by Anna Meriano
Tía Paloma sighed through her nose, her lips shut tight. But before she could say any more, Isabel said, “That’s okay.” Her hand landed protectively on Caroline’s shoulder again. “We can recast the revealing spell, and maybe that will help us. Where is the candle?”
“In my room,” Caroline answered, “on my bedside table.”
“See?” Isabel said. “You probably had other objects on your bedside table, right? An altar you didn’t even know you were making. That helps already; we can use those to help us make a reverse spell. Let’s go see it.”
“But what about all the ghosts?” Caroline said.
“Spirits,” Leo said. Most of them were sitting and talking animatedly about finding their loved ones, and Mr. Pérez paced restlessly, as if getting ready to make a run for it.
“Leo,” Tía Paloma said, “keep an eye on them. Distract them. We need to figure out the spell. Please?”
Isabel smiled encouragingly at Leo and walked Caroline into the hallway and through her butterfly-painted bedroom door. Caroline shot one apologetic glance over her shoulder before Tía Paloma shut the door behind her. Leo felt the oreja spell snap like a rubber band as the conversation left her, and the raised voices of the spirits resumed their normal volume.
Leo sighed. She couldn’t be mad at Caroline for getting caught up in the excitement of magical secrets and leaving Leo behind, not when she had done the same thing to her friend. And she couldn’t be mad at Tía Paloma or Isabel, who had given her a useful job that would help them focus on their investigation. She couldn’t even be mad at the spirits, who were as confused by this as anyone else. So instead, all her anger sat in her stomach like a lump of undigested oatmeal, weighing her down. She sighed again. How was she supposed to keep six spirits busy and happy and distracted from trying to leave the house for as long as it took her family to figure out the spell?
“Hey,” she said in her loudest fighting-with-Marisol voice. “Hey, listen up, everybody!”
Six pairs of eyes flicked her way.
“Who’s hungry?”
She made coffee first (tea for Mayor Rose), taking the six orders of cream and sugar and working out the small mysteries of the Campbells’ coffee machine while the spirits grumbled their way into the kitchen. Leo’s experience handling the cash register during the morning rush at the bakery made this small stampede easy enough to handle.
Once everyone was settled with a warm mug, she opened the refrigerator to see what kind of breakfast she could throw together. The refrigerator was in good shape, filled with healthy food and no prepeeled boiled eggs, but making something would require more cooking skill than Leo felt she had. She understood the huge ovens of Amor y Azúcar well enough to change out trays or set a timer, but she wasn’t quite as confident with a family-sized stove. So in the end, she pulled two Toaster Strudel boxes out of the freezer.
“This is not in keeping with the traditions of our family,” Abuela grumbled as Leo popped the pastries out of the toaster and onto plates two at a time and Mrs. Morales squeezed a packet of sugar icing in a squiggly trail across them. “It’s not even strudel,” she moaned, pinching the crispy dough between her fingers.
Biting into the last pastry from the second box, Leo had to agree with Abuela. She would take one of Mamá’s guava-and-cheese conos over the super-sweet store-bought treats any day. Still, the spirits ate quietly and sipped their coffee without complaint, so there must have been some magic, even in Toaster Strudel.
“May I have another?” Mr. Pérez asked politely.
There was a third box in the freezer, but Leo wondered if Mr. Campbell would get suspicious if it seemed like Caroline had gone through eighteen breakfast snacks in one day. She held up a finger to Mr. Pérez and then ducked back toward the hallway to ask Caroline.
Caroline wasn’t in her room anymore. Instead, she stood in the middle of the hall, giving Tía Paloma instruction as she tugged down the trapdoor in the ceiling to release a folded ladder up to the attic.
“What’s going on?” Leo asked.
“Something weird.” Caroline held out her hand to show Leo a silvery Monopoly game piece (the iron), a red Sorry! token, and a hexagonal piece of cardboard with a flat miniature forest painted on it from Settlers of Catan. “These appeared on my bedside table.”
Leo prodded the iron. “You mean, when you all tried to perform the reveal spell?”
