The Toil and Trouble Trilogy, Book One

by Val St. Crowe

  * * *

  The invisibility charm looks just like the charms we’re selling outside the shows. Brice shows me how it works backstage during the play. He slips it over his head, and he simply disappears. It’s pretty neat. After the show, we get out of our costumes as quickly as possible. It’s ten o’clock, and we only have two hours. All magic stops at midnight, so the charms won’t work after that. Also, there’s the fact that Brice will change into a berserker. Which I don’t like to think about.

  Brice is excited. We take the bus into the city. I don’t like to drive there. I can never find anywhere to park, and the car always seems like more of a hassle than it’s worth. We don’t talk about what we’re going to do as we stare at the lights of the city across the water through the bus window. Instead, Brice insists we should pretend we don’t speak English. He says it will be fun, because it will be like an acting exercise. We have to try to communicate without actual words, just using inflections.

  We make up gibberish words and babble them to each other constantly as we get on the bus. We pretend we can’t understand if anyone says anything to us like, “Can you move your feet out of the aisle?”

  It’s hard not to erupt into giggles, but I manage to “stay in character.” I don’t point out to Brice that being foreign people who speak a language no one has ever heard before probably makes us more conspicuous than we would be otherwise. It doesn’t matter that much anyway. I doubt that we have to worry about arousing suspicion.

  Because the jettatori families are a city-wide problem, I know that the records are kept in a central location. The Records Bureau is housed in the back of the Midtown Precinct. I know this because Nonna brought me here to meet a lawyer once, when my father was going to trial. I’ve never been inside, but I saw the door when we were there. The lawyer came out of it carrying a big box of files. Overall, the lawyer didn’t do a very good job for my dad. I guess most of those files were about how my dad really was a criminal.

  The bus drops us off within a few blocks of the Bureau. We duck into an alley and don charms. Instantly, Brice winks out of sight. I do too. It’s very strange to wave my hands in front of my face and not see them. I laugh in delight.

  “Where are you?” says Brice’s disembodied voice. Something collides with my face. It’s Brice’s hand. “Oh, there you are.”

  “Ow.”

  “We should hold hands so we don’t get separated.”

  “Good idea.”

  It takes a second for Brice and me to find each other’s hands. Then we start off down the block. It’s very strange. I’ve never realized before how much I rely on seeing my legs to walk. For the first block or so, it’s slow going as Brice and I step and stumble, trying to figure out how far to lift our legs and how far to step. Eventually, Brice whispers to me, “It’s probably easier if you just stare straight ahead.”

  So we try that. And it is easier. Mostly. Except we do nearly go sprawling when we encounter uneven sidewalks.

  The Midtown Precinct is open, but we just stand outside of it when we reach it. I don’t want to open the door and have someone inside think it’s weird to see the door open on its own. Finally someone comes by and goes into the building. I tug Brice forward so that we can slide in before the door closes.

  Inside, there is a metal detector right as we come in. I lead Brice around it. The guy who is manning the metal detector doesn’t even look up from his magazine. Behind the metal detector, there is a polished dark wood counter with carved wooden edges. Two women are behind it. Both of them are on the phone. There’s a little swinging door, only the height of the counter, which allows people to walk back into the rest of the building. On the far wall, I can see the door labeled “Records.”

  Brice and I follow the person who went in the door before us, who’s just gotten through the metal detector, through the swinging door. We dodge people walking around behind the counter and weave our way back to the Records door. I try the knob.

  It’s locked.

  I feel immediately idiotic. What was I thinking? Of course the door would be locked. What are we going to do? Stand here and hope someone who has the key comes by and opens it? How could I have been so stupid? I swear under my breath.

  “Is it locked?” Brice whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “Hold on.” I can feel him reach around me and put his hand on the lock. All I see are a few blue sparks.

  I look around anxiously to see if anyone else saw. But the women at the counter are still talking on the phone. They aren’t even facing us. And any other people around are only paying attention to where they’re walking.

  The doorknob turns. Brice must be turning it. The door opens a little bit. I take one more look around. Then I drag Brice after me into the Records Room. Once we’re inside, I carefully shut the door.

  It’s dark inside.

  A beam of light appears right next to me. “I brought a flashlight,” says Brice.

  Thank God one of us has a brain. Honestly, I’m glad I let Brice talk me into letting him come. This would have been a really useless trip without him.

  The beam of light sweeps the enormous room. There are rows and rows of shelves, each straining under the weight of file boxes. The shelves travel so far back that I can’t see the end of the room. How are we going to go through all of this?

