Outside, in the neighbors’ backyards, swing sets are uprooted and cats claw at back doors, desperate to be let in. Halfway down the block, a poplar tree cracks in two and plummets to the ground, hitting a fire hydrant and crashing through the window of a parked Honda Civic. That’s when Sally and her daughters hear the knocking. The girls look up at the ceiling, then turn to their mother.
“Squirrels,” Sally assures them. “Nesting in the attic.”
But the knocking continues, and the wind does, too, and the heat just rises higher and higher. Finally, near midnight, the neighborhood quiets down. At last people can get some sleep. Sally is one of the few who stay up late, in order to fix an apple tart—complete with her secret ingredients, black pepper and nutmeg—which she’ll freeze and have ready to take to the block party on the Fourth of July. But even Sally falls asleep before long, in spite of the weather; she stretches out under a cool white sheet and keeps the bedroom windows open so that the breeze comes in and wraps around the room. The first of the season’s crickets have grown quiet and the sparrows are nesting in the bushes, safe within a bower of branches that are too delicate to support a cat’s weight. And just when people are beginning to dream, of cut grass and blueberry pie and lions who lie down beside lambs, a ring appears around the moon.
A halo around the moon is always a sign of disruption, either a change in the weather, a fever to come, or a streak of bad fortune that won’t go away. But when it’s a double ring, all tangled and snarled, like an agitated rainbow or a love affair gone wrong, anything can happen. At times such as this, it’s wise not to answer the telephone. People who know enough to be careful always shut their windows; they lock their doors, and they never dare to kiss their sweethearts over a garden gate or reach out to pat a stray dog. Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you’ve had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.
High above the neighborhood, the ring has already begun to twist around itself, an illuminated snake of possibility, double-looped and pulled tight by gravity. If people hadn’t been sound asleep, they might have gazed out their windows and admired the beautiful circle of light, but they slept on, oblivious, not noticing the moon, or the silence, or the Oldsmobile that had already pulled into Sally Owens’s driveway to park behind the Honda Sally bought a few years ago to replace the aunts’ ancient station wagon. On a night such as this, it’s possible for a woman to get out of her car so quietly none of the neighbors will hear her. When it’s this warm in June, when the sky is this inky and thick, a knock on the screen door doesn’t even echo. It falls into your dreams, like a stone into a stream, so that you wake suddenly, heart beating too fast, pulse going crazy, drowning inside your own panic.
Sally sits up in bed, knowing that she should stay exactly where she is. She’s been dreaming about the swans again; she’s been watching them take flight. For eleven years, she has done all the right things, she’s been conscientious and trustworthy, rational and kind, but that doesn’t mean she can’t recognize the sulfurous odor of trouble. That’s what’s outside her front door now, trouble, pure and undiluted. It’s calling to her, like a moth bumping against a screen, and she just can’t ignore it. She pulls on jeans and a white T-shirt and gathers her dark hair into a ponytail. She’s going to kick herself for this, and she knows it. She’ll wonder why she can’t just ignore that jangly feeling that comes over her and why she’s always compelled to try to set things right.
Those people who warn that you can’t run away because your past will track you down may be right on target. Sally looks out the front window. There on the porch is the girl who could get into more trouble than anyone, all grown up. It’s been too many years, it’s been an eternity, but Gillian is as beautiful as ever, only dusty and jittery and so weak in the knees that when Sally throws open the door, Gillian has to lean against the brick wall for support.
“Oh, my god, it’s you,” Gillian says, as if Sally were the unexpected visitor. In eighteen years they have seen each other only three times, when Sally went west. Gillian never once crossed back over the Mississippi, just as she’d vowed when she first left the aunts’ house. “It’s really, really you!”
