Destruction: The December People, Book One

by Sharon Bayliss

  Then, finally, he came out to give the prognosis. “She’s stable… She’ll be admitted into intensive care for monitoring… Don’t worry… She’ll be fine… No spinal issues… Should recover… She’s a tough little girl, that one.”

  David took the boys home the next day. Amanda stayed. They decided someone would stay with Emmy all the time. That evening, David returned to relieve Amanda. He would stay the night in Emmy’s room. They had moved her out of intensive care, which seemed encouraging and meant a much more comfortable room and fewer visits from the nurses.

  David took one of the deepest breaths of his life when he saw Emmy’s blue eyes wide open. He hadn’t breathed right since she fell.

  “I’m not sure I’m ready to go,” Amanda said.

  “I want to be with her too,” David said. “And someone has to watch the kids at home.”

  Amanda hovered by Emmy’s bed like a bodyguard, although he couldn’t imagine what she guarded her against now. The damage was done.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Emmy said in a scratchy voice. “Go home. You’re a mess.”

  Amanda kissed Emmy and gushed enough I love yous for several weeks’ worth of life outside of a hospital room. Amanda nodded to David with the intimacy of a shift change as she gathered her things. David stood in her way and wrapped her into a hug before she had time to protest. He laid his hand on her head and held her to him.

  “Are the boys okay?” she asked.

  “It depends on what you mean by ‘okay,’” David said. “But… no… I mean, yes, they’re fine. Just worried about you,” he said to Emmy.

  “It’s not his fault,” Emmy said.

  “Do you have everything you need?” Amanda asked.

  “I’m fine. Go home,” David said.

  She kissed Emmy one more time, then left.

  David sat in the chair Amanda had vacated. Casts and bandages held his daughter together, and she had an ugly purple bruise on the side of her face. She hated to be still. He couldn’t imagine Emmy bedridden. This would be hell for her.

  He took her hand, and she didn’t pull it away this time. Too tired, perhaps.

  “Mom told me a little bit about what happened,” he said. “Was she angry with you when you told her?”

  “She tried not to be, but I know she is,” Emmy said. “Are you mad at me?”

  “I’ve been too scared to be mad,” he said. “For what it’s worth, thank you for trying to do good magic.”

  Emmy smiled stiffly.

  “I really thought I could do it. And if I couldn’t, I just thought that nothing would happen.”

  “What did happen?”

  “It’s fuzzy. Mom asked me what was going through my mind, and there wasn’t really anything. I just felt so sad, and I wanted to do anything to stop the feeling. It was intense. I never want to feel like that again.”

  “I’m sure you won’t.”

  “I don’t know how the spell went wrong. It’s supposed to work by releasing the bad feelings from the person. Samantha thinks maybe I left myself too vulnerable to Jude’s depression, so it came off him and right into me. Does that mean Jude feels like that all the time?” Emmy asked.

  “I hope not,” David whispered.

  “I asked him,” Emmy said. “He said no. He said he wasn’t suicidal, but I don’t know if he would tell me the truth. But I guess if he did feel like that all the time, he would already have killed himself. It didn’t feel like a choice to me. I didn’t have to think about whether or not I wanted to die. It was like a reflex. Samantha said maybe it didn’t work because I’m a dark witch. What does that mean? Does that mean I can’t do good magic?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Are you just saying that, or do you know? Because that’s not what Mom says.”

  “I hope she’s wrong,” David said.

  “Me, too.”

  David barely slept that night, and neither could Emmy. How could anyone sleep in a hospital room when a nurse came in every hour to prod and poke and question? In this case, prod and poke his little girl. Amanda came back around seven in the morning, much earlier than she had planned. She said she couldn’t relax at home. David ate breakfast with Amanda in the hospital cafeteria, then he went home.

  Amanda had pulled all the Christmas decorations out of the attic, either by her own hands or by the art of delegation. But, David guessed in this case, she had done it herself to busy her hands. Strings of lights lay in single rows on the living room floor where she had detangled them. The stockings sat on top of the mantel, but she hadn’t hung them yet. He imagined her standing there with the three stockings. Only three. He could see her starting to hang them and then realizing… panicking… not knowing whether or not she should buy two more.

  They had decided not to tell the kids about their downswing in fortunes until after Christmas and would try to rein in their Christmas spending in subtle ways, such as putting up the Christmas lights themselves instead of hiring help.

  David saw Evangeline sitting on the steps of the back porch. She wore the jacket he had bought her, huddled over her notepad. When he opened the patio door, she pressed her notepad against her chest so he couldn’t see it.

  “Is she okay?” Evangeline asked.

  “She’ll be okay,” David said.

  “We didn’t teach her that,” Evangeline said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad she’s okay,” Evangeline said. “She looked so… broken… when I saw her on the floor.”

  “You don’t want me to see what you’re drawing?”

  She squirmed and leaned over the pad.

  “You don’t have to show me if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s for therapy.”

  “That was smart of her to ask you to draw. I know you’re good at it.”

  “Okay… here.”

