27 Magic Words

by Sharelle Byars Moranville

  The woman laughed. “That’s most of the point.”

  “But don’t they get wet when it rains?” Brook asked. “And what about bird poop?”

  “Brook, it’s art,” Grandmamma said in a voice icy enough to fog the windows.

  Sally Hancock said, “It’s an installation. My mother is a sculptor.”

  “Our mother is a writer,” Kobi said. “And our dad is a magician.”

  Uncle Wim’s head swiveled and he looked at her as if she had begun barking.

  “How is Patricia?” Grandmamma asked Sally Hancock.

  “Mom’s fine,” she said.

  They talked a little longer and then Uncle Wim drove on. On a narrow, shady street, they passed a brick church. The bells in the tower, which Uncle Wim called a carillon, pealed out a song.

  “How do you spell that?” Kobi asked.

  “C-a-r-i-l-l-o-n.”

  As she thought, she realized it was one of the magic words she hadn’t yet found the use of.

  “Why did you ask?”

  “I just wondered.”

  Soon Uncle Wim turned into a gravel alley and stopped.

  When Kobi got out of the car, the breeze dried her sweaty legs and she felt more hopeful. Inside would be icy lemonade, a cool bath, clean pj’s, and a comfy bed.

  Uncle Wim’s house was white with fancy cutouts around the front porch. The second story disappeared into the trees. The back porch sagged and the sidewalk was uneven.

  “Wim, why do you live in a place like this—”

  Uncle Wim’s hand went up as if he were stopping traffic.

  Grandmamma sighed.

  Uncle Wim unlocked the door to the back porch and held it open for them.

  As Kobi stepped into the dim, hot kitchen, she felt a long way from home.

  In the dining room, a chandelier furry with dust hung from a high ceiling. Kobi waited for Grandmamma to ask where they would eat, because there was no table. No sideboard. No petit point dining room chairs.

  Grandmamma shook her head. “If you would buy some nice antiques, Wim . . .”

  “Ah. Furniture.” Uncle Wim opened his mouth again as if to say something about furniture. Then closed it.

  In the living room, newspapers, a pizza box, crumpled socks, and a T-shirt were scattered around a brown recliner. The room looked like the nest of some large animal that pawed and snorted in its sleep. A huge black couch with saggy cushions crouched in the opposite corner.

  Kobi glanced at Grandmamma for assurance that she wouldn’t abandon them here.

  “The last people left the couch,” Uncle Wim explained. “I guess they couldn’t get it out.”

  “Then how did they get it in?” Brook asked.

  Uncle Wim fixed her with a look.

  Grandmamma wouldn’t leave them here, would she? Yet Kobi had learned that grown-ups sometimes did selfish things. Like set off on long ocean voyages without their children.

  “And this would be the foyer,” Grandmamma said, a line of sweat trickling down her powdered cheek.

  In the foyer, a carved staircase went up to a landing, where a stained-glass window glowed. Then the staircase turned on itself and disappeared into the shadows.

  “Follow me, ladies,” Uncle Wim said, his voice echoing.

  The farther up they went, the hotter Kobi got.

  At the top, Uncle Wim said, “Bet you’ve never seen such a big bathroom.” He opened a door that squealed on its hinges.

  They could stand straight only in the middle of the room. The rest of the ceiling sloped almost to the floor. Uncle Wim switched on a fan, which stirred the air. At the end of the narrow room hung the head of an animal with large, pointy horns.

  Brook screamed.

  “It’s an oryx,” Uncle Wim said. “The eyes light up. The last people left that too.”

  “Let’s see the guest bedroom,” Grandmamma said, worry in her voice.

  Uncle Wim led them down the hall. “There’s a little porch out that door,” he explained, pointing. “And this is the guest room.”

  Sunshine poured through several windows. The white paint of the woodwork shone, and a bay window had a cozy seat. Gold-and-white-striped paper covered the walls. White curtains billowed in the breeze. A squirrel sat on a branch only a few feet away, flicking its tail. It was not at all a bad room.

  “But where’s our bed?” Brook asked. “A bedroom has to have a bed. That’s what the word means.”

  Uncle Wim fixed her with that look again as if he didn’t like smarty children, and then he pointed to boxes against the wall. He glanced at Grandmamma, his face red.