Gillian has cut her blond hair shorter than ever; she smells like sugar and heat. She’s got sand in the ridges of her red boots and a little green snake tattooed on her wrist. She hugs Sally fast and tight, before Sally can have time to consider the lateness of the hour and the fact that perhaps Gillian might have called, if not to say she was arriving, then just sometime in the past month, only to let Sally know she was still alive. Two days ago Sally mailed off a letter to Gillian’s most recent address, in Tucson. She gave Gillian hell in that letter, about her trail of broken plans and missed opportunities; she spoke too strongly and said too much and now she’s relieved that it’s a letter Gillian will never get.
But her sense of relief surely doesn’t last long. As soon as Gillian begins to talk, Sally knows that something is seriously wrong. Gillian’s voice is squeaky, which isn’t like her at all. Gillian has always been able to think of a good excuse or an alibi in seconds flat because she’s had to soothe the egos of all her boyfriends; usually she’s cool and composed, but now she’s all but jumping out of her skin.
“I’ve got a problem,” Gillian says.
She looks over her shoulder, then runs her tongue over her lips. She’s as nervous as a bug, even though having a problem is nothing particularly new. Gillian can create problems just by walking down the street. She is still the kind of woman who cuts through her finger while slicing a cantaloupe, and then is rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctor who has stitched up her finger falls head over heels for her before she’s even been sewn back together.
Gillian stops to take a good look at Sally.
“I can’t believe how much I’ve missed you.”
Gillian sounds as if she herself was surprised to discover this. She’s sticking her fingernails into the palms of her hands, as if to wake herself from a bad dream. If she weren’t desperate, she wouldn’t be here, running to her big sister for help, when she’s spent her whole life trying to be as self-sufficient as a stone. Everyone else had families, and went east or west or just down the block for Easter or Thanksgiving, but not Gillian. She could always be counted on to take a holiday shift, and afterward she always found herself drawn to the best bar in town, where special hors d’oeuvres are set out for festive occasions, hard-boiled eggs tinted pale pink and aqua, or little turkey-and-cranberry burritos. One Thanksgiving Day Gillian went and got the tattoo on her wrist. It was a hot afternoon in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the sky was the color of a pie plate, and the fellow over at the tattoo parlor promised her it wouldn’t hurt, but it did.
“Everything is such a mess,” Gillian admits.
“Well, guess what?” Sally tells her sister. “I know you won’t believe this, and I know you won’t care, but I’ve actually got my own problems.”
The electricity bill, for instance, which has begun to reflect Antonia’s increased use of the radio, which is never for an instant turned off. The fact that Sally hasn’t had a date in almost two years, not even with some cousin or friend of her next-door neighbor Linda Bennett, and can no longer think of love as a reality, or even as a possibility, however remote. For all the time they’ve been apart, living separate lives, Gillian has been doing as she pleased, fucking whomever she cares to and waking at noon. She hasn’t had to sit up all night with little girls who have chicken pox, or negotiate curfews, or set her alarm for the proper hour because someone needs breakfast or a good talking to. Naturally Gillian looks great. She thinks the world revolves around her.
“Believe me. Your problems are nothing like mine. This time it’s really bad, Sally.”
Gillian’s voice is getting smaller and smaller, but it’s still the same voice that got Sally through that horrible year when she couldn’t bring herself to speak. It’s the voice that urged her on every Tuesday night, no matter what,
with a fierce devotion, the kind you acquire only when you’ve shared the past.
“Okay.” Sally sighs. “Let me have it.”
Gillian takes a deep breath. “I’ve got Jimmy in the car.” She comes closer, so she can whisper in Sally’s ear. “The problem is ...” This is a hard one, it really is. She has to just get it out and say it, whispered or not. “He’s dead.”
Sally immediately pulls away from her sister. This is nothing anyone wants to hear on a hot June night, when the fireflies are strung across the lawns. The night is dreamy and deep, but now Sally feels as if she’s drained a pot of coffee; her heart is beating like mad. Anyone else might assume Gillian is lying or exaggerating or just goofing around. But Sally knows her sister. She knows better. There’s a dead man in the car. Guaranteed.
“Don’t do this to me,” Sally says.
“Do you think I planned it?”
