Page 60 of The Book of Magic

Sally did as he said and swam to the shallows. But by the time she was out of the water, she realized why he’d demanded that she go back to the inn. He didn’t wish for her to catch sight of Franny as she now was, but Sally turned to see him carry the body to the shore, limp and heavy with water. There was no need for an ambulance. Sally stayed where she was on the shore. Franny was an old woman, but she looked so young, little more than a girl, her red hair wringing wet, leaving scarlet drops of madder root tint on the grass.

Ian delivered Franny to the bank of reeds. Sally knelt beside her, inconsolable, her face streaked with tears. She leaned down to place her ear to her aunt’s chest. No heartbeat. There was no sound at all. It was so quiet here, even the toads were silent, and the beetle had stopped its dreadful clatter. Sally’s weeping was the only sound. She had called Franny on the telephone when she was four years old, when tragedy struck and her parents died in a house fire, and she and Gillian were left alone. We’re coming to live with you, Sally had said, and they had, and everything their lives had become had been due to the loving care of their aunts. It was funny how you could come to love people who began as strangers, how they could change your fate, how surprised you could be by how grateful you were.

“I can’t give her up yet,” Sally told Ian and he understood and sat in silence while she sobbed in the grass. This is what love was, you stayed when you wanted to run away. You held on when you knew you had no choice but to let go.

Later, after the ambulance had come and the family had been asked to sit down in the parlor of the Three Hedges Inn to be told what had occurred, after Vincent had openly wept, and Kylie had been told none of this had been her fault, Ian finally went up to Sally’s room and stripped off his sopping wet clothes. He was still shaking from the cold when Sally followed with an armful of borrowed clothing the bartender kept in a bureau. Black trousers, a white shirt, a black tie. She clasped them to her chest, shy and reserved, but burning all the same. She wondered what it would feel like to be in love without holding anything back, to give everything you were to another person and expect everything in return. The story of Ian’s life was written all over him, but the one place he had never covered with ink was his heart. That was hers if she wanted it. She didn’t have to read his mind to know that, he told her out loud. He had dedicated himself to being alone, no matter how many women he was with, always concealing who he was. No one had ever read his story before. No one knew him. He was well aware that he talked too much, but he didn’t speak now. They wondered if they dared to do this, and then they stopped thinking. Thinking was good for some things, but not for others. They felt the sting of what was to be before it happened, a siren they would answer, gratefully and desperately. Ian went to Sally and unbuttoned her soaking-wet dress. She was slow to kiss him back, and then she wasn’t. His hands were hot even though the rest of him would be chilled for days to come. It was mortal love they had, but love all the same, deeper than the water beyond the fens, as deep as could be. This day had changed them. For this, and for a hundred other things, Sally would always be grateful to Franny, for on the day her aunt died, she was lucky enough to fall in love.

PART SIX The Book of Life

Franny’s funeral had been small, with only the immediate family gathered at the Owens cemetery, a woodsy plot of land surrounded by a black iron fence no one outside the family dared to cross. Two weeping willows grew in the center of the graveyard and yellow-green moss covered many of the old stones. There was a time when people in their family were banned from the town cemetery, and even though that time was over, this small burying ground was still preferable to most of the Owens relations. Franny’s husband had been buried here, and now she had come to be beside him. A hundred white candles had been lit to celebrate her life and the end of the curse. What begins can end. What is done can be undone. What is sent in the world comes back to you three times over. They all wore white, a tradition among the family. White for funerals, black for every other day.

Vincent had returned to the States for the first time since he was a young man, and oddly enough, Massachusetts looked as familiar as a recurring dream. The oak trees with their enormous star-shaped leaves, the huge drooping hemlocks and pines, the magnolias with their waxy black-green leaves. The pond in the center of town where the swans nested, the houses with their gables and wide front porches, the weeping beeches in the town cemetery, the landscape of Vincent’s past. He wished his sisters were with him as he made his way along the narrow roads, with Franny complaining about the damp weather, and Jet pointing out the fireflies in the trees. He regretted the many years they’d spent apart, and now, just when he’d found his way to Franny again, he’d lost her. From the time they were small, he could always hear Franny’s thoughts, and she his, and he knew she was not the ferocious individual she presented herself to be. They had called her the Maid of Thorns when she was young, for she hid her true emotions. Stone-heart, cold-heart, no-heart, biggest heart he had ever known. The red-haired girl who saved him time and time again, who knew him when no one else did. Her love was the fiercest part about her.

