The Rules of Magic (33 page)

For many it was a time when miraculous things happened every day. This past summer, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had been the first people to reach the moon, on
Apollo 11,
landing in the Sea of Tranquility. It seemed the distance between earth and the stars and planets was growing smaller, and perhaps the world, that floating blue orb, could be better than it had ever been. But there was no peace to come; instead there was unrest in cities that were brutal and brutally hot. In the park there were swarms of bees, so many that Franny took to wearing a scarf when she sat beneath the Hangman's Elm. She brought the deer a bowl of cool water, but it refused to drink. She could see in its eyes that it had given up.

Sometime in the night, someone shot the deer with a bow and arrow, as if hunting season had been declared in Manhattan. People were outraged and a sit-in began, with many of the
protesters the same children who had tried their best to save the deer. The mayor took up the cause and a collection was raised so the deer could be buried on the grounds of the Cloisters.

For days after the murder of the deer, there was a trail of blood on the concrete path where the poor creature had last lain. Near that place the children of PS 41 planted a rosebush one murky afternoon. It bloomed overnight with masses of white flowers, though the blooms were out of season. It was a miracle, everyone said, and some were satisfied, but to anyone with the sight there was still a sense of doom in the park. Franny stopped going to Washington Square. Instead, she sat shivering in their own small garden and she waited for whatever was bound to happen when a white deer appears, when white roses bloom overnight, when bees follow you home to nest in your rooftop.

It didn't happen until October. A letter arrived at 44 Greenwich on a Sunday afternoon, a time when mail wasn't delivered. There was no stamp and no return address, but the cream-colored stationery and the slanted handwriting were instantly recognizable. The missive was addressed only to Franny.

“Aren't you the lucky one?” Vincent said drily. He had stopped by for coffee, as he often did in the morning when William left to teach his classes.

Franny looked at the envelope on the floor by the mail slot. She had no urge to retrieve it, in fact she had gone quite cold with dread. In the end, Jet was the one to get the letter. She looked at her sister and Franny nodded. “You open it.”

Wren hopped on Jet's lap as she sat down to inspect the envelope. When the cat batted a paw at the letter there was the thrum of a bee.

“Better take it outside,” Jet suggested to Franny. “It's addressed to you, after all.”

Franny went out to the rickety back porch. The city smelled like possibility and corned beef hash. Franny used a dull knife to slit open the envelope, then watched as a bee rose into the cloudy air. The last time they'd seen bees they had portended a death.

The note inside was brief.

Come today.

Isabelle did not often make requests, and when she did it was best to comply. So Susanna Owens had believed and so her daughter did as well. Franny packed a suitcase and took the bus to Massachusetts within the hour. Jet had packed her a lunch, a tomato sandwich and a green apple and a thermos of Travel Well Tea, composed of orange peel, black tea, mint, and rosemary. Riding through the lush New England countryside, Franny thought of the first summer they'd come to visit, when Haylin wrote letters every day. She thought she could have what she wanted; she thought she could see the world from above, as if it were a distant blue ball whose sorrows had nothing to do with her. She had wanted to be a bird, but now she knew, as she looked out the window to see Lewis following, that even birds are chained to earth by their needs and desires.

There was a chill in the air and Franny wore her mother's ember spring coat and tall lace-up black boots, along with jeans and a shirt that had been Vincent's castoff. She had an awful feeling in the pit in her stomach. A one-line message was never good. It meant there was no recourse to something that had gone wrong. For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.

To Franny it seemed that nothing had changed when she walked toward Magnolia Street, except that the Russells were no longer in residence. The house had been painted and two unfamiliar girls played in the front yard. Franny stopped and leaned over the fence, curious.

“What happened to the family before you?” she asked.

“They were stinkers,” one of the girls said.

“We had to burn sage in all the rooms,” the older of the two sisters confided. She was all of ten. “Bad karma. We got the sage from the mean old lady at the end of the street.”

Isabelle.

“What made her mean?” Franny asked.

