Magic and the Modern Girl

by Mindy Klasky

  “What about Neko?”

  “What about Neko? I can’t feel him, either. And he doesn’t even have the decency to keep voice mail on his phone. What sort of idiot doesn’t have voice mail?”

  “You can’t feel him?” David asked, ignoring my question. For the first time, he sounded truly concerned. He might finally be through playing the dispassionate instructor, the cold analyst.

  “I told you that, in the first dozen messages I left for you.”

  “You didn’t leave a dozen messages.”

  “Might as well have,” I muttered. But complaining wasn’t going to get me any closer to a solution. I tried to clarify, “I can feel that I used to feel him, if that makes any sense. I can feel that we used to be able to talk to each other, that I used to be able to reach out to him. But there isn’t anything there now. I don’t have any power!” The more I explained what was happening to me, the more frustrated I became, until my voice cracked on the last word. I cleared my throat and said, “You said creating the anima would make it all better. You have to do something!”

  David paused for so long that I wondered if the phone had cut off. When he finally replied, his voice was grave. “There isn’t anything I can do. Not until we find Ariel.”

  “Then look for her!”

  “I will. I have contacts, obviously. I’ll let you know what turns up.”

  “That’s all?”

  He sighed, and I could picture him running his hand through his hair in familiar exasperation. “I don’t know what else I can do, Jane. I’ll reach out again to Neko. I’ll let him know what’s going on.”

  “And in the meantime? I’m just supposed to go to work and act like nothing’s wrong?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  And that’s what it came down to. I didn’t have a better idea. I had no ideas at all.

  So, for four straight days, I went in to work. An entire week of being a librarian, of sitting at my desk, of mentoring Kit and answering questions, and pretending that I was a totally ordinary woman, leading a totally ordinary life.

  On Wednesday, I called Melissa to book mojito therapy for Friday night, but she begged off, reminding me, “Rob and I are going to The Tempest.”

  “Don’t even mention that play to me.”

  “Still no word, huh?” I’d told Melissa everything on Tuesday evening, over platefuls of Key Lime Locks and Cinnamon Smiles. It was a miracle that she didn’t need to roll me out the Cake Walk door.

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s an all-afternoon yoga session at the studio on Saturday. Way of the Warrior. You’ll find it really restful.”

  “I’d find it really maddening, but thanks anyway.”

  Friday night, I sat by the phone, waiting for it to ring. I actually used my cell to call my land-line twice, to make sure that the connection was working. How could everyone abandon me at the same time? No Neko. No David. And definitely no Will.

  Not that Will had any real reason to call me. I’d given him my number when I made up my lie about the library board meeting, but he’d probably read through my storytelling. He probably felt utterly and completely snubbed, and I’d never hear from him again.

  I went to bed at eight o’clock, pulling the pillow over my head to block out the last of the summer sunlight that peeked in my window.

  I was sound asleep by nine o’clock, buried in one of those foggy, dream-bound places, where you can’t move, can’t see, can’t talk. I came to the surface slowly, opening my eyes to peer at my clock. The green numbers glowed patiently, but it took a long time for me to realize that it was still Friday night, that I’d only been asleep for an hour. It took me even longer to realize that I had been awakened by someone pounding on my front door.

  “I’m coming!” I called as I shuffled across the living-room floor.

  The racket didn’t make sense. Neko or David would have just come into the cottage; they both had full rights to disrupt my privacy, by the nature of our arcane commitment. I couldn’t imagine Ariel making so much noise, even if she had decided to come home.

  My heart pounded as I thought of Gran—I hadn’t seen her in nearly a week. What if her excitement about the wedding had proven too much for her aged heart? What if she had collapsed at home, giving in to the lungs that had been weakened by pneumonia two autumns ago? What if she was lying in an emergency room even now, if police had been dispatched to bring me running, to let me kneel beside her bed, grab her hand, listen to her dying words?

  I flung the door open and saw Melissa standing on my doorstep.

  “Oh,” I said, letting the door frame bear my weight as relief crashed against me. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, it’s me! Who did you think it was?”

  “I thought that Gran—I mean, I thought that you weren’t Neko. Or David. I mean…” I rubbed at my face, muzzier than I should have been.

  “Were you asleep?” Melissa sounded shocked.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, looking down at my nightshirt and feeling vaguely ashamed. As if in surprise, Melissa sneezed. “Bless you,” I said. “Come on in. Every mosquito in D.C. is going to attack me if we leave the door open.”

  Melissa closed the door behind her, and I led the way across the living room. “Jane!” she said, her voice raw with urgency. By now, my mind was working a little better. Melissa was supposed to be on her date with Rob Peterson. It must have self-destructed in a truly spectacular way, for her to report the disaster in person. “Jane!” she repeated, as I flipped on the kitchen light. “I found her! I found Ariel!”

  “You what?” The words didn’t make any sense. Melissa wasn’t supposed to be looking for Ariel. Melissa was my mundane friend. She was ordinary. She was normal. She didn’t have any confusing witchcraft flowing through her blood. I told her my arcane problems, over and over and over again, but she didn’t have the ability to fix them. Still, any port in a storm. “Where?”

