The Rules of Magic (31 page)

“And to think Ethan always feared his son would be a failure,” the woman went on. She was older but wore a Mary Quant miniskirt, along with a silk blouse and a long rope of pearls. The elevator opened directly into the apartment, and when it did Franny felt as though she were dropping back through time.

The party was crowded with guests, but otherwise it seemed exactly as it had when they were in grade school and Haylin had first brought her home, only after she had made a solemn promise not to tell anyone how he lived. It was after they had met in the lunchroom, when she had given him half of her tomato sandwich and he had eaten it without complaint, though it lacked salt and mayonnaise. The decor hadn't changed since that time; the same pale pearly wool carpets, silk wall coverings, persimmon-colored sofas. Someone offered to take her coat.

“Oh, no thank you,” Franny said. “I'm cold.”

Indeed, she was shivering. She was out of place with or without her coat; nothing she had on seemed appropriate for this
gathering. The women were in jewel-toned cocktail dresses, the men in well-tailored suits. Franny stayed on the edge of the huge formal parlor, where glasses of champagne were offered and hors d'oeuvres were served on polished trays. She thought she spied Emily through the crush, but there were so many tall, pretty young blond women she couldn't be sure. There was a table littered with silver gifts. Platters, serving trays, candlesticks. Due to Franny's presence, many of the smaller silver pieces tarnished and turned black. She walked away from the table, embarrassed by what witchery could do. She avoided the other guests, but she couldn't hide from Haylin, who came up behind her and put a hand on the small of her back. She felt the heat of his touch through her coat. She tried to catch her breath.

“I couldn't send you an invitation,” he said. “You never told me where you lived.”

He was in an expensive suit, his hair cut short. She didn't think she'd ever seen him in a suit before. But it was still him, her dearest friend, no matter what he wore, no matter whom he had promised to marry.

There were spots of color on Franny's cheeks and her hair had begun to unwind. She wanted to say,
Run away with me. Now I know nothing else matters. I don't care if we come to ruin.

In her black coat with her shining red hair, she was impossible to miss. From across the room, Haylin's father spied her. He glared and gestured for his son to get rid of her.

“Let's step outside.” Haylin led her to the elevator. He pushed the button for Lobby, but halfway down he stopped the elevator's descent and drew Franny to him. In an unexpected show of intimacy he put his mouth against hers. It was so fast and intense nothing could stop what happened next. It didn't
matter where they were; it didn't even take courage to do this. It was fate and they didn't try to fight against it. Franny threw herself at him and Haylin didn't stop her or himself, although by now Emily Flood was wondering where he'd gone, worrying because she'd seen a tall pale woman with red hair. She still had nightmares about Franny, for after Franny's visit to the hospital, it had taken Emily months to win back Haylin's affections.
Don't you see?
she had told him.
She's never coming back to you. She doesn't care or she would have come to Cambridge with you.

What Emily Flood had feared had come to pass. It all happened too fast and then they realized where they were and what they had done. Haylin backed away, pulling up his pants like a fool, pained by his own actions. He was not a disloyal man, yet he had just betrayed his fiancée. “I'm getting married,” he said, shaking his head as if puzzled by his own statement.

“I know. I read about it in
The New York Times.
” Franny tilted her chin up, ready to be hurt by whatever he would next say. She felt this was her last chance, and she was taking it.

“I have to marry her,” Hay told her.

“Do you hear yourself?
Have to?
”

Haylin groaned and said, “You always do this to me. You make me think I have a chance.”

The elevator alarm went off. Haylin did his best to stop it, but in the end he had to punch the up button for the sirens to subside. The elevator resumed, climbing back to the seventeenth floor. When the doors opened, Ethan Walker was there. Both Haylin and Franny blinked and looked guilty.

“I thought I made myself clear,” Haylin's father said. “Get rid of her.”

Mr. Walker was utterly impossible to see into, closed as a
locked vault. Franny, however, was completely transparent at this moment, a woman in love who had just been fucked in the elevator and clearly didn't give a damn about anyone else's feelings, certainly not those of the bride-to-be, who had gone off to lock herself in the bathroom to weep, terrified she had already lost Hay before he was hers.

“Don't make an ass out of yourself,” Walker said to his son. “She dumped you and she'll do it again. Do the right thing for once in your life.”

Franny saw the expression set on Hay's face. When his father left them, she tugged on Hay's sleeve. “Don't listen to him. You never have before.”

Haylin looked at Franny. “It's not about him, Franny. You know I don't care about my father's opinion. But all those years! You should have contacted me.”

“I didn't want to ruin your life,” Franny explained.

Hay laughed bitterly. “But now you do?”

Franny recoiled, stung. “Is that what I'm doing?”

Hay appraised her coolly and she could see how she'd hurt him. “I don't know, Franny. You tell me. Because I'm not sure I want my life ruined.” He shook his head, his confusion evident. “I keep thinking about when I was drowning and you didn't come in after me. And when we were going to school together, and you didn't come with me.”

“But you didn't drown! And you did fine without me at school! But you resent me for everything. I see I shouldn't have come.”

Franny hastened into the elevator, but Hay threw his arm across the door, making certain it wouldn't close. “I couldn't go through losing you again,” he said. “It killed me. It took me years to get over you.”