“No,” Caroline said. “They were there when we went into the room. And the board games they belong to are all packed up in the attic!”
“Wow,” Leo’s voice dropped low to match Caroline’s. “That is weird. So, you’re going to investigate?”
“I guess so.” Caroline’s smile looked frazzled. “We’re still looking for clues. Your aunt says I must have powers of my own, which is so weird. But did you need something?”
“No, it’s fine.” Leo couldn’t help but smile. Sometime, when the mysteries were solved and the spirits restored to el Otro Lado, when Caroline had time to hear it, she would tell her friend how excited she was to have a friend with magic, how much fun they could have together learning more about their powers. For now, though, she just gave her friend a thumbs-up. “Good luck.”
Tía Paloma waved Caroline onto the ladder, and Leo left as her friend climbed up to see what magical mysteries hid in her attic. She made her way back to the kitchen, skipping in excitement.
The spirits had finished the last box of toaster pastries on their own and were now helping themselves to a family-sized box of shredded wheat. Leo brushed away a pile of orange petals and sat on the counter, her brain buzzing over Caroline’s magic—she had real magic!—and what it meant. Did Caroline have a birth-order power? Would she have to develop a family skill to channel her magic, the way the Logroños had with baking? What if her family had a boring aptitude, like being able to magically fill out tax forms?
Leo’s brain swirled through ideas like milk swirling at the bottom of Abuela’s empty cereal bowl, and her fingers tapped a line down the Campbells’ counter. She should have learned more about other people’s magic. She should have asked Isabel more about the spellcraft convention, or read some of Tía Paloma’s books.
Tía Paloma’s spell books, or most of them, at least, still sat in a stack on the counter where Isabel had dropped them. Some were old and bound in leather with handwritten pages, like the family book of magical recipes Leo had stolen out of the bakery last year. Others were thin and new, with plain-colored covers. Only one of them was in English, and as she skimmed through the chapter titles, it seemed to deal mostly with crystals and wildflowers, with only a small section on “Candles and Summoning.” Leo was about to set the book aside and try to tackle one of the Spanish ones—Curanderismo y brujería en las Americas sounded promising if she wanted to learn about other types of magic—when she noticed one of Tía Paloma’s saint cards bookmarking a page in the English book. She flipped the thin pages to where San Pascual peeked out at her, and read:
The summoning of deceased spirits or otherworldly beings may be achieved by certain practitioners, especially those with an inherited capacity for it, using one or more candles and a good deal of will. Anything from an unexplained breeze to a brief sensory interaction with the summoned entity may indicate success.
Leo glanced up from the page. She watched Abuela pour herself more coffee, yawning as she upended the mostly empty pot. These spirits were a lot more than an unexplained breeze or a brief interaction. She stood to help Abuela make more coffee and bumped elbows with her grandmother. Abuela was a lasting, five-senses apparition. Why had Caroline’s spell been so powerful?
“It’s exhausting, isn’t it?” Mrs. Morales asked Abuela, taking a long sip from her own mug. “Being in the living world?”
“I forgot how hard it was to move with a body,” Mr. Pérez said, nodding. “And right that it’s weird to have skin?” He pinched his cheeks and pulled his face in opposite directions, making Abuela and Mrs. Morales giggle. When he dropped
his hands, he traced the cursive letters of a tattoo that circled his wrist. “It is strange how I forgot about it. You have to hold yourself together and keep everything else out. It takes so much energy. How did we manage it for so many years?”
“Well, that’s why we got old.” Abuela laughed. “And ugly.”
“Speak for yourself, viejita,” Mrs. Morales declared with a flourish of her skirt.
But she was wrong. Abuela didn’t look so old anymore. Her body had straightened and smoothed considerably since she had first appeared by Leo’s bed, and her movements looked surer. Her face was more round, her hair dark and thick where it swept back from her forehead into its bun. She looked more like Mamá than the abuela Leo remembered—all except for her eyes, dark brown-black and full of grumbly humor as she joked with her friends. Her eyes were the same, even if the rest of her was getting younger every minute.