  “Whoa,” says Brice.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Brice shines the light up onto the side of one of the shelves directly in front of us. “Files by Suspect Last Name,” it says. “Ba-Br.”

  Good. At least there’s a relatively easy to understand filing system.

  Brice suddenly pops into sight next to me, holding his charm. “No one’s in here, anyway,” he says.

  I take mine off too. It’s a relief to see my body again. I take a second to look it over, just to make sure everything’s still there. I don’t think I like being invisible that much.

  “Let’s find the Cs,” says Brice.

  I follow him down the aisles between the shelves as he shines the flashlight on the boxes. We search for a long time, but eventually, we find the boxes labeled Calabrese. There are a lot of them. Some of the boxes have files on more than one person in them, so the box is labeled, “Calabrese, Paul; Calabrese, Pia; Calabrese, Oscar.” My father has two boxes all to himself. My mother is sandwiched in a box with my great-grandfather and two of my uncles. It’s on the top shelf. We have to hunt for a step ladder to get up and get it.

  I climb up and take the box off the shelf. I hand it down to Brice. Together, we take the top off and search for the files on my mother. There’s only one folder. I pull it out. My heart is pounding in my chest. There’s a picture of my mother paper-clipped  to the front of the folder. I look into her eyes, wondering if I really do look like her. I’m not sure if I see it myself.

  I open the folder.

  The door to the Records Room opens and someone flicks on a light switch. The room is bathed in light. Brice put his charm back on. I do too.

  A woman is walking into the room. She’s dressed in a black suit. She wears a name tag clipped to her label and a badge on a necklace around her neck. She doesn’t wear any makeup, and her hair is pulled up in a ponytail. For some reason, I feel a strange kinship with the woman. There is something about the way she walks. She seems tough too. If things were different, maybe we’d be friends. But she’s the police. The enemy.

  She is humming to herself as she strolls past the shelves.

  Brice and I don’t dare move the box. It would make noise. We’re still crouched on the floor, the file box open on the ground.

  The woman is about to walk past the aisle where we are hiding.

  I hold my breath.

  She walks right by.

  I let the breath out.

  She stops walking. She backtracks. She looks down the aisle. She sighs. “Guess they figure I’ll clean it up, since I’m a woman,” she mutters. She starts down the aisle.

 
I try to back away from the box without making any noise, but I’m still holding my mother’s file. It drags against the ground. I freeze at the sound.

  The woman makes a face, confused. She looks around. “Hello?” she calls. When no one answers, she surveys the box. “Fuck it,” she says. She turns and heads back up the aisle, continuing on to wherever she was going in the first place.

  I wait for several seconds, until I’m sure she has really gone. Carefully, I put my mother’s file against my chest. I stand up, feeling around for Brice. I can’t feel him.

  I can hear the woman a few aisles down, still humming to herself. I can’t speak to Brice. She’ll hear me.

  I stretch out in every direction, dragging my invisible hand through the air. No Brice. Where is he? Did he move? I take a silent step in the direction towards the door and feel around again. Still nothing.

  I take another step and repeat the process. I can’t find him. I’m afraid I’m moving in the wrong direction. I have the file. I’d like to just get out of here. But I can’t leave Brice. I have to find him.

  How long can that police woman stay in here, anyway?

  Right now, she’s turning down an aisle, still humming. She walks halfway down, so she is exactly even with me. She crouches down to read the names on the bottom shelf. I can see her face. If I weren’t invisible, she’d be able to look right over at me and see me too. My heart is pounding.

  The woman slides a box out. She pulls out three file folders, then puts the lid on the box and slides it back in place.

  Good. Maybe now she’ll leave.

  But she doesn’t. She goes to another file box and does the same thing. Then another file box, this one further away. While she’s in the depths of the file room, I tiptoe around the aisle, feeling for Brice as I do. I still can’t find him. I don’t know what to do.

  In all, the woman goes to six different boxes. It seems to take an agonizingly long time. During all this, I still can’t find Brice. I walk up and down the entire aisle. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere. I wonder if he’s just gone without me. Did he go to the door? Is he waiting for me outside? If only I could be sure.

  Finally, the woman comes back in the direction of the door, her arms full of file folders. She pauses at the opening to the aisle where I’ve been waiting. She shrugs. “Ah, what the hell?” She comes down the aisle and places the lid on the box we’ve left lying on the floor. She looks at the front of the box to see where it belongs.

