27 Magic Words

by Sharelle Byars Moranville

  As if Grandmamma had read her thoughts, she said, “Everything will be fine.”

  After Uncle Wim left, Kobi asked, “What’s the Domestic Violence Shelter?”

  Grandmamma sighed. “I believe it’s a place for women and children to go when someone is hurting them at home.”

  “Why would someone do that?”

  Grandmamma took a deep breath. “Wim has always liked to help people. His father was the same way. But Wimbledon could have been a doctor. Or a diplomat. Or even a teacher. There are many ways of helping people. I don’t know why he had to be a social worker.”

  That wasn’t the question Kobi had asked, but maybe Grandmamma had answered the question Kobi had been wondering about. Uncle Wim didn’t like Grandmamma telling him what to do because he was grown up. And Grandmamma was happiest when people did what she wanted.

  “Is Sally Hancock Uncle Wim’s girlfriend?”

  “Oh!” Grandmamma exclaimed as if somebody had stepped on her bare toes. “Heavens no. Why would you think that?”

  Kobi didn’t know, except she had observed that older people had girlfriends and boyfriends. And fiancés.

  “Oh no, no, no,” Grandmamma said. “Sally Hancock is not at all my son’s type. Plus, she’s years older.”

  “Why do you use her last name?”

  Grandmamma shot Kobi a look that warned about asking personal questions.

  Kobi dropped the subject. But how did Grandmamma expect them to live here without information?

  After the beds were assembled, Sally Hancock left. Soon Uncle Wim returned from helping the family who had been hurt, and they went to the mall. Grandmamma found fluffy comforters and pillows for their new beds. She bought a lamp with a fringe of beads that twinkled when Kobi ran her fingers around the edge. Grandmamma bought piles of thick striped towels. She bought a bath mat shaped like a zebra, pretty soap, bubble bath, and toothbrush cups with fish on them. Uncle Wim trailed along, making trips to the car with their bags.

  Finally, they ate a hurried meal at the food court. Then they rushed home and washed the new sheets and put them on the beds and set up the lamp and snipped tags off towels and packed Grandmamma’s bag and rushed to the airport.

  The airport lights turned the twilight a weird color, as if they were on another planet, which was how Kobi felt.

  Grandmamma said, “Drop me off, Wim. Everyone’s exhausted.”

  Uncle Wim pulled to the curb and they all got out.

  “Here’s your carry-on,” Brook said, placing it at Grandmamma’s feet. “Do you have your passport and boarding pass?”

  Grandmamma patted her purse.

  “You should actually check,” Brook said.

  Grandmamma got out the two documents. She looked about ready to cry.

  “Do you have your sleep mask and your eyedrops?” Brook asked.

  Grandmamma nodded.

  “You should check.”

  Kobi noticed the way Uncle Wim’s eyebrows moved as he watched Brook.

  “I have what I need, honey.” Grandmamma kissed Uncle Wim on the cheek.

  Uncle Wim hugged her. “Take care of yourself, Mom. And don’t worry.”

  “You’re a good son, Wim,” Grandmamma said, hugging him back.

  Kobi, Brook, and Grandmamma fell into each other’s arms. Kobi pressed her face into Grandmamma’s silk shirt. She could feel Grandmamma’s heart racing and Grandmamma’s arms tightening around them. Too quickly, Grandmamma stepped away and walked through the doors.

  Kobi hoped she would look back and wave, but she didn’t. Kobi was going to call, “Give my love to Mr. Gyver.” But Grandmamma rushed into the crowd. Caribou. I love you.

  They were quiet in the car. Finally, Uncle Wim asked if they’d like to eat at the mall again.

  Kobi glanced at Brook, who barely shook her head. “No. Thank you,” Kobi said.

  Kobi was lonely already. She could tell by the look on Brook’s face that her sister was, too.

  “Girls, you have to eat. If you don’t, I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Could we have real food?” Brook asked.

  “What do you mean?” Uncle Wim asked.

  On hot evenings like this, Madame Louise gave them vichyssoise, a delicious cold potato soup. And bread, crusty on the outside, soft as clouds on the inside. And little wedges of cheese, crumbly and salty. And juicy pears from the silver bowl on the dining room table.