“She always wore black and a pair of old boots,” the older sister said. The girls suddenly stopped their play and looked at Franny more carefully. Her black coat, her boots, her blood-red hair piled atop her head. “Oh,” both sisters said thoughtfully.

The girls' mother came to the door with a skeptical expression. “Lunch,” she called, clapping her hands. When the girls skittered into the house their mother walked onto the porch, hands on her hips, eyes fixed on Franny. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Franny detected a stain on the porch beneath the gray paint. Crimson. She felt her face grow flushed. She knew what it was and it didn't bode well. “What happened to Mrs. Russell?”

“Are you a relative?”

Sometimes the truth was the best way to find out more of the truth. “I'm Franny Owens. I think you got some sage from my aunt.”

The neighbor continued to be wary. “What if I did?”

“If you did, I'm glad she could help you.” The woman relented
and came a little closer. She no longer seemed quite as guarded, so Franny went on. “Mrs. Russell was involved with my brother,” she explained. “So I just wondered.”

“Well, it's a good thing he wasn't around when it happened. Her husband? He was kind of a mild-mannered guy? He murdered her. I take it she had all kinds of improper flirtations. We got a great price on the house because of the crime, but I've had to go to your aunt half a dozen times to try to rid the place of her aura. It still smells of burning rubber in the basement.”

“Try some lavender sachets. Put them in every room and bury one under this porch.”

“Frankly, it's good you're here,” the neighbor confided. “Your aunt hasn't had the porch light on for weeks. People in town are a bit worried about her, but we all know she values her privacy.”

Franny thanked the neighbor and walked on. October was such a tricky month. Today, for instance, it was as chilly as wintertime, but the sun was bright. The weather report predicted that the following day would be in the sixties. Vines snaking around the old house were still green, but there were no leaves, only thorns. When Franny went through the gate she noted the garden hadn't been put to bed as it usually was at this time of year. The beds had not been raked, tender plants had not been taken into the greenhouse, where they would winter over in the faint sunshine. The new neighbor had been correct: the porch light, always turned on to let those in need of a remedy know they were welcome to call, burning for more than three hundred years, was turned off. Moths caught inside the glass dome were fluttering about helplessly.

Finding the door unlatched, Franny shoved it open. Colder inside than out. A sign of a passing over to come. Franny kept her
coat on. Her throat tightened as she walked through the house, the echo of her heels clattering on the wooden floor. There were dishes in the sink, unwashed, and dust glazed the furniture. Isabelle was always meticulous to a fault. Now there were ashes in the fireplace. Herbal encyclopedias were scattered over her bed. There was one book of poems, a present from Jet one Yule.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Franny came to see that the back door had been left open. A beetle squatted on the threshold. Deathwatch beetles are wood borers; they can be heard in the rafters calling for mates and there was a call from somewhere inside the ceiling. There was nothing Franny could do about the beetle hiding in the attic, but she stepped on this one and crushed it flat, then went on to the garden. The lilacs were bare but she swore she could smell their scent.
If there are lilacs,
her aunt had told her once as they'd worked in the garden,
there will be luck.
The spindly plant in the backyard of 44 Greenwich was one of the reasons she'd decided it was the right house for them.

She went on to the greenhouse, thinking of the night she learned to make black soap, and in doing so learned who she was. The door was ajar and she peered inside. There was Aunt Isabelle sitting in a wicker chair.

“You received my note,” Isabelle said when Franny came to her, her voice a dry rasp. Her skin was sallow and she was clearly chilled to the bone, for she wore a sweater, a coat, and a shawl. Still she trembled. “I won't play games with you. It's pancreatic cancer. One can't escape every evil under the sun.”

Franny sank onto the wicker ottoman and took her aunt's hands in her own. Her emotions swelled into panic. “Is there no cure?”

“Not yet.” Isabelle was honest above all things, a trait Franny admired. It was an important rule. Nature could be shifted, but not controlled. “Not for me,” Isabelle said. “But, darling, you can cure yourself. I wanted to make certain I spoke to you about this matter right away.”

