“Then you need the exercise,” Tilda replied. “Do this every week and you won’t get arthritis.”
I wasn’t getting arthritis before, thought Olivia.
“But you will,” said Tilda. “If you just sit around counting your money.”
“Did Warren G. Harding’s wife do this?” Olivia asked.
“I imagine she did.”
“What I mean is, how did that help him become president?”
Tilda smiled and redoubled her efforts with the dough. “Keep at it,” she urged Olivia. “You expect that magic is just waving a wand and mumbling some magic words. It’s work too. It’s learning your craft from the bottom up. Walk before you can run, or you’ll fall down and bump your head.”
At last, Tilda decided that the dough had been kneaded enough. She prepared two more bowls and put the lumps inside, covering both with a damp cloth. “Now we let the Lady do her part,” she said.
“Put them in the oven?” Olivia suggested.
“Oh, not yet, not yet. The dough has to rise. Let’s go outside and enjoy the last of the summer.”
Aunt Tilda’s garden wasn’t all that big. The swimming pool at Olivia’s parents’ house was larger than the whole area, flagstones and all. But Tilda had managed to fit a lot into it. They sat on two wicker chairs that faced the planted area. A tree grew near the back fence. Some of its leaves were already starting to turn red and yellow. A rosebush still had a few remaining blooms on it, and some chrysanthemums were starting to put out buds.
“Pay attention,” Tilda said, surprising Olivia, who thought she was already paying attention.
“I don’t mean concentrate,” said Tilda. “That’s different. Paying attention is being calm and allowing yourself to experience what’s going on. You’re tense, because you’re always thinking about yourself. Don’t worry so much. Sit and listen and watch.”
Olivia made an effort to do what Tilda said.
“You’re still trying,” Tilda told her. “Not trying is the key.”
Sounds pretty stupid, Olivia thought before she remembered that Tilda could read her mind. Then she decided that the only way not to allow Tilda to do that was to think of nothing at all.
It wasn’t easy. Threads of the things that bothered Olivia kept creeping into her head. Dulcimer and her hair... Alex and Wolverine and the cat... Ms. Noyes and the poetry... Madison and her threats... Eva and James Sheelin...
Tilda waved her hand very slowly to catch Olivia’s eye, then pointed to the tree. Olivia looked. A small bird was making a noise. Not a song, really. A call of danger. She followed the bird’s angry look and saw that Julius was sitting in the doorway, eyeing the bird.
Olivia hadn’t even heard the bird before, nor seen Julius for that matter. But as she watched, all at once she became aware of other things: a yellow leaf separated from the tree and floated down to the pavestones where Olivia was sitting. Looking at that, she saw a few ants marching purposefully forward. They were heading for a dead caterpillar, which was already covered by a swarm of ants. Somehow this didn’t seem yucky to Olivia. It was just part of something that was going on.
And then she realized that she herself was part of everything that was going on. It was like slipping into a swimming pool on a warm day. As easily as that, you found yourself in the water and it surrounded you, enclosed you, made you part of it.
Olivia became aware that there were other sounds and other things moving. A breeze rustled the dry leaves, which moved across the pavestones, getting in the way of the ants, who started pushing them out of the way. Rose petals fell and scattered, leaving behind the husk at the heart of the flower. For a second Olivia thought she could smell it. Then she realized she actually could smell the herbs Tilda had planted here. So many kinds... hard to tell one from another... some sweet, some spicy, some bitter.
And here she was, sitting in the midst of it. Waiting. Olivia’s eyes opened wide. “I’m supposed to do something,” she said to Aunt Tilda. It seemed like a remarkable discovery, but Tilda only nodded and said, “We all are.”
Olivia was excited. She had never felt anything like this before, but Tilda had been right: as soon as she tried to notice what was going on, everything went back to normal. The bird flew away, Julius lay down and closed his eyes, and the ants didn’t seem so important.
“Time for some magic,” Tilda said.
“That was magic,” Olivia replied.
“It was a good start, but wait till you see how the dough has risen,” Tilda told her.
It was true. The dough had doubled in size. Olivia wasn’t really aware that was what happened when bread got made. But it was far from over. Tilda seemed to think it was necessary to knead it all over again and let it rise a second time before shaping the dough into loaves and putting them in the oven.
“Not long now,” she told Olivia. This time, when they went outside to wait, Tilda poured glasses of juice. “What is this?” Olivia asked when she tasted hers.
“A recipe of mine,” Tilda said. “I think it needs a little more cranberry. Do you think it’s too sweet?”
“I think you should bottle and sell it and make a million dollars.”
“If you knew what was in bottled soft drinks, you’d never go near another one,” said Tilda. “They have preservatives and artificial flavorings and chemicals designed to make you want more.”
“How do you make this?”
“Start with real fruit and press the juice from it. For this batch I used oranges, lemons, cranberries, and currants. I used to put in strawberries, but you can’t buy decent ones at this time of year. Next June we’ll find some real ones at a farmer’s market.”
“It’s a lot of work, though,” commented Olivia. “Like the bread.” Secretly, she thought that home-made bread couldn’t be good enough to justify all the work, when you could just go to the store and buy as much as you needed. Not even Tilda’s bread could be that good.
