One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I still don’t eat nuts. Magic doesn’t last forever, and it’s hard to know exactly when a certain bit of magic might run out. Some jars have magic that lasts a few minutes or hours; others have magic meant to last lifetimes. Generations. Dad usually gets long-lasting magic. That’s part of what makes him so special. That, and how sure he is about what each jar might do.

  In other families, someone might not know if the cloudy white magic or the silky silver magic was the right one for restoring breath. Or maybe they wouldn’t have even caught magic strong enough to save me. In other towns, faraway ones without magic, there is no solution to the unexpected things that go wrong. Bad things happen, and then what?

  “I’m scared sometimes,” Lyle says. But we shouldn’t feel any fear. If we’re sick, magic cures us; if it rains when we want it to be sunny, magic dries us up; if we are hungry, magic bakes us a cake, roasts us a turkey.

  “What do we have to be scared about?” I ask. Lyle purses his lips.

  “Not scared,” Lyle says. “But. You know.” We aren’t scared of Dad. But we worry about him sometimes. Which is normal. He’s our dad. He’s the most magical man in all of Belling Bright. It is a big responsibility. And that means we have a big responsibility, too. To make things easy for him, to make our home a happy place, to be good so that he has the time and space to focus on magic. He has the broadest smile and the boomingest laugh and the friendliest wave. He’s the best person I know and probably the best person anyone in Belling Bright knows.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, because as long as we are good and happy and easy, then Dad can be good and happy and easy too. The magic will be ours and we will be its, too, and we will be the magical Anders family and we will have jars in every window and in every closet and hidden in secret pockets in Dad’s clothing, and it shouldn’t be very hard to be good and happy and easy with all this magic everywhere.

  Three

  In our Global Studies textbook there’s a photograph of one of the places Mom visited. There’s a clock tower. It’s brown. Maybe brick. The hands of the clock are long. Maybe bronze.

  “How does it work?” Ginger asks. She’s my best friend and she’s good at asking questions that other people might feel silly asking. “Does it just stand there?”

  “Just stand there?” Ms. Flynn asks.

  “The clock. In a non-magical town. What does it . . . do?”

  “It tells time,” Ms. Flynn says. She has a smile on her face like she’s answered this question before, and I guess maybe she has; maybe every year in Global Studies, she shows this very picture of a clock and waits for the first person to ask how it could possibly tick and tock in that non-magical town across the ocean.

  “But with what?” Ginger asks.

  “Inside there are wheels, and the wheels turn and make the hands go around and around, and sometimes it even chimes.”

  “Without magic?” It’s me this time. A chime is a magical sound. Created by jars of magic filled with specks of gold and silver. We’ve all seen Chime and Bell magic. We’ve heard it every single day of our lives. Whoever gets jars of this particular magic is in charge of the clock that year, but it’s been the same person, Greggor Barnum, every year that I’ve been alive. He’s good at it. He loves clocks and he doesn’t mind getting up in the mornings to make them ring out and wake the rest of us. People like Greggor Barnum prove that magic knows where to go, that it is finding us as much as we are finding it.

  “These clocks work without magic,” Ms. Flynn says. “They work with bells. With metal and the way it vibrates. Things made with human hands. A very precise art.” She looks almost admiring, and it makes me nervous, but I don’t know why. She keeps her gaze trained on that photo of a clock, as if somehow not-magic is something special. When everyone knows that special and magical are basically the same word. You can’t have one without the other.

  “Magic is a precise art,” I say. “Capturing jars. Knowing what to do with them. It’s all very precise.”

  “Yes, yes, of course it is.”

  “Very precise,” I say. “That’s why my father—”

  “Why he needs so much peace and quiet,” Ginger finishes for me. And she’s right—that’s exactly what I was going to say—but it sounds a little strained coming from her. Like she’s heard it one too many times. And I guess we’ve heard it a lot, we’ve heard him say it a lot, but that’s only because it’s so important. Important things have to be said over and over and over again.

