The Rules of Magic (40 page)

She went back to the restaurant, arriving as Haylin was getting out of a taxi. He'd flown from Frankfurt, where he'd been stationed, and now he embraced Franny on the sidewalk. He kissed her and could not stop. It was Paris so no one looked at them twice.

“I should have been here sooner,” he said.

“You're here now.” Franny seemed more in shock than grief-stricken.

She barely spoke that evening. As the dinner was ending, with aperitifs and small cakes, Franny went to Agnes and asked if she could call on her the next day. “I want to thank you and perhaps get to know you better, as my mother did. I was rude before, and I apologize.”

“I'm so sorry,” Agnes demurred. “I'm closing up my apartment. I really won't have time. I'm going out to my country house.”

“So that's it? Vincent is gone and we don't speak about it?”

Agnes shrugged. “How can we understand life? It's impossible. To the world, Vincent is dead and buried. Let's leave it that way, my dear.”

“And we don't speak of William either? I'm not even sure where he is. What do I do when his father calls me and asks where he is?”

“William is where he wants to be. How many among us can lay claim to that?”

Franny rushed back to the hotel and Jet's room.

“William lied to us,” she told her sister. “He let us go through that charade of a funeral. All the while, that Madame Durant had placed a disappearing spell on Vincent so we wouldn't know the truth. He's alive, Jetty.”

“If William lied, he did it for Vincent. You knew we were going to lose him. I suppose this was the best way.”

“To make us think he had died?” Even for a few hours it had been horrible.

“He has died. For us. And we must keep it that way if we want him to be safe.”

At the hotel, Jet was happy to leave Franny and Haylin to each other. She preferred to be alone to grieve. The loss of her
brother affected her deeply. She went to her room and when she took off the hat she'd been wearing all day, she found that her hair had gone white all at once. It had happened at the funeral. Her best feature, her long black hair, gone. She gazed into a mirror above the bureau and spied the woman she had seen in their aunt's black mirror. She wondered what Levi would have thought if he was with her. Perhaps he would have lain down beside her and told her she was still beautiful, even if it wasn't true. He would have read to her from a book of poems, then perhaps planned where they would go for a drink, someplace somber, but warm, where they could sit close together. But now, without him, she had stepped into her future, and, like it or not, this was who she'd turned out to be. He was a boy, and she was now a woman who had lost nearly everyone she'd ever loved. She thought of what she'd told April once. This was what happened when you were alive. She called the desk and asked for some coffee, since she already knew she wouldn't be able to sleep. Paris was too noisy, the room was too cold, the injury of losing Vincent too fresh. She did not mind being alone. She sat beside the window and wrote a postcard to Rafael. She always wrote him postcards, even when they were both in New York City, and then when they got together they would read the postcards in bed. She wished he were here with her now. Just as a friend, of course. The friend she wanted to be with more than any other.

It had begun to rain, a thin green drizzle that made the sidewalks shine.

Paris is sad,
she wrote,
but beautiful enough to make you not care about sadness.

Franny fell asleep beside Haylin, exhausted. When she woke he was sitting on the edge of the bed watching the rain falling. They were supposed to stay away from each other, but their pact didn't need to apply yesterday, nor today. The sky outside was thick with rain clouds. Paris was so gray in November. Wood doves were gathering on the small balcony. Franny held out her hands to them and they pecked at the glass. She wished they never had to leave this room, but they did. Haylin had told her he was being transferred to the field. He would be leaving in less than eight hours for Vietnam. They spent those eight hours in bed, telling each other they didn't love each other; they did so for luck and to do their best to ensure they would one day see each other again.

The sisters packed up and called a taxi. They went to the Tuileries and walked down the gravel paths. The leaves were turning brown. They had their suitcases with them, so they stopped at the first café they came to in the park. They ordered white wine, but they didn't drink much. They were thinking about their mother when she was young, and the rules she'd made up to protect them. They had their own rules now. Franny cast a circle in the gravel beside their table. Then she took one of Lewis's feathers that she had in her pocket. She let the feather fall. Outside the circle, and their brother was gone. But it landed inside, right in the center. Jet let out a sob. Franny reached for her hand. It was good news. He was somewhere close by, but when the feather blew away they knew the other side of the truth. He was lost to them now.

When the sisters returned to New York, Franny took to spending the night in Vincent's room. From here she could hear the echo of children in the school yard in the mornings. She let the crow remain inside. He was aging and he liked to perch on the desk near the heater, where he dozed in fits and starts. The dog followed Franny around, but she was a poor substitute for Vincent, and he began sleeping at the front door, waiting for his master to reappear.

