Witches of East End by Melissa de La Cruz Page B

but who wanted to be called handsome when one was once beautiful?
    The problem, as she saw it, was that right when she would finally get her figure back, bam , she would find herself pregnant again, and the whole cycle of gaining and losing would start up once more. The children had to be reborn whenever they got themselves into trouble and had to leave the world, or else had been pushed out of it by accident (a car crash, maybe; Freya had once perished in a hotel fire) or malice (like the crisis that had claimed their lives in the seventeenth century), and Joanna would begin to feel the symptoms. It usually happened after she hadn’t heard from her girls in a century or two. First, her gray hair would turn blond again. She would marvel at her changed appearance, the loss of wrinkles, the fat in her cheeks, strong hands that did not ache from arthritis. Then it would happen: the vomiting, the nausea, the exhaustion. And she would realize: goddamnit, she was pregnant!
    Nine months later she would have a fat, crying baby to care for and love. This time the girls were reborn just a few years apart, so that in the current lifetime they had grown up like proper sisters again, squabbling over toys, annoying each other on long car rides. Life had been a happy tedium of preschool and swimming and gymnastics and endless birthday parties along with the occasional accidental magical outburst: Ingrid’s griffin causing havoc with the flower beds; and having to keep Freya from hexing mean girls she did not like.
    It was easy enough to fool the neighbors; the restriction did not prohibit Joanna from using her considerable power to keep their immortality hidden. It wouldn’t do to have people wonder why the “widow” Beauchamp suddenly looked half her age and was pregnant to boot. Magic was useful in that matter at least.
    No matter what, though, no matter how long it had been, with every hopeful pregnancy she never got her boy back. Never. Of course she understood it was useless to hope that she would. That had been made clear to her during the sentencing after the bridge between the worlds had collapsed. Joanna knew he was still alive, but no witchcraft could help him now. He was out of her reach.
    One would think after so many lifetimes the pain would dull a little, but it never did. If anything, every passing year just made it ache that much more. She missed him more than ever and thought about him every day. That was the problem with motherhood: not only did it make you fat and put anxiety lines in your forehead, but the love you felt—that intense, all-consuming love for one’s child—was like owning the sharpest and most exquisite knife. It stabbed her right in the heart. Her boy was alive somewhere but he might as well be dead to her, since she would never get him back. They had taken that away from her. It was the worst kind of sentence a mother could endure, which was why it had been given.
    Her beautiful boy, her happiest child: his smile was the sun, his light lit up the whole entire world. It was true what they said about mothers and sons: it was a special bond, a mutual admiration society. It was also true what they said: one loved one’s children the same amount, but sometimes you liked one child more than another. She had been mourning his loss for so long, and the girls were a great comfort. Still, it had never been the same. But now she had this wonderful new boy: this Tyler Alvarez, of the quirky flapping hands and the mischievous smile, who would not embrace her yet would head-butt her if he wanted a kiss on the top of his head. He did not heal the hole in her heart, but he did fill a gap that had been empty for a very long time. Joanna took to the boy immediately. He called her Abuela, or “Lala” for short, and she called him Checkers. She wasn’t sure where that came from, something with his cheeks maybe. She was constantly pinching them. She loved her daughters, but they did not need her anymore. They were