One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  Four years ago, Lyle and I asked Dad why magic mattered.

  “Is that a real question?” Dad asked. He grinned. When he liked one of our questions, he’d answer with a story better than anything we’d ever find in books.

  “It’s a real question,” I said with a grin just like Dad’s. When things were like this with Dad, it felt so good I wanted to hang on to it forever. We were sitting on the couch, Lyle reading, Dad lining up jars on the coffee table, me watching the two of them do what they liked best, and wondering how it would feel when I could line up my own jars next to Dad’s, when I finally turned into the person he promised I would be.

  “Why does magic matter . . .” Dad said, like he’d never considered it. But it didn’t take him long to decide on the right story for the question. “Look there,” he said, pointing at a photograph above the fireplace. “What do you see?”

  “A rainbow,” I said.

  “That’s been there forever,” Lyle said. “Is it magical?”

  “Wait,” Dad said. He always sounded a little tenser, a little less patient when Lyle was the one asking questions. “Just look at it. Have you ever really looked at it?”

  We hadn’t. The rainbow over the fireplace was like everything else in our home that we saw but didn’t really see. It was like the color of the walls in the bathroom or the knobs on the closet doors. A fact of the place, not a feature. But we looked now. The rainbow was extra bright. It looked a little fake, on top of the cloudiness of the sky. It was exactly what a rainbow was meant to be—the colors in the right order, the whole thing arching perfectly, what I would draw if someone instructed me to draw a rainbow.

  “What do you think?” Dad said. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back, looking at it himself.

  “It’s a rainbow,” Lyle said.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “It’s my first magic,” Dad said. “Well, my first magic that really worked.”

  I don’t know about Lyle, but I looked at the photograph with new eyes. I wanted to understand everything about how it happened and what he did to make it appear and what it meant.

  I hummed out a “wow” and Lyle shifted in his seat and Dad let it land.

  “I promised my parents I’d save my magic for something important,” he said at last. “We’d talked about what to use magic for. Curing illnesses. Passing exams. Fixing the hole in the roof of our little house. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to do it right.”

  “I want to do it right,” I said.

  Lyle sighed. He didn’t like talking about magic. Not his own. Not Dad’s. And especially not mine. Sometimes I wondered if Lyle wished he could be in a different family, where he could capture his jars on New Year’s Day and use them for whatever and not think too much about any of it.

  Sometimes—less often, and only when I was almost asleep—I wondered if I’d like that too.

  “A day or two after I captured my first jars of magic, I walked into the kitchen and my mother was crying. I’d never seen her cry before. You never met her, but she wasn’t— Some people cry. She wasn’t one of those people. But there she was, crying anyway. Her shoulders shaking. Nose running. The whole thing. Awful.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Dad said. He shrugged, like the why wasn’t important to the story. Dad’s stories were often this way. The things I wanted to know he didn’t have answers for; the parts of them that seemed important to me were silly details to him. “I don’t know what the crying was about, but it was so hard to watch and I couldn’t stand it. I had to do something to make it stop. And I had all this new magic, so I went right for my jars. I thought I’d make the most beautiful thing I could think of.”

  “A rainbow,” I said.

  Lyle was quiet. He twirled a tassel of a throw blanket around his finger.

  “Now, what I didn’t know is that weather is almost impossible to do well. It’s hard to do at all. Some people will never get that advanced,” Dad said. We knew this already. Weather was one of the bigger magics. Not impossible, not incredibly rare. But difficult to do well, requiring some artistry. “I didn’t know it would be hard, I just knew my mother would like to look out her window and see something besides the gray sky. So I set out to work. And it took all day and all night and most of my magic. I kept opening jars that had nothing to do with weather and making all kinds of silly mistakes. I was unpracticed. I magicked up some crayons. I made a rainbow-colored cake. I turned my hair rainbow colored. But finally, finally I did it. And once it was there in the sky, it was perfect. More brilliant than anything anyone had ever seen. My mother stopped crying. Whatever was making her sad stopped mattering as soon as that rainbow reached the sky.”

  I looked at the photograph again. It was a very pretty rainbow. But I couldn’t imagine it fixing something that was making his mother cry. Maybe I had to have seen it in person to understand. Maybe I had to make one myself.

