13
Hah! I sit up, startled out of a sleep riddled with nightmares. Where am I? The place is so dark and silent—other than the distant trilling of the phone—I wonder whether I’m dead like too many in the World of Magic seem to believe. I wonder whether I really am the Abby Teller, a child who died by her father’s side and my life I’ve known has been one big monstrous illusion on a mindless reality show in an alternate universe.
The aches and pains cramping every muscle and punishing every joint rudely inform me I’m not dead. That’s the good news.
I unzip my sleeping bag, roll off the mattress, and step into the flip-flops I set next to the bed, unwilling to pad barefoot on Stanley’s filthy floor. In my sleep T and boxer shorts, I grope through the bedroom’s darkness to the only slightly less dark living room, to my new home office.
Where my cell, lying on the desk, keeps trilling, each trill more irritating than the last. Should I let my answering service pick up? I don’t need the complications of a sorcerer like Brand or the hassles of a psychopath like Barb. But could it really be Carla this time with news that the house sold?
I slide in the craftsman chair and eye the phone. What time is it, anyway? The clock on the answering machine displays 4:44 in the A.M. Oh, joy. Four whole hours of sleep.
Does a tenant have an emergency? But, wait. How could a tenant have my cell number so soon? I’ve held the job since seven-thirty yesterday evening. Well, why not? All things seem possible at the Garden of Abracadabra. This is a job with flexible hours, Stanley told me. Expect tenants pestering you any time of the day or night, including 4:44 in the A.M.
I clap the phone to my ear. “Good morning! This is the Garden of Abracadabra. How may I help you today?”
“Jesus, Abby, is that you?” drawls a male voice I know only too well. “You’ve got to be on a cell. Your reception sucks.”
Daniel. My Daniel. The Daniel Stern, heir to the Stern Sausages and Meat Products Company of Buckeye Heights, a successful corporation closely held by the Stern family over four generations. Not so successful these days because health buffs like me spurn processed meat products loaded with poisonous preservatives.
Daniel, Daniel. How I remember the night we met at a holiday gala benefiting the Buckeye Heights Animal Shelter. I remember our first dance like it was yesterday, him so gallant in his tuxedo. I fell in love the way only love at first sight can–madly, heedlessly. Without a thought about tomorrow.
Without a thought about who he was, really.
He possessed no power, I realized that from the start, but I hadn’t expected such a communion with any man. My own power was a shameful secret. Something I suppressed in deference to my mother’s wishes. Something I told no one about.
From the start he dangled the carrots–one carat, fourteen karats. But after three years, a marriage ring with a one-carat diamond set in fourteen-karat gold and keeping house together and making babies hadn’t happened for me and my Daniel.
He’s not my Daniel anymore.
Amazingly, I feel fine about that. Or fine enough.
“Abby, are you there?”
“Daniel, do you have any idea what time it is?”
A pause while he pushes up the cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt and checks the gold hulk of his Rolex. “It’s a quarter to eight. What’s the problem? You’re like me, up and running early. I figured it would be all right.”
He would figure that. He would figure that whatever is all right with him is all right with me.
I can just see him, his navy-blue necktie snug around his pinstriped collar. He’s thickened around the middle since we got engaged but–I have to admit–he’s still a blue-chip hottie. I’ve always admired his Brooks Brothers style, how he fields a softball in a T and jeans, the way he poises over me in bed in nothing at all.
I mean, poised. Past tense.
Daniel will make an excellent match for some woman with her eyes on the prize.
But not for me.
Daniel will be frowning now, on the other end of the connection. He’ll be creasing his patrician brow the way he does when he’s annoyed, running his fingers through his thinning brown hair. His face determined, his gray eyes calculating. Calculating how he’s going to get his way. The way he always gets.
“It’s not all right,” I say. “It’s not even dawn here and I only got to sleep a few hours ago.”
“Not even dawn?” Another pause while the wheels spin in his beady brain. “You’re on the west coast? California?”