“So you were driving along, headed for my house, figuring we should finally see each other, and he just happened to die?”
Sally has never met Jimmy, and she can’t say she’s ever really spoken to him. Once he answered the phone when she called Gillian in Tucson, but he certainly wasn’t talkative. As soon as he’d heard Sally’s voice, he shouted for Gillian to come pick up.
“Get over here, girl.” That’s what he’d said. “It’s your goddamn sister on the phone.”
All Sally can remember Gillian telling her about him is that he served some time in the penitentiary for a crime he didn’t commit, and that he was so handsome and so smooth he could get into any woman simply by looking at her the right way. Or the wrong way, depending on how you wanted to evaluate the consequences, and whether or not you happened to be married to this woman when Jimmy came along and stole her before you had an inkling of what was going on.
“It happened in a rest area in New Jersey.” Gillian is trying to quit smoking, so she takes out a stick of gum and pushes it into her mouth. She has a pouty mouth that’s rosy and sweet, but tonight her lips are parched. “He was such a shit,” she says thoughtfully. “God. You wouldn’t believe the things he did. Once we were house-sitting for some people in Phoenix, and they had a cat that was bothering him—I think it peed on the floor. He put it in the refrigerator.”
Sally sits down. She’s a little woozy hearing all this information about her sister’s life, and the concrete stoop is cool and makes her feel better. Gillian always has the ability to draw her in, even when she tries to fight against the pull. Gillian sits down beside her, knee to knee. Her skin is even cooler than the concrete.
“Even I couldn’t believe he’d actually go and do something like that,” Gillian says. “I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and let it out of the fridge or the thing would have frozen to death. It had ice crystals in its fur.”
“Why did you have to come here?” Sally says mournfully. “Why now? You’re going to ruin everything. I’ve really worked hard for all this.”
Gillian eyes the house, unimpressed. She truly hates being on the East Coast. All this humidity and greenery. She’d do almost anything to avoid the past. Most probably, she’ll find herself dreaming about the aunts tonight. That old house on Magnolia Street, with its woodwork and its cats, will come back to her, and she’ll start to get fidgety, maybe even panicky to get the hell away, which is how she ended up in the Southwest in the first place. She got on a bus as soon as she left the Toyota mechanic she’d left her first husband for. She had to have heat and sun to counteract her moldy childhood, with its dark afternoons filled with long green shadows and its even darker midnights. She had to be very, very far away.
If she’d had the cash, Gillian would have run out of that rest area in New Jersey and she would have kept running until she got to the airport in Newark, then flown someplace hot. New Orleans, maybe, or Los Angeles. Unfortunately, right before they left Tucson, Jimmy informed her they were penniless. He’d spent every cent she’d earned in the past five years, easy enough to do when you’re investing in drugs and alcohol and any jewelry you took a fancy to, including the silver ring he always wore—which had cost nearly a week of Gillian’s salary. The only thing they had after he was done spending was the car, and that was in his name. Where else could she have gone on a night as black as this? Who else would take her in, no questions asked—or, at least, none she can’t think up an answer for—until she gets back on her feet?
Gillian sighs and surrenders her fight against nicotine, at least temporarily. She takes one of Jimmy’s Lucky Strikes out of her shirt pocket, then lights up and inhales as deeply as she can. She’ll quit tomorrow.
“We were about to start a new life, that’s why we were heading for Manhattan. I was going to call you once we were settled. You were the first person I planned to have visit our apartment.”
“Sure,” Sally says, but she doesn’t believe a word. When Gillian got rid of her past, she got rid of Sally as well. The last time they were supposed to get together was right before Jimmy and the move to Tucson. Sally had already bought the tickets for herself and the girls to fly to Austin, where Gillian was working as a concierge-in-training at the Hilton. The plan had been to spend Thanksgiving together—which would have been a first—but Gillian called Sally two days before she and the girls were set to take off, and she told Sally to just forget it. In two days, she wouldn’t even be in Austin anymore. Gillian never did care to explain what went wrong, whether it was the Hilton, or Austin, or simply some compelling need to move on. When dealing with Gillian, Sally has gotten used to disappointment. She would have worried if there hadn’t been a hitch.