  “Duke Ellington High School.”

  “Duke—She was at the play?”

  Melissa nodded, her smile so wide I thought she might burst out laughing. “On stage, front and center.”

  “What happened?” I grabbed for a chair and sat down heavily. I was still having trouble waking up; the world felt blurry, smeared.

  “Well, you know it was opening night tonight, right?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “That’s why we went,” Melissa said, with a certain exasperation. “Rob’s on the board for the D.C. Arts Council.” She blushed. “He was the one who brought the poster into the shop in the first place. That’s why I knew about the show, when I asked him out.”

  Rob was the one I could blame for all this. If he hadn’t brought the poster to Melissa, she never would have mentioned it. I wouldn’t have noticed the actor who looked like David, and I never would have strayed from my magical summoning when I created Ariel. Great. Just great.

  Melissa tumbled on, apparently oblivious to the fact that there was any blame to spread around. “Well, we were sitting there watching the opening scene. You know, the shipwreck, with all the shouting and confusion?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t seen the play in years, but the first scene was one of those classic Shakespeare moments—a shipwreck! Live! On stage! I could only imagine what an Elizabethan audience must have felt. Certainly they would have been more enthralled than my impatient twenty-first-century self.

  “Well, that’s when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “When the play was interrupted. Miranda was talking about how the only thing she could remember from her childhood were the women who used to take care of her. It was weird—the language of the production was all updated, so she sounded like a whiny suburban reject from High School Musical. I half expected her to break into a song about how Prospero had never understood her.”

  “But what happened?”

  “All of a sudden, in the middle of one of Miranda’s lines, this woman walked on stage.”


  “This woman?”

  “Your Ariel.”

  “What?”

  “She looked just like you described her. She was really tall—like she could be a model or something. Her skin was so white it glowed in the theater. All I could think of was marble. And her hair was black. It almost disappeared in the stage lights.”

  My heart pounded as Melissa completed her recitation. Tall, thin, pale. Black hair. “What was she wearing?”

  “This strange gauzy dress. It flowed when she moved, sort of floated all around her. It was woven from different colors, red and orange and yellow.”

  I knew that dress. I’d seen it in my basement. I’d made it with the last of my magic. I forced myself to ask, “And she walked on stage?”

  “She just stood up in the audience and walked down the aisle, like she was part of the show. She climbed onto the stage and looked out at all of us. About half the audience thought that she was part of the production, that she was supposed to be some sort of dream scene or something.”

  “And the other half?” I asked, a queasy feeling turning my belly.

  “The other half thought something was wrong. The guy playing Prospero pretty much confirmed it. I mean, he tried to ad-lib and everything, to pretend like he was summoning servants to clear a ghost. He actually did a decent job—at least with all the modern talk, he didn’t have to make up lines in iambic pentameter. But the stagehands who came out weren’t anything like island servants.”

  “What did they do?” I tried to picture what she was describing, tried to imagine the entire production stalled by this strange woman. By my anima.

  “Only one guy came out at first. He tried to walk her off the stage, but she refused to move. It was creepy. She didn’t say anything, just stood there, like a statue.”

  Didn’t say anything. Like a statue.

  Or like an anima.

  “So what happened next?”

  “The entire crew came out on stage. They were all wearing black, and a few of them had headsets. They gathered around her like she was some sort of wild animal.”

  Wild animal…That wasn’t too far from the truth. “And then?” I asked.

  “She held up a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “A poster. Like something we might have made in school for a pep rally. I didn’t see where she’d been hiding it, it was like she just produced it out of nowhere. She held it up above her head so everyone could see. It said ‘Empower The Arts.’”

  Empower The Arts. The slogan that had been on the play’s promotional poster. The slogan that I’d thought of when I created Ariel. The slogan that had apparently taken the last of my magic and twisted it into something I could no longer recognize, something that was utterly foreign to me, something that had been stolen from me.

  “Empower The Arts,” I echoed.

  “She held up her sign, and she pivoted around, making sure that everyone in the audience saw it. People started clapping—it was like she was Norma Rae or something. And then the stage crew got serious. They closed in around her, trying to herd her into the wings. Before they could make her move, though, she just jumped off the front of the stage. Jumped off and ran away.”

  “Did she take her sign with her?”

  “That was the strange thing. That’s why I’m here.” Melissa looked at me with eyes that were half-afraid. “The sign totally disappeared, Jane. It was like she’d never been there. Like she was totally a figment of our imagination. Everyone was talking. They thought it must be some theatrical trick. But I was pretty sure it was something else. Something you needed to know about.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. “What happened next?”

  “The stage manager came out. She said that they’d start the show over from the top, that it would take them fifteen minutes or so to reset the shipwreck, and there was coffee in the lobby for anyone who wanted it. I told Rob that I had to leave, and I came over here as fast as I could.”

  “Without Rob?”

