The Lightness of Hands

by Jeff Garvin

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded. “We found the truck at an estate sale in Las Vegas. She fell in love at first sight. She said it reminded her of her father’s truck, and of how he used to take her for midnight rides to the beach.”

  I stared. “She used to take me on drives, too. To the desert instead of the beach, but . . .”

  Dad cocked his head. “I never knew.”

  “You remember how sometimes she couldn’t sleep?”

  Recognition passed over his face like a shadow. “I remember.”

  I pressed my lips together. I wanted to say more, to ask a thousand questions about my mother, but I didn’t want to rekindle his anger.

  He ran a hand across the scuffed cover of his journal. “She designed the whole illusion. The narrative, the mechanics.” He swallowed. “When I failed on that show . . .” His voice faded to a whisper. “I think she blamed herself. I think that’s why she . . .”

  Dad had never talked about her death. Never. My heart felt pinched. Slowly, I moved toward him and sat down on the edge of the bed. I was still afraid of making him angry—but my longing to know more about my mother was stronger than my fear.

  “Tell me about her. Please.”

  He let out a long breath and turned his face toward the window. “She was funny,” he said. “Talented, beautiful. Tempestuous.” Now his eyes met mine, and I understood at once that this last part was about me, too. “She came to Las Vegas to get away from her family. She prized her freedom over everything else. You couldn’t tell Cora Prince what to do. And if you tried, she’d do the opposite just to spite you.” He smiled, shook his head; and the smile faded. “Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t . . . I wonder if she might still be here.” He looked at me, his eyes wide and wet and seeming to beg my forgiveness.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Dad.”

  He tilted his head as if he wanted desperately to believe me. The weight of his gaze compressed my rib cage.

  “Anything can trigger it,” I said. “Anything and nothing. And when it’s bad . . .” I shook my head. “It’s a sickness, Dad, and sometimes people die from it. You can’t . . .” I shrugged, helpless to explain it any better than that.

  Dad looked away, his jaw tight. “I miss her. So much.”

  “You never talk about her.”

  “No.”

  “But you still think of her?”

  “Every day. Every moment.” He faced me again. “You look so much like her.”

  I bit my lip. I wanted to hide my face. I wanted to look in a mirror.

  “Dad, I’m sorry.”

  His eyes drifted out of focus. I tensed, anticipating the return of his anger. I didn’t think I could handle it now.

  “I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry I went behind your back.” My eyes flooded with heat. “I’m sorry I wrecked the bus.” My breath hitched. I put my face in my hands and felt the sobs take me over, wracking my body.

  He sat next to me on the bed, put his arm around me.

  “Hush, now,” he said, stroking my hair, but it only made me cry harder. “You were right,” he said. “You did everything right. None of this is your fault.”

  His forgiveness punctured some invisible membrane inside me, and I dissolved into hysterical crying, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes, gasping for air. Dad held me until I became still.

  After a long silence, he released me, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his prescription bottle.

  I frowned. The last time I’d checked, he had only a few pills left—but the bottle he held now contained at least ten tablets. Also, they were the wrong color; it was apparent, even through the orange plastic vial. I read the label, and my mouth fell open.

  “How—”

  “You need them, Ellie,” he said, pressing the bottle into my hands, “and I need you.”

  My throat tightened. “But what about yours? Your heart!”

  He pulled another bottle from his coat pocket, smiled, and rattled the pills inside. “Got it covered.”

  “But we were broke. How did you get these? Did you—”

  “I didn’t steal. I never had your light hands.”

  I shook my head and felt the ghost of a smile on my lips. Dad returned a more substantial one. Then he held up his wrist, showing a band of pale skin where his watch had been. “Nothing up my sleeve.”

  “You sold your grandfather’s watch?” My smile vanished. That watch had been in our family for almost a century.

  “Pawned it,” he said, smiling more broadly. “But you can buy it back for me, once we’ve received that big fat check from Flynn & Kellar.”

  I gaped at him, and a tornado inside me seemed to suck away my breath.

  “You’re going to do it?”

  He nodded.

  I threw my arms around him, and he squeezed me tightly.

  “I’ve been a fool,” he said. “Trying to protect my reputation, my pride. What I should have been protecting is you.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “I can’t afford to lose you, Ellie. So we’ll do the show. I won’t pretend to be happy about it. But yes, of course, we’ll do the show.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but he shushed me.

  “I have conditions,” he said.

  I nodded, ready to accept any conditions he laid out.

  “First, you will take your medication every day, and you’ll tell me when you’re running low. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Then start now.”

  I opened the bottle and tapped one of the little blue tablets into my palm. I stared at it for a moment, feeling relieved but also terrified. It would be good to feel even again, to level out, to have that chemical safety net. The drug would protect me from the lows—but what if it blocked out the highs as well? What if it dimmed the stage lights, numbed the rush of performing, tamed the impulses I’d give in to so freely with Liam? Would all those precious highs dissolve as the medication took hold? I didn’t know. Somehow, I couldn’t remember how it had been before.

  “Take it, Ellie,” Dad said.

