Adele sighed. “All right. I suppose I ought to tell you. You have a right to know, dear… it happened when Scotty was just little, and you hadn’t come along yet. George worked in the bush then as a logger, so he was away most of the time. It was just me and the boys,  which suited me fine.”

Bright sunshine slanted through the cabin’s tiny streaked windows. Though snow still lingered in the deep woods, the meadows and cleared area around the cabin were greening up nicely. Adele loved this time of year. Her soul was well suited to this North country; its extremes of seasons thrilled her. Even the bitter cold and long darkness of winter seemed beautiful to her, with the brief hours of mid-day sunlight sparkling in rainbow brilliance from bright impossibly white snow. Spring, though, was her favourite.

She dressed the little boys, who had caught her excitement and were in a boisterous fever to escape the tiny bounds of their cabin.

They spilled out the door into the muddy yard. Adele carried Scotty, who wasn’t yet comfortable with walking through the deep mud. She extricated Carl once when his boots became stuck in the calf-deep muck, which made him giggle, and her swear under her breath. She decided to take the boys for a real walk, out of the mud and into the meadow down the path behind their cabin. George didn’t like them to venture far from home; the meadow was frequented by bears, who would be emerging from their winter hibernation, thin and hungry.

He would be angry to learn she had taken them this far from home in bear country, but she knew they would be in no danger. Asafel would protect them. She hadn’t told him about Asafel; the occasion to do so had never arisen. Spending as much time alone had given her a sense of freedom and independence. When George was home, her life revolved completely around him, and Asafel was forgotten. Carl, too, was normally so excited to have Daddy home that he didn’t think about Asafel.

Soon it would be breakup in the deep woods where George worked, and he come home for two or three months. Even during breakup, however, Asafel had so far not been an issue. Last year they had traveled out to Alberta for an extended visit with George’s relatives, and the excitement of a holiday on the farm with horses and cows had occupied all of their attention until it was time for them to return home, and for George to return to the bush.

Now it was George who was forgotten, far away from her, and Adele was free to do as she pleased. Carl was a bright and venturesome four, curious about everything. She was in the habit of speaking with him as an equal, and often called Asafel out to talk with him too.

“Mummy, is As’fel a angel?” Carl asked her.

“I don’t know exactly what Asafel is, Carl honey. Let’s ask him. Asafel?”

He was right there, of course. He always was. To speak his name was to invoke him, and he had never failed to respond to her invocations. It was a point of pride for her not to invoke him for petty things, like pulling Carl from the mud; she wanted to be a strong and competent mother to her children. She didn’t hesitate to invoke him to answer any question Carl might want to ask, though.

Asafel appeared as a thin smoky wraith, visible in the sunshine as a reflective, pearly swirl in the air, approximately human-shaped.

“Yes, dear one?” he responded in his silky, caressing voice. He felt so good to her! Carl loved him, too; of course, he did. To speak with Asafel was to feel deeply known and loved without question.

“As’fel, is you a angel?” Carl repeated his question.

“I suppose you might call me that,” the wraith chuckled affectionately. “I’m your angel, in any case. I’ve been with your family practically forever. All the way down to the beginning of time. It’s my job to guide and protect you.”

Carl frowned. “How ‘bout Auntie Clare? An’ Jeff an’ Joey?” Clare was Adele’s younger sister. Carl was not sure he wanted Asafel to live with his cousins the way he did with his own family.

“Clare has the option of calling on me if she wishes, and if she did so, I would come. She does not; she doesn’t choose to remember me, and her sons have not been taught my name. Always it is the elder child, especially if she is a girl, who has the strongest claim and bond with me. You are the eldest, even though you’re not a girl.”

“What if Mummy has a baby who’s a girl?” Carl asked, curious. He knew that Mummy and Daddy wanted another baby, especially a little girl. They had been preparing him for the possibility for some time now; in fact, Adele had already conceived Sylvie, although she had not yet told anyone, including George.

“Then she, too, will have a claim on me,” Asafel laughed. “I have always followed the female line, from mother to eldest daughter. It is less likely that Scotty there,” He indicated the little boy who was giggling and batting at Asafel’s swirls of creamy mist, “will feel as drawn to me as you do, or as your little sister would. He simply won’t feel me as strongly. Even now, he does not hear me in his mind the way you always have. It tends to work that way.”

“If I have a sisser, will you still want to be wif me?” Carl asked anxiously.

“I promise you, little one,” Asafel said, very seriously so that Carl would know he was telling the truth, “For as long as you want me, I will be there for you when you call.”

Asafel smiled, an expression not visible on what passed for his face, but was felt instead, palpable as sunshine through cloud. “Your Mummy will indeed have a little girl, and very soon; a baby sister, and she is going to love you with all her heart. You will be her guide and protector, her beloved big brother. Do you think you will like that?”

Carl frowned. “I dunno. Maybe.” He thought a moment, then grinned. “Yah. If she loves me, den I’ll love her too.”

“That’s the way it works, isn’t it?” Adele laughed. “We love the ones who love us. It’s a lovely way to live.”

“As’fel, lift me up!” Carl cried. Asafel was teaching him to fly, but he hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet. Once he was assisted into the air, though, he could maintain his own altitude. Adele smiled to see him cavorting in the air. She and her sister had flown with their ‘invisible friend’ as children too, though he had cautioned them to be careful not to be seen by anyone except their own mother. Now, Adele felt flying was beneath her dignity as a grown woman, a matron, but she liked to see her own child delighting in that breathless freedom.

