We’re in silence, all of us, looking out at the path we drew with our fast feet, looking for Mom and Lyle to spring up too, but they’re nowhere to be seen. Maybe they want to stand under the magical waterfall and forget about me and the trouble I’ve caused.
It’s just me, Dad, and the one person Dad told me to stay away from only a few hours ago.
“I’m trying to understand,” Dad says, but he doesn’t look like someone trying to understand. His hair is messy from his hands traveling through it and pulling at it; he is red-faced from the run over here or his feelings, I can’t be sure. He keeps rubbing his forehead, and I know that’s never a good sign with him. It’s what he does before he does something else or says something else or gives me more memories I want to forget all about.
“That’s what I’m doing!” I say. “I’m trying to understand! You didn’t tell me this was a possibility. You didn’t tell me I might fail. You didn’t tell me how to be out in the world without being Little Luck. You didn’t tell me there were people who were Not Meant for Magic. And you did not tell me I might be one of them!” I fling my arms all around. Then I feel like Dad, the way he sometimes is, and that makes me want to still my arms.
“You didn’t tell her about us,” Zelda says.
“She didn’t need to know about people who are Not Meant for Magic,” Dad says. “How would that help her? And she isn’t— She caught a jar. She got scared or distracted or who knows what, but there’s no reason to start worrying about—”
“He didn’t tell you who we are,” Zelda says. She keeps looking at my father like they both know something big that I don’t know.
“I know who you are,” I say, but the words don’t feel true, and Zelda’s face is hard and the temperature is starting to drop, the party is already ending, the magic is running out.
“Tell her,” Zelda says. She’s loud; her voice carries and fills the whole playground, maybe all of Belling Bright can hear her. Usually when people talk to my father they flutter their eyelashes, they ask a hundred questions or they ask for advice or they ask to touch his hands, the ones that capture all that magic. Even when Dad’s being difficult and people are seeing that, they are only ever quiet. They look away, they check in with my mother later to ask if everything’s okay. They do not raise their voices or look him in the eye or do any of the things Zelda is doing right now.
I thought for a long time that meant that everyone respected my father. But right now, in the deserted playground, feeling the cold rush in, watching magical fireworks dot the sky and then fade, I know something else is true. They were afraid of him.
I know because I am afraid of him. I am watching his fingers itch at the tops of his legs. His throat bulges and his face looks like it is fighting something back.
“I suggest you return home,” Dad says to Zelda, but it’s obvious she’s not about to go anywhere.
“Your old home,” Zelda says.
“Rose. Let’s go. This is a family matter.”
“I agree,” Zelda says. “And we’re family.”
The temperature plummets, and in an instant, Belling Bright is in winter again. I imagine snow might start falling any second. Usually I’m sad, when the magical weather of Ginger’s party fades and we are left with the way things actually are. But today the cold feels good, like a reminder than there’s really only so much magic can do.
Dad is quiet. He paces, and the pacing looks a lot like marching. His feet hit the ground like he’s mad at it, and I know how Dad is when he’s mad.
And I don’t want Zelda to know.
I don’t want anyone to know, really.
“We’re not family anymore,” Dad says at last.
“You get to just decide that?” Zelda asks. “That your family isn’t your family anymore?”
“What does that mean?” I ask. “What are you guys talking about?”
“I told you to stay away from this girl,” Dad says, turning all his awful energy toward me. “You should have respected that. You owed it to me to do something right.”
I don’t think he means to say it. Not like that, not in that tone of voice and with that little cover. He can’t talk it away or pretend he meant something else. It’s not like I didn’t know how he felt about my failure. But we’ve been dancing around it and fighting against it and trying to picture it as something else entirely. Not anymore, I guess. Dad can only mean one thing: I owe him for how deeply I’ve disappointed him, and I have to try to be a better daughter now, since I’m not the daughter he thought I was.
“You know what I mean, Rose,” Dad mumbles, but it’s too late. “You’re better than these people.”
