This was a mistake, talking to Adam at all, trying to keep him at bay with half-truths. The wine wasn’t helping. She was homing closer and closer to the full truth the longer they went on, because part of her wanted to tell it. When you’d had a chance at love and magic and turned it down, it was hard to stop confessing, like the Ancient Mariner after he shot the albatross.
“He was just one of the other men in this little colony. Like I said, he helped me out.”
Adam wasn’t willing to let it go. “What was his name?”
“Ar—” She stopped herself. How could she explain the name, so uncommon, so obviously foreign, without raising any more questions?
“What did you say?”
“Aaron,” Nora said, pleased by her own resourcefulness. “His name was Aaron.” She waved her hand in a vague gesture of unconcern and managed to knock her wineglass off the bar.
“Oh, shit.” She grabbed for it uselessly and braced for the sound of smashing glass.
With a sort of unhurried assurance, the wineglass rose through the air, intact, and alighted gracefully on top of the bar.
“Fuck, did you see that?” Adam asked.
He looked down at the glossy black tiles of the floor, plainly expecting to see shards of glass there, and not seeing them. “What happened?”
Nora laid her hand gently on the base of the wineglass, as though to anchor it to the bar. “See what?” she asked.
Chapter 2
“That’s good,” Ramona said, when Nora told her about the wineglass, back in New Jersey, as they were walking home from the public library. It was the first chance she’d had after her visit to school to speak to her sister alone; at the house, their father or their sister Leigh or Nora’s stepmother always seemed to be in the room, too. Ramona was the only person in this world who knew, sort of, how Nora had spent the past year.
Now she seemed more interested in what Nora considered a side issue. “Why were you with Adam? I thought you guys broke up.”
“We did. It was just a friendly drink.”
“But he was a jerk to you, wasn’t he? Why were you having a drink with him when you could have changed him into an ant and stepped on him?”
“I don’t hate him that much,” Nora said.
“Then don’t step on him.” Ramona was nothing if not practical. “Or—I know—give him a dog’s head. An ugly dog. Or poison his drink, turn it into something really gross.”
Nora snorted. “One of those Australian chardonnays he hates.”
“I was thinking of warm spit.”
“The chardonnay would be worse.”
“Whatever.” Ramona shrugged. “You could make warts grow all over his body, or turn him into a fat old lady, or make it so flies come out of his mouth every time he talks.”
“That’s disgusting,” Nora said, chortling. She had a quick mental picture of Adam lecturing to a classroom full of undergraduates, trying to ignore the cloud of flies buzzing around his head. “I wouldn’t be that obvious,” she said. “I’d—oh, I’d make his face break out.” Was there a spell for ensuring that he’d never get tenure? “Or I’d make him just a little bit shorter.” Adam was already sensitive about his height.
“Make him a lot shorter! Two feet tall. And everything he eats will taste like old sneakers.”
Mentally Nora ran through some of the curses she had read. Many of them had to do with weakening an enemy in battle or harming his livestock, or they involved various intimate matters that she thought—she hoped—her eleven-year-old sister would not understand. “He’ll be stricken with fear at, um, faculty meetings, his books will get bad reviews, and he’ll fall in love with a fish.”
“A fish?”
“It’s actually a fairly harsh curse,” Nora said. “Depending on the kind of fish. People have gone crazy or drowned. I’d be nice—I’d make it a goldfish, and Adam could just keep it in a bowl.”
“Make it a shark.”
“A jellyfish.”
“That’s not a real fish. An electric eel.”
“Doesn’t matter. An octopus.”
“OK, an octopus,” Ramona agreed. “‘Give me your arm, darling. And your other arm. And your other arm—’” With a melting gaze, she tenderly reeled in the multiple limbs of Adam’s imagined paramour.
Nora lost her composure and had to lean against a maple tree to recover. Then she wondered if anyone had heard them, their shrieking, their unguarded talk of spells. She glanced around. The street was quiet, nothing moving except an SUV pulling out of a driveway a few houses down.
“Well?” Ramona asked, suddenly strict. “Can you do it?”
Nora grimaced. “No.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I can’t.”
One of the first, most elementary spells she’d ever learned was for levitating objects. Now Nora thought of all the things she’d tried—and failed—to levitate since that evening at Petrarch with Adam: an earring, a cotton swab, a pretzel, a crumpled-up tissue, her toothbrush, a penny, a dime, a five-dollar bill, a spoon, a Styrofoam peanut, an actual peanut, a packet of sugar, her phone, a pencil stub, a bookmark, a bottle cap, the driver’s license she needed to renew, several pebbles, too many fallen leaves to count, a Subaru station wagon—that was just for the hell of it—and a subscription card to the New Yorker.
Practice, she kept telling herself. It will come back. I just need to practice.
Now, as they passed under a cherry tree, she tried to levitate a pink petal from the sidewalk. It danced into the air, and she felt her heart race. But when a corps de ballet of other petals rose, too, Nora reluctantly concluded that it was the wind, not magic, that had lifted them up.
“I’m still stuck. I can’t work any magic,” she told her sister. “Except for the wineglass, that one time.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just harder to do magic in this world.”