The path was muddy, an old logging track that in the summertime would be thick with grass. She was so tired of mud! She allowed herself to levitate a little, enough to avoid sticking in the mud, but not so high as to obviously be flying.

The woods here were thick, spruce and fir mostly, with some barren poplars and alders interspersed. When they got to the meadow, an old logged-out area that would soon be full of fireweed, she breathed a sigh of relief and let herself sink back to earth. Instead of the god-awful muck underfoot, she now walked on springy damp turf. She plunked Scottie down on the ground so he could toddle about, and sat on the stump of a tree to breathe in the fresh air and bask in the sunshine.

Just when it seemed like  my life couldn’t get weirder, Sylvie thought. She struggled to make sense of what her mother was telling her.

“But… Mom,” she said finally, “Why are you telling me all this now?”

“I was so desperate after you left. I think I went a little bit crazy,” her mother confessed. “I did something I hadn’t done in many years. I called on Asafel to show me where you were.” Seeing Sylvie’s look, she said, “Asafel is a, I don’t know what you’d call him. A demon, a spirit, a helper, a guide? All I know is, when I ask in a certain way, he comes and tells me what I need to know.

“It must have been Asafel Carl was talking to the night your father… you know,” she said. “I grew up with Asafel and I wanted my children to have his help and guidance too. But George, well… I got afraid and stopped calling on him. Until last week, that is. And Asafel told me you needed to be told. So, that’s why.”

“I don’t get it, Mom. I mean, if this Asafel character was so important to you for so long, how could you give him up for a guy? Even for Dad? Why didn’t you just divorce him? People get divorced all the time for stupider reasons than that!”

Adele sighed. “That’s a very modern attitude, Sylvie, but I’m an old-fashioned woman. I grew up in the bush, and I had very romantic notions as a girl, mostly from books; I read a great deal. But also, I’ve always known that when I married, it would have to be forever. You see, Asafel always cautioned me to be very careful choosing a husband because I’d be stuck with him for life. He told me that…” she hesitated. “If my marriage ever ended, so would my life.”

“What?”

“It was a prediction, a prophecy. And Asafel is always right. He always has been.” She looked at Sylvie pleadingly. “Sylvie, your Dad is a good man. I was careful choosing him. I love him with all my heart. I didn’t know about his phobia, you see. It didn’t really show up until we had children, when things like Santa and the tooth fairy started to become issues. Before that, I was sure he would come around. I really believed it was ignorance talking when he would go on about ‘irrationality’ and ‘superstition’. I kept waiting for the right moment to reveal to him what I could do, to offer it to him as a gift. I was never quite sure what held me back, until…

“Well, I found out it’s a seriously deep-seated phobia for him. I couldn’t leave him, but I couldn’t let him leave me, either, and he would have. He almost did, once.” Her voice sharpened. “My life was at stake, do you understand? What would you children have done without a mother?”

Sylvie picked up the thread of what her mother had left unsaid. “He almost left you… what do you mean? What happened?”

Rocked as she was by these revelations, Sylvie burned with curiosity. “Mom,” she said, “I do want to hear more about all that, and it’s interesting and all, but I’m dying to know, how did you find me here? What’s going on?”

Her mother assumed an expression of put-upon patience. “Yes, Sylvie, I know. Please bear with me. I’m getting to it.” She sucked in a deep breath, her chest expanding to its fullest, then released it in a long, slow sigh. “All right. Here’s the short version. Sylvie, it was me who taught Carl magic. I did it when he was very young, but it seems he never forgot. And, to answer your question, I used magic to find you here.”

Sylvie couldn’t believe her ears. She sat up straight on the bed, electrified with shock and horror. “What are you saying, Mom? Are you telling me you’re some sort of witch?”

Her mother’s face flushed and she waved her hand as if to bat the word away. “Oh, Sylvie, please don’t call me that. I honestly don’t know what I am. But if your father ever found out what I’ve done, he would hate me. He would leave. I couldn’t bear that! He must never know.” Her eyes held Sylvie’s. “He must never know,” she repeated deliberately.

“Well, I’m not going to tell, if you’re worried about that,” Sylvie said, offended. “I know how to keep a secret. But…” she stopped for a long moment, then burst out with what was bothering her. “Mom, why didn’t you ever teach me about magic ?I mean, I needed to know about that stuff!” Her heart was full of things she didn’t know how to express. She was sure that if she had known such a thing as magic existed in the world, she  she would have been far better equipped to handle the strange events of the past few days. She felt betrayed to her depths by what her mother had hidden from her. And to find out that her beloved Carl had also conspired to hide such an important secret from her burned like napalm in her soul.

A terrible ache grew in her chest. “Mom?” she whispered. Adele’s face was turned away. Her shoulders shook again.

“I’m sorry, Sylvie,” she cried. “I couldn’t. I should never even have taught Carl what I did. When I learned how strongly your father felt, how violently he hated anything that even pretended to be magical, I stopped showing Carl the things I could do and I told him we couldn’t play that game any more. I was just showing off, anyway. It was so wrong of me, I was so selfish, I shouldn’t have!” She sobbed woefully into the now-mostly-shredded wad of tissue.

Sylvie discovered a folded white handkerchief on her bedside table and handed it to her mother. “Here, Mom, use this,” she said softly. Adele accepted it without comment and blew her nose. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she hiccupped. She was distraught, hands shaking, lips trembling. “If I could turn time back,” she sobbed, “I would undo it all. But that’s a magic I could never master. I’m not really very good at it, you know. I just knew a few tricks.

“But Carl was gifted, and once he had the idea he continued to practice in secret, even after I forbade him.”