One Jar of Magic

by Corey Ann Haydu

  But today it looks different. I mean, it looks the same, but I see it differently.

  It’s a plain jar and it has only the tiniest bit of magic inside and I didn’t even catch that magic by myself.

  And maybe I was meant for more than this one jar of magic; maybe Dad thinks I was promised something more special, some greater destiny.

  But a promise isn’t the same as the way things are, and the promise was dozens of shiny, fancy jars, but the reality is this one jar of almost-nothing. But this one jar of almost-nothing maybe means I don’t need more, I don’t have to have magic to make myself better. Maybe capturing only one jar of magic means I am enough, just like this.

  Forty-Four

  Zelda’s father’s eyes are wide at the sight of all these jars of magic.

  “He really— He got all of that, huh?” He looks sad, like something must have gone wrong for there to be so much magic in one place.

  Lyle and I nod, and Zelda’s father, our uncle, shakes his head. “No one should have that much,” he says. “He still going out there to steal it?”

  There’s a break in the world turning. Or at least it feels that way.

  “Steal?” Lyle asks. He feels it, too. The shift. It’s not just the jars of magic that are all getting piled into the car. It’s that word. And how casually Bennett said it. Like we already knew.

  “Well, one person can’t catch so much at once,” Bennett says, but more slowly, like he can tell he’s shaking the world up for us too, like we’re stuck in some snow globe that’s never had snow. And now, all of a sudden, a blizzard’s coming down. “There’s not this much magic at once anywhere. Ever. Not even TooBlue Lake on New Year’s Day.” He looks at us to see if we had already known this. We did not. Not exactly. I move closer to Lyle.

  “Our father catches more than a hundred jars every year,” Lyle says. There’s still a flush of pride there. It’s hard to let it go.

  “I’m sure he does,” Bennett says. “But not all at once. He goes back throughout the year. He finds more on his own when no one else is around. When you’re not really supposed to—”

  “No,” Lyle says. “That’s not allowed.”

  Bennett hangs his head. “I haven’t talked to your father in many years,” he says carefully, “but that’s what he used to do. It’s what I did, a long time ago with him. When I thought magic was—when I thought I was meant for it. When I believed in it. When I believed in . . . well, in him.”

  I know it’s true as soon as he says it. Not just because our uncle seems so steady and so quiet and so good. But also because I have been there. I have gone to TooBlue Lake with my father when it wasn’t New Year’s Day. I have seen how natural it was for him. I have seen him sniff the air, looking. I have seen the extra jars. I have seen, without seeing. I have known, without knowing.

  “That’s not fair,” I say.

  “Why would he do that?” Lyle asks.

  “Your father—he thinks magic—we both for a long time thought magic could fix things. Big things.”

  “It can,” Lyle says, but I am starting to know it cannot. Because it didn’t fix the things that are the most wrong about us.

  “We didn’t have the best time growing up, your father and I.” He looks at us in the rearview mirror. His eyes are exactly like Dad’s but also completely different. When they look at us, they really see us. They aren’t looking for more. They aren’t assessing. They just are. “Families can be hard for all kinds of reasons,” he says. “Ours was— We had a dad who wasn’t very predictable. And sometimes that meant we got hurt.”

  I nod. I don’t want him to say any more, because I know what it all means.

  He doesn’t say another word until we are at TooBlue Lake, and then he doesn’t say anything there, either. We get out of the car and unload the suitcases and bags and backpacks and ourselves.

  And even though he doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking, I know, from the way Zelda’s dad looks at the tops of the trees and puts a hand on my shoulder, that his father was a lot like my father. And that he never thought he and his brother would turn out so different.

  “Was your dad mean?” I ask our uncle Bennett. It’s not quite the question I want to ask, but close enough.

  “He didn’t try to be,” Uncle Bennett says.

  “But he was anyway?” I ask. I know the answer. Uncle Bennett knows I know the answer.

