Page 73 of The Book of Magic

Rafael sat heavily on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. He didn’t hear Franny enter the room or know she was there until the bed sank down as she sat beside him.

“Let me apologize,” Rafael began, but Franny pushed a cup of steaming hot tea into his hands. She had sneaked downstairs to make a cup for herself, but clearly the strong brew was even more necessary for this man.

“You need this,” she insisted.

Rafael took a sip and recognized it immediately. Courage. Jet always gave him a box of this mixture on the first day of the year.

“The damn curse,” he said.

“Didn’t seem to have stopped you,” Franny responded.

Rafael laughed at her matter-of-fact tone. Jet had told him Franny could stand up to anyone and anything, including the curse. He didn’t realize he was still crying until Franny handed him a handkerchief. One of Jet’s.

“You seem to have done just fine.” Franny patted his shoulder with awkward compassion. “You knew how to love her.”

“And this dog,” Rafael declared, eyeing Daisy. The pup gazed back at him and for some reason he felt like weeping all over again. How could it be that this mutt understood him? How could she know his pain? “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“I suspect Jet left it for you so you wouldn’t be alone. Now you’re stuck with it.” Franny stared at the dog. “But what of me?”

Rafael patted Franny’s hand. She nodded her thanks for his attempt to comfort her, then lifted her hand away. They sat there for a while in a haze of grief until they heard a ruckus downstairs.

“Shall we?” Franny said.

“Of course.”

Rafael knew he would never be in Jet’s room again. He would never meet her at the Plaza Hotel or walk through the park with her on a November night or slip into bed beside her. He handed the handkerchief to Franny, who shook her head, insisting he keep it, and so he did, tucking it into the pocket of his suit jacket. There was a rush of noise from downstairs, and some stray gasps. Franny was already on her way downstairs; she was spry for someone her age, despite her bad knee, and when Rafael reached the first floor he saw what the fuss was about. There was a sparrow in the dining room, flitting from one corner to the other, settling on the iron rod that held up the damask curtains.

“But it’s not Midsummer’s Eve,” Rafael heard a tall young woman say. It was Kylie, who on this day realized there was a good deal she didn’t know about her own family. She had taken many of their traditions for granted, not asking for explanations. Husbands and wives often didn’t live together, mirrors were covered with white cloths, and a sparrow came through the window every Midsummer’s Eve and had to be chased out with a broom or bad luck would follow them. Now it was here, out of time and season, an unexpected guest peering down at them all with its bright eye. “I don’t understand,” Kylie said to her sister. “Why is it here today?”

But Rafael understood and so did Franny, who reached out her hand so that the sparrow might come to perch. She’d always had a way with birds; the natural world had beckoned to her even when she was growing up on Eighty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, when the only nature nearby was Central Park, a preplanned swath of countryside on the other side of the wall running along Fifth Avenue. It was said that the Owens girls could levitate, and that Franny in particular had the talent for rising, and often had to check herself so that she would not do so in public.

“Dear girl,” Franny said to the sparrow. She could hear its heart beating and she felt quite dazed with emotion. Franny knew that heartbeat; she’d heard it all her life and had never paid much attention. It’s only when you’re old that you truly appreciate those you have lost.

Franny went to the window and nodded to Rafael, who came to open it. The rain had stopped, and the air was fresh; as it turned out this day in March was the most beautiful day of the year. It would be like Jet to choose such a day to be interred, so that her family would be reminded of how glorious the world was. Franny breathed in the soft air. She wanted this moment to last. She was aware that spirits could return in the form of birds to let those they’d left behind know they have not been forgotten, and also to remind those who loved them that they must let go. Franny would be so alone, but what choice did she have? The sparrow flew through the open window to perch in one of the old magnolias, and then, before anyone could blink, it was gone, as was Rafael.

He walked the long way back to his parked car, left outside the cemetery gates. The dog was trailing him, and he understood that Jet had meant for this to happen. She hadn’t wanted him to be alone, so he whistled, and Daisy walked beside him so he could take her home to Queens.

“How do I do this?” Rafael said aloud.

The dog looked up at him, but they kept walking, for that seemed to be the only answer. Rafael counted twenty-five magnolias as they went along, all abloom, each one planted in the name of love, a long time ago, when there was a man who refused to believe in curses and a woman who wished she had known love when she first saw it.

III.