Tilda smiled.
When Olivia finally bit into a slice of the bread, she realized she was wrong. It wasn’t like any bread she’d ever had before. In fact, it wasn’t like bread at all. It was like some delicious new food that Tilda had just invented. “It is a lot of work,” Tilda said. “And if you find a really good family-owned bakery, you can come close to it. But bakeries don’t use athames, and I wanted to teach you some magic.”
“Can’t you use magic to knead it?” asked Olivia, whose hands still ached.
“The Lady wants you to make a contribution to the process,” Tilda replied. “Otherwise you won’t appreciate the result.”
Chapter Ten
FOR THE REST OF THE WEEKEND, Aunt Tilda showed Olivia magical things. At first, like the bread, they didn’t seem particularly like magic, but as Olivia got into them, she saw the point. Sometimes the two of them just sat in the backyard and entered into what was going on all around them. Or they went for a walk and all of a sudden things were transformed. Olivia saw things in a new light. She wanted to pick up all the colorful leaves that were falling from the trees because they seemed as precious as jewels. Tilda smiled and said, “They’re a gift, but the kind of gift that you can’t hoard or save. Learn to enjoy them in the moment and then store them in your memory.”
Tilda did have a wand, even if she refused to call it a magic wand. It was a smooth, reddish-brown stick with a black tip. As they passed Danny, the homeless man, Tilda reached out and touched him with it. All of a sudden, he looked different to Olivia. Sure, he still needed a shave badly and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in much too long. And the three or four filthy black ski jackets he wore still made him look like he could bounce off the sidewalk if he fell down, but there was a different look on his face. Calm, intelligent, and... something even better.
“Is it time?” he asked Tilda. He looked down at himself. “I’ll need armor.”
“No, not yet,” she told him. “You need to go down to the clinic, though. It’s the twentieth of the month.”
“I
don’t like it there. They make me take pills and I forget who I really am.”
Tilda touched him with the wand again, so gently that he didn’t notice. “It will help you regain your throne,” she said.
A peaceful look came over his face. “I will go,” he said. “But I will return.”
“Your subjects are counting on it,” she said. “So you must take care of yourself.”
He pulled himself to his feet and walked off in the other direction. “Is he going to get help?” Olivia asked.
“He needs to renew his meds,” Tilda responded.
“And then he won’t imagine he’s a king anymore?”
“He won’t remember when he was a king,” said Tilda.
They walked on a little as Olivia considered this. “He really was?” she asked timidly.
“Once upon a time,” Tilda said, “as all fairy tales begin.”
“And he really could be again? Or do you just tell him that?”
“You must believe first,” Tilda said, “if you are going to make it happen.”
Olivia thought some more. “So why do you encourage him to take his meds to forget?”
“It isn’t time yet,” Tilda said. “He’s under a curse. Remembering only makes him unhappy.”
“Why don’t you just lift the curse?”
“You think I can do anything? What about the person who put the curse on him? Do I want to make enemies I don’t need? Magic is a very hazardous business, Olivia. If you really want to learn it, remember that.”
Olivia felt a little hurt. “I thought you were teaching me.”
“I am. But there’s a lot to teach.”
“Does that mean I can’t have a wand or an ath... athame?”
“Not yet. And really, they find you, not the other way around.”
“How will they find me?”
“When you’re ready, they will.”
Later, tired of answering Olivia’s questions, Tilda took her to the library on the second floor. When Olivia realized where they were going, she tried to get out of it, because she worried that Tilda would notice that a book was missing. Tilda insisted, however, and sat Olivia down in a comfortable chair, turning on a reading lamp. As Tilda looked on the shelves for the book she had in mind, Olivia’s eyes crept to the place where she had found the John Dee book, way up on the top shelf.
She blinked. There wasn’t an empty space there any longer. From here, Olivia couldn’t read the title of the book that was there, but it didn’t even look like the John Dee book. Had Aunt Tilda replaced it? If so, why hadn’t she asked Olivia what happened to the missing book?
Olivia reminded herself not to think about all this; fortunately, Tilda was distracted by searching for the other book, and wasn’t reading minds. She brought out a book titled Helping Others Through Wicca, gave it to Olivia, and left her alone to read it.
It wasn’t as interesting as she’d hoped. She wanted to know specifically how you could do magical things, but this was a kind of encouraging book about witches and what good things they often did. It started by saying that witches had gotten a bad name from people who were superstitious and afraid. Men as well as women could be witches, though men witches were sometimes called warlocks.
Olivia soon grew tired of the book and left it on the table as Tilda had asked her to. She took another nervous look at the place on the shelves where the John Dee book had been. It was awfully high up—way too high for Olivia to reach. Maybe she was thinking of the wrong place. Then she remembered, however, that the book had kind of fallen off the shelf and into her hand. She thought of what Tilda had said about the wand and athame. How they found you.
That made Olivia nervous, and she left the room. That evening, when she was eating dinner with Tilda, she had to remind herself not to think about the John Dee book. Pretty early, she said she was tired and went to bed.
