Chapter 10

When everyone in a room looks at you funny, you may be inclined to look down at your feet or act like someone else did the thing you're being stared at over or blend in with the furniture, as apparently I have done, maybe just quietly leave the room with a newspaper in front of your face, or maybe to stand with your head held high and glower back at your accusing public, defying them to be judgmental of you when they all have very obvious defects themselves, some of them have goofy clothes on and there are a few very suspect haircuts or what have you, and this is hypothetical because far be it from me to say that any of the folks around me were funny-looking in any way, I mean some of them are really quite attractive and only one of them is the sort who you would add "if you like that sort of thing" to that statement, but it's not his fault – I seem to have lost my thread here. Anyway, everyone was looking at me expectantly, as if I were preparing to give birth to a rhino with the able assistance of the other parent, whatever that might be, or more properly whatever it would take for me to mate with in order to produce a rhino, including having the appropriate biological equipment to do so, and I was having a little difficulty in nailing down exactly what I was feeling at this moment, so my mind was wandering. A bit.

I was thinking of what it is to be a mother. Mine seemed great, I mean caring and smart and perceptive and possessed of that knack of making you feel like it was just the two of you wherever you were. She was firm but loving with the Weasley kids from what I saw, clearly closest to Ginny but respected and loved by all of them, even Percy to a degree. She seemed like she was strong when she had to be. She was also the first mother of anyone that I could remember. The second mother I ever heard of was Molly.

If Molly was any indication of what mothers were like, I thought, then they were amazing beings. Molly put herself between me and a murderer, losing her consciousness in the process, and I wasn't even her child. And the whole elf thing. She must have been something to have as a mother, and the loss of her from her family would certainly explain the tentativeness, the faintly halting cadence of their voices, the bursts of anger and frustration. Such a bitter catalyst for everyone's lives, I thought more or less, and I decided that when I felt sorry for myself maybe I should think of the boys and girl who lost more than I knew could exist, that the things I felt that I might have been inclined to call hurt were really more like sentimentality, like nostalgia for a time that never existed, but during my long sleep they had all been awake and forced to live with the wrongfulness of this undermined life.

I also thought that if my friend Luna could remain herself while people stared at her, then I would have to learn to as well.

She was speaking. "Professor McGonagall, I would like for you to meet someone." She turned to me.

The older woman looked at me for a moment. She clearly found me wanting. "How do you do," she said politely, but indicating with her tone that she had no inclination towards shaking hands. "Minerva McGonagall."

Luna examined me for a moment, then said in her violin voice, "Oh, how silly of me. May I clean you up a bit?" She pulled out her wand.

"I guess so," I said. Okay, more magic things. This might be good. I was a bit sooty. I probably looked like what they give to bad kids on Christmas. There was a mildly abrasive feeling that rolled over me for an instant, and then I felt … lighter is as good a description as any. My hands were clean, my arms…very nice. I looked up, feeling much better, and then that good feeling evaporated. Minerva was staring at me in horror and disbelief. Most of that horror was focused around my forehead.

"Lily…" she said tremulously. "Is this …"

"Yes, Minerva. He's my first born son. He was taken by Arthur Weasley when he was four and hidden away – Arthur even changed his name. We thought he was dead all these years, but –"

"Arthur abducted him?" Minerva asked incredulously.

"Changed my name?" I said.

She worked her way to me through a bit of rubble and said, "Yes, it was one of the 'orders' he was given that he took literally. We'd actually named you H – well, after your grandfather."

Minerva was still standing there like she was in a strong gale. "The boy who…"

"Lived? I suppose so, though no one but me seems to be happy about it," I said, perhaps a little unworthily. "My name is Deasil."

Luna's eyes were bright. "Molly must know some unusual spells." She came a little closer to Minerva and said, "Aren't you very good at memory charms?"

"I should say so."

"Can you describe the Obliviate spell?"

"Well, it's a fairly simple one – it's more the intention of the caster that begins the spell. The wand flicks left, then makes a small clockwise rotation before a swish to the r - … actually, before a deasil swish."

"It was curious, really," Luna said softly, almost to herself, "at least to me."

"What in particular is curious, Miss Lovegood?"

