Some Kind of Magic

There were certain inevitabilities in life.

Like the light at the end of the tunnel almost always being a train. Like the more you cared about people, the more likely you were to lose them.

Here was a new one.

The plane was going to crash.

Hmm, he thought. We’re going to crash.

He'd never much cared for flying. Mostly because he liked being the one in control. He didn't like putting his life in someone else's hands. Now he guessed he could say that uneasy feeling he always got whenever he stepped into a plane wasn’t entirely unfounded.

He wasn’t scared. Maybe because his life had been nothing more than a series of screw-ups anyway. A plane crash was probably as good a way to go as any. And sometimes enough was enough.

He had to give the pilot credit. He fought it all the way down, somehow managing to keep the plane parallel to the ground until they were skimming along the snow-covered earth like a rock over water.

Trees were sheared.

Metal ripped.

The plane's right wing snapped away, then the left. With a huge roar, everything came to a bone-jarring halt.

Claire Maxfield and her friend Libby sat in a dark corner of The Brewery, an ancient establishment with long wooden tables that had known the elbows of several generations of Fallon, Idaho, residents.

They were both on their second beer when the tone of the television in the corner changed. The regularly scheduled program was interrupted with another update on a twin-engine plane that had crashed that morning in the nearby mountains.

Libby leaned halfway across the table. "I heard one of the passengers is an escaped convict.”

'"Who told you that?” Claire asked, not believing her for an instant. Libby was always trying to manufacture calamity in her life. Nothing ever happened in Fallon, not in the winter anyway. In the summer, when tourists invaded the town and increased the population from two thousand to fifteen thousand, things happened, but those things were more along the line of bicycle thefts and public intoxication.

“Glenna, the girl who works mornings at the gas station—well, her brother-in-law is on the rescue team, and I overheard Glenna telling somebody that shots had been fired.” Libby looked past Claire, momentarily distracted from the local gossip.

“Here we go,” she said with an air of expectancy.

A flaming cake suddenly appeared in front of Claire. One of those little emergency jobs.

Normally a cake would be the signal for waitresses to appear from every corner of the tavern, drawn like moths to a porch light. Instead, an approaching storm had sent most of the customers and staff scurrying home for the warmth of their own fires.

So the bartender came over, giving them a tenor for the requisite Happy Birthday sing-along.

When they were finished, the waitress apologized. “We couldn't fit thirty candles on the cake, so we just put on ten.”

Libby got quite a kick out of that. Claire rolled her eyes.

"'Make a wish!”

“Yeah make a wish,” everyone chimed.

Claire made a wish.

She blew.

There was a collective moan as all but one of the candles went out.

Claire blew again, extinguishing the lonely flame.

“Aw,” the waitress moaned. “Now your wish won’t come true.”

“Gee, and I wished I could be fat, poor, and ugly.” Claire wondered if she was getting drunk on two beers. It could happen.

“Really, what'd you wish for?” Libby asked a few minutes later around a mouthful of cake.

“For some excitement in my life.” Not gossip-generated excitement, but real excitement.

“Don’t we all.” It was a statement, not a question.

They’d been friends a long time. Through diets and binges. Divorce and desertion.

They were friends, yes, but Claire was enough of a realist to know that it wasn’t the kind of relationship where Libby would be there no matter what. If something—or someone—more exciting came along, Libby would vanish, to resurface months later, walking back into Claire's life as if she’d only just left.

Yet their friendship had endured. And maybe that’s what it was all about. Endurance. Claire understood that Libby had to have colors and noise, while Claire just liked to visit that place from time to time.

There was only once when their friendship had been seriously tested. That’s when Libby had confessed that she’d seen all the Ernest movies— and liked them.

“You need to get out there,” Libby said. “Start dating.”

Claire took another swallow of beer. It was tasting better all the time.

Dating.

The word gave Claire chills.

“When I wished for excitement, I didn’t mean a man. Excitement can be a good book. Or a new bar of scented soap. A good night of TV viewing. So good that I have to record one show while I'm watching another.”

“You have high expectations, don’t you?”

“If you don’t ask, you won’t receive.”

“Anton’s been gone, what, three months?”

It seemed like three years. And it seemed like three days. To Claire’s humiliation, she was living a cliché. The one about the man who went out for cigarettes and never came back. Except in her case he’d gone to an artist retreat in California, met an independently wealthy widow, and never came home. He'd even managed to get one of his horrid oil paintings on the cover of a new magazine,
California Nights
.

After the years Claire had toiled to be able to accurately reproduce images on paper, all Anton had done was slap some bright colors on canvas and sleep with a rich woman.

It was hard on the self-esteem, getting dumped like that.

“Before I forget, I want you to start saving your glass bottles for me,” Libby said, tearing Claire away from her morose musings.

“Recycling?” Claire asked.

Libby's eyes took on an excited glow that didn't appear to have anything to do with the beer she'd consumed. She leaned closer. “This spring I'm putting up a cement wall around my house. I have to have enough bottles to stick in the top. Then, after the cement hardens, you break the bottles so it leaves a jagged edge.” “How lovely,” Claire murmured, not surprised in the least.

Libby's new thing was what Claire called compounding. For six months, she'd been working to make her home self-contained and as inaccessible as possible. Claire wasn't sure who her friend thought was coming, but whenever Libby got involved in a project, she went all the way and then some.

“When society collapses, you can come live with me. I've made sure I have enough stockpiled for my friends.”

“Thanks. Just don’t start wearing camo.”

