The Root of Magic

by Kathleen Benner Duble

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Benner Duble

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Pascal Campion

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525578505 (trade) — ISBN 9780525578512 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525578536

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For the wondrous women of Currier’s Ten Man: Kate Beers, Ali Clarke, AJ Motgi, Delia Pais, Maren Shapiro, Annie Shoemaker, Meg Starr, Maggie Wollner, and Tess Wood—I want to thank you for all the warm sunshine and laughter you have always added to my life! And to my daughter, the tenth woman of the ten man, Tobey Duble, who keeps this tree of roommates firmly flowering and has always embodied the idea that the true root of all magic is kindness, compassion, family, and friends. I am in awe of you all!

  We must believe in free will. We have no choice.

  —ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  “Are we going to die?” Wisp asks from the depths of his blankets in the backseat.

  Mom’s hands whiten on the wheel of the car, and her mouth tightens.

  In the front seat beside their mother, Willow tugs nervously on her long hair.

  DuChard Unspoken Family Rule #1: You are never, ever to say the words “death” or “die” when Wisp is within earshot.

  But because Wisp himself is asking the question, Mom has no option but to pretend she hasn’t heard him.

  “Of course not,” Willow tells her brother, when their mom says nothing. “It’s just snow, Wisp.”

  Yet even as she tries to convince her brother, Willow realizes she is lying. They have been driving in the dark for over two hours in what the weathermen on the radio are calling “the blizzard of the century.”

  It is four days after Christmas, and the first storm of the year. Usually, a December snowfall in the Northeast tumbles in like a light blanket, one you pull up just as the temperature begins to dip—fluffy but not too heavy.

  But this storm is monstrous. Willow imagines it as a great roaring beast—irritated by the release of aerosols in Russia, the exhaust of cars in China, the heat of nuclear reactors in the United States, and other global warming factors.

  Her science teacher has said that hurricanes, fires, and tsunamis have been increasing in number and intensity. Why, Willow wonders, should snow sit on the sidelines?

  When they left that afternoon, the flakes were light. Then the weather changed—faster than they could change their plans. Now Willow wishes they had stayed the night in some safe, warm hotel in Canada. But it’s too late. They are committed to driving home.

  Usually on car trips, Willow listens to music or writes in her journal, but tonight she simply stares into the dark night and icy roads, preparing to point out any danger that might suddenly throw them off course.

  “Do you think we’re going to be swallowed up by this storm and suffocate in this car?” her brother asks. His weary voice floats softly up to the front seat. “Are they going to find us months from now, when everything melts, just skeletons, since we have no food and only a few bottles of water?”

  In the front seat, Willow rolls her eyes at her brother’s bizarre questions.

  “Don’t be silly, Wisp,” their mom finally snaps.

  But a minute later, she sighs and rubs her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just tense from driving.”

  Willow says nothing. She knows she is to blame for their being on this road at this hour, just below the Canadian border in the wilderness of Maine, where even their car’s headlights seem unable to penetrate the wall of white in front of them.

  “Dad can drive in anything,” Wisp says.

  Willow goes still.

  DuChard Unspoken Family Rule #2: Never mention Dad in front of Mom, especially when she is already under so much stress that the lines on her face look like cracked dry clay.

  “Do you see your father here?” Mom asks.

  Her brother goes mute, seeming to recognize his mistake, leaving Willow to answer her mom.

  Willow should call out her brother for this cowardliness, but she won’t. Instead, as usual these days, she swallows her annoyance with him, forcing the heat of it back inside.

  She shakes her head as a response. It’s safer that way. And she realizes in that moment that she, like her brother, is a bit of a coward these days, too.

  “It was your father’s last-minute cancellation that left us having to drive all the way to New Brunswick for this hockey tournament in the first place,” their mother goes on, in the tone that Willow has come to know as worse than the taste of sour milk. “He could have made that decision earlier, and then you could have ridden with one of your teammates. But no, once again, he waits until the last minute. And now, as usual, he’s nowhere to be found, leaving me on my own, driving through a horrific storm while he’s holed up in some basketball court, all warm and toasty. And it was his idea that you play hockey in the first place, so I really don’t understand why it’s me doing the hauling around, especially with a…”

  Their mother goes suddenly silent.

  In her mind, Willow finishes the sentence for her mother. “…with a sick child.”