“But you did get over me.
You
found someone else.
I
didn't.”

“Tell me you won't walk away again and I'll call the whole thing off.”

Franny took a step back, startled by his raw emotion.

“Tell me,” he demanded. “And I'll do anything. I'll hurt her if I have to.”

That was when Franny saw Emily. She had come to search for Hay and was watching them from the parlor. Franny lost her voice then, and felt the courage drain from her body. Who did she think she was to cause another woman such grief? Perhaps Emily was Haylin's fate and Franny would only be interfering in what was meant to be.

“You still can't make a promise to me,” Haylin said, and in that moment he let the elevator go.

On the street Franny hailed a cab. She rode along past the gates into the park she and Haylin used to walk through. Love had to happen without any certainty, the ultimate leap of faith. But Haylin now stood beside Emily Flood while Franny was headed downtown, weeping as she looked out at the world she had once known.

Once a month Jet went to Massachusetts. She told no one in her family, but they knew. Sometimes Franny packed her a lunch and left it on the kitchen table. A cucumber sandwich, some cookies, a green apple. Vincent often left out cash for the bus. She was grateful, but she never discussed her plans with them. She simply went early on the last Sunday morning of the month. When she got to town, she took the local taxi to the cemetery, and she
always brought daffodils no matter the season. She sometimes stopped at the local grocery that sold flowers. Everyone knew who she was but treated her politely all the same. In the spring she walked to the cemetery, and she picked her own flowers, the ones that grew in the fields that were the color of butter.

Isabelle did not consider it rude that Jet didn't stop in to see her, although once or twice she had spied her niece walking through town. One time in particular she'd happened to be going to the library when she noticed Jet standing in front of the Willards' house. Maybe it was a good sign or maybe it wasn't. Only time would tell. The Willard home was a white house with green shutters, more than two hundred years old, with a huge garden that had never regained its former glory once the Reverend had cast down salt on the day when April Owens blundered in, aiming to pick some of his pie-plate-size roses. Now the rosebushes were bare and the leaves curled up. The only things that grew here were daffodils, and Jet was surprised to see that there were hundreds of them.

There was an apple tree that Levi had told her about. He'd said he loved to climb the tree and pick crisp McIntosh apples, but now the bark of the tree was leathery and black, the boughs were twisted and bare. It hadn't borne fruit for years.

Jet was leaning on the white fence looking up at the second-floor window where Levi's room had been when the Reverend came out. He was putting out the trash, but he saw her and stopped. They looked at each other in the fading light.

“I'd like to see his room,” Jet said.

The Reverend no longer attended to any services. He didn't attend to anything. He no longer watered or weeded his garden. The gutters on the house were sagging, and the roof needed
work. There were two rocking chairs on the porch he never sat in. He didn't want neighbors passing by to greet him or wish him well or ask him how he was faring. He looked at the Owens girl with the dark hair and her serious pale face with the scar on her cheek and then he signaled to her. He didn't know what he was thinking or if he was thinking at all, but he watched her come into the yard and up the porch steps.

“I appreciate it,” she said. “Thank you.”

She followed the Reverend into the house and up the stairs. The carpeting was beige and the walls were white, but yellowing. There was the scent of mothballs and of coffee that had recently been brewed. No lights were turned on. The Reverend didn't like to spend the money on electricity bills, plus he could see just fine until it was pitch dark. After dark he went to bed. Or he sat by his window, looking into the yard as if he could see back through time into the past. His wife had died much too young, of cancer, and maybe that was when everything started to go wrong. He was strict with his son, and he feared bad luck, and then it seemed he had brought it upon himself, and upon everyone near him.

“Watch your step,” he found himself saying, for the stairs were steep.

Once inside, the Reverend switched on a lamp. Jet had wanted to see Levi's room ever since they'd met. Whenever they sat in the park he would describe it in the greatest of detail. The blue bedspread, the trophies he'd won on the swim team, photographs of his mother and father on a picnic out by the lake. The wallpaper was blue and white stripes, the rug was tweed. Jet stood in the doorway now. If she closed her eyes she could see him sitting on the bed, grinning at her, a book of poems in hand. Her eyes were brimming and hot.

“Unable are the Loved to die, for Love is Immortality,” Jet said, quoting Emily Dickinson.

When she opened her eyes the Reverend was standing beside her, crying. They stood together like that until the light changed, with bands of blue falling across the floor.

After a time, Jet followed him downstairs. He opened the screen door for her and they walked into the garden of daffodils. Everything else was black. Even the soil.

“I can drive you to the bus station,” the Reverend said.

“That's okay, I like to walk.”

He nodded. He liked to walk, too.

“You can come by next time,” he said. When she looked at him, confused, he added, “I know you're here every month. I see you at the cemetery, but I don't want to disturb you. I know you want your time with him.”

Jet stood on the sidewalk and watched him walk back up the steps to the porch. The lamp had been left on in Levi's room and it cast a yellow glow. Jet waved and then turned. She walked the long way to the bus station. She liked to walk through town, especially in the fading light. It brought her comfort to know that for more than three hundred years people in her family had been in this town, walking where she walked now. The next time she came she wouldn't wear this black dress, which was too warm for the season. And she would come earlier in the day so she would have more time, because for the first time in a long time, she felt she had all the time in the world.