The Rules of Magic (17 page)

The water was murky, filled with mysterious, mossy items. Still, Haylin didn't back down. He pulled off his boots and unzipped his jeans, then took everything off. She'd never seen him naked. He was like a statue, perfect.

Haylin inhaled, then leapt into the pond. The turtles splashed away as he disappeared into the blackness of the surface. Water rose up and slapped against the rocks, then spilled onto the path. Though the pond was filled from a tap, trash left to sink to
its depths made the water appear ominous and unclean, likely chock-full of strange debris and unknown pathogens. Franny's heart was hitting against her chest. Haylin would probably need a tetanus shot.

He didn't rise. Franny thought of bees, and ashes, and broken glass. But Haylin hadn't been inside their house when the deathwatch beetle appeared, so surely he'd be safe. And yet there was a circle forming around the spot where he had disappeared. No air bubbles, no Haylin. Franny wanted to leap in after him, but she knew from the time spent in Leech Lake it was impossible. She would only float to the surface. Because she couldn't be drowned, she couldn't follow him into the depths to save him. She was frantic, her pulse pounding, fearing that the curse was happening right now.

When Hay suddenly reappeared, he broke the surface like some sort of enormous fish. He was sputtering for air, turning blue. He struggled for breath, then met her eyes. Franny sat frozen on the rock; a kind of terror had immobilized her. Caution.

Hay shook his head. “Jesus, Franny,” he said.

She'd never seen anyone look as sad or disappointed. He swam to the rocks with two strokes of his long arms and hoisted himself out. His hair was slicked back. His penis looked blue from the cold. Franny had a small shiver of what she thought was fear, but it was really something else entirely, what she didn't want to feel for him and already did.

Hay reached for his clothes and pulled them on even though he was soaking wet. “There's a shopping cart down there. My leg got stuck. I almost couldn't surface. In case you care.”

“Haylin.” Franny spoke with emotion. “Of course I do.”

“There's something wrong between us, Franny.” Hay cast
his large, wet feet into his boots without bothering with socks. Then he came to her and put his hands on her shoulders; he was shaking from the frigid water and from raw emotion. “Were you going to let me drown? Seriously. Tell me the truth. You're keeping something from me. What
are
we to each other, Franny?”

Before she could answer
Everything
and explain the curse of who she really was, Franny spied a figure weaving through the trees. He was headed straight toward them with a strange, shuddering gait. It was Vincent and he was barefoot. He'd run all the way down Eighty-Ninth Street and through the park and was now sprinting forward, crying out her name. Franny pulled away from Haylin. She could hear bees, the ones that had been there on the day when she and Vincent knew someone in their house was doomed. She looked up and spied the moon and instantly knew what this night had brought. She now thought one word. Her sister's name. Jet.

“What is it?” Hay said, concerned.

When Vincent reached them, he was pale with shock. “They had an accident.” He looked so young standing there, barefoot, his bravado gone. Because Franny appeared to be frozen, he grabbed her hand. “I know what you're thinking, but she's alive.”

Which meant the others were not.

Franny and Vincent took off across the park together. Haylin called out, but Franny couldn't answer; she was running too hard. She didn't realize that she was also barefoot until they'd reached the pavement. She stood shivering on Fifth Avenue while Vincent hailed a cab.

They sat side by side in the ER at Bellevue, not speaking. The cold linoleum floor nearly froze their feet. When the doctor came to speak to them it was long past midnight.

“Your sister has a concussion and several broken ribs,” the doctor told them. “She's quite shaken and we had to stitch up her face, but she'll be fine.”

“And our parents?” Franny asked.

The doctor shook his head. “I'm sorry. It was instantaneous. And the boy also just passed on.”

Franny and Vincent exchanged a look. They had completely forgotten that Jet had intended to meet Levi.

“You mean he's dead?” Vincent asked.

“He was struck by the cab your parents were in.”

Franny had never felt so cold. “They followed her. They chased after them.”

Vincent draped his jacket over her shoulders. “Let's go see Jet.”

She was in a small private room, her black hair streaming onto the white pillow. Her face and arms were bruised and bandaged, and there was a gash on her face that had been closed with thirty neat stitches. Her eyes were rimmed red. It was her birthday, her night, her parents, her beloved. Guilt was curling around her heart with tendrils of self-hatred. In one instant she had lost everything.

