One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I close my eyes. I listen for something, anything. Mostly I can hear kids laughing. I can hear Ginger’s feet running away from the shore, and Maddy’s squeals as she follows her. I can hear everything changing and my friendships breaking apart and my heart beating out its rhythm of worry and confusion. I can hear Lyle moving from embarrassment to annoyance to pity.

  I can hear Dad coming back to us, whispering to Mom, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.

  I open my eyes and look up at Lyle. It’s what I do when I don’t know what else to do. Sometimes Lyle is the brother who makes up limericks about how annoying I am or pretends he can’t hear me even when I’m right next to him, talking directly into his ear.

  But other times he is the person who sits next to me on the bit of slanted roof outside my bedroom window and distracts me from whatever is happening inside our house. Sometimes, Lyle is the only person who knows anything about me at all.

  Right now, he is that person.

  “It’s like a shadow,” Lyle says. “Or like when you think you see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look at it head-on, it’s not there. Magic’s like that. You can’t look at it head-on.”

  I nod. Dad never tried explaining any of this to me. I guess he didn’t think it was necessary.

  “It’s from the heart,” Dad says, joining us again, interrupting the thing between Lyle and me, and I can practically hear the bubble we were in pop, a sound louder and clearer and more sure than any whisper of magic. “There’s no tricks. You open your heart, and it’s there.” His voice is gruff. He’s still only looking at the lake and not at me at all. “Or not there. Whatever magic thinks is best.”

  The silence after this sentence lasts forever. I get lost in it.

  “I opened up my heart and that’s why I went into the lake,” I say. I want it to be true, but it isn’t. It was from my head. It was from a sureness. Not sureness that magic was in the lake, though. Sureness that I was meant for something big. Sureness that I would show them all. Sureness that I could be Little Luck, and sureness that I had to be Little Luck.

  Dad shakes his head. “That wasn’t magic, Rose. Whatever you felt. That wasn’t it.” His face is a hard knot of anger.

  “You said it would be easy,” I say. My voice is starting to shake. All of me is starting to shake. “So I thought it would be easy.”

  Dad doesn’t reply. Doesn’t move. Everyone else has now run this way and that, so it’s just my little family still standing here, trying to unremember what just happened.

  “Tell her to get back out there,” Mom says. “She needs to try again.”

  “Go back out there,” Dad says, but it sounds like nothing, like the kind of thing he’d say to anyone—Lyle, the mail carrier, a porcupine, a lampshade.

  “Okay,” I say, even though it’s the last thing I want to do and even though it feels completely impossible.

  “Tell her she can do it,” Lyle says. He and Mom are so much alike, and I don’t think I knew it until right now, because Mom doesn’t play video games and Lyle doesn’t run a daycare; Mom doesn’t eat pizza cold in the mornings and Lyle doesn’t wear his hair in a loose bun on the tip-top of his head. But underneath all of that, they are the same.

  They love me the same.

  Dad loves me too. But it’s different.

  I don’t think it’s supposed to be so different.

  “I have work to do,” Dad says. “We need magic. I don’t have time for all this. Not today.”

  “Wendell,” Mom says, a little bit of warning in her voice, the way she sometimes talks to a toddler who is smearing paint in his hair or banging toy cars against the floor.

  “I suggest you all get to work,” Dad says, not looking at any of us now, just at the trees and the magic he’s ready to capture.

  And he does capture it. Within a few minutes he’s filled four jars of magic, and he’s sprinting up the hill to catch a fifth. I don’t see what it is he’s chasing. I don’t see the magic or hear it or know it’s around at all.

  I put my shoes back on. My sneakers are the beat-up pale blue canvas kind, not the fancy red-and-purple kind made for jumping and leaping.

  “Just try to get at least a couple jars. Easy ones,” Lyle says before he bounds off too, joining up with a group of kids his age who seem to be into New Year’s Day more for the jokes and fun and partying than for the magic.

  Mom kisses my forehead. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she says. She doesn’t tell me I will certainly catch magic soon. She doesn’t tell me it doesn’t matter, what I did in the lake.

  She doesn’t even tell me that she’s going to leave me there, so she can walk off to capture her own magic. She’s simply there one minute and gone the next, tiptoeing up by the rocks, as nimble and graceful as anyone.

  My shoes hurt, my pants are soaking wet, my hair’s in my eyes, and I’m still holding a jar of lake water like it’s magic, like it’s something, like I’m special. But it isn’t, it isn’t, I’m not.

  I’m not.

  Twelve

  I try to remember lessons from Dad. They all started out nice and clear and sturdy: take your shoes off and feel the earth, listen for tiny chimes and whispers of air, don’t worry about anyone else, you’ll be fine, you’re a natural, you’re special, the magic will find you.

  The magic finds the people who deserve it.

  I walk away, as far away as I can from the thing that happened, and I find myself at the top of the hill, the very very top, past the cabins and the patches of flowers where I’m certain magic is probably lurking. I walk past my classmates and their snickers, past everyone who hoped I wouldn’t do well or was positive I would, past all of them and the things they’ve thought about me and whispered about me and wondered about me.

