Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  “Are you talking about a real man?” Sally asks Kylie. “Someone who’s sneaking around our house?”

  “I don’t know if he’s real or not. He’s just there.”

  Sally watches her daughter spoon decaf into the white paper filter. At this moment, Kylie seems like a stranger, a grown woman with secrets to keep. In the dark morning light, her gray eyes look completely green, as though they belonged to a cat that can see in the dark. All that Sally wanted for her, a good and ordinary life, has gone up in smoke. Kylie is anything but ordinary. There is no way around that. She is not like the other girls on the block.

  “Tell me if you see him now,” Sally says.

  Kylie looks at her mother. She’s afraid, but she recognizes her mother’s tone of voice as one to be obeyed and she goes to the window in spite of her fear. Sally and Gillian come to stand beside her. They can see their reflections in the glass, and the wet lawn. Outside are the lilacs, taller and more lush than would seem possible.

  “Under the lilacs.” Little knobs of fear are rising on Kylie’s arms and her legs and everywhere in between. “Where the grass is the greenest. He’s right there.”

  It is the spot exactly.

  Gillian stands close behind Kylie and squints, but all she can make out are the shadows of the lilacs. “Can anyone else see him?”

  “The birds.” Kylie blinks back tears. What she wouldn’t have given to look out and find he’s gone. “The bees.”

  Gillian is ashen. She is the one who should be punished. She deserves it, not Kylie. Jimmy should be haunting her; each time she closes her eyes, it should be his face she sees. “Oh, fuck,” she says, to no one in particular.

  “Was he your boyfriend?” Kylie asks her aunt.

  “Once,” Gillian says. “If you can believe it.”

  “Is that why he hates us so much?” Kylie asks.

  “Honey, he just hates,” Gillian says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s us or them. I just wish I’d learned that when he was still alive.”

  “And now he won’t go away.” Kylie understands that much. Even girls of thirteen can figure out that a man’s ghost reflects who he was and everything he’s ever done. There’s a lot of spite under those lilacs. There’s a whole lot of get-even.

  Gillian nods. “He won’t go.”

  “You’re talking about this as if it were real,” Sally says. “And it just isn’t. It can’t be! No one is out there.”

  Kylie turns to look outside. She wants her mother to be right. It would be such a relief to look and see only the grass and the trees, but that’s not all that is out in the yard.

  “He’s sitting up and lighting a cigarette. He just threw the burning match on the grass.”

  Kylie’s voice sounds breakable, and there are tears in her eyes. Sally has gone very cold and very quiet. It’s Jimmy her daughter is in contact with, all right. Every once in a while, Sally herself has felt something out in the yard, but she’s dismissed the dark shape seen from the corner of her eye, she’s refused to recognize the chill in her bones when she goes to water the cucumbers in the garden. It’s nothing, that’s what she’s told herself. A shadow, a cool breeze, nothing but a dead man who can’t hurt anyone.

  Now as she considers her own backyard, Sally accidentally bites her lip, but she pays no attention to the blood she’s drawn. In the grass there is a spiral of smoke, and the scent of something acrid and burning, as if, indeed, someone had carelessly tossed a match onto the wet lawn. He could burn the house down, if he wanted to. He could take over the backyard, leaving them too frightened to do anything but peer through the window. The lawn is rife with crabgrass and weeds, and not mowed nearly often enough. Still, the fireflies come here in July. The robins always find worms after a storm. This is the garden where her girls grew up, and Sally will be damned if she lets Jimmy force her out, considering he wasn’t worth two cents even back when he was alive. He’s not going to sit in her yard and threaten her daughters.

  “You don’t have to worry about this,” Sally says to Kylie. “We’ll take care of it.” She goes to the back door and opens it, then nods to Gillian.

  “Me?” Gillian has been trying to get a cigarette out of the pack with her hands shaking like a bird’s wings. She has no intention of going into that yard.

