The Real Thing

by Marina Simcoe

  I had to take a couple of weeks off work for the worst of my injuries to heal. However, it still took me a few weeks after that to finally quit my job in Toronto and get ready to move into Marcus’s house in Nevada.

  To me, quitting my job felt like jumping head first into a void in space. Ever since my graduation, I worked nearly every single day in a year. It was so weird to find myself with absolutely no job to go to one fine Monday morning!

  I was sad to leave my work, but I was looking forward to building a new life and having our own family with Marcus. In the end, I had to leave the unsolved mystery of the increased Christmas demand for toilet paper behind; it was now for someone else to ponder.

  The weekend before leaving Toronto for our long drive to Las Vegas, I asked all my family, along with Mikey and Emily, to get together for a spring picnic. I also invited Simon to join us in Toronto for a few days, but he politely declined. He claimed he needed to stay in Las Vegas for business this time, but I made him promise to come to the ranch house for Canada Day dinner in July. With me moving away, my family decided to celebrate Canada Day in Vegas this year!

  Our spring picnic took place on The Beaches on Toronto waterfront of Lake Ontario. With my parents living in a one-bedroom condo apartment now, our family gatherings had been happening in restaurants or other public places large enough to accommodate all of us.

  “Oh, my God! I’m so very happy to finally meet you, Marcus!” my mom yelled as soon as she caught the sight of the two of us approaching.

  And just like that — with her excited screaming reaching half the way across the park — my two worlds finally collided.

  We pushed two picnic tables together end to end and took out the enormous amount of food we all brought in coolers with us.

  I watched mom fuss with paper plates and napkins, arranging them just the right way on the tables. She also divided in two parts the red rose arrangement that Marcus brought for her; she wrapped the bases in pieces of tinfoil somehow to create two separate centrepieces for both picnic tables and proudly displayed her efforts on the checkered plastic tablecloths.

  Over the past few weeks, I helped my parents sell or donate most of the furniture from the house. Lily and Evan assisted me with all of it.

  We were shocked to discover an enormous collection of shopping bags and still unopened boxes with all the stuff that my mom had bought over the years. Clothes, shoes, hundreds of small and large home décor items, dishes, books, and even children's toys were arranged in neat rows inside the large storage room in the basement and up in the unfinished attic. Many bags had store receipts tucked inside; almost all of the items had the price tags still on.

  My mother sobbed quietly, watching us load some of the shopping bags into Lily’s car. We were about to take the items in them back to the stores where they had been purchased, to see if any of them could still be returned. Mom wasn’t sorry to part with her “treasures,” she didn’t care about any of them. To her, they’d served their purpose as soon as she paid for them and brought them home. She was crying from shame, having the proof of her “crime” being brought up into the open.

  I felt sorry for her, but didn’t know what to say to her at that moment. I had never been good at voicing the compassion that I felt, even when it was tearing my heart apart from the inside.

  Surprisingly, it was Lily who came up with the right thing to say for once.

  “It is an addiction. You can never get rid of it completely, Jen, but with help, you will be able to control it. You can stop it from ruining your life.”

  My mom exhaled a shuddered breath and gave her a small nod in reply before going back inside the house. Her shoulders relaxed a little: we weren’t there to judge her — the rest she could deal with.

  Instead of saying anything at all, I walked over to Lily then and hugged her. As calm as her words sounded, I knew they were heartfelt because she spoke from experience. Over the past many months, she had been there for my brother more than any one of us had.

  Even if my brother didn’t give Lily the pink-gold ring that she absolutely loved by the way and showed to everyone who cared to look, she was my family too.

  “You know, Marcus, you really should think about cutting your hair off.” Lily’s voice came from across the picnic table.

  I gave her the stink eye. I loved his hair!

  “It can’t be practical for a man.” She said nonchalantly as she continued to nibble on cheese and crackers, ignoring any signs of my displeasure as usual.

