Page 41 of The Rules of Magic

“That’s not the way it would happen,” Jet told him.

So he sat on the bed beside her and kissed her and they kissed for a very long time. This was the way it would have begun. At first she thought she would cry again, but then Jet kept her eyes closed and the bellman was Levi to her. She said Levi’s name. Rafael might have been offended, but inside he pitied the dead man for all he had missed out on. He unbuttoned Jet’s blouse and undressed her gently, just as Levi would have. He had a condom in his wallet, though he hadn’t expected to use it today. Jet kept her eyes closed. When Rafael touched her he expected her to be cold, but she wasn’t. She was hot under his touch.

“I want you to look at me,” he told her. When she did he said, “I don’t want to be the dead man.” Jet turned away and began to cry, but he insisted. “We can’t pretend. We’re both alive. We have to do this like living people. Otherwise I wouldn’t feel right.”

She really looked at him. He was a handsome young man who was worried about her even though he didn’t know her. She kept her eyes open as he made love to her. She was supposed to have had her first time with Levi, but instead she was here in a bed with a stranger. They could hear traffic on Fifth Avenue. They could hear the wind in the trees. When she embraced him he was himself, and that was fine.

“Is this one of these things where I have to be responsible for you for my whole life now?” Rafael asked. “Like when you save someone from death, and then you’re their angel, and you can’t have any peace until you know they’re all right.”

“I am all right,” Jet said.

“Then why am I still worried?”

It was dusk now and the room was dark. Jet was pretty certain Rafael would get fired despite his uncle. “If you lose your job, it would be the reverse. Then I have to be responsible for you.”

“If I lose my job, it’s fate,” he said.

“We make our own fate,” Jet said, and then all at once she realized that they did. They could not control it, but they could choose how to respond to what happened. She insisted he get dressed and go back to work. He did so, although he seemed reluctant to go.

“So this isn’t a relationship,” Rafael said.

“Absolutely not.” She told him about the curse, and the trouble people in her family had in matters of love. There was no reason not to tell him everything since they would remain as strangers. The truth was, he looked different to her now. He was even more good-looking than she’d thought at first, and he had a concerned expression. He wasn’t Levi and he wasn’t going to be no matter how hard she tried to pretend that he was.

“We should meet here in six months. Check in with each other,” he said. “Then I would know you didn’t kill yourself.”

Jet shook her head. “I won’t. But we’re never going to see each other again. Let’s just get that straight.”

“You miss him,” Rafael said. “Even right now.”

She did, but the day of the accident now felt as though it belonged to the past. She was glad she had kept her eyes open.

“I’m glad you were you,” Jet said.

He kissed her good-bye as himself and then they both laughed. “So am I,” he told her.

When Rafael left, Jet took a long bath, then she put on a white robe and finished what was left of the chicken. She got into bed and phoned Franny to tell her where she was.

“You are not at the Plaza Hotel,” Franny said. “That costs a fortune.”

“I had to stay here. I needed to complete what should have happened that night.”

She could see the lights come on along Fifth Avenue now. Rafael would be checking out of work and heading for night class. He had told her he wanted to be a teacher. She went to the window and gazed out. She thought she saw him, but she wasn’t sure. She barely knew him after all.

“It’s beautiful here,” she told her sister. She’d forgotten how lovely the sky was at this hour of the day.

“Will you come home in the morning?” Franny wanted to know. “We can’t afford another night at the Plaza.”

“Yes,” Jet assured her. “I promise I will. After I have breakfast from room service.”

The Plaza Hotel was the least of their financial problems; there were heating bills and electricity and taxes, things their parents had seen to in the past. Even before the shop opened their savings had all but disappeared. Jet set a paper spell, hoping to bring money their way, burning a dollar bill coated with honey and milk in the fireplace. The only result was an order from a small pharmacy on Bleecker Street for a box of black soap. Franny had altered the recipe, adding city ingredients that were available. There were no blooming roses outside the door, no lush herbs and flowers as there were in Isabelle’s garden. So she made good with what she had. A branch from an ash tree in Washington Square Park, two dappled feathers of a nesting dove on West Fourth Street, leaves from the wavering lilacs in their yard. The result was grittier than Aunt Isabelle’s recipe, with more intensity. Wash with it, and not only were you beautiful, you were ready to do battle. It was especially good for anyone riding the subway or walking down a dark street after midnight.

The pharmacy ordered several more boxes in the ensuing months, but the sale wasn’t enough to sustain them. When their money ran out they had no choice but to divest themselves of family belongings. They sold their mother’s good Limoges china at a bad price. They sold the French cooking pots, and then the costume jewelry their mother favored, jeweled bugs and starfish and butterflies. One gray day, when they hadn’t enough to pay the electricity bill, they brought nearly all of Susanna Owens’s Chanel suits and Dior dresses to the secondhand store on Twenty-Third Street near the Chelsea Hotel. Franny bargained as best she could, but in the end they collected only a few hundred dollars for the timeless clothes their mother had bought in Paris when she was young and in love. They sat in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel and counted their money.

“You could have stayed here instead of the Plaza,” Franny said. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be so broke.”

“My fate wasn’t here.” Jet had a small smile on her face that gave her away.

“Oh really.” Franny now understood. “What was your fate’s name?”