  Forty-Five

  We unpack the jars one by one and line them up on the shore. They glint and glimmer and shine. They are beautiful. They are a lifetime of work.

  But they are my father telling me over and over that he got the most jars because he deserved them the most. And they are my father getting the most jars because he went out and stole them.

  They are my father saying magic knows everything.

  And they are me knowing, now, that magic can be just as swayed by a handsome man who loves scarves and bare feet and oatmeal-colored sweaters and has a big booming laugh and a perfect smile as anyone else.

  Magic can be wrong.

  We can be wrong.

  Some days, the whole world can feel wrong.

  But these jars on the shore are right. If only we can figure out what to do with all their magic.

  “He’s going to be so mad,” Lyle says. He’s flushed, because fear makes him turn red, and I’m scared too. At how Dad will feel. And also at Lyle using that word.

  Mad.

  We don’t use that word to talk about Dad.

  “It’s okay,” I say, knowing it also sort of isn’t. “He—” I try to think of a way to smooth this out. I’ve been doing it my whole life, smoothing out the rough edges of Wendell Anders. Telling stories a little differently than the way they happened. Finding reasons for the things he does and says and is. Making it sound better, even to myself.

  But I’m having trouble today.

  “He’s mad a lot, isn’t he?” Zelda’s dad asks.

  Lyle freezes. I look harder at the lake, like maybe if I stare at it enough it will swallow me up and I won’t have to answer. It’s a question I have wanted to ask my whole life but also wanted to make sure I never, ever asked. Does Dad get mad a lot? What’s a lot? What’s too much? What’s normal?

  “What’s normal?” I say here and now, finally, even though what I really want is to live at the bottom of TooBlue Lake and not out here anymore, where everyone can see me and wonder about me and judge me and worry about me.

  “There’s no normal,” Zelda’s dad says. “Or if there is, we’re not it. But there’s okay and not okay.”

  “What’s not okay?” I ask.

  “If you’re scared of him,” Zelda’s dad says, “that’s not okay.”

  “Oh,” Lyle says.

  “Even just sometimes?” I ask, which I guess is about the same as admitting I am sometimes scared of my dad, but it feels sort of like Zelda’s dad knows that anyway, like that’s kind of the whole point of us being here in the first place.

  “You don’t seem like someone who gets scared very easily,” Zelda’s dad says.

  “She’s not,” Zelda says. Then she turns to me. “You’re not.”

  We all watch the lake for a while. I think I can feel the magic under us, making the sand a little warmer or making the ground a little shaky. I think maybe I can even hear it too. A whisper, a shadow of a sound, a thing I’ve been hoping to hear my whole life, a thing I was promised.

  But before I can enjoy the prettiness of it, or even just the there-ness of it, I hear my dad in my head telling me he knew I was special and then asking why I couldn’t have heard it earlier, when I was supposed to, and maybe I didn’t try hard enough and why did I give up and how much more could he have given me and why wasn’t I grateful and, and and and . . .

  “I want to be who he wants me to be,” I say. It’s so simple and should be so doable, because he’s been training me to be exactly that person for my whole entire life. “I want to be Little Luck.”

  “But you’re you ins
tead,” Zelda says. It comes out of her mouth easy, and it’s weird how simple it sounds because it feels completely impossible.

  I listen again for the sound of magic. I could use it right now, the promise of something big and special and lucky come to save me.

  But then I look at Lyle. And Zelda. And the uncle I never knew I had.

  And maybe they are that big and special and lucky thing that is saving me.

  And maybe I am too.

  Forty-Six

  “So it’s going back to the lake, like Lyle said, right?” I say. “It might be sort of hard. It will probably take a while.”

  Uncle Bennett nods. “Most good things take a while,” he says. “Most good things are a little hard, too.”

  It’s the opposite of what my father told me. He promised that good things, like magic, would come easily, would find me naturally.

  But I am learning there’s a lot my father wasn’t right about.

  “So we’re just gonna just drop the jars into the lake?” Zelda asks. I shake my head.