Both sisters slept uneasily upon their return, disturbed by sounds of the city, the rumble of buses, the shrill sirens, the ever-present traffic on Seventh Avenue. When Franny opened the window she found that New York City had only one scent now and it never changed. It was the sharp tang of regret. She longed for something darker and greener, for a silence that might allow her to find some peace.

One night she dreamed that Isabelle was sitting on the window seat of the old house in Massachusetts.

You know the answer,
Isabelle said.
Fate is what you make it.

When Franny awoke, she realized she was homesick. She was at the kitchen table when Jet came downstairs. To Franny, Jet seemed even more beautiful with her white hair, for her beauty was rooted inside of her now.

“I'm ready to go,” Franny told her sister. In fact, she had already packed up her room.

Jet looked at her surprised. “Go where?”

“The place we feel most at home.”

“All right. We'll shut down the store.”

“I'll call the attorney. He can manage selling this place. It was temporary for us. Now the rightful tenant can have it.”

Jet understood her sister's wish to leave New York. 44 Greenwich Avenue was already becoming the past as they sat there. It was disappearing in front of their eyes. It had been a home for the three of them, but they were three no longer. She thought of Vincent playing “I Walk at Night” for the first time, of April visiting with Regina and eating chocolate cake in the kitchen, of the plumber who did work for them in exchange for a love spell, and of the night when Vincent came home and told them he was in love. As for Franny, what she remembered most was standing outside on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows, knowing that lilacs grew here and that she would buy this house and that for a while they would live here and try to be happy, and, in a way, they were.

During the course of two years Franny collected 120 letters from Haylin, all wrapped in string, kept in the bureau in the dining room. The house on Greenwich Avenue had been sold and divided into offices. A literary agent had taken the rooms on the third floor, and her desk was now in the space where Vincent's room had been. She was a lovely woman with a beautiful smile who filled up her bookshelves along the wall where his bed had been. For a while the shop was a mystery bookstore and occasionally the owners found red thread and wishbones in unexpected places. The ramshackle greenhouse Vincent had built was pulled down and carted away, but some of the seeds scattered through the neighborhood so that foxgloves and sunflowers grew in the alleys for several seasons. They took the tilted kitchen table that had been in their family
house on Eighty-Ninth Street, and they took Edgar, the stuffed heron, whom they kept in the parlor of Aunt Isabelle's house and decorated every Yule with silver trimmings and gold tinsel.

The sisters settled into the Owens house on Magnolia Street. It felt like home in no time. Franny took Aunt Isabelle's room, where Lewis, now so aged his feathers had begun to turn white, nested on the bureau. Jet was happy to have the guest room where April Owens had stayed when they refused to share a room with her. The attic, where they'd spent their first summer, was a place for young girls, not for grown women who needed more comfortable beds, so they used it for storage. Harry still slept by the door, waiting for his master, while Wren kept to the garden, where she chased off rabbits and mice.

They had an entire winter in which to restore everything that had been ignored for so long. Charlie came to clear out the gutters, cut back the vines on the porch, and deliver a cord of wood for the fireplace. He said it was grand to see people in the house again.

“I miss your aunt,” he told the sisters. “She was one of a kind for certain.”

On days when the sky was spitting out snow, Jet took possession of the window seat to read from one of her beloved novels. Magic came back to her slowly, like a long-forgotten dream that hovered nearby.

Now that she lived in town, she visited the cemetery every Sunday. She walked no matter the weather. Some children called her the Daffodil Lady, because she always carried a bunch of the blooms. Sometimes the Reverend gave her a ride home,
especially if it was raining hard. He was there every Sunday as well. In nice weather he brought two lawn chairs, and when the sky was overcast he brought a large black umbrella.

They didn't talk very much, although the Reverend noticed that Jet still wore the moonstone ring Levi had given her, and Jet saw that the Reverend kept one of Levi's swimming medals pinned to his jacket. When they talked, they talked about the weather, as people in Massachusetts often do.

“Cold,” he would say.

And she would agree with a word or two, and then one day she brought mittens she had knitted for him out of soft gray wool. The next time he brought the scarf she had made for Levi, which made her cry. She ducked her head so that the Reverend wouldn't see, although he could tell all the same. He carried a handkerchief, and gave it to her, and gently said, “This comes in handy.”

In the spring he handed her a new business card he'd had printed. He had gone back to work and was now a justice of the peace. He had already married six couples. He told her that one couple had phoned him in the middle of the night, desperate to marry, so he had performed the service in his living room dressed in his pajamas.

One day he said, “Maybe you should move on with your life.”

Jet was grateful for his kind thought. Years had passed. She still met Rafael in the city several times a year. For a while he saw another woman, and thinking he wanted a family, he was married briefly. But in the end he divorced. His wife didn't know him the way Jet did. They could talk with each other in a way they couldn't with anyone else, and so they began to see each other again.