"Why he should be named after a movement that Molly Weasley had difficulty with, why Arthur's memory charms on him didn't work all of the time, why Molly is in a coma instead of dead, why Arthur stumbled into a pub in a highly suggestible state the night his wife was attacked and heard what he took to be orders from a group of drunken men, and then carried them out to the letter for fourteen years, and why in order to hide, instead of merely changing his hair and face a little, he disguised himself as a woman? And not awfully well, either – oh, I'm sorry about that," she said over her shoulder.

A faint "That's quite all right, dear" floated in from somewhere.

Minerva paused, then shook her head slightly.

"I seem to have missed a few things," she said. "Do we have any way of explaining this?"

"Well," Luna said, "we could always ask."

There was another pause. "I beg your pardon? Has Arthur returned as well?"

"Yes," his voice came from the back of the room, and he shuffled out into view behind Luna. He was wearing a simple blue dress and flats that I think, had I been able to remember them, that I never would have liked much on him.

He had a way of silencing a room.

It was Luna who spoke first. "I suppose I thought one of the Weasleys would have wanted to do this, but I can ask them if you would like."

"Ask who?" Minerva said.

"Them."

She indicated Arthur.

Blank stares.

"It's not just him in there, I don't think."

Right.

Right!

"Arthur?" I said softly.

"Yes," he said.

"…Molly?"

"Yes, dear?"

Ron, to his everlasting credit, encapsulated the feelings of all present.

"Merlin's…wrinkly…bollocks."

"Ronald Bilius Weasley, language," Arthur said.

It was his mother speaking to him.

•

I forget things. This is not unusual for me, but it is regrettable. Not to me, I mean it's all the same to me when I remember anything. Unless I forget a birthday, or what someone's least-favorite nickname is, or that there's a baseball coming at me, or, well, like that. Some things should happen in order, or so I understand, and perhaps it's best to hear a story in the order that the events therein had occurred. But that's not what appears to me. Maybe other people remember everything like a movie, one frame after another, and maybe that is a thing that shores up the reality of a memory, that it plays back on demand, tells its story in an apparently objective and orderly way, and then folds itself up for easy re-filing and future access. But for me memory doesn't unfold, or march in an orderly way. It lunges, flares, and looms. It billows, and flickers, and sometimes goes out like a candle. It's solid though diaphanous, my backbone and ribs and femurs and also my guts, my cartilage, my soft tissue. It bruises easily but now that I possess it it's the defining thing, the most powerful structure in my life.

Anyway, I forgot about the elf thing.

Ginny's mother, according to Ginny (freshly convinced not to harm me, still amused by her joking with me about why she became a midwife), was from an old family, not a uniformly wealthy one, but for the most part willful, intelligent, hard-working and good-natured as a tradition. She'd told me this in a matter-of-fact way, but it was clear she loved them. There were people in the family Ginny only tolerated, but the underlying theme was present in all of them. Her father and her brothers had always told her stories about Molly when she was small, and it was partially those stories that made her feel so close with her, even though Ginny had not heard her mother's voice since she was three – they were what she had for memories, and she treasured them. Molly was a practical girl who liked to make things, who liked healing hurts and looking after things and people. She rescued abandoned baby birds and nursed them to health when she could, though she always had a problem with releasing them. She was compassionate and curious about how things worked, and these two traits came together one day at the house of a wealthy friend of hers who she visited sometimes during her childhood summers.

The house was very large, with some floors that were beautiful stained wood, some with richly colored rugs full of scenes from nature and complete with animated magical creatures scampering across their surfaces (she wanted to hear about how this was possible and pestered her girlfriend's father until he explained it to her), and some of a smooth, cool marble, always perfectly clean and which she always wanted to press her cheek against, and I thought of the side of our building in Manhattan and the broad silence of stone. At a certain point she became aware of the permanent state of cleanliness of the floors, and indeed of the rest of the house, and marveled to her friend about how much work it must take to keep their home in such wonderful condition all of the time, thinking of her mother and her shoulders moving from behind, scrubbing something with a brush that magic would not clean. Her friend laughed and said it was the elves before pulling her outside to play. Her day thereafter was permeated by an image she could not shake.