  “How about scrambled pancakes?” Uncle Wim suggested.

  Kobi nodded. Brook rolled her eyes.

  Before they went to bed, they put their luggage in two identical stacks in front of the bay window so Brook would stop worrying that something terrible would happen if the room wasn’t symmetrical.

  Kobi got between the new sheets, but she couldn’t sleep. She missed having her sister beside her in bed.

  A car cruised past, sending thudding music into the night.

  “Why didn’t Uncle Wim buy one big bed?” Brook asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t have enough money. I think he’s unfortunate.”

  “Does one big bed cost more than two little ones?” Brook asked.

  “Probably.”

  Kobi stared into the darkness. The sound of Uncle Wim’s TV drifted up. He was in his creaky recliner right below them.

  “Do you think Grandmamma is missing us?” Kobi asked. She hated to think of Grandmamma sitting by strangers.

  “Yes,” Brook said.

  Kobi heard the TV go off and heard Uncle Wim on the phone, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  “I’ll bet he’s talking to his girlfriend,” Brook said.

  “She’s not his girlfriend. I asked Grandmamma.”

  “Well, Grandmamma doesn’t like her,” Brook said. “So we shouldn’t, either.”

  “It would serve Grandmamma right if we did,” Kobi said.

  Brook said, “We mustn’t be mad at Grandmamma . . .” She was silent until she exploded into sobs. “. . . or she might not come back!”

  Kobi scrambled out of her bed, taking her pillow with her. Brook turned away, yanking the sheet over her head, but Kobi wrapped her in a hug. “Grandmamma will be back,” she whispered, but her own eyes suddenly flooded with tears. Caribou, caribou.

  Finally, Brook uncovered her head. After a while, Kobi felt Brook breathing evenly and one of her feet twitched.

  Kobi didn’t hear Uncle Wim’s voice anymore. Actually, she didn’t hear a single inside sound. No TV. No banging of pipes that went along with water running anyplace in the house. No recliner creaking. Surely he wouldn’t go off and leave them alone.

  Brook jerked awake. “Kobi?”

  “What?” Kobi whispered.

  “I have to count the stripes on the wallpaper.”

  Kobi groaned and buried her face in the pillow.

  The lamp went on and after a while Kobi heard it being scooted. Then the lamp went off and Brook got back into bed.

  “There are thirty-one stripes,” she whispered. “But I put the lamp in front of one, so it doesn’t count. That leaves thirty, which can be divided evenly by two, three, and five . . .”

  Kobi turned the sound of Brook’s voice down and slipped away with Avanti!

  Her parents were bedding down, too. They were high in the tree house. Beneath the stars, the damaged sailboat bobbed in the cove.

  Her mother unrolled a mat she had woven from grass. Her dad yanked a cord and a curtain of mosquito netting dropped around them. They snuggled like Brook and Kobi were snuggling. A chorus of insects sang in the trees.

  “Good night, Beatrice, my love,” the Great Alighieri whispered. “Good night, bunnies.”

  “Good night, Al,” their mother whispered. “Good night, my babies. Sleep well.”

  “Good night,” Kobi said, knowing they couldn’t hear her.

  SEVEN

  SHE woke up to sunshine and Brook’s pokes. Kobi yanked the sheet over her face. Brook tugged it away.

  “Get up,” Brook said, trying to sit on Kobi
. “I’m lonesome.”

  Kobi groaned and sat up. Brook’s purple luggage was open and stuff was scattered everywhere.

  “I have this idea,” Brook announced. “We could turn the room across the hall into our closet.” She picked up a pair of fur-lined boots and a woolly hat with earflaps. “We can leave these winter things packed away and stack the suitcases neatly along the wall. Then . . .”

  Kobi’s stomach growled so loudly Brook stopped talking.

  “Let’s have breakfast first,” Kobi said.

  “Can’t. Uncle Wim is outside mowing.”

  Hunger was jabbing holes in Kobi’s stomach. She helped Madame Louise cook all the time. “I can make pancakes.”

  Downstairs, they found the skillet and a box of mix on the counter from the night before.

  “Read the directions,” Kobi said.

