Magic City

by Paula Guran

  “Also kind of bitchy,” Trent added over his shoulder.

  “We would have hurt each other,” said Gary, “before we knew what we had to lose.”

  Sheila blushed at this open display of emotion and Gary laughed. “Look at you!” he said, pointing a finger and turning to look over his shoulder at Trent. “Trent,” he said, “Look. We’ve embarrassed Sheila.”

  Trent laughed, too, and Sheila rolled her eyes. “I’m not embarrassed, you jerks,” she said. “I know what love is. People pay me to help them find it or make it. It’s just that, with you two—I don’t know—there’s something special about your love.”

  Trent turned a kabob with his tongs and said, “Maybe it’s because we didn’t need you to make it happen.”

  It was quite possible that Trent’s theory had some kind of truth to it, but whatever the reason, Sheila didn’t care. She just wanted to sit with them and drink wine and watch the lightning bugs blink in the backyard on a midsummer evening in Cleveland.

  It was a good night. The shish kabobs were spiced with dill and lemon. The wine was a middlebrow Syrah. Trent and Gary always provided good thirty-somethings conversation. Listening to the two of them, Sheila felt like she understood much of what she would have gleaned from reading a newspaper or an intelligent magazine. For the past three months, she’d simply begun to rely on them to relay the goings-on of the world to her, and to supply her with these evenings where, for a small moment in time, she could feel normal.

  In the center of the deck several scraps of wood burned in a fire pit, throwing shadows and orange light over their faces as smoke climbed into the darkening sky. Trent swirled his glass of wine before taking the last sip, then stood and slid the back door open so he could go inside to retrieve a fresh bottle.

  “That sounds terrible,” Sheila was saying as Trent left. Gary had been complaining about natural gas companies coming into Ohio to frack for gas deposits beneath the shale, and how his nonprofit was about to hold a forum on the dangers of the process. But before Sheila could say another word, her cell phone rang. “One second,” she said, holding up a finger as she looked at the screen. “It’s my mom. I’ve got to take this.”

  Sheila pressed the answer button. “Hey, Mom,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Where are you?” her mother asked, blunt as a bludgeoning weapon as usual.

  “I’m having a glass of wine with the boys,” Sheila said. Right then, Trent returned, twisting the cork out of the new bottle as he attempted to slide the back door shut with his foot. Sheila furrowed her brows and shook her head at him. “Is there something you need, Mom?” she asked.

  Before her mother could answer, though, and before Trent could slide the door shut, the dog Sheila disliked in the way that she disliked all dogs—without any particular hatred for the individual, just the species—darted out the open door and raced past Sheila’s legs, down the deck steps, into the bushes at the bottom of the backyard.

  “Hey!” Gary said, rising from his chair, nearly spilling his wine. He looked out at the dog, a white furry thing with an impossibly red tongue hanging out of its permanently smiling face, and then placed his glass on the deck railing before heading down the stairs. “Snowman!” he called. “Get back here!”

  “Oh, Christ,” Trent said, one foot still held against the sliding door he hadn’t shut in time. “That dog is going to be the death of me.”

  “What’s going on over there?” Sheila’s mother asked. Her voice was loud and drawn out, as if she were speaking to someone hard of hearing.

  “Dog escaped,” said Sheila. “Hold on a second, Mom.”

  Sheila held the phone against her chest and said, “Guys, I’ve got to go. Gary, I hope your forum goes well. Snowman, stop being so bad!” Then she edged through the door Trent still held open, crossed through their kitchen and living room to the front foyer they shared, and took the steps up to her second floor apartment.

  “Sorry about that,” she said when she sat down at her kitchen table.

  “Why do you continue living there, Sheila?” her mother said. Sheila could hear steam hissing off her mother’s voice, flat as an iron. “Why,” her mother said, “do you continue to live with this illusion of having a full life, my daughter?”

  “Ma,” Sheila said. “What are you talking about now?”