  “Now,” Sally says, with that strange authority she gets at these times, the worst times, moments of panic and confusion when Gillian’s first instinct is always to run in the other direction, as fast and heedlessly as possible.

  They go outside together, so close each can feel the beat of the other’s heart. It rained all night, and now the sticky air is moving in thick mauve-colored waves. The birds aren’t singing this morning, it’s too dark for that. But the humidity has brought the toads away from the creek behind the high school, and they have a sort of song, a deep humming that rises up through the sleepy neighborhood. The toads are crazy about Snickers, which teenagers sometimes throw to them at lunch hour. It’s candy they’re looking for as they wind along the neighborhood, hopping across the squishy lawns and through pools of rainwater that have collected in the gutters. Less than half an hour ago, the newspaper delivery boy joyfully biked right over one of the largest toads, only to discover his bike was headed straight for a tree, which crumpled his front wheel and broke two bones in his left ankle and ensured that there’d be no more newspaper deliveries for today.

  One of the toads from the creek is halfway across the lawn, on a path toward the hedge of lilacs. Now that they’re outside, both of the sisters feel cold; they feel the way they used to on winter days, when they would wrap themselves up in an old quilt in the aunts’ parlor and watch the windows as ice formed inside the panes of glass. Just looking at the lilacs makes Sally’s voice naturally drop.

  “They’re bigger than they were yesterday. He’s making them grow. He’s doing it with hate or spite, but it sure is working.”

  “God damn you, Jimmy,” Gillian whispers.

  “Never speak ill of the dead,” Sally tells her. “Besides, we’re the ones who put him here. That piece of shit.”

  Gillian’s throat goes dry as dust. “Do you think we should dig him back up?”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Sally says. “That’s brilliant. Then what do we do with him?” Most probably, they’ve overlooked a million details. A million ways for him to make them pay. “What if someone comes looking for him?”

  “Nobody will. He’s the kind of guy you avoid. Nobody gives enough of a shit about Jimmy to look for him. Believe me. We’re safe when it comes to that.”

  “You looked for him,” Sally reminds her. “You found him.”

  Out in a neighboring backyard, a woman is hanging white sheets and blue jeans on a laundry line. It won’t rain anymore, that’s what they’re saying on the radio. It will be beautiful and sunny all week long, till the end of July.

  “I got what I thought I deserved,” Gillian says.

  It is such a deep and true statement Sally cannot believe the words have come out of Gillian’s careless mouth. They both measured themselves harshly, and they still do, as if they have never been anything but those two plain little girls, waiting at the airport for someone to claim them.

  “Don’t worry about Jimmy,” Sally tells her sister.

  Gillian wants to believe this is possible, she’d pay good money to, if she had any, but she shakes her head, unconvinced.

  “He’s as good as gone,” Sally assures her. “Wait and see.”

  The toad in the middle of the lawn has come closer. In all honesty, it’s quite pretty, with smooth, watery skin and green eyes. It’s watchful and patient, and that’s more than can be said for most human beings. Today, Sally will follow the toad’s example, and will use patience as her weapon and her shield. She will go about her business; she’ll vacuum and change the sheets on the beds, but all the while she’s doing these things she’ll really be waiting for Gillian and Kylie and Antonia to go out for the day.

  As soon as she’s fin
ally alone, Sally heads for the backyard. The toad is still there; it’s been waiting right along with Sally. It settles more deeply into the grass when Sally goes to the garage for the hedge clippers, and it’s there when she brings them over, along with the stepladder she uses whenever she wants to change light bulbs or search the top shelves of the pantry.

  The clippers are rusty and old, left behind by the house’s previous owners, but they’ll certainly do the job. The day is already turning hot and sultry, with steam rising from the rain puddles as they evaporate. Sally expects interference. She’s never had any experience with restless spirits before, but she assumes they want to hang on to the real world. She half expects Jimmy to reach up through the grass and grab her ankle; she wouldn’t be surprised if she clipped off the tip of her thumb or was toppled right off the ladder. But her work goes ahead with surprising ease. A man like Jimmy, after all, never does well in this sort of weather. He prefers air-conditioning and several six-packs. He prefers to wait until night falls. If a woman wants to work in the hot sun, he’d never be the one to stop her; he’d be flat out on his back, relaxed in the shade, before she’d even have time to set up her stepladder.

