“God, no!” I stared at her with wide eyes. “No! Absolutely not! It’s nothing like that.”
“Swear?”
I stopped and looked into Claire’s eyes.
Okay, I was having maybe the worst week of my life. But was what Mama had done to me technically abuse?
Suppose some government official came to the house to help me? Mama had all kinds of spells. She could turn people into whatever she liked. She could mess up their minds so they wouldn’t know which way was up. She could make them forget their own names.
Or, most likely, she would just talk to them, persuade them everything was fine, and they’d leave smiling, thrilled to have had a close encounter with Anise LaZelle, local TV celebrity.
And afterward, she might come after me. Without Dad or Uncle Tobias around to make her think twice, who knew what she’d do?
“I swear,” I said. I shuddered.
“Call me if you change your mind.”
“Sure.”
Claire walked me all the way home, came inside and helped me put antibiotic and a bandage on my scrape. Mama had already left for work, and I was glad.
Claire called me as soon as she got home to make sure I was okay. I heard her mom July in the background, telling Claire to tell me I was welcome to come stay at their house if I wanted. So I knew Claire had told her mom something.
I thought the offer over for two seconds. But distance wouldn’t break the spell. I would just act superweird in front of people who didn’t know me well enough. “Thanks. I mean that. I’ll let you know,” I said.
For dinner that night I made a great big salad, looked at it, and put down my fork. I was hungry, but I couldn’t face another bowl full of green stuff.
Later, I picked up a book by reflex, and found myself on the stairs again. Up, down, up, down.
I knew I had lost some weight during hell week; my pants were loose around my waist. I did feel a little stronger than I had before. Short distances that I had balked at walking last week seemed like nothing now.
I hated everything I had eaten since the spell started except for the oranges, apples, and bananas. I was constantly hungry and tired. I hated this life.
Twenty-five minutes later, I stopped running up and down the stairs. Longer session than before; I guessed my endurance had grown.
The only time I had felt free of the spell was after I fainted.
I looked at the stairs. I breathed hard for a little while.
Then I ran up and down some more, under my own power. I ran even though I had a stitch in my side. I ran with breath heaving in and out of me, sweat dripping off me. I ran, though my legs felt like lead.
I ran past the end of my energy.
This time I melted down to the floor before I passed out. Blessed darkness wrapped around me.
I woke in the hospital. Mama sat by the bed. Shadows darkened the skin around her eyes. “What happened, honey? I put failsafes in the spell to protect you. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her.
“Gyp,” she whispered.
I waited. After a while, she went away.
WHEN I woke up the next morning, Dad was beside my bed. “Baby, what happened?”
“Why didn’t you call back?”
“Call back?”
“I left you messages every night.”
“I never got any messages. I talked to your mama every night, and she said everything was fine.”
Of course. I only thought I was making those calls. My eyes got hot.
Dad sat on the bed, took my hand. “Gyp, what happened to you? The doctor says you’re malnourished and dehydrated and fatigued. How could that happen?”
“Mama,” I whispered. Sobs started, and they wouldn’t stop. Dad held me. After a long time, my crying slowed. “I can’t go home, Daddy. I can’t go home.”
“What did she do to you?”
I told him about the diet and exercise spell. That was the first time I saw Dad in a white hot rage. He went away, closing the door very softly behind him.
Jasper dropped by in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t even want to talk to him about what had happened. He asked if he could spell me better, and I asked him please not to do that. I had had enough of people using power on me lately. He gripped my hand and left.
Later, Claire came to see me, and I asked if I could stay at her house, and she said sure.
I slept. I woke up after dark had fallen, and there was Mama, sitting by the bed again. I turned away from her as far as I could with that IV thing in my arm.
“Honey, I’m so sorry. You weren’t supposed to get hurt. I thought I fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”
I closed my eyes and thought myself down into a dark cave in the center of myself. Her voice kept making noise, but I didn’t listen.
Hot fingertips touched my forehead. My eyes popped open. I had to stare into her face, even though I wanted to turn away again. “Talk to me,” she said.
My voice tried to make a sound. Despair drowned me, and I let it choke the voice before it responded to Mama’s command.
Dad spoke: “Stop it, Anise! I forbid you to spell Gyp again! Leave her alone!”
“But Miles, she won’t speak to me,” Mama said. Her fingers stroked over my forehead. I felt the compulsions seep away, and I could close my eyes again.
“That’s right. Live with it,” Dad said.
Live with it? I didn’t know if I could live with what had happened. In my heart there was a broken place. In the image I had of family, there was a broken place.
In the fall, I went away to boarding school.
Three
GEORGE Fox High School was a small alternative-education Quaker boarding school on a farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, in Northern California near Reno, and I stayed there, even over the four-day holidays they had every month. Life was strange there; nobody was trying to be a witch. They were all more or less normal. After a while, I saw advantages to that. I even started to like it.
All the kids at Fox had work jobs that changed every term. I signed up for garbage detail first term, which was fun; we got to ride around in the school flatbed truck, collect garbage from all the cans around campus, and drive it to the dump, where stacks of strange and interesting discards from other peoples’ lives swarmed with rats. Occasionally we picked up cool free stuff for our dorm rooms or cabins.