  “Whatever,” Mom finally says softly. “Your dad should be here, not me.”

  DuChard Unspoken Family Rule #3: When their mom starts going on about their dad, it’s best to act like you’re facing an angry bear and, as Willow’s Girl Scout leader once told them, “Hold perfectly still and play dead.”

  So Willow turns statuelike, and she thinks about the game. The game they won—the big save she made.

  Willow can s
till feel the puck hitting hard against her glove as she raised it a few inches above her shoulder. And she remembers the complete and utter amazement when she realized the puck was there—safe, stopped, just as the buzzer sounded and the game ended. Incredibly, they had won by that one, single stopping of a goal.

  Willow can still hear the crowd screaming her name and feel her best friend, Elise, jumping on top of her before the rest of the team piled on, all smelling of sweat from their hard-won battle. It had been a sweet save, a sweet win.

  And Willow wishes her dad had been there. Because, unlike her mom, he would have known that feeling, understood that victory, cheered her on as a winner. He’d played hockey in college. He knew.

  But he couldn’t find a substitute to coach his high school basketball team this weekend. Instead, it was her mom waiting for her at the end of the game, tapping her foot during the winning-team pictures, shooing Willow off the ice, urging her to change quickly, barely able to wait half an hour before packing them up and starting the drive home, worrying and fussing about the snow.

  Now, with this scary drive, the joy of that miracle win in Willow’s otherwise miracleless life has deflated quickly, like bubble gum that has gone flat and tasteless.

  “Are we going to be lost forever?” Wisp asks.

  He must feel that even though the blizzard is still raging outside their car, the “Mom storm” has passed, but Willow isn’t so sure.

  “Maybe we’ll be like Rip Van Winkle and get lost in these hills and sleep for centuries,” Wisp says.

  “Rip Van Winkle left his poor wife alone to handle everything herself while he was out having a good time and a long nap,” Mom snaps again.

  As Willow thought: her brother was wrong. Neither storm is backing off.

  “I would like to nap like that,” he whispers.

  This shuts their mother up. Willow glances back at her brother, his little body curled tight on the seat, and he gives her a weak smile. Dark circles ring his eyes—constant reminders of his sickness. No doctor has been able to pinpoint what is wrong with him, even though they’ve done plenty of tests.

  Once, Willow overheard a doctor tell Wisp he had a “rare disease” because he was a rare kid. She knows the doctor only said that to make Wisp feel special. But sometimes she remembers that comment to make herself feel better too, especially when her brother looks really pale—kind of like he does now.

  Willow glances over to where their mom sits, tense and worried, both hands on the wheel. The coffee she bought earlier at a rest stop grows cold in its cup holder; her eyes are focused on the road as if her will alone can guarantee their safety. Her mom—the battler of battles, the gladiator in all their lives.

  If Mother Nature bothered to show herself now in the midst of this storm and challenged Willow’s mom to hand-to-hand combat, her mom would quickly tie these dark clouds into tight knots, blow this wind back where it came from, gather these snowflakes together and wring them out until they were nothing but a bucket of harmless water drops.

  And just as Willow is thinking this, the car’s wheels begin to slide. Her mom slams on the brakes and the car slips—only a little at first, but then the ice suddenly shoots them sideways and sends them spinning. Around and around they go, like some wild carnival ride. Wisp slams into the side of the door because, of course, he didn’t fasten his seat belt as he had promised he would. And their mom is fighting the car and the ice with all her gladiator strength.

  And when their mom finally gets the car to stop, Willow can see they’ve hit something gray and solid, and she can feel the car tilting, like they’re sitting on top of a giant seesaw. They are crosswise to the road, their front end low, their back end high. The car groans and slides slightly forward. Willow looks down, and through a sudden break in the mist and the snow, she sees water below them—swirling and rushing and splashing up toward their car as though trying to haul them all down to a watery grave.

  But Willow says nothing, because in her family, you never, ever say the words “death” or “die” when Wisp is around.

  They hang suspended, as if time is no more and the world has stopped its spinning. There is nothing but silence. Willow senses the danger surrounding them in her glimpse of the water, in the tilt of the car, but she is not sure why they seem to be hanging in midair.

  From the backseat, she hears the sound of her brother throwing up into the bucket they always bring for him.

  “Wisp,” Mom chokes out, “are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Wisp answers wearily.