  “She must have been so proud of you,” Lyle said. I was surprised he was the one to say it. And he looked a little sad, letting the words come out, like it was something he’d never have for himself.

  Dad shrugged. “She grounded me for a month. I wasn’t supposed to use magic for things like that, she said.” He looked at the rainbow hard. “But it wasn’t a mistake. I didn’t apologize. It worked. It changed things. That’s what magic’s for.”

  I nodded. Lyle nodded too. I liked the story. And I also didn’t understand it, exactly. But it was an important story, and if I wanted to be Little Luck, if I wanted to be the next-most-magical person in all of Belling Bright and maybe also the world, I’d have to understand it someday.

  And that meant I’d have to make a rainbow.

  I looked at Lyle. We were good at speaking without speaking. And even though it meant something different to him, even though the story hit him in other places, made him feel other things, I knew he wanted to make a rainbow too. And that someday we’d do it together.

  Seventeen

  No one’s on the road. They’re all on the beach.

  The roads away from TooBlue Lake are curvy, and on the bus I didn’t notice it so much, but in our family car, stuffed with magic that isn’t mine, sitting in the back next to Dad’s red parka that he insists would only encumber his magic capturing, I’m woozy. It’s quiet. Lyle scans the radio, looking for something with too many guitars and lyrics I won’t be able to understand. Mom makes a little sighing noise at every turn, and I know she has something to say—probably a lot of somethings—but she isn’t saying anything at all.

  We drive like that for a while until we reach the Belling Bright Woods with its tall trees and magical growth. Lyle says he has to use a bathroom and Mom says she needs a coffee, and I’d like to ask for breakfast but am too embarrassed to say anything at all. Besides, I don’t deserve breakfast. I don’t deserve lunch or dinner either.

  Mom stops the car at a rest stop. It’s a small brick building in a field of dandelions and long grasses. There’s a bench and a hammock out front. I must have seen it before—we are right outside Belling Bright, not very far from our own home—but it’s not the kind of place I’d ever remember.

  “Who will be here?” Lyle asks. “Isn’t everyone at the lake?”

  “Not everyone,” Mom says.

  “Who wouldn’t be at the lake?” Lyle asks.

  Everything shuts down from New Year’s Day morning until January 3—the library, the post office, the grocery store in the center of our little town, even the twenty-four-hour diner by our house closes, hanging a sign in the window that proclaims: We will reopen soon—more magical than ever!

  “Just some people,” Mom says. “People who don’t—there’s a few people without much—people who aren’t interested in magic.”

  My heart stops. Or I stop feeling it for a moment. We have never heard those words in that order. We’ve never even thought them. Magic is magic. It’s the thing that helps you do other things. It’s not some preference, li
ke how I’m not really into soda even though everyone seems to love it, or Lyle isn’t into camping even though Dad says he loved camping when he was Lyle’s age.

  “Not Meant for Magic,” Mom whispers, like she almost doesn’t want us to hear her, but then she smiles a tiny bit, like maybe she’s happy we have. The smile vanishes before I’m even sure I’ve seen it. Maybe it was never there at all.

  There are lights on in the rest stop, and the smell of something cinnamony baking, and, if I look closely, shadows moving around behind the closed floral curtains. But we haven’t left the car.

  “Not Meant for Magic,” I repeat. They’re the first words I’ve spoken since we left the lake, and they feel too right in my mouth. They feel like they belong to me.

  “I’ve been up all night,” Mom says. “This isn’t the kind of conversation we can have on no sleep. And without your father. And in a parking lot.” She rubs her forehead. “I just wanted a coffee. I didn’t mean to open a whole— We agreed to wait to— We should have kept driving.”

  “Well, we’re here now,” Lyle says. He rolls down his window and raises his head up and out. He sniffs the air like maybe there’s some scent that will explain it all.

  I just keep looking and looking and looking.

  “We can get back on the road,” Mom says. “It’s just another mile. I’ll brew some coffee at home. Make us a couple sandwiches. We can sit on the porch. We can read or play cards. Dad will be home, you know, sometime. There’s no reason to be here.” She turns the key, restarts the car.

  “I want to know what Not Meant for Magic means,” I say. My heart twirls again from the words.

  “Rose,” Mom says. But my name isn’t an answer or an explanation. It’s just my name, all bare and lonely by itself.