Next term, I switched to babysitting for teachers while they taught.
Then I signed up to work on dinner prep, and something about that job woke up a sleeping part of myself. Making food for lots of people—after that horrible week when I couldn’t even choose what to make for myself—excited me. I studied the school cook’s talents and skills, and when she realized I was interested in more than just chopping vegetables and spoon-dropping cookies onto huge baking sheets, she taught me things.
Jasper and I wrote letters to each other. I wrote more often than he did, but his letters came with all kinds of surprises. I learned to sneak off into the hills to open them after a firebird flew out of one in the middle of the dining hall.
I went home for Christmas—Christmas was a big deal in our family, though not from the same traditions I saw at other people’s homes—and kept my distance from Mama. She didn’t spell me.
Summer was harder. My ideal summer had always been lazing around the house and reading, and now I was scared to do that, even though Mama said she’d leave me alone. I stuffed books into a backpack and ran off to Claire’s house most of the time. Claire’s mother had a beat-up La-Z-Boy on her porch that she called Gyp’s chair because I spent so much time in it, and their cat Bavol gave me a lot of laptime. Claire and I went to the beach together, sometimes with Beryl, Flint, and Jasper. We went to the mall and the movies. I watched Claire test-drive boyfriends. She wasn’t as good at it as Opal had been, but she knew how to tease. No boy ever looked twice at me unless I beat him at basketball. That was okay with me.
> Dad and Jasper gave us both driving lessons.
Gradually I found a way to live at home and not be scared. I went to boarding school for three years, and each summer I spent at home felt better. Mama made an effort to accept me the way I was. It wasn’t successful, but she stopped being obvious about all the things she hated about me.
So after I graduated from high school, I moved home.
TWO years later I was still living at home, working as an English tutor at the tutorial center at Santa Tekla City College. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do with my life.
I wasn’t following the usual path in my family, which was to go through transition and see where your gifts led you, then follow, if you could stand it. Opal’s gift led to her being a makeup artist in movies and TV, with a growing reputation for greatness. Jasper’s gift led him toward music, though it didn’t lead him out of the house. Flint’s gift confused the hell out of him, and Beryl kept hers quiet.
I asked Beryl about it once, on one of those nights when we made rootbeer floats and sat out on the high back porch, watching cars drive along the Old Coast Highway and Highway 101 below. “What am I going to be when I grow up?” she repeated. “I’m going to put off thinking about it as long as I can. I’m still technically a kid, Gyp. My only distinction so far is being the baby of the family. Gonna milk that for all it’s worth.”
When I talked to Dad about my future, he said I should take my time. People in his family were late bloomers. Wait. Try lots of different things. See what called me. So I went to City College and took lots of different classes. One of my English teachers told me they needed tutors at the Center, and since I wasn’t doing anything else with my afternoons, I went over there and got a job.
I met all kinds of people. That was the great thing about a city college, my supervisor, Jorge Diaz, told me. Lots of adults came for continuing education along with all the kids who were getting their first two years of college out of the way in a less expensive venue than the University of California. I met men and women from other countries who had come here to make new lives, older people who wanted to learn something new, and a bunch of kids my age and younger, who weren’t as fun to teach—not as motivated. I liked watching them tease each other, though. The Learning Center, the city college itself, they were both like boarding school: a place where I could teach myself by observation how to be a normal human being.
Every day I worked—I worked three days a week—I asked myself whether I wanted to make teaching my life’s work. The answer wasn’t clear to me yet. But at least I had something to talk to Dad about. He was a professor at UC Santa Tekla, and he taught me lots about how to communicate with students.
FLU was going through the college that winter, but I usually didn’t get sick. We had basic family spells to guard against illness that covered everybody in the household. Every once in a while something slipped through, though.
One weekend in early December, the whole family planned to go to L.A. to see Opal, who was working on the makeup for a big-budget monster movie and thought she could get everybody in to meet the star, Gerard Shelley.
My family usually didn’t get starstruck—we had a history of film work dating back to the teens, when the Ace of Hearts Studio shot westerns in the hills above Santa Tekla, and our grandparents were on the crew. Need special effects? Clever sets? Crafty costumes? Someone who could ride herd on a horde of extras without anyone complaining? Hire a LaZelle. We still had lots of relatives in L.A. working behind the scenes on all kinds of projects. We’d heard tons of stories about the stars and their clay feet; we didn’t awe easily, secure as we were in our own talents.
Thing was, Opal said Gerry was really nice, besides being an actor we had all admired in the four or five years since he started landing leading roles.
But Friday, after I got home from work, when everybody else was heading for the van, I went in the bathroom and threw up.
Beryl knocked on the bathroom door. “Aren’t you ready yet? Mama’s getting snippy.”
I swished water in my mouth to get rid of the bile taste. “I’m sick, Bere.”
She came in. “Sick sick?” She’d been sick that week, too, but not like this, though she’d missed a big history final. Somebody had muffed a health-protect spell.
I leaned on the sink, still holding the cup with some water in it, and measured how I felt. I thought about the pita pocket I’d had for lunch, and lurched back to the toilet so I could throw up again.