  “You don’t find long hair practical?” asked Marcus, tilting his head, and I saw the tiny sparks of amusement spring to life in his navy-blue eyes.

  “Well, it is very practical for me.” She touched her glossy bun with not a hair out of place. “Your hairstyle looks very impressive on stage, but it must be a pain to have it down all day. It’s not like you can pin it up. A bun doesn’t work for men!”

  “You think so?” Marcus stretched his arm over the table and closed his empty hand into a fist with all eyes on him. He opened his hand a moment later, displaying a black hair elastic that wasn’t there before in the middle of his palm.

  “Wow!” laughed Emily and clapped her hands.

  “Cool, dude! Did you have it up your sleeve?” Even asked, and unceremoniously pulled the sleeve of Marcus’s leather jacket back. “How did you do it?”

  “If I tell you — the magic will be gone.” Marcus gave him the standard answer he gave to anyone who asked similar questions. Only I knew that his magic was there to stay no matter what.

  Marcus pulled his hair back and used the elastic to twist the heavy mass into a knot quickly.

  “What do you think?” he asked Lily with a cocky grin and turned his head to the side a little so that she could have a better look.

  “Well,” she furrowed her brow in thought and bit down on her bottom lip. “This is weird, but you actually can pull it off. You still look hot!”

  “Hey!” My brother nudged her in the arm. “He may be your brother-in-law one day!”

  “Honey,” Lily explained patiently, “I just stated the fact: he is hot. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with him.”

  Her words made my mom choke on the leaf of lettuce from her salad, and my father quickly changed the subject, “These are beautiful roses, Marcus!” He waved his plastic fork at the improvised centrepieces.

  “Thank you, Henry,” Marcus gave my dad a polite smile and then winked at me.

  I was delighted to see him so happy! He had been apprehensive about meeting my family. I even suggested he keep his mask on for today if it made him feel more at ease. In the end, he decided against wearing the mask, mostly because it would have attracted more unwanted attention in the park.

  Now he looked so comfortable here! He seemed to thrive in the company of my family. He was so much more social by nature than he allowed himself to be most of his life. Thinking about the years he spent in his self-imposed prison of isolation made my heart ache.

  “Marcus, now that it looks like you are it for me,” I smiled back at him, chasing the sad thoughts away, “I feel like I should confess something to you: roses are not my favourite flowers. I actually don’t like them at all. They’re prickly, loud and expensive.”

  “Really?” He looked sincerely surprised. “And you’re telling me now? What are your favourite?”

  “I like wild flowers,” I replied dreamily.

  “Wild flowers? Like the ones that grow out in fields and forests, right? You’re kidding me! I don’t know of any florist — either here or in Vegas — that sells field flowers. Do you expect me to prance around a meadow somewhere, gathering wild flowers for you?”

  I imagined Marcus “prancing” in his leather pants and chains and started laughing uncontrollably. He watched me for a few moments, a warm smile playing on his lips.

  “You know, for you, I just might do it,” he said softly.

  “Okay, Angela, Marcus, you have to tell them your news!” Emily’s loud
voice interrupted our moment. “Please, please, please! I can’t wait anymore. It’s been killing me for the past twenty-four hours.”

  I told Emily about the baby yesterday. To be honest, I didn’t expect her to keep the secret for this long.

  “Can I tell them?” Emily begged, and it literally shot out of her as soon as I gave her a nod. “Angela and Marcus are having a baby!”

  “Is that true?”

  “Oh, my God!”

  My mom clutched her hands to her chest. My father got up from his seat and then plopped back down on the bench.

  “Congratulations, my baby-girl! Marcus! I’m so happy that you came into Angela’s life!” Mom looked at him with eyes full of pure adoration, and for a moment, I even thought that she would go on thanking him for sticking around long enough to get me pregnant.

  “Really? Way to go, sis!” Evan yelled and punched Marcus in the shoulder.

