The Rules of Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  “You could have come here if you wanted daffodils,” she said when Jet walked in.

  True enough, the yard was thick with them at this time of year, a sea of yellow. Jet saw that the garden was far ahead of the rest of town. The wisteria was already blooming; the climbing roses were budding.

  “Looks as though you saw a ghost,” Isabelle said.

  “I saw Levi’s father.”

  “That Reverend doesn’t own the cemetery and he doesn’t own this town. You have your right to Levi’s memory.”

  “I want to get rid of it,” Jet said.

  “Do you?”

  “I want to have no memory of him. Please,” she said to her aunt. “Please do this for me. I know you can do things like that. And I can pay you.” Jet was in tears.

  “Jet, if I did that, then you wouldn’t be you.”

  “Good! I don’t want to be me.” Jet had come to sit on a wooden bench, her hands folded on her lap. “I let Franny think I drank courage.”

  “But you did,” her aunt said.

  Isabelle signaled for Jet to follow her back to the house. There was a woman pacing on the porch. She stopped when she saw Isabelle. “Oh, Miss Owens,” she said. “If you could spare me a moment.”

  “You’ll have to wait,” Isabelle told her. “Just sit down and be quiet.”

  Jet followed her aunt into the kitchen, where Isabelle put up the kettle.

  “I don’t want to keep that woman waiting,” Jet said.

  “She’s waited twenty years for her husband to love her, she can wait another twenty minutes.”

  When the tea was brewed they both sat down and had a cup.

  “Taste familiar?” Isabelle asked.

  “It’s what I had before.”

  “You asked for caution but I gave you this. It was what you needed. And it’s what you have.”

  Jet laughed and drank the rest of the tea. Was this what courage felt like?

  “Once you forget a piece of your past, you forget it all. That’s not what you want, dear.”

  Jet went to embrace her aunt, who was surprised by the unexpected show of emotion.

  “I have a client,” Isabelle said. “Time for you to go.”

  “Will her husband love her?”

  “Would you want love you had to buy?” Isabelle asked.

  Isabelle then called Charlie Merrill, who came in his old station wagon to give Jet a ride to the bus station. As they drove, Jet asked if he would take a detour. The cemetery gates were closed, but Charlie knew the trick to picking the lock with a screwdriver. He pushed the gates open for her and waited in his car, happy to listen to a basketball game on the radio.

  It was nearly dark and Jet was glad she knew the way. She cut across the grass, luminous in the fading light. She was entitled to her memory and to this place.

  Here lies the life I might have had once upon a time, the man I might have loved for all my life, the days we might have had.

  Jet went to his headstone and knelt down. There were two bunches of daffodils. The Reverend hadn’t thrown hers away.

  She lay down beside him once more, and this time she told him she would never forgive the world for taking him, but she had no choice but to go on. She was alive. She walked back in the pitch dark, glad she could see Charlie’s headlights cutting through the night.

  “Everything all right?” Charlie Merrill said when she climbed back into the car. It smelled like cough drops and flannel.

  Jet nodded. “I think I’ll go to the bus station now.”

  He drove her there in time for the last bus. When he pulled over, Charlie handed her a paper bag. Inside was a small thermos and something wrapped in wax paper. “Your aunt sent along some tea. I think there’s some cake in there, too.”

  Jet threw her arms around the old man, utterly surprising him.

  “She’s a good lady,” he said, as if explaining her aunt to her. “Anyone who knows her knows that.”

  He waited, his car idling, until the bus pulled away. It was likely Isabelle told him to do so, and he always did as she asked. His two boys had been heroin addicts; one was in prison by the time he was twenty, the other went half-mad with drugs. She’d fixed them both with one of those mixtures of hers. Afterward there’d been a knock at their door even though everyone knew Isabelle Owens didn’t call on people. She came to see the boys every night for two weeks, watching over his grown sons as if they were babies until they were well again. She charged him nothing for doing so. Now when his sons saw her on the street, or when they were working on her house and she looked in on them, the boys would elbow each other and stand up straight. They were still afraid of her even though she’d sat by their beds and fed them soup with a teaspoon.

