by Mindy Klasky
CHAPTER 15
“TOO?” I ASKED, SO SHOCKED THAT I COULDN’T PUT together a true sentence, couldn’t express the utter confusion that buffeted me.
Ryan asked, “Anana is your genie?”
“Teel,” the meddling old creature said by way of self-introduction. She extended her hand to shake his, letting her sleeve creep up to reveal her flame tattoo. The individual tongues of fire wove back and forth, twisting around themselves as if they were excited by their proximity to the Garden. Ryan’s attention was snagged, stolen by their hypnotic spell.
Irritated by the feeling that everyone else knew what was going on except for me, I clapped my hands to get Ryan’s attention. The brief sting of my palms fed the block of ice that was settling in my belly, freezing my anger into a righteous ballast. “Hello! ‘You have a genie, too?’ So you’re saying that you’ve got one? And you never told me?” As Ryan spluttered a nonresponse, I rounded on Teel. “And what the hell are the odds on that?” Teel whistled tunelessly, a snatch of song that her character sang in the first scene of However Long. “You had to know! Don’t give me that innocent act!”
She pouted. “Well, I did tell you about Jaze, didn’t I? That I was hoping to share my time in the Garden with someone special?”
Yeah, she’d told me. Over and over again—but I’d always assumed that Teel’s romantic dreams were just a touch of added drama, cheap manipulation to get me to speed up my wish-making. “Jaze is Ryan’s genie? And you’ve known that all along? Without telling me? Telling us?”
Teel raised one lined hand. “Guilty as charged.” She shrugged, her shoulders moving as if she were a much younger woman. “What can I say? MAGIC fired us up. The Decadium got us all excited to get into the Garden. It made your human world seem…boring. But Jaze and I thought it might be entertaining to see what happened when two of our humans got together. We wondered how long it would take for the two of you to figure it out. You really weren’t very clever, were you?” Teel must have recognized the look of fury on my face. She blurted out, “It was all Jaze’s idea.”
“I don’t believe it,” I shouted. “You’ve been manipulating me—manipulating us—from day one!”
“You got your wishes,” Teel said sullenly.
Before I could retort, Ryan finally succeeded in dragging his eyes away from Teel’s wrist. The expression on his face was so dazed, though, so confused, that I half expected his eyes to swirl like pinwheels when he looked at me. “I never dreamed you had a genie, too.”
I whirled back to Teel. “So let me get this straight. You and Jaze purposely brought Ryan and me together, just to see what would happen? Like we were some sort of experiment? Some sort of rats in a maze?”
Teel said, “Not exactly. Or not completely.” She looked at Ryan and prompted, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
When he didn’t answer, I snapped, “Ryan! Did you know about this? Did you just forget to mention it, like you forgot to mention Pam? Like you forgot to mention your software project?”
“No!” The vehemence of his reply chased away the last of his hypnotized response to my genie. “I never knew you had…Teel,” he said. “And I didn’t think I could tell you about Jaze. I thought the words would just get stuck in my throat. You know, the whole silence thing?” he said.
Yeah. The silence thing. Like he’d been silent about Pam, about his past.
I let some of the ice inside me freeze my words as I glared at Teel. “Could you give us a minute alone?” I waved my hand, indicating the general direction of the Garden. “Can’t you go watch the birds fly, or something? Spend some time smelling flowers through the gate?” Teel’s eyebrows drew together in consternation, and I thought that she was going to refuse my request. “That’s why you brought us here, right? You wanted to give us a chance to talk?”
“I thought that was what you wanted.” Teel’s old woman voice was stretched tight with a curious haughtiness. “I thought that you wanted to discuss lies, and the type of person who tells them. You know, to supposed friends.”
Even as I tried to parse those words, tried to figure out what I could possibly have done to earn Teel’s scorn, my genie pulled herself up to her full, if diminutive, height. Her silver hair gave her a halo of dignity as she stepped toward me. Stepped toward me, then glided around Ryan, then took several steps away into the gray distance.
