Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “So you decided to help her,” I said.

  “No,” she replied, shaking her head. “No, not right away. I told the doctors that they had to try, and they said that they couldn’t. And then I went to Mrs. Webb, and I asked her to try, and she said—she said it was impossible.” Tabitha spat the word like it was poison she’d sucked from a snakebite. “Impossible. She said it couldn’t be done. And then it was the first week of school, and Alexandria DeCambray was in my office saying that if I didn’t do surgery on her little friend, she’d get me fired, and that’s when I had the idea.” My sister’s eyes were bright, feverish. I wanted to back away, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did. I sat there, frozen in place like she wouldn’t see me if I didn’t move.

  “So you did the surgery on Courtney,” I said quietly. “You did it to see if you could do it.”

  “And it worked. It worked! I did it, and it went great, and she’s fine! Nothing went wrong!”

  “You realize that you didn’t sedate her?” I said, and I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice as I remembered Courtney sobbing in the hall outside Tabitha’s classroom. I also remembered Alexandria’s face as she’d asked for a glass of water earlier—she’d been trying to get Tabitha out of the room so she could tell me the truth. I’d thought she had been afraid of confessing what she’d done, but I’d had it all wrong. She had been terrified of Tabitha. Terrified of my sister, who could take a person apart with a thought. But Tabitha just waved a hand as if I’d criticized the plaque that hung beside a masterpiece.

  “She was fine,” Tabitha said. “It took me a couple of hours to do the whole thing—longer than it’s supposed to take, I think, but then I probably took her apart way more than I needed to. But it worked, Ivy! I reached right in and plucked the pregnancy away. It was gone.” She smiled, proud of herself. “All those years I spent trying to figure out how I could have done it for Mom, and I finally had it.”

  Something solidified. “You’d been trying to figure that out all this time?”

  “God, for years. Since the day she died. I worked so hard, Ivy. I worked and I worked and I worked and I just thought—”

  “You thought that if you worked hard enough,” I finished for her, “you could do it. You could save her.”

  Tabitha nodded, her eyes shining. She didn’t seem to realize that I was quoting her. “Yes, exactly, exactly!”

  “If you could just remove the emotional aspect,” I continued, “you could eliminate fatigue. Right, Tabby?”

  She frowned. “Wait, what are you talking about?” I reached into my bag and pulled out the journal. Her face whitened. “Where did you find that?”

  “It was in my apartment,” I said. “I thought it was Sylvia’s, but it’s yours, isn’t it? How often did you go there before I moved in? Were you using it to experiment?”

  She shook her head. “I was there all the time, Ivy. I was there every other day. But that was back before it was vacant. When … when it was still Sylvia’s place.”

  I stared at her as it all fell together. That’s why she was there, crying on my couch the night of my date with Rahul. She wasn’t there to see me. She hadn’t wanted to have an emotional sister-moment. She wasn’t coming to me for comfort or looking to bond. No: she was there to remember Sylvia. To remember their relationship. To remember the love she’d had there.

  I had intruded on her grief. Because it wasn’t supposed to be my apartment at all. It wasn’t supposed to be my life. It was supposed to be hers.

  “Tell me the rest,” I said, my voice breaking. “Tell me about what you did.”

  She took a deep breath. “Well, everything worked out great with Courtney. So I told Sylvia I could do it to her, too.”

  I shook my head. “But, Tabby—”

  “And I did it,” she said, continuing as if I hadn’t said anything. “I set up the Theoretical Magic aisle so that nobody would ever know we were there. I had to set up extra wards on either end of the aisle—a little sign about reorganization, just in case, and blackout glamours, and soundproofing. She trusted me to take care of it. I don’t think anyone even came by, though—they never do, not that early in the year.”

  “Why here?” I asked, incredulous. My voice was getting shrill and loud; the books fluttered to match me. “Why not, I don’t know. At home? At your apartment, or hers? Why would you do this at the school?”