Maybe my dad has said a million untrue things over the years. He was wrong about things he seemed so sure about. But this untrue thing is the worst, the meanest, and the least true of all.
“I’ll go,” Zelda says, her voice deeper than it was a moment ago.
“You can’t go,” I say, flying my body toward her. I need her here. I can’t be alone with my dad right now. And I have a thousand questions that need answering. “You were saying—”
“I thought I wanted to—but this isn’t what I wanted. We were just fine. Without all of this. Without all of you.” I’d think maybe I should be the one crying, but it’s Zelda’s eyes that are watering, it’s her chest that’s shaking. She turns to my father. She isn’t yelling at him anymore. The yelling was better; it meant she had hope. Now she’s giving up, and I don’t even know what she’s giving up on. “My dad was right about you,” Zelda says to my father, who won’t look at her. “Just because you’re his brother doesn’t mean you’re anything like him.”
My heart loses itself for a second that could be an hour. “His brother?” I say, but I don’t think it comes out as words so much as sounds and disbelief.
Zelda turns to me, finally. She’s still crying. It’s not a hard, heavy thing; it’s not the way I’ve cried over Ginger and Maddy. The tears are fast but her breathing is slow. “You weren’t the only one who was told to stay away,” she says. “I thought—when you showed up I thought you knew we were cousins and you were ready to— But I don’t want this. I don’t want the way you all do things. I don’t know what you’re meant for. Magic or something else. But you’re not meant for me.”
Zelda is the same age as me. She looks a little like me, from certain angles, I guess. And we grew up a mile away from each other. But when Zelda speaks she could be one hundred years old and from the moon. She says things I’ve never heard anyone else say; she does things no other kid in Belling Bright does.
“Cousins?” I ask, because I am not Zelda with smooth words and certainty and tears that don’t make any noise. My voice catches and panics and I squeak and stutter even though I’m only saying one word.
“Whatever that means,” Zelda says, her back already to me, her legs already walking to the far end of the playground and then away. I notice her bare feet, again, and my father’s. It steals my breath in a way that feet shouldn’t be able to do: that you can be family without even knowing it, the things we all share by accident. I want to show Dad, too. Look, she has bare feet, she’s one of us, we belong to each other. But I don’t. Of course I don’t.
“Zelda! Wait!” is all I can actually manage to say.
Her shoulders shudder—she’s still crying—and then she’s gone, her bare feet moving her far away from here and us and this. Then I’m crying, not because she’s my cousin, but because she doesn’t want to be anymore. Because of all the secrets and then because of every way I’ve messed up and then, finally, I’m crying because Dad’s still pacing and the pacing feels too big for his body, and for the playground and for the moment. Still, I can’t stop myself from asking; I can’t seem to stop talking and make it all better.
“Was that true? Is Zelda’s dad—” I ask even though I know I shouldn’t.
“You’re meant for magic,” Dad says.
“Okay, but is Zelda my—”
“You caug
ht that jar.”
“Okay, but do I have a—”
“You’re my Little Luck. You are. You just are. That’s what matters.” Dad moves toward me, and I don’t want him to touch me. So he doesn’t, and we simply stand still and it’s just me and my dad and the stories he’s been telling me my whole life that aren’t true, the things he wants me to be that I’m not, and the person everyone thinks he is that he’s never actually been.
After a long while, we walk home in silence through the woods, maybe because it’s a place we both like to be. Dad looks very intently at certain patches of dirt, certain flowers and trees. They must be the ones he made from his jars over the years. I imagine he has maps of his magic in his head, all the places he’s opened jars and whispered things into being. I bet he checks on them from time to time, to see if they’re still here, if the magic was as strong as he’d hoped.
“I think I’ve earned your trust,” Dad says, stopping before we’re all the way home. He doesn’t like to walk and talk at the same time, so he turns to me and digs his heels into the ground.