  “The boys,” said her mother. “You’re always with the boys. But those boys like each other, Sheila, not you. You should find other boys. Boys who like girls. When are you going to grow up, make your own life? Don’t you want children?”

  “I have a life,” said Sheila, evenly, as she might speak to a demanding child. “And I don’t want children.” She could have also told her mother that she was open to girls who liked girls, and had even had a fling or two that had never developed into anything substantial; looking around the kitchen, however, Sheila realized she’d unfortunately forgotten to bring her wine with her, which she would have needed to have that conversation.

  “Well, you should want something,” her mother said. “I’m worried about you. You don’t know how much I worry about you.”

  Sheila knew how much her mother worried about her. Her mother had been telling her how much she worried about her for years now. Probably from before Sheila was even conceived, her mother was worrying about her. But it was when Sheila turned fifteen that she’d started to make sure Sheila knew just how much. Sheila was now thirty-seven, and the verbal reminders of worry that had started when she’d begun dating had never stopped, even after she took a break from it. So far, it had been a six-year break.

  Sheila didn’t miss dating, really. Besides, being alone—being a single woman—was the one witchlike quality she possessed, and it was probably the best of the stereotypical witch features to have if she had to have one.

  “Ma,” Sheila said.

  But before she could tell her mother that she didn’t have time to play games, her mother said, “I’ve met someone.”

  Sheila blinked. “You’ve met someone?” she said. Was her mother now, at the age of fifty-eight, going to surprise Sheila and find love with someone after being divorced for the past eighteen years?

  “Yes,” her mother said. “A man. I’d like you to meet him.”

  “Ma,” Sheila said. “I’m speechless. Of course I’ll meet him. If he’s someone important to you, I’d love to meet him.”

  “Thank you, lovey,” her mother said, and Sheila knew that she’d made her mother happy. “I think you’ll like him.”

  “I’m sure I’ll like him, Mom, but I’m just happy if you like him.” What Sheila didn’t say was how, at that moment, it felt like a huge weight was being lifted from her.

  “Well, no,” her mother said. “You have to like him, too. As much as I’m glad you trust my judgment in men, it’s you who will be going on the date with him.”

  “Ma,” Sheila said, and the weight resumed its old position across her shoulders.

  Her mother made a guttural noise, though, a sound that meant she was not going to listen to anything Sheila said after the guttural noise reached completion.

  “He’ll pick you up at seven o’clock tomorrow. Be ready to go to dinner. Don’t bring up witch stuff. No talking shop on a date. His name is Lyle.”

  “Lyle?” Sheila said, as if the name seemed completely made-up—a fantasy novel sort of name, one of those books with a cover that features castle spires and portentous red moons covered in strands of cloud. One of those novels where people are called things like Roland, Aristial, Leandor, Jandari, or . . . Lyle.

  “Lyle,” said her mother. Then the phone went dead. Sheila looked down at it for a while as if it were a gun that had accidentally gone off, leaving a bullet lodged in her stomach.

  The bullet sat in Sheila’s stomach and festered for the rest of that night, and the feeling was not unfamiliar. Sheila’s mother had a habit of mugging her with unwanted surprises. Furniture that didn’t go with Sheila’s décor. Clothes that didn’t fit her. Blind dat
es with men named Lyle.

  Her mother was a mugger. Always had been. So why was she still surprised whenever it happened, as if this were a sudden, unexpected event? By the next morning, Sheila had come up with several jokes about her mother the mugger that she would tell to the two clients who had appointments with her that afternoon.

  “Mugger fucker,” Sheila mumbled as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror. “Mugger Goose. Holy Mugger of God. Mugger may I?”

  Her first client was a regular named Mary, who was forty-three, had three children, and was married to a husband she’d fallen out of love with four years ago. Mary came every other month for a reboot of the spell that helped her love her husband a little longer. She’d tried counseling, she’d tried herbal remedies, she’d even tried Zumba (both individually and with several girlfriends as a group), but nothing seemed to work, and in desperation she’d found Sheila through a friend of a friend of a former client who Sheila had helped rekindle a relationship gone sour years ago, back when Sheila had first started to make her living by witching instead of working at the drugstore that had hired her while she was in college.