  “I needed the books,” Tabitha said simply. “We can’t take them out of the aisle, and there are texts in here…” She reached out a fingertip to stroke the spine of a book with no title on the binding, which looked like it was made of water. “There are texts in here that I could never buy without attracting attention.” She smiled at me, her gaze distant, as her hand slowly sank into the spine of the book.

  “Tabitha?” I said her name sharply, and she blinked a few times before snatching her hand back. I tore my gaze away from the rippling book, although I couldn’t stop myself from looking back at it every few seconds. “So, alright, you—you set up the aisle? You sterilized it?”

  “Of course I sterilized it,” she huffed. “I’m incredibly good at planning, Ivy. I set up the aisle in a day. And then I had to get a substitute for my classes, and I had to give a couple of other teachers food poisoning so it wouldn’t look suspicious that Sylvia and I were both missing.”

  “You poisoned people?” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  “It took three days, uninterrupted. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop to eat. There was so much cancer, Ivy, and it was … it was everywhere. It was like trying to sort oats from rice. But I did it. I got it all. I took all the cancer out. I saved her.” She glowed starbright with triumph.

  “That’s impossible,” I whispered. Tabitha’s lip curled.

  “Is it?” she snapped. She reached into the air in front of her chest and tugged a piece of paper out of it. “Is it impossible? Read the coroner’s report, then. Tell me if it says cancer anywhere.” Her voice had grown sharp, impatient.

  I took the paper, brushing my thumb over the torn corner where she’d pulled it off the missing coroner’s report. I didn’t read it. It didn’t feel important anymore. “Why did you take this?” I asked. My sister bit her lip, looking away from me.

  “I thought you’d figure it out if you saw the report,” she said. “I thought that if you saw that she had the same kind of cancer as Mom, you’d realize…”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to hear more. “So what happened, then? Why did you … why did she die? Did you two have a fight?” I tried to keep my words gentle again, tried to sound like I wouldn’t judge her for murdering someone in the middle of a high school library. “Did she say something, when you put her back together?” Tabitha’s eyes welled with tears again, and she covered her mouth with both hands, shaking her head. I pressed harder. “What happened, Tabitha? You have to tell me what happened.”

  She shuddered. “I fell asleep,” she whispered, and the tears broke over the edges of her eyelids. “I tried so hard to stay awake, but it was three days, Ivy. It was three days, and the whole time I had to hold every part of her all together, and I couldn’t put her back until it was finished because then the cancer might have spread more, you know?” She let out a hysterical laugh as tears streamed down her face, along her jaw, beading on the end of her chin. “I was so tired, and I was almost done putting her back together. And I thought I was done, I thought I had performed the final reunification, but … but I was so tired, and I had been working so hard, and I just couldn’t do enough. I closed my eyes, just for a second.” She looked at me, pleading. “Just for a second, and then when I opened them again, she was…” She gestured to the bloodstains. “I tried to put her back, but I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried, something else fell out, and I couldn’t—” She pushed at the air with her hands, a sculptor trying to push clay back into the shape of a vase. “I couldn’t do it.”

  I didn’t hold my sister as she sobbed into her hands. I didn’t lay a co
mforting palm on her shoulder. Instead, I stared at the bloodstains on the carpet, listening to her cry over the woman who’d left them there. As her gasping sobs began to slow—How long had it been? Twenty minutes? Thirty?—I realized that the books were silent.

  She’d fallen asleep. That was all. She’d saved her girlfriend from the cancer that had eaten our mother alive, and then, in the last few minutes—she’d fallen asleep. I didn’t know anything about how magical surgeries normally went, but if they were anything like nonmagical surgeries, the doctor would have had a huge team of people working beside them, scrubbing in and out, providing relief. Making sure that the doctor was well rested and alert.

  My sister hadn’t just done something impossible. She’d done the impossible thing by herself. And she could never tell anyone.

  “Tabitha?” I said. “I think you have to tell someone.”

  She looked up at me. “You mean you have to tell someone, right?”