“I think you’ve broken my trust,” I mumble. I’d like to keep walking, but I don’t want Dad yelling about anything else before the day is done.
“All I want is the best for my family and for Belling Bright and for the world, and that’s it, Rose. That’s all I’m trying to do. You understand, don’t you?”
“I guess,” I say.
“I’m not perfect,” he says. “But I try so hard to make things right. And beautiful. And good. For you. For everyone.” His eyes are teary. He wipes at them, and my heart breaks. I don’t want to cry. And I see how hard he tries. I do. I see all the things he’s done for all of us. “Do you understand?” he asks again, his voice cotton-soft and small.
“Sometimes,” I say.
“I try to protect you. To make sure you have the best life.”
I nod, and I understand and don’t understand in the same uncomfortable moment. He watches me.
“I’m going to walk ahead,” he says at last. “We both need time to think. I can see that. But Rose, remember all the good things in our life. Look around at all this magic, all this wonder, then tell me if you think it’s fake. If I should have done everything differently. This is the world I helped build for us. For you. Think about that.” I want to agree with everything he’s saying because he looks so gentle and sad and Dad-like saying it. So I nod. And nod. And hug him. Because he looks like he needs a hug and he’s my dad and I need a hug too.
But when he’s walked ahead, I am mad again. And sad. And scared.
I look at the things he wants me to look at. There is so much beauty: heart-shaped trees and leaves that look like stars, flowers that are taller than me and trees that are tinier. Plants that sing and hum and feel like velvet and silk and clouds. Pink steam rises out of one blossom; a minuscule waterfall slides from the slope of another. He’s right. I’m lucky to grow up here, in all of this. I’m lucky he helped make this place.
But if I’m so lucky, why am I also hurting? If this is all so right, why does it also feel kind of wrong?
I lean against a tree. I choose one of the large ones, built by our magical ancestors from ancient jars of magic. The bark is tough and scratches my skin. It’s the kind of tree that has always been here and will always be here. It’s the kind of tree I can trust and depend on and believe in.
Except, in a flash it isn’t. With my full weight against it, in an instant so fast even my father couldn’t possibly capture it in a jar, the whole tree vanishes. Poof, like it was never there at all. I topple to the ground and look around like maybe the tree is hiding, somehow, but of course it isn’t. It’s gone. The way all magic is eventually gone, the promise that none of it is forever, even if some of it is for a very, very long time.
Even the things that are the most certain, the most stable, can be gone in a flash, like they were never really there at all. My back and elbows and wrists hurt as I lie here, in the place where the tree used to be, in the place where magic once was but finally, at last, and with no warning at all, where magic finally wore itself out.
Thirty-Three
A Story About Fishing That I Guess Was Actually a Story About Something Else Entirely
Before I learned to catch fireflies I learned how to catch butterflies. And before butterflies, I learned how to catch frogs. And before frogs, it was fish.
There’s a pond on the edge of Belling Bright, and that’s where Dad took me to learn.
“It takes patience,” he said. “You could use some patience. Patience will serve you well, Little Luck.”
“But don’t we have to be quick, when we’re capturing magic?” I asked.
“We sure do.”
“But also be patient?”
“We have to be a lot of things at once,” Dad said. He smiled. He liked the challenge. He liked that not everyone could be both patient and quick. And I liked that too. Ginger’s family would probably just let her be whoever she was. My dad wanted me to be more than that. I had to be things that made no sense together. Impossible things.
I wanted to be impossible. Impossibly lucky and impossibly special and impossibly magical. Like my father.
So I sat with Dad on the edge of the pond, my feet in the water, my shoulders burning in the sun, and I tried to be patient. For Dad, patient meant quiet. Quiet was hard for me. It made my throat hurt and my ears ring and it made my insides buzz with everything that was going unsaid.
Dad liked things going unsaid.
