff on it and it stopped hurting," I checked her knee and found it smeared with crushed mint and something else I couldn't name, smelling faintly sweet. The scrape barely stung, she said. She was already running off to play again.

And then there was the song.

I was washing dishes when I heard Caylie humming from the living room. It was a tune I hadn't heard in twenty years, a lullaby my mother used to sing while she rocked me, about a little sparrow tucked safe beneath a willow tree. My hands went still in the dishwater. I had never sung that song to Caylie. I had never even thought of it since my mother's funeral. There was no way for my daughter to know it — unless someone had taught her.

That night, after Caylie was asleep, I pulled down the old photo album from the top of the closet. I turned the pages slowly, past my wedding, past my sisters and me as girls, until I found the picture I was looking for: my mother in her garden, silver hair loose down her back, a basket on her arm, smiling at the camera. Her name was Rose.

The next morning, I set the album on the kitchen table and let Caylie flip through it while I made breakfast. She turned a page, stopped, and pressed her small finger to the photograph.

"That's Rosie!" she said, delighted. "That's my friend."

My throat closed up. "Caylie," I said carefully, "do you know who that is?"

"She's your mama," Caylie said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "She told me. She says she watches over us. She says she couldn't stay away, not with a granddaughter to look after."

I sat down hard in the kitchen chair. All the pieces I had been explaining away suddenly fit together: the jar of dried lavender that had fallen from the shelf that first night — my mother's jar, one of the few things of hers I had kept. The shadow racing across the backyard. The garden by the back fence that I never tended, yet somehow the rosemary stayed trimmed and the lavender got bundled and hung by the door. The song no one else could have taught her.

That night, I did not go to bed. I sat in the dark living room with a blanket around my shoulders and waited. The house ticked and settled. The clock moved past midnight, into that still hour when the whole world seems to hold its breath.

Caylie's bedroom door creaked open. I followed her — not frightened now, only curious — as she padded down the hall in her bare feet and slipped out the back door into the moonlit garden. She walked to the lavender by the fence, and there she stopped, swaying gently, as if listening to someone.

Then I heard it: humming, soft and low, the lullaby about the little sparrow. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, carried on the night air along with the scent of lavender and something warm, like cinnamon. And for just a moment, in the silver moonlight beside my daughter, I saw the shape of a woman with long silver hair, her hand resting lightly on Caylie's shoulder, the way a grandmother would stand with a child she loved.

I did not call out. I did not run. I stood in the doorway and let the tears come, because I understood at last. My mother had been a witch in the old sense of the word — not the frightening kind from stories, but the kind who knew which herb eased a cough, which tea settled a restless child, which song could make a dark night feel safe. She had loved me with those hands and that knowledge, and now she was loving my daughter the same way. Death had not taken that from her. It had only changed the hour she came to visit.

The humming faded like breath on glass. Caylie turned, rubbed her eyes, and saw me in the doorway.

"Mama," she whispered, "did you hear her?"

"I heard her," I said, and I held out my arms. She ran to me, and I carried her back to bed and tucked the blanket around her the way my mother had once tucked mine.

In the morning, over breakfast, I told Caylie the truth as plainly as I could. "Rosie is real, sweetheart. She was my mama, and she is your grandma. She loved me, and now she loves you."

Caylie beamed. "I know," she said. "She told me she'd wait for you to catch on."

We spent that Saturday in the garden together, Caylie and I. We trimmed the rosemary and bundled the lavender and hung it by the back door, the way my mother had taught me when I was small and had forgotten until now. Caylie sang the sparrow song while she worked, off-key and utterly sure of every word, and I sang along, my voice catching only once.

That night, I put a cup of tea on the porch rail before bed — chamomile, my mother's favorite — and I did not lock the back door against the dark. I no longer think of the witching hour as something to fear. It is simply the hour when the house is quiet enough to hear love that never really left. Some nights I still wake to a small sound in the kitchen, or a shadow passing through the yard, and I smile into the dark and whisper, "Hi, Mama." And sometimes, if I listen closely, I swear I hear her humming back.