Practical Magic

She's in the middle about everything. She misses Gideon; she goes to the basement and takes out her chessboard, which always reminds her of him, but she can't bring herself to call him. When she runs into any of the girls she goes to school with and they invite her to go swimming or to the mall, Kylie isn't interested. It's not that she dislikes them; it's just that she doesn't want them to see who she really is, when she herself doesn't know.

What she does know is that awful things can happen if you don't watch out. The man in the garden has taught her this, and it's a lesson she won't soon forget. Grief is all around; it's just invisible to most people. Most people will figure out a way to stop themselves from being aware of agony—they'll have a good stiff drink, or swim a hundred laps, or not eat anything all day, except for a small polished apple and a head of lettuce—but Kylie isn't like that. She's too sensitive, and her ability to feel others' pain is getting stronger. If she passes a baby in his stroller, and he's wailing until he's bright red with frustration and neglect, Kylie herself is grumpy for the rest of the day. If a dog limps by with a stone embedded in its paw, or a woman buying fruit in the supermarket closes her eyes and stops to recall a boy who drowned fifteen years ago, the one she loved so much, Kylie starts to feel as if she's going to pass out.

Sally watches her daughter and worries. She knows what happens when you bottle up your sorrow, she knows what she's done to herself, the walls she's built, the tower she's made, stone by stone. But they're walls of grief, and the tower is drenched in a thousand tears, and that's no protection; it will all fall to the ground with one touch. When she sees Kylie climb the stairs to her bedroom Sally senses another tower being built, a single stone perhaps, yet it's enough to chill her. She tries to talk to