Leo picked the book back off the counter and scanned the page, an uneasy feeling nagging at the back of her brain. Her eyes flicked over paragraphs detailing specific types of candles and their uses, and she felt frustration tighten her throat even though she wasn’t sure what exactly she was looking for.
Finally she saw, at the bottom of the page, a single line among the many tiny numbered footnotes. “For more on the effects of summoning the deceased, see Appendix IV.”
Leo silently thanked Ms. Luchesi, her school librarian, for teaching proper research skills as she flipped to the table of contents and then the correct page.
She read the whole section, then started over and read it again. She took a long breath.
“Abuela,” she said. Her voice barely made a sound over the fear stuck in her throat. “Can you come look?”
“What’s wrong, Leonora?” Abuela leaned over her shoulder.
“What are you reading?” Mrs. Morales leaned on Leo’s other side and inspected the book.
A tiny voice in Leo’s head whispered to her to flip the book shut, to lie, to hope she had read everything all wrong. But more secrets and denial weren’t going to help anything, and tricks couldn’t get her out of this problem.
She pointed to the paragraph in question. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
Appendix IV described a sorceress, Elisheva Zafrani, who was able to send letters to her husband after her death.
By following her instructions, he was able to summon her spirit even though he possessed no magic himself—he was even able to help her achieve an inconsistent visual manifestation. Zafrani’s letters, though, show the toll that these repeated manifestations took on her spirit. She describes feeling “drained” and “uncomfortable” in this world, and chides her husband for complimenting her appearance. “You say I grow more beautiful with every passing day, full of youth, as if I have shed my years. But it is myself, not my age, which I lose. My love, you must not call me again, or I am sure I shall lose myself in this empty realm of the living and never find my way back to peace.” Her fears echo a commonly cited wisdom, that bringing spirits into our world too often, or for too long, can cause them to disintegrate, becoming tortured and haunting fragments of their former selves.
Abuela bit her lip. She lifted the book and pulled it closer to her face, tilting it away from Mrs. Morales. “¿Qué diablos?” she whispered. Her mouth moved silently as her finger dragged over the same lines over and over. Leo had focused on just one word.
Disintegrate.
The age spots on the backs of Abuela’s hands had almost faded away, veins hidden under stronger skin. By normal living-person standards, she looked strong and healthy. But Leo missed the fingers twisted with arthritis and creased from decades of life.
“It’s bad, right?” Leo asked, putting a hand over Abuela’s to stop her rereading.
Abuela looked up from the paper, her bottomless-pit eyes fierce and frightening. “Hush, Leo. Don’t say anything yet. We don’t want to spook . . .” Her eyes flicked to Mr. Pérez, who stared moodily out the window while sipping his coffee, and Mayor Rose, who had started a conversation with Old Jack that was half whispers and half requests for the mayor to “Speak up, sir!”
Leo nodded. She needed to think, and she needed to find out if this was true, and she needed to do it without causing a panic among the spirits in Caroline’s kitchen. She tugged the end of her braid. “Maybe I should . . .” She glanced toward the hall where Tía Paloma, Isabel, and Caroline were still exploring the attic.
Mrs. Morales put an arm around Abuela’s shoulders. “Go ahead, tell your aunt what’s happening. Hurry.” She waved her arm to shoo Leo.
Leo nodded, hesitated, and then followed Mrs. Morales’s flapping arm and dancing marigold petals out of the kitchen.
“Caroline?” she whispered from the bottom of the attic steps. “Caroline, are you up there?”
A draft of air from the attic hit her face, warm and dusty and carrying the scent of old paper. As she blinked against the breeze, the space in front of the ladder seemed to shimmer and wave like a curtain following the current of air—just like she’d seen earlier on the car window and outside Caroline’s door. Leo blinked until the effect faded.
“Leo.” Caroline’s head appeared in the rectangular hole in the ceiling, her eyes gleaming but her voice hushed. “Is that you? We found something.” She pulled her head back, and a second later her fuzzy green slipper socks poked out of the dark ceiling and landed on the top step of the ladder. “We found something that might help!”
