To Wish or Not to Wish

by Mindy Klasky

  Timothy said, “My lease is up in seven weeks, and my landlord is making it impossible for me to stay.”

  “Why? What’s he doing?”

  He shrugged, letting the lithe movement siphon off some of his obvious frustration. “He’s tripling my rent.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “He’s allowed to—it says so in my lease. But I’ll never make enough on the restaurant to meet his demands.”

  “Does he have someone waiting to move into the space?”

  “I don’t think so.” Timothy shook his head.

  “But why would he do that? It doesn’t make any sense!” Outrage boiled beneath my words.

  “He doesn’t really care if he gets someone who can pay what he’s asking from me. He just wants me out.”

  “But why?” My shock made the words sharp. I couldn’t imagine what Timothy had done to offend his landlord. He was soft-spoken, perceptive, a shrewd businessman. Sure, his restaurant model was a bit unusual, but in the crowded field of food purveyors in New York City, that should be a virtue, not a vice. Certainly not a vice to warrant a tripling of rent, a virtual death sentence for his business.

  “According to the letter I got this morning, I’m encouraging vagrancy. I’m bringing an undesirable element into the neighborhood.”

  “Undesirable—” I spluttered.

  “Let’s face it,” he interrupted, and then he sighed. “The homeless folks I serve aren’t exactly the most popular people on the block.”

  I thought about the look that had crossed Sam’s face when he realized what was going on at that back table. But then, I remembered the quiet submissiveness as Lena asked for Timothy’s permission to use the restroom. Garden Variety’s homeless customers weren’t hurting anyone—except for, maybe, Timothy. And then, only if you measured the bottom line, which I somehow suspected he rarely did.

  “What are you going to do?”

  His face was grim, his eyes hardened into agate pools. “Close up shop. Unless I can figure out a way to pay three times the rent without driving away every single paying customer I have. And without abandoning the people who rely on me, like Dani.” He nodded toward my neighbor’s closed door. “She needs to sell her produce to keep the Gray Guerillas up and running, so I can’t just shop somewhere cheaper.”

  Before I could offer any brainstorms—or at least some heartfelt condolences—my phone jangled with Amy’s ring tone. I glanced at my watch. Five o’clock. A strange time for her to call; she was usually fixing Justin’s dinner just about now. “Excuse me,” I said. “I should take this.” Timothy gestured broadly as I snapped open my phone. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Erin!” The urgency in her voice slammed a knife between my ribs.

  “What’s wrong?” Fear jolted my heart into overdrive. Timothy leaned forward, obvious concern stretched across his shoulders, written on his features. I could only shake my head, though, unable to answer his silent question, unable to explain.

  “You have to get out here!”

  “Where? Amy, where are you?”

  “New Brunswick Memorial.” Her voice was shaking so badly I barely made out the words.

  “What happened? Are you okay?” And then a sliver of ice shot through my brain. “Is Justin?”

  “He tied a towel around his neck for a cape. He said he was Soldierman. I only went inside the house for a minute. The phone was ringing, and I told him to stay in the front yard.” She started sobbing—harsh, racking cries that broke my heart.

  “Amy, what happened? What happened to Justin?”

  “He climbed up on the roof. He climbed up, and he jumped off, like he thought he could fly.” I caught my breath, picturing the rose trellis that Justin must have used as a ladder, the gutter he must have balanced against before he leaped. “Erin,” Amy said, “he won’t wake up. My baby won’t wake up!”

  CHAPTER 7

  “I’VE GOT TO GO,” I SAID TO TIMOTHY. ANY THOUGHT of solving his restaurant woes had boiled off in the panic of my sister’s frantic voice.

  He snatched up his grocery bags, keeping pace with me as I raced to the elevator. “What’s wrong?”

  “My nephew. He—” The words caught in my throat. He fell off the roof. He’s unconscious. What was Amy not telling me? Had Justin broken his neck? His back? Was he in a coma? My hands began to shake as I punched the down button.