  “If you want to be the most magical man in all of—” I say.

  “Belling Bright is lucky to have him,” Ms. Flynn interrupts. “You’re lucky to have him. We’re all of us lucky, to live surrounded by all these jars of magic. And a man like Wendell Anders to lead the way with them. But. Well. These towns without magic, these faraway places, they have their own—they—well, they make do. They have clocks that chime and the sun does come out from time to time, and sometimes, by strokes of luck in their very own non-magical kitchens, they make some delicious feasts.” She shrugs. Ms. Flynn is like that. She likes to say something enormous as if it’s no big deal. She keeps two jars of magic on her desk, fewer than the other teachers do. One has lake water inside that bubbles occasionally. One has a bright red light within. We’ve asked her why she doesn’t bring more jars. And she shrugs to that question too.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad shrug, and maybe that’s why he’s so magical. I decide I will stop shrugging immediately. I start right now. I still my shoulders and stare at Ms. Flynn and don’t let myself even twitch or shudder or shift a little in my seat.

  It is very nearly New Year’s Eve, my birthday, which means it is very nearly New Year’s Day, the capturing. Which means that I need to become the person I am meant to become.

  “I’d like to visit a non-magical town,” Ginger says.

  “You would?” I ask. She’s never mentioned wanting to go anywhere at all aside from TooBlue Lake.

  “Sure,” Ginger says. “I think maybe I’d like it.”

  “Me too,” Maddy says. “I think I’d like it too.” I should have been ready for Maddy to pipe in. She always does.

  “Oh,” I say. “That’s—I guess—it could be interesting.” I say it because Ginger and I agree about everything. We both like the color yellow and books about dogs going on adventures and looking at my father’s jars of magic and guessing what each one does. We both think the same boy in class is cute and we both like to wear fuzzy sweaters and the fingerless gloves that Ginger’s mother knits for us every year. So we need to have this in common too.

  “I thought you only liked magical places,” Maddy says to me. I try to remember everything I’ve ever liked about Maddy. How good she is at painting nails and that she laughs at even my silliest jokes and that she isn’t scared of anything, not even of being the new girl in Belling Bright or of capturing magic or of the scariest parts in scary movies. I list all those things in my head and remind myself to be nice. Maybe truly nice people don’t have to remind themselves, but I do with Maddy, when she’s acting this way.

  “I don’t know what I like,” I say by accident. It’s not what I mean, and it’s not true, and I straighten my back and try again. “I mean. I like it here. And I don’t know about out there. But my dad says if you have enough magic, you can make here into anywhere. So.”

  Then I shrug even though I promised myself I wouldn’t. I want to be just like Ginger, and I want to be just like Dad, and I somehow want to be myself, too, but I’m not sure there’s any room for me to be all three of us.

  There’s a long pause, and Ms. Flynn doesn’t say anything to fill it up, and no one nods or agrees with me or says their father said the same thing, and even Ginger is just sort of pretending this whole conversation never even happened. I think I see her look at Maddy and smile. But maybe she’s just holding back a sneeze or something.

  Dad says that being special can be lonely. “No one understands you,” he said very, very early this morni
ng when we were practicing jumping and running in the front yard. “Not fully. Not all of you.” He looked half sad and half proud when he said it. I want to be special. But I don’t want to be lonely. Or misunderstood.

  I guess the magic will have to decide who I am and who I’m meant to be.

  Even though my dad and I and everyone in Belling Bright already know.

  Four

  There is a firefly batting its wings against my palms, and Dad says that’s how magic feels when you catch it. Like a flutter, a blur, a tickle, a whisper. I let it go after only a moment. It’s not magic. It’s a firefly. And it deserves to be free as much as anyone else.

