Practical Magic

by Alice Hoffman

  “Will you excuse me for a minute?” Sally says. “I’ll be right back.”

  She runs upstairs to Kylie’s room and switches on the light. It was nearly dawn when Gillian got home from Ben’s, where half of her belongings are now taking up most of his closet space. Since she has today off, her plan was to sleep as long as possible, go shopping for shoes, then swing by the library for a book on cell structure. Instead, the shades are being cast open and sunlight is spilling across the room in thick yellow stripes. Gillian squirms beneath the quilt; if she’s quiet enough, maybe this will all go away.

  “Wake up,” Sally tells Gillian and she gives her a good shake. “Someone’s here looking for Jimmy.”

  Gillian sits up so fast that she hits her head on the bedpost. “Does he have a lot of tattoos?” she asks, thinking of the last person from whom Jimmy borrowed too much money, a guy named Alex Devine, who was said to be the singular human life form able to exist without a heart.

  “I wish,” Sally says.

  The sisters stare at each other.

  “Oh, god.” Gillian is whispering now. “It’s the police, isn’t it? Oh, my god.” She reaches to the floor to grab for the nearest pile of clothes.

  “He’s an investigator from the attorney general’s office. He found the last letter I sent you and traced you here.”

  “That’s what happens when you write letters.” Gillian is out of bed now, pulling on jeans and a soft beige blouse. “You want to communicate? Use the damn phone.”

  “I gave him some coffee,” Sally says. “He’s in the kitchen.”

  “I don’t care what room he’s in.” Gillian looks at her sister. Sometimes Sally really doesn’t get it. She certainly doesn’t seem to understand what it means to bury a body in your backyard. “What are we going to tell him?”

  Sally clutches at her chest and goes white. “I may be having a heart attack,” she announces.

  “Oh, terrific. That’s all we need.” Gillian slips on a pair of flip-flops, then stops to consider her sister. Sally can have a fever of a hundred and three before she thinks to complain. She can spend the whole night in the bathroom, brought to her knees by a stomach virus, and be cheery by the first light of morning, down in the kitchen, already fixing a fruit salad or some blueberry waffles. “You’re having a panic attack,” Gillian decides. “Get over it. We have to go convince that damn investigator we don’t know anything.”

  Gillian runs a comb through her hair, then starts for the door. She turns when she senses that Sally isn’t following her.

  “Well?” Gillian says.

  “Here’s the thing,” Sally says. “I don’t think I can lie to him.”

  Gillian walks right up to her sister. “Yes, you can.”

  “I don’t know. I may not be able to sit there and just lie. It’s the way he looks at you....”

  “Listen to me.” Gillian’s voice is thin and high. “We will go to jail unless you lie, so I think you’ll be able to do it. When he talks to you, don’t look at him.” She takes Sally’s hands in her own. “He’ll ask a few questions, then he’ll go back to Arizona and everyone will be happy.”

  “Right,” Sally says.

  “Remember. Don’t look at him.”

  “Okay.” Sally nods. She thinks she can do this, or at the very least she can try.

  “Just follow my lead,” Gillian tells her.

  The sisters cross their hearts and hope to die, then swear they’re in this together, forever, till the absolute very end. They’ll give Gary Hallet simple facts; they won’t say too much or too little. By the time they have their story worked out and go downstairs, Gary has finished his third cup of coffee and has memorized every item on the kitchen shelves. When he hears the women on the stairs, he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and pushes his coffee cup away.

  “Hey there,” Gillian says.

  She’s good at this, that’s for sure. When Gary stands to greet her she sticks her hand out for him to shake just like this was a regular old social event. But when she really looks at him, when she feels his grip on her hand, Gillian gets nervous. This guy won’t be easy to fool. He’s seen a lot of things, and heard a lot of stories, and he’s smart. She can tell that just by looking at him. He may be too smart.

  “I hear you want to talk to me about Jimmy,” Gillian says. Her heart feels too big for her chest.

  “I’m afraid I do.” Gary sizes Gillian up fast—the tattoo on her wrist, the way she takes one step back when he addresses her, as if she expects to be hit. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “I ran away in June. I took his car and hit the road and haven’t heard from him since.”

