A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic

by Lisa Papademetriou

  The color drained from Babar Taya’s face, and Leila felt a stab of worry. But Babar Taya turned to Mamoo. “You don’t mind doing the honor?” he asked, glancing toward the goat.

  “I insist,” Mamoo said, in a voice that left no room for doubt.

  Babar Taya murmured a quiet prayer, thanked Mamoo—who waved him away—and then darted into the house. Chirragh gave Mamoo the knife, and Mamoo motioned to the servants to place the box on the ground.

  Leila untied the goat. “Good-bye,” she said, throwing her arms around the goat’s neck. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The goat let out a terrified scream as Asif picked her up. Mamoo opened the lid of the box, and Asif placed her inside. Mamoo barked directions to Asif, and he and Mamoo’s driver lifted the box. Asif smiled at Leila, his dark mustache trembling as if he was laughing very quietly as he carried the box to Mamoo’s car.

  Chirragh jutted his chin, and Mamoo’s whiskers twitched. “I’ll be back in time for dinner,” he said, and then turned to follow the box.

  Leila smiled after him. “I like that crazy old guy.”

  Samir nodded. “He’s a good man.”

  Wali looked up at Leila. “But what are we going to eat?”

  “It’s called seitan,” Leila said. “I had Asif pick some up at the international store. It’s made of wheat, but it tastes like meat. Once Chirragh is done with it, you won’t know the difference.”

  “And what about Allah? Won’t he be angry?” Wali’s black eyes were huge.

  “Mamoo has given money to the poor for our family,” Samir explained. “No one will go hungry because of this goat.” He grinned at Leila. “Furthermore, it was a sadaqa,” he said.

  “Sadaqa?” Leila repeated. A blessing. A good thing. Well . . . it sort of is. Like feeding the pigeons.

  “It was an adventure!” Wali cried, which made Leila giggle, although she guessed it was true. It was small, and it was kind of . . . weird. And there were parts of it that she didn’t understand.

  It wasn’t at all like a Dear Sisters adventure, but it was real, and it was magical, and it was hers. She wished she could tell someone about it—Ta’Mara, or Aimee, or even Nadia. But none of them would ever believe it. None of them had the right kind of imagination.

  But she did.

  Leila looked up at the sky. The clouds were small and choppy, but the sky was clear. The smoke had lifted; the rain had washed it all away.

  THE EXQUISITE CORPSE

  FALLS RIVER SENTINEL

  Mark and Ellen Grove (nee Flabbergast) are delighted to announce the birth of their son, Walter Isaac Grove, on July 10, 1968. He weighed seven pounds, ten ounces, and was seventeen inches long.

  Walter Grove is the first great-grandchild of Ralph and Edie Flabbergast (nee Allen). The couple would like to invite the public to an ice-cream social to celebrate the birth, as well as the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The party will be held on the town green, Saturday, July 28, at 2 p.m. All are welcome.

  If you don’t believe me, check the county records.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kai

  IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE me, check the county records, Kai read.

  She stood up.

  She sat down.

  She stared at the book.

  Kai stood up again. Adrenaline coursed through her body; she wanted to move, but there was nowhere to go. She was seated at a table in the center of the small, old library.

  “You okay?” Carlos asked from his place behind the service desk. He was looking at her over the tops of his black-framed hipster glasses.

  Kai blinked at him. How to explain that a magic book had just told her—what? That her father was related to Ralph and Edwina? She plopped back down into her chair and looked over at Doodle, who peered at her curiously. “Is there a tack in your chair?”

  Kai spun The Exquisite Corpse and pushed it at her friend. “Look.”

  Doodle scanned the names. “I don’t get it. What is this?”

  “Walter Grove,” Kai said, pointing. “Walter Grove. That’s my dad.”

  “Oh my gosh!” Doodle stood up, her eyes bugging, froglike, from her head. Then she looked over at Carlos, who was watching them with narrowed eyes. What? He mouthed. Doodle shook her head and sat back down. “Ralph Flabbergast is Walter’s great-grandfather. . . .”

