One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  Dad shakes his head like the question doesn’t matter, but I know that it does. “You had it so much better than me,” he says. And I know he thinks that is true. But for the first time in my whole life, what my dad thinks is true isn’t the same as the truth.

  I move my wrist in circles. All this rain is making it ache, like always. Dad turns away from me.

  “You took my magic away from me,” Dad whispers to Uncle Bennett.

  “It’s different than when Dad took your magic away from you,” Uncle Bennett says. “He did that to be cruel. We did this to save you. To save your kids. To start to right all the things that are wrong.”

  “He never wanted me to have anything good, and neither do you,” Dad says. “All those years, I protected you from him. He’d get mad and I’d step right in. And he’d take every jar of my magic for himself, wasting it all. I got punished for protecting you, and here you are, doing it to me again. You never appreciated—”

  “Of course I appreciated—” Uncle Bennett starts.

  “This is appreciation? This? This is what you do?”

  “You thought the solution was more magic. I thought the solution was less.” My uncle tries to put an arm around my father. There’s so much about my father’s childhood that I’ll never know. But I see that my father had been brave and that he had also been angry and sad and kind and mean and jealous and alone.

  I know about all of those things. I know how you can be all of them at once. I want him to lean against Uncle Bennett now, and be the kind and good part of himself.

  But instead Dad’s hands fly into the air and he propels himself toward my uncle, who isn’t meant for magic, and isn’t meant for this either, for my father’s rages, for my father’s anger. My uncle wasn’t meant for any of this, shouldn’t have been involved, shouldn’t have helped us, should have been allowed to stay in his home with his family forgetting all about us.

  It’s my fault.

  I’m the one who deserves it. So I leap in between my uncle and my father and let my body take the impact, which is powerful, which hurts, which is my father’s hands shoving me, hard, so hard I fall onto the ground, so hard I lose my breath, so hard the evidence of this exact moment right now will be visible on my shoulder blades and where Dad’s elbow hit my chin and in the bones of my wrist, which crack when they hit the ground, trying to catch me, trying to keep me upright, but fumbling and giving in under the weight of me and him and this.

  Forty-Eight

  The doctor looks sad as he holds the x-rays up to the light. Dad wanted to take me alone, but no one would let him. Uncle Bennett, Lyle, and Zelda are all huddled in the room with us. Mom is on her way. Dad keeps saying she didn’t want to get involved with all the worrying about jars of magic and who took them where, that she doesn’t understand what’s at stake, that she doesn’t really understand magic like the rest of us.

  But I think Mom understands magic pretty well. I remember her disappointed look when Dad did the UnTired magic, the way she was always wary of using it for anything that mattered. How she’d sprinkle it onto burnt cookies and make them un-burnt and say that’s about all magic is good for. We always thought that meant she was silly and small.

  I don’t know why we never listened to her. I guess the reason is simple, though. Because that’s what Dad told us.

  I want her here now. I want her non-magically-minded self looking at my wrist and asking the doctor questions and smoothing out my hair and telling me it’s okay to cry.

  “You keep hurting this wrist, huh?” the doctor says to me in a small voice. He doesn’t look at my father. My father doesn’t look at me.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “This wrist,” the doctor says. “I can see on the x-ray that—”

  “She’s fine,” Dad interrupts. “She’s never hurt anything. She’s a healthy Anders girl.”

  “Wendell,” Uncle Bennett says. He stands up. He is the same height as my father, but I see him trying to pull himself up higher, taller, bigger in this moment.

  “Look at her. She’s fine. You ever hurt your wrist before, Rose?” Dad asks. His voice is gruff and he’s talking too fast, and I can see his jaw clench.

  I roll my wrist around in a circle again. Like I always do when it gives me a phantom pain, except this time the pain is urgent and strong and I know where it came from. That other ghostly pain has always been strange and unexplained and brushed off.

  But there. It has always been there.

  “I don’t remember anything happening, but it hurts when it rains. And other times. It sort of aches, sometimes.”

