Something Magic This Way Comes (4 page)

What was she doing? Her dissertation, her job. She put everything in jeopardy because of a
feeling!

Truth. Know truth now
. Cymorth looked at her.

Those deep gray eyes held Gabby captive for a moment.

An entire world of understanding beyond normal senses opened before her.

What is truth without proof!
Gabby wanted to shout at the dog.

Truth is truth. You know. Cymorth know. Proof
come later. You know where to look now
.

“It doesn’t matter how I know. I know. I’ll submit the entire collection to experts for
thorough
examination. We’ll be in touch, Mr. Marshall. I’ll send a receipt to you for the donation by registered mail, along with an estimated valuation for tax purposes.”

Gabby turned on her heel and retreated inside with her dog. No, her familiar. She heaved a sigh of regret.

The dissertation and the job with the University would have to wait for lab results.

Better to be right
, Cymorth told her. Her sentence structure and vocabulary improved with every communication.

“Yeah, I guess. But it would have been nice to be right and finish on schedule.”

Other opportunities
.

“Promise?”

Promise. Trust Cymorth. Cymorth never lie
.

A whiff of potpourri tantalized Gabby as she entered her museum again. With the scent came memory of her dream that morning.

“That old Gypsy was right. I stumbled three times this morning. Once when I was getting dressed, again at the car, and a third time greeting Mr. Marshall. My old life with limited perceptions has ended and a new life begun with you, my dear. And I met a man who changed my life—Ian brought you to me, Cymorth.”

More to truth than proof
.

“I see that now.”

I
N the autumn, late in October, after he came back from visiting his father’s house, Jorge papered the walls of his room with trees. He was sad when couldn’t find any pictures of birch trees like the ones that he and Papi had stumbled on that last sweet afternoon wander—a grove of trunks so white they shone, their leaves gone from green to fluttering gold.

He consoled himself with photographs of oaks and beeches, solemn pines and perfect scarlet maples.

Postcards and pages out of magazines, the occasional black-and-white newspaper clipping, even scraps torn guiltily from long-neglected books found in the dimmest corners of the local library. All went up over the cracked plaster and sickly beige paint of his bedroom walls. And later still, when every square inch of wall was covered with pictures of leaves and trunks and branches, Jorge took a spray can of green paint, stencils shaped like maple leaves, and made over his ceiling in the image of a forest.

Remarkable, how many pictures of forests there were to be gathered, once you began to look for them.

He was done by Election Day, proud to have breathed the spirit of the woods into a tiny room in a dingy New York apartment. Of course, there was nothing he could do about the view from his window—towering rows of the housing project slabs crowding the uppermost tip of Manhattan—but he felt he’d done enough for his purpose: to make magic.

And it was done well before December! That was magic, too,
December
, the magic word, the magic time bright with hope. His father had sworn he’d be back in December to take Jorge and Ramõn up to Vermont for a real old-fashioned New England Christmas.

(“I’m back on my feet now, this time for real, for good. All I needed was to get out of the city, breathe some decent air, get away—Ah, but not from you,
mijitos
. Don’t look at me like that,
mi Jorgelito, mi
Ramõncito
. Yes, yes, I know you hate those baby names, you’re both all grown up now, even if your
tía
Clarinda’s got more whiskers than the two of you put together. When you have sons of your own, you’ll understand. Never, never think I had to get away from you.”)

Every day after school Jorge came straight home, dodging the dealers and the bullies and the terrifying, hopeless faces at every turn of the cold streets. He raced into his bedroom, dug his father’s letter of promises out from under the pillow, and flopped down on his bed, drinking hope and happiness from the well-read pages. When he was sated, he folded his arms under his head and stared into the future through painted treetops. Sometimes he would lie there like that, gazing up at a plaster sky, until
tía
Clarinda came into his room to announce that it was time for dinner.

It was the day after Thanksgiving when the phone call came, with the season’s first snow dusting down over the glittering city streets. Jorge and Ramõn were in the living room, playing Monopoly. Ramõn was cheating, and Jorge was letting him get away with it.

He was too distracted to bother trying to stop him.

Ramõn was twelve, three years younger than Jorge.

Tía
Clarinda constantly complained that suddenly there was nothing anyone could do to control that child, though Jorge was proud that sometimes he could still bring his little brother to heel.