  I closed my eyes, placed it on my tongue, and swallowed it dry.

  “Good.” Dad smiled. “Second, you will take the rest of this semester off.”

  My shoulders stiffened. Taking a semester off would push everything back half a year: graduation, job, insurance. Dad was looking older by the day, and I wasn’t sure we could afford the delay.

  He put a hand on my arm. “You’re not dropping out—you’re just taking a health leave. I’ve already called your doctor, and he’s writing your principal a letter. You can take double courses in the summer if you must.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “I won’t budge on this, Ellie.”

  I closed my eyes. He was right. I couldn’t handle school right now; my grades proved that. I had to start taking care of my own health, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “But when this is over, I want to land somewhere and stay. I don’t care if it’s LA or Vegas or Fort Wayne. But one of us needs to get a real job, with a steady paycheck and medical insurance.”

  Dad’s eyes lost a little of their sparkle, but he nodded his agreement.

  “Now,” he said, “there’s something I want to show you.”

  He retrieved his leather journal and sat back down on the bed. My breath quickened. Dad had never showed me anything in his journal; he’d guarded it fiercely for as long as I could remember. Now he ran his thumb over the cover, which was embossed with an owl, wings spread, clutching a ribbon in its beak that read: The Academy of Magical Arts.

  Other kids grew up dreaming of Hogwarts: the moving staircases, the talking portraits. But I had spent my Sundays witnessing real magic in a real castle, one you entered by speaking an incantation to an owl with ruby eyes and walking through a secret door concealed in a bookcase. They were tricks, of course—but they had been real to me. They had had physical form, and they had made promises to my young mind. Promises that magic was real, and that I could learn to perform
it.

  I hadn’t been back to the Magic Castle since I was a child. Dad’s membership had lapsed, and anyway, he couldn’t have shown his face in the bar or the close-up room. There would have been whispers and the intolerable hum of pity.

  My heart pounded as he opened the journal to a page near the middle. The date stared at me from the corner of a dog-eared page. It was the date. The day that had wrecked his career and our lives.

  “Ten years ago,” he said. “Almost to the day.”

  I took the journal from him, ran my thumb over the rough paper, stared at the drawing within. The page showed an intricate ink diagram of the Truck Drop as seen from backstage. It was rendered so perfectly that I wondered if I had seen the drawing before, or if I was simply remembering that night. I closed my eyes.

  I watch from the wings, clutching my mother’s hand as the curtain goes up. My father stands center stage. Half a dozen cameras train their lenses on him.

  My mother kisses my cheek, then strides away. I try to follow, but a man wearing a headset holds me back.

  Gracefully, my mother crosses the stage, her hair falling black and straight to her waist. When she reaches my father, she stops and raises her arms in a V, showing the audience a length of rope. She selects a female volunteer, who binds Dad’s wrists and ankles with the rope before returning to her seat.

  Upstage, a second curtain ascends, revealing a gleaming vintage pickup truck, its waxed hood shining in the stage lights: a 1947 Chevrolet in Cape Maroon. Mom helps Dad into the driver’s seat and closes the door. A spotlight follows the truck as a winch hauls it toward the rafters with Dad inside.

  Six stagehands push a massive Plexiglas tank downstage into a pool of light beneath the truck. The water inside laps against its transparent walls as it comes to a halt.

  My mother smiles. Her skin is clear and smooth even in the harsh white spotlight.

  The sudden silence of the crowd, the glare on the chrome hubcaps—and the splash as the truck strikes the surface of the water and begins to sink. As Dad makes a show of struggling with the ropes around his wrists, water gushes into the truck through the open windows.

  By the time the tires touch the bottom of the tank, Dad is supposed to be free of his bonds—but he’s still struggling. The water level rises, and now it’s over his head.

  He should be climbing out of the truck already—but instead, he’s thrashing, straining desperately at the ropes.

  Something is wrong.

  Fifteen seconds pass. Thirty.

  A fist stops my heart.

  My mother runs into the wings. I reach for her, terrified—but she moves right past me. She’s whispering hoarsely to the stagehands, gesturing at the tank. I don’t understand what’s happening.

  Forty-five seconds. Sixty.

  Dad’s face is turning dark. He kicks desperately against the driver’s side door.

  My mother puts her hands on the sides of her face and screams.

  Ninety seconds.

  Finally, the stage manager gives a signal, and the main curtain drops, cutting off the audience’s view. I can hear them murmuring anxiously on the other side of the curtain.

  Onstage, the crew rush in, grab the emergency release levers, and open the dump hatches. Water gushes out of the tank, onto the stage, and into the audience. It’s a tidal wave. It’s a nightmare. The soundstage is flooding.

  My mother screams again as my father floats motionless inside the truck.

  “Ellie.”

  I flinch and look up at Dad.

  The memory was almost tangible. I smelled the chlorine, tasted the stage fog.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” I was afraid to look him in in the eye, so I flipped through the journal instead. Most of the writing was old and faded—but on the later pages, the ink was fresh.