  “That happens after a break,” the doctor says.

  “But I never broke it,” I say.

  The doctor points to a place on the x-ray. It’s not something I’d ever notice. It’s a tiny strip of blank space where bone should be, a nothing of a mark, except it’s everything. It’s an answer. “Right here,” he says. “Didn’t heal great the last time it broke.”

  Dad shakes his head and paces the room.

  Uncle Bennett leans in to get a better look at the mark. And Lyle hangs his head.

  Zelda’s the only one who will really look at me. And she does. She looks at me and asks with her eyes if I’m okay, and I answer with my eyes and a quiver of my chin that I am not, and she slides next to me. “We’re here,” she says. “We know.”

  I don’t know Zelda very well. It will take a long time for me to know her the way I know Ginger. But I trust her anyway. Maybe because of her flower crown or the way her eyes never dart away when she speaks. Maybe because she’s my cousin. Or maybe because she’s Not Meant for Magic and neither am I and neither is anyone else, but she understood that before the rest of us.

  The doctor doesn’t say any more about the wrist to me, but he asks my father to stay, and when my mother arrives—teary and hugging me so tight I almost can’t breathe—he tells her to stay, too.

  He wraps my wrist gently and hums a tune I can’t quite catch while he does it.

  Uncle Bennett doesn’t leave my side. He doesn’t touch me, but he makes sure I know he is there. He’s like a tall tree, steady and there if you ever need something to lean against.

  “Do you ever use magic to do this?” I ask the doctor. He has to do so much squinting and inspecting and snipping, I assume it would be easier to do with a jar of magic. And I can see jars lined up on his desk, ready to be used.

  “Never,” he says.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier?”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “So why don’t you?” I ask. Dad’s shifting in the corner of the room. He’s used magic a hundred times when we could have gone to the doctor instead. We go for checkups, but never if we’re sick or hurting. Not until today, and today we’re only here because Uncle Bennett insisted.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” the doctor says. “Magic can only fix the surface of things. Magic can change what you see, but it can’t change anything deep down. And you never know how long it will last. We’re more powerful than magic. That’s the truth.”

  My dad clears his throat. Zelda begins to smile. I wonder why Dad never told me that. For all the years he spent telling me what magic is and why it matters and what to do with it, he never mentioned that maybe I could do even more without it.

  He told me I was lucky thousands of times.

  But he never once told me I was powerful all on my own.

  Forty-Nine

  “Again?” Ginger says at school two days later.

  Our desks are still next to each other, so Ginger is close enough to touch my cast, which she does, quickly, and then retreats.

  “What do you mean, ‘again’?” I ask. People are watching us, but I don’t care anymore.

  “Oh,” Ginger says. She blushes like she doesn’t want to say, so she says it to her desk instead of me. “There was that time your broke your—your wrist got broken before. And your dad fixed it with magic.”

  “You remember that?” I ask
.

  “You don’t?” Ginger replies. She looks a little sad, like it’s a memory I need, and I try to find it. If I used my one jar of magic, maybe it would be for this—remembering whatever it is that Ginger remembers. But I don’t want to use magic, and I don’t have to. Ginger is here. And maybe we aren’t exactly what we were before, but I don’t need that. I need to know the things she knows about the way things used to be.

  “When was it?” I ask. I think about that nothing-mark on my x-ray, how sure the doctor was that I’d broken my wrist before, and what he said, about magic not really fixing anything below the surface.

  “Years ago,” Ginger says. “Maybe four years ago? We were, I don’t know, seven or eight. You were tiny. You were into wearing a lot of purple.”

  “I still wear purple,” I say.

  “I know, but like a lot,” Ginger says, and we both laugh a little because it’s almost sort of an inside joke, and maybe my friendship with Ginger will be okay and we’ll have things we used to have—inside jokes and knowing things about each other that other people don’t, and whispering in a room full of people who are trying to listen.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe we’ll have something else entirely.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Ginger says.

