I swallowed. I had been so happy when I woke up, glad to have my power back. Fifteen ugly lemon-tree scrapes and scratches later, I felt nostalgic for my pre-power life.
I would love to have a good curse I could use over and over to spill off power in the least horrible way. To find it, though, I needed to do more experiments.
I dug a little hole and half-buried the banana, then curled both my hands around it. Red flame glowed around my hands.
“Be a tree, contained and small, dark and quiet below the wall.”
The banana stirred inside my hands, grew. A short dark trunk sheathed in big stiff petally things shot up, and large feather-shaped leaves unfurled from its top. They were black. Flame flowed from my chest down my arms and into the plant, and it grew, but not too big, only eight or ten feet tall, leaves unscrolling from the top of its trunk in a black bouquet. The trunk, about three feet high, swelled in my embrace.
The power flowed out of me. When it was gone, I backed up and got to my feet, held a hand out to the tree, touched a glossy black leaf. It felt smooth and giving, and it didn’t sting or make me itch. Not so bad.
A spike grew up from the center of the plant, drooped toward me. A huge, inverted teardrop-shaped bud with giant maroon petals swelled on the end of the spike, nodding down closer to my face. One of the topmost giant petals curled back, revealing a fringe of tubular flowers with thready yellow petals at their ends. A delicious smell came from them, banana, but floral, too, with an edge of vanilla. My mouth watered. Before the flowers could fruit, I backed away and ran to the house.
In the kitchen I got a Sharpie pen from the mess drawer and wrote a note. “Don’t go to the orchard. There’s a cursed tree there. Should be gone—” I checked my watch—“around four.” I signed it and taped it to the double back-porch doors.
Upstairs, I wrote up my first two curses of the day in my curse journal, then went to find someone to drive me to a store. I listened at the doors in the kids’ end of the house.
Mama and Dad had a huge master bedroom/study suite at the other end of the upstairs. Between the ends, the staircase rose, three sides of a square, to an open hall that fronted on two spacious bedrooms, one the guest room and the other Opal’s old room, each with their own bathrooms. Opal’s room opened onto the widow’s walk on the roof, and Mama’s study opened on the other end of it. They could go out any time they liked and watch the ocean and the weather from way high up. You could sneak onto the widow’s walk from the guest room’s bathroom window, but you had to make sure Mama wasn’t out there first. She had creative trances there and hated to be disturbed.
The four of us still at home had had a number of discussions about who should inherit Opal’s room now that she had moved out of it, but we all had good arguments, and even though she’d been gone six years, none of us had moved. We did sneak in once in a while, but we left her stuff alone, unless we were cursed. Sometimes I suspected Mama snarled our arguments about Opal’s room so we couldn’t find a clear answer just so we’d leave the room alone. Mama hoped Opal would move back.
Through Beryl’s door, I heard the radio playing top forty, so I knocked, wondering who would answer, old Beryl or young Beryl?
Young Beryl came to the door. “You all right?” we asked each other.
“Yes,” we said. Then we laughed.
“Guess the curse or the spell interpreted ‘day’ as that thing which ends in sleep,” Beryl said. “I woke up me.”
“Me, too. Thank God.”
“Seriously?”
I thought about the banana tree. A quiet curse. I could live with that, even if I had to do it every two hours. There could be a little grove down there, one tree disappearing as I planted another one. If I got bored, I could plant an orange, or maybe a brussels sprout. I could make this work.
“Something smells great,” Beryl said.
“I’m baking cookies, but I ran out of tins to put them in. You have time to run me to the store?”
“You’re not driving?”
“Afraid I’ll curse somebody.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Just let me get dressed and find my shoes.”
“I’ll get my wallet.”
WE reconnected five minutes later. “Those curses I put on you yesterday?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How was that? Are you still living with Ultimate Fashion Sense?”