“I’m in Timbuktu.”
“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “So enough of this, already. When are you coming home?”
“I’m not. This is my home. I got a new job and a new apartment and I’m starting school this afternoon.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, not listening as usual. “I said I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
“Forgive you. Bye, bye, got to go.”
He doesn’t hang up and, for some inexplicable reason, neither do I. It’s like my normal, quotidian Buckeye Heights past is reaching out with grasping fingers and yanking me back.
“Abby, you’re something special. I feel so different when I’m with you. I’ve never known any other woman like you. There’s never been anyone else but you.”
I have to sigh. How can I tell him it’s my magic he’s feeling? That hidden power of mine we can’t really share but he senses? “No one else but Stern Sausages and Meat Products.”
“I’m involved with the business, I admit that. But I’m saying let’s do it. Let’s really do it. I’ve talked things over with Mother and Father, and we’ve all agreed. I’ve booked a fitting with my tailor. We want a big church wedding, three hundred guests, and–”
“Daniel, how did you get this number?”
“Piece of cake. I drove by your mother’s house. Your realtor posted a ‘For Sale’ sign with her phone number. I gave her a jingle and made an offer, knocking fifty thou off your asking price. She told me to go to hell. I told her maybe you wanted a quick sale and we should talk, you and me.”
“You tricked my realtor into giving you my number?”
“Well, yeah,” he says in that drawling, privileged tone I once was so impressed by and now distinctly dislike. “I said I had cash. The poor woman practically jumped through the phone.”
I told Carla no such thing. I’m willing to ride out the housing meltdown in Buckeye Heights. Ours is an established neighborhood of Tudors, midcentury moderns, and one actual castle. Of broad lawns and an old-growth woods, the real deal, bordering our backyards.
The tide will turn as tides always do.
“I think Carla wants her commission,” he says.
“Carla and I are both willing to wait.”
“Like you’ve been willing to wait for me?”
“Not anymore. Now I’ve really got to go.”
“Wait, wait.” He sighs melodramatically and I brace myself. “Abby. You know I’m sorry about your mother. I always liked Alice.”
“I know.”
“But this mother’s death thing, it’s thrown you off your game. You’re all confused.”
“This mother’s death thing has opened my eyes.”
“Really? Then why are you telling me we’re through now that you’re finally free? Marrying me is everything your mother wanted for you.”
“Actually, she told me on her deathbed to leave you.”
That stops him cold. “That’s ridiculous. Your mother adored me.”
“She thought you were more in love with yourself than with me.”
“Oh, I see. You always think what your mother tells you to think? Do what she tells you to do? Like taking care of her for all those years?”
In an earlier day, that would have kicked the wind right out of my chest. Today, it doesn’t matter. Today, it only tells me how right my mother was.
“She was sick, I ran the household. It was the right thing to do. And what I wanted to do. And no, I’m not leaving you because she said so. I’m leaving you because I say so.”
When he sees he can’t hurt me with such a cheap shot, he tries another tack.
“Abby, Abby. That was way out of line. It’s just, you’re making me crazy. You know I want you by my side. With me, you’ll always be comfortable. Always secure. You’ll never have to work again or want for anything.”
“I’d have trouble knowing I owed my comfort and security to butchered pigs, red dye 40, and sodium nitrate.”
Is that a lame excuse, petty and untrue? No, it’s true enough. And will have to do. How can I tell Daniel I’ve got power and he doesn’t? How can I tell him I’m setting out to study Real Magic, to dedicate my life to Real Magic, and he can’t follow? Let alone tell him the Horde is going to come hunting me one day, and I’ll need to protect myself with magic?
He inhales sharply. “Don’t let’s start that ridiculous nonsense again.”
“If it makes you feel any better, blame our breakup on that ridiculous nonsense. Good-bye, Daniel. And I mean it.”
I close the phone before he can call me an ungrateful bitch.
********
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