On the morning of Franny’s funeral, Antonia found Vincent in the second-floor bedroom he’d occupied when he’d first come to Magnolia Street, sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. She sat beside him and let him cry, black tears falling on the white quilt and the hand-knotted rug. Antonia’s bedside manner had improved after her visits with the Reverend. She patted Vincent’s hand and nearly wept herself, then she handed him a tissue from the bedside table and watched as he wiped his eyes. “All better,” Antonia said calmly. It was a statement not a question, reminding Vincent of his beloved no-nonsense sister. “All you have to do is get through today.”

Now, a year had passed since that day, and the world had changed. The dark spring had taken its toll, but this season the lilacs had surged with masses of blooms. Sally’s wedding took place on the first of June, the ceremony held beneath the tree that had been brought to town three hundred years earlier by a man who believed in love. Women still whispered his name, as if the words Samuel Dias were a prayer that could bring them the sort of love Maria Owens had found with him. They were buried together in the Owens family cemetery, sharing a single headstone decorated with an etching of a magnolia tree, the oldest tree on earth, here long before men and women lived and died, before there were bees. Men still got down on one knee and declared their love beneath the magnolia’s branches; women said their vows here and meant every word.

Reverend Willard, now the oldest man in the county, officiated at the wedding and was proud to do so. He was carried across the lawn in his hospital bed by the Merrill brothers, George and Billy, now close to seventy themselves, and he was clearly overjoyed to still be alive on this glorious day. The Reverend had agreed to perform the service if it took under five minutes and Chocolate Tipsy Cake was served afterward, a bargain that was quickly agreed to.

The cake for Sally’s wedding took three full days to bake and was the size needed to feed fifty people. It was the largest of its kind ever made, with so much rum involved that half the town was drunk merely because they breathed the air. Bees found their way into the kitchen, their wings dusted with powdered sugar, but they didn’t linger on the day of this joyous occasion, and strays were chased away with dish towels, for no one wished to be stung on a day of celebration.

The sky was cloudless and blue and most people believed that the Owens sisters ensured it would be so. Rain on a wedding day is said to be good luck, but it’s also quite messy when the festivities are to be held outside; no one wanted that gorgeous Tipsy Cake to dissolve into a pool of melting chocolate. Blue ribbons were laced through the tablecloths, and everyone in the wedding party had their jacket or dress hemmed with blue thread. The Owens family from Maine was there, told in no uncertain terms to keep family secrets to themselves, and the New York Owenses were all staying at the Black Rabbit Inn, while the members of the Dias-Owens contingent from California had arrived, speaking Portuguese among one another, all of them dark and good-looking.

The weeklong celebration began with a pre-wedding lunch in a nearby field, where the bride and groom-to-be were toasted. Long wooden tables were propped up in the grass. Ice-cold beer and rosé wine were served at lunch, along with oysters that out-of-towners wolfed down, and then, for anyone who still had room, rich slices of Honesty Cake, which made for several interesting speeches in which declarations of love and buried desires were blurted out and later retracted. An older gentleman had arrived from France, very elegant, wearing a black linen suit, and speaking French whenever he wanted to avoid a question. It was said he was Franny and Jet’s baby brother, Vincent, beloved and missed for many years. He liked to walk through town at night and the neighborhood dogs took to following him on his route. Everyone in town fell in love with him and people came outside to wave when he passed by. After the first two days of his visit, they all knew his name, and many local people decided to sign up for the conversational French course at the library on Monday evenings.

On the third day of his visit, Vincent was no longer alone. An English gentleman had joined him, arriving in time for the weekend, and he and Vincent were soon ensconced in the bridal suite at the Black Rabbit Inn. A year earlier, before leaving England for Franny’s funeral, Vincent had phoned David Ward, asking him if they might meet on his way to the airport. Vincent remembered what William had told him on the last day of his life. Be in love. It won’t take anything away from us. And it hadn’t. Vincent and David now lived together in the village of La Flotte, and had brought Dodger with them to run along the beach and take up space in their bed. It had all happened because Vincent had known it was what William would have wanted for him.

When he’d gone to meet David in London, Vincent had waited on the bench in Hyde Park, surprised by how nervous he was.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” David told him when he arrived.

Vincent laughed. “I think you knew.”

“Hoping isn’t knowing.”

“Isn’t it?” Vincent had said.

There was a great deal of excitement now that Sally Owens had arrived back home after a year away, bringing an Englishman of her own with her. Ian Wright was carefully observed by one and all, and had been asked several times if he had known any of the Beatles. Indeed, he had not, he was sorry to say, which was a disappointment. People exchanged glances when they noticed he was covered with tattoos; they had assumed so much ink meant he had ties to the music business, but obviously that was a wrong guess. Several of the Maine cousins began to wonder if perhaps this fellow of Sally’s was a criminal, but it was soon discovered that he was a professor and a writer, which would explain why he sat at home at his desk all day and had never met any of the Beatles. But Sally would be returning to England after the wedding, and you never knew who she might meet.