“Naw. I liked it. I redecorated my room, and I spruced up some of my accessories, but eventually I realized I was spending all my time and energy on what stuff looked like, and I kept wanting to fix everybody against their wills, so I undid it.”
“There’s a way?”
“It acted like just another spell. You missed a lot of our training about spells, I know. Tobias taught us how to unweave spells put on us by other people, and it wasn’t a particularly difficult or nasty spell. The old-age one . . .”
We headed down the stairs while she thought about it, stopped in the kitchen long enough for her to grab a handful of cookies. Then we went out the backdoor, down the steps, around the guest house to our hidden parking places under the giant fig tree.
Beryl had a vintage dark blue Volkswagen bug. She had gotten it cheap and totally fixed it up. She warded it so tree drips wouldn’t touch its skin, or bird shit; it always sparkled, and everything in it stayed in tune. She was good with engines when she wanted to be.
We climbed in and she started that chugging engine, and finally she said, “Being old was interesting and scary. My body didn’t work very well, and lots of things hurt—my joints, my fingers and toes. My eyes saw everything blurry. I tried to go with it, feel what it was like, but after a while I couldn’t take it anymore and made some improvements. Then I went to the supermarket and tried that out.”
She took off the emergency brake and backed out of her space, drove out of our yard and onto the little ragged-edged road we lived on. Bosquecito had many giant expensive houses, and, paradoxically, lots of small pot-holed roads paved in gray asphalt with white and gray rocks in it. People weren’t interested in making their houses easy to get to.
“That was shocking,” Beryl said. “Worth the experience. You have white hair and wrinkles and look eccentric, nobody wants to make eye contact. You ask questions and they don’t even hear you. I bought some groceries, and those bag boys, the ones who always tease me when I go in there as normal me, no connection at all. ‘Help you to your car, ma’am?’ They didn’t even listen to my answer. One of them carried my groceries out even though I said no. I felt like I was encased in Jell-O.”
Welcome to my world, I thought. “Wow,” I said.
“I went to the library. The librarians pay attention to everybody. So then I felt better. I went home and had fun with Tobias and Daddy and then, when Mama got home, boy howdy.”
“How’d that go?”
Beryl frowned. “As soon as she figured out who I was, she started spelling at me. She was going to uncurse me without even asking. Completely against rules she made up herself.”
Right. The let-us-sort-everything-out-ourselves, no-parental-interference-unless-things-got-severe rule. My favorite.
Beryl said, “Mama gets kind of fractured about how we look.”
“No kidding.”
We stopped at a red light, and she turned and gave me a searching stare. “So that was educational too,” she said after a moment. “More than I knew. That’s what she’s always like with you?”
“She’s kind of resigned, or at least she controls herself pretty much, but when she’s ticked and wants to yell at me, that’s the first thing that comes to the top.”
“Guess I knew that,” Beryl said. “Guess I’ve heard some of those fights. . . . Where are we going, anyway?”
Cookie tins at the bakeware store in the mall, a store I adored, would be way too expensive. “Let’s try the drugstore. I bet they have a bunch of holiday stuff.”
“Or Thrifty’s.”
“T
hat would be good, too.”
No store along the Old Coast Highway in Bosquecito carried anything cheap. Beryl hit the freeway for the short drive into downtown Santa Tekla, to the low-rent district, which had the best inexpensive stores, bodegas, panaderias, and the best branch library if you wanted to check out kids’ books.
“So anyway,” Beryl continued, “I told Mama to leave me alone. I think she was pissed that I looked like that while we had company, though.”
“Yeah! I’ve been meaning to ask. What happened after I fell asleep? I cannot believe I brought Ian home and then just crashed. Was he okay? How long did he stay? Was he mad that I fell asleep? Who put me to bed?”
“He’s really nice, Gyp. Where’d you find him?”
“At Claire’s.”
“Lucky! Mama invited him to Christmas Day.”
“Oh, God.”