  The knock came at exactly ten in the morning. Mary was never late and never early. Her sessions always lasted for exactly thirty minutes. Sheila was willing to go beyond that, but Mary said she felt that Sheila’s power faded a little more with every second past the thirty-minute mark. She still paid Sheila three hundred dollars for each session, and walked away a happy—or at least a happier—woman. She’d go home and, for five to six weeks, she’d love her husband. Sheila couldn’t work a permanent fix for Mary, because Mary had fallen so out of love with her husband that no spell could sustain it forever. Their relationship was an old, used-up car in constant need of repairs. Sheila was the mechanic.

  When Sheila opened the door, Mary pushed in, already complaining loudly about her husband, Ted. Sheila had never met him, though she did have a lock of his hair in an envelope that stayed in her living room curio cabinet. Except on appointment days with Mary; on those days, Sheila would bring the hair out for the renewal ritual.

  “I don’t know if I want the spell again,” Mary said. She hadn’t even looked at Sheila yet. She just sat down heavily on the living room couch and sighed. “I don’t know if I want to fix things any longer.”

  “What else would you do?” Sheila asked, closing the door before coming over to sit in the chair across from Mary. “Divorce? Start over? You know you could do that, right?”

  Mary clutched a small black beaded purse in her lap. She was a beautiful woman, long limbed, peach-skinned, with dark hair that fell to the small of her back like a curtain. She exercised, ate healthy, and didn’t drink too much alcohol—even when alcohol sounded like a good idea. She wore upper middle class clothes that weren’t particularly major designer labels but weren’t from a mall store, either.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said, pushing a piece of her layered black hair away from her face. Sheila noticed that Mary had gotten a nose piercing in the time between their last appointment and this one. A tiny diamond stud glinted in the sunlight coming through the living room windows. “The children . . . ” said Mary. Sheila nodded, and stood, then went to her curio cabinet and took out the envelope with the hank of Ted’s hair in it.

  Sheila opened the envelope and placed the lock of hair on the coffee table between them. It was a thick brown curl that Mary had cut from Ted’s mop one night while he was asleep. When Mary had come to Sheila for help four years ago, Sheila had said, “I’ll need you to bring me something of his. Something you love about him. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to work with.” Mary had said she didn’t love him anymore, so how could she bring Sheila anything? “Surely you must love something about him,” Sheila said, and Mary had nodded, her mouth a firm line, and said that, yes, she did love Ted’s hair. It was beautiful. Thick and curly. She loved to run her fingers through it, even after she’d stopped loving Ted.

  Now Mary looked down at the lock of curled hair as if it were a dead mouse Sheila had set out in front of her. “You know the drill,” Sheila said, and together the two pinched an end of the hair and lifted it into the air above the coffee table.

  Sheila closed her eyes and tried to feel Mary’s love come through the coil of hair. Like an electrical current, a slight hum flowed through it, but it was weaker than ever and Sheila worried that she wouldn’t be able to help Mary once this slight affection for Ted’s hair eventually disappeared. She took the lingering love in through her fingers anyway, whipped it like cream, semi-consciously chanting an incantation—or more like noises that helped her focus on the energy in the feeling than anything of significance—and after she’d turned Mary’s weak affection into a fluffy meringue-like substance, Sheila pushed it back through the hair, slowly but surely, until Mary was filled with a large, aerated love.

  When Sheila opened her eyes, she noticed Mary’s face had lifted a little. The firm line of her mouth had softened and curled up at the edges, as if she wanted to smile but was perhaps just a little shy. “Thank you, Sheila,” said Mary, blinking sweetly on the couch. This was when Sheila went soft, too. Whenever a client like Mary, hardened by a deficiency of love, took on a shade of her former self—a youthful self who loved and was loved, who trusted in love to see her through—Sheila had to fight to hold back tears. Not because seeing the return of love made her happy—no, the pressure behind her eyes was more a force of sadness, because the person in front of her was under an illusion, and no illusion, thought Sheila, was pleasant. They were more like the narcotics those with chronic pain took to ease their days. This returned love would only be brief and temporary.

