The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (40 page)

Fancy Zing paused at the southeast corner of the oval. She had just collected Band-Aids from the glove box of her car.

From here, she could see Cassie lining up to race. The starting gun cracked, and Cassie took off at the pace of Fancy's heart. The other children, Fancy thought, moved like frantic puppets. Cassie stretched smoothly away from them.

Fancy's gaze shifted to the finish line where Cath Murphy waited: her hair cut sharply across her neck; her excellent posture; her expression of mild exasperation. She felt a surge of love for Cath, and then for the ribbon, in Cath's hand. It had such power! A child needed only to brush against that ribbon and the adults had to drop it at once.

Her eyes followed the lane markings beyond the finish line, to the other side of the oval where four blocks of color had appeared. They seemed to be enormous flower beds.

Amazed, Fancy turned back to watch her daughter's race.

Heading toward her car at the end of the day, Fancy watched a flock of pigeons rise as she approached. She smiled to herself modestly.

It was strange how things worked out sometimes. Marbie had taken a day off work to bring Listen along to the carnival so they could watch Cassie win races. “It turns out,” Marbie had confided, “that Nathaniel doesn't need to have a revenge affair, because he already
got
his revenge.”

“How?” wondered Fancy.

“He pushed me in the path of a sports car!” Marbie's eyes shone.

It was even possible that their mother would win Cath around. She had been phoning her occasionally, and Cath had been hanging up. But now she had a plan: She would suggest that Cath
herself
carry on with the Secret. Nikolai would still be expecting reports, ready to authorize funds. Why not let Cath draft the reports?

“Would she really want to report on herself?” Fancy asked doubtfully.

“Who said she had to tell the truth?” replied her mother.

Fancy reached her car, opened the door and, coincidentally, there was Cath, way across the oval, staring at her. She waved and smiled, but then Cassie appeared, ribbons and trophies spilling everywhere.

Cassie's friend Lucinda was panting a few steps behind, trying to keep up.

“Okay,” said Cassie from the backseat, polishing a trophy on her T-shirt as they drove home. “Okay, Lucinda. Never eat an apple and jump up and down.”

“Why not?” said Lucinda.

“The apple goes up your nose.”

“I'm going to try it as soon as I get to your place, Cass.”

“
Never.
Did you hear me, Lucinda? NEVER. What did I just say to you?”

“Take it easy, Cassie,” said Fancy, checking in the rearview mirror.

“You could just get some apple and put it up your nose, if you wanted,” Lucinda commented. “You wouldn't have to jump up and down.”

“
Lucinda,
” murmured Cassie, shaking her head.

Fancy turned into her driveway, and pointed the remote control at the garage door. It rose.

While the girls ran into the house, she wandered down toward her mailbox. A mynah bird was pecking at her lawn, so she detoured slightly and approached the bird, watching with pleasure as it fluttered out of her way. This was Fancy's new regime. She
made things happen.

She went to shopping malls as often as she could, so she could march toward automatic doors. She raised her right hand to make taxis stop. When she passed dog walkers on the street she said, “May I?” and then, holding a single finger in the air, she said, “Sit!” Usually, the dog would.

Also, she had made her husband leave, simply by saying the words, “I want a divorce.” Such small gestures led to such grand results!

Radcliffe had been surprisingly compliant once the Secret was burned to the ground. (At present, he was living in the campervan out the back of the Banana Bar, but she was thinking of making him move on from there. It was no place for Cassie to visit.)

All her life she had been so caught up with rules, she had hardly had space in which to live. She used to wear her blazer in her bedroom, because the school rules said the blazer must be worn whenever “outside the school gates.” Once, at the gym, she felt a frisson of fear when a police car flashed by a window, and she realized that her arms were not swinging. As if the police might arrest her for failure to achieve the optimum cardio workout.

The only freedom in her small, rule-bound life had been in her foolish fictions.

She glanced over at the Canadian's house, and
tch
ed at herself. She didn't even know his name! He was a figment, a fantasy, constructed of chocolate terrines and colorful lingerie!

Fondly, sadly, she recalled a particular fantasy she had developed around something he had said. He had come to her door to offer a cake, apologizing for something his brother had said. She herself had blathered that it didn't matter, that she wrote wilderness romances, that the only person she had ever slept with was her husband. At which moment, the door had squealed, and the Canadian had said, “I could fix that.”