  One of Brook’s eyebrows went up. “Heat the skillet—”

  Kobi turned a knob, but nothing happened. In Madame Louise’s kitchen, the stove burner twinkled immediately into a gentle ring of flame.

  She leaned forward to look. Nothing. Snapdragon!

  Fwooom!

  Kobi leapt back, her face scorched. Her hair made a crinkling noise.

  Uncle Wim strode in, putting his phone in his shirt pocket. “Text from Mom. She touched down at Charles de Gaulle. She sends her love.” He sniffed. “Smells like somebody is cooking a chicken with its feathers on.” His gaze landed on Kobi. His eyebrows sprang into the air.

  Uncle Wim crossed the room and turned off the stove. When he finally looked at them, his face was red. “Mom will kill me if I let anything happen to you. So from now on. No. Using. The stove.” His voice rose. His eyes drilled into Kobi. “Got it?”

  She nodded.

  His eyes went to Brook.

  She nodded and said in a small voice, “But Kobi was hungry. And I didn’t use the stove.”

  Kobi glared at Brook.

  Uncle Wim put his hands over his face as if, when he looked again, they would have disappeared. “Get dressed,” he said. “We’ll see what can be done about the hair.”

  They drove through a fast-food place on the way to wherever they were going, but Kobi couldn’t eat the strange pale thing on a bun that came wrapped in warm, damp paper. When she sniffed it, it smelled like her dead hair. She left it lying on the seat. No amount of magic could make it edible.

  At Quick Snips, Kobi tried not to look in the mirror.

  “What happened?” the lady asked, pumping the chair up with her foot.

  “I was making pancakes.”

  The lady shook her head. “Kids.” She began spraying Kobi’s head with icy water. Kobi closed her eyes, holding back tears, listening to the sound of long hair like her mother’s sliding down the plastic cape.

  “Have a look,” the lady said after a while.

  Kobi opened her eyes. A sad boy with a long neck and big ears stared at her.

  “When I was a kid,” the lady said, letting the chair down, “there was this model, Twiggy. She was skinny as a twig and she had a haircut like yours. For a few years, girls wanted boy cuts, as we called them then. Maybe you’ll bring the style back.”

  Kobi couldn’t say anything. The knot in her throat was too huge.

  In the car, Uncle Wim gave them their school supply lists. Kobi stared at the words. She couldn’t think without her hair.

  “We’ll go to the mall,” Uncle Wim said. “Sally gave me coupons.”

  “Why are our lists on different-colored paper?” Brook asked.

  “Different schools, different lists,” Uncle Wim said, stopping at a light.

  “Different schools?” they cried.

  “Kobi goes to Horace Mann Elementary and Brook goes to Lincoln Middle School.”

  “But Grandmamma said we’d go to the same school,” Brook said. “The same school,” she repeated loudly as if Uncle Wim might not understand English.

  “Well, I don’t know why she’d think that, since you’re in different grades. The schools here are K through five and six through eight.”

  “I want to talk to Grandmamma,” Brook said. “Right now.”

  Uncle Win sighed and handed his phone over the seat back.

  When Grandmamma answered and Brook spilled out the terrible news, whatever Grandmamma said made Brook’s face crumple. She thrust the phone at Kobi.

  Malleable, Kobi breathed, taking the phone. She wasn’t using the magic power selfishly. It was for Brook, too. It had almost worked yesterday for getting Grandmamma to do the right thing and take them back to Paris with her.

  “Will you please tell Uncle Wim to move Brook to my school?” she asked. “It won’t matter what grade we’re in for a few months.” Malleable.

  Kobi heard background noise as if Grandmamma were in a cavernous place. Maybe Montpellier would be a better word. Montpellier.

  “I’m going through customs now, sweetheart,” Grandmamma said in a breaking-up voice. “But we’ll work it out so you girls can be together. We may not get it worked out by tomorrow, so be brave for a couple of days, okay?”

  Kobi didn’t want to be separated from Brook for even one day, but she said “Okay” and handed the phone to Uncle Wim. “Grandmamma says we’ll work it out. But not by tomorrow.”

  Brook crossed her arms. “Then we won’t go to school tomorrow.”

  Uncle Wim glanced at them in the mirror, his brows in a no-nonsense line. “You have to go to school tomorrow because I have to go to work.”