  She narrows her eyes when she sees the name. She stands up straight, looking around the file room. Her eyes slide over me and stop. I could swear she can see me, but I can’t even see myself.

  She crouches down by the box again and lifts the lid. She shuffles through the contents.

  Damn it. She’s looking to see if anything is missing.

  “Gianna Calabrese,” she murmurs. My mother’s name. She knows the file is gone. She shakes her head. “No one would be using that file. Would they?” She looks around the file room again, suspicion all over her face.

  I really don’t like this.

  Suddenly, fingers brush my own. Brice! He takes my hand in his own.

  I can’t stand being in here anymore, so I head towards the door and pull him along with me. Once there, I slowly and quietly turn the knob. As the door opens, I keep my eye on the police woman. She doesn’t notice. Brice and I tumble out of the records room.

  It isn’t until we’re blocks away that we stop running. Both of us are out of breath. Brice drops my hand. I hear him wheezing next to me on the street. “Where were you?” he asks. “I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

  “I was trying to find you,” I say.

  A man on the street next to us cocks his head and looks confused as to where our voices are coming from. We’re still invisible. We join hands again and walk until we find a space between the buildings where we can duck out of sight and take off the charms.

  I’m relieved again to see my body, and to see Brice, who pushes sweaty hair away from his forehead. “You got the file, right?” he asks.

  I show it to him. I want to sit down right here and read it, but it’s dark, and we need to keep moving. “That woman knows it’s gone now.”

  “No one could know we have it,” Brice says. “They couldn’t see us.”

  He’s right, of course, but it makes me nervous.

  When we get back to the bus stop, there are a bunch of people crowded there. It seems like more than would usually be taking a bus back to the island at this time on a weeknight, but I don’t regularly take the bus, so I don’t know. Still, as I look around at the throng, I wonder if we’re all going to fit. Brice, being much more outgoing than me, strikes up a conversation with one of the people waiting.

  “What’s going on?” Brice asks.

  The man is smoking a cigarette. He flicks ash from it furiously. “The 11:15 bus didn’t show up,” he says. “And the 11:26 bus is already five minutes late.”

  It’s 11:30 already? How did it get so late? We must have spent more time searching for each other in the records room than I thought. This isn’t good. It’s getting too close to midnight.

  “That’s not good,” Brice says. “Any idea what’s wrong?”

  The man puffs on his cigarette. “We’re at the mercy of the transit system here.”

  The only other way home besides the bus is the ferry. The ferry terminal is blocks and blocks from here, a long walk—maybe even an hour. It’s probably not worth it even to consider it. Of course, maybe we could take the subway to the terminal. “Does the ferry run overnight?”

  “It leaves on the hour,” says the man. “I’m thinking about heading down there myself. Who knows when the bus is going to show up, or if they’ll even be enough room.”

  I swallow hard. If the ferry leaves on the hour, then the next one won’t leave until midnight. Which will be too late. We can stay and wait for the bus, but even if we get on it before midnight, we won’t reach our destination before midnight. Brice is a ticking time bomb.

  Brice smiles at the man we’ve been talking to. “Thanks man.” He leads me away from the crowd at the bus stop. “You were right. I shouldn’t have come,” he says to me in a low voice.

  “I didn’t think it would take so long in the records room. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I pushed for it. I wanted to come. It was a stupid idea.”

  “Look, if we can find someplace to lock you up for an hour, we can catch the ferry back afterwards.”

  “At two, you mean? Because we’ll never make the one o’clock ferry.”

  With a sinking sensation, I realize he’s right. We’re not going to get home until late.

  “Where are we going to lock me up, anyway?” he says.

  And if I can’t contain Brice, he might not be going home at all. A berserker on the streets will get picked up by the police in a second and taken off to one of the asylums. If he’s crazy violent, or if he’s killed someone, the police might just shoot him. I’m starting to feel panicky. Think, think, think, I order myself. Where can we lock up Brice? “I don’t know yet. It needs to be someplace that you can’t break out of. Someplace sturdy.”

  “Yeah, I guess the trunk of your car wasn’t great before.”

  “I don’t have my car anyway.”

  “There are cars around, though, aren’t there? If we could open a trunk, would it be safe?”

  “I don’t know. How would we do that anyway?”

  Brice waves his hand at me. Sparks of blue travel between his fingers. He did open the locked door at the police station, didn’t he?

  “What about a basement?” I say. “These old apartment buildings have basements, right?”