  “Am I Not Meant for Magic?”

  “Rose,” Mom says again.

  I watch Lyle pull his head back into the car. He stares at his hands. Even being the brother of someone Not Meant for Magic is probably a bad thing. And Mom isn’t saying no. She isn’t saying anything.

  “I caught a little,” I say, but even I don’t believe that means anything good. “Maybe I’m just meant for a little magic. Magic knows, right? Magic decides who you are and who you’re meant to be?” I’m saying it to make myself feel better, but it makes me feel worse.

  My one jar is so slight, so dim; if that’s all magic thinks I deserve, something must be very, very wrong with me.

  “I wish your dad were here,” Mom says.

  “He’s not,” Lyle says.

  Mom nods. And nods. And nods. And finally speaks. “Some people try to capture magic and just—it doesn’t come naturally. And they decide—some of them—to forget about it. To live their lives without.”

  The quiet is almost violent. It prickles my skin.

  “They decide?” I ask. “Or magic does?” Dad’s always made it sound like magic decides everything, like he is who he is because magic said it was so.

  Mom pauses. She doesn’t like to answer things like that.

  There’s a knock on Mom’s window, and it makes us all jump in our seats. Mom gasps. Lyle chokes on nothing. I just look. I am more alert now than I was the entire night at TooBlue Lake. There’s a girl my age attached to the knock and she’s got a round face and straw-colored hair and tiny hands and a big red flannel shirt like the kind Dad wears on weekends and Mom wears to bed sometimes and I would never wear because none of the girls at school ever wear flannel.

  I have a big collection of fuzzy sweaters and floral T-shirts and stripy dresses and black and gray and blue leggings and things that sparkle a little but not too much. And of course, Dad’s sweaters and scarves, a dozen of each, and they go with everything, even dresses that I hate but that I wear when Mom or Ginger asks me to.

  “Hi!” the girl in the flannel shirt says. “Can we help you?”

  I can see Mom’s eyes in the rearview mirror and they are enormous. Lyle is looking at me like I know how to talk to other twelve-year-old girls, even ones who aren’t meant for magic.

  Maybe especially ones who aren’t meant for magic.

  “We need coffee,” I say. “Or my mom does. And a bathroom. My brother needs that. And—something to eat? Maybe?”

  “I’m Zelda,” the girl says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “And you are?”

  “Rose,” I say. “Rose Alice Anders.” People know my name. Even people on the edge of town who I’ve never seen before have heard about my dad and his lucky daughter.

  It’s true, because Zelda’s eyes get as wide as Mom’s. She looks from me to Mom to Lyle, and all the way back around again. “You’re—really? I thought—my dad always said you wouldn’t ever come here.”

  Mom clears her throat. Shakes her head. Clears her throat again. Shakes her head even more firmly. Zelda looks confused and I feel confused and Lyle finally speaks up.

  “You know about Rose,” he says. “Of course you do.” Maybe yesterday he would have been annoyed or envious or just bored with the way people talk about me and my dad, but today he remembers that everything has changed and he hangs his head.

  Zelda laughs. It’s a big laugh; the only other person I know with a laugh like that is my dad, and I hadn’t really wanted to think about him at all right now, but Wendell Anders is everywhere, impossible to avoid, even at a random rest stop a mile outside of town.

  “Well, of course we know about Rose!” Zelda says. She beams.

  “Everyone does, don’t they?” Mom says. Her voice is shaky and she’s talking fast like she does when she’s nervous. “Rose is famous. Like her dad. Even perfect strangers have heard of her. Which is—I’m sure it’s been a lot of pressure. And maybe that’s why—or maybe it will be nice for her to have a break from all the attention—but regardless, yes, even a stranger we’ve never met before knows our family, how funny, right?”

  It isn’t funny, and my mom isn’t being herself. She sounds the way I feel inside. All hectic and worried and speeding through a million new understandings of the way things are going to be now.

  “Right,” Zelda says, about a hundred times slower than Mom. “Even strangers like me know Rose Alice Anders.” I wait for her big booming laugh, but it’s gone, like it was never here at all. She puts her hands in her jeans pockets and keeps staring at Mom.

  There’s a moment of silence, and even though this girl’s a stranger, I don’t want her to know how weird we all are right now, so I speak up and try to get us back on track. “So, um, can we get some food and coffee and stuff?” I ask.

