I reach for Lyle’s hand, because I don’t know what exactly I heard except I am absolutely positive about what I heard.
Then there’s Mom’s voice floating up and up and up, quieter than it’s been, maybe quieter than it’s ever been, but I’m straining so hard to hear anything but that awful sound that I can actually hear it.
“It’s okay,” she says, but it can’t possibly be. “It’s okay. I’m okay. It barely— You barely— It’s okay.”
Forty-One
Maybe it is five minutes. Or it might be five hours. Seconds. Maybe time stops existing after that sound, and what we know it means and what it has probably always meant.
They don’t speak, but they leave. Mom first, her feet tiptoeing, and I know she’s hoping we didn’t hear and I know she also must understand that we did. Still, she doesn’t look at the top of the staircase on her way out the door. That way, she can pretend we weren’t there at all.
I can’t see her whole face on the way out. Just her hand pressed against her cheek, like it can stop the hurt.
It cannot. I’m sure of that.
Dad leaves next, right after Mom, and I swear I can hear his heart beating from up here, but maybe that’s Lyle’s heart, or mine, even. I don’t know where they’re going, except that I know I want to escape the house too. If we stay here, the things that happened are real.
We wait awhile. We don’t speak except through the beat of Lyle’s heart and the way my fingers tap on my thighs. Maybe if we don’t move, everything will be okay. Maybe if we stay just like this, we’ll be safe.
I wonder if we realize in the same moment that we were never safe. That magic never fixed anything. Because Lyle shifts his legs, turns his head my way at last.
“You’re right,” he says. He has to say it again, because his voice in the air after what we’ve heard doesn’t make sense at first. I’ve forgotten words and language and everything except for how badly I want things to not be what they are.
“About what?” I ask.
“Magic,” he says.
“I don’t even know what I think about magic,” I say. “There’s nothing for me to be right about.” Lyle shakes his head, though.
“Everyone thinks he’s so magical and so special,” Lyle says. It takes a great effort to say it. “And we have all these jars. And I thought the jars were hope. Like some promise that everything would always be great. That we could make things beautiful.”
I know what he means. The jars crowding all the shelves, all the jars in the closets and on the windowsills and the very best ones on the mantel—they were all there to tell us that things would be wonderful, that we were wonderful, that our life was beautiful, that we were special, that whatever we wanted would be ours.
But here we are, with more magic than the rest of Belling Bright combined, and still the world is scary and our home is sad and we are hiding the things we don’t want people to know about us. We are wanting things to be different than they are, but there’s no magic that can do that. Not really.
“I don’t want to stare at a jar of magic thinking it can make everything great anymore,” Lyle says.
“Me neither.” I don’t know quite what it means to be saying this. Magic glints at us from every direction, every corner of our home. It floats in the jars, glows and sparkles and shimmers and stays. We are outnumbered by it. We are drowning in it.
And it didn’t fix a single thing.
But maybe getting rid of it could fix something.
“I’m done with it,” Lyle says, and he doesn’t sound sure, but he sounds like he wants to be sure. “I’m done with magic.”
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
“Yes.” He is more certain of this. It is a fact that has always been true.
“Then I know what to do.”
I get up off the steps. My legs aren’t so steady, so Lyle has to help me. We hang on to each other for a second to get our balance. It comes. The steadiness. And with that we walk down the stairs, and I take the first jar off the mantel. It is pink. It glows. Maybe it is for love or wellness or the pink hair that Ginger and Maddy and Layla got for themselves.
I don’t know.
I’ll never know.
And I don’t have time to think about it. We have a lot to do.
Forty-Two
Zelda arrives with three suitcases, four backpacks, and her dad, who waits outside in his car. She is wearing a flower crown, and I want to be wearing one too; it feels like I need one, for this moment.
“You came,” I say.
“You asked me to,” she says.
“But you’re mad at me.”
Zelda shakes her head. She looks at the jars of magic we’ve taken off the shelves, extracted from the closets. They’re on the ground, lined up the way Mom brings in bags of groceries that need to be put away. They look different here, like this. Casual. Unimportant.
“I told you before. Family is forever. I can be mad at you and still want to help you,” Zelda says. She’s saying it all casual and unimportant too, but it feels huge to me. A sentence I’d never considered before.
“You can?” I ask.
“Mad isn’t a forever thing. It’s not even the most powerful thing. It’s just a thing you feel sometimes, before you feel something else.” Zelda adjusts the crown on her head. She shrugs.
I have a hundred questions about how it’s possible to think of anger as just one more thing a person might feel, instead of the thing you should be most afraid of in the whole wide world. It doesn’t feel true, but in the same breath, it also feels very true. Looking at not-angry Zelda makes it seem like it could be true.
It didn’t last forever, her being mad at me. And it didn’t make anything awful happen. It didn’t make the world collapse. It didn’t make Lyle and me hide out on the roof. It didn’t make my mother cry.
“I don’t know you very well,” I say.
“Same,” Zelda says.