Ramona pondered this for a while, looking down at the pavement. “Arundill could do magic here. He could make animals talk.”
“Aruendiel,” Nora corrected, privately savoring the name. It had almost escaped when she was talking to Adam last week. She wondered how much longer she could keep it locked away. Such a relief to talk to her sister about magic, but Ramona was only a little girl. There were other things she couldn’t begin to explain. “I never learned that spell. I was still a beginner when I left.”
Ramona rolled her eyes. “Why didn’t you study harder? Is that why you can’t do magic now?”
“Are you really going to lecture me about studying harder?” Nora asked. She reminded Ramona about the wineglass; it wasn’t as though she could do no magic whatsoever.
“But you didn’t plan to make the glass float,” Ramona said. “It was a reflex or something. The magic’s not as good if you can’t control it.”
That was just what Aruendiel would say—she needed to work on her control. She wished she could hear him say it. “I know,” she said.
The discouragement in her voice must have been obvious, because Ramona gave her a worried look and changed tactics. “You just have to keep trying,” she said, punching the air with a small fist. “Don’t give up.”
“All right.”
“It’s all mental. You have to believe in yourself.”
Nora felt fairly sure that Ramona was repeating life lessons from her soccer coach. She sighed. “It’s not exactly like that. True magic isn’t really about you. It’s about making a connection with the world. It comes from understanding the things around you, their inner life, and drawing on their power. Does that make any sense?”
“I guess.”
“It’s hard to explain. Aruendiel used to tell me that you can’t understand real magic until you’ve done it, which I thought was massively unfair, but it’s true.”
Ramona was quie
t for a minute. “When you first got back, you said you didn’t want to do magic anymore.”
“Well, I was wrong.” The rescued wineglass had filled her with more, and more lasting, elation than any wine ever could. “I miss it. I really miss it.”
“I thought maybe you could teach me some magic,” Ramona said, sounding unusually shy.
“I wish I could,” Nora said. Disturbed by how sad she sounded, even to herself, she tried to be more cheerful: “What, you want to make flies come out of Leigh’s mouth when she talks?”
Ramona wasn’t buying it. “But I bet you won’t even have time to try to do magic. You’re going back to North Carolina this summer, and then you’re going to England.”
Nora’s spirits sank even lower, and she suddenly understood that for the past few days, almost since her conversation with Naomi, she had been trying not to think about school or her fellowship or the entire enticing future that it had just opened for her.
“I suppose I will be pretty busy,” she said.
Perhaps, Nora thought, she didn’t understand the secret life of matter here. Or perhaps the reverse. Aruendiel had speculated that her ability to work magic had been awakened because she was a foreigner in a strange world where everything was new to her. Now, on her home turf, her senses were probably dulled, stupefied; her magical abilities had been quelled. She had become an ordinary person again. What was that word that Ramona had once used? Muggle. Even without having read the Harry Potter books, Nora thought it sounded unfairly pejorative.
It was also possible, she thought with a sense of heaviness, that she could not levitate a cherry blossom petal or a pretzel or a piece of paper with magic because there was no such thing as magic, just as there might not be any such person as Aruendiel or any world other than the one she inhabited at present.
Nora contemplated this idea, not for the first time. Accepting it, she could see, would make resuming her old life easier. There would be no more unease over telling her family and friends only part of the truth. And she could tell herself—what? A head injury, or maybe she really did spend the past year stoned out of her mind. It would be easier to forget Aruendiel if she had only hallucinated his existence, had mistaken a dream for reality.
No, it wouldn’t. Disbelieving in Aruendiel would only make her regret his absence more, she felt keenly. And anyway she could not unwind her certainty of his existence. She knew him too well for that, no matter how much he’d tried to hide himself from her. She had memorized him—his searching gray eyes, his secret, lonely kindness—the way she learned poems she loved, although that was not enough and would never be.
The kiss she had never given Aruendiel weighed down her heart more than ever with a kind of exquisite, impatient grief. He was real, he existed somewhere—bent over his books in the tower study, or wandering in the shadows of snowy pines, or turning his watchful, battered face toward the light of a dying fire. Whether she liked it or not, some deep part of herself remained with him, awake and alive in a way that she could remember but never quite recover. For a tantalizing, dangerous moment, Nora let herself crave everything she had lost.
The magic existed, too, even if she could no longer find it. She had turned her back, she was marching away, she was doing the responsible thing, and someday in the unknown future she might even resign herself to the fact that she’d made a terrible, idiotic mistake and would never see him again—but at least she was not fool enough to think that she could erase his existence entirely.
After a week in New Jersey, Nora drove south in a rented car to her mother’s house in Richmond. Her mother and stepfather had salvaged the stuff from her apartment when she went missing; now it was all in cardboard boxes in her mom’s garage.
The day she arrived, she opened a couple of cartons and experienced some surprise at how random and unfamiliar the contents seemed, even the books. It felt like the kind of voyeuristic browsing that you did at a yard sale, marveling at how anyone could have bought those shoes or those dishes in the first place.