  Kai was tryng to work out what it meant. She couldn’t quite—

  “They’re your great-great-grandparents!” Doodle hissed.

  “It’s so weird. . . .” Kai shook her head. “It’s so weird. . . .” Her thoughts pinged off of one another like marbles in a jar.

  Doodle stared at her.

  “What?” Kai asked.

  Doodle kept staring at her, like she was trying to beam a thought across the table.

  “What is it?” Kai asked. “Don’t just think it at me—tell me.”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “I thought I got it. . . .” She looked down at the book. They’re your great-great-grandparents, she told herself, just like Doodle said.

  “You’re the heir,” Doodle said.

  “I’m the air?” Kai’s brain wasn’t really working at top speed. It’s like when you put too much stuff in a blender, and the blade just spins, but nothing gets pureed. Kai thought Doodle was working on a metaphor, something along the lines of “You’re the wind beneath my wings,” but she couldn’t quite make sense of it.

  “The heir to the fortune,” Doodle explained. “American Casket. You should own it. You!”

  Carlos leaned against their table, arms folded. “You girls are freaking me out with all of the whispering,” he said. “What are you plotting?”

  Doodle took one look at Kai’s blank, stunned expression, and said, “Carlos, we need to do a search of the local birth and death records.”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  “But . . . we can never prove it,” Kai said slowly. “Everyone thinks Edwina died in Lahore.”

  “You have the book!” Doodle cried.

  “A magic book is hardly proof, Doodle.”

  “This conversation is mighty interesting,” Carlos observed calmly.

  At that moment, the front door huffed open and Professor Hill wheeled into the library. A large manila envelope sat across his knees. “Carlos! I have a present for you!”

  “What is it?”

  Professor Hill steered right up to him. “I know that you’re interested in preserving historical documents, so I’ve brought you some correspondence between prominent local residents.”

  A very strange feeling crept over Kai’s scalp. “Who—” she whispered. “Who is it from?”

  Professor Hill smiled. “Hello, Kai. Doodle. An old friend and colleague of mine in Pakistan has sent me these letters.” Opening the flap, he pulled out a bundle of letters bound with a pale ribbon. “These were written at the turn of the twentieth century, between a woman named Edwina Pickle and her brother, Parker. Heirs to the American Casket fortune. And speaking of that! This same overseas friend has been concerned about the shellac used at the American Casket Company, so I have sent that sign we took to a laboratory. We should have results in a few days.” His ran his hands through his white hair, which continued to stand on end. “But I have a feeling that those results might make someone very unhappy.” Professor Hill cackled gleefully.

  “You sound like you hope the results make someone unhappy,” Doodle told him.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that.” Professor Hill looked at her very seriously, and then chuckled. “Oh, hell—I’ll confirm it. I hope Pettyfer Jonas spends a little time in prison for putting people at risk. I wish they could bring his old great-grandfather back to life and throw him behind bars, too.”

  Doodle wanted to hear all about this, of course, but when she looked over at her friend, she saw that Kai was in a daze. She hadn’t heard a word about the shellac. Doodle reached for Kai’s hand and held it, but Kai barely felt her fingers. She wasn’t attached to her
body. She had floated out, somewhere beyond the ceiling, into the bright blue sky, and beyond.

  “Lavinia!” Kai shouted as she flung open the front door. “Lavinia!”

  Her aunt shone like a shell on the dark green velvet couch. She wore a brilliant turquoise and pink tunic over white jeans, and smiled as Kai, disheveled and sticky with sweat, burst into the living room, demanding, “What was the name of your uncle’s wife?”

  Lavinia made no comment on Kai’s wild-eyed looks or rude question. Instead, she gestured to the armchair across the room. “Kai, sugar, look who’s here,” she said gently.

  A woman in a loose gray dress stood up. She had short dark hair, clipped into a bob that reached just below her ears, and warm gray eyes.