  I’ve been practicing for New Year’s Day by chasing fireflies and catching them with my hands. I let them bat against my palms for a single moment, imagining that they are magic, and then I release them, knowing they aren’t magic at all. Just because something looks like magic or feels like magic doesn’t make it magic, Dad’s always saying. Don’t be fooled. You don’t get this many jars of magic by chasing something else entirely. It’s at that point that he always waves to the jars. Dozens and dozens of them lined up on our windowsills, on the mantel, on the high shelves of the bookcase.

  Soon, I’ll add five or ten, or maybe, like Dad did on his first year, twenty-three.

  The thought gives me a rush.

  I practice for New Year’s Day barefoot, even when it’s cold. I don’t have gloves or a practice jar or a net or Ginger’s high leaps or Lyle’s ability to see magic where most people only see air. I don’t have anything but the way Dad looks at me—like he’s sure I’m something special. Like he’s sure I’m his.

  It’s cold tonight, a few nights before we travel to the shore to capture jars of magic. It’s so cold I have on three sweaters—one is mine, one is my mother’s, and one is my father’s. The top layer—my father’s—is a thick beige cardigan that smells like him: bacon and sugar and the woods. It might be a lucky sweater. Anything of his might be lucky, so I’ve wrapped his gray plaid scarf around my neck three times and I’m wearing his wool hat, too. It’s brown and threadbare and not keeping my ears very warm at all, but my father is the best capturer I know, the best capturer anyone knows, so it’s worth doing everything I can to be just like him.

  “Rose,” Mom calls out from the kitchen window. “Shoes. Please.”

  “You know I can’t,” I say.

  “You’ll freeze.”

  “Dad’s never frozen.”

  “That’s true!” I hear Dad call. He’s probably sitting at the kitchen table, polishing jars of magic, readying himself to capture another few dozen jars on New Year’s Day. “Bare feet make all the difference. Let the girl practice however she wants. Her toes will be fine. Rose? Pack some socks in your pockets for an emergency to make your mother happy, okay?” I can hear his smile. It’s just as easy to hear my father’s smile as it is to see it, a fact about him that I love.

  “Do you have some I could borrow?” I ask. “Lucky socks?”

  “Gross!” Lyle calls out. He’s not practicing. He’s sitting in the window seat and watching me work. It’s his third year capturing magic, and he’s done fine every year without so much as thinking about footwork or smelling the air or how a firefly feels when it’s asking your hands to let it go.

  He’s done fine, but Dad and I are meant for being more than fine.

  “You don’t need lucky socks,” Dad says. “You’re the luck.” The year I was born was his best year ever. I came into the world only a few hours before New Year’s Day, and he said he caught them for me. One hundred sixty-one jars of magic. We’ve used most of them, but a few special ones are in my closet, on Dad’s dresser, tucked into cabinets next to canisters of sugar and pasta and oatmeal. Mom always jokes that she may someday accidentally bake a batch of cookies with magic instead of flour, but it would be a hard mistake to make. Jars of food are heavy and plain. Jars of magic are practically weightless and filled with things like beams of light and the smell of the ocean and dandelion seeds, the kind blown from the stem when making a wish. The kind that look like discarded bits of clouds.

  “Our children are both the luck,” Mom says, which is what she always says when Dad calls me Little Luck. She says it for Lyle’s benefit, but I’m not sure Lyle cares. He shrugs now and turns the page of a heavy book. He scratches a place behind his ear. He hums some song that all the kids at school are into lately.

  Dad comes outside. He takes off his shoes and digs his feet into the ground. “You’ve got this, Little Luck,” he says. “Close your eyes. Try to hear the magic.” Dad says magic sounds like someone blowing an eyelash off their finger. He says sometimes it sounds like a wind chime, if you shrunk the noise and turned it to air. I close my eyes and listen. When I hear nothing, I close them tighter, so tight my head beats and my feet lose their focus and my face scrunches up. “You hear that?” Dad says. I’d bet anything his eyes are closed too, but I’m not about to open mine and look. “The magic is close. The days are dwindling. It’s almost time.”