  She gasped, “Still. In. The. Box? Wimbledon!”

  “Well, Mom, it’s not like I had a lot of notice.”

  Kobi said Snapdragon to herself halfheartedly, which was probably why it didn’t work. Snapdragon was a foot-stomping magic word. A command. She used it to conjure the bill in cafés, for example, when Grandmamma was getting impatient and cranky. Of course, it never worked when she tried to use it selfishly, but Brook and Grandmamma wanted a bed too—though perhaps not as much as she.

  FIVE

  KOBI was as hot and sticky as one of Madame Louise’s pound cakes. She stripped off her dress. “Hurry up!” she told Brook. “It’s my turn.”

  Brook stood in the claw-footed tub, stooping to avoid banging her head on the sloping ceiling. “I need a mat. Look around, would you? Maybe there’s one in the closet.” She pointed at the little door under the eaves.

  Kobi peered inside. The closet was empty except for one towel. “There’s nothing in here but one towel, and Grandmamma will need that.”

  Brook dripped indignantly. “We each get one towel?”

  “Use our dirty clothes to drip on.” With her foot, Kobi slid her dress to the side of the tub.

  Brook stepped out, her wet feet leaving marks on the dress.

  Kobi climbed in.

  “Nasty!” Brook cried. “Tell me you—”

  But Kobi slid under. It had taken half an hour to fill the long tub because the water came out in a twisty little trickle the size of her pinky. Kobi would be a melted blob on the bathroom floor before the tub filled again.

  She held her breath underwater as long as she could, listening to pinging and burbling. Finally, she came up for air.

  She relaxed against the tub’s sloping back. It was getting dark outside and the little windows along the floor didn’t let in much light.

  “Maybe we should turn on the oryx,” she said.

  “You know I don’t like light-up eyes.”

  “You don’t like dark places, either.”

  “Fine,” Brook said in a too-tired-to-argue voice. “How do I turn it on?”

  “There’s got to be a switch.”

  Brook climbed onto the sink and felt around. “This is very creepy.”

  Suddenly, the room lit up, making both girls scream. The oryx moved, Kobi was quite sure. It shifted its head and pinned her in its bright gaze. Squelch!

  “Girls?” called Grandmamma. “What’s going on?”

  Squelch. Squelch. Squelch, squelch, squelch.

  Kobi stared at the animal. It looked calmer now. Less vicious. But she didn’t want it watching her with its weird eyes. “Turn it off!”

  “I don’t know how! I don’t even know why it went on.”

  “Then throw my dress over it!”

  Once the oryx was wrapped in Kobi’s white eyelet dress, it made a moonlight glow. And except for the horns, it didn’t look vicious. Kobi’s heart slowed down. She thought it was safe to get out of the tub. Using her big toe, she pulled the plug and let the bathwater run very slowly down the drain.

  Kobi settled into Uncle Wim’s bed with Grandmamma and Brook. Uncle Wim said he would sleep in his recliner. The closet door was open and she saw khakis hanging on a rod. Between two windows stood a tall metal bookshelf crammed with books and stacks of folders. There was a framed picture, too, but Kobi couldn’t make out who was in it. Bugs tapped the screens a
nd insects screeched in the trees.

  Grandmamma turned off the lamp. “Maybe the bugs will settle down now,” she said as the carillon struck the hour. She yawned. “Nine o’clock. Four in the morning Paris time. No wonder we’re exhausted.” She drew them close. “I want you to enjoy this adventure, girls. Wim takes getting used to, I’ll admit. But I’m very proud of my son. If everybody were like him, the world would be a better place. Don’t forget that.”

  Maybe Grandmamma understood how living in an empty house without enough towels made the world a better place, but Kobi did not. She yawned.

  Soon Grandmamma began to snore gently. Brook mumbled something and turned over. Kobi rolled on her side, her back against Grandmamma’s softness.

  She fell asleep in the middle of Avanti!

  Birdsong woke her. The dead weight of Brook’s arm lay across her waist. Grandmamma was already up.

  In the bathroom, Kobi started to say Squelch but decided the oryx wasn’t so scary this morning. She listened for sounds of Grandmamma or Uncle Wim, but all she heard was a dog barking.