  I walk until I’m all alone.

  And Dad said being special was lonely, but he didn’t say that finding out you’re maybe not special at all would be lonely too.

  When Dad said I might be lonely, he didn’t say it like it mattered, like it would hurt. He said it like it was fine, and maybe that’s how it feels to him, because when I think about it, I’ve never seen my dad have many friends. I’ve never watched people try to become his friend, even. People mostly stay away from Dad and lean close to Mom and that’s how it’s really always been. At holiday parties and school events and even right now, as I watch them take a break to drink some water with Ginger’s mom and Maddy’s dad, that’s how it is. Bodies are leaning toward Mom. Women touch her arm sometimes and men nod and laugh at the things she says. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her face is tilted toward my father, and his face is looking somewhere else entirely, somewhere far away. Sometimes his hand will reach out and circle her arm or squeeze her shoulder.

  And when it does, sometimes, but not always, Mom’s fingers will fold into her palms or her shoulders will move a tiny bit, as if her heartbeat has temporarily relocated to her extremities for one powerful bah-dum before making its way back to where it’s supposed to be.

  That’s what it does right now, when his hand finds its way to rest near her neck, a place I don’t like watching his hand be. Mom’s shoulders jump, Dad’s hand stays, and I am here wondering if he was wrong about me, and if that means he could be wrong about so many other things. No one standing with them is saying anything, but all of them are leaning a little farther away, and maybe I don’t see magic very well, but I see other things, important things, things I have been trying not to see.

  I should be looking for magic, but I’m not.

  Instead I am seeing even the shallow breaths my mother is taking and I’m hearing her shift her weight from one hip to another and I’m thinking if I could see the magic the way I can see her discomfort, I wouldn’t be in this moment to begin with.

  And wouldn’t that be something.

  Thirteen

  A Story I Am Thinking About on the Top of This Hill

  Once, Ginger and I stole a jar of magic.

  It was Gi
nger’s idea. She talked about wanting to do it once a day, for ten days, and then we did it, because I didn’t think I could have the same conversation eleven times in a row.

  It wasn’t like Ginger to break rules. She didn’t even like staying up past bedtime, let alone stealing something valuable from my parents. But it was like Ginger to get something into her head and be totally unable to let it go.

  And it was like Ginger to try to fix something complicated by doing something simple. The complicated thing was my parents fighting downstairs while we were trying to watch The Sound of Music upstairs in the playroom for the millionth time. And the simple thing was to fix it by using magic.

  “That’s what it’s for,” Ginger said the first time she brought it up. Julie Andrews was singing about deer and rain and sewing and I was doing everything I could to listen to that instead of my mother’s almost-weeping voice and my dad’s hand hitting the table a little too hard at the ends of his sentences.

  “You think magic is for stealing?” I asked.

  “It’s for fixing things,” she said. “Cars. Broken windows. Illnesses. Families.”

  “My family doesn’t need fixing,” I said, and it sounded true enough, but Ginger shook her head like she didn’t believe me.

  The next day, my parents fought outside the school, on their way in to our choir performance. Maddy heard them and reported it to me and Ginger, and we watched them from the window in the girls’ bathroom. My dad’s arms waved around and my mother’s stayed locked together in front of her, and the two of them whisper-yelled until it was time to come inside and watch Maddy, Ginger, and me sing a bunch of songs about how great it is when the seasons change.

  Ginger raised her eyebrows and wiggled them around before telling me again that she knew how to fix it.

  My parents fought at my tenth birthday party, the one we had in the middle of December at the roller-skating rink where there was supposed to be a fortune-teller and a cotton candy machine but all that was actually there were a bunch of smelly socks and a guy who sold stale pretzels and the sound of my father telling my mother she was wrong and absurd and the sound of my mother driving away with their car, so that Dad and I had to hitch a ride home with Ginger’s family.

  “Now?” Ginger asked before I got out of the car that day, and I wondered what her mom and my dad thought she was talking about. I shrugged instead of shaking my head, and I guess that’s when her idea became our idea.

  We talked about it for another week, until the day of her family’s Christmas party, when my mother and father got into it outside the bathroom, where I guess they thought no one could hear them, but in fact absolutely everyone heard every word they said. I made sure no one saw them by standing at the corner where the hallway turns and leads you toward the bathroom.

  It was important that even if every single person in all of Belling Bright could hear them, no one could see them.

  I had only seen once. Or maybe two or three times, but it felt better to say it was only once.

  “It’s time,” Ginger said when my parents’ fight was over and the party was continuing on as if it never happened, including my parents, who were holding hands and talking to whoever had the guts to talk to them. My father’s hand looked like it was holding on tight. My mother’s looked loose, like she couldn’t quite convince herself to commit her fingers to holding on to his.

  Ginger and I were eating cookies behind the Christmas tree and watching everyone from there, because we were sort of jokingly and sort of actually hiding from Maddy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “They’re here, so no one’s at your place. No one will notice if we go. They haven’t noticed we’re missing right now, even. It’s time.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, and even I knew it wasn’t true.

