Page 82 of The Rules of Magic

Franny laughed. “I was not pissed off.” She looked at him. “Was I?”

“You most certainly were. Until I sat next to you.”

Haylin grinned, which undid her, as always. She leaned her head against his chest and wondered how on earth she could ever let him go.

“Was it fate?” she asked.

“Do we care?” he answered.

The truth was, they had managed to get what they wanted. It just wasn’t lasting long enough, not that it ever could. When he passed, the doctor was sitting on the porch on an autumn night. The lilacs were blooming out of season. There were so many stars in the sky it was impossible to count them all. They had turned off the light on the back porch, the better to see the swirling show above them.

Oh, how beautiful was the last thing he said.

There was no warning when it happened, and no pain, he just was there one moment and then he was gone. Franny sat outside with him all night. She was so cold in the morning that Jet brought her a pair of gloves. Charlie’s sons took him to the funeral parlor in their new truck, with Franny insisting she go. She sat in the bed of the pickup with the doctor, who had been covered by a woolen blanket. She did not notice what roads they took or that the sky was piercingly blue. They made sure he was dressed in a black suit, with no shoes on, for that was the way people were buried in their family, in a plain pine coffin. Franny sat in the funeral parlor all night. Near midnight Jet came with a thermos of tea and a blanket for her sister and they sat together, not speaking, but holding hands, as they had when they were girls sitting on the roof that first summer they visited Aunt Isabelle’s house, wondering where life would lead them.

The Walkers did not argue or protest Haylin’s final resting place in the Owens cemetery. They were all buried in Bedford, New York, but they understood his place was not with them. His family came up to Massachusetts in three long, black cars. The Reverend performed the service. It was brief, and allowed time for patients and friends to stand up and say their piece or give a blessing. The youngest speaker was nine. Dr. Walker had cared for him when he had appendicitis, and the speaker, who had been bought his first suit for the occasion, wanted to say that he had decided to become a doctor because of Dr. Walker.

Mr. Walker was old by then, and he had lost his only son. His wife had been gone for some time. Even though he was rich and had a new wife, even though Haylin had spent a lifetime quarreling with him, Mr. Walker was bereft. Franny made sure Haylin’s father sat next to her, with Jet on his other side.

“It was always you,” he said to Franny. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen very often. It was never going to be Emily Flood. Even I knew that.”

Love of my life, Franny thought.

The day Haylin was buried was beautiful and clear. The crow was in the tree, old Lewis, who was going blind, his eyes filmy and white. Seeing him broke Franny’s heart. The bird cried, even though crows are said not to have tear ducts. Afterward Franny called Lewis to her and she carried him home, where she wrapped him in a blanket, for he coughed and fretted. He died the following day and one of the Merrill boys buried him behind the shed. He had never belonged to Franny, and had always preferred Haylin, and she’d never once blamed him for that.

Franny stayed out on the porch for seven nights. The vines began to grow over the bench where Haylin liked to sit. They grew and grew until passersby could no longer see Franny Owens in mourning. The bin where Dr. Walker had offered lettuce to passersby was empty. Children asked for him when the new doctor in town made a house call. They wanted the story about the rabbit and the kind, tall man who had lollipops in his pockets.

People in town pitied Frances Owens her grief, and many felt bereaved themselves by the loss of such a good man. They brought casseroles and salads, pies and cakes, all of which Jet accepted gratefully. But Franny did not try a bite and she left it to her sister to send thank-you cards. People in town had lost a doctor and a friend, she had lost her life. She looked at the trees and they grew taller, and the vines covered the fence and the gate, and people stayed away, the way they used to, before Haylin Walker came to town.

For seven days Franny Owens did not brush her hair or wash her face or have a meal. The birds in the thickets came to nest in the vines, but she couldn’t even hear them sing and they wouldn’t come to her when she held out her hands. She had lost some of who she was when she lost her beloved. Though Jet had draped sheets over the furniture and drawn all of the curtains, Franny couldn’t bear to go inside and leave the place where she had last been with her husband. The man Haylin had been lingered in the dark. All she wanted was to hold his hand. To see the way he smiled at her. She saw bits and pieces of him out of the corner of her eye, or maybe it was the fireflies. He was a man of integrity, a man of honor, the boy who had chained himself up in the school cafeteria for the rights of others, the doctor who kept lollipops and bars of soap in his pockets, who had helped five hundred men learn how to walk, who had known how to make her shiver with a kiss when she was a seventeen-year-old girl. She had loved one person in her lifetime, and for that she would always be grateful.