It was a surprise that Sally had left town, but it was impossible to know where fate would lead you, and it seemed she had made the best of it. The fiancé she’d brought home was exceptionally friendly, chatting with everyone, even the cousins from Maine; he could hold his drink extremely well and he seemed bemused by the family. Maybe this was why Sally seemed changed, and many people vowed that her silver-gray eyes had turned a pale blue. She had always been so reserved, ice-cold some might say, but now that she’d returned after a year away she actually remembered local people’s names, something that had never occurred when she’d worked at the library. Back then she would stare at you, point a finger at the middle of your chest, and announce the last book you’d withdrawn. You were forever known to her as Fahrenheit 451 or Olive Kittredge or Beloved.

The taproom at the inn had been rented out for Friday night, and Sally’s daughters had decorated with black crepe paper and black balloons. Vincent’s guest, David Ward, had taught the bartender how to make a really good martini, and although they were invited to attend, the two decided they would take the opportunity to make a quick trip to Manhattan so that Vincent could show David the house at 44 Greenwich Avenue where he’d lived when he was young, when the world began to open up to him, when he fell in love for the first time, but, as it turned out, not the last.

Kylie and Antonia had planned the bachelorette party for over a month, with Sally putting in her two cents via telephone. No macaroni and cheese! No embarrassing speeches! They bickered over the menu and the guest list, but all agreed on one thing. Now that the curse was gone, they could all love someone without fear of reprisal.

Since her return from England, Kylie’s hair had remained densely black, worn in a waist-length braid. She left it that way to remind herself of the first Essex County, where enchantments occurred and people went missing. It happened all the time. A woman would be found wandering in a desperate search for her beloved, a man would drink himself to death beneath a holly tree, a girl defied her parents and set off to have an adventure never to be heard from again, all were said to have been toad, placed under a spell. Kylie had been toad. She had overheard Margaret Wright assure her worried, bleary-eyed family that she would recover. She’d been on the wrong path, but had returned to them, damaged, it was true, but returned all the same. Still, they must remember that those who had been toad were altered in some deep way that was irreversible, and their futures could be precarious if those around them weren’t vigilant. No snakes, no stones, no nights spent alone for a good long while, no narcotics, no needles, no knives, no razors, no mirrors. Such individuals must be treated with kindness even when they sulked and looked at the world with dread through unenchanted eyes. It was best not to mention the changes that might have occurred, the black hair, for instance, the vacant stares. Best to wrap your arms around the person who’d been missing, for an enchantment is a step out of ordinary life, and when that person returns nothing is the same, not her image in the mirror, not the lines across her palm.

Kylie had, indeed, been changed, but the one constant was her love for Gideon. She and Gideon had moved into the house on Magnolia Street as soon as his physical therapy ended. Gideon didn’t often speak about the time when he was between worlds.

“I am so sorry,” Kylie said when she first got to the hospital to see him.

“I’m sorry,” Gideon said. “I was the idiot who stepped in front of a car.”

He had changed as well and was a much more serious person now, planning on applying to medical school. He drove down to Cambridge every Tuesday and Thursday to attend classes, dropping Kylie on the other side of the Charles River. She had left Harvard and now attended Simmons University, where she was studying library science. As it turned out, she had a passion for books. On weekends, Kylie worked with Miss Hardwick at the Owens Library, and the after-school story hour she led was beloved by mothers and children alike. Currently, she was reading Half Magic, in which only half of wishes that were made came true, prompting all sorts of unexpected adventures. Many of the children who came on Tuesday afternoons arrived half an hour early, desperate to hear what happened next to Jane and Katharine and Mark and Martha, who was very, very difficult indeed. It seemed that half magic was often quite enough.

Whenever she walked home from the library and turned onto Magnolia Street, Kylie had no desire to be anywhere else. In every generation there was someone who stayed, who planted the garden early in the spring, and kept the bees, and switched on the porch light at twilight so the neighbors knew they were welcome to come for cures and elixirs. As it turned out, Kylie was quite good at magic. She took good care of the red Grimoire Franny had left for them, kept under lock and key in the greenhouse. All they had ever known and all they would need to know had been written down in it, and not a single line had been lost. Kylie was in residence on Magnolia Street, and by rights the book belonged to her now.

There was rarely a night when neighbors didn’t come to the door for help, which was always given freely, although often there would be payment left on the porch, a hand-knitted sweater, a pot of chrysanthemums, a silver serving spoon, an envelope of cash, and once, quite recently, a black kitten Kylie had named Raven, a great mouser who stretched out on the porch on warm days as if he owned the place.