  “Do you want them to get divorced?” Ginger asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “I heard your mom ask my mom about the houses in the middle of town.”

  The houses in the middle of town were very cute and very small and very neat and very perfect for parents who had split up. Maddy’s dad lived in one, and Lyle had a friend with two dads who split up and now lived next to each other in the houses in the middle of town. Every once in a while a friend would have a birthday party at one of those houses, and it was always a friend with divorced parents, and there were always way more presents than my birthdays, and usually it seemed like everything was fine but maybe a little more confusing and sometimes a little sadder and I’d always wonder what it was like before, when the whole family lived in another house, on the edge of town instead of right there in the center.

  “That’s not true,” I said to Ginger, but I was pretty sure Ginger wasn’t a liar.

  “It is true,” Ginger said. “But we can fix it.”

  It struck me as odd that my parents wouldn’t use the magic themselves to fix whatever was wrong between them. Maybe that meant it wasn’t that bad.

  Or maybe, maybe, it meant that it was so bad they didn’t even think magic could fix it.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can try.”

  It was as easy as Ginger thought to sneak next door to my house and steal the jar of magic.

  It took time to pick the perfect one. We looked in the back hall closet, at rows and rows of jars, all lined up neatly. They were different sizes and shapes and the magic inside came in all different colors and textures. Some glowed extra bright. Some were feathery or spiky or swirly. Each one was unique. I wanted the magic we chose to be forgettable but pretty, strong-looking but soft, too. I’d seen my dad choose jars for different things, and he couldn’t ever explain how he knew one from the other, except that clear magic is usually about love and stretchy magic is about coming together and magic that glows is extra powerful. He chose a pebbly magic when Mom was sick one summer and a glittery magic when I was afraid of the dark. An airy, nearly invisible magic when Lyle was failing math class. A huge jar of watery magic the time the whole town came together to help a family who’d lost their home in a fire.

  I needed to choose the right one.

  Finally, after sifting through some very small jars with something cloudy inside, and a jar with little blades of grass, and one jar that had something orangey-yellow in it that looked like yarn, I chose a little bit of sunlight trapped in a narrow jar. The sunlight had some weight to it. That, and brightness, usually meant it was a magic that would last a while. It stretched from one side of the jar to the other, sticking to the sides.

  “This?” I asked Ginger.

  “That,” Ginger said. It was the way we agreed to things—without discussion, just trying to see something the same way in the same moment. I loved that she saw that bit of stretchy, bendy, sunlight magic and knew the way I knew that it was what my parents, my family, needed. A little bit of sunshine. Something warm and easy and light let loose into our home.

  We begged our parents to let Ginger stay over after her Christmas party, and we stayed up until everyone was asleep. In a few days it would be Christmas and I thought about cookies for breakfast and Mom leaning against Dad while we opened presents and Dad singing along with the radio and Mom saying how much she loved his voice, the way she used to do.

  “Do you know how to do this?” Ginger asked. The two of us were sitting on the floor, the jar of magic between us. We stared it down, as if it could tell us what to do.

  “I’ve seen my dad do it,” I said.

  “My mom usually does ours.” Ginger touched the lid’s top but didn’t dare remove it.

  “Lyle knows how to do it.”

  “Lyle? Really?”

  Sometimes it feels like my family is a big rocky mountain I’m trying to climb, and Lyle is the rocks that jut out, the places where I can grab on to, the ledges that make it possible for me to keep climbing.

  When Dad says something that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Dad should say, Lyle comes into my room and we sit on the roof and look at Belling Brigh
t and all the people walking on the sidewalks and driving down the road. Mostly we don’t talk. We throw acorns, trying to make them hit the highest branches on the big tree in our yard. We pretend it’s a game we’re choosing to play, and not one that we have to play because the house is too small for Dad and all his feelings and us too.

  The one thing we don’t do is talk about Mom and Dad.

  It’s weird, I guess, because the rest of Belling Bright loves talking about my dad. Other towns, too. People everywhere know of Wendell Anders. They talk about his bare feet and his handsome smile and his booming voice. They say he’s larger than life, and I hate when they say that, but I can’t explain exactly why.

  “It might be okay to ask for Lyle’s help,” I said. It was after midnight, which meant Mom and Dad were definitely asleep but Lyle might still be playing video games, sneaking chips into his room, laughing at some cartoon that seemed kind of stupid to me but made him happy.

  “Your call,” Ginger said. But I could tell from the tone of her voice that she didn’t want him here, not really, and when Ginger wanted something it felt big and important to me. Always bigger and more important than whatever I might want.

  I could tell from her posture (leaning) and the tone of her voice (choppy) that she wanted it to be just us opening this jar, and she wanted me to feel about my brother the way she feels about hers.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Let’s just do it you and I. We can figure it out. We’ve been watching people open up jars of magic our whole lives. How hard can it be?”

  “Not hard at all,” Ginger said. And she grabbed the jar of magic. I thought, since it was my family, that I’d be the one to open the jar and try to think the right thoughts to make the magic do the right thing. But Ginger didn’t hesitate. She grunted, opening the jar, like the top was stuck on really tight.