  “Your witchcraft stuff is strange enough to me, and I’ve known about it for two years. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him what was really going on.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that I knew a reporter, someone who was going to be thrilled to get the scoop. Rob was still going to come with me, but he couldn’t because he had to do the whole glad-hand thing with the rest of the Arts Council people, after the play.” She shook her head and sneezed again.

  “Bless you,” I said automatically. “Melissa—” Even as my mind was racing, even as I was trying to process everything that she’d said, I felt terrible that I’d ruined her date.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, reading my mind with the ease of years of friendship. “I mean, there’ll be other dates. Another one tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

  “You go, girl!” I said, climbing to my feet.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Put on clothes. I’ve got to get over to the high school. I have to see if it was actually Ariel.”

  “Do you really think it was?” Now she sounded doubtful.

  “A tall, black-haired woman who makes an albino look tan, wearing a gauze silk dress? Naw. Couldn’t have anything in common with my anima.”

  I strode into my bedroom, palming on the light and tearing open my closet door. What did one wear for anima-hunting on a Friday night in Georgetown? I settled on a pair of jeans and a green blouse. I carried my tennis shoes into the living room and tugged them on as Melissa watched. “Aren’t you going to call David?” she asked.

  I’d been hoping to avoid that. Still, Melissa was right. I’d be an idiot not to bring my warder into the hunt. I reached for him with my mind reflexively.

  Nothing.

  The bond between us shimmered with the faintest reflection of memory, taunting me with the fact that it had been there, that I had relied on it. But there was nothing now. I sighed and picked up the phone. And cursed when I got his outgoing message. “David, Ariel was here in Georgetown. At the high school. I’m going to try to find her. Call me on my cell when you get this.”

  I didn’t even bother trying to reach Neko, certain that he’d be at some unbearably fashionable nightspot, surrounded by music too loud to hear his phone ring, by activity too vigorous for him to feel the vibration in his pocket.

  In the end, Melissa and I shouldn’t have bothered. We got over to the school while the play was still going on; we had a chance to rattle a bunch of locked doors, to peer into night-dark classrooms. We decided to comb the nearby streets before the crowd let out, but our gesture was meaningless. Ariel could have been anywhere, hiding in any shadow, lurking behind any tree or car or house. My efforts to think a command to her were utterly unsuccessful.

  After an hour, we headed back to Cake Walk. Melissa turned on the working light below the cabinets on the back counter, but she purposely left off the overhead so that we wouldn’t be disturbed by late-night patrons with the munchies. She excavated a platter from beneath the serving counter, peeling back tin foil to reveal an almond-and-chocolate confection. “Lust After Dark?” she asked.

  I giggled, letting off some of the pressure that had gathered while we searched unsuccessfully for my magical creation. Almond Lust was one of Melissa’s signature creations. The addition of chocolate had been my idea, long ago, and the new name always made me laugh. I sighed in appreciation as Melissa poured a tall glass of milk to accompany the toothsome sweet.

  We sat in companionable silence for a while, before Melissa asked, “Notice anything different?” She waved a hand toward the wall.

  There was the spotless sink. A clean dishrag. A wall-mounted telephone. A little white board for writing down emergency messages. A calendar.

  Melissa’s dating calendar.

  Melissa’s dating calendar with each day for the past week shining through with unadulterated white squares. Not a single red X for a week—no First Dates.

  “Melissa?” I asked. “Are you f
eeling all right?”

  “What?” She grinned.

  “Did you lose your red pen?”

  She laughed again. An open and friendly laugh. An honestly cheerful, not sulking at all, enjoying-herself-like-an-ordinary-person open and friendly laugh that was so contagious I almost forgot the misery of my missing anima. “I decided I was being a bit obsessive.”

  Obsessive? Melissa? The woman who had counted off her First Dates for the past dozen years? My best friend, who had alternated her evenings out with all the precision of a professional stocking the dairy shelves at the most exclusive grocery store on the eastern seaboard?

  “Do you think?” I asked, not bothering to disguise my mocking tone.

  “I was just marking off the disasters in red to give myself the feeling that I was doing something. That I was trying to make myself happy.”

  “And now?”

  She blushed. She blushed the color of the red ink that used to reconfirm her spinster status on a painfully regular basis. “And now, I really have done something to make myself happy. Asking Rob out was the best thing I ever could have done. We flirted all week long. He helped me close up on Wednesday.” She blushed even deeper. “He stuck around for…dinner. By the time we got to tonight, it was like we’d been dating forever.”

  “Where’d you eat tonight?”

  “Don Lobos.”

  The little Mexican restaurant was one of our favorites. More to keep her talking happily than because I had any real interest, I said, “What did you have?”

  “We shared the garlic shrimp, and then I had—”

  Okay. Worried about Ariel or not, I had to call her on that one. “You ate the garlic shrimp? You? The queen of appropriate First Date foods?” Ariel be damned, there were some announcements so earthshaking that they needed to be given their full, unstinted due.

  “We both ate the garlic. Besides, I don’t think First Date foods apply when you’ve been talking to a guy every day for a year.”

  “What about your Five Conversational Topics?” For years, Melissa had prepared for potentially awkward dates, queuing up discussions to drop into any uncomfortably long pauses.