When she arrived home, she found her mother in the kitchen, preparing food with her wand hand and stirring a pot with the other, and asked her if elves were real. Her mother turned her head and told Molly that yes, they were real, and they were industrious, powerful creatures who knew all sorts of magic that humans didn't, that they were faithful and generous, and that some people felt that it was all right to take advantage of their good nature and skills but that in the Prewitt house, humans could do their own dirty work. For the rest of the evening, Molly's young mind was haunted by images of enslavement.

When she returned to her friend's house, she marched directly up to her friend's father and asked him if he had enslaved elves in his house to do the cleaning. The man laughed and told her that she didn't understand, that they weren't slaves and were very happy to serve their masters, that if they had no one to serve, well, they just wouldn't know what to do.

If there was one thing Molly really despised, it was being condescended to. If there was a master, there was a slave, she reasoned. She determined to find an elf in the house and ask if he or she was a slave or not. This turned out to be very difficult – she hadn't seen them before because they were quite stealthy in the performance of their tasks. When she finally managed to find one, it was in the otherwise empty dining room. She had been quietly wandering through the house while her friend was otherwise occupied and stepped quietly into the room, where she was surprised to see a short, wiry figure, dressed only in a cast-off flour sack, causing a variety of dishes to arrange themselves in a decorative fashion on a side cabinet. The figure was female, with large drooping ears and a long nose, and large bright eyes. She was unaware that she was being watched, and she was doing all of her magic without a wand. When Molly realized this (she was too young to have a wand, and thought all magic was emitted from one), she gave a small gasp. The elf turned her head rapidly with an expression of horror, and in doing so dropped one of the plates, which smashed itself on the cabinet top.

A shriek escaped the mouth of the elf, but before the bits of the plate could even stop moving, they all vanished and the original plate reappeared, now in its proper place. The elf began speaking rapidly and Molly had expected to be berated for distracting her, but once she was able to understand the broken English she realized the elf was apologizing to her and indicating what punishment might be most appropriate for her mistake.

Molly immediately countered that it was her fault, really, and besides the plate was as good as new, and … and how did she do that magic?

The elf shyly told her that she was far too gracious and kind (which mortified the girl), and that the magic she'd performed was what the master referred to as household magic, and that there were many duties to the master that the elf had to fulfill, but that when she was finished with them and if the young mistress were still here…

Molly thanked her, but insisted, "I'm too young to be anyone's mistress, I'm just Molly."

The elf began to look horrified again, and a stream of apologies and objections poured from her, taking Molly aback for a moment. Summoning a stance she assumed when her brothers were being foolish with her, she put her hands on her hips and said firmly, "I'm just Molly. This is not how friends speak to one another."

The elf's eyes grew even larger out of surprise. There was a moment of silence between them, and then she said softly, "My name is Pella," before disappearing with a crack.

Over the following years Pella and Molly spent a great deal of time together. Molly loved the elf for her kindness and generosity, and respected her magical abilities greatly. Pella was happy to find a willing and eager listener and did her utmost to share her knowledge with the girl. Her magic and indeed all elvish magic was centered on order, in this instance the magic of the house, and of what made a home. When elves lived in the wild, they were keepers of nature, unblocking streams from flotsam, tending to sickly trees that animals depended on, being a part of order. The enemy was entropy. When they encountered humans they were drawn irresistibly to the large and powerful and yet cumbersome systems that we had put into place with barely a thought as to the trueness, the rightness of order, of how things must be. Molly learned about the things that made a home, how a home is grown of balances of light and dark, objects and spaces – that it supports the owner, strengthens them, guides them back to the center when they are lost, and reflects their essence. Style is unimportant. What is, must be, and what must be, is. The home does not lie.

These ideas appealed to Molly's very core. Her mother knew of her friendship with Pella, though they did not discuss it – she could see it in the unfamiliar magic Molly used around the Prewitt home – but she approved whole-heartedly. When Molly put something in its place, it belonged. What she planted would flower with an ease her mother had never achieved in their garden. When Molly went away to school, she and Pella remained close – Molly would visit in the summer, and eventually, in an unusual turn, Molly only needed to say her name and Pella would appear before her. Molly had learned that an elf bonds to the owner of the home and is able to hear them anywhere and appear to do their bidding, and wondered aloud at why Pella could hear her, to which Pella replied, in her high, clear voice, "I believe humans have a saying – 'home is where the heart is'." Molly hugged her friend for a long time.