  “I’ve replayed it over and over in my mind,” he said. “Trying to figure out where it went wrong. But I always come to the same conclusion.” He looked at me. “I let myself become distracted. I failed the escape. That was all. I just . . . failed.”

  He took back the book, closed it with a decisive snap, and sat up straight.

  “You’ve located the props,” he said.

  I nodded, trying to keep up with the abrupt change of subject. “Ripley helped. But yeah. Higgins agreed to rent them to us.”

  Dad raised his eyebrows. “How did you persuade him to do that?”

  “I told him the value would double, even if everything went wrong.”

  Dad laughed out loud, and my heart swelled. But then his smile faded.

  “How much does want?” he asked.

  I braced myself for his reaction. “Five grand.”

  Dad’s face reddened. “Five thousand—that bastard!” He flexed his fists. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “Even if we could rent a tank and tear the engine out of a different truck, it would cost at least that much. And we don’t have time.”

  Dad nodded, but I could see the wheels turning.

  “Besides, we want the original truck. The one you used that night. They’re going to show the old video—you know they will. And if we use the same truck . . . Think of it. The resonance of the thing.”

  He nodded again, stroking his mustache as he always did when he was problem solving. We sat side by side in silence. My heart fluttered in my rib cage like our lost doves.

  “If we do this,” he said, “we have to make it better than before.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bigger,” he said. “More spectacular.”

  “We have to play on the failure,” I said. “Give them something they won’t expect.”

  Dad pointed at me. “Precisely! A twist. So,” he said, folding his arms, “how do we do this?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You masterminded this operation. Signed the contract. Lined up the props. Steered us west. You must have something in mind.”

  I shook my head, backing away slightly. “I do close-up. Not the big stuff.”

  “You’ve been around grand illusion your whole life. You know what there is to know.”

  I threw up my hands. “I was six years old when you did the Truck Drop!”

  He gave me an infuriating smile. “Yes, but I’m sure someone has made a YouTube out of it. And I imagine you’ve watched it more than once.”

  I tightened my jaw and looked away. After all this—booking the show, finding the props, getting us here—he expected me to fix the illusion, too?

  He was right, though. I had watched the video—hundreds of times.

  Dad smiled again, as if he could hear my thoughts. “I’m only asking for your ideas.”

  I glared at him.

  I’d started bugging Dad to teach me magic when I was seven years old, but he had refused. Ten years old, he’d claimed, was the youngest a person could be and still keep a secret—which was important because of rule number two: Never tell them how it’s done.

  Then, shortly after my eighth birthday, he caught me lighting one of his playing cards on fire while I was trying to re-create his large-deck production, and he agreed to teach me just to keep me from burning down the house.

  Dad had taught me magic in this way: he would perform a trick, and I would have to guess the method. I learned quickly to think before I spoke, because once I posed a theory out loud, he would make me demonstrate it. If I got close, he would nudge me this way or that. If not, he would let me fail and make me tell him why. At the time, I found his method maddening. But it taught me how to think like a magician. How to follow the truth instead of the lie.

  I reached for the journal, and Dad yielded his grip. I flipped to an early drawing, examined it, and looked up into my father’s expectant face.

  “What if we—”

  I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Dad put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’ll get it.”

  There was another knock—and then a voice, muffled and va
guely familiar, called out from the other side.

  “Ellie? Are you in there?”

  I gripped the bedspread. It had to be Beard Boy. He’d discovered that I’d ripped him off and had somehow tracked me here.

  “Who’s there?” Dad said.

  “I’m a friend of Ellie’s. Is she there?”

  I frowned. It couldn’t be Beard Boy; I had told him my name was Purcilla. And besides, this voice was younger. Higher-pitched.

  My jaw went slack. No way.

  Dad turned to me, eyebrows drawn together. I nodded. Cautiously, he opened the door.

  A teenager stood on the peeling threshold: a slender boy at least six feet tall with red hair; round, handsome features; and amber-brown eyes. He wore skinny jeans and a rust-colored hoodie with the Atari logo screen-printed across the chest.

  I had never seen him before in my life.

  Slowly, I got to my feet. “Ripley?”

  CHAPTER 17

  “IT’S YOU, RIGHT?” THE WORDS tumbled stupidly out of my mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said, with an awkward under-the-breath laugh. “It’s me.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I just . . .” Ripley swallowed nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork in a wave.

  Dad eyed me and cleared his throat.

  “Sorry. Dad, this is Ripley. Ripley, Dad.”

  Dad’s face lit up with recognition. And, I thought, a little relief.

  “Of course. I’ve heard so much about you.” He put out his hand. Ripley seized it and pumped a little too hard.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Dante.”

  Dad took a step back. “Why don’t you come in?”

  I took one glance around our disgusting motel room and quickly intervened.

  “Actually, is it all right if I step out for a few minutes? Ripley and I need to talk.” I grabbed my hoodie.

  Dad frowned, tugged the end of his mustache. “All right. But take your phone. And this time, answer it.”

  Ripley and I moved down the walkway. His gait was long and loping and didn’t seem to match the voice I’d heard on the phone for the last two years. He felt alien to me, as if the role of my best friend had suddenly been recast with a new actor.