  “Yeah, if they haven’t turned the basements into illegal apartments, I guess they do.”

  We don’t find a basement for at least twenty minutes. It’s a difficult process, wandering around the building, looking for doors that lead down, putting on our charms and going inside to scope out the d
oorways. I’m nearly ready to shove him in a trunk when we do find a basement. It’s small, and it’s dank and dusty, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be fun in there, but the door is solid, and I don’t think Brice will be able to get out. By this point, he’s starting to get antsy, and I can tell the change is coming soon.

  I kind of hate locking him up in there. He doesn’t complain, though. He just gets inside. As I’m closing the door, he says, “I’m sorry about this, Olivia.”

  But there’s no more time to talk about it.

  It’s a long hour. At first, I can hear Brice screaming in pain as he changes. Then I can hear thumps and roars of rage as he tries to get free of his prison. I sit outside on the sidewalk because I’m afraid he’ll get loose. I’m also worried about what people will think if they see me just sitting there, but I can’t make myself invisible, because the charms don’t work anymore. Once activated, all magic tied to objects breaks loose at midnight. No one really knows why. It just stops working. From a business perspective, it’s a good thing, since it means that once we sell someone a charm, they can’t use it indefinitely, so we’ve never tried to work around it. Right now, I wish we had.

  I don’t feel frightened, even though I’m alone in the city. Maybe I should, but my worry is focused on Brice and our situation. I don’t see too many people, and most that I do see walking by don’t pay much attention. A bum does wander by and ask me for change. I tell him to get lost, and he does.

  After what seems like a very long time, it’s one o’clock. I let Brice out of the basement. His hands and face are bloody because he’s been throwing himself up against concrete walls. His fingernails are ruined from scrabbling at corners, trying to dig himself out. He looks tired and haggard.

  We make our way to the subway station and catch a train to the ferry terminal. As we sit inside the train, which only has a few other people on it, Brice asks me, “So what did the file say?”

  I realize I haven’t even looked at it. I take it out and open it so that we can both look. The heading on the first page says, “Gianna Calabrese-Informant.”

  I slam the file closed, shaking my head. It’s true. My mother betrayed the family. My mother ratted people out to the police. It’s the worst thing I can think of to do, and my mother did it. I feel disgusted and numb. And I also feel bad that I’ve made Brice go through everything he’s gone through tonight, all for this information. Information that I almost wish I didn’t have.

  Brice gently pries the file out of my hands and opens it. “You were hoping she didn’t give the police evidence, huh?”

  I don’t say anything. Brice is reading the file. I almost want to take it from him and rip it up into little pieces, but I don’t do that. I don’t do anything. I do my best to wrap my head around this new piece of information, which makes my mother seem like a completely different person than I thought she was.

  Brice keeps reading until we get off the subway. Then we make our way into the ferry terminal, which is practically empty. We have to wait another half hour or so before the two-o’clock ferry arrives. We sit on some benches. Brice hands the file back to me.

  “I’m sorry about all of this,” I tell him. “I’m sorry I got you involved. This hardly seems worth it now.”

  “But you know the truth,” says Brice. “No matter how bad it makes you feel, at least you know the truth now.”

  I don’t respond.

  “Do you want to know what else is in the file?”

  I start to say that I don’t, but I realize that I’m lying. I do want to know. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “She did help them nab your father,” says Brice, opening the folder. “You can see the information she gave on different occasions. Most of it is about your father’s whereabouts. She didn’t know much about his illegal activities, apparently, so she never has much to say about that.”

  “My father would have kept it from her. It’s not jettatori practice to talk business with women.”

  Brice raises his eyebrows at me. “So how are you doing anything you do, then?”

  “I’m not like other girls,” I say. “I’m not particularly feminine.”

  Brice laughs. “Right.”

  “What? You disagree?”

  “I, um...” He blushes. “I think you seem pretty feminine. I mean, from what I remember, anyway.”

  I realize he’s talking about what happened in the dugout. I feel embarrassed too. “I was just drunk that night. It was a bad day.”

  He looks away. “Yeah, I guess it was. What happened to me must have been pretty horrible for you. I mean, we were almost... and then...”

  I clap him on the back. “Hey. It was rougher for you, I’m sure. And tonight. You’re all bleeding and scratched up. I just keep getting you into messy situations.”

  “I’m okay. I’m fine.” He gestures at the file. “You want me to keep going?”

  I nod.