Only when she raised her hands, curling her fingers around invisible iron bars, did I realize that I’d completely mislocated the Garden. In my frustration with Ryan, in my absolute surprise to find him there, I’d forgotten to wait for Teel’s cues, forgotten to stall while she let me know exactly where the Garden was, exactly what she was seeing.
I was totally busted.
But first things first. I clenched my arms around my frozen core and turned back to Ryan. “Go ahead,” I said. “What other things did you forget to tell me? Let me guess. You’re actually a government spy from a supersecret agency, and you’ve got a license to kill? No! Wait! You’re the heir to an Eastern European throne, with millions of dollars locked up in Swiss bank accounts. No! Better! You never actually wrote However Long, you just found the manuscript on a table in a coffee shop, and you decided to pretend that it was yours!”
The disappointment on my tongue turned my words as bitter as kola nut—with or without cheddar popcorn. “That’s not fair,” Ryan said. “Becca, I know this must be a shock, finding out about Jaze, but there was no way for me to tell you about her. At least, I didn’t think there was, since I didn’t know you had your own genie.”
His words pricked my conscience with enough guilt that I recalled my own efforts to talk about my magical encounters. I thought about that day, weeks ago, when I’d tried to talk to Jenn, when I’d tried to tell her about the bizarre gift that Kira had left for me. I remembered the way my throat had closed up, the way the words had just stopped.
Okay. So, he had a point. About the genie. “But what about Pam? Oh, I know! She had supernatural powers, too! She made you go silent whenever you tried to say her name!”
He sucked in a quick breath, and I knew I’d scored a point. I also knew that he was going to run his fingers through his hair, ending with the curls that were just a little too long, the ones that brushed against the back collar of his shirt. I knew that he was going to hunch his shoulders and sigh. I knew that he was going to look up at me through his eyelashes.
I knew Ryan.
Except, I didn’t.
I knew all those superficial things, all those mannerisms, all those actions that anyone in the world could see, if they only watched him long enough. But I didn’t know his thoughts. I didn’t know the way his mind really worked, the way he chose what to share and what to keep buried inside forever. I didn’t know the real, true him. Just like I hadn’t known Dean.
“Pam…” he started, but he trailed off as if he were searching for an answer. Well, he could stare off into the nonexistent scenery all day long, but he wasn’t going to find any guidance there.
He squared his shoulders and tried again. “Pam was part of my past. A part that I’m not proud of. I let myself get sucked into the world I thought that we—that she and I—shared. I let myself believe we had a future together, that we had a real relationship. But it wasn’t based on anything. Not anything real. And when she sold the software, when I finally realized…” He shook his head as he trailed off. “Something just broke inside me. I started to question everything I’d ever done, everything I was.” His hands worked, clenching and unclenching. “Becca, I needed to build a whole new life for myself I know you’ll never understand, but I needed to start from ground zero.”
But he was wrong. I did understand. At least a little bit.
When Dean disappeared, he tore down the ramparts of both my professional and my personal life. His embezzlement revealed his true colors, but money wasn’t all he’d stolen. He’d taken my confidence. My faith in myself.
And I’d selected However Long as my pat
h back. My method of rebuilding my own identity.
The brick of ice in my belly started to melt, especially when I thought about how little I’d told Ryan about Dean. Not that I’d really needed to share that dirty laundry. There was plenty of gossip about Dean and me posted on ShowTalk. I said to Ryan, “Okay, so maybe I can understand your need to separate the past from the present. But to never even mention her? To wall off a part of you that is so important, that made you who you are today?”
He caught my gaze and held it. “You’re right. I should have told you about Pam.”
The admission was so honest, so frank, that I caught my breath in astonishment. Unable to let the argument drop so suddenly, though, I said, “I was embarrassed to hear about her from your mother.”
“I understand,” he said. “That must have been really awkward.”
