The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight (The Broom Closet Stories)

by Jeff Jacobson

  Randall turned into the massive Costco parking lot. “It’s always a hassle to find parking here. Let’s see, okay Mr. Volkswagen, you coming or going? Okay, you’re staying put, aren’t you there, little buddy, okay, hmm…ah, there’s a spot, yep, let’s just…hey! Looks like Missy Ford Focus just stole from us. Ah…” he said and then found a place to park between two large trucks. He turned off the car and faced Charlie.

  “Beverly thinks I come here only for the hot dogs. I tell her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But she might be right. Don’t you think the drive and the hassle of parking are worth it? Tell me you’ve had a Costco hot dog before.”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “You’re kidding me! Boy, you are in for a treat. But I warn you, those witchy foodie people will give you grief if you try to extol the virtues of the Costco dog. Confess to them at your own peril.”

  Randall grew serious. “Remember the other night, when I got mad at your mom and your aunt? And I mentioned how hard it was for me to accept Beverly’s true identity?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “I thought that maybe if I told you the whole story, it might help you some.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Charlie said, excited to learn more.

  Randall looked out the window at the shoppers running into the store to avoid the rain.

  “I met your aunt when I was just starting out as a pilot. My shift was over, so I flew as a passenter from Seattle to San Diego, where I was living at the time. She told me later that she was headed down for some sort of witch conference. As it happened, I was lucky enough to sit next to her.

  “Holy schmokies, I fell head over heels the first five minutes we started talking. We didn’t shut up the whole flight. When we landed, and she got ready to leave, I asked for her phone number. I called her that night and we had our first official date.”

  He smiled as he stared ahead out the windshield, as if seeing that first plane ride, not the gentle rain, the mass of cars parked in the lot, or the people wheeling large flatbed carts loaded with bulk toilet paper and guacamole.

  “We dated long-distance for a while, and then when things got more serious, I moved to Seattle. Her family and friends didn’t like me very much. I thought it was because I was a new pilot and didn’t have much money. Little did I know the real reason, that the community frowns on witches and non-witches being together. Of course, she didn’t tell me any of that at the time. But she kept insisting that she wanted to be with me, so I just said, ‘F-.’ Oops. I said, ‘Screw you all. We’ll date if we want to.’

  “We decided to get married. I didn’t know how much pressure she was under to let go of the relationship. But eventually she persuaded her community to let her marry me. I found out much later that she had to go through a formal process where she promised that the safety and security of the witches would always trump anything else. That if our marriage ever threatened the secrecy of her community, she would choose them over us.”

  “How could your marriage threaten them?” Charlie asked.

  “If I found out who Beverly was, and divulged the secret to non-witches, they could all be exposed. So Beverly had to agree that if her non-witch husband ever spilled the beans, they’d make sure I never talked again.” Randall’s forced laugh bounced off the car’s interior.

  “Oh,” Charlie said, realization sending a small shiver down his back. He couldn’t imagine the Lostich’s silencing someone. Maybe Daniel Burman, but not Jeremy and Rita. Was it like the stories he’d heard of Mafia killings? Or was it some spell the witches would cast to keep his uncle from talking?

  “Yeah, right. Creepy. But like I said, I didn’t know any of that at the time, and you know what they say - ignorance is bliss. So, we got married and lived for a while in a house over in Madison Park, like we told you the other night. Technically it’s not that far away, but it can feel pretty removed from West Seattle. She was going back and forth a lot, and I was working long shifts and irregular hours as a pilot, because I didn’t have seniority at the time, so I had to take any flight I could get.”

  He paused, running a hand over his mustache as if to flatten it, as if all this storytelling caused the hairs to stand on end. He turned his head and looked out the window at the truck next to them. Then he faced Charlie.

  “I’m not proud to tell you this, but I began to get suspicious. Beverly kept strange hours. Stranger than mine. I knew there was something going on that she wasn’t telling me. And look at her. She’s a beautiful, talented, brilliant woman. Rich, too. Deep down, I guess I couldn’t believe that someone like her really wanted to be with an average Joe like me.

  “So I did the typical guy thing and began to worry that she was having an affair. I didn’t confront her at first. But the longer we lived together, and the more she kept her weird hours and her secrets, the more I was sure that’s what it was.

  “‘You’re kidding, right? You can’t be serious,’” she kept saying when I told her what I suspected.

  “But I didn’t buy it. I begged her to tell me his name, where he lived, how many times a week they got together, if she’d known him before she met me.

  “She kept telling me that I was crazy, that there was no one else. She said she loved me and only me.

  “But I kept at her. I’d say, ‘Then what the hell is going on? What am I supposed to think? You go to all these ‘family meetings’,’” Randall said, making air quotes with his fingers. “‘Why don’t you ever bring me? Why do you keep so many secrets from me?’

  “She finally confessed that there were things she hadn’t told me, but they didn’t have anything to do with having an affair. Furthermore, she said they didn’t threaten our relationship, and hoped that I’d just forget about it. But I wouldn’t let it go.

  “‘What is it?’’ I kept asking. ‘Are you in trouble? Are people after you? Do you need money to pay them off? You could take our savings if you need it.’