  Gary nods and makes some notes, but the notes are just scribbles, nothing but nonsense words. Ivory Snow, he’s written at the top of the page. Wolverine. Apple pie. Two plus two equals four. Darling. He’s jotting down anything in order to appear concentrated on official business. This way, Sally and her sister won’t be able to look into his eyes and sense that he doesn’t believe Gillian. She wouldn’t have had the nerve to take off with her boyfriend’s car, and Hawkins wouldn’t have let it go so easy. No way. He would have caught up with her before she reached the state line.

  “Probably a smart move,” Gary says. He’s done this before, smoothed out the doubt so it doesn’t seep through his voice. He reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out Hawkins’s legal record and spreads it across the table for Gillian to see.

  Gillian sits down to get a better look. “Wow,” she says.

  Jimmy’s first arrest for drugs was so many years back he couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Gillian runs her finger down a list of crimes that goes on and on; the misdemeanors becoming more violent with every year, until they veer into felonies. It looks as if they were living together when he was picked up for his last aggravated assault, and he never bothered to mention it. Unless Gillian is mistaken, Jimmy told her he’d gone to Phoenix to help his cousin move some furniture on the day of his court date.

  She cannot believe what an idiot she was for all those years. She knew more about Ben Frye after two hours than she knew about Jimmy after four years. Jimmy seemed mysterious back then, with deep secrets he had to keep. Now the facts are apparent; he was a thief and a liar, and she went and sat still for it for longer than would seem humanly possible.

  “I had no idea,” Gillian says. “I swear to you. All that time, I never asked him any questions about where he went and what he did.” Her eyes feel hot, and when she blinks it doesn’t do any good. “Not that that’s any excuse.”

  “You don’t have to make any excuses for who you love,” Gary says. “Don’t apologize.”

  Gillian will have to pay even more attention to this investigator. He’s got a particular way of observing things that catches you up short. Why, before he introduced the idea that love was blameless, Gillian never once stopped to consider she might not be responsible for everything that went wrong. She glances over to gauge Sally’s reaction, but Sally is staring at Gary and she has a funny look on her face. It’s a look that worries Gillian, because it’s totally unlike Sally. Standing there, with her back against the refrigerator, Sally seems much too vulnerable. Where is her armor, where is her guard, where is the logic that can put it all back together again?

  “The reason I’m looking for Mr. Hawkins,” Gary explains to Gillian, “is that it appears he sold some poisonous plant matter to several college students which has been the cause of three deaths. He offered them LSD, then went and supplied them with the seeds of some highly hallucinogenic, highly toxic weeds.”

  “Three deaths.” Gillian shakes her head. Jimmy told her there’d been two. He told her it wasn’t his fault; the kids were greedy and stupid and tried to trick him out of the money he was rightfully due. “Fucking spoiled brats,” that’s what he’d called them. “College-boy babies.” He could lie about anything, as though it were a sport. Gillian feels ill thinking how she automatically believed Jimmy and took his side.
Those kids must have been looking for trouble. She remembers thinking that. “This is awful,” she tells Gary Hallet about the deaths at the university. “It’s horrible.”

  “Your friend has been identified by several witnesses, but he’s disappeared.”

  Gillian is listening to Gary, but she’s also thinking about the way things used to be. August in Tucson can bring the desert floor up to 125 degrees. One broiling week, soon after they’d first met, she and Jimmy didn’t even leave the house—they just switched on the air conditioner and drank beer and fucked each other every way Jimmy could think of, which mostly had to do with his immediate gratification.

  “Let’s not call him my friend,” Gillian says.

  “Fine,” Gary agrees. “But we’d like to catch up to him before he sells any more of this garbage. We don’t want this to happen again.”

  Gary stares at Gillian with his dark eyes, which makes it difficult to look away or manage a half-decent fabrication. Maybe this gal knew about the college kids dying, and maybe she didn’t, but she certainly knew something. Gary sees that inside her—he can tell by the way she stares at the floor. There is culpability in her expression, but that could be only because she was the one James Hawkins came home to on the night the history major went into convulsions. Maybe it’s because she’s just realized who it was she was fucking and calling sweetheart all that time.