I continued the debate, even though he wasn’t engaging. “I mean, Dani hardly seems like your mother, like anyone’s mother, but she thought I knew, and I had no idea, and it was so uncomfortable for both of us—”
“You’re right,” he said for a third time. The chunk of ice inside me splintered, shards of bitter cold breaking away like an iceberg calving into the ocean. At least until he said, “But there’s more I need to tell you. More that you should know, more that I think you’ll understand, since you have…Teel.”
I didn’t want Ryan to tell me more. I didn’t want to hear anything else that might break my heart. But we’d had enough of supposedly protective silence between us. I braced myself and said, “Go ahead.”
“You need to know about my wishes. I found Jaze’s lamp in a used bookstore, four, almost five years ago. My first wish was to make Pam, um, love me.”
Love him. Somehow, I couldn’t picture a guy making that wish—it was too princess-and-pony, too dream-date-for-the-prom. “Sure,” I said. “Love.”
He blushed. “Okay. I wanted her to…want me.” He shot another look at me from under those eyelashes. For a man who made his living by words, he seemed completely uncomfortable with the ones he was choosing right now. “That was part of the problem between Pam and me,” he wobbled on. “I started things under…under false pretenses. And when I thought I really loved her, she wasn’t interested. Had never been interested. Had only been caught by Jaze.”
Ouch. I decided to let him off the hook about word choice. “So what was your second wish?”
“I wanted to sell the writing software.” I nodded in sudden understanding as Ryan went on. “The way it all played out, I was furious with myself for not making my true wish clearer. I blamed Jaze for playing tricks on me. I blamed Pam. If she’d just told me about the deal before making it final, if she’d warned me about the exclusivity clause, I probably could have fixed things. But she didn’t, and everything just collapsed around me. Around us.” He shook his head. “She was so proud of herself for making the sale. And I was so angry with her. And she was still being driven by…manipulated by…my first wish, so we ended up hurting each other even more, understanding each other even less.” He closed his eyes against the old emotions. When he continued speaking, his voice was very soft. “I’d made huge mistakes, with both my wishes.”
His hurt was so obviously raw that I settled my palm against his arm, trying to soothe him. He jumped a little at my touch, and his eyes flew open. I held his gaze and said, “And your third wish?”
“The Peace Corps. I’d thought about it before. I’d imagined the things that I could do, the places I could go. I came back to it seriously, though, when I realized what a mess I’d made of everything in New York, everything with Pam. I thought I could…redeem myself by going to Africa.”
I heard the doubt in his voice, the judgment he was casting on himself. “But?” I prompted.
“But using the wish was cheating. I mean, people apply to the Peace Corps and then wait months, even years for placement. I just spoke to Jaze, and bam! I was heading to Burkina Faso in two weeks, job, visa, inoculations, all in order.”
“But you did do great things while you were there! You helped people. And you wrote However Long. Your work was good enough that we picked it up, even though you came to us outside our usual process.”
He took a deep breath and stepped away from me. My fingers curled into the empty space where they’d been touching his sleeve. “That’s the thing,” he said. “However Long. That was my fourth wish. To have the Mercer produce my play.”
I felt like he’d punched me in my stomach.
His play. His amazing play. The one I’d read, the one I’d championed, the one I’d moved heaven and Hal to produce…All because of a wish? All because of a genie’s manipulation?
He had to be lying. I didn’t know why yet, but he had to be making up a story.
But I remembered waking up with a sudden compulsion to read However Long. I remembered knowing that it was perfect, that Hal had to select it. I remembered knocking on Ryan’s door to share my good news, our good news, to tell him that we’d selected his play. And I remembered his strange reaction, the way he’d taken two deep breaths, as if he were ashamed.
As if he were guilty.
As if he’d used magic to achieve his fourth and final dream.
Sudden tears pricked the backs of my eyes. I had to be a better judge of theater than that! I had years of education behind me, countless hours spent reading endless scripts…. I knew a good play when I read it. I couldn’t have been fooled by Jaze, by Ryan, by a stupid, idiotic wish.