  “As you can see, I was just shooting in the dark.

  “After days of this, she finally said, ‘No, it’s nothing like that, Rand. Believe me. Look, give me a few days, okay? Then I’ll fill you in a bit. I just need some time to figure things out first.’

  “Later that week she took me down to one of our favorite spots, just a little picnic table on the beach where no one else ever came. We bought fish and chips at a local shop, like we had a million times before. It was raining, much harder than it is right now, but like usual, we had our trusty rain gear on.

  “I was nervous. All I could imagine was that she was some sort of drug smuggler, or was plotting to take over the government or something. Or maybe she was a jewel thief,” Randall said, shaking his head. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But I had no clue what she was going to disclose. Witchcraft isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind.

  “Anyway, after we’d eaten for a while in silence, she finally spoke.

  “‘Rand, do you love me?’’ she asked me, looking right at me with those big, beautiful eyes of hers.

  “I told her that I did.

  “‘Do you trust me?’”

  “I told her that I trusted her.

  “She then proceeded to tell me, right then and there, about her family, about the legacy, about who she was and what she could do. I don’t remember most of what she said, though a few things do stand out: broomsticks, not bad people, but good, good people, spells and incantations, for the benefit of humanity and whatnot.”

  He paused, looking out the window again. The sudden silence seemed strange to Charlie. There had been so many words for the past twenty minutes, and now, nothing. He caught himself holding his breath. He had to know what Randall had said in response. It seemed important, not just for his aunt and uncle, but for himself and his own future.

  Finally, when he could handle the tension no longer, Charlie spoke. “What did you say? What did you say when she told you all that stuff?”

  Even in the semi-darkness of the car, Charlie could see the l
ines on his uncle’s forehead deepen, could see the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes grow longer.

  “Well, it wasn’t my best moment. Not by a long shot. At first I laughed. Then I told her she was crazy, not only for saying what she was saying, but for expecting me to believe it. I asked her if she needed professional help. I talked about medication.

  “She told me later that as she sat there, listening to me accusing her of being a nutcase, she got angrier and angrier. I guess it had been a relief to let the cat out of the bag. She thought she could just tell me, and everything would be right as rain. I was the first non-witch she’d ever talked to about all of it. It hadn’t occurred to her that I’d laugh at her. That I wouldn’t believe her.

  “I know now how much I hurt her. Can you imagine? Finally telling the person you love most in the world who you really are, only to have him behave like a complete jackass?

  “Like I said, I know all of this now. But let’s just say at the time I wasn’t looking at the situation through her eyes. I was busy wondering how I could convince her to see a psychiatrist.

  “Anyway, you’ve seen her get angry, Charlie. You know what she’s like,” Randall said, crossing his arms and looking at his nephew.

  Charlie nodded, swallowing.

  “You know how she goes very still, like the quiet before a storm?”

  He nodded again, riveted to every word Randall was saying.

  “After a long silence, she stood up from the picnic table. She put her hands on her hips, and even though she was wearing a raincoat, she looked scary. Intense. In that focused way she can get.

  “She said, ‘You want me to show you, Rand? You want me to show you I’m not the crackpot you think I am?’

  “‘Yeah, Beverly, go on. Show me some of this hoohaw you’re trying to convince me is real,’” said Randall, his voice mocking.

  “You said that?” asked Charlie in disbelief.

  “You bet I did. What would you have done? Your wife, whom you thought was having an affair, but now you think is nuts, wants to show you that she isn’t?”

  “Yeah, okay. Good point.”

  “She looks up for a minute, like she’s listening for something, then makes this big sweeping movement with her hand,” Randall said, demonstrating for Charlie, “and I swear to God, all the food on the table, all the little bits of fish and chips, the coleslaw, even the gobs of ketchup and tartar sauce, they shoot up into the sky like pebbles, and they just hover there, above her head, while she has this wild look in her eyes, staring at me. Before I can even register what’s going on, a huge flock of seagulls swarms above us and eats it all up.”

  “Whoa! What did you do?” Charlie asked excitedly.

  “At first I just sat there, blinking my eyes, with all that seagull squawking going on above us. I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t happened. Maybe I’d missed something, maybe her arm actually hit the food, you know, and swept it up in the air. Maybe it hadn’t really floated. Or a huge gust of wind did it. It’s amazing what you tell yourself when you don’t believe what’s right in front of your nose.

  “‘You still don’t believe me, is that it? You still think I’m crazy?’ She started yelling at me, her hood back, her hair getting soaked. I gotta tell ya, I did get a little afraid then. Or at least really, really confused. Like maybe I didn’t know which end was up anymore.

  “Before I knew it, Beverly’s hands came smashing down on the picnic table. The entire thing cracked down the middle lengthwise and collapsed in on itself. I fell back off the bench, but my feet got tangled up in the base of the table and I couldn’t get away.

  “‘Do you think I’m crazy now?’ she yelled at me. ‘How ‘bout now? How ‘bout now?’

  “She started doing things, Charlie. Her body changed shape, or color, I can’t remember. Things flew at me. A small section of beach near us turned liquid, like a tar pit. I heard voices, I saw images of people I knew, floating in the tide pools nearby.