  I hold my nose, because I’ve heard that some senses get stronger when others are stopped. I try to stop breathing altogether. I bow my head and imagine my ears to be bigger and bigger and bigger, big enough to hear the faraway magic gathering on the shores of TooBlue Lake.

  But all I hear is Mom stirring a pot of soup on the stove and Lyle turning another page in his book and the beating of my own heart, so loud and fast it must be drowning out the delicate, sweet sound of magic.

  “You hear it, right, Little Luck?” Dad asks.

  “Yes,” I say, the lie sort of sticky and sour in my mouth. “Loud and clear.”

  Five

  What I Am Thinking About When I Can’t Sleep After Not Hearing Magic Once Again

  When Lyle turned twelve, I was nine and no one was practicing capturing magic on the front lawn or the back lawn or anywhere near our house.

  On New Year’s Eve that year, we celebrated my birthday like always, and Lyle sang extra loud when the cake came out. I thought he’d be mad, that I was getting attention on a night that should have belonged to him. He was about to capture magic for the very first time, and I was just turning nine, which isn’t even a very exciting age to turn. It’s not like ten or twelve or thirteen or an age that actually matters.

  But Lyle doesn’t always do what I think he’ll do. He looks a little like my dad, with big hands and long hair that goes into his eyes, so that can confuse me, and I expect him to act like my dad.

  But Lyle isn’t anything like my dad, and sometimes I think that’s actually kind of lucky.

  “Where are the candles?” Lyle asked when the cake was set down in front of me. “She needs to make a wish.”

  “Candles?” Dad said. He’d been the one in charge of the cake. Magicking it up and deciding how it should be decorated and I guess probably lighting the candles too. Dad loved our birthdays. He’d make up a special song every year, about me and all the things I loved to do. He always brought a special jar of magic back especially for me the next day, and he’d call it my birthday jar and let me keep it in my room. He took the cake seriously. It had to look as special as a birthday was.

  He brought it out to the kitchen table this time. He had a big smile on his face because the cake looked completely spectacular. It was three layers and neon pink with glittery purple sugar all over it. Except the sugar wasn’t just purple and glittery; it changed colors, traveling through the rainbow like it was showing off.

  Magic cake.

  “Candles, honey,” Mom said. “Cakes need candles.”

  “A birthday’s not a birthday without wishes,” Lyle said. He looked especially disappointed, and I remembered that Dad had forgotten his birthday candles that year, too.

  And maybe the year before, as well.

  “We don’t need wishes,” Dad said. “We have magic.”

  “It’s not about that,” Lyle said. “It’s just what you do. On birthdays. To make them special.”

  “
It’s okay,” I said, because I was watching Dad’s shoulders go from loose to tight, his face go from smiling to that other thing, and I didn’t care about candles.

  Not really.

  Maybe only a little. I liked the way they flickered and how you always knew the smell, how birthday candles smelled and looked different than any other kind of candles. I liked picking out wishes, except I always wished for the same thing.

  “I thought a magical cake would make things special, Lyle,” Dad said. “I thought everything I do for this family made things special.”

  “I can get the candles,” Mom said. She started walking toward the kitchen, but Dad blocked her.

  “Is there more you need to say, Lyle?” Dad asked.

  Lyle shook his head. Dad was under a lot of pressure, being in charge of all that magic, and sometimes he needed a minute to cool off and we needed to stop bothering him, and I don’t know how Lyle forgot all of that that one day, but he did. Because the next thing he said was, “Can’t you do anything the normal way? Can’t you give us one normal thing? Candles on a cake? Like every other kid in the world gets?”

  We never ate that cake. Not one crumb of it. After Lyle said what he said, Dad threw the whole thing in the trash. There’s not really any way to fix a birthday, once the cake is in the trash.

  Lyle and I stayed up late that night, even though he really should have gotten rest for his first New Year’s Day capturing. We threw acorns at trees from this little patch of roof we could get to from my bedroom window.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “I wanted you to be able to make your wish. You love wishing on birthday candles,” Lyle said.

  I nodded. It was a small thing that was actually very big.