  Brook sniffed and turned to stare out the window. After a while, she said, “You should have a housekeeper to watch us.”

  Uncle Wim barked a laugh. His neck turned red. Kobi felt sorry for him. He would probably have a housekeeper and furniture if he were more fortunate.

  Temporarily. She used that word when she saw people on the streets of Paris who Grandmamma said were unfortunate. She could never tell for sure if the magic worked, but she hoped it did.

  “Grandmamma can hire a housekeeper if you can’t afford one,” Brook said.

  Uncle Wim’s eyes in the mirror turned cold. “No thank you. It will be good for you to live like normal kids for a change.”

  Kobi didn’t want to live like a real kid if it meant being separated from her sister. She tried to swallow the anger at her parents for going off on a sailing trip, and at Grandmamma for going off on a wedding trip.

  As they traipsed from store to store buying school supplies, Kobi’s naked neck and ears tingled. And they turned hot and red even though she told them not to. People stared.

  At lunch in the food court, Brook arranged her four crab rangoons around the edge of her plate, the little cup of sauce in the middle. She picked up each rangoon, bit off a corner, and placed it back on the plate.

  Uncle Wim watched. Kobi was glad he didn’t say anything. After a while, he turned to Kobi. “You remind me of your mother with that haircut,” he said.

  Her mother had waves and waves of beautiful hair. Abundant hair, their dad said. One day on the island, he carved a wooden comb out of a tree root a wild boar unearthed.

  “When I was about four, Bea went to the mall one day and came home with a haircut like yours, except it was a little more spiky. And get this.” He paused for drama. “She had a safety pin in her ear.”

  “Not possible,” Brook said, biting a corner off a rangoon.

  “Possible and true. And she used to eye me like she was going to put me on the curb for trash pickup when Mom wasn’t looking.”

  “Why?” Brook asked, her eyes big with disbelief.

  “Because she hated me,” Uncle Wim said.

  “Our mother didn’t hate people!” Brook said.

  Uncle Wim shrugged at Brook as if to say You tell your story and I’ll tell mine.

  “Why would she hate you?” Kobi asked. Their mother said it was wrong to hate people.

  “Probably because my dad wasn’t her dad, and Mom was the oldest mother on the planet when she had me. I was an embarrassment.” He s
hrugged. “Plus, she was jealous. I was mighty cute.” He grinned. After a while, he said, “I wish I’d gotten to know Bea better after we were grown up.”

  That evening, in her pajamas, Kobi laid out her first-day-of-school clothes on the window seat. She loved the gray dress with the smocked top and the soft white collar. She loved it especially because the skirt flared and showed the pale pink lining when she twirled.

  Brook came into the room, her toothbrush in her hand, to check for the third time that her shoes were perfectly lined up on the floor beneath her dress.

  “Do you remember much about school?” Kobi asked.

  Brook shook her head.

  “Me neither.”

  Kobi was afraid she’d do something stupid because she didn’t know any better. She was afraid kids would shy away from her because of her strange haircut.

  Uncle Wim’s footsteps came down the hall.

  “You should be in bed, girls,” he said. “It’s nine o’clock. Big day tomorrow.”

  They said “Okay,” but he kept standing in the doorway. Kobi hoped he wasn’t going to kiss them good night like Grandmamma did. She blinked and shoved all thoughts of Grandmamma and Mr. Gyver and Madame Louise and the Paris apartment away.

  Uncle Wim kept standing there. And Kobi and Brook kept standing there, too, as if they were playing statue and somebody had cried “Freeze!” Uncle Wim’s gaze traveled around the room. When they landed on the school clothes on the window seat, his eyebrows jumped. Were they not allowed to lay things on the window seat?

  His eyes moved to them. His expression looked very mixed up. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “Lights-out in fifteen minutes, okay?”

  They nodded.

  Fifteen minutes later, Kobi squirmed to get comfortable in bed. Her neck and ears felt exposed. She covered them up even though it was too hot.

  Outside their windows, birds were bedding down, their cheeps trailing off to an occasional twitter. And then silence. Sleep came like a door swinging shut.

  She jerked upright, awakened by the carillon bonging midnight, and remembered where she was.