  So Charlie stayed and waved as Jet got on the bus, and Jet waved back, and when she realized she was starving and hadn’t eaten all day, she was glad to have the chocolate cake her aunt had sent along, and grateful to have been convinced that forgetting her loss would be worse than the loss itself. So she sat there remembering everything, from the beginning of her life to today. By the time she recalled the pale yellow of the daffodils she’d picked that morning, she had reached New York.

  The announcement was in The New York Times on March 21, Franny’s birthday, a day that had always proved inauspicious. It was the unluckiest day of the year, but it was also the day to celebrate Ostara, the spring equinox, when eggshells must be scattered in a garden, for new growth and transformation is possible, even for those who consider themselves to be unfortunate.

  Perhaps publishing on this date was an oversight; but whether intended or not, it had the effect of injuring Franny more fully than she already was. Vincent tried to hide it, he threw the Times in the trash, but Franny found it when she took the garbage out to the bin. It was opened to the engagement announcements, and there it was in her hands, an arrow to wound her.

  Haylin Walker, son of Ethan and Lila Walker of New York and Palm Beach, is engaged to Emily Flood, daughter of Melville and Margot Flood of Hartford, Connecticut. The groom is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Medical School. The bride, a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Radcliffe College, is currently working at Talbots in Farmington, Connecticut.

  Franny couldn’t read on. Not about how the groom’s father was the president of a bank and how his wife was on the board of the opera, not about how the bride-to-be’s parents were both doctors who raised boxer dogs that showed at the Westminster Kennel Club. Dating someone else was one thing, but this was marriage, this was the end of hope that it might ever be different between them.

  Franny burned the newspaper in the fireplace. The smoke was gray and gave off the bitter scent of sulfur. Afterward, she propped open the windows, and yet her eyes continued to tear.

  When Vincent came into the room there was still a gritty mist hanging in the air.

  “Hay’s engaged,” Franny told her brother. “You shouldn’t have tried to hide it from me.”

  “You should ignore it, Franny. How many years did you think he would wait for you? Ten? Twenty?”

  “Shouldn’t he have waited?”

  “Not when you told him to go away. People believe you when you say things like that. You never told him you loved him, did you?” Vincent held up his hands. “Do as you please.”

  After he went upstairs, she did exactly that.

  She phoned Haylin’s parents’ number, which she had memorized when she was ten years old. When a housekeeper she didn’t recognize picked up, Franny said she was calling about the engagement party. The housekeeper assumed she was a guest invited to the celebration that evening. Yes, yes, Franny said. What was the time? She had forgotten.

  She wore her funeral dress, for her other clothes were all too casual. She slipped on a pair of her mother’s old stiletto heels bought in Paris. They were red, which made Franny feel her kinship with her mother anew.

  The sky was a mottled pink and gray when she took a cab to Park and Seventy-Fourth Street. Her chest hurt when th
e cab pulled up at the Walkers’ address. Their apartment took up an entire floor. Tonight it glowed like a firefly. Franny went inside the building, following an older couple and taking the elevator with them so she might be considered a member of their party. “Such an exciting occasion,” the woman said to Franny.

  “Yes,” Franny murmured in response. She had worn her brilliant hair twisted up so as not to call attention to herself, but she noticed the man staring at her shoes. Her mother’s red high heels. She kept her eyes downcast.

  “And to think Ethan always feared his son would be a failure,” the woman went on. She was older but wore a Mary Quant miniskirt, along with a silk blouse and a long rope of pearls. The elevator opened directly into the apartment, and when it did Franny felt as though she were dropping back through time.