“Well, I was planning to call you,” Gillian says. “Believe it or not. But we had to get out of Tucson really fast because Jimmy was selling jimsonweed to the kids at the university, telling them it was peyote or LSD, and there was sort of a problem with people dying, which I had no idea about until he said, ‘Get packed, pronto.’ I would have called before I arrived on your doorstep. I just got freaked out when he collapsed at that rest area. I didn’t know where to go.”
“You could have taken him to a hospital. Or what about the police? You could have called them.” Sally can see in the dark that the azaleas she recently planted are already wilting, their leaves turning brown. In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you’ll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.
“Yeah, right. Like I could go to the police.” Gillian exhales in little, staccato puffs. “They’d give me ten to twenty. Maybe even life, considering it happened in New Jersey.” Gillian stares at the stars, her eyes open wide. “If I could just get enough money together, I’d take off for California. I’d be gone before they ever came after me.”
It’s not just the azaleas Sally could lose. It’s eleven years of work and sacrifice. The rings around the moon are now so bright Sally’s convinced everyone in the neighborhood will be awake before long. She grabs her sister’s arm and digs her fingernails into Gillian’s skin. She’s got two kids who are dependent on her asleep in the house. She’s got an apple tart she has to take to the Fourth of July block party next weekend.
“Why would they come after you?”
Gillian winces and tries to pull away, but Sally won’t let go. Finally, Gillian shrugs and lowers her eyes, and as far as Sally’s concerned that’s not a very comforting way to answer a question.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re responsible for Jimmy’s death?”
“It was an accident,” Gillian insists. “More or less,” she adds when Sally digs her nails in deeper. “All right,” she admits when Sally begins to draw blood. “I killed him.” Gillian is getting pretty shaky, as if her pressure had started to drop a degree a second. “Now you know. Okay? As usual, everything’s my fault.”
Maybe it’s only the humidity, but the rings around the moon are turning faintly green. Some women believe that a green light in the east can reverse the aging process, and sure enough Sally fe
els as though she were fourteen. She’s having thoughts no grown woman should have, especially not one who’s spent her whole life being good. She notices that there are bruises all up and down Gillian’s arms; in the dark they look like purple butterflies, like something pretty.
“I’m never getting involved with another man,” Gillian says. When Sally gives her a look, Gillian goes on insisting she’s through with love. “I’ve learned my lesson,” she says. “Now that it’s too damn late. I just wish I could have tonight, and call the police tomorrow.” Her voice is sounding strained again, and even littler than before. “I could cover Jimmy with a blanket and leave him in the car. I’m not ready to turn myself in. I don’t think I can do it.”
Gillian really sounds as if she’s cracking up now. She has a tremor in her hand that’s making it impossible for her to light another cigarette.
“You have to stop smoking,” Sally says. Gillian is still her little sister, even now; she’s her responsibility.
“Oh, fuck it.” Gillian manages to light the match, then her cigarette. “I’ll probably get a life sentence. Cigarettes will just shorten the time I have to serve. I should smoke two at a time.”
Although the girls weren’t much more than babies when their parents died, Sally made snap decisions that seemed forceful enough to carry them both along. After the sitter they’d been left with became hysterical, and Sally had to get on the phone with the police officer to hear the news of their parents’ death, she told Gillian to choose her two favorite stuffed animals and throw all the others away, because from then on they’d have to travel light, and take only what they could care for themselves. She was the one who told the silly baby-sitter to look for the aunts’ phone number in their mother’s date-book, and she insisted she be allowed to call and announce that she and Gillian would be made wards of the state unless a relative, however distant, came forward to claim them. She had the same look on her face then as she does now, an unlikely combination of dreaminess and iron.
Practical Magic Page 7