  “The sign says open,” Zelda says with a shrug. She points at the sign above the rest stop. It’s the same floral pattern as the curtains with shiny gold lettering on top: Open 24 Hours. Every Day. Really. Every Single One of Them.

  “Well, yes, look at that, that’s right.” Mom’s voice is chirpy, like she swallowed a bird, and Lyle looks relieved at being able to use a bathroom after all this awkwardness.

  “Well, if you’re open, then I guess we’re coming in,” I say, looking at my mom and Lyle and my mom again. I know I’ve made everything in our life confusing and wrong and mixed-up, but there shouldn’t be anything so confusing about picking up a doughnut, even if it’s from a person who isn’t meant for magic, in a town where I thought everyone was meant for at least a little.

  Zelda smiles. “Well, great,” she says. “Visitors. The Anders family. On January second. Who would have thought?”

  Eighteen

  The rest stop is more like a home, and the people there are, I’m pretty sure, a family. Zelda’s family. There’s a girl Lyle’s age who looks just like Zelda except her straw-colored hair is in a short pixie cut and her flannel shirt is blue and made for someone much bigger than her. There’s a tall man and a short woman and everyone’s got a mug in one hand and a pastry in the other, and a sleepy look on their face like the day just began. It confuses me for a second, because my yesterday never really ended, so it could be six in the morning or three in
the afternoon and it would probably feel just as right. Or just as wrong.

  “Oh!” Zelda’s maybe-mom says. She almost drops her pastry. “Oh.”

  “We have some strangers visiting, Mom,” Zelda says very fast, like she doesn’t want her mom to have a chance to say anything else. “They—need coffee and a snack.”

  “A snack,” her mom says. She nods slowly.

  “And the restroom. Do we have any scones left?” Zelda says.

  “We sure do,” Zelda’s mom says. She has a lazy smile, as if part of the point of smiling is the journey to get there and not the smile itself.

  She points Lyle to the bathroom and stares at my mother, who won’t meet her gaze. The morning is strange here, but it was strange out there too, so it’s hard to say why anyone’s acting the way they’re acting.

  It smells like butter and cinnamon inside. There’s a kitchen table and a bunch of mismatched chairs. There’s a little fireplace that’s got a fire almost too big for it burning inside. There’s a big brown couch that looks like it’s seen a lot of pillow fights and its cushions have built about a hundred forts. The girl I assume is Zelda’s older sister keeps laughing at the book she’s reading, and the man who is maybe their dad peers over her shoulder every time she giggles, like he can’t stand to see a joke pass him by.

  He looks up at us and tilts his head. “The Anders family,” he says. It’s not unusual for people to know us without us knowing them, so I know to smile and not act too snotty about it.

  “It’s us,” I say.

  “It sure is,” Zelda’s maybe-dad says, before turning back to the other girl’s funny book. I get the sudden urge to make him laugh the way that book is making his daughter laugh. He seems calm and steady and easy to please, and I just want to make someone happy today.

  But I can’t think of anything to say that’s funny or cute or charming, so I just take a step closer to my mom and lean my head against her shoulder, where I feel safest.

  Zelda’s mom ducks behind a pastry counter that looks out of place in what otherwise seems like a living room or dining room or kitchen or all three rolled into one. She emerges with three of the biggest scones I’ve ever seen, absolutely drenched in a yellowish icing. “A scone without icing is like—” She started the sentence like she knew where it was going, but she pauses, clearly having no idea where it’s meant to end up. “Well,” she says. “I’d say it’s like a New Year’s Day without magic, but that’s not so bad anyway. I guess it’s more like—” She pauses again. She doesn’t seem worried by the pause. She looks at the fire, at the ceiling, at me. “Like a winter without snow. It happens from time to time, but no one really likes it. And everyone’s thinking the same thing—Is this really winter at all?” She hands me and Mom our scones, and I can’t help but smile. It’s true. It doesn’t feel like winter’s begun until we gather around the window and watch the first snow, which is often the only snow in this part of the country, until Dad dares us to go outside barefoot in it, until Mom says that’s too dangerous, until Lyle sticks his head out the window, his tongue out of his mouth, and says snow tastes like ketchup, like anchovies, like cake.