  “What did you do? Were you still stuck under the table?”

  “No, I managed to untangle myself and sort of crab-walk away from her, but she kept coming after me, yelling, asking if I still thought she was crazy.

  “I’m not proud of what I did next, Charlie. All I can say is that I completely and utterly lost my shit. I just lost it.”

  Charlie waited, eagerly watching his uncle’s face staring out the window, his brow furrowed, his large hands formed into fists and tapping on the steering wheel, his mouth opening then closing slightly, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to bite into something. Minutes passed. So many, in fact, that he wasn’t sure Randall was going to finish his story.

  Finally he looked at his nephew.

  “I left. I got up, ran across the street, got in my car, and drove away as fast as I could. And I didn’t come back for a year.”

  “You what? You left her?” asked Charlie, incredulous. “You left Aunt Beverly? For a whole year?”

  Having been left as a boy by his own father, Charlie had developed rules and laws about what you did and didn’t do with your family. First and foremost was that you never left them. To do so was one of the most reprehensible things a person could do.

  “I did. I never contacted Beverly, I never asked about her, I never…”

  “But why? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you come back?” Charlie interrupted. He knew the answer, knew that his uncle had been terrified. But he was angry at Randall for abandoning Beverly, angry for thinking that the best thing to do was to pack up and leave. Even more so, he was furious at his own mother for having done the same thing, for slipping away without telling him why. How could she?

  But he didn’t know how to express any of this, so for now all he could do was to ask the obvious.

  Randall stared at the boy, then turned his head away, as if he couldn’t bear to look in Charlie’s eyes.

  “I’m not saying that what I did was a good thing. But you of all people should understand. I literally could not believe what Beverly had done. I felt like I was going crazy, like everything I knew about the world, about reality, about how things worked, was slipping away from me. It felt like I couldn’t hold on to anything real, like I was losing my mind.

  “I didn’t think, ‘Randall, you should get up and drive away and abandon your wife for a year.’ I wasn’t thinking at all. I was scared out of my gourd. All I wanted to do was to get far away from her, from what she had done, from what she was…”

  The sharp burst of a car horn somewhere off to the right caused both of them to jump.

  “I’ll see you back at home!” they heard a young woman shout from the parking lot. “Don’t forget to buy the folding chairs!”

  Randall continued. “I drove for about two and a half hours that day, until I couldn’t go any farther. I pulled into a motel outside Portland and holed up for a few days. I didn’t sleep much. I kept seeing all those crazy things in my mind, and I was afraid she was going to come and get me.”

  “What do you mean? That Beverly would hurt you or something?”

  “I know it sounds crazy now. But I couldn’t connect what I had seen with the wonderful woman I’d married. Maybe she was someone different. Or maybe she’d changed somehow, and that the good, normal Beverly wasn’t around anymore. All I knew was that I was afraid and I wanted to be away from her.

  “Initially I assumed it would be for a couple of days, or maybe a week. I always thought that I’d just pick up the phone from the motel and call her - this was before email and cell phones, remember - but I kept putting it off.

  “The airlines put me on probation because I called in sick too many times, but eventually they took me back. I got an apartment in Portland, then signed up for as many flights as possible, working like a madman. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to deal with it, but the work helped me to forget what I’d seen. And somehow I thought Portland was far enough away for Beverly not to find me. Ha! She told me later that she used a
spell to make sure I was okay, and then just waited for me. It was really hard on her. But she was afraid that if she showed up in Portland, she’d only drive me further away. She knew she had to wait, to let me find my way back to her. And she also knew that I might not come back.

  “Charlie, you gotta understand. This was pure survival on my part. I’m not saying what I did was good, except that I think it kept me sane. Remember when you first saw the talking dog? How it just didn’t make sense?”

  He nodded, still able to recall the sensation that the ground underneath him had flipped upside down, that his mind was going to split in two, that the reality he knew was running away from him like a herd of frightened gazelles, dashing off into the thick protection of the jungle.

  “On the one hand, I think what I did was a mistake. It was really hard on Beverly, and on our marriage. Also on me. But what Beverly did was a mistake, too. She’d be the first to admit it. She lost her cool and showed me too much. So on the other hand, what I did might not have been a mistake. My brain cracked open, and it took me some time to put it back together again. It’s not like there was an advice column I could write to for help. ‘Dear Abby, my wife’s a witch. What should I do?’” His laugh sounded hollow.

  “I think if I had stayed and tried to understand it all right away, I might not have been able to handle it, and would have eventually left. I don’t know.

  “Believe me, Charlie, she and I have been over and over this. We’ve apologized more times to each other than I care to count. We’ve wondered if things didn’t work out the way they should have. It’s easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback now, but at the time, neither of us knew what to do.

  “I’ve read a lot since then about how our brains work. When something so unbelievable happens, our mind just can’t accept it, so it tells us to do what it needs to survive: ‘Run! Get away! Or at least make up some logical explanation for what you’re seeing!’ Because if it can’t, or if you can’t get away, then you really can go crazy.