  “Where is he?” Timothy asked, holding open the elevator door as soon as the car arrived. I started to pound the G for the ground floor, knowing that beating up on the elevator wouldn’t make it move any faster but feeling like I had to do something. My fingers had turned to ice.

  “N-New Brunswick Memorial,” I stammered, trying to focus. The elevator took centuries to move down eight flights, its idiotically perky bell marking off each passed floor. I used the time to dig for my wallet, fishing out cab fare to the bus terminal.

  Four dollars. Four crumpled bills, shoved deep into their slot, as if they were embarrassed to be seen with me. I swore as the elevator door finally opened on the ground floor. “Where’s the nearest ATM?”

  “Here,” Timothy said, putting down one of his grocery bags to dig into his apron. He pulled out three perfect twenties.

  “I can’t take that!” I was embarrassed that I was so ill-prepared, ashamed that I didn’t take better care of my finances.

  He shoved the bills into my hand. “I know you’re good for it.” When I still hesitated, he reached out to extricate my forlorn wallet from my trembling fingers. He snapped the clasp closed over my scant hoard and returned it to my purse. The gesture was personal enough that it made me catch my breath, and I realized that my heart was galloping so fast my chest ached.

  Despite my panic—because of it—I closed my eyes and took a long, steadying breath. When I looked at Timothy again, my heart lurched back to something approximating its normal rhythm. “No wonder you’ve got landlord problems. You’re a lousy businessman, Mr.—” I cut myself off, suddenly realizing that I had no idea what Timothy’s last name was.

  “Brennan,” he said with a wry grin. He pulled a business card from that deep apron pocket, adding it to the money in my fist. “Timothy Brennan.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, trying to joke my way past the terror that was already rushing back into my throat.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s easier to hail a cab at the corner.”

  He shifted both grocery bags to his right hand and pushed open the Bentley’s heavy glass door with his left. He settled in beside me as we race-walked down the street, his fingers hovering by my elbow. As we passed the alley that led to Garden Variety, he said, “Are you all right to get there on your own? Let me just put a sign on the door, and I’ll come with you.”

  “That’ll take too long,” I said automatically, even as part of my brain chimed that it would love Timothy’s company. I glanced at my watch. “There’s a bus that leaves in twenty minutes. I think I can catch that one.”

  “Here,” he said, and this time he reached into one of the grocery bags. He produced a plastic clamshell of black raspberries, the perfect little fruits nestled together like a jewel hoard.

  “What—” I started to ask.

  “You’re going to be starving by the time you get to Jersey.”

  Reflexively, I stashed the fruit in my tote bag. I couldn’t imagine eating ever again, but I wasn’t going to waste time arguing with him.

  We’d reached the street corner, the one that fed onto busy Eighth Avenue. Timothy stepped off the curb, raising his free left hand with such authority that a cab skidded to an immediate stop. My knight in soft black clothing opened the door, swinging his grocery bags out of the way so that I could climb into the back. As I maneuvered around him, he settled his fingers on my arm. I looked up, surprised, and he leaned in for a quick kiss, a brush of his warm lips against the ice of mine. I caught a hint of mint on his breath before he stepped back.

  I stared at him, astonished. “Go,” he
said, nodding toward my tote, toward the wallet that held his business card. “Call me when you know what’s going on.”

  I could have asked him what that kiss meant. I could have told him that I wasn’t getting involved with anyone, that I was living my life separate, alone, without a man to complicate things. I could have explained about the Master Plan. I could have said that I really was able to take care of myself, even if I didn’t have enough cash, even if I didn’t carry snacks, even if it regularly took me fifteen minutes to hail a cab, on a good day.

  Instead, I let him hand me into the taxi. I was strangely aware of his palm against the small of my back, of the way he folded his other hand above the door, so that I couldn’t hit my head. I listened as he told the cab driver to take me to Port Authority. I sat back in astonishment as he closed my door, as he slapped the roof of the cab twice, sending me on my way with the competent flat of his hand.

  I sank into my New Jersey Transit bus seat with seconds to spare.