Tía
Clarinda answered the phone. Right away Jorge knew it was his father because
tía
stopped speaking Spanish and started using every bad word she’d managed to pick up in English. It was her way of letting him know that as far as she was concerned, he was excluded, outcast, an unwelcome alien. In
tía
Clarinda’s implacable heart, he’d thrown away all rights to be part of
la familia
when he let the booze and the junk and the women drag him out the door, out of his sons’ lives. Jorge’s mother was dead—Ramõn had been two when she died so he didn’t remember her at all—but she was still Mami when
tía
Clarinda spoke of her. Jorge’s father was never Papi, always the colder, starker
your father
. She used the word
ashamed
a lot, too, when she talked to him:
Aren’t you ashamed
and
You ought to be ashamed
and
You probably don’t even
have the grace to
be
ashamed,
sinvergüenza!

Sinvergüenza:
shameless one. When
tía
Clarinda lapsed into Spanish, Jorge knew it was only a matter of time before she’d work herself into a fit of exasperation with Papi. Then she’d throw the handset at him as if it were a dead rat and stomp off into the kitchen to light all of those big votive candles by the window.

Jorge always missed the first minute of Papi’s call because of how loudly she’d pray. No one could badger the Holy Virgin like
tía
Clarinda.

“Say what, Papi?” Jorge stuck a finger in his ear, trying to hear his father’s words.

A chuckle came through the wire. “I said that I can’t tell whether Clarinda’s angrier at me for not calling on Thanksgiving or for calling today.”

“Yeah, well, Ramõn and me, we thought maybe you forgot. Ramõn got all bent out of shape about it, wouldn’t hardly eat any of his dinner, and later on he went out to hang with these kids
tía
Clarinda doesn’t like so much.” As soon as he’d said that, Jorge screwed up his lips into a cynical smile.
Doesn’t like
so much
was a real understatement when it came to what
tía
Clarinda thought of Ramõn’s new friends.

Jorge’s father wasn’t slow. “He’s not getting with a gang, is he?” Jorge imagined his father’s face darkening like a thunderhead. “God damn it, what’s he trying to pull? Doesn’t he see what happens to kids like that?”

Jorge shrugged, as if his father could see that through the phone lines. “I guess he’s gotta. You remember Domingo Sandoval, guy from my old school? He got shot in a drive-by last week, right downstairs on the corner.”

“
Dios!
Dead?”

Again Jorge shrugged. “I dunno. I guess not. There wasn’t any funeral.”

He heard his father mumble a long string of oaths in Spanish, and then: “God, I’m glad I made the decision.”

“What decision?” Jorge could feel his heart start to beat faster, louder. It echoed in his ears like a drum, so clamorous that he was sure his father had to hear it too.

Papi’s voice turned jolly, teasing. “Don’t get nosy; you’ll find out soon enough. I called to say that I’m coming down to see you boys on Sunday. I figure that’s far enough from Thanksgiving that Clarinda won’t think I’m using the holiday to try weaseling my way back into
la familia
.”

Jorge’s throat narrowed. “Papi, we—you and me and Ramõn—we are
familia
.”

“Tell that to your aunt. No, never mind, I’ll tell her myself when I see her. I’m tired of living like this, Jorge. What good is a clean life if it’s empty? I can’t blame your aunt for feeling like she does about me— I
was
a
sinvergüenza
. So many times I promised her I’d get clean, so many times I broke that promise. Now that I’ve finally done it, she doesn’t believe me. Well, it’s time I made her believe. I can’t wait for Christmas—not if what you’re telling me about Ramõn is true. I have to do something
now
, for him, for all of us. You tell your aunt I’m coming Sunday early, before Mass. Does she still drag you boys to the ten o’clock?”

“Yeah, still,” Jorge replied. He didn’t add that Ramõn always managed to vanish when it was time to leave the apartment for church, and that he often joined him. “But if you’re coming all the way from Vermont, how will you get here that early?”

His father’s laughter cradled him in warmth. “By starting out the night before. I’ll be there with time to spare so I can put on my good suit and go to Mass with all of you. Then I’m going to stand up in the middle of the church, and I’m finally going to make my promise before God. That way, Clarinda will
have
to know it’s for real, and then—” He inhaled deeply and let out his breath in a ragged sigh. “—and then she won’t be able to tell me no.”