  “Should we get out?” Willow asks, and then notices that a line of blood is trickling down her mother’s forehead.

  “Mom!” she cries. “You’re bleeding.”

  In the shock of the accident, Willow has not even considered whether any of them might have been hurt. Nothing feels broken or shattered to her.

  Her mom puts a hand to her head and wipes the blood away. “It’s all right,” she says to both of them. “It’s just a scratch. What about you, Willow?”

  “I’m okay,” Willow assures her mother.

  The car lets out a groan, and for a moment, the snow lightens. And Willow sees what has happened. Their car is stuck on a metal bridge, and they are inches from going over the rails.

  Before she can even let out the scream of terror that shrieks to be released, an angel appears through the wailing wind and slicing snow. The angel comes not on wings, but in warmth and lights. Two beams of a snowplow truck cut through the dark like a razor-sharp saw, and the roar of its engine breaks the silence of the storm and the inside of the car.

  The back door on the high side of their vehicle is suddenly jerked open. Wind howls inside, bringing eye-burning cold and pelting snow and the sound of the river.

  “Here now. Let’s get you out of here quick,” a grizzled face commands.

  “Can you grab my son?” Mom says. “I think my daughter and I can get out by ourselves.”

  “I’ve got him,” the old man assures her. “But don’t you move. It’s too dangerous. I’ll be right back.”

  He lifts Wisp from the car and carries him away. They melt into the storm like ghosts disappearing through walls.

  Willow hears the man call above the roar of blizzard and rushing waters. “We’ve got a minute more before she topples.”

  Willow’s heart pounds in her ears at his words, and she lets out a soft moan. She does not want to be a dead almost-thirteen-year-old. There are too many things she hasn’t done yet—gone parasailing, ridden in a hot-air balloon, had cinnamon-cayenne ice cream.

  “Willow?” Her mom’s voice wobbles. “Can you free yourself?”

  Willow reaches for her seat belt, and her frozen fingers undo the clasp. Her mom sighs at the sound of the click.

  The car tilts slightly, and Willow’s stomach lurches with it.

  And then her door is yanked open, and a new face appears, a woman, all freckle-faced and honey-haired beneath her hat, her nose red with cold. “I’m here to take you out. Y’all just hold on.”

  “My journal,” Willow says. Without thinking, she bends down and reaches for her precious notebook, which has fallen to the floor at her feet.

  The car makes another awful metallic whine. Willow finally lets out that cry of terror she has been holding in, and even her mom whispers, “Dear God.

  “Leave it, Willow,” her mother adds through clenched teeth.

  Willow obeys, unwilling to risk the move of a muscle.

  The woman quickly puts an arm under Willow and lifts her out. The rushing waters thunder below them, and Willow sees just how precariously the car is balanced on this bridge that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.

  “Mom!” she yells, struggling to free herself from this stranger, to bring her mother to safety too. But the woman has tightened her grip, as if she knew Willow would fight to go back
to the tottering car to get her mother.

  “He’s got her, honey,” the woman says to Willow. “Just look!”

  And the man does. He has Willow’s mom in his arms and has moved away from the car, when suddenly, everything gives way. Willow watches as the car topples front end first into the waters below. The crash of steel on rocks is a muffled explosion in the raging world of this storm.

  Willow stands there until the snow and the strange silence in the aftermath of the crash remind her to breathe, because she realizes that for the last few minutes, she has been holding her breath.

  “Wow,” Wisp says into the quiet. “That was awesome.”

  They all climb into the truck. As it moves forward, plowing through unending banks of snow, their rescuers introduce themselves. The man says his name is James McHenry. He is a local plowman, and the woman, Layla, is his wife. She knits in the dark as they drive. Her needles clack, clack, clack away, never once pausing. After Willow’s mom introduces their family, James says he is taking them all to the town of Kismet, Maine, which is just a few miles down the road.

  From the tiny backseat, Willow looks out the window as the windshield wipers fight a losing battle to clear the snow from the glass. They should be passing homes and shops, but truly, there is nothing to see in this whiteout world.

  James and Layla chatter away, talking about the storm and how long they’ve been digging folks free. They marvel at how Willow’s family got lost enough to wander so far from the main road and say they can’t remember the last time someone came to town and crossed that bridge. The McHenrys are so chatty that not Willow, Wisp, or their mother can get a word in.