Libby got a strange look on her face—a confession, if ever Claire saw one. “Oh, Libby.”

“It's just one pair of field trousers. They're so comfortable. You should try them.”

“I'll pass.” More camouflage. Just what Idaho needed. “Don't you think the broken glass might be a little much?”

“I wouldn't talk if I were you.”

“Me? I'm not the one building a wall.”

“Oh, yeah?” Libby took another drink of beer. “Claire, he's not coming back.”

“I know that. Even if he did, I wouldn’t let him in the house.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“You think you know me so well.”

Was she that weak? Would she take him back? It was true that she spent a large portion of her day fantasizing about Anton’s return. Sometimes she slammed the door in his face. But most of the time she jumped into his arms, and pretty soon he was doing all of the wild, wonderful things to her that he was so good at. She had to give credit. He was definitely an artist when it came to making love.

“Last call,” the bartender announced from across the room. A polite way of saying, Please leave.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Libby pulled two white paper bags from her backpack and slid them across the table. “I know you said no presents, but when I saw these, I had to get them. Open the little one first.”

Claire was down to her last pair of Levi's, and they were ripped in more than one place. Two days ago, Libby had tried to talk Claire into letting her buy her a new pair of jeans for a birthday gift, but Claire had refused. She had pride. She may have been broke, but nobody was going to buy her clothes, not even Libby.

Thankfully the packages she'd shoved toward her were both too small to contain jeans. She didn't want to have to argue with Libby, especially when she was only trying to be nice.

She opened the sack Libby had indicated— and pulled out a small, rather crude stuffed doll with text on it. What in the world? She remembered that it was a gift and that Libby was waiting for her reaction. Claire tried to compose her features, tried to act as if she really liked it, as if it were something she'd wanted. Whatever the hell it was.

"'It's a voodoo doll.”

Claire continued to stare, kind of fascinated, kind of horrified.

Libby pointed to the doll's tummy. "It has all the places marked where you can stick the pins. “And see—“ She turned it over. “The other side has good voodoo.”

"'Good voodoo? I didn't know there was such a thing.”

Oh, yeah."

An Acme voodoo doll.

Libby turned it back over.

“You get some of Anton's hair, like out of a brush or something, and you glue it to the doll’s head, then you poke these black pins in the different places. Here’s the spot to make him impotent.”

Since it hadn't yet been activated with anybody's hair, Claire felt fairly safe in testing a few pins in various sites. It almost made her feel as good as the time she’d burned all of Anton's silk underwear.

“Open the other one,” Libby reminded her.

Claire was afraid to see what could possibly be next. She doubted anything could top the voodoo doll.

She was wrong.

The other present turned out to be a set of handcuffs.

Libby burst out laughing while Claire stared at the cuffs that were connected with about four feet of chain.

“They’re called belly cuffs,” Libby told her when she was able to catch her breath. “I got them at the army-surplus store. They were right next to the grenades.”

Claire didn’t know what to say, so she fell back on the standard reply. “Just what I’ve always wanted. How did you know?”

Libby waved her hand, not believing her for a second. “If I know you, you’ll use them to chain yourself to your easel.”

Clare stuck both gifts in her purse. “We’d better get out of here before they tell us to leave.” She slid across the slick vinyl seat. It wasn't until she stood up that she realized she was a little woozy.

When Anton left her, she’d tried drowning her sorrows, but all she ended up with was an evening of paying homage to the toilet bowl and a day in bed with a hangover. That’s all it had taken for her to decide to leave the drama of the bottle to somebody else—somebody who could hold her liquor.

Standing, they both went about the chore of putting on layers of winter crap, with Claire finishing by cramming a stocking cap on her head.

She felt about as sexy as a polar bear.

“You still have that cap?” Libby asked as they walked toward door, waving goodnight to he bartender. “I swear I’m going to burn it one of these days.”

Claire just gave her a sleepy smile.

Outside, the frigid air felt good on her hot cheeks. It stole her breath. It stung her eyes. More importantly, it cleared her head.

Without lingering, they said their goodbyes through frozen lips, then scurried to their vehicles, the packed snow creaking under their boots, the way snow did when the temperature dropped to zero.

The Jeep’s engine was sluggish, but it finally turned over.

Shivering, her breath a cloud in front of her, Claire waited for the vehicle to warm up. Libby didn’t dally. She honked her horn and took off, in a hurry to get to the safety of her compound.

That was when Claire thought she heard a sound, coming from directly behind her.

Her scalp tingled.

“Anton?”

In one of her daydreams, before she found out that Anton had left her for the old broad, she’d imagined him returning to her, injured and helpless. She would nurse him back to health so they could once again make passionate love.

She was beginning to think that the sound behind her seat had been nothing more than the ringing of her own ears, when something was pressed against the back of her head.

Her heart stopped.

Claire had never had a gun to her head, or any other part of her body, but if she had, she was fairly certain it would feel like this. Exactly like this.

Cold.

Hard.

Any remnant of alcohol in her bloodstream vanished. She went from warm fuzzy glow to completely sober in a fraction of a second.

A voice came out of the darkness directly behind her.

“Drive. ”

Not Anton.

Anton's voice was soft, sexy, sensual. This person’s was harsh, broken.

Desperate.

She swallowed. Or tried to swallow. “Y-You c-can have my J-Jeep.”

The gun was shoved more insistently against her head. “Shut up. Just shut up and do what I say.”

Happy birthday, Claire.

She'd wished for excitement, but being taken hostage wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

Was this what happened if you didn’t blow out all your candles?