Jorge didn’t ask
No? No to what?
He knew: Can I have my sons back, Clarinda? Can I have them back right now, today, this minute, with no objections from you, no threat of calling a lawyer or Child Services or the cops? Have I earned back the right to be their Papi? Clarinda, will you stand in my way when I want to repair the past?

After he hung up the phone, Jorge went into his room. He had to be alone. The magic couldn’t work if he tried to call it up when other people were around.

He didn’t say a word to Ramõn, not even when his little brother asked him what was up, why was he acting so weird, why hadn’t he called him to the phone to talk with Papi too? Lucky for Jorge the phone sounded off again right then—Papi calling back, probably just as confused as Ramõn because Jorge had hung up on him like that—so Jorge’s magic caught a break.

Alone in his room—Ramõn on the phone with Papi,
tía
Clarinda still chattering through her prayers—Jorge shut the door and hooked the back of a chair under the knob. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but it was the best and only thing he could do to buy a little privacy. There were no locks on any doors in the apartment, not even the bathroom.
Tía
Clarinda said she knew what people got away with when there were locks.

Jorge didn’t turn on the overhead fixture, just the little bedside lamp. It was an old-fashioned thing he’d found at a Salvation Army thrift store. He bought it because the base was painted with a forest scene— pine trees and a cabin, a deer—and because the yellow parchment shade cast a golden glow that reminded him of the birch grove. By that enchanted light, Jorge cast his spell.

He stood in the middle of the floor, his eyes closed, his arms outstretched, and strove to call on something greater than himself. He ached to harness all the undirected yearning in his heart, to turn scattered dreams, wishes and desires into a spear instead of a cloud. He believed in all the magic he’d ever read, and he was sure that if he focused his thoughts, if he gritted his teeth and furrowed his brow and knotted his hands into fists and made all the outward signs of concentration, he’d find the power to summon
something
.

Something . . . what? He wasn’t sure. It would have to be something stronger than himself, because alone he was weak. Proof of his weakness surrounded him.

He didn’t have the freedom to walk down certain streets. He starved for the strength to excel in school without fearing the shoving hands and the taunting voices—
What, man, straight A’s? You kissing up to
Teach? You think you better than us?
He saw his little brother slipping away bit by bit into the dark heart of the city and he craved the power to pull him back.

But most of all, he wanted to summon something old and wise and strong enough to work the greatest magic: something that would soften
tía
Clarinda’s heart, something that would bring their
familia
together instead of breaking it into smaller and smaller fragments, something that would bring his Papi back to him, bring all of them home.

So Jorge stood in the middle of his bedroom floor, under the painted canopy of leaves, and sent out a spell and a prayer and a cry of the heart. He sent it out of a body as tense as a drawn longbow, sent it flying into the rustling shadows, into the unseen places beyond the paper trees.

When he couldn’t hold his body in that strained, rigid posture any longer, he crumpled to his haunches, gulping down deep breaths of air.

Stupid
, he thought, a self-mocking smile on his lips.

What do you have to go and do stuff like that for, huh?

Who do you think you are, Harry Potter? Ah, well, so
what? Not like anyone saw you, thank God. No worse
than
tía
Clarinda and her candles.

He stood tall, stretching the kinks out of his back before unbarricading the door. Just as he was about to leave the bedroom, ready to return to his Monopoly game (and determined
not
to let Ramõn get away with any more cheating) he paused:
What the hell, who
knows? Maybe it works. I guess I’ll see.

* * *

Sunday morning began long before the sun came up. It started the second that the hands of
tía
Clarinda’s old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock ticked one beat past midnight. Jorge lay on his back, staring up into the leaves he couldn’t possibly see in the dark, and tried to stay awake, tried to imagine that Papi was just as restless and eager as he was for the
real
start of Sunday morning to come. Where was Papi now, what was he doing? Loading up his car, starting it rough in the chill just-past-midnight darkness, turning down the same county road that Jorge still remembered from October? What did it look like now, that road? No more splashes of red and yellow and bronze, no lingering touch of green. The trees must be bare, branches like black craze-marks across a dropped china plate. Jorge dreamed he could see the narrow path that Papi’s headlights traced as the car flew down the road to the distant city, and then Jorge simply dreamed.