  “She was supposed to testify against your father at his trial,” says Brice, “but she disappeared.”

  “She was killed,” I say. “By stray gunfire when they arrested my dad.”

  “The file says disappeared,” Brice says.

  I snatch it from him. He’s right. There’s no mention of her death. Does that mean that she wasn’t killed by stray gunfire? Did my father shoot her? Did Angelo shoot her? I don’t know the answer to that question. “Why would my mother do this? Why would she betray us?”

  Brice takes the file away from me again and closes it. “One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t trust your family.”

  I can’t believe he’s said that. Family is the only thing I trust. The most sacred thing. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they lie to you. They screw you over.”

  “No. They’re your family. They’re the only people you can trust.”

  “Not my family,” he says.

  I think about Brice’s family. His parents are benedette. They’re older, and they’re traditional. They seem solid. I don’t get it. “Your family is—”

  “All a lie,” says Brice. “My parents aren’t my parents.”

  “You’re adopted?” That seems strange, because Brice totally resembles his family.

  He laughs, but he sounds bitter. “Not exactly. I found out a year ago. My parents are actually my grandparents. My sister is actually my mother. She got pregnant right out of high school. She didn’t want anyone to know, so they hid it.”

  Oh. “I’m sorry.”

  “She got married when I was seven or eight. She had two other kids. And to this day, even though she I knows I know, she still treats me like a kid brother. She left me. She abandoned me. I’m like a dirty secret she just pretends never happened. Do you know what it’s like to find out that everything you ever believed about yourself and your family is a lie?”

  I look down at the file. Maybe I do know. I take Brice’s hand. We look at each other. I squeeze his fingers. He squeezes mine back.

   

  Chapter Six

  Nonna is waiting up for me when I get home. She is not happy. “Have you been with that boy, Olivia?” she says the minute I come in the door.

  The truth is that I have. But it’s not like that. So I dodge the question. “I wouldn’t be so stupid as to get involved with a boy who’s a berserker. Give me some credit.” I go back the hallway to my bedroom.

  Nonna follows me. “You know how that disease gets spread, don’t you, Olivia? If you and that boy are sinning, God will punish you. You will become a beast, just like him.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Nonna. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “If you weren’t with him, where were you?”

  “I just lost track of time,” I say. “After the play, I was hanging out with the cast, and we didn’t realize how late it was.”

  She shakes her head at me. “You are lying to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I hear things about you. I hear things from people. At church. They say you are
working with your father’s family. That you are working with the jettatori.”

  Nonna doesn’t know about what I’m doing. We aren’t supposed to talk to the women about it. And besides, she wouldn’t understand. “Listen,” I begin.

  But she cuts me off. “I tell them that the jettatori don’t allow teenage girls to work for them, and they say to me that you are different. They say to me that you are the one who killed Joey Ercalono.”

  Jesus. How is this getting out? If everyone knows this, I could be in trouble. A lot of trouble. I’m a murderer and if the police find this out... “That’s crazy, Nonna.”

  “That’s what I say. I say that’s crazy.” She grabs my arm and turns me, forcing me to look her in the eye. “But here you are home in the middle of the night. And I hope to God that it’s because of a boy. Tell me you are just in love. Tell me it’s only that.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “I just lost track of time. Really.”

  Her eyes are welling up with tears. “I told your mother that if she married your father, I would never speak to her again, but I couldn’t hold to that promise because I loved her too much. And I can threaten you that if you are doing things with your father’s family, that I will disown you, and I will kick you from under my roof, but I don’t think I will do that. Olivia, you are all I have left.”

  She’s making me feel uncomfortable. Guilty. I try to pull away from her. “Nonna, I’m tired.”

  “Be careful, Olivia. And be sure you know what you’re getting into. Please, be careful.”

  “I was just out late after the play,” I say. But she doesn’t believe me. I can see that. “I’m always careful.”

  She nods. Once. “Good.” Then she toddles down the hall, looking suddenly like a very old woman, despite all her fire. I feel like I want to cry, but I swallow it down, the way I always do. I hate to think I’m hurting Nonna. I love Nonna.

  I undress and get into bed. I lie there, in the darkness, wishing I knew what to do. If my mother betrayed my father, maybe she did it for a good reason. If my father is responsible for my mother’s death, how can I obey him? Do I know what I’ve gotten myself into?

  Before I fall asleep, I think once more of Joey’s glassy eyes. I yank the covers over my head and try to think of anything else. But his empty stare haunts me and follows me into my dreams.