The Root of Magic

by Kathleen Benner Duble

  “Thirty years of marriage,” James says, “and me and Layla still like being in this truck out in the snow, just the two of us, all warm and toasty with the cold outside our windows.”

  “All wrapped up together in a cocoon-like closeness,” Layla agrees, and they smile at one another.

  “Well, I’m grateful that you came along when you did,” Mom finally manages to say. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”

  “Oh, no chance of that,” Layla says, her laughter filling the truck. “Not in Kismet. We’re always aware of any danger here.”

  The truck slows and then stops by a giant stone wall. In the glare of the headlights, a closed wooden gate appears. A sign—KISMET, MAINE, POP. 173—stands next to the invisible road.

  James jumps out of the truck, his legs sinking deep into the snow. Willow expects to see him struggle to open the gate, to fight the mounds of moisture-laden flakes that have collected around it. He should need their help. But oddly, the gate opens easily after being unlocked, swinging on its hinges as if the ground were bare of any obstacle at all.

  James is back in the truck in no time, moving it forward before getting out again to close the gate for good. It makes a loud thunking noise as it shuts.

  They drive on until at last, Willow begins to see tiny twinkles of light. A few hundred yards more and the truck begins to climb a hill, groaning as it pushes ahead, bulldozing a path on the untraveled road. Snowflakes continue their madcap dance outside the windows, when suddenly, in front of them, a huge Victorian house swims in and out of Willow’s vision. The truck pulls up in front and comes to a stop.

  “This is our town’s bed-and-breakfast,” James says. “Cora has a room for you tonight.”

  The B&B is massive, and shaped like an odd gingerbread house that someone seems to have added on to whenever the fancy took them without a care as to looks or function. It stands stark and dark against the snow-laden sky, all pointed angles and decorative trim.

  James opens his door, steps down, and goes around the truck, opening the passenger side and reaching up to the front seat for his wife, who squeals at the cold and laughs as he lifts her out.

  Willow pauses before following them, hesitant to leave the safety and warmth of this vehicle to head toward a building where she can almost imagine a wart-riddled witch might live. But her mom gives her a poke.

  So Willow pushes the front seat forward and jumps down too.

  Since they have no luggage, Willow and her mom hurry up the snow-filled walkway, helping Wisp along, as if propelled by the storm itself, toward the large inn. Their mom keeps a hand over Wisp’s head, trying her best to keep the snow off his face.

  As they get closer, Willow can see lace-curtained windows outlined by the lights inside. They soften the grim look of the house, promising warmth and shelter at last.

  James and Layla don’t bother knocking on the massive front door. They open it and shoo Willow’s family inside. Soon they are all standing in a small hallway, complete with a coatrack and an umbrella stand. The walls are covered in rose wallpaper, and everywhere Willow can see, there are greens—long vines spiraling out of pots, broad leaves hanging lazily over couches, small trees gracefully scraping the ceiling.

  “There you are,” grunts a large woman with bright red lipstick and earrings that bobble as she rises from a chair in the living room. The chair looks as if a spider created it, all lines and curlicues and intricate wooden weaves. She meets them in the hallway.

  “Here we are,” James agrees. “Cora, meet Starr DuChard, her daughter, Willow, and her son, Wisp.”

  Cora gives them a brief nod, her eyes talon sharp upon them.

  “We’ve got to get back to the plowing,” James says to Willow’s mom. “I’ll stop by the local garage and let them know about your car, but I think they’ll be too tied up at the moment dealing with this snow to do anything about it for a day or so.”

  “Oh, no. You don’t have to bother,” Mom protests. “I’ll do it myself. We really can’t wait that long. We have to get home as soon as possible—tomorrow morning at the latest. Is there a car rental agency around?”

  James shakes his head. “Not for miles, I’m afraid. And this storm won’t be letting up anytime soon.”

  “But it might,” Mom says, and Willow can hear the determination in her voice. “Weather is unpredictable. It could clear.”