  “Mom!” Kai raced to her mother and flung her arms around her, pressing her cheek to the soft folds of her mother’s old linen sundress. She smelled of coffee and baby powder. She had her arms around Kai and was kissing the side of her head, murmuring, “Buggy, buggy, my little love bug,” which was her pet name for Kai. “I’ve missed you so much. When did you get so tall? What happened? It’s only been a few weeks!”

  “You can’t stop them growing.” Lavinia’s eyes sparkled.

  “What are you doing here?” Kai asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “Well, I didn’t know I was,” Kai’s mother said. “But I had a Skype interview with Browning Solutions last week, and it went so well that they flew me in for an in-person interview yesterday.”

  Lavinia perched at the edge of her sofa cushion. “Where are they located, exactly? What part of Houston?”

  “It’s right by Rice University,” Schuyler replied. “It’s about a ninety minute drive out here. I was supposed to fly back tonight, but they offered me the job—”

  “They did?” Kai asked. “To work in Houston?”

  “Kai, honey.” Schuyler’s voice was gentle, and she took her daughter’s hands. “They need someone to start soon. In a few weeks. This is a great opportunity, and I hope that you will—”

  “Fine! Great! Let’s move to Houston!”

  “—uh . . .” Schuyler stood still for a moment, blinking at her daughter. “Um.” She looked uncertainly at Lavinia, who shrugged. Schuyler looked back at Kai. “I had sort of prepared a speech. . . .”

  “Oh! Sorry.” Kai sat down on the chair and looked expectantly at her mother. Lavinia pushed herself backward on the couch and did the same.

  “Well—maybe it isn’t necessary. . . . But . . . uh . . . Kai, the schools are very good, and a few people have suggested violin teachers.”

  Kai put up a hand. “Look, Mom—about that.” She pressed her lips together, hesitating as her ears grew hot with shame. “I want to keep playing,” she said in a low voice. I have to, she thought. I can’t just put away my father’s violin forever. “But I don’t want to be as—intense—about it anymore.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey. I’m so glad.”

  It was Kai’s turn to be nonplussed. The air conditioner hummed. A truck rolled by outside. “What?” Kai asked.

  “Buggy, you love the violin. You always have. But all of that intensity—that wasn’t healthy.”

  “But—what about Dad? What about his dream, and . . . and having opportunities he never had?”

  “Kai, your father loved the violin, but his father forbade him to play it. He said that it was taking time from his academics,” Schuyler explained.

  “He used to practice over here, sometimes,” Lavinia put in. “It was his little secret.” Her eyes twinkled.

  Schuyler took Kai’s hand. “Walter wanted you to have the opportunity he never did—the opportunity to be whatever you wanted to be. I like it when you play because you seem to enjoy it. But I think we both got . . . carried away, maybe. It shouldn’t be about being the best. It’s about the music.”

  Kai then leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

  It’s about the music.

  It’s about the moths.

  And she laughed with a sound like bells ringing, clear and loud. She looked at Lavinia, then at her mother.

  Everything was happening so fast. They don’t even know about Edwina and Ralph! They don’t know about American Casket. “I have to tell you something,” she announced. “You might want to sit down.”

  “Is everything okay?” Schuyler asked, turning to Lavinia.

  “As far as I know it is.” Lavinia looked concerned and confused.

  “It’s all okay,” Kai reassured them. “It’s great, in fact. It’s just—unusual news. Highly unusual. And it’s kind of a long story.”

  “Well, then,” Lavinia said, standing up and straightening her tunic. “I’d better get us all some of your world-famous Luna Juice.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Leila

  “WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING at?” Samir asked as he stood in the doorway to Leila’s bedroom.

  She was sitting on the red coverlet, her silver laptop in her lap. She turned the screen to show her sister being doused with water by a baby elephant.

  Samir walked the twenty-three steps to take a better look. “Is that Nadia?”

  “She has a blog,” Leila explained. “It’s kind of fun to read, actually. I’ll send you the link.”

  “You must miss her a lot.”

  Leila thought it over. She hadn’t missed Nadia at all at the beginning of the trip. In fact, she had missed her friends more. But, over the past three days, Leila had started thinking about her sister. She had wondered if Aimee really did have more in common with Nadia than with Leila. She had started to see that, even though she had known Aimee a long time, they were really very different. And Leila had started to wonder if, maybe, her real Best Friend was still out there, waiting for her. “I do miss her.”