  Grabbing another cab on the far end of the trip, I soon found myself attempting to navigate the sterile hell of a hospital emergency room. My first stop was the triage station. As I wasn’t spurting blood or screaming in agonized pain, I was referred to a different desk. The nurse there checked her records, and calmly told me that no Justin Carlson had been admitted. I insisted that she was wrong, and after another consultation on her computer, she referred me to a third desk. Which passed me on to a fourth. And then a fifth.

  I was a little astonished that so many petty bureaucrats worked so late in the day.

  At last, I circled back to the first desk, the one that was right off of the emergency room. A different nurse was staffing the station, and she pulled up Justin’s record immediately. I wanted to curse, to rant, to rave about the vagaries of computer files, but I settled for asking how Justin was doing. The nurse stared at me with reptilian eyes and stated that she could not provide any information about the status of a minor. I insisted that I was his aunt, but that blood relationship apparently wasn’t enough to vanquish the hospital’s privacy rules.

  Recognizing a stone wall when I saw one, I retreated to the waiting room and collapsed into a gray leatherette chair, determined to figure out a different solution. This entire nightmare felt horrifically familiar. Amy and I had gone to the hospital after our parents’ car crash. We had been shuffled from one room to another, forced to check in with nurses and candy stripers and a million other people who supposedly had our best interests in mind. We’d run up against administrative brick wall after administrative brick wall until a weary chaplain had finally ushered us into a small private room, to give us the news that changed our lives as siblings, as daughters.

  I hated hospitals.

  I dug out my cell phone and punched in Amy’s number, but she didn’t pick up. I left her a message, then sent a text for good measure. She’d know that I was at the hospital, at least, stranded in the waiting room, trapped, for all my good intentions.

  An hour passed as I fumed, frantic and alone. I left my fingers crossed. I muttered, “Please, just this once,” as if it were a mantra powerful enough to change the universe.

  I couldn’t say what made me finally look up at the precise instant that I did. I couldn’t say what cosmic force drew my eyes to the swinging door on the far side of the room, to the porthole window that barely let me glimpse into the hospital corridor beyond. I couldn’t say why I happened to see Amy frozen there, her face streaked with tears, her hair tangled as if she’d been riding roller coasters all night long.

  I sprang to my feet and dashed for the door. “Excuse me, miss!” Stone Wall planted herself in front of me, immovable as a defensive end. “Only emergency personnel back there.”

  “I can see my sister!”

  “If you take a seat, she’ll be out soon enough.”

  “I’ve been trying to find her for hours!”

  “If you’ll just take a seat—” I could hear the force of repetition behind her words, the oaken certainty that she controlled the doorway. I turned on my heel and walked back to my chair. Stone Wall harrumphed her way back to her desk.

  Poised on the edge of the cushion, I craned my neck so that I could keep Amy in sight. She was arguing with a doctor. I could see that she was getting more and more upset. She ran her fingers through her hair. Tears tracked down her cheeks. The tendons in her neck stood out, and she clutched at the doctor’s white jacket.

  Made desperate by Amy’s own panic, I did the only thing I could think of. I raised my right hand in front of me, tilting it so that my tattooed flames glimmered under the fluorescent lights, a ghost of a pattern barely visible in the harsh, clinical setting.

  I pressed my thumb and forefinger together firmly and said, “Teel!”

  The mist was thicker than it had been in my apartment or in the bathroom at the audition hall. Motes danced in the air, red as blood, green as the cross emblazoned on a canister of oxygen behind the nurse’s station. Silver glints swirled in, echoing the stainless steel around us, and the blue cross from paperwork on Stone Wall’s desk was splintered into sapphire shards.

  The fog swirled around me, luring me into its dance, pulling me into its circular force. Everyone else, though, everything else remained anchored, steady, stable. Stone Wall was frozen in her chair, frowning in midtap as she organized a stack of papers. A man whose face was creased into a worried frown lowered himself into his chair, his hands already on the armrests, his legs bent in midair. A trio of high school kids gathered around a single cell phone, pointing at the screen and opening their mouths to shriek at something they clearly found hysterically amusing.