  Cora lets out a harrumphing sound, as if Willow’s mom’s hope is completely foolish.

  “Either way, I’m afraid you’re here for the night,” James says. “Might as well make the best of it. Cora’s beds are known to feel like heaven.”

  Cora smiles. “That they are.”

  Willow’s mom nods absently, though Willow knows she is already worrying that they are so far from a real hospital and Wisp’s doctors. She will not sleep tonight, fretting about Wisp, no matter how nice Cora’s beds are.

  “We’re off, then,” James says. “I’ll check in on you all tomorrow.” He smiles at Cora. “Sweet dreams.”

  “Sweet dreams,” Layla echoes.

  “You too,” Cora says to them both.

  James and Layla head out the door.

  “Welcome to Kismet,” Cora says, reaching to help them out of their coats, hanging them on the coatrack in the hall. “You can leave your winter gear right here. There’s plenty of room. We don’t get many visitors to our town.”

  “Do you live all alone in this place?” Wisp asks as he tugs off his boots.

  “I certainly do,” Cora tells him, waving them into her living room. The large common area has a fireplace and a window seat and comfortable-looking couches with needlepointed pillows thrown helter-skelter. Through an open doorway, Willow can see an enormous dining table. At the far end of the living room, there is a heavy dark wood reception desk with a window behind it that is pitch-black, a reminder to Willow of how far they are from cities and real civilization.

  “Aren’t you afraid some stranger will check in and rob you while you sleep?” Wisp asks.

  Willow feels her face redden.

  “Wisp,” Mom scolds him.

  But Cora just laughs, a hoarse chuckle that sounds as if she has spent a lifetime talking all day long. “Visitors aren’t strangers once you get to know them, Wisp, and without even knowing you yet, I’d say you’re not that strange either. Though now that I think on it, your name sure is odd. How’d you come to be called Wisp anyway?”

  Wisp sighs with annoyance. It’s a common question, one he hates.

  But it makes their mom smile.

  “His real name is Jack,” Mom tells Cora. “But when he was little, he was always following his sister, Willow, everywhere she went. So his dad and I began to call him Will-o’-the-Wisp. And Willow was given her name because we wanted her to be like the tree: bendable in a strong wind but unbreakable, sturdy, with deep roots.”

  “Cute,” the woman says, but Willow can see she isn’t impressed with their mother’s hippie-style of name-giving. Neither is Willow. She doesn’t love her name.

  “Well, your room is all ready for you upstairs,” Cora adds.

  The lines on her mom’s face reappear, and her frown returns. “I’m afraid I don’t have any money or credit cards to pay.”

  “Lost it all in the river,” Cora says, nodding. Then she turns and shuffles away to lift a large brass key from a hook behind the reception desk. “Well, you can’t leave here tonight, anyway. So not to worry. I expect I can get paid later, when we work everything out.”

  And it is at that moment that it suddenly dawns on Willow that, even though they are alive, they have lost everything—their car, Mom’s wallet, their cash, their cell phones, which were charging in the car. Willow doesn’t know how they will get home. Their dad could come get them, but that won’t make their mom happy—Dad as rescuer rather t
han villain.

  “Dad,” Wisp whispers, as if reading his sister’s thoughts. “Should we call him?”

  Wisp has spoken soft and low, but their mom has heard. Her mom sucks in her breath. Anticipating a rant about their father, Willow turns away. She is about to make her mind think about the game again when she sees a line of seashells on one of Cora’s windowsills. So instead, she concentrates on the sea smell of shells and how they can take you to the ocean even though they are often land-bound.

  Then Willow feels sick to her stomach. She has remembered, in thinking of water, that she has also lost her journal. Willow prays that no one will find it floating down the river and read what she has written there—her most private thoughts, her personal daydreams, her darkest secrets. She begins to add up all that was in that car: her expensive hockey equipment and her computer. Anger and sorrow fill her, like baking soda and vinegar thrown together in a glass and about to fizz over. Willow doesn’t know what to do about these feelings.