  “Well, you’re going home in a few days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s Houston like?” Samir reached for the chair by the desk and sat down in it.

  “Gah. Boring.”

  “Not as boring as here, I’ll bet.”

  “What? It isn’t boring here!” Leila closed the computer. “There are parrots in the trees and donkey carts and crazy dressed-up goats and fakirs and your squirrels have stripes and—how can you think it’s boring? People are always visiting; there’s always something happening. It’s—it’s magical.”

  Samir smiled. “I’ll bet Houston would seem magical to me.”

  Leila thought about her safe little neighborhood, the pretty park nearby with the community swimming pool and skate park, and the lady down the street who planted her whole yard with blooming cornflowers. She thought about the tornado sirens that wailed every night at six, just to make sure they were working, and the times that the sky would turn black with thunderclouds bitten by flashes of lightning. She thought about the strange traditions that her family took part in: the rodeo, the Houston Moonlight Bicycle Ramble, the way they could hop into the car and be at the beach in Galveston in forty-five minutes. It isn’t such a bad place to live, she decided. It wasn’t like Precious City, California, or the Dear Sisters’ mansion . . . but it had magic all its own.

  “Yeah—you’d like it,” Leila said.

  Samir smiled. “Do you want to go downstairs? Everyone’s watching Pakistan Idol.”

  Leila stood up. “Did they kick that awful guy off yet? The one with the beard?”

  “Don’t say that in front of Rabeea—he’s her favorite!” Samir scolded as they walked toward the stairs. They could already hear Wali shouting at the television set.

  Leila missed her family, but this was her family, too. It had taken time, but she felt at home here. Her trip hadn’t been what she had expected, but it had shown her where she belonged.

  Everywhere.

  EPILOGUE

  WELL, THERE ISN’T MUCH more to the story. Leila returned home and discovered that Nadia was still often annoying, and that, in spite of her epiphany in Pakistan, the whole world had not turned magical overnigh
t. Ta’Mara had a new boyfriend, and she talked about him all of the time. Aimee was obsessed with her new part in the fall ballet, so she didn’t hang out with Nadia as much as Leila had feared she would. And Nadia was still . . . Nadia. She had decided to start a nonprofit—something about helping baby ducks—and was busily assembling a robot in her spare time.

  Leila never started a blog, but she did keep in touch with Samir, who sent emails with photos of Wali, and Rabeea’s art, and even Mamoo and the goat, which had grown quite fat in Mamoo’s care.

  Babar Taya had said that Leila could take The Exquisite Corpse with her to America, and she had, but nothing new appeared. Over time, the words began to fade; a week before school was to begin in the fall, it was completely blank except for the first page. It was just as she had found it. “Nice try,” she told the book when she discovered the change. “But I know you’re still magic.”

  Kai’s copy of the book also faded, but she also stubbornly clung to the belief that the book was magic. “I have a witness,” she informed the book. “Doodle knows all about you, wise guy.”

  When Professor Hill sent the lab results and the copy of Mamoo’s email detailing his concerns about Scarlet Catsbane to the local paper, the small-town press had a field day with the fact that Pettyfer Jonas Sr., knew that the shellac used at American Casket could cause problems for asthmatics, and did nothing. He was quickly ousted as president, and Doodle’s father was chosen to take his place. When Scarlet Catsbane was replaced with a harmless compound, his lungs recovered quickly and he found he was rarely ever sick. In addition, the new shellac actually cost less and lasted longer. Unharvested, the field of Scarlet Catsbane grew and bloomed behind the factory, and Doodle spotted three Celestial Moths there one evening, a fact that she dutifully reported to the Lepidoptery Society at their monthly meeting.

  Once the judge reviewed the proof of Edwina’s life and checked it against the will her parents had made, Kai became the official heir to the American Casket fortune. The money was held in trust for her, but once she turned twenty-one, the money would be hers.