When the war came, Molly's entire family were involved, including her new husband. She was terrified for her brothers and Arthur, and in the way I'm told these things happen, she wanted to plant where the soil was roughest, to assert life in the face of fear and death. Her home was filled with the sounds of one, two, three boys, and she did her best to keep the ugliness of the outside world in its place beyond their doors. When Charlie was born another floor was added to their house, and when Percy came along a room was extended from that, like a new limb on an oak tree.

Ginny had spoken aloud at this point. "She tried so hard to keep the war away, but in the end it got in, like it did with everyone."

In the most cruel and wrongful way she could imagine. Two of her brothers, funny, witty and mischievous Fabian and Gideon, who had alternately irritated and delighted her for her whole life, were killed by terrorists trained by Tom Riddle, killed on their front lawn, defending the family home. When Molly arrived, she found them lying next to each other, surrounded by the bodies of five Death Eaters, and she could only think of hideous dark insects dead around a candle, extinguished by the beating of black wings.

The murderers' corpses were nearly incinerated by her burst of accidental magic.

Molly found her way home and for the next several weeks found herself helpless. Her boys needed her, but she could not rise out of her well of depression to help them. Her husband could not reach her. Small things broke and were not fixed, plants went unwatered, meals were irregular as Arthur was not a good cook, dishes piled, her magic dimmed.

In the middle of the night, Molly awakened to a small hand pulling hers. She initially thought it was one of the children, come to try and coax her from her bed, which she had not left in many days, and in a flat voice she barely recognized as her own she told the child to go back to bed, to leave her in peace.

The voice that answered her was high and clear, urging her out of bed, and with a strong tug Pella had Molly upright and was sliding her feet around to the floor. She brought a protesting Molly to her feet, jarring her into wakefulness when she said, "Your enemy has come."

Molly cast a look at Arthur, still sleeping soundly, but Pella dragged her to the door, saying that it was for Molly to face, and Molly alone. Molly was terrified at this, and tried to protest, but Pella managed to bring her out of the room and down stairs into the center of the house. Molly's eyes darted fearfully around, not seeing and not finding what she expected. She turned to Pella and whispered, "Where are they?"

"Who?"

"Death Eaters … Voldemort …" She was shivering. She had no wand. She was helpless.

"They are not your enemy now, Molly," Pella said. "Your enemy is entropy."

The family room she stood in slowly became clear to her, but painfully, as one detail after another returned to her perception. Broken toys, limping with the remains of their enchantments. Chairs pushed crooked and blocking pathways, a corner of the rug folded, the scent of spoiling food from the kitchen like a pall over everything, and the dust dulling all colors, and she saw it, cast-off skin cells, their dead weight bending the backbone of this sighing, darkened house.

"You can not let this be so," Pella said, her voice quivering with emotion. "This must not be. It is not as you truly are."

There must be order, the elf said, and vanished with a crack.

In the morning her husband was awakened by the smell of eggs and bacon. He told her later that he took a deep breath, filling himself with the scent, and then sat in their bed alone and wept, knowing his wife was returning to herself and not wanting her to see him like that, knowing she was doing what she had to do to move on. A year later two more ginger heads joined the family portrait, the house sprouted yet another floor, and one day not too long after, a clock appeared in their family room, a bit of magic that Molly had conceived and created for her home, to watch over her family and facilitate her tending, to help her keep order.

Ginny had dropped her gaze from mine at that moment, a little flushed. I wanted to thank her for letting me listen to her thoughts, and I wanted to tell her something of my own life, to maybe try to make it even, but there was nothing for me to tell. She spoke first, though.

"That clock is really amazing," she said softly. "Dumbledore clucks over it every time he thinks of it – apparently he can't figure out how it works."

"Who's that?" I said.

"Oh, he's…" She stopped talking, and was looking at me.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I'll have to do some more things that I can remember, so I can tell you what hearing your story was like."