  And yet, I was able to move. I could turn my head. I could gasp in shock and surprise as the sparkling fog coalesced into a human form, settled into a human body: a party boy of a type I suspected only my fellow actor Shawn could love. Teel wore leopard-skin pants made out of some clingy fabric that emphasized every taut line of his anatomy. His chest was barely covered by a black leather…thing, a garment that swooped down from his shoulders, framing the astonishingly erect nipples on his waxed chest. His hair was bleached platinum blond and spiked to stand straight up. His tattoo flared at his wrist, writhing in a complex dance of flames. It drew my eyes immediately, compelling me to take a step closer even as I tried hard to swallow my surprise.

  “Time to join the par-tay?” he crowed.

  Before I could respond, though, he looked around the room, took in the authoritative letters that said Emergency, the nurse, a cadre of frozen doctors barely visible around the corner. “Oh!” he said. “Even better!” He thrust out one leopard-spotted hip and raised long, pointed fingernails to his earlobe. Tugging twice, he made Leather Leopard Boy disappear.

  In his place stood a dreamy doctor.

  He wore a white coat over blue scrubs. A stethoscope draped around his neck like a tamed snake. Pens poked out of his pocket, and a BlackBerry hung at his waist. He was tall—tall enough that I needed to look up at his face. His cheekbones were chiseled into the perfection of a male model. He had a strong jaw and a cleft chin and compassionate blue eyes that danced behind the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on anyone, male or female. His hair was black, silvered at the temples with just enough gray that I instinctively believed this was a man to be trusted. This was a man to be believed.

  Except for the fact that he was a genie.

  “Just sit back,” he crooned, “and tell me where it hurts.” His voice was low, rumbling with masculine reassurance. Something inside me unwound a little at his cool competence—this was a man who could get me past any swinging door, any junkyard-dog nurse.

  “I have to see Amy,” I said, nodding toward my sister. She was just as frozen as the others around us, just as locked into place by the magic that had brought Teel to me.

  “We’ll take care of that,” Dr. Teel said. “Right now, though, I want to make sure that you’re all right.”

  I almost melted at the concern that coated his words. The tear
s that pricked my eyes made me realize just how tense I’d become during my mad rush around the hospital, during my endless wait. I recognized the rocks that had replaced the muscles beside my spine. I realized that my jaw was set into a grim cliff of defiance. Teel’s tone unlocked all of that tension, let me take a deep breath, let me relax back to my normal, neurotic self.

  Nodding, he produced some sort of scope, turning on the brilliant white light and holding it at an angle that made it clear he was ready to study my eyes, ears, nose, throat and possibly the inside of my brain. “Three out of ten wishers fail to recognize their own compromised health, when they’re intent on completing their wish cycles. Open your mouth and say, ‘Ah.’”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, Teel!” I pushed his hand away. “I just need to get to Amy! They won’t let me through that door. I have to find out what’s going on with Justin.”

  Teel nodded and clicked off his blinding scope. “Let’s see what we can do about that, then.” He produced a pen from his pocket and summoned a medical chart from midair. He took three steps toward the swinging door and then turned back to me. “Coming?”

  “Wait,” I said, even as I closed the distance between us. “Aren’t you going to make me use a wish?”

  His smile was patient. “Erin, it’s not always about the wishes.”

  “It isn’t?” I said doubtfully. I was worried about Justin, but I was totally thrown by this Teel. My genie had become a creature totally foreign to me; his central cause d’être had evaporated. His concern for my well-being was welcome, but I felt as if a magic carpet had been swept from beneath my feet.

  Again, he gave me that soothing grin. “We’ll worry about wishes when we know what’s going on here.” His voice was calm and reassuring, as if he were providing professional medical assistance to a madwoman. When I still hesitated he added, “With any luck, you’ll need your last two wishes to straighten everything out here.”

  There we go. So much for my genie’s kinder, gentler side.

  “Ready?” he asked, and I nodded. Before I could brace myself, Teel tugged twice at his earlobe.