On the eighth night she came inside and got into bed beside Jet. She was shivering and still wearing her coat. Haylin was gone and there was nothing she could do about it.

“How will I ever love anyone again?” she said to her sister.

That was when the telephone rang.

PART SIX

Remedy

Thirty years after Vincent’s disappearance, his granddaughters, aged three and four, lived with their mother and father in a house in California, in a town called Forestville, where the trees were so old and tall it was impossible to see the sky. Regina Owens had grown up to be a beautiful woman with long, black hair and gray eyes the color of mist. She had a lovely singing voice and was so graceful the birds came to watch when she hung the laundry on the line. She knew how to have fun. She didn’t believe in drudgery or boredom and had a trick so that the broom swept all by itself when she cleaned the house. Her daughters, Sally and Gillian, were thirteen months apart, as different as chalk from cheese, but best friends all the same, a good thing, for there were no other children for miles.

Their world was mossy and green with rain that splattered down for days on end. The girls’ father, Daniel, was a fisherman and a guide on the Russian River; their mother was a painter whose subject matter was trees, not surprising given their location. The girls liked to climb the trees surrounding their house, and often had tea parties with their stuffed animals aloft, using the branches as the table and chairs. When they concentrated they could make the wind come out of nowhere and shake the branches and then they would laugh and hold on for dear life. Sally would open her hands and birds would come to her as if they’d been called and Gillian could dangle on the farthest branch and let the wind blow right through her and not be scared at all.

The girls’ grandmother April, who had been their favorite person in all the world, had recently and unexpectedly died of a lethal bite from a brown wandering spider that had been hiding in a bunch of bananas brought from a market. They had not eaten fruit since. They had not laughed or climbed trees. They had been in mourning, and their mother especially had been so sad she took to her bed. It was not at all like Regina to be mournful, but sometimes she could be heard crying while she hung the laundry on the line, and now the birds scattered. She spent her birthday under the covers, even though the box from Ladurée Royale that always came to her from Paris on that day had arrived and the girls knew there would be delicious macarons inside, a treat to be savored. First a pale orange cookie that was apricot, then a green pistachio, then chocolate, of course, then the best of all, pink ones that tasted like roses. Regina brightened up then, as she did when anything came from Paris. Sometimes there was a postcard with a single heart as the message. Once there was a beautiful box of pastels.

They had the macarons and a fragrant tea that always made them feel especially brave. “Always choose courage,” Regina told her girls. She wasn’t worried about Gillian, who loved to walk on a tightrope set up between the trees, but cautious Sally was another story. “Don’t live a little,” Regina would whisper to her older daughter when she tucked her in at night. “Live a lot.”

Regina had fallen in love with the girls’ father when they were students at Berkeley. They’d dropped out to live on the land and for the first year they’d lived in a shack, sleeping together in one sleeping bag, mad for each other. They were still so in love they hadn’t spent a night apart. Sorrow was not in either of their natures. At last their father told their mother that it was high time they had a little vacation. He surprised her with plans for a second honeymoon.

Regina my beautiful queen, he said, let’s celebrate our lives.

He kissed her on the mouth and made her laugh and after that she seemed more like her old self, the one who knew how to have fun and who always took her daughters outside to dance in the rain. They packed their suitcases, promising to bring home presents and chocolate bars. The girls stood at the window waving, and they watched their parents dance on the lawn before they waved back and headed off for their trip.

But something had gone wrong. That much was evident. The girls were woken in the middle of the night by their babysitter, a teenager who had become so hysterical the sisters couldn’t make out a word she said. They clutched each other and tried to make sense of the babysitter’s ramblings. She mentioned a phone call from the sheriff, and then she talked about fire and water, which they knew never mixed. She called them poor pathetic creatures and wondered what would happen to them now. As the babysitter considered their future, her despair set her into fits of uncontrollable weeping.

It was pouring, buckets of cold, stinging rain. No one could dance in this sort of weather. The trees were shuddering without the sisters willing them to do so. Leaves fell like a black blanket. Birds that always gathered at Sally’s window disappeared. The girls waited for their babysitter to catch her breath and stop crying. They had never been up in the middle of the night and they knew bad luck when it came to them. It tapped on the door, quietly at first, then it pounded, insisting on being let in.