Franny smiled softly. It was so like her aunt to worry about her when she was the one who was dying. “I have no disease.”

“You will,” Isabelle said. “Unless you love someone.”

Franny bent to rest her head on her aunt's knees. “You know I can't. It's not possible in our family.”

“Maria Owens did what she did for a reason. She was young and she thought damning anyone who loved us would protect us. But what she had with that terrible man wasn't love. She didn't understand that when you truly love someone and they love you in return, you ruin your lives together. That is not a curse, it's what life is, my girl. We all come to ruin, we turn to dust, but whom we love is the thing that lasts.”

“Maybe I'm afraid of love,” Franny admitted. “It's too powerful.”

“You?” Isabelle scoffed. “Who chose courage? You're stronger than you know. Which is why I'm leaving you what matters most. The book.”

Franny raised her head, touched by her aunt's generosity. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “Can we change what's happening to you? You once said that just as anything whole can be broken, anything broken can be put back together again.”

Isabelle shook her head. “Everything except for this. Death is its own circle.”

“How long do you have?” she asked her aunt.

“Ten days.”

Then and there they began the work that would take ten days to complete. They shielded the furniture from daylight and dust by laying down white sheets. They made soap out in the garden, the best batch that had ever been prepared. If used once a week it could take years off a person's appearance. They wrapped the portrait of Maria Owens in brown paper and string for storage, then put bay leaves and cloves in the closets to keep moths away. They telephoned Charlie Merrill, who could be trusted to keep their business private, and had him exterminate the attic and the rafters to rid the house of beetles. Before he left, they asked him to fashion a plain pine coffin and to please do so quickly. He stood there, blinking, choked up and not knowing quite what to say to Miss Owens.

“I can't do that,” he said, distraught.

“Of course you can. And I'll appreciate it, just as I've appreciated all of your hard work over the years,” Isabelle told him.

She handed him a check for ten thousand dollars, since she had been underpaying him for fifty years, and when he protested she simply wouldn't hear anything more.

“We have too much to do to argue,” she said and off she and Franny went to the pharmacy, where they ordered hot fudge sundaes with marshmallow cream at the soda fountain.

“Much too fattening,” Aunt Isabelle said. Her hand shook each time she lifted the spoon.

“But we don't care,” Franny said, though she had noticed that Isabelle was only taking small bites and that her silver sundae cup was overflowing with melted ice cream.

They saw to all of their chores, readying the house and the garden, and on the eighth day, when Aunt Isabelle could barely walk, they had Charlie take them to the law firm in Boston that
the Owens family had always used. There a will was taken from a file. It had been drawn up after Franny had come to spend the summer. Isabelle now confided that she had known right then. Franny was the next in line.

Once they'd been ushered into a private office, they sat in oxblood-red leather chairs facing the lawyer, Jonas Hardy, a young man with sad, moody eyes. His father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all worked for the Owenses. He shyly addressed Franny. “You are the trustee for your brother and sister when it comes to the house, in which you have equal shares. Everything else, however, goes directly to you. That includes all belongings: furniture, dishes, silver. There is a trust used to manage the house, so you never have to worry about taxes or upkeep. But you can never sell the house, you understand.”

“Of course she understands,” Isabelle said. “She's not a nincompoop.”

Franny signed the necessary papers, then they had tea and sugar cookies.

“Your aunt gave me this tea when I first met her,” Jonas Hardy said. “She sends a box here to the office every year.” He lifted his cup. “Thank you, Miss Owens!”

Franny took a sip.
Courage.

They all shook hands when the papers had been signed and the tea had been drained to the last drop, and then Franny and her aunt got into Charlie's waiting car, and they navigated the bumpy streets of Boston, which had been cow paths when Maria Owens first came to set up the initial trust for her daughter and her granddaughter and all the daughters to follow. Aunt Isabelle rested her head back and dozed. She woke once when they hit a pothole and was clearly disoriented. “Is this New York?”