“You’re not really planning to go back to school, are you?” her mother asked the next morning. They were having breakfast in the sunroom, a term that Nora always considered somewhat misleading, because sunlight flooded through enormous windows into almost every single room in the house, including some of the walk-in closets. It was mid-April, and the air-conditioning was already going full blast.
Nora said that she was, yes.
“You can do so much better for yourself! It’s just a waste of your time.”
Nora put down the piece of toast she had been eating, secretly uncertain which side of the argument she preferred to be on. “What would be a better use of my time?” she asked mildly. She mentioned the fellowship again.
“That’s so wonderful, Nora. I’m so proud of you. But being an academic—it’s not what you’re called to do. I see that now.”
In spite of herself, Nora was intrigued. Her mother sounded so certain. “All right. What am I called to do?”
“You’ll find the right path”—her mother looked serious and hopeful at the same time—“if you let God show you.”
She should have seen that one coming. “Fine,” Nora said, “but I wish he would hurry up.”
“You don’t need to scoff, Nora. God really does have plans for you.”
“But I can’t wait for God. I have to figure something out soon. How old am I? Thirty?” The question was not entirely a joke. Time didn’t seem to sync up exactly between Aruendiel’s world and her own. “I have to get moving.”
“Then don’t waste any more time. Life goes so quickly. It really does.” There was a catch in her mother’s voice, so slight that almost anyone else would have missed it, but Nora knew what she was thinking. The date had just rolled around again, the anniversary of the accident. The night when the police came to the door, and Nora was roused out of bed by her parents so they could all go down to the hospital, and nothing was ever the same again.
“I know, Mom,” Nora said, as gently as she could, although part of her wanted to scream.
“Your brother had so little time, it still hurts. He was so gifted. He could have done anything, really. And then at the end,” her mother said, some steel coming into her voice, “we took away the time he had left.”
Nora stared at her mother’s thin hands, wrapped around a coffee cup, and noticed how dark and ropy the veins had become. “He was gone, Mom.” They had been having this conversation for seventeen years. It would never be finished. “We waited weeks, and he was already gone, the doctors all said so. We could have waited forever and nothing would have cha—”
“I would have waited forever. It’s not your fault, Nora,” her mother added quickly. “You were so young. And your father was so—”
“I wasn’t a little kid! I knew what we were doing. It was the best thing for EJ.”
“We’ll never know, will we?” Her mother’s eyes blazed a fierce blue. “Well, I praise God that you are here, and well.”
A moment of silent guilt for all those months of absence. Nora frowned apologetically at her mother. “I’m sorry. I really am. For, well—for all the anxiety I caused—”
“Well, don’t you ever do that again!” Her mother pressed her lips together, visibly holding herself in check. In a slightly different tone, she went on, “I want you to be happy, Nora! I do. I would feel so much better if you could be doing the work God has for you, no matter what, no matter where. When you do find the right path, you follow it. Don’t waste a minute.” Nora sighed, and her mother shook her head vigorously. “And no, I don’t mean that job at Scott’s office, either.”
It was an entry-level marketing position. Scott, Nora’s stepfather, had already mentioned it twice.
“He’s just trying to be helpful, but it’s not for you. You should be helping people,” her mother went on. “You have a good heart, and you’re so smart. Med
ical school, even.”
“Oh, Mom.” Would studying magic be an acceptable substitute for medical school? But it was too late, she was back in her own world, she had missed her chance.
“It’s just a thought. But I’m serious, Nora. Don’t underestimate yourself. And you don’t want to start a family too late, either.” If EJ were still alive, Nora wondered, would Mom be so obsessed with planning my life? “Of course you need to find the right man,” her mother finished reflectively.
I might have, and then I lost him. “Oh, now you’re asking the impossible,” Nora said lightly, but her mother frowned over the brim of her coffee cup.
“You’re not still brooding about Adam, are you?” she asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“We heard he’d gotten engaged to someone else. He never even got in touch with us to say he was sorry you’d disappeared.” Her mother’s mouth tightened with disapproval. “Anyway, I was just going to say, he wasn’t right for you. He didn’t respect you enough.”
“You’re certainly right about that,” Nora said. “Getting engaged to someone else—not very respectful.”
She spread more jam on her toast and then bit into it. She knew without looking up that her mother was staring at the wretched ring again.
“That gadget I ordered over the internet didn’t help?” her mother asked.
Nora shook her head, swallowed. “It didn’t work.”
“It’s amazing. I can’t believe that thing won’t come off.”
“I know, it’s bizarre. Believe me, I’ve tried to get it off.” Some of the most powerful magicians in the world—although not this world—had tried. Actually, Aruendiel had managed to get it off briefly, but Nora began turning to stone, so the ring went back on her finger. Would that curse work in this world? Nora wondered, not for the first time.
Her mother took another sip of coffee. “Mmm. Maybe you really don’t want the ring off your finger.”
There was a tiny grain of truth in the idea. The ring was a small, stubborn reminder of another world, another life, that was now out of reach forever. And Faitoren magic exploited your inner wishes, it was tricky that way. Although Aruendiel had said the spell wasn’t a conventional Faitoren enchantment. Nora twisted the ring on her finger, considering. “I don’t think it’s that kind of magic.”
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 2