“I don’t know anyone but my dad super well sometimes,” I say, which is closer to what I wanted to say. What I want to say is that Wendell Anders is so big in so many ways that it’s hard to remember other people do things differently, have lived different lives, feel different things. Wendell Anders is so big he makes you believe in the exact way he sees the world.
He is so big, I still don’t know exactly who I am, so I can’t possibly know quite who Zelda is, but I’d like to. I’d really like to.
“It’s easier without magic,” Zelda says. And maybe she means getting to know people is easier without magic, but maybe she means everything is easier without it.
Maybe, in spite of everything, things will be easier without these jars.
I put one in Zelda’s suitcase. Then three more. Six. A dozen. The suitcases fill up fast with the three of us working. Our backpacks fill up too. Our pockets are stuffed with small jars. We find tote bags and grocery bags and Mom’s old purses.
We don’t know when our parents are returning, so we move quickly and soundlessly. There will be more time to talk about what a magic-less life looks like, more days to wonder about anger and how it hangs on different people, and whether it’s something to even be scared of.
Someday, we can all talk about Wendell Anders and whether he was ever the person he said he was and what magic means and why he got so much and why I captured almost nothing at all.
Sometime, maybe a long time from now, or maybe in a day or two, which feels like a pretty long time from now anyway, we will figure out whether it was ever true, that you get the magic you deserve, the magic you are worthy of.
But not now.
Right now, we have to decide what to do with hundreds of jars of magic that maybe don’t mean what we thought they did.
“We can just open them up,” Zelda says. “Bring them to my house and release them all.”
“Into the air?” Lyle asks. He is aghast. I am too, but I try not to show it so that I don’t hurt Zelda’s feelings.
“I guess,” Zelda says. She
sounds less sure, though. She’s remembering how very little she knows about magic and what it can do. “It doesn’t last forever, right? Magic?”
“Not forever, but it can last a long time, decades. Centuries,” I say. “And opening those jars could cause—” I start, but I actually have no idea how the sentence ends. No one has ever opened up dozens of jars of magic at once, with no plan or thoughts on what they want the magic to be used for. “Well, I don’t know what it would cause, but it would be bad,” I finish.
Zelda nods.
“The lake,” Lyle says.
“What lake?” I ask, because he can’t possibly be saying what I think he’s saying.
“TooBlue Lake,” he says, and it almost makes me laugh. “That’s where the magic’s from. So that’s where it should go back to.”
“We can’t get there,” I say.
“We’re not allowed to go there,” Zelda says.
“We’re not allowed to steal Dad’s magic either,” Lyle says. “But here we are.”
“Here we are,” I say. “Zelda? Do you think your dad would drive us there? He wants to get rid of the magic, right?”
“I don’t know if he wants to get rid of it exactly. . . .” Zelda says. “He wants—I don’t know. He wants it not to matter. Or not to matter so much. Especially—well, especially to you, Rose.”
“To me?” I hadn’t thought Zelda’s dad ever thought about me. I thought he wanted to stay far away from me and my magical family.
“That’s all he’s ever wanted,” Zelda says. “For it to not matter if you’re meant for magic or not. For you to be Rose, without all the worrying about jars. . . . For your father to—well, I guess for your dad to stop caring about being the magical Anders family and to just be, you know, a family.”
“We’re a family,” Lyle says, but he doesn’t say it with a lot of force. He doesn’t say it like he believes it.
“Sometimes,” I say, and I’m thinking of eating dinner outside in the summer, and celebrating Lyle’s birthday at the movies. Going on a hike in the woods behind our house. Having a sleepover in the living room when our bedrooms were getting painted and Mom was scared of the fumes and Dad said we should have just used magic and Mom said we couldn’t use magic for everything, and Dad nodded just the littlest bit, and maybe he didn’t totally agree but he didn’t disagree and that was something, it was something, it was a small moment of being just a family. And in that small moment I remember wishing our nights were always that cozy and sweet and unmagical.
It was a long time ago. Maybe it was always. Maybe there has always been a big part of me wishing for less magic, not more.
And maybe that’s why I’m Not Meant for Magic. Because I don’t believe in it. Not really. Not the way Dad does.
“Are we really doing this?” I ask. We could put the jars back. Pretend Zelda was never here, put our backpacks and suitcases and bags back where they came from, stop thinking of ways to change the world we’ve always lived in.
But if we drive these jars of magic to TooBlue Lake, that’s it: the world will never be the same, our family will never be the same, Belling Bright will never be the same.
I wouldn’t mind everything changing, because for me everything already has changed. But for Lyle—he can’t want that. He could still live a totally normal life with a totally normal amount of magic. He has all the same friends he had before New Year’s Day, and he could keep going to their houses, playing their video games, coming up with ways to use their dwindling jars of magic until the next New Year’s.
Except our dad would stay the way he’s always been. The way we’ve tried to pretend away, or ignore away, or just stay very quiet and still about. Nothing changes, unless everything changes. Wendell Anders is a big force. Magic is a big force. So we have to do something even bigger to make it different.
“I’m sure,” Lyle says, in spite of everything. “Maybe I’m Not Meant for Magic either.”
“But you’ve always caught magic,” I say.