  At the door, Mary took out three hundred-dollar bills. “Worth every penny,” she said, folding them into Sheila’s palm, meeting Sheila’s eyes and holding her stare.

  When Sheila closed the door behind her, she turned and looked at the face of her cell phone. Thirty minutes had passed. On the dot.

  Her next client was new: a good-looking young man who was a bit too earnest for only being a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate. His name was Ben, and he had just acquired a decent job with an advertising company. He’d gotten a mortgage, purchased a house, and was ready to fill it with someone else and him together, the kids, the dogs, the cats: the works. Sheila could see all of this as he sat in front of her and told her that he wanted to find love. That was simple, really. No need to drum up love where love already fizzed and popped. He just needed someone to really see him. Someone who wanted the same things. He wasn’t the completely bland sort of guy that no one would notice, but he wasn’t emitting a strong signal either. Sheila did a quick invocation that would enhance Ben’s desire so that it would beam like a lighthouse toward ships looking for harbor.

  She charged him a hundred dollars and told him that if he didn’t get engaged within a year, she’d give him his money back. Ben thanked her, and after she saw him out of the house, it was time for Sheila to sit in her living room and stare at the television, where the vague outline of her body was reflected in the blank screen.

  Lyle would be coming to pick her up in several hours. Lyle, Lyle. She said his name a few times, but it was no good. She still couldn’t believe a man named Lyle was coming for her.

  Sheila had tried to make the thing that made her different the most normal aspect of her life. Hence her business: Paranormal Romance. She had business cards and left them on the bulletin boards of grocery store entryways, in the fishbowls full of cards that sat on the register counters of some restaurants, and on the bars of every lowdown drink-your-blues-away kind of joint in the city of Cleveland, where people sometimes, while crying into a beer, would notice the card propped against the napkin holder in front of them and think about Sheila possibly being the solution to their loneliness, as the cards declared.

  She had made herself as non-paranormal as possible, while at the same time living completely out in the open about being a witch, probably because of what her father had once
told her, years ago, when she was just a little girl and even Sheila hadn’t known she had magic in her fingertips. “If I had to be some creepy weirdo like the vampires and werewolves or whatever the hell else is out there these days,” her father had said while watching a news report about the increasing appearance of paranormal creatures, “then I suppose a witch would be the way to go.”

  The way to go. That’s what he’d said. As though there was a choice about being cursed or born with magic flowing through you. Vampire, werewolf. Whatever the hell else. The memory stuck with Sheila because of the way her father had talked as if it were one of those “If you had to” games.

  If you had to lose a sense, which one?

  If you had to live on a deserted island with only one book, which one?

  It was only later, after Sheila felt magic welling up in her as a teenager, that she realized how upset he was when she accidentally revealed her abilities—a tactless spell she’d cast to bring him and her mother closer. Unfortunately, her father had noticed Sheila’s fingers weaving through the air as she attempted to surreptitiously cast the spell while her parents were watching television one evening. Her mother stuck by Sheila, but he filed for divorce and disappeared from their lives altogether.

  Thus her business, Paranormal Romance, was born. She would make it work for her, Sheila decided in her late twenties. She would use this magic in a way that someone with good legs, flexibility, and balance might become a dancer or a yoga instructor.

  This desire for normality also explained why Sheila wanted to kill her mother after she opened the door that evening to find a man dressed in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a black V-neck shirt, and work boots, sporting a scraggly goatee, whose first words were, “Wow, you don’t look like a witch. That’s interesting.”

  “Probably the least interesting thing about me,” said Sheila. She tried to restrain herself, but couldn’t refrain from arching her eyebrows as a cat might raise its back.

  “I’m Lyle. Nice to meet you,” the somewhat ruggedly good-looking Lyle said.