"Oh…" She frowned a little, but let it go. "Anyway, my mum … ended up in a coma, and I wanted to be near her, because of all of the stories I'd heard. She looked like she was kind, even though she's utterly still all of the time. I visited her a lot with Charlie when I was little, and, you know, spent a lot of time in hospital, and got used to that. In school I spent a fair amount of time in the infirmary with Quidditch injuries, and - oh, Quidditch is a sport magical folk play, and it's terrifically dangerous – and I got to where I could help the school nurse with some of the healing, and then after the end of the second war, there was so much healing to do, and I could be at the hospital near my mum, and … somehow the things I used to think I wanted to do seemed so frivolous."

"We're alike," I said.

"How do you mean?"

I was struggling to put this together. "We both have been told things about what happened in our pasts, and the stories are what we have, and somehow the story has taken the place of memory, or becomes memory, or … something like that."

She gave me a slightly amused look. "I think I know what you mean. I can't be sure, because it is you, and you tend to go all around the park to end up a step away, or take one step and end up on the moon, one of the two."

"True," I said, experiencing the unknown sensation of being known to someone, having ways that someone might get accustomed to, and as with so many things surrounding her, the feeling was of a surpassing sweetness. Right around that moment my parents came back into the room.

Anyway, I remembered that.

•

"I guess I know why our apartment always looked nice, but the food wasn't so great," I said to no one in particular.

"Well, I like that," Arthur or maybe actually Molly said, "You only remember one meal and I was trying to do it without magic. The cheek…"

The Weasley kids were clearly unbalanced by this recent development. The boys were gaping in various states of disbelief at the man in the ill-fitting dress that now somehow didn't seem so strange, or maybe seemed stranger than anything they could imagine but in a more recognizable way. The strongest disbelief seemed to be emanating like heat off of a summer sidewalk from Percy. He had taken a step back and was shaking his head. He was about ready to pop.

"No, no, no!" he finally shouted. "This is ridiculous! Don't you all see? Our father has lost his mind!"

"You're wrong, Percy," Luna said, "he just has an additional one to contend with."

"You're as insane as he is," he hurled back at her. "Our family has been through enough without dredging up old –"

"I told you she wasn't dead," Ginny said, and I for one would have taken the cue from her tone and shut my mouth had I been her brother.

"You…have…to…accept this!" he growled. His brothers were clearly shocked at his tone, as if they had never seen him this way. Another thing to set me on edge. I didn't know from angry people, but this didn't look good to me. "You never even knew her! She's been gone for years! But you insist on tending her body like it's alive," he raged, taking steps towards her, "wasting our time, our money, our lives, and all of this so you can stay a stupid little g –"

Kind of suddenly, he was on the ceiling. He looked like a strand of spaghetti thrown at the refrigerator to see if it was done. And he was done, as far as I was concerned. A little chewy, in fact. Ginny looked more surprised than anyone, and her glance at me contained many things, but I was busy just then, looking him right in the eye.

"You're the one who has to accept things," I said. The world had taken on a reddish hue. "You're the one who has been wasting your life. You decided she was dead, so she's been dead to you. You wanted your hurt to end and you thought if she were dead you could move on. But it was a lie and you trapped yourself in it. You won't ever stop hurting until you stop lying."

He was shaking now, his eyes reddening, and he struggled for a moment before letting out a gutteral wail, deeper than I thought cold come from his narrow frame. Ginny gave a shuddering sigh that sounded like crying.

"Let him down, son," my father said, a little sadly. "He needs his family."

I had to stop feeling the thing I was feeling to allow him to come down, had to will it away, part anger and part sympathy, and something else, something I had suspected.

His feet touched the floor, and Bill and one of the twins took his arms, and he was able to hold himself upright, and look at me with an unfamiliar expression.

"Ginny doesn't give up on anyone," I said as I felt her moving at my side. "Not even you."

She stepped forward to her brother, brushing my arm as she passed, came to a foot or so from him, and waited, searching his face.

His expression seemed to ripple as he looked at her, like someone had dropped something heavy into a deep, clear pool, and then suddenly he was crying and she was holding him. Good sister, I thought. I hoped he knew it. I thought that he might.