Monday morning, Olivia took a new look at René as she got into his cab. Taking a walk through the neighborhood with Tilda had made Olivia conscious of the fact that things—and people—were not as they seemed. René might be a witch or a warlock. She recalled Tilda’s saying that Mr. Feldstein might have been a witch. Maybe everyone in school was, and it was all a big joke on Olivia.
It was almost reassuring to find Alex waiting at her locker. If he was a witch, then Olivia might as well give up trying to escape. “Did you bring my book?” she remembered to ask him. Maybe the book had magically disappeared over the weekend. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.
“Um, no, it’s still at my house,” he admitted.
“You know,” Olivia began, “if you think you can get me to come over and make out with you just by keeping my book—”
He put up both hands as if to ward her off. “No, listen,” he told her. “I found a way to figure out what that coded part in the back of the book means.”
“You did,” she repeated, sounding as doubtful as she felt.
Sensing her skepticism, he added, “Well, really, I dreamed it.”
“Oh, I see now,” she said. “Like when you dreamed you were my cat.” She gathered up her books and started down the hall. Alex stayed close behind.
“Kind of like that,” he said. “Only now I was on the computer. Looking at eBay.”
“As a cat?”
“Just looking. I don’t know if I was a cat or not, okay? The important thing is that I found a code translator on eBay.”
Olivia couldn’t help laughing, but when she saw the downcast look on Alex’s face, she took his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just sounded funny.”
“But listen,” he went on, “it really was on eBay.”
“In your dream.”
“No, when I woke up, I remembered how to find it and I went online and looked it up.”
“And it was really there?”
“Yeah, exact same thing.”
“Oh, come on, Alex.”
“I know it sounds a little weird...”
Olivia sighed. How to tell him it was flat-out batfloop?
“Anyway,” he said, “I ordered it.”
“You ordered it?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t an auction. Just a buy-it-now sale.”
Olivia couldn’t help it: she was curious.
“Is it a book?” she asked.
Alex smiled. “See, now you’re interested. I think it’s something that you use, like a magnifying glass. It has a name.”
“A name?”
“I wrote it down because it was one of those words I can’t remember.” He handed her a small piece of paper.
Olivia read: Decodesphere. “I never heard of it,” she said. “Maybe you spelled it wrong.”
“Well, it’s guaranteed to work,” said Alex. He always seemed pretty confident for somebody who otherwise wasn’t too smart. “Anyway, now you’ve got to let me hold on to your book until we can translate it.”
Olivia caught the implications in that “we.” But then she shrugged. What did it matter? It would be interesting to see what kind of scam Alex had bought into.
“How much did this cost, anyway?” Olivia asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Alex. “My dad’s got lots of money.”
That made Olivia suspicious, but if Alex’s dad didn’t mind, why should she?
Anyway, Olivia had something else on her mind: namely, how to obtain a lock of Dulcimer’s hair. She thought about it for most of the morning. The only thing that she really learned in class was that Pocahontas, Captain John Smith’s girlfriend who saved his life in the movies, was in real life just a ten-year-old girl. When Mr. Feldstein mentioned that she used to turn cartwheels, naked, through the camp of the English settlers, it put a new light on the whole story. (As well as bringing forth suggestions from some of the boys how the tale could be improved if one of the girls in the class volunteered to reenact it.)
Ms. Noyes continued with her poetry obsession, even though their literature text had plenty of prose in it. Olivia suspected
that Ms. Noyes was staying with poetry as a way of showing that Madison, and Madison’s father, couldn’t decide what she should be teaching. So it was no surprise (to Olivia, anyway) when, at the end of class, Ms. Noyes chose another poem from the book and said that those who wished to do so could memorize it for Friday. She didn’t even sound sarcastic when she said “those who wished to do so.” Or when she added, “Anyone who does will, of course, raise their final grade.”
Lunchtime came at last and that meant pizza. Olivia felt just a twinge of guilt, or perhaps it was fear about what Mother would say if she knew that her daughter was eating at least once a day at a pizza parlor. “Not that I’m complaining,” she said to the others, “but do you really eat pizza every day?”
“It’s the perfect food,” Paul responded. “Has all four of the major food groups—bread, vegetable, dairy, and meat, providing you count anchovies as meat. Even the anchovies provide protein, in a form that’s a lot less likely to clog your arteries than, say, hamburger.”
“Could I write that down?” Olivia asked. “Just in case anybody asks?”
“If you want totally boring food,” Dulcimer added, “come over and eat kosher at my house on Saturdays. That’s guaranteed to show you the advantages of junk food.”
“Maybe I will,” Olivia said.
“My parents will be impressed that I know the daughter of movie stars.”
“Really?” Olivia asked. She’d never thought of herself as somebody you could show off.
“I doubt it, actually,” Dulcimer admitted. “Maybe if your parents were classical musicians.”
Which reminded Olivia of what she wanted to do today. Over the weekend, she’d devised an excuse. “You know,” she said to Dulcimer. “I really like your hair.”
Dulcimer pulled the end of one side of her hair down to where she could see it. She frowned. “You do?” Evidently, she was deciding it wasn’t shocking enough, if somebody could actually like it.
“Yeah, I wanted to get mine toned the same color.”
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