  So she sucks in her breath, as her mom just did, and for a minute, it helps her feel a strange sense of peace. Suddenly, she understands why, in these past two years, her mom has been all small sighs and big breaths.

  “We’ll call your dad in the morning,” Mom says. “It’s too late now.”

  Cora walks back from the desk and hands Willow’s mom the key. “Room’s upstairs on the right. It’s got a double bed there for you and your daughter, and I put a rollaway in for the boy.”

  Layla comes running in from outside. “Hey, y’all, I went and got these from the couple who own the drugstore. They’re just the right size for each of you.”

  She holds up three sets of pajamas, three toothbrushes, and a tube of toothpaste in her pink perfectly manicured hands.

  Willow sees her mom’s anger and worry fade. It has been a long day, and her mom has obviously realized that there is nothing to do now but get some sleep and deal with everything in the morning. “Thank you. You’ve been wonderful.”

  “Well, that’s what this town of Kismet is all about, missy,” Cora says as Layla sings goodbye and heads back out into the storm.

  Cora waves them toward the stairs. “Now off to bed with you. You three look like you could sleep standing up. Sweet dreams.”

  Obediently, they trudge up the stairs, passing black-and-white photos of a Kismet from long ago, people staring at the camera, mouths tight and unsmiling, their colorless seriousness giving Willow the creeps.

  But when her mom opens the door to their room and they see the fluffy four-poster bed, and for Wisp, the little rollaway with a bucket nearby should he need it, they sigh and breathe, their bodies softening with release.

  And it isn’t until they are all in bed, and Mom’s snores are washing over Willow as the snow washes over Cora’s little B&B, that Wisp speaks out into the dark.

  “How did that Cora lady know to bring in this extra bed and a bucket before we even got here?”

  He’s right, Willow thinks. How in the world did she know?

  Willow wakes at four a.m. She hears the chimes of a grandfather clock somewhere in Cora’s house, marking the hour. Willow knows it was probably the deep booming of the gong that interrupted her sleep, but she might have woken up anyway. She is used to waking in the middle of the night.

  Her father has trouble sleeping sometimes too. Some of Willow’s best memories of him are of the two of them, sitting together on the front porch of their house in Vermont, in the deepest part of a summer night, whispering so they wouldn’t wake Mom and Wisp. They’d talk about hockey or school or the basketball team her dad coaches until there was nothing more to say. Then they would just sit in the silence, looking up at the stars, or watching the fireflies flitting through Mom’s organic garden until they were tired enough to go back to bed.

  Sometimes, in the winter, her dad would make them both hot milk, and they’d sit in the kitchen drinking, with the cold pressing hard against the house. And when at last they were sleepy, he’d tousle Willow’s hair and kiss her forehead and sometimes carry her back upstairs. Willow was eleven then, and thin as a pencil. Not like she is now—almost thirteen with older girl curves.

  But those were what Willow calls the “before” days—before Wisp started getting occasional nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop on their own and nausea and pains in his muscles, before the doctors told them they had no idea what disease Wisp might have, before their mom and dad fought over experimental treatments that forced their split.

  Since her dad moved out a year ago, there have been no more of those talks and those silences, those mid-night minutes of closeness. And Willow still misses them when she wakes like this and just lies still, all alone in the night, her thoughts like restless sea waves. She wishes she were with her dad now, and she wonders if he’s at his house, awake and wishing he could talk to her too.

  Shivering, Willow gets up. Cora’s house is cold, the wind seeping in through the cracks like fingers probing a purse for change.

  Willow envies her best friend, Elise, right now. Elise and her sister and parents are on their way to spend the rest of the Christmas vacation in the Caribbean. Willow imagines Elise sleeping with her bedroom windows open, stars sprinkling the skies, a warm breeze blowing the curtains.

  Willow knows the alarm that sits next to their bed, which their mom set earlier, will go off in two hours. Her mom will hurry them into their clothes in the near dark and cold, anxious to leave here and get back home.