Franny came to sit on the edge of the bed. “There was nothing any of us could do to stop it. You can't blame yourself, Jetty. It was an accident.”

Jet leaned into the soft pillow. She was doomed to lose everything, even her gift of sight. When they'd first brought her into the hospital she could hear the patients' jumbled thoughts.
Hearts that beat stopped with a shudder, men who were racked with pain. Then all at once she couldn't hear a thing. The only sound that reverberated was the voice of the Reverend, who'd come to a room down the hall and set to wailing when he found his son, here in New York City, a place he had always believed caused ruination. He had been right about the curse, for this was what love had done to his boy, who never would have been struck if not for Jet. Although she'd never met the Reverend and he likely despised her, there was no one Jet felt she had more in common with than he, for the person they both loved best in the world was gone.

The furniture was draped with white sheets as Aunt Isabelle instructed they must do when they entered the mourning period. She had arrived late that night without a suitcase, though she carried a large, black purse. She had a black silk band around her right arm, and she wore a felted hat with one ember feather attached to the brim. She told them they needed to turn the mirrors to the wall. Then she had them sprinkle salt on the windowsills and leave sprigs of rosemary outside the doors.

“It was bad luck,” she told them. “Nothing more.”

She sat beside Jet, offering a cup of tea, which Jet refused to drink.

“It was bound to happen,” Jet said in a small, broken voice. “It was my fate.”

“It wasn't fate. It was the interruption of fate. No one can control such things.”

Jet was thin and pale. She turned away from her aunt, tied
up with guilt and grief. Isabelle knew right away that her niece had lost the sight, for her eyes were a dull dove gray without light or life.

Isabelle slept in the room where the previous family's cook had cried herself to sleep every night. Franny had made up the bed with clean white sheets and had left lavender in the dresser drawers. Isabelle unpacked her purse, in which she had a nightgown and slippers and a bar of black soap.

“She never thought to choose courage,” Isabelle said.

“But she did choose courage. Didn't she?”

“In life we don't always get what we choose. I gave her what she needed.”

On the day of the funeral, Franny found two black dresses in their mother's closet. She was surprised to see several pairs of red shoes in the back of the closet, something her mother had forbidden them from wearing. Franny helped Jet to dress, pulling her nightgown over her head, then slipping the prettier of the dresses on her, treating her as if she were a child. Jet still hadn't slept or had a bite to eat. She thought of her parents, how she had often heard them talking late at night. If it wasn't true love that they'd had, then it was a true partnership. She couldn't imagine one without the other. Now she realized that she hadn't spent enough time with them, or told them she loved them; perhaps she hadn't even known. All she knew was that she didn't feel safe with them gone. Anything could happen now. Whatever their world had been, it would never be again. She sat in a chair in the living room, wearing her black dress,
hands folded in her lap as she watched the door, as if she expected their parents to walk through, maybe then time would have rolled backward, maybe then Levi would still be alive.

Vincent, bleary-eyed and ravaged, had on a black suit he hadn't bothered to press. When he came out of his room barefoot, Isabelle insisted he go back for his boots. That was the way in which their family members were buried and it was disconcerting to see Vincent without shoes. At the funeral home on Madison Avenue the coffins were closed. The mortician had been instructed that both their mother and father must wear black and be barefoot. Franny had chosen a Chanel dress for their mother and handed over her favorite red lipstick and Maybelline mascara, for she never went without her makeup and Franny was not about to have that change. For their father, Vincent had taken a Brooks Brothers suit from the closet, along with one of the white shirts he had had tailored in London. Franny had straightened her own unruly hair with an iron and dabbed on pale lipstick so that she might look presentable. There was no way to hide the wound on Jet's face, though Franny tried with some powder from one of their mother's gold compacts. It looked as though blue flowers had been stamped on Jet's skin. Even when it healed, a jagged line would run down one side of her face.

Not that Jet cared. Nothing would be punishment enough for having lived through the accident. She kept seeing Levi put his arm out and step in front of her, and then she saw stars, and he called her name, or maybe it was only a sigh, the last of his life and breath rising up.

“You know he was related to us,” Vincent told Franny.

“No.” She looked at her brother. “How so?”

He shrugged. “Isabelle wouldn't tell me.”

“Jet has lost the gift,” Franny said sadly. “I didn't know that could happen.”

Their sister was still sitting in the chair, though the car had come for them. She barely seemed to breathe.

“She'll get it back,” Vincent said. “It's in her blood.”