  The party was crowded with guests, but otherwise it seemed exactly as it had when they were in grade school and Haylin had first brought her home, only after she had made a solemn promise not to tell anyone how he lived. It was after they had met in the lunchroom, when she had given him half of her tomato sandwich and he had eaten it without complaint, though it lacked salt and mayonnaise. The decor hadn’t changed since that time; the same pale pearly wool carpets, silk wall coverings, persimmon-colored sofas. Someone offered to take her coat.

  “Oh, no thank you,” Franny said. “I’m cold.”

  Indeed, she was shivering. She was out of place with or without her coat; nothing she had on seemed appropriate for this gathering. The women were in jewel-toned cocktail dresses, the men in well-tailored suits. Franny stayed on the edge of the huge formal parlor, where glasses of champagne were offered and hors d’oeuvres were served on polished trays. She thought she spied Emily through the crush, but there were so many tall, pretty young blond women she couldn’t be sure. There was a table littered with silver gifts. Platters, serving trays, candlesticks. Due to Franny’s presence, many of the smaller silver pieces tarnished and turned black. She walked away from the table, embarrassed by what witchery could do. She avoided the other guests, but she couldn’t hide from Haylin, who came up behind her and put a hand on the small of her back. She felt the heat of his touch through her coat. She tried to catch her breath.

  “I couldn’t send you an invitation,” he said. “You never told me where you lived.”

  He was in an expensive suit, his hair cut short. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him in a suit before. But it was still him, her dearest friend, no matter what he wore, no matter whom he had promised to marry.

  There were spots of color on Franny’s cheeks and her hair had begun to unwind. She wanted to say, Run away with me. Now I know nothing else matters. I don’t care if we come to ruin.

  In her black coat with her shining red hair, she was impossible to miss. From across the room, Haylin’s father spied her. He glared and gestured for his son to get rid of her.

  “Let’s step outside.” Haylin led her to the elevator. He pushed the button for Lobby, but halfway down he stopped the elevator’s descent and drew Franny to him. In an unexpected show of intimacy he put his mouth against hers. It was so fast and intense nothing could stop what happened next. It didn’t matter where they were; it didn’t even take courage to do this. It was fate and they didn’t try to fight against it. Franny threw herself at him and Haylin didn’t stop her or himself, although by now Emily Flood was wondering where he’d gone, worrying because she’d seen a tall pale woman with red hair. She still had nightmares about Franny, for after Franny’s visit to the hospital, it had taken Emily months to win back Haylin’s affections. Don’t you see? she had told him. She’s never coming back to you. She doesn’t care or she would have come to Cambridge with you.

  What Emily Flood had feared had come to pass. It all happened too fast and then they realized where they were and what they had done. Haylin backed away, pulling up his pants like a fool, pained by his own actions. He was not a disloyal man, yet he had just betrayed his fiancée. “I’m getting married,” he said, shaking his head as if puzzled by his own statement.

  “I know. I read about it in The New York Times.” Franny tilted her chin up, ready to be hurt by whatever he would next say. She felt this was her last chance, and she was taking it.

  “I have to marry her,” Hay told her.

  “Do you hear yourself? Have to?”

  Haylin groaned and said, “You always do this to me. You make me think I have a chance.”

  The elevator alarm went off. Haylin did his best to stop it, but in the end he had to punch the up button for the sirens to subside. The elevator resumed, climbing back to the seventeenth floor. When the doors opened, Ethan Walker was there. Both Haylin and Franny blinked and looked guilty.

  “I thought I made myself clear,” Haylin’s father said. “Get rid of her.”

  Mr. Walker was utterly impossible to see into, closed as a locked vault. Franny, however, was completely transparent at this moment, a woman in love who had just been fucked in the elevator and clearly didn’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings, certainly not those of the bride-to-be, who had gone off to lock herself in the bathroom to weep, terrified she had already lost Hay before he was hers.

  “Don’t make an ass out of yourself,” Walker said to his son. “She dumped you and she’ll do it again. Do the right thing for once in your life.”

  Franny saw the expression set on Hay’s face. When his father left them, she tugged on Hay’s sleeve. “Don’t listen to him. You never have before.”