  “You can tell me,” I say.

  “I can’t, I really don’t know. We were playing. We knocked over some jars of magic. Your dad came in—”

  “Knocked over?” I ask. The memory is on the edge of my brain, but it isn’t quite mine yet. It sounds familiar, like a story someone told me once but not in a great long while.

  “By accident. We were playing and crashed into a table with jars on it. We lost some magic. It flew out. Nothing much happened. Some ivy grew on the ceiling. Lyle couldn’t stop laughing for like two hours because of some sort of laughter magic. It was green and sparkly and jumpy. It was small magic. But your dad was mad.”

  “How mad?” I ask, but I know.

  “Mad, Rose,” Ginger says. “I hid my eyes. And I opened them again when I heard a snap and you were on the floor and your dad was above you and breathing sort of heavy and you were crying, but Lyle was still laughing from the magic and your dad went and got that cloud magic really fast and it fixed everything. Or not everything, I guess, but it fixed your wrist. He said not to worry about it and not to worry your mom with it because she would only get upset about it.”

  “Cloud magic?” I ask. I wonder how many things Ginger remembers that I don’t. Then I wonder how many things I remember that Ginger doesn’t. And how many things we both do, but in wildly different ways. That friendship can exist somehow, in all those different rememberings, is kind of amazing, when I think about it. I lean closer to Ginger. Maybe someday we’ll remember this time, when we were twelve and everything changed, and we’ll have to tell each other different parts of the story, and the truth will be somewhere in the middle of all the different ways we remember it.

  “It was this tiny jar,” Ginger says. “We loved it, remember? A tiny jar with the world’s smallest, fluffiest cloud inside. Like, a perfect cloud. Not a rainy stormy cloud. A floaty one. But smaller than your fingernail. In that little jar. We’d always ask your dad what kind of magic it was.”

  It’s the cloud I remember, at last. The way it floated in the jar. The perfect symmetry of it.

  When Dad opened the jar, he held it right up to my wrist. The cloud felt exactly like I thought it would—soft and transparent, a whisper of a feeling. And like that, my wrist was fine. There was the pain—I am now remembering the pain, but only because it’s the same pain that I felt at TooBlue Lake—and then the sudden vanishing of it.

  Magic.

  “We didn’t have any magic this time,” I say, lifting my arm a little to remind her of the cast on it. Not that she’d forgotten.

  “Your dad has more magic than anyone,” Ginger says.

  “Not anymore,” I say, and I tell her what we did.

  And I tell her what I’ve been thinking. What the doctor said. The thought that won’t leave my brain or heart alone.

  “I want everyone to put their magic in the lake,” I say. “I don’t think anyone should have any. I don’t think I believe in it. And maybe I never did.”

  A few weeks ago, maybe Ginger would have told everyone in class what I’ve said and made sure they all knew how weird and wrong I am. And maybe if Maddy heard me now, that’s what she’d do. But Ginger just keeps looking at my wrist. She’s thinking. And remembering, I guess. And maybe she’s really hearing me.

  Fifty

  A Story I Had Forgotten About Ginger and Her Family That Is Also About Me and My Family

  When Ginger’s dad was sick, my dad offered to help with all these jars of magic. Ten of them, maybe. I helped carry them.

  “We’re going to fix him,” I told Ginger. She was quiet. She was quiet all the time when he was sick, and it made me louder, because I wanted to fill up all the space her being quiet left. I wanted her to feel like nothing was changing, so I talked and talked and talked. “My dad can fix anything,” I said. And Ginger was still quiet.

  Dad went upstairs to see Ginger’s father. He was up there awhile. Once, the house shook. Once, we heard what sounded like a symphony playing something really beautiful. Once the sky turned orange for a bit, then it turned back to blue.