“Uh-oh,” said my little sister. She reached for my forehead.
“Don’t touch me. It’s probably the flu. It’s a twenty-four hour bug. Everybody else at the Center already got it. I’ve heard all the advice: lie in bed. Sleep lots. Drink 7-Up and lots of water when you can keep liquids down. Rest. Aspirin if there’s a fever.”
“I’ll go tell Mama I’m staying home with you.”
“It’s nothing, it’s just the flu. You feel bad for a little while and throw up and then it’s over. Go on. I’ll be okay.”
“But Gyp—”
“Beryl?” Mama called from below.
Beryl shook her hands, then ran out. I heard her footsteps cross the sitting room, then run down the hallway to the top of the stairs. She explained things to Mama. While she was doing that, I threw up one more time, and started feeling better right away. I washed my mouth out again and brushed my teeth. I gave the toilet a quick scrub, washed my hands, then headed back to my bedroom. Flannel nightgown, that was the ticket. Heap a couple extra blankets on the bed. The pillows looked like heaven. I lay down and wrapped up. My stomach felt sore.
A little while later, Mama came up to see me, even though she was terrible in the sickroom. She was wearing a shield; I saw glints around her edges, and I was glad. If she caught anything from me she would be upset, and when Mama got upset everybody felt it.
“Will you really be all right?” she asked.
“It’s mild,” I said. “Everybody else already had it. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”
She went to the bedside table. “Here’s my cell phone number.” She wrote it in my dream journal. She went out in the hall and got the upstairs phone, brought it in and set it on the table. Next she brought in a pitcher of water and a glass. “This pitcher will refill itself.” Then two two-liter bottles of 7-Up. “I put a spell on these so they’ll stay nice and cold, okay, honey?” She set a big box of saltines there too. “I wouldn’t let your father come up. I don’t want him catching this. But he asked if you want him to stay home with you.”
“No, no,” I said. “Go on.”
“Call if you need help. One of us will manage to get to you.” Instant travel was taxing but possible for Uncle Tobias and Mama, and easy but unreliable for Flint. Jasper had trouble with it.
“I will,” I said.
She blew me a kiss. It marked my cheek with warmth. “We really have to go, you know. What if Opal’s in love with this Gerry guy? We have to find out whether he’ll make a good addition to the family.”
“Go,” I said.
“We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon,” she said.
The plan was to stay with Opal all weekend, only coming home late Sunday night. We didn’t get down to L.A. very often, even though it was so close. Besides seeing Opal and meeting Gerry, the family had plans: the Huntington Museum; the Getty; Beverly Center. . . .
“I’ll be fine. Don’t change your plans on my account.” If they skipped everything to rush home and I wasn’t even sick, people would be mad at me.
For a second she looked anxious. Then she formed a spell in the palm of her hand and tossed it over my bed. I pulled the covers up to my chin. “It’s just a little guardian spell,” she said as I stared up into the blank air. “Something to give you strength if you need it.” Her voice sounded hurt.
“Thanks, Mama.” I closed my eyes and curled up tight under my blankets.
When I opened my eyes again it was much later. The room was dark. My blankets were wet through with sweat, and
I felt worse than I ever had in my life.
I fumbled for the phone, knocked my dream journal off the table, couldn’t seem to reach my aching arm high enough to turn on the light. When I lifted the phone’s handset, the buttons lit up. I dialed Claire’s old number; I knew that by heart.
July answered. Of course, July answered; Claire had moved into her own apartment a year earlier.
“Help,” I croaked.
Later, a light was on. July’s warm, swarthy face, her wide gray-green eyes, short pepper-and-salt hair hovered above me. “Hey, child. Hey.” She washed my face with a warm wet cloth. My skin was burning, but that soothed it. My stomach twisted and burned. My throat was swollen and hot.
“Thanks,” I whispered to her.
She lifted my head, held the water glass to my lips so I could drink. “This going to stay down?”
I drank. I waited for my stomach’s response. “Yes,” I whispered. “Thanks. Thanks.”
“Anytime, kiddo. How’d you end up so all alone?”
“Everybody went to L.A. I didn’t think I’d get this sick.”
“I talked to my friend the nurse. She said there’s a flu going around, but yours is the worst case she’s heard of. You know you were running a temperature of one-oh-five?”
“Didn’t know.” The room wavered. All the colors slid toward red.
“Rest,” she whispered, and I sank down grateful into darkness.
When I woke up again, I felt fine, and there was daylight beyond the curtains. July sprawled in a chair by my bed, her face tired and old in repose. I felt so grateful to her. I took a shower, got dressed, went downstairs and cooked a big breakfast. Was that right? I checked the clock after I’d made two ham and cheese omelettes with green onions and avocado in them. Noon. Hmm.
I set the breakfasts on a tray with cutlery and napkins, coffee in white ceramic mugs, cream and sugar in Mama’s best crystal service. I took the whole thing upstairs.
The smell of coffee brought July awake. “Oh, man! Room service! Gyp’s cooking. I love Gyp’s cooking!” We ate our omelettes with our plates on our laps in my room. “Guess you’re feeling better,” she said after she had finished.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 4