“Maybe magic doesn’t know what’s best. If magic was perfect, if it always went to the right people—I don’t think so much of it would have gone to our dad. And so little to you.” Lyle speaks in a mumble; he doesn’t quite look at me.
I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking—that people have always loved Wendell Anders for his big laugh and his big personality and his big, big magic. But they didn’t really know him. And maybe magic didn’t know him so well either.
“Nothing’s perfect,” Lyle says. “Not even magic.”
“Especially not magic,” Zelda says.
I put the last of the jars under my arms. I give one final look at our house, the one filled with magic that we’ve always known, and I walk right out the door, taking all that magic with me.
Forty-Three
“Wait,” Lyle says, before we take the last of the bags outside and into Zelda’s dad’s car. “Are we sure?”
“About what?” I ask. We are so far in, it feels way too late to be unsure about something, even if there’s a nervous ache in my stomach and a whole unknown world opening up in front of us to feel unsure about.
“Maybe we shouldn’t get rid of everything,” he says.
“Isn’t that the whole point?” I ask. My voice is rising, as if I’m angry, but all I really am is scared. I need Lyle to be certain, because if he’s not, then I have to be, and I can’t be.
“One jar is okay,” Zelda says. Her voice is quiet in a way it’s never been, and her eyes are wide and kind and telling me I can take a breath. So I do. I take a breath. And another.
“One jar?” I ask.
“Keep one jar. One jar to never use.” Zelda smiles, and I can’t remember when I smiled last, and it’s weird, how you can get so used to being sad that being happy seems absurd, that even smiling seems like a little too much.
It’s funny, how something hard can start to feel normal. How sadness can start to feel like okay-ness, how fear can feel like skin, a thing that you can’t be separated from. It’s funny, how easily the way things are can feel like the way things have to be.
“Why would we—” I start to ask at the same time as Lyle starts to sort through his bags, looking for something special. He likes the idea. I don’t think I understand it.
“My dad has one,” Zelda says. Another secret revealed. I hope it’s the last one, but something tells me it’s not, that the world is filled with secrets, and they will pop up from time to time and shake us up, and we won’t have magic to set things right again.
“Your dad has a jar of magic?” I ask. “He’s not meant for it, though.”
“I just found out,” Zelda says. “Just now. He showed it to me. It’s pink. The jar is old. The top’s on really tight. It’s been in our house this whole time. Up in the attic. In a box with my old toys.”
“But why?” I ask. The whole point of magic is to use it. The whole point of jars is to count them up and have the most.
“He liked it,” Zelda says with a shrug. “He said having a jar that you never use is beautiful. It’s like trusting yourself and the world to have enough magic for you without the kind of magic you find at TooBlue Lake. He says every day he doesn’t open that jar, even the hard days, is one more day that he believes in himself, one more day that he thinks he is enough.”
There’s a long silence.
Maybe Lyle is having a long rush of memories, just like me. Times that we’ve been sad and Dad’s promised us we’ll be able to fix it with magic. Times we’ve felt small or not smart or not pretty or not cool or, sometimes, sometimes, not loved. Not safe. And that we were promised we could change all of that with a jar of magic. The whole town, the whole world, was given that promise. That if there’s some way you want to be better, some way you want the world to be better, you can have that, if you capture enough magic. If your magic is strong enough to last a good long while.
And all this time, Zelda’s father has decided to not change things with magic. He’s had it right
there, and instead he’s decided that he’s enough. That their home at the edge of Belling Bright is enough. That his family is enough.
I thought being Not Meant for Magic meant you weren’t good enough for it. But maybe it means you choose to believe in something else, something bigger and better than magic. Maybe I only caught one jar of magic because my heart knew a hundred jars don’t solve anything.
A hundred jars cause more problems than they solve.
Problems Lyle and Mom and I try so hard not to talk about.
Problems I was never very good at ignoring.
I look at Zelda. She’s always been enough. Just like this. Just the way she is right this second, with tangled hair and knobby knees and some dirt under her fingernails and not doing anything very special, not doing anything worth mentioning, just standing here trying to help us. And I don’t know, maybe that’s the exceptional thing.
Or maybe there’s no need to be exceptional when you can just be.
“We all keep one jar,” I say, nodding. Lyle’s already ahead of me; he’s picked a good one. It’s dark and shimmers a little like the night sky, and the magic inside moves like there’s a tiny breeze behind the glass. I know the story of it—he caught it in the dark of night; he had a feeling there was magic in a certain patch of nighttime air and he swung his jar at it and closed it tight and he caught a kind of magic that isn’t so easy to catch.
We pick out one of Dad’s and one of Mom’s—something that looks like rain for Dad, since he loves stormy magic, something that looks like sunlight for Mom, since it seems like that’s something she’d like to look at. And then it’s time for me to choose my jar, except I don’t have an array of jars to choose from. I just have my one jar. It doesn’t shimmer and shine or remind me of a wonderful moment. In fact, a few days ago, I would have liked to get rid of it entirely, for reminding me of all the ways I don’t measure up, all the things I don’t have that everyone else has.
One Jar of Magic Page 18