I found Arthur at the edge of the room and crossed over to him, away from the re-knitting of the siblings - there were a lot of them and it took a bit of space. His face was drawn, careworn and lost. I realized what a disability his condition was. Imagining the battle for consciousness, two different impulses, two sets of feelings, a blurred sense of self. I could not wonder any more at his disconnected presence. It would be too much for anyone, being shouted at from both sides, every moment of every day. You would know bad things were happening around you, sad things, but which set of feelings would you have about them? And if the feelings were close, but not identical, wouldn't they be blurred or doubled, like having a lazy eye? I went to him and put my arm around his shoulders, which was a little more difficult as he seemed to have grown a few inches, or was it the shoes? No, it wasn't. I didn't know what to make of that, so I ignored it. "You've both looked after me all of this time," I said. "Maybe we can fix this thing that has happened."

His eyes never left his children. "We should try to," he said absently.

Percy had let go of Ginny. His cheeks were red and shiny with tears as he approached us with her at his side.

He took a long look at Arthur, and gathered himself. "I'm sorry…for how I have treated you. I can't possibly understand…I… well, I'm glad you're home."

Arthur looked at Percy as from the bottom of a well, and nodded before bowing his head.

"H-…Deasil," Percy said to me, "I know you were only protecting Ginny…"

"Not so much," I said, "I was actually protecting you from her."

His eyes found mine. He glanced at his sister, then a strange thing happened, something I never would have expected. It started life as a wince, or maybe something got in his eye, or …

He was winking at me.

"Right enough," he said.

Ginny was looking at me intently. I felt like I was being searched. Or at least patted down. I did the only thing I could do, and I hoped it would work. I thought very hard about something I had seen a few moments ago. It was a little thing, really. Just her hand, opening and closing, when he was getting ready to call her a stupid little girl.

Well, I didn't want the room to burst into flame again, did I? I thought.

No, I suppose you're right.

Good. That was close.

She narrowed her eyes at me a little, but didn't say anything aloud. There was something else she wasn't saying, and that was all right with me.

"But how is this possible?" Minerva said. She sounded impatient. Fair enough, I thought. I was wondering the same thing.

"There's absolutely nothing like this in the literature," Hermione said, almost defensively, as if she were responsible.

"What literature?" I asked.

"Anything I've ever read about magic," she said, as if that said it all, and I could easily imagine that it did. I thought she was all right. Maybe a little single-minded, but good to have on your side.

I thought of who Molly was. "All magic?"

"Well, of course all…" Hermione stopped, and her eyes glazed over for a moment. The next thing she did was smack her head, rather hard. I would have been seeing stars. It must be an extraordinarily hard head. "No. Not all magic. Only human magic. Nothing else is written down."

"Why not?"

"Erm … mostly because the general academic consensus has been that human magic is superior, which is of course completely untrue. It's just that the other forms are frowned upon by most of the people who write the books that get published. It's really a disgrace –"

"Molly," I said, turning to Arthur, "is there anything you can tell us about how this came to be and how we can fix it?"

"Oh, I don't know, dear," he said, a little flustered, as if he were being fussed over at a tea party. "It's very hard to remember, it's been so long – I can't seem to find it in me."

"But there are ways to get memories, aren't there? Magic ways – like the pub one from earlier?"

"It can be done," my mother said, "but it's more complex when the person has a block or if there is some disturbance, and this would certainly," she said as Arthur smoothed his dress and then scratched himself in what I suppose you might call a manly way, "qualify as one. It's really quite a delicate process, and…" She paused.

"What?"

"Well," she said carefully, "the real expert on that, the sort of acknowledged master, is …"

"What? Out of town? We'll go find them. What's the problem? It's not like it's Dumbledore or something," I finished.

She looked a little apologetic.

Crap.

He was surely going to be insufferable about it.

I hoped he was bringing his fireproof beard.

•

A/N: Something that really helped me through this chapter, especially after I lost an entire section because I wasn't paying attention and had to rewrite it, was a picture. It's at hp-lexicon dot org /wizards/molly.html - it's the topmost, black and white portrait of Molly. I can't imagine her any other way now. Maybe I'm projecting, but I can kind of see the girl she once was, and the woman Arthur loved for many years. It's hard for me to imagine that face slack and immobile and comatose, but it surely makes it easier to write some things. And it really makes me want to wake her up. Thanks to Jules for looking over and not over-looking.