Days later, she had begun to believe that this was a cryptic message. That he was referring not to the door, but to her desolate sex life! What a dreamer! What a fool she was!

She laughed softly, and opened her mailbox. Its lid hung loose from its hinge, and she wondered vaguely if she could replace it with a remote-control cover. Then she could
make
it open.

There was a metallic clang nearby. It was the Canadian. He was standing at his own mailbox, and had just let the lid drop closed.

“Nothing,” he called.

“Oh,” she replied.

At least, she admitted to herself, she had not imagined his dark skin, nor the brightness of his eyes behind their spectacles.

“How about you?” Now he was walking toward her companionably. His feet were bare, and the edges of his jeans were frayed.

“Well,” she glanced down. “This might be a copy of my latest book.”

“The wilderness romance?” he inquired politely. He was standing right by her shoulder, and she found herself beginning to chatter.

“Yes! It'll be my wilderness romance! I
know,
it's such a cliché! Me, a housewife in the suburbs, writing this sort of trash! This one's full of multiple orgasms, you know, and I've never even
had
a multiple or—” She dropped the mailbox lid, and it swung crookedly.

“I could fix that,” said the Canadian.

He was gesturing at her mailbox, but when Fancy looked up, and into his eyes, she saw that they were dancing.

A flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos descended on a fig tree. Listen watched them for a moment, and then turned back to the sea.

It was Friday night, and she and Marbie had driven from the Redwood Sports Carnival to Balmoral Beach for fish and chips.

“So strange to be free on a Friday night,” Marbie murmured to herself on the drive over. She murmured this every day.

“She's in denial,” Listen's dad confided.

Listen herself was in denial. The last few weeks, they had let her stay home from school, pretending she needed time to recover from the fire. She'd spent the days with her dad in the Banana Bar or going to movies with Marbie (who took days off work whenever she felt inclined). The Zings, meanwhile, seemed not to have noticed that Listen was the one who had led Cath Murphy to the shed. Instead, they clapped their hands to their mouths or burst into tears of joy when they saw Listen coming. Fancy kept turning up with baskets loaded with peaches, chocolates, books, CDs, and “Thank you for saving my life” cards painted by Cassie. And the freezer was crowded with cherry pies baked by Grandma Zing. Each had the words, “Listen Taylor—What A Hero!” piped in chocolate across the pastry lid.

But eventually, Listen knew, she would have to face the truth. Soon she had to go back to school.

She dug her toes into the sand. She would just have to find a new strategy for making friends.

It almost made her laugh now, thinking how she had seen the Secret as a kind of “strategy.” Even if she'd known what it was, nobody at school would have believed it.

She herself would not have believed it. It was so much crazier even than her own theories: that the Zings were spies, or “Keepers of the Family,” or hiding from the police.
Or maybe,
she thought suddenly,
you could say it was all three in one.

There was a scuffle of sand, and Marbie sat down beside her. She handed Listen a Styrofoam box of fish and chips.

“Have I told you the story of the day a beach umbrella almost killed me?” Marbie said, tearing open a little packet of salt. “See my scar?” She pointed to her forehead.

Listen had heard the story before, but she let Marbie tell it again, and this time it was different. “I wasn't concentrating,” Marbie said. “Everyone was shouting,
Look out for the umbrella!
And I was just sitting there staring out to sea. Why didn't I get out of the way? And that's the thing, Listen, most bad things can be avoided if you just pay attention.”

“Hmm,” agreed Listen. “What's your point, Marbie?”

“Well, I'm leading up to an apology,” Marbie said. “I have to apologize to you, because I did a stupid thing, and it caused me and your dad to break up.”

“What did you do?”

“I'll tell you one day,” Marbie said. “But for now, can we just say it was stupid? And there's no excuse. And I promise I'll watch out for sharp, flying objects in the future. Am I making sense?”

“Kind of.”

“It's the sharp things, like bird beaks and thumbtacks, those are, kind of,
reality,
so we have to concentrate and…I'm not making sense, am I? I can see it in your eyes.”

Listen blinked. “Did you say that the fight you had with Dad was because of something stupid you did?”