  Gary is waiting for Gillian to declare herself in some way, but Sally is the one who can’t keep her mouth shut. She’s been trying, she’s been telling herself not to talk, to go on following Gillian’s lead, but she can’t do it. Could it be she’s compelled to speak out only because she wants Gary Hallet’s attention? Could it be she wants to feel exactly the way she does when he turns to her?

  “It won’t happen again,” Sally tells him.

  Gary meets her gaze. “You sound pretty certain of that.” But of course, he knows from her letter how sure of herself she can be. Something’s not right there, she wrote to Gillian. Leave him. Get your own place, a house that’s yours alone. Or just come home. Come home right now.

  “She means Jimmy will never go back to Tucson,” Gillian hurries to say. “Believe me, if you’re after him, he knows it. He’s stupid, but he’s not an idiot. He’s not going to go on selling drugs in the same town where his clientele have been dying.”

  Gary takes his card out and hands it to Gillian. “I don’t want to scare you, but this is a dangerous person we’re dealing with. I’d appreciate it if you’d call me if he tries to contact you.”

  “He won’t contact her,” Sally says.

  She cannot keep her mouth shut. It’s simply impossible. What is wrong with her? That’s what Gillian’s glare is asking, and that’s what Sally is asking herself. It’s just that this investigator gets such a worried look when he focuses on something. He’s a man of concern, she sees that. He’s the kind of man you’d never want to lose once you’d finally found him.

  “Jimmy knows we’re through,” Gillian announces. She goes to pour herself a cup of coffee, and while she’s at it she sticks an elbow into Sally’s ribs. “What’s wrong with you?” she whispers. “Will you just shut up?” She turns back to Gary. “I made it perfectly clear to Jimmy that our relationship was finito. That’s why he won’t contact me. We’re history.”

  “I’m going to have to have the car impounded,” Gary says.

  “Naturally,” Gillian says graciously. If they’re lucky, this guy will be gone in under two minutes. “Go right ahead.”

  Gary stands and runs his hands through his dark hair. He’s supposed to leave now. He knows that. But he’s dragging his feet. He wants to go on looking into Sally’s eyes, and drown a thousand times a day. Instead, he takes his coffee cup to the sink.

  “You don’t have to bother with that,” Gillian tells him warmly, desperate to be rid of him.

  Sally smiles when she sees the way he places the cup and the spoon down so carefully.

  “If anything does happen to come up, I’ll be in town until tomorrow morning.”

  “Nothing will happen,” Gillian assures him. “Trust me.”

  Gary reaches for the notebook he keeps to remind himself of details and flips it open. “I’ll be at the Hide-A-Way Motel.” He looks up and sees nothing but Sally’s gray eyes. “Someone at the rental car desk recommended it.”

  Sally knows the place, a dump on the other side of the Turnpike, near a vegetable stand and a fried-chicken franchise known for its excellent onion rings. She could not care less if he’s staying in a lousy motel like that. She doesn’t give a damn that he’s leaving tomorrow. As a matter of fact, she’ll be leaving, too. She and her girls will be out of here in no time. If they wake early, and don’t stop for coffee, they can make it to Massachusetts by noon. They can be opening the curtains in the aunts’ dark rooms to let in some sunlight just after lunch.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Gary says. He spies the half-dead cactus on the window ledge. “This is definitely not representative of the species. It’s in sad shape, I’ll tell you that.”

  Last winter, Ed Borelli gave each of the secretaries at the high school a cactus for Christmas. “Plop it on your windowsill and forget about it,” Sally had advised when complaints were raised about who on earth would want such a thing, and other than slosh some water onto its saucer now and then, that’s exactly what she herself has done. But Gary is paying the cactus a good deal of attention. He’s got that worried look, and he’s fumbling with something stuck between the saucer the cactus rests on and its pot. When he turns back to face Sally and Gillian, he seems so pained that Sally’s first thought is that he’s pricked his finger.