  Sally, however, is used to hard work, especially in the dead of winter, when she sets her alarm for five a.m. so she can wake up early enough to shovel snow and do at least one load of laundry before she and the girls head out. She considered herself lucky to get the job at the high school so she could have time with her children. Now she sees she was smart. Summers have always belonged to her, and they always will. That’s why she can take her time cutting down the hedges. She can take all day, if need be, but by twilight those lilacs will be gone.

  In the far section of the yard only a few stumps will be left behind, so dark and knotty they’ll be good for nothing other than a toad’s home. The air will be so still it will be possible to hear a single mosquito; the last call of the mockingbird will echo, then fade. When night falls, there will be armloads of branches and flowers on the street, all neatly tied with rope, ready for the trash pickup in the morning. The women who are called to the lilacs will arrive to see that the hedges have been chopped to the ground, their glorious flowers nothing but garbage strewn along the gutter and the street. That is the moment when they’ll throw their arms around one another and praise simple things and, at long last, consider themselves to be free.

  Two hundred years ago, people believed that a hot and steamy July meant a cold and miserable winter. The shadow of a groundhog was carefully studied as an indicator for bad weather. The skin of an eel was commonly used to prevent rheumatism. Cats were never allowed inside a house, since it was well known that they could suck the breath right out of an infant, killing the poor baby in his cradle. People believed that there were reasons for everything, and that they could divine these reasons easily. If they could not, then something wicked must be at work. Not only was it possible to converse with the devil, but some in their midst actually made bargains with him. Anyone who did was always found out in the end, exposed by his or her own bad fortune or the dreadful luck of those close by.

  When a husband and wife were unable to have a child, the husband placed a pearl beneath his wife’s pillow, and if she still failed to conceive, there’d be talk about her, and concern about the true nature of her character. If all the strawberries in every patch were eaten by earwigs, suddenly and overnight, then the old woman down the road, who was cross-eyed and drank until she was as unmovable as a stone, was brought into the town hall for questioning. Even after a woman proved herself innocent of any wrongdoing—if she managed to walk through water and not dissolve into smoke and ashes or if it was discovered that the strawberries in the entire Commonwealth had been affected—that still didn’t mean she’d be welcome in town or that anyone believed she wasn’t guilty of something.

  These were the prevailing attitudes when Maria Owens first came to Massachusetts with only a small satchel of belongings, her baby daughter, and a packet of diamonds sewn into the hem of her dress. Maria was young and pretty, but she dressed all in black and didn’t have a husband. In spite of this, she possessed enough money to hire the twelve carpenters who built the house on Magnolia Street, and she was so sure of herself and what she wanted that she went on to advise these men in such matters as what wood to use for the mantel in the dining room and how many windows were needed to present the best view of the back garden. People became suspicious, and why shouldn’t they be? Maria Owens’s baby girl never cried, not even when she was bitten by a spider or stung by a bee. Maria’s garden was never infested with earwigs or mice. When a hurricane struck, every house on Magnolia Street was damaged, except for the one built by the twelve carpenters; not one of the shutters was blown away, and even the laundry forgotten out on the line stayed in place, not a single stocking was lost.

  If Maria Owens chose to speak to you, she looked you straight in the eye, even if you were her elder or better. She was known to do as she pleased, without stopping to deliberate what the consequences might be. Men who shouldn’t have fell in love with her and were convinced that she came to them in the middle of the night, igniting their carnal appetites. Women found themselves drawn to her and wanted to confess their own secrets in the shadows of her porch, where the wisteria had begun to grow and was already winding itself around the black-painted railings.