“Right. It was. And I'm so sorry, Listen, I can't—”

“So it wasn't a fight about absolutely nothing?”

“No.”

Then the fight was not her fault.

She had not done a spell that caused her dad and Marbie to break up. She poured a handful of sand through her fingers and smiled.

Actually, she realized, that meant that not a single one of the spells in that book had worked. No wonder it ended by telling her to hide it somewhere she would never see it again. It was trying to protect itself.

She hoped no one would find it hidden under that rock in the entranceway to Redwood Elementary. It was a waste of time.

And then, swimming across her mind, came the silver italic words from the back cover:
This Book Will Make You Fly, Will Make You Strong, Will Make You Glad. What's More, This Book Will Mend Your Broken Heart.

At least the Book had kept one of its promises. Her heart had been broken by Donna and the others. Now, she thought, it might be almost mended.

Although, soon she'd be back at Clareville Academy and the heartbreak would start all over again.

“So, the thing is, you can think about
reasons,
which is a good thing to do, because it might help you not make the same mistakes, you know what I mean, but a reason is not an excuse.”

Listen realized that Marbie was still babbling. Who knew what she was babbling about?

“Exactly,” she agreed. She squeezed some lemon juice onto her fish.

“Like, let's say your friend, Donna, was ever unkind to you?” Marbie continued.

The lemon juice squirted sideways and hit Listen in the eye.

“I've met your friend, Donna, and she seems to me a very anxious person. So, let's say she ever decided to be unkind to you? That would be the reason: She's so anxious her judgment gets confused. And let's say the other girls went along with her? Well, that would be because it's easier to keep Donna happy than to have her fall apart. That would be their reason. Let's say Donna and those girls were ever mean to you.”

There was a long silence. They both watched a wave find its way along the sand toward them.

Eventually, Listen spoke. “They sort of were mean to me,” she mumbled. Then she laughed and shrugged. “It was no big deal though. It was nothing.”

Marbie punched the sand and hissed, “Those stupid girls were mean to you? Spoiled, moronic, little brats!”

Listen looked over in surprise. “But you just said they had reasons.”

“I changed my mind. There's no reason in the world.”

“Seriously, Marbie, you can't blame them. I'm a taker, not a giver. Because I don't really talk very much.”

“For a smart girl,” said Marbie, “you're not very bright. You've got that the wrong way around. The takers are the people who talk all the time. The givers are the listeners like you.”

“Well, what if a person went to a school where nobody agreed with that? Where everybody thought that the person was a taker?”

Marbie scraped her heels slowly along the sand.

“I guess you know,” she said, “that the person would have to go back to the school and try again. Somewhere at the school there would be friends for that person, if she just kept on trying.”

“Right,” agreed Listen quickly. “Okay. I know.”

“So that's what you know,” said Marbie, “but here's what I think. I
think Clareville Academy has had its chance with that person. I think that person is much too precious to go back to that school. I'm not letting that school anywhere near that person ever again.”

“You're not?”

“No way in hell. We're tracking down a different school. For that person.”

“Well,” said Listen casually. “Bellbird Junior High seems like the kind of school a person could try.”

“So she could,” said Marbie.

And she did.

Once upon a time there was a confectioner who flew in a hydrogen balloon.

This was in 1810. He invited a friend from Bristol, and the flight began well enough: They drifted over the Bristol Channel toward Cardiff.

Four miles off Combe Martin, however, they crashed into the sea.

But they did not break their legs or drown; they did not catch alight and burn.

Instead, something extraordinary happened: The basket bobbed on top of the waves, the balloon billowed out behind them, and presto!
They were saved.
They spent an hour wafting along in this manner, and were rescued by a boat from Lynmouth.

Maude has always preferred the confectioner's story to the tale of the watercolor painter whose parachute was upside down.

She likes to imagine how the balloon must have looked, floating on top of the sea. The tiny basket, the immense sphere of cloth, the hopeful little men, the great expanse of water and sky. So strange, so lovely, so mystical, as with all unlikely, dreamy things such as whales, flying fish, pavlovas, and unexpected snowfalls.

But the confectioner's story was more. It was disaster transformed. A sailing ship conjured from a capsized balloon.