  She handed him her notepad. David’s breath caught in his throat. He saw a sketch of Crystal, as detailed and realistic as if she had handed him a photo. More so. Evangeline had captured a certain glow about her in the shading of her skin. The pride in her eyes. Evangeline drew her in a sleek, black evening gown. Instead of the angel wings tattoo on her back, she had two large, very real, black wings spread out behind her.

  “It’s my mom,” she said unnecessarily.

  “I know. I recognized the wings.” His voice cracked.

  “You’re crying.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “You did love her.”

  “I told you I did.”

  “Just not enough, I guess.”

  David bit his lip and tried to keep himself together. He knew he couldn’t handle this right now, but as a parent, he had no choice. He sat down next to her and immediately wanted to lie on the porch and fall asleep.

  “I tried to find you,” he said. “You weren’t in any records or in any computers. I tried really hard.”

  “If you had used magic, you would have found us,” she said.

  David had no response to that.

  “I asked her about you,” Evangeline said. “All the time.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course. You’re my father.”

  “Did she say why she hid from me?”

  “She said she was destroying you.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “Maybe your marriage, then. She told me you needed to be with your wife because she is your talisman.”

  “Talisman? I thought those were like your rock and Xavier’s cross.”

  “Those aren’t the real ones. Just objects. My mom was really into to object talismans. She created hundreds of them. Rocks. Jewelry. Trinkets. All sorts of things. Different ones for different purposes.”

  Evangeline pulled her magic rock out of her jacket pocket and laid it on the porch. “This one is you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me to think about you when I held it. And if I did it enough times, my thoughts would stick to it, and it would really be you and your
protection.”

  David looked at the indentation in the rock.

  “Did I turn out to be anything like what you pictured?”

  “Not really.” She smiled. “In some ways, I guess. But I always thought you would be a wizard. A real one. A really good one.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay. I kept my object talisman for my mom. She wouldn’t want me to go anywhere without it, but it’s just a symbol. My stepfather told me that. He knew more about magic than my mom. He said they weren’t real talismans and they wouldn’t really do anything. He said only people can be talismans, and those talismans work. They are the most powerful kind of magic. I think he was right. My mom made talismans all the time, but nothing ever happened. She said it wasn’t always obvious, that talismans aren’t supposed to stop bad things from happening. They protect you on a deeper level. But it didn’t work for her. She’d been messed up for a long time. At the end, she wasn’t really my mom anymore.”

  “Did your mother have a real talisman?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “It was me.”

  She nodded.

  “So, I left her unprotected.”

  “Yeah, but it was her fault. She even set up spells to make it harder for you to find us. Even after she realized you were her talisman. Even after she knew you could fix everything. She kept trying to make her talisman into something else.”

  Evangeline looked down at her picture. She blinked a few extra times, as if she might cry, but her eyes stayed dry.

  “Last March, when we were in town one day, Xavier stole someone’s phone. It had Internet on it. He wanted to know everything Mom had ever told me about you so he could look for you. He knew your name but not much else. But we didn’t know how to use the Internet then, and the phone stopped working at our house anyway. Later, Xavier tried to find you with a spell. I don’t know what it was exactly; he wouldn’t tell me because he didn’t want me to try. I don’t know where he learned it or if he made it up, but it was supposed to bring you to us.”

  She leaned over her knees and stared at her sandaled feet. She had painted her toenails silver.

  “My mom deserved to die.”

  David thought for a while before he spoke. He put his hand on her shoulder. “She was a good person when I knew her.”

  David pulled the box of Crystal’s ashes out of his jacket. He lay down on the uneven sofa bed mattress in his office and held Crystal to his chest. If anyone walked in, he would get caught cuddling with a dead woman. Especially abhorrent, since he should be trying to save his marriage with his living one. He closed his eyes and felt her weight on his chest. She moved up and down as he breathed. He felt better.

  “You believed in ghosts,” he said. “Couldn’t you be one for a minute? Come back to me. Tell me what to do.”

  Like a child, he waited, as if she really might appear there. He watched the ceiling fan spin in a mundane, non-magical way. The clock ticked. The computer whirred.

  It did work… sort of. He fell asleep and dreamed about her. For some unknowable reason, his subconscious put her at The Galleria, a place she had never set foot and would never want to. She waited for him in front of the ice rink with the domed glass ceiling. She leaned against the railing and watched him approach her with one of her patented poker faces. But, as she watched him approach, the edges of her lips turned upward ever so slightly and her eyes opened a little wider.

  “I’m sorry, Crystal.”

  She stared at him.

  “I know it doesn’t help, but I still love you. You saved my marriage by cutting me out. I wouldn’t have been able to stay away from you forever.”

  She still said nothing but gave a long, slow blink, like an acknowledgement.

  “Our children are really amazing. They’re beautiful. I’m glad I get to know them now.”

  Another blink. A longer one.

  “Why won’t you speak to me?”

  Her eyes gazed downward, then back up. She looked like a statue that could move only her eyes. He moved close to her. He feared touching her, as he feared to touch their children, afraid anything he did could hurt her. He touched his forehead to hers. The contact animated her slightly. He heard her breathe.