“I think he’s going to come, too. He doesn’t have family around here, and he doesn’t have enough money to fly home, he said. He survived us pretty well. There’s a guy who’ll make eye contact with a little old lady. You started snoring—”
Oh, God. Could this get any worse?
“—and he and Daddy carried you upstairs. I put you to bed after they left. Ian went back downstairs and finished his brownies, and charmed Mama, and said good night. He didn’t even seem like he was rushing away.”
I covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t believe I’d ever see him again.
“He was so much better than Opal’s dates.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling wretched. “How hard is that?”
She poked me. “Quit worrying. You’ll be okay with him. And it’s harder than you think to do better than Opal did with guys. Ever notice that I never bring anybody home?”
Now that she mentioned it. Huh. “I never meant to bring him home. He was just supposed to drop me off at the top of the driveway. Only, that curse. . . .”
“I think you’re going to be okay.” Beryl pulled into a parking space by the Thrifty’s and turned off the engine.
Most of the Christmas stuff was already ten percent off, so I was happy. I found many, many Christmas tins in very dubious taste. Currier & Ives scenes on the lids of people at ice-skating parties or riding in sleighs through snowy winter landscapes were the prettiest ones. How relevant was that to Southern California holidays? I ended up buying all they had of those, and even some Coca-Cola Santa tins. What the heck.
I drew the line at tins with cartoon reindeer and snowmen, though.
I met Beryl at checkout. “Whoa,” she said. “You need all those?”
“Probably.” I had had to get a shopping cart so I could really load up on tins.
She had scored some purple wisteria shampoo and a kit of holiday nail polish & lipstick, both with candy-apple-red glitter in them. She flashed the nail polish at me. “Wanna have a girl date?” she asked. We had done that when we were younger, sat around painting each other’s nails, tried on lots of different colors of lipstick and wiped them off again. Red glitter. Ultimate Fashion Sense would probably say no.
“Sure,” I said.
We bought our things and left.
On the way home, Beryl said, “So I’m going up to the mountains to do my annual tree talk, maybe this afternoon.” Beryl was responsible for summoning our Christmas tree. She had to wander through the wilderness talking to trees until she found one who agreed to come home with her. She shifted her shoulders. “Hope it works.” She had brought us a good tree every year of the past six, and she still wasn’t sure of her tree-calling skills.
“Can I come?”
“What?”
For a minute I didn’t say anything. “I never got to go.” There were a number of family traditions I had gotten shut out of because I didn’t have powers. I had never particularly wanted to go find a tree and ask it to come stay with us for the holidays, but I had wondered what it was like.
“Oh.” She drove in silence. “It’s kind of a personal and private thing. I don’t know how it would work if someone else were there.”
I fiddled with my seatbelt.
“Maybe it would be okay. We could try it. If it didn’t work, I could go out again on my own.”
“Never mind. I’ve got baking to do anyway.” Mama hadn’t gotten around to assigning us holiday chores yet this year, but I assumed they would be the same as last year.
Come to that, it was odd that she hadn’t told us what to do yet. Usually she was ultra-organized and gave us our chores at least a month in advance. Had she even gotten Christmas cards this year? We hadn’t had an evening session of going through the cards that had come in, copying the return addresses into our card book, addressing our own cards to go out. Usually that was a family thing: we did three or four nights of card work together. Mama wrote all the messages in our cards, and she and Dad signed them. I did most of the address work, as I had the best handwriting. Flint had perfected an unreadable scrawl just to get out of it, I sometimes suspected.
We spent a few uncomfortable moments as Beryl navigated the maze of Bosquecito streets toward home.
“I’m sorry, Gyp.”
“It’s okay. Really. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“That’s not right. I mean, we’ve got to be able to ask. I just have this feeling.”
“You can say no. It’s all right. I understand. It’s your special thing.”
“That’s it.”
When we got home and I carried my bags of cookie tins into the house, I found Flint and Jasper sitting at the kitchen table with glasses of milk, eating cookies.