  I shook my head. “No, I think you have to tell someone. I think … I think you have to talk to someone about this. And I think you should stop working at Osthorne.”

  She wiped the back of a shaky hand across her eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, picking up speed, “I mean, Tabitha. I think that what you did to Courtney left her really scared, and maybe really hurt. And she’s not going to tell anyone that it was you who did it, not now, anyway. But the longer you’re here, the more likely it is that she will tell someone. And who knows how long Alex will keep quiet. If this gets out … they’ll put it together, just like I did.”

  She stared at me, her brow furrowed. “You’re not going to tell anyone?”

  I stood up, brushing myself off. There wasn’t anything on my clothes, but it felt like there was something clinging to me. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to get rid of it. “I’m not going to tell anyone,” I confirmed.

  “But … why?” Tabitha was still sitting on the floor, looking up at me, and I saw my sister there, but I also saw a stranger.

  I had wanted so badly for us to come back together, sisters and friends again after all those years. I had wanted her to turn out to be just like me in all the right ways. I had wanted her to be mine again. I had wanted us to exist in a world where that was possible.

  But it would never be possible. She wasn’t the same girl who had held my hand in an incubator, who had caught frogs with me, who had helped me smear on my mother’s forbidden lipstick under a fort made of bedsheets. She wasn’t anyone I really knew. And as I thought about it, I realized that everything I’d thought I knew about her—every little gift of laughter and relationship she’d given me over the past week—it was all fogged over by the fact that I had been trying to solve a murder she’d committed.

  She was my sister. And that was all she would ever be.

  “It won’t bring justice to anything,” I said, and as I said it I felt a steady rain of exhaustion begin to saturate me. I couldn’t look at her. “But you did something horrible to Courtney. You know that, right?” She bit her lip hard, but didn’t look away. “You did something that could have hurt her so badly, even more than it did, and you didn’t protect her the way she needed to be protected. So … look.” I rubbed my eyes. I was so tired. “Go find a research lab somewhere, or something like that. Work there. You can’t teach here anymore, okay? That’s the deal. You leave Osthorne—hell, leave the country. I won’t tell anyone what you did. But … but you can’t come back.”

  Tabitha watched me warily. “What are you going to tell Torres?”

  “I’ll tell her the truth,” I said. “I’ll tell her that the ’miz had it right. This was theoretical magic gone wrong. Sylvia reached into a black box, and it had a cobra in it.” I didn’t add that the cobra was named Tabitha Gamble. I didn’t think she’d understand, if I did say it.

  She stood up and made to hug me, but I stepped back out of her reach. She stood there, awkward and puffy-faced, as I avoided her eyes. I stepped away, dodging her, and the edge of my foot landed on one of the long arms of a bloodstain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. I started to answer her—to say “It’s okay,” even though none of it was—but she didn’t let me get a word in. “I’m sorry that I manipulated you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gave me a rueful half smile. “I got you drunk. I added a compound to your water—something to loosen your consciousness—and then I tried to plant it in your mind that Alexandria DeCambray should be a suspect. I thought it would throw you off. I even … I even tried to do a little bit of theoretical dynamism.”

  A memory flashed—Tabitha sitting across from me, saying that it seems strange that the last time Alexandria DeCambray blackmailed a teacher and didn’t get her way, she got aggressive. Her half smile held, as if she were telling me about a prank she’d pulled when we were kids.

  “Well, it worked,” I said, a muscle in my jaw spasming as it crystallized: She was the one who drugged me. “I suspected Alexandria. I was sure, actually. I was totally certain that she killed Sylvia. She’s just a kid with more power than she understands—but you understood exactly how much power she had, didn’t you?” The half smile had congealed on my sister’s face. “The funny thing is, you’re the exact person who would have been able to guide her through these next few years. She’s about to have a really intense time, and you two are … God,” I said, running a hand through my hair. A crazed laugh bubbled up through my chest. “You’re exactly alike. She might not have been manipulating anyone on purpose, but she was still willing to make people afraid in order to get what she wanted, wasn’t she?” I was getting loud, but I didn’t care. “She was still willing to fuck with people’s heads, just like you. Do you know, I’ve spent half the time I’ve been on this case wondering if I was going crazy?” I shook my head, and let fatigue snuff out the anger that had started to spark in my belly. It wasn’t worth it. “She really could have used a mentor like you,” I muttered. “If only as a cautionary fucking tale.”