  “No, they’d be found in two minutes. Dad would come right back here and gather them all up.”

  “Well then, what are we supposed to do?” Zelda looks at the lake. It’s cold out, and the lake looks even colder.

  “Open them underwater. Say . . . something. And I guess hope for the best,” I say.

  “Say something,” Lyle says. I think maybe he’s mad at me, but he’s smiling. “Rose Alice Anders, Little Luck, has a great plan, and it’s to say something.” He shakes his head and laughs.

  “Say ‘no more magic,’” I say. “Okay?”

  “Really?”

  “Seems like a safe thing to say. I don’t know. It’s what we want. And if magic can make things happen, maybe it can . . . make things not happen.”

  Lyle closes his eyes. I wonder if he’s thinking about all the books he’s read on the topic, all the many, many pages of secret learning about magic that happened alone in his room.

  “No more magic,” he says, trying it out. “It’s very simple.”

  “I think it might work,” Uncle Bennett says. “It’s sort of—well, it’s sort of what I did. I wished for no more magic, and the magic stayed away. It’s what you did too, didn’t you, Rose? During your capturing?” He says it like it’s an obvious thing.

  “No,” I say. “All I ever wanted was magic. It didn’t want me.” They’re Dad’s words, though, and I let myself wonder if maybe they aren’t quite true. Sometimes—sort of often—I wondered why Dad had all that magic and why anyone needed one hundred sixty-one jars of anything, and most of all I wondered what the point of all those jars was, if they’d never been able to fix the thing that most needed fixing—my family.

  “You’re sure you didn’t tell the magic to stay away?” Uncle Bennett says. He tilts his head. I wonder what I look like to him. If I remind him of his daughters or of my dad or of their dad or of someone else from their family who I know nothing about.

  “Maybe I didn’t quite believe magic was the most important thing in the world,” I say, which is about one-tenth of the whole answer, but it’s the part I can say right now.

  “If you tell it to stay away, it will,” Uncle Bennett says. “Magic is there because we want it to be. I think releasing it into the lake—”

  “Let’s do it,” Lyle says, which is what I needed him to say. I need us to be on the same page, to have the same plan, to be in it together. Because Wendell Anders has been wrong about a lot of things, but one of the biggest ones is staying away from his brother. So I pull mine close and hand Lyle a jar. It’s pink and fluffy inside. I take one too. It glows a radioactive blue brightness.

  We run into the lake. I think he’s going to hit the water first—his legs are longer and faster than mine—but he slows down right as his toes touch the first wave, and we dive in together, push ourselves below the surface of the water, take the tops off our jars, and say, through the lake water, “No more magic.” Maybe I can’t hear him and maybe he can’t hear me, but maybe, maybe, the magic can hear us both.

  It takes hours, releasing it all, even with the help of Uncle Bennett and Zelda. Even when we run fast and say the words fast and get good at opening the jars in one quick movement. It’s still a long, exhausting process, the lake filling with all kinds of magic, the water turning shades of pink and red and green, a whooshing noise getting louder and louder.

  “What is all that magic going to do?” Zelda asks after an especially full jar of spiky, silvery magic gets released. But we don’t know, so we can’t answer. I can hear the magic now and see it making the waves bigger. I can feel it too, a sort of wind running through my bones, a tremble and shake and excitement for what comes next. A worry, too.

  We keep going. We’re in it, and releasing the magic feels like releasing so many things. I always thought—Dad always told us—that having as many jars as possible made us safe and better. That life was more beautiful with every bit of captured magic. But as the magic slides away into the water, I feel lighter and lighter, less and less worried, less scared, more alive. I feel more like myself, if I even know who myself is, which I don’t really, but without all that magic hanging around, maybe I can find out.

  After a hundred jars, the rain starts.

  And after two hundred, it’s the wind.

  When we are on the last few jars, the lake lurches and rolls. Usually a storm comes from the sky, pouring down. But this storm moves upward from the lake.