  “Evangeline drew me a picture of your wings. Can I see them?”

  He pulled back from her and waited. At first, he thought nothing would happen, but then she pulled her tank top over her head. She pulled her shoulders back and raised her chin, as if she wanted him to know she had no shame in showing her naked breasts. Then it happened. Two massive black wings spread out behind her, twice her height. Her wingspan rivaled a California condor’s. He reached his hands out to them.

  “May I?”

  An infinitesimal nod. He ran his fingers across the smooth feathers. They weren’t black. Not really. Each feather had the sheen of a different color. Blue. Red. Orange. Green. Yellow. Violet. The feathers fell around his fingers like water. She was gone.

  mmy came home on December 10th. The doctors said she healed well. Fast. She said she would recover quickly, and she did, as if she could somehow will her bones back together. Who knew what was possible anymore? She wore a cast on her arm and a brace on her knee. She couldn’t do much but insisted on walking into the house on her own two feet. David and Jude walked on either side of her, ready to catch her if she stumbled, and she kept swatting their arms away.

  “I can walk,” she screamed at Jude as he grabbed her elbow to help her over the threshold. “Let me go.”

  “Whoa,” she said when she entered the house. “It’s just as bad inside.”

  Christmas had hit the Vandergraff home with the subtlety of a tidal wave. Amanda had coated the outside of the house with Christmas lights. And not just the house. Every branch of every tree. She even ran strings of lights along the ground. She had placed two Nativity scenes in the lawn, a giant cross formed out of Christmas lights, and a blow-up Santa Claus with all eight reindeer.

  The inside of the house looked the same. Green garlands wrapped around everything. The whole house twinkled. A twelve-foot tree. A creepy dancing Santa on the dining table. Five more small Nativity scenes. David had seen Xavier and Patrick playing a ‘count the baby Jesuses game. According to Patrick, counting both pictures and figurines, they had twelve baby Jesuses on the property, and they hadn’t done a full search yet. Apparently, new ones showed up every day.

  Amanda had multiple Christmas candles burning, and the smell of chemically contrived pine trees made it hard to breathe. Trans-Siberian Orchestra played throughout the day, and Amanda had made about two hundred Christmas cookies that probably would give David diabetes. Apparently, Amanda thought she could attack dark magic with a relentless onslaught of Christmas.

  Samantha and Jude plastered themselves onto Emmy like wings all day. David and Amanda could hardly pry Samantha off Emmy long enough to talk to her, but they did manage to catch Samantha doing laundry alone in the afternoon. David didn’t know someone could excel at something as ordinary as laundry, but Samantha did. She folded clothes as if she worked at The Gap, and everything came out cleaner than new and smelled of springtime. If she used some kind of laundry magic, he wouldn’t stop her.

  She looked at them serenely, but David didn’t miss the hint of fear in her eyes. She put down a towel and folded her hands in front of her in a docile way. He didn’t like her looking at him that way. They had had a “talk” with her about teaching Emmy a dangerous spell which had made her melt like a popsicle in August. She cried silently and didn’t say anything besides, “I’m sorry.”

  Apparently, a “talk” with Amanda and David Vandergraff amounted to the worst kind of torture, although David pegged Amanda as the scary one. In the end, David wanted to apologize to her, but Amanda appeared unaffected by the display of emotion. She stayed firm but not cruel, and quite clear. No magic.

  “Do you want to sit down with us in the dining room for a minute?” Amanda ask
ed.

  “You’re not in trouble,” David added.

  Samantha nodded politely and floated, as she always did, into the dining room.

  “We have found a good private investigator,” David said. At least, not one of the three different PIs who had failed to find Crystal and his kids. So, no strikes against him yet. “Unless… this may be a strange question… but you don’t know where we could find a wizard private investigator? Perhaps it would help if they had all the facts.”

  “No, I don’t know about anything like that.”

  “David, I told you,” Amanda said. “You can’t Google ‘Wizard PI’ and expect to find something.”

  “That’s why I’m asking her,” he said.

  “Do you know how many wizards there are in the world? Even if there are wizard PIs, what are the chances she knows one?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Anyway, Samantha, it would be helpful to know more about the people your parents know. Do you have other family?”

  He treaded carefully here; he didn’t want her to read between the lines and realize they wanted to find her real guardians… just in case.

  “My Grandma, my dad’s mom. She lives in a nursing home in Baytown. You could talk to her, but she’s pretty confused. She would probably say she saw my dad yesterday even if she hadn’t.”

  “And your other grandparents?”

  “Dead.”

  David wondered whether or not he should change his retirement plan based on the apparently shorter life expectancy of a wizard.

  “Sorry,” David said.

  “My dad is an only child, but my mom has two sisters. She hasn’t spoken to my Aunt Irene for as long as I can remember, but she does get along with my Aunt Charlotte. I see her a couple times a year.”

  “Can you write down their full names?” Amanda asked, passing her a piece of paper. “And addresses or phone numbers.”

  “Aunt Charlotte lives in New Orleans, but I don’t know where. My mom is from Nevada, and she said Aunt Irene stayed there. Las Vegas. But who knows now.”