  Maria Owens paid attention to no one but herself and her daughter and a man over in Newburyport who none of her neighbors even knew existed, although he was well known and quite well respected in his own town. Three times every month, Maria bundled up her sleeping baby, then she put on her long wool coat and walked across the fields, past the orchards and the ponds filled with geese. Drawn by desire, she traveled quickly, no matter what the weather might be. On some nights, people thought they saw her, her coat billowing out behind her, running so fast it seemed she was no longer touching the ground. There might be ice and snow, there might be white flowers on every apple tree; it was impossible to tell when Maria might walk through the fields. Some people never even knew she was passing right by their houses; they would simply hear something out beyond where they lived, out where the raspberries grew, where the horses were sleeping, and a wash of desire would filter over their own skins, the women in their nightgowns, the men exhausted from the hard work and boredom of their lives. Whenever they did see Maria in daylight, on the road or in a shop, they looked at her carefully, and they didn’t trust what was before them—the pretty face, the cool gray eyes, the black coat, the scent of some flower no one in their town could name.

  And then one day, a farmer winged a crow in his cornfield, a creature that had been stealing from him shamelessly for months. When Maria Owens appeared the very next morning with her arm in a sling and her right hand wound up in a white bandage, people felt certain they knew the reason why. They were polite enough when she came into their stores, to buy coffee or molasses or tea, but as soon as her back was turned they made the sign of the fox, raising pinky and forefinger in the air, since this motion was known to unravel a spell. They watched the night sky for anything strange; they hung horseshoes over their doors, hammered in with three strong nails, and some people kept bunches of mistletoe in their kitchens and parlors, to protect their loved ones from evil.

  Every Owens woman since Maria has inherited those clear gray eyes and the knowledge that there is no real defense against evil. Maria was no crow interested in harassing farmers and their fields. It was love that had wounded her. The man who was the father of her child, whom Maria had followed to Massachusetts in the first place, had decided he’d had enough. His ardor had cooled, at least for Maria, and he’d sent her a large sum of money to keep her quiet and out of the way. Maria refused to believe he would treat her this way; still he had failed to meet her three times, and she just couldn’t wait any longer. She went to his house in Newburyport, something he’d absolutely forbidden, and she’d bruised her own arm and broken a bone in her right hand by pounding on his door
. The man she loved would not answer her cries; instead he shouted at her to go away, with a voice so distant anyone would have guessed they were little more than strangers. But Maria would not go away, she knocked and she knocked, and she didn’t even notice that her knuckles were bloody; welts had already begun to appear on her skin.

  Finally, the man Maria loved sent his wife to the door, and when Maria saw this plain woman in her flannel nightgown, she turned and ran all the way home, across the fields in the moonlight, fast as a deer, faster even, entering into people’s dreams. The next morning most people in town awoke out of breath, with their legs shaking from exertion, so tired it seemed as though they hadn’t slept a wink. Maria didn’t even realize what she’d done to herself until she tried to move her right hand and couldn’t, and she thought it only fitting that she’d been marked this way. From then on, she kept her hands to herself.

  Of course, bad fortune should be avoided whenever possible, and Maria was always prudent when it came to matters of luck. She planted fruit trees in the dark of the moon, and some of the hardier perennials she tended continue to sprout among the rows in the aunts’ garden; the onions are still so fiery and strong it’s easy to understand why they were thought to be the best cure for dog bites and toothaches. Maria always made certain to wear something blue, even when she was an old lady and couldn’t get out of bed. The shawl across her shoulders was blue as paradise, and when she sat on the porch in her rocking chair it was difficult to tell where she ended and where the sky began.

  Until the day she died, Maria wore a sapphire the man she’d loved had given her, just to remind herself of what was important and what was not. For a very long time after she was gone, some people insisted they saw an icy blue figure in the fields, late at night, when the air was cold and still. They swore that she walked past the orchards, traveling north, and that if you were very quiet, if you didn’t move at all, but stayed down on one knee beside the old apple trees, her dress would brush against you, and from that day forward you’d be lucky in all matters, as would your children after you, and their children as well.