  Haylin looked at Franny. “It’s not about him, Franny. You know I don’t care about my father’s opinion. But all those years! You should have contacted me.”

  “I didn’t want to ruin your life,” Franny explained.

  Hay laughed bitterly. “But now you do?”

  Franny recoiled, stung. “Is that what I’m doing?”

  Hay appraised her coolly and she could see how she’d hurt him. “I don’t know, Franny. You tell me. Because I’m not sure I want my life ruined.” He shook his head, his confusion evident. “I keep thinking about when I was drowning and you didn’t come in after me. And when we were going to school together, and you didn’t come with me.”

  “But you didn’t drown! And you did fine without me at school! But you resent me for everything. I see I shouldn’t have come.”

  Franny hastened into the elevator, but Hay threw his arm across the door, making certain it wouldn’t close. “I couldn’t go through losing you again,” he said. “It killed me. It took me years to get over you.”

  “But you did get over me. You found someone else. I didn’t.”

  “Tell me you won’t walk away again and I’ll call the whole thing off.”

  Franny took a step back, startled by his raw emotion.

  “Tell me,” he demanded. “And I’ll do anything. I’ll hurt her if I have to.”

  That was when Franny saw Emily. She had come to search for Hay and was watching them from the parlor. Franny lost her voice then, and felt the courage drain from her body. Who did she think she was to cause another woman such grief? Perhaps Emily was Haylin’s fate and Franny would only be interfering in what was meant to be.

  “You still can’t make a promise to me,” Haylin said, and in that moment he let the elevator go.

  On the street Franny hailed a cab. She rode along past the gates into the park she and Haylin used to walk through. Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith. But Haylin now stood beside Emily Flood while Franny was headed downtown, weeping as she looked out at the world she had once known.

  Once a month Jet went to Massachusetts. She told no one in her family, but they knew. Sometimes Franny packed her a lunch and left it on the kitchen table. A cucumber sandwich, some cookies, a green apple. Vincent often left out cash for the bus. She was grateful, but she never discussed her plans with them. She simply went early on the last Sunday morning of the month. When she got to town, she took the local taxi to the cemetery, and she always brought da
ffodils no matter the season. She sometimes stopped at the local grocery that sold flowers. Everyone knew who she was but treated her politely all the same. In the spring she walked to the cemetery, and she picked her own flowers, the ones that grew in the fields that were the color of butter.

  Isabelle did not consider it rude that Jet didn’t stop in to see her, although once or twice she had spied her niece walking through town. One time in particular she’d happened to be going to the library when she noticed Jet standing in front of the Willards’ house. Maybe it was a good sign or maybe it wasn’t. Only time would tell. The Willard home was a white house with green shutters, more than two hundred years old, with a huge garden that had never regained its former glory once the Reverend had cast down salt on the day when April Owens blundered in, aiming to pick some of his pie-plate-size roses. Now the rosebushes were bare and the leaves curled up. The only things that grew here were daffodils, and Jet was surprised to see that there were hundreds of them.

  There was an apple tree that Levi had told her about. He’d said he loved to climb the tree and pick crisp McIntosh apples, but now the bark of the tree was leathery and black, the boughs were twisted and bare. It hadn’t borne fruit for years.

  Jet was leaning on the white fence looking up at the second-floor window where Levi’s room had been when the Reverend came out. He was putting out the trash, but he saw her and stopped. They looked at each other in the fading light.

  “I’d like to see his room,” Jet said.

  The Reverend no longer attended to any services. He didn’t attend to anything. He no longer watered or weeded his garden. The gutters on the house were sagging, and the roof needed work. There were two rocking chairs on the porch he never sat in. He didn’t want neighbors passing by to greet him or wish him well or ask him how he was faring. He looked at the Owens girl with the dark hair and her serious pale face with the scar on her cheek and then he signaled to her. He didn’t know what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all, but he watched her come into the yard and up the porch steps.

  “I appreciate it,” she said. “Thank you.”