Leo opened her mouth to explain the fear squeezing around her chest, but then closed it. If Caroline had discovered how to send the spirits back, then there was no need to worry about what would happen to them if they stayed. She let out a shaky breath.
As Caroline’s flannel pajama shorts and button-down shirt descended from the attic, Leo caught sight of a gray-brown journal, about the size of a postcard and thinner than a pack of playing cards. Caroline cradled it to her chest with one hand while the other held the thin railing to guide her down to the hallway floor.
Leo bounced on her toes. “Is that your spell book?” she blurted out. “Does it belong to your family? Can you use it to send the spirits home?”
Caroline shook her head, hugging the book to her chest. “It’s just my great-grandmother’s diary. My mom kept it in her treasure box, but I couldn’t read it when I was younger.”
Leo had seen Mrs. Campbell’s treasure box once, when Caroline brought it to school for show and tell. It was light brown with a latched lid, made of some kind of wood that left its smell on the treasures inside—a crystal-beaded rosary, library cards from every library Mrs. Campbell had ever worked at, report cards from her lower school in Costa Rica. Leo didn’t remember seeing the small book inside, but maybe her eyes had danced over it, too intrigued by the miniature domino set or the handmade paper dolls. Maybe Mrs. Campbell had removed the book from the box before sending it to school, or maybe the book had hidden itself because it really was magic.
“Can you read it now?” Leo’s curiosity combined with the worry of her finger stuck between the pages of the appendix, resting on the word “disintegrate.” She hopped up and down. “Does it say anything about sending them back to el Otro Lado?”
Caroline shook her head. “It’s not like that, Leo. She tells some stories about her aunt and uncle, and about our family history—she mentions that generations back, her great-grandparents were both curanderos, and they healed people’s illnesses and injuries and helped them with their problems. There are notes about using candles for magical healing, not all that different from what Tía Paloma has been teaching you and your sisters. So I guess there is magic in my family. I think there’s more to it, because she said that our focus shifted, but I don’t know to what. I’m going to keep reading, because your aunt says that knowing more specifics about my . . . about the magic that brought the spirits here will help with, um, something?” Caroline shrugged.
“It will help us devise an unraveling spell.” Tía Paloma climbed down the ladder slowl
y, her hands gripping the handrail tightly and her feet flailing through the air with each step down. She landed with an “oof” on the hallway floor. “I want to look more closely, of course, but we have two good clues from that paragraph you read: that your magic is rooted in curanderismo, and that your family regularly channeled magic through candles. Those are great places to start.”
Leo frowned. Those might be good places to start, but they didn’t sound like an answer that could be used to send the spirits home—not yet. She tapped the thin cover of the book she was holding and opened her mouth, but the bad news stuck on her tongue, and before she could free it, another voice interrupted.
“I want to take a look at your altar again too,” Isabel said as she descended the ladder with one hand holding her skirt close to her legs. “I’m imagining that we’ll make a separate one for the unraveling, probably more intricate to deal with the fact that your spell combined our family magic on the candle with your family magic. But we can still try to use similar elements, or ones that are symbolically opposite. . . .” She reached the floor and turned to face the group. “Leo! What are you doing here?”
“I came to tell you,” Leo whispered, “that I was looking through some of the books you left in the living room and . . . I found something. Something . . . maybe bad. How soon until we have an unraveling spell, do you think?”
Isabel frowned. “This is a complicated situation, and we still don’t have all the information yet. It’s going to take hours—at least—to come up with even a basic outline.”
Leo winced. “Okay,” she said. “That’s not good.” She held out the book, opened to the appendix.
Before anyone could look, though, the sound of a door slamming shut startled them all. Caroline spun around. Tía Paloma’s eyes, magnified by her glasses, bulged like a frog’s. Isabel looked at Leo, eyebrows spiking up her forehead.
“Leo, you left the spirits alone, didn’t you?”