For many years, Vincent Owens had lived on the Île de Ré, across the bridge from La Rochelle on the west coast of France, the scene of a bloody battle between Huguenot Protestants and Catholics, an island that in the past had belonged to England and then to France. Vincent had wanted to get as far away from his old life as possible and he had succeeded. Sometimes, when he woke, he had no idea where he was, not until he looked out at the flat blue sea. His residence was on the far side of the salt marshes, past the village of La Flotte, in an old stucco house where the ivy grew wild in the garden and every room was laden with sunlight. No one knew who he was. They had no idea that he’d been broken many times, and that love had saved him.

By now he was old, but he still had the charm he’d been born with when a nurse at the hospital had been so enchanted by him she’d tried to steal him from the nursery. Vincent’s thick black hair was now white, but he still wore it long, and his handsome features were the same, even though he often had a dark expression. He was tall, and his form seemed that of a younger man, for his mother had drilled all of her children on the need for good posture. A half smile crossed Vincent’s face when he thought of his mother; Susannah Owens had run away from love while he had run toward it. Vincent was the sort of man who loved completely. That was what he’d had with William, and it had been worth giving up his country and his family for that sort of love. It had been worth everything.

William’s heart had stopped, suddenly, in his sleep, and when it did, it was the end of a life that had been bound with Vincent’s, for they were made for each other, and had made one another’s lives whole. Now that his life with William was over, Vincent’s existence seemed pointless. His loneliness could not be soothed by words of comfort, there were no incantations to ease his pain, nowhere to take refuge. The family curse had ruled his fate and forced him to surrender one life and begin another in which he could be safe and anonymous, but the curse meant nothing now that he had been left with only his grief to sustain him. Nights and days alike were dark, and they had been ever since the instant he lost the only man he had ever loved.

Since that time, the doors and windows had been kept shut. For months Vincent had lived in gloom and he had wanted it that way. The house echoed his distress, and should anyone happen to pass, Vincent was pleased that his home was so shrouded in ivy it appeared forbidding; no one would think to stop by. This past winter, the ivy froze, then broke into cold green shards so that the garden seemed littered with glass. The sunflowers that had always been kept in jars to dry fell to pieces, with petals falling onto tabletops and dusting the corners of every room. Vincent often didn’t rise from bed until the dark was settling. He lost weight. He drank. He sat in a metal chair on the stone patio at odd hours and smoked cigarettes, which he never would have done if William had been there. William, who had loved him completely, would have taken the cigarette from his hand and scolded him. How lucky they had been; how ruined he’d become.

They had deliberately kept to themselves, as people in love often do, but in the months since William’s death, the other inhabitants who had homes on the narrow, curving road at the edge of the village began to worry about their solitary neighbor. Vincent walked at night, along the cliffs, a haunted man. There was debris piling up outside his house and the mossy smell of rotting plants. The rambler roses had no buds and only black leaves, the lawn had gone to seed, the paper lanterns William strung along the deck, always so charming, had been shredded by the wind. An expat American down the lane was chosen to look in on Vincent, and was startled by the ghost of a man who faced him when he came calling. If the neighbor wasn’t mistaken, the handsome old man who peered out at him was someone who used to be famous.

“Do I know you?” the neighbor asked.

Vincent had disappeared from his music career, faking his death, in exchange for the freedom to love someone. He had been in hiding from the curse for so long, he’d never expected anyone to notice him or remember that once, long ago, he’d written a song whose words nearly everyone knew. It occurred to him that he’d become a grumpy old Frenchman.

“You don’t know me,” he said with a scowl, and then, as soon as the door had slammed closed, he packed up the house. He took the train to Paris the following morning, wearing his black coat and cap, a single suitcase in hand, going directly to his old friend Agnes Durant’s elegant house on Boulevard de la Madeleine. His song, “I Walk at Night,” recorded years ago, happened to be playing on the radio when he climbed into a taxi and Vincent was stunned by how moved he was by the sound of his own youth and innocence and by the depth of the love he had to give. His one regret in life was that he had not seen his family for all these years, his daughter Regina, now gone in a tragic accident, his granddaughters Sally and Gillian, and most especially his dear sisters, of whom he often dreamed. The time he and Franny and Jet had spent at 44 Greenwich Avenue in Manhattan was the landscape he walked through during his restless nights of tossing and turning in bed, and he remembered every street, Barrow and Bedford and Jones and Christopher. He remembered the first night he had spent with William, and how Franny was there for him when he was beaten in the street on the night of the Stonewall Uprising, ready to wrap her arms around him, and how Jet had stood in the garden beneath a lilac tree on the day that the boy she’d loved had died so young.