  She was wrapped in a blanket of tiredness, and she thought about crawling back into bed, but she went to the bookshelf instead. She looked at the picture of a beautiful lady holding a pudgy toddler in her arms. A teenage girl beside her glared at the camera. Kobi had seen similar pictures in Grandmamma’s albums. It was a picture of Grandmamma, Uncle Wim, and Kobi and Brook’s mother.

  The cover of the book beside it showed a chicken strolling through a pretty garden. The title was Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful Chicken-Friendly Yard. There were a lot of garden books on the shelf. The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control; Mini Farming: Learn How to Create an Organic Garden in Your Backyard. She went down the hall. On the right, in the room that would be theirs, she studied the boxes. Twin beds. Somebody should have told Uncle Wim that she and Brook slept together. And somebody should have told Grandmamma that abandoning granddaughters in America with a half uncle, two beds, and three towels was a bad idea.

  Across the hall, she discovered a tiny room with two tall, narrow windows. Faded blue paper with shiny little stars covered the walls. Her footlocker sat on the floor. Five years ago, it had gotten dinged up on the trip from San Francisco to Paris. And it now had a new scratch in the shape of a lightning bolt on one side. Kobi tried the clasp to make sure it was locked.

  She went outside onto the porch. It was about the same size as the stone balcony of Grandmamma’s apartment. But this porch was wooden, and the paint was peeling. In Paris, when she stood on the balcony, she looked down on the awnings of Monsieur le Bault’s bakery across the street. Here, she looked down at grass growing through a broken sidewalk.

  The smell of coffee drifted up from below. Uncle Wim said, “Did you get any sleep?”

  “Alas, no,” Grandmamma said, her voice sounding tired. The porch swing made creaking noises. “I’m getting old, Wim. And some days, I feel so tired.”

  “You’re not old, Mom!”

  “And it’s killing me to leave the girls,” Grandmamma said.

  “They’ll be fine. It’s for a few months. I’ll take them shopping for school supplies on Sunday and they’ll start school Monday. Then they’ll be too busy to get homesick.”

  “Maybe. But they’ve led quiet lives, Wim. Remember that. They’ve been around mainly tutors and old people.”

  “You’re not having second thoughts, are you? Not after you brought them all this way.”

  Kobi held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut. It seemed to be taking Grandmamma a long time to answer.

  Malleable. That word often worked to help people decide to do the right thing, which, in this case, Kobi felt sure, was to take them back to Paris.

  Grandmamma sighed. “I guess I am having second thoughts, Wim.”

  Kobi let out her breath and opened her eyes. Yes.

  “But they need to get to know you. And you need to get to know them. And you and I need to be a little closer. Just in case.”

  Just in case? Kobi shivered as if something had run its icy fingers through her hair.

  “In case what, Mom?”

  “Oh, Wim. They’ve been scarred by what happened. Poor Brook works with a therapist for her OCD, but I’m worried . . .”

  A car with a loud muffler went by, setting off the dogs in the neighborhood and blanking out what Grandmamma and Uncle Wim were saying for a while.

  “. . . the therapist says when the time is right, she’ll be able to accept what happened and start to remember. But it’s best not to push. Not to insist.”

  What did Brook not remember?

  Kobi remembered everything. Every single detail. Most of all, she remembered being so happy to find the magic words that let her discover her parents safe on the island. She wished she could tell Brook and Grandmamma, but her mother had said the words were serious magic. Secret serious magic.

  SIX

  THEY sat around the wobbly little table in the kitchen. Grandmamma brushed Kobi’s hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear.

  Brook scowled at the jibbled-up stuff Uncle Wim was scooping onto their paper plates.

  “Your uncle makes scrambled pancakes. It’s his specialty!” Grandmamma announced in a bright voice.

  “Why would you scramble a pancake?” Brook grumbled. Uncle Wim placed syrup and a jar of peanut butter on the table. “Why would you scramble an egg?”

  “Because scrambled eggs are good,” Brook said.

  Scrambled was one of the words Kobi’s mother had given her. Kobi had tried it for all sorts of things. Making the little dog in the dress shop let her pet him. She knew he would feel better if she petted him. Making things fall off Grandmamma’s schedule so she would go on the field trip to the Louvre with Kobi and Brook and the other homeschooled kids. Grandmamma would have more fun doing that than going to a boring meeting.