  Emily jumped up and down in excitement as if she had heard the news for the first time herself, and Lily smiled and hugged Mikey for whatever reason.

  I squeezed Marcus’s hand tight and smiled so wide my face hurt. These were my people. Every one of them was perfectly imperfect, and all of them together made up my family, my world.

  36. The Worries.

  I loved living on the ranch. For one, it was much warmer here. Even though I was born and raised in Canada, cold weather was not something I missed. I was used to the cold back home, but it didn’t mean I liked it very much.

  I did miss the luscious green forests of Ontario, but I loved the peace and quiet of living on the ranch just as much. Of course, I wasn’t here in the middle of summer when air temperatures, reportedly, reached otherworldly heights. I could possibly change my opinion then but for now I enjoyed the tranquil mornings and the vivid desert sunsets.

  In any case, being with Marcus was never meant to be tied to one place for the rest of my life. We could enjoy breakfast in Paris in the morning, have a swim on a beach in the Caribbean in the afternoon and then listen to an opera in Milan in the evening – all in one day. And this was exactly how we wanted to live our lives, with a complete disregard to boundaries of any country. I couldn’t wait to start travelling as soon as we confirmed somehow that it was safe for me to teleport again. I didn’t even know if there was a way to find it out for sure.

  There were also so many other things I wanted to know about his magic, things that Marcus didn’t know himself. All his life, he had been learning about his own abilities by trial and error. And since the error part of this method could have devastating consequences, he preferred to err on the side of caution, refraining from using his magic if there was a chance that it could be dangerous for him or others.

  I, on the other hand, was extremely curious about the potential of his abilities. Could Marcus really pull the moon from the sky? Could he actually cause a tornado by stopping an incoming storm? Was there really a danger to the world if he conjured things from nothing?

  More than anything, I couldn’t wait to find out which of his father’s powers would be passed on to our baby. I began to think about the baby as ‘he’ because of what Ingeborg had said about the extremely low chance of it being a girl.

  Having our first baby was a life-changing event on its own. In our case, I had the added anxiety of all the possible implications of raising a “magical” child, especially, since I didn’t even know what the exact nature of my baby’s gift would be.

  My overactive imagination kept coming up with one horror scenario after another. What if my baby-son woke up one night and wandered out of the house straight through the walls and into the dark desert with snakes and coyotes? What if he got mad that his diaper was wet and set his crib on fire? What if he liked a story in his book about elephants and then decided to teleport himself to somewhere in Africa to see a real one?

  Try as I might, I could never answer any of these questions, and neither could Marcus, but we weren’t alone. We knew now that there were a number of people who had successfully raised magical children for centuries, and I wanted to get to know them better.

  One evening, during Marcus’s week off from the shows and after the dinner I made for us, we sat in a big comfy chair in the living room and watched one of the stunning desert sunsets through the large windows that lined the whole back wall of the house.

  This was one of our “stay-in dates” that we preferred to going out. We liked having dinners at home, simply because we could do things here that we couldn’t do in a restaurant, like me sitting in Marcus’s lap, the way I was doing it right now.

  Like on a real date, we dressed up and had champagne — or a flute of apple juice and sparkling water in my case. I wore a red silk dress, stockings and stiletto pumps, and Marcus had on his leather pants and a dress shirt: I didn’t insist on torturing him with a suit even on our special dinner dates.

  “Angela,” he said, after placing a kiss in my hair.

  “Mmhmm?” I answered, my head on his shoulder.

  “Do we still have the invitation to the family reunion next month?”

  This was the first time that he had brought it up. Of course, I had told him everything I learned from Ingeborg that Sunday morning in the café. I made sure he understood that his magic was not some accidental freak of nature; it was hereditary. I wanted him to know that his parents were like him, they had no reason to shun him. He had listened to everything I said but didn’t reply then. I sensed he needed some time to process all of it first. Was he finally ready to talk now?

  “Yes, we do. We’re still invited. Would you like to go?” I asked carefully.