  It’s a multicolored storm. A storm of lake water and magic and something else, too, something even more powerful than magic pulsing through the air, making it beautiful and loud.

  I never got to make my rainbow. I never got to do the things with magic that I imagined. But I made this storm, and it is bigger and better than anything else I could have done, because I know it is all the magic I will ever do. It is better than pink hair and parties and learning violin and making Evan Dell be my boyfriend.

  It is saying goodbye to something that hurt, seeing it light up the lake and the shore and the sky and Zelda’s eyes and Lyle’s, too, and knowing we chose to let it go, we chose this moment right here.

  I don’t want magic anymore, but I know what it is to have a big force in your life and want something for yourself. A little bit of something that you can control or fix or make your own. Maybe that’s what the magic was for Dad. Him trying, so, so hard, to finally get to choose how things would be, to make the world the way he wanted it to look when he was small with a father who scared him and a family that didn’t quite protect him and a world that felt wrong more often than it felt right.

  Maybe he just wanted things to feel right.

  And somehow, magic made it all wrong.

  Forty-Seven

  “What have you done?” His voice is a boom, thundering louder than the storm.

  Here he is, at TooBlue Lake, as if the storm called him here. It’s still raging, and must be in Belling Bright, too, because Dad’s soaked to the bone and shivering and looks, for the first time ever, scared.

  I can tell from how my uncle Bennett looks at him that it’s not the first time he’s seen my father scared. Not by a long shot.

  “Bennett,” Dad says. He looks at his brother, and something passes between them. A whole bunch of somethings, a whole lifetime of talking and then not talking, of being in the same room at night and telling all their secrets and of being in the same town for years but never speaking. And maybe it’s nice for a moment, maybe it’s the way Lyle and I sometimes look at each other over the dinner table—Did you see that? Are you here with me? Are we in this together? Will we take care of each other? Yes and yes and yes and yes.

  But then the nice thing turns not nice and Dad’s jaw tightens and his arms cross over his chest and he takes a breath and holds it, like by holding that breath in he’s holding a lot of stuff in, and we all know what that stuff is, even if we don’t want to say it out loud.

  “We’re going home,” Dad says, and it’s qui
et, but the bad kind of quiet.

  “Wendell,” our uncle Bennett says. “It’s for the best.”

  “What is?” Dad asks.

  “You’re not meant for it either, you know. I’ve always thought that.” Zelda’s dad says it so calmly even though it’s the worst thing he could ever say to my father.

  “You think I’m Not Meant for Magic?” Dad asks. His voice explodes now, back to itself, and a laugh spills out too, but it’s a sharp laugh, one that isn’t meant to include anyone else in it.

  “Look what it’s done to you,” Uncle Bennett says.

  “Given me and my family everything we’ve ever wanted? Given us respect and acclaim? Made everything beautiful? Made everyone happy?” Dad’s shouting now. He’s getting closer to Uncle Bennett, and I’m watching his fingers and his arms, keeping track of the ways his muscles twitch and tighten and strain, wondering where all that energy and noise will go.

  I think about those long evenings in our front yard. How cold my toes were without shoes. How impossible catching fireflies felt. How my lungs would burn from all the running and jumping and trying. How bad I’d feel for Lyle, ignored and alone inside, and then how bad I’d feel for me, for not getting to ever be ignored and alone and inside. I think about reporters and Ginger and Maddy and how feeling like I was better than them seemed fun but actually only made me feel like I wasn’t one of them, and how I’m not one of them, not one of anyone, really, and how that feels awkward and wrong but also more right than it felt trying to be Little Luck and failing.

  “I wasn’t ever really that happy,” I say, and maybe I shouldn’t have said it, but it’s so true it makes my mouth dry, so I have to.

  “Of course you were,” Dad says. He looks almost sad, like all this time all he’s wanted was to make me happy and he’s seeing that he failed.

  “Were you?” I ask. “When you were little?”