He splish-splashed his feet in the water every so often and hummed half tunes, but mostly stayed in silence. My mind was busy. I was wondering how long we would have to stay and how many fish were in the water, and what colors and shapes and sizes they were. I was thinking about Lyle back home and the sad face he’d made when he heard Dad was taking me, and only me, fishing. I was thinking about Mom looking worried, asking Dad if he was okay, reminding him to not get too upset with how the fishing went. That upset him, and his lips pursed in a funny, awful way. I was thinking about Evan Dell and the joke he made to me about how geography and geometry were kind of the same thing because they were both about the shapes of things. I thought about how I had laughed and accidentally snorted and tried to pretend it was a cough, but I was pretty sure he knew it was a snort. And Evan Dell said it wasn’t a joke, it was a deep observation, and I felt like I’d messed everything up.
I was trying to think about fish.
It didn’t go well. I hoped he didn’t notice how not-well it was going.
“Oh!” Dad said, breaking the silence, interrupting his waiting and my not-waiting, and I looked to the water, assuming I would see a fish flapping its tail or the fishing rod bending from its weight. But the water was still and the line was steady and there wasn’t so much as a tadpole swimming by.
I looked at Dad, to see where he was looking, and it wasn’t at the water. He was looking across the water.
The pond was a small one. You could talk to someone on the other side without even raising your voice. So it wasn’t hard to see the person Dad was looking at, the only other person at the pond. Dad had said the pond was a secret, so I’d thought it was a secret no one else knew existed.
“Someone’s at our pond,” I whispered. Even with a whisper, it was possible the person on the other side could hear me. But I didn’t care.
“Don’t get like that, Rose,” Dad said, but I didn’t think I was getting like anything. Sometimes it was hard to know what Dad’s rules were and what I was allowed to say and do. It’s not easy, following rules that no one’s actually told you.
Calling the pond ours seemed safe, since it was something I’d heard from Dad’s own mouth. But I guess it wasn’t safe, because Dad’s hand grabbed my arm, near the elbow, and squeezed. Sometimes Dad squeezed there a little harder than he needed to. Sometimes I could still feel the squeeze an hour later, or three. Sometimes the beginnings of tears appeared in the corners of my eyes and I had to wipe them away be
cause it was silly and weak and not very Anders-like to cry because of an elbow squeeze.
Still, my eyes filled and I had to blink extra hard to get rid of the evidence. I knew how to do it because I had seen Mom do it. Blink, blink, blink, blink, breathe. Smile. Then, if needed, smile bigger.
Other rules no one told me but I needed to know about, I guess.
“We should go home,” Dad said. We’d barely been at the pond two hours, and I’d thought fishing would be an all-day thing, sunup to sundown.
“We didn’t catch anything,” I said, even though the bruise by my elbow told me to shut up.
“We’ll come back another day,” Dad said.
“Wendell!” the man across the pond called. His voice was full and sweet, like Dad’s but lighter. The kind of voice that sounds like a warm place you want to go in the winter, a voice that has been warmed up by a fire and a mug of cocoa.
Dad didn’t respond. He was busy packing up worms and hooks and sandwiches.
“Wendell! It’s me!” the man called.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Wendell, I know you can hear me. It’s time we talked. It’s time I met your kids and you met mine and we put this all—”
Dad didn’t turn around. His back was to the man. I watched for his shoulders to wince or his head to turn or even for his foot to tap or his hands to lose their grip on the rod. But he moved as if there was no voice calling his name, as if the pond were an ocean and he wouldn’t be able to hear a person across the water.
“Rose,” the voice said, and I startled, hearing my own name. “I’m your—”
“That’s enough,” Dad bellowed, and he marched away, and I had no choice but to follow him. The way he stomped, the loudness of his words, made that clear.
Still, I let myself take one last look across the pond. The man was tall and skinny. He had a stubbly chin and blue eyes and a straight nose that looked like my father’s. I let myself wave. I didn’t really know why I was doing it, except that he’d said my name like he’d been wanting to say it his whole life.
One Jar of Magic Page 15