  I kept talking to Ginger. About a TV show I was watching and about Lyle’s annoying singing voice and about what I wanted to do over summer break. And about magic. Ginger nodded sometimes, but she didn’t say a word. We put on a movie she loved and she curled into the couch like it might swallow her up, and the day turned to night, and when Dad came downstairs his face was drawn and he looked tired and his jars were empty.

  “Is he okay?” Ginger said, her first words all day, and maybe they were the only words her brain could think or her mouth could form those days.

  “I think we did it,” Dad said. “Magic knows the way. Magic knows what’s best. Magic will do what it’s supposed to do.” He kept nodding and I gave him this huge hug because he was saving Ginger’s dad and that meant he was saving Ginger, too, and I was so, so proud that he was my father and so, so hopeful that I would be as magical as him, someday.

  Ginger looked worried. She ran upstairs. Her mother mumbled a thank you, but it wasn’t a very big one, and Dad and I sort of snuck out without anyone really saying goodbye.

  Halfway home, Dad sighed. “They don’t understand,” he said. “They don’t listen, that family. They don’t take magic seriously. That’s the problem. Magic is serious. It’s everything.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t really want to ask, either. Sometimes, asking only made things worse. So when I could help it, I tried not to ask too much.

  But it sounded, a little bit, like Dad thought it was Ginger’s family’s fault that her dad was sick. And it sounded, sort of, like magic wasn’t going to fix him after all.

  Ginger’s dad was gone within a day.

  “I tried,” my father said on our way to the funeral.

  “Of course you did,” Mom said, next to him in the front seat, wiping away tears by the second.

  “If there was just more magic—” Dad said.

  “Let’s not talk about magic today,” Mom said. The tears were coming faster. She was having trouble keeping up with them. “Not everything’s about magic. I’m getting sick and tired of magic, frankly.”

  Dad stopped the car. “Fine,” he said. “You get yourself there, then.”

  Lyle and I froze in the backseat. When Dad got mad, it usually took more time than that. There was usually a path from normal to not-normal that we could trace and know how to fix and do better next time.

  “Wendell,” Mom said. “Please. This isn’t about you.”

  “Get out of the car,” Dad said. His voice was the bad kind of calm.

  “It’s important we’re all there,” Mom said.

  “I said get o
ut,” Dad said. “I won’t say it again.”

  And so we did. Because once Dad has decided something, his mind doesn’t change.

  Mom got out first and Lyle and I followed and Mom was quiet, just like Ginger had been.

  This time, though, I didn’t try to fill up all that silent space with anything. I was pretty sure there was nothing that would work, anyway.

  Not even magic.

  Especially not magic.

  Fifty-One

  At the end of the school day, Ginger finds me.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  “Go where?” I ask. Maybe a few months ago, when we were still best friends, I wouldn’t have had to ask what she meant. I would have just known. But I don’t know this Ginger in front of me, with her pink hair and perfect clothes and twenty jars of magic.

  “To the lake,” she says. “I told my mom. She says she’ll drive us. So all that’s left is you saying you’ll go with us.”

  “TooBlue Lake?” I ask, as if there’s some other lake we might go to.

  “Obviously. I’m ready. I want to get rid of my magic too.” She beams. Her fingers tremble a little, like the excitement has to shiver out of her body.

  “But you love magic,” I say.

  “What makes you think that?” Ginger looks actually confused, which makes no sense, because all she’s done since New Year’s is make magic happen. And make fun of me for not having any magic. And choose to only be friends with people who do have magic.

  “I mean—everything that’s happened makes me think that,” I say.

  “Well, everything that’s happened would have made me think you love magic, too,” she says. She raises her eyebrows. I can’t argue with her. Not after a lifetime of being Little Luck. “But I guess maybe you never had a chance to think something different.”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ve had time to think too,” she says. “And every time I think magic is going to fix stuff it’s just made things worse.”

  I could ask her what she means. But she grabs her dad’s ring around her neck and she looks extra long at me, and I don’t have to ask, because I already know. We’ve been waiting our whole lives to be twelve, so that we could finally have magic and finally make everything be the way we wanted it to be.