Nausea twisted through my gut, and I forced myself to take deep breaths. This wasn’t happening to me. This couldn’t be real. My first solo choice as a dramaturg, my first declaration of independence from Dean Marcus, couldn’t have been because I’d been manipulated by someone else’s magic.
I remembered that night at the Pharm, the night that Jenn had handed over the bribes from other playwrights. I’d spent so much time convincing myself that I’d been right, that I’d been fair. That I’d followed all the rules.
And all that time, it had never occurred to me that I was being manipulated in a far more subtle way. I’d been dragged through ethical breaches I hadn’t even imagined existed. Ryan’s wish had forced me to forfeit every moral standard I’d ever worried about as a dramaturg.
But then, as clear as the nightingale song that I couldn’t hear in the Garden, I realized something. However Long was a good play. The story was strong. The characters were unique. The language was pure poetry.
Ryan may have wished his play into rapid production, but he’d only expedited his success. In the ordinary course of business, I would have eventually gotten around to reading his manuscript, eventually plucked it out of the pile on my desk. I would have recognized the script’s inherent power. I would have suggested it to Hal, worked to bring it into the Mercer.
All of that would have just happened a few years further down the line.
Even as I took comfort in my realization, a tiny part of me was struck by the absurd irony of the situation. If Ryan hadn’t wasted his last wish on getting my attention, However Long might have been in a stronger position to debut. A year from now, two years from now, Dean’s theft would be ancient history. The Mercer would have rebuilt its ties with its traditional sponsors. We’d never have become indebted to the Popcorn King. I never would have stormed into rehearsal, ranting about Ronald’s insulting popcorn flavors. I never would have started screaming at Ryan like a madwoman, and Teel never would have intervened by taking us away, taking us both to the Garden.
I never would have known that Ryan had a genie, too.
“Okay,” I said, realizing that Ryan was still standing in front of me. I could read the agony on his face, the absolute certainty that I could never forgive his manipulation, his turning me into the object of his fourth and final wish. It was time for me to speak. “I understand.”
“Really?” The tiniest spark of hope brightened his face. “And you don’t hate me?”
“I don’t hate you. Any more than you sho
uld hate me, for moving in across the hall.”
I watched him process that. “One of your wishes?”
“Not specifically. I mean, not across the hall from you. But after I realized Dean had left me with no place to live, I had to do something. My first wish was for a place to live. Teel stole your address from the copy of However Long that was on my desk. She and Jaze must have loved that opportunity to mess with our minds.”
“And your second wish?”
“For clothes, back when I didn’t have anything. When all of my possessions were still wrapped up in Dean’s police investigation. I wished for the wardrobe that got us through all those business meetings. And my third was for the Gray Guerillas.”
“You used a wish to help my mother?”
I nodded. “After I saw what the Grays were doing, after you showed me how to plant the seeds, and I watched those little plants sprout…I had to do something when Dani was arrested. Had to let others have the same experience. I mean, I didn’t plan on getting the mayor involved, but…”
“So, you have one wish left?”
“And I’m saving it for a rainy day.” I think that the old cliché made us both think of seed bombs, of the type of dark and stormy night that was perfect for guerilla attacks. We smiled at each other.
“Hey,” I said. “What did you do with your lamp? After you made your last wish?”
“I packaged it up and sent it to Burkina Faso. To a woman in the village where I was stationed, the model for Fanta. I knew that she’d be able to use the wishes, and I liked the idea of putting a genie in circulation there.”
I liked that idea, too. I wasn’t sure how Jaze would fit in to African village life, once her sabbatical was over in the Garden. But one thing was for sure. She’d be appreciated. Probably more than I could ever imagine.
Ryan cleared his throat. “Becca, I’m not even sure what we were fighting about back there, in the theater. I mean, I know I was furious with Ronald, but I never should have taken it out on you. Or on Jenn. Or on you about Jenn.”