  “Damn it,” Gillian whispers.

  It’s Jimmy’s silver ring Gary is holding on to, and that’s what’s causing him such pain. They’re going to lie to him and he knows it. They’re going to tell him they’ve never seen this ring before, or that they bought it in an antique store, or that it must have dropped from the heavens above.

  “Nice ring,” Gary says. “Real unusual.”

  Neither Sally nor Gillian can figure how this can be possible; they know for a fact that ring was on Jimmy’s finger, it’s buried out back, and yet here it is in the investigator’s hand. And he’s looking at Sally now; he’s waiting for an explanation. Why shouldn’t he be; he’s read a description of this ring in three depositions: A rattler on one side of it, he remembers that. A coiled snake, which is exactly what he’s got now.

  Sally feels that heart-attack thing again; it’s something wrong in the center of her chest, like a red-hot poker, like a piece of glass, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She couldn’t lie to this man if her life depended on it—and it does—and that’s the reason she doesn’t say a word.

  “Well, look at that.” Gillian is all wonder and sugar. It’s so easy for her to do this, she doesn’t have to think twice. “That old thing’s probably been there for a million years.”

  Sally’s still not talking, but she’s leaning all her weight against the refrigerator, as though she needed help to stand up.

  “Is that so?” Gary says, still drowning.

  “Let me take a look.” Gillian goes right up to him and takes the ring out of his hands and studies it as if she’s never seen it before. “Cool,” she says, giving it back. “You should probably keep it.” This is such a nice touch she is truly proud of herself. “It’s much too big for any of us.”

  “Well, great.” Gary’s head is pounding. Fuck it. Fuck it all. “Thanks.”

  As he slips the ring into his pocket, he’s thinking that Sally’s sister is really good at this; she’s probably well aware of James Hawkins’s whereabouts as of this very second. Sally, however, is another story; maybe she doesn’t know anything, maybe she’s never seen this ring before. Her sister could have her fooled completely, could be siphoning money, groceries, family heirlooms to Hawkins as he watches TV in some basement apartment in Brooklyn, waiting for the heat to die down.

  But
Sally isn’t looking at him, that’s the thing. Her beautiful face is turned away because she knows something. Gary has seen it before, countless times. People who are guilty of something think they can hide it by not looking you in the eye; they presume you can read their shame, that you can see in through their eyes to their very soul, and in a way they’re right.

  “I guess we’re done,” Gary says. “Unless there’s something you’ve suddenly thought of that I should know.”

  Nothing. Gillian grins and shrugs. Sally swallows, hard. Gary can practically feel how dry her throat is, how the pulse at the base of her neck is throbbing. He’s not certain how far he would go to cover for someone. He’s never been in the position before, and he doesn’t like the feel of it, yet here he is, standing in a stranger’s kitchen in New York on a humid summer day, actually wondering if he could look the other way. And then he thinks about his grandfather walking to the courthouse to legally claim him on a day when it was a hundred and twelve in the shade. The air started to sizzle; the mesquite and the Russian thistle burst into flame, but Sonny Hallet had thought to bring a container of cool spring water with him, and he wasn’t even tired when he walked inside the courthouse. If you go against what you believe in, you’re nothing anyway, so you might as well stick to your guns. Gary’s going to fly home tomorrow and hand this case over to Arno. He can’t even pretend it will turn out all right: that Hawkins will surrender, and Sally and her sister will be proven innocent of assisting a murder suspect, and Gary himself will start writing to Sally. If he did, perhaps she wouldn’t be able to throw away his letters; she’d have to read each one again and again, exactly the way he did when hers was delivered, and before she knew it, she’d be lost, the way he seems to be at this very moment.

  Since none of this is going to happen, Gary nods and heads for the door. He has always known when to step aside, and when to sit by the road and just wait for whatever was going to happen next. He saw a mountain lion one afternoon because he decided to sit down on the bumper of his truck and drink some water before changing a blown tire. The mountain lion came padding toward the asphalt, as if it owned the road and everything else, and it took a good look at Gary, who had never before been grateful for a flat tire.