  Before I left my sister behind in the Theoretical Magic section of the library, I reached out to brush the spines of the books on the nearest shelf with my fingertips. They were still and silent, like dead things, and my eyes grew suddenly hot with tears over the loss of their whispering. I let the tears flow as I left the silence behind.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I WALKED OUT TO THE Osthorne staff quarters with the weight of seventeen years of estrangement—and many more to come—resting heavy on my shoulders. I wasn’t sure if I could carry it. Not because I’d just spent a little over a week being drugged and lied to and manipulated in every way that these goddamned mages could think of. It wasn’t that I was angry and hurt and exhausted. It wasn’t that.

  It was that I didn’t know what to do next. How to keep going. I told myself that nothing had really changed: I was the exact same amount of alone as I’d been when I took the case. I’d never had anything, not really. Not with Rahul, and not with Tabitha. Both of those relationships had been fledgling at best. Rahul was a guy I had been excited about, sure; infatuated with, definitely; turned on by, no question. But I hadn’t developed a real relationship with him yet. I didn’t even know his middle name. And Tabitha—it had been nice to imagine becoming friends with her, rekindling that sisterhood we’d lost. I’d been like a kid playing house. I’d been living a ridiculous daydream where I was something more, where I had something more. But it had only been a week, and I had logged more hours in dreams of future closeness than actual interactions with her.

  I pictured myself going home and lying on the floor in the dark of my living room, staying there until my bones dissolved into the carpet. That, at least, felt like a worthwhile daydream.

  Before I could do that, I needed to pack up the Osthorne apartment where I’d been staying. I opened the door and froze.

  At first, I thought I’d walked into the wrong place. But then I realized that I was seeing the apartmen
t through the eyes of a stranger—of a civilian. It hit me like a blow. My chest ached as I took in how far I’d let things go. The story the place told wasn’t a good one. Files carpeted the floor. Horrible photos of Sylvia’s body were taped to the walls next to notes about the particular arrangement of the corpse. Empty bottles lined the kitchen counter: rum, gin, wine, wine, wine, wine. A trail of papers led down the hall.

  The bedroom was down the hall.

  My knees felt loose. I walked across the living room on far-away feet, shoved a pile of half-crumpled notebook paper off the couch, and let myself collapse into the cushions. I needed to leave. I needed to clean the place up and get out.

  I needed to go home.

  I started sobbing, and I couldn’t stop, and I didn’t want to stop, because stopping would mean trying to find a way to comprehend all of the things I’d learned, and all the things I’d seen, and the broken place that my mind had become over the course of the past few weeks. It would mean looking ahead, to the drive home, to the flat-pack furniture in my empty apartment, to the bar where my favorite bartender pretended to give a shit about where I’d been and why I hadn’t come around for a while.

  And then a laugh bubbled up out of me, because maybe the bartender really did give a shit, and God, I actually felt a pang of guilt at the idea of disappearing. At the idea of making him worry. I was feeling guilty about the way I’d been neglecting the most important person in my life, the person who knew me best. A person I tipped for his time.

  People don’t stick, I thought, that old bruise I couldn’t stop pressing. But pressing that bruise didn’t give me the same sense of satisfied, aching relief that it was supposed to.

  Because it wasn’t people who didn’t stick.

  It was me.

  It had always been me. I had always slipped away unnoticed, a guest leaving the wedding before anyone can ask her to make a toast. People didn’t stick because I was made of fucking Teflon. I’d always told myself that it was better that way, that being alone was easier. That I wasn’t a coward for easing my way out of friendships before they could really start.