  Uncle Wim sat down, jiggling the table and sloshing milk out of Kobi’s glass. For an instant, she waited for Madame Louise to clean it up. And then Uncle Wim thrust a roll of paper towels at her.

  She blotted up the mess.

  “You have to eat these the right way.” Uncle Wim smeared globs of peanut butter over the lumps and then poured thick syrup on them. He looked at Kobi, waiting for her to copy him.

  She drizzled syrup over the lumps on her paper plate and picked up her fork. Peanut butter did not go with pancakes.

  “Peanut butter is part of the package,” Uncle Wim said, adding a few dollops to the mess on her plate without her permission. Then he swirled everything together until it looked, as Madame Louise said, like something from the seventh stomach of a cow.

  Kobi glared at Uncle Wim. Now she had nothing to eat.

  A gallon of milk sweated in the middle of the table. Madame Louise put the milk in a pitcher and the pitcher on a plate. And the table didn’t jiggle.

  Grandmamma said with determined cheerfulness, “Oh, Wim. You should patent these pancakes.” She blotted her mouth on a paper towel.

  Madame Louise used linen napkins and china plates. And pretty place mats.

  Kobi took a bite of the disgusting-looking food only because hunger moved her hand. Scrambled, she said to herself, hoping maybe . . . The gooey stuff tasted . . .

  . . . so delicious Kobi shut her eyes and held it on her tongue. And then she mashed it against the roof of her mouth and made a humming sound. Scrambled!

  “Wim, promise me you’ll get the upstairs plumbing fixed so the tub will fill in less than an hour,” Grandmamma said. “Otherwise the girls will spend all their time trying to bathe.”

  Uncle Wim’s face turned red slowly, starting at his neck and rising to his hair.

  “Ding-dong,” somebody called from the back door.

  “Yo!” Uncle Wim called.

  The lawn-mowing lady from yesterday stepped into the room. The toolbox made the muscles in her arms bulge. “I thought you might need an extra pair of hands with the beds.
” She plunked the metal box onto the counter. A sticker on it read REAL WOMEN FIX DRIPS.

  “That’s kind of you, Sally Hancock,” Grandmamma said stiffly.

  Why did Grandmamma always use Sally Hancock’s last name? Was that what they did in America?

  “Want some breakfast first?” Uncle Wim asked, smiling at her.

  Sally Hancock shook her head. “No thanks.” She poured a mug of coffee and leaned against the counter.

  Kobi wanted a bed to sleep in, but she was not going to leave one bite of the scrambled pancakes uneaten.

  “Well,” Sally Hancock said. “Who’s good at following directions for assembling beds?”

  “I am!” Brook waved her hand in the air. “I am an extremely well-organized person.”

  Kobi tried not to roll her eyes. That was one way to describe her sister.

  “I’ll go on and get started,” Sally Hancock said, picking up her toolbox and clumping through the empty dining room. “Come when you’re ready.”

  Brook asked to be excused, and soon Kobi heard scooting and bumping sounds overhead.

  “I didn’t know the upstairs tub was slow to fill,” he said to Kobi, as if she were the one who’d asked him to fix it. “I’ve always used the shower down here.” He pointed to the little bathroom off the kitchen.

  His shirt pocket quacked like a duck and he looked at his cell phone. He went to the back porch, where Kobi heard him talking.

  She couldn’t stop stuffing herself with scrambled pancakes. Between bites, she gulped cold milk from her sweaty glass. She had never had a more delicious breakfast.

  Against the light, the shape of Grandmamma’s head showed through her hair. The sudden knot in Kobi’s throat made her put down her fork.

  Her grandmother sipped her coffee and was silent.

  Uncle Wim came back into the kitchen. “I need to take a woman and her children to the Domestic Violence Shelter.”

  Grandmamma looked surprised. “But it’s Saturday.”

  “I’m on call.”

  Grandmamma stood and smoothed the front of her robe. “Then we’ll keep the home fires burning, won’t we, Kobi?”

  This would be the last morning Kobi would see her grandmother for a long time.