  “I never had a family, even an extended family. I have no idea how to feel about all of this.”

  I hated to see a deep crease between his thick, black eyebrows, to watch his hands squeeze tightly into fists, to hear his heart speed up against my upper arm pressed to his chest.

  “Having a family can be a wonderful thing, Marcus. Even if most of them are dysfunctional in some way or another.” I gently touched his face and smiled. “Family are people who know you better than anyone else does. And yes, it can be maddening sometimes; but more often than not, they are the ones who stick with you even if you act yourself. It can be great to have more people like you around; people, who know exactly who and what you are.”

  “It’s bigger than me now. It’s no longer about the past.” His fists relaxed, and he splayed his hand over my stomach.

  It hadn’t grown at all. I wasn’t that far along, and I read it was normal not to show for a while, especially for the first pregnancy. Of course, my mother volunteered her opinion on this matter. “With your wide hips, Angela, there is plenty of space for the baby to be comfortable for a while yet!” she said. Well, she might be right too.

  His hand caressed my arm.

  “My parents couldn’t be there for me. But I want to be there for our baby. I want to help him every step of the way.”

  “And you will, Marcus. We both will,” I whispered.

  “But how? We don’t even know what kind of abilities the baby will have? I want to support him in everything, but I have no idea what kind of support he may even need. It makes me feel so powerless.”

  “Well, all of the parenting books I’ve been reading lately say that most, if not all, new parents feel some form of anxiety, even the parents of children born without any magical powers, believe it or not, but there are always people who can help. There are some who can help us too. We know it now.”

  “You made sure we do,” he chuckled, teasing, but I could feel love in his voice; love so warm and strong, I could almost touch it. Hot tingles spread from my heart and along the exposed skin of my arms, as I busked in his love like in rays of sunshine.

  I looked up to make sure that the crease on his forehead had smoothed out.

  “Will you come to Phoenix with me?” he asked at last.

  “Oh, Marcus,” I exhaled with relief. “Of course I will!”

  “I’m curious to mee
t Ingeborg face to face too.”

  “She’d be so happy to see us there.” I cupped his face. “I believe you’ll enjoy being around people from whom you don’t have to hide. Remember, how you gravitated towards me when you realized that I knew your secret and that you could be yourself around me?”

  He smiled brightly, a naughty twinkle in his eye.

  “I gravitated towards your spectacular ass, my queen!” His hands slid under the skirt of my dress and cupped my backside. “Its pull is too strong for a man to resist! And I actually made a significant effort not to be myself around you in the beginning!” he laughed between his kisses to my shoulder and neck.

  “You did?” I asked breathlessly and wrapped my arms around him, pulling him closer.

  “Mmhmm,” he murmured against my skin. “I didn’t believe you would let me hang around you very long if I did all the magical things I wanted to do to you then. How was I supposed to know that you would actually like them all, my little fearless pervert?”

  My favourite music began to play softly in the background, and the fresh smell of field flowers drifted through the air around me.

  Marcus pulled away from me with a confident smile on his face and leaned back in the chair. Just that smile of his instantly made the sweet tingle of anticipation run along my spine.

  “I want you to sit on the stool over there.” His voice had changed.

  37. The Date.

  “I want you to sit on the stool over there,” Marcus repeated in the commanding voice he used with me only when we were alone.

  I knew what would follow but feigned innocence. “What stool?”

  Instead of a reply, a barstool rolled in on coasters and stopped by the window in front of us.

  I removed my arms from around his neck but didn’t get off his lap.

  “You know what happens when you don’t listen,” he said, his voice deep and low. Serious, threatening, ever so scary.

  I nodded but still didn’t move.

  To my delight, I was lifted into the air at once. I flew through the air and landed with my ass on the barstool, which went into a spin from the impact. Another barstool from the kitchen appeared in front of me, and I quickly put my foot on it for balance and to stop my spinning.