  Shuffling to the window, Willow sees that the storm is still upon them, beating against the wooden houses of Kismet, Maine—big and little, one story and two. The storm they are enduring does not discriminate.

  And she’s thinking about her dad again, about the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs and the way he always sings Beatles songs in the shower. And she feels a surge of sadness that they are with him only on Tuesdays and Saturdays and hardly ever overnight because of Wisp’s illness—when suddenly, Willow sees something strange.

  As the wind blows and the snow parts, she catches a glimpse of Cora in the wan glow from the streetlights, bundled up and looking as huge as a sumo wrestler, waddling through the drifts and making her way down her drive to the unplowed road. She swings side to side, moving toward what looks like a lake with a large brick building at its end. Cora stops for a bit and then turns and lifts her head.

  Willow freezes, for it’s as if Cora is staring right up at her, as if she can see Willow standing there in the darkened room with the lace curtain pulled back, gazing down. Willow feels caught, as if she is spying on Cora.

  But then Cora turns and continues. And Willow shakes herself. This is America—land of the free and home of the brave. Standing here, watching out a window, is within her rights. Willow remembers her sixth-grade Revolutionary history lesson on freedoms.

  So she stays there, and through the small breaks in the snowfall, she sees Cora unlock a door and go inside the large brick building. Then, in a last moment of clarity, before the storm gobbles up Willow’s view for good, she sees that there is no one on the road anymore. It’s just snow and emptiness again.

  Willow stands there puzzled, until her feet are frozen into blocks of cold and her eyelids are heavy as ten-pound weights.

  She makes her way back to the bed and slides in next to the heat of her mother. Willow lies there for a moment, thinking about what she has just seen.

  Already, sleep is luring her back to unconsciousness. She yawns, unable to stay awake a moment more. Yet even as her eyes close, her thoughts are still swirling. Why would Cora go outside in a snowstorm in the middle of the night? What is in that brick building that would make her brave all that snow?

  The snow comes down as the sun comes up, showing no sign of whisking itself away. If anything, it has intensified, falling in slabs of white on the houses of Kismet, cloaking them in coats of thick cold. Trees bend under the weight
. Power lines sag with possible outages.

  “State of emergency’s been declared over all New England. No one’s allowed on the roads,” Cora informs them as she pours Willow’s mom a cup of coffee and puts a glass of orange juice in front of Wisp.

  For a second, Willow thinks that maybe Cora has forgotten about giving Willow something to drink too.

  “I’m getting yours,” Cora says, as if reading Willow’s mind. Willow stares at her in surprise.

  Cora turns back to Willow’s mom. “I’m afraid you’re stuck here a few days more.”

  “But we need to get back,” Mom says as she pulls at the napkin in her lap, lines forming at the sides of her mouth. “Maybe if I call the state and explain about Wisp, they’ll make an exception.”

  “Won’t,” Cora says shortly. “Unless it’s an emergency, no one’s going anywhere.”

  “Is there a doctor in town?” Mom asks.

  Cora nods. “Of course. Kismet may be small, but we have a hospital.”

  Mom sighs, looking over at Wisp. “I’ll have to call in to work, I guess, and then I’ll walk over to the hospital here just to check—in case we need them.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about calling your office. No one is expecting anyone to go anywhere in this stuff,” Cora says.

  She heads into the kitchen and returns with a glass of grapefruit juice, plopping it down in front of Willow and giving her a wink. Willow’s eyes widen. She loves anything with a tart, tangy taste that makes her tongue wince and reminds her brain with a jolt that she’s alive: Sour Patch Kids, pickles, fresh lemonade—the more sour and explosive, the better. Willow was actually going to ask Cora if she had any grapefruit juice.

  A strange tingling spirals down Willow’s spine because it’s as if Cora knew this. In fact, Cora seems to have a strange way of knowing lots of things. First there was the cot and the bucket, and now the juice. Willow can’t shake a feeling that there is something uncanny about this woman—something peculiar. Then Willow remembers waking up and seeing Cora from the window.