What? Before I’d even had time to assemble the cookies, give Jasper his batches, sort the others into various tins so I could add other kinds later and we’d have gift baskets? “Hey!” I yelled. “Stop eating!”
I wasn’t even conscious that I had any power to spend. I hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t worked out a rhyme. My words came out with a curse anyway, a flash of red fire from my hand to my brothers’ faces. Their mouths closed, and their eyes widened.
“No!” I dropped my plastic bags full of tins and put my hands over my mouth. “I didn’t mean that!”
Jasper and Flint looked at each other. Jasper worked his jaw, but his mouth didn’t open. Flint pressed his fingers to his mouth, then shook his head. He smiled at me, but with lips only. No teeth.
“What!”
Jasper got up and fetched the phone message pad and pen. “Good one, Gyp,” he wrote.
I shook my head. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!”
Flint shrugged and offered me the plate he had been eating from. There were six cookies left. I glanced at my cooling racks. Lots of cookies gone.
I guessed Jasper had decided not to worry anymore about eating sweets. His plate still had about eight cookies on it, and lots of crumbs.
Jasper wrote another note and showed it to me. “Time limit on this?”
“Six point seven hours? That’s what it was yesterday. God, you guys. I’m so sorry.”
“Quit apologizing. It happens,” he wrote. “At least we’ve got full stomachs.” He tucked the pad and pen into his pocket, tapped Flint’s shoulder.
Flint stood, made his best sheepish face, added a shrug, and followed Jasper out of the kitchen.
I sat at the table, staring at half-eaten cookies, half-drunk glasses of milk. For a short time I laid my head on the table and let tears drip onto that smooth surface. No. I was never going to be like the rest of my family, flinging power here and there, hurting people without thinking it through. I was going to be careful and kind, no matter what sort of power I had.
Gyp, get a clue.
My sister had given me the face of a witch. My brother had broken my leg (though not on purpose). I’d been a pawn in a variety of ways when they were really feeling their power, their desires. Sometimes they still made me do things against my will. Sometimes they made me do things without my even being conscious of it. Sometimes they made me do things, and made me
feel good about doing things, so that I wondered why I bothered with free will; sometimes being directed felt better.
I sniffled and rubbed my nose and sat up, poured the leftover milk into one glass, grabbed the cookies that were half-gone or broken, and treated myself to a snack. I was a member of this family. Now I had the power to make scary mistakes, just like everybody else. My family was strong. They could handle it. They might even be expecting it.
My cookies tasted like tears at first. Then I got to the full flavor of melted chocolate chips, butter, flour, sugar, vanilla. Delicious.
I cleaned up everything that was out of place, washed a few dishes, checked the coffee thermos, started another pot of coffee, and went back to baking.
“SO, we’re not allowed to touch these now?” Tobias asked me when he came down to the kitchen around eleven.
“You may have three,” I said. I had already filled some of my new tins and felt less volatile.
Tobias checked the racks carefully and selected the three largest cookies. He got coffee and sat at the table, watched while I stirred pineapple filling on the stove. For a while neither of us spoke. He must have run into my brothers if he knew I was being strict about letting people eat the cookies. Was he going to get mad? Tell me how to remove curses? What?
I hunched my shoulders, tried to ease the tension in them. Time for another banana pretty soon.
“That was a nice boy you brought home last night,” Tobias said.
“I can’t believe I fell asleep!”
“Sometimes a spell will knock you out. You can never tell ahead of time if that’s going to happen.” He bit into a cookie and smiled at me. “Sometimes you cast the spell, and the results dismay or disturb you so much you knock yourself out because that’s the best way to get through it.”
I sighed.
“You’ve been learning a lot, haven’t you?”
“I hope so.” I set my spoon on a plate on the stove and turned to face Tobias. “Beryl said I couldn’t curse myself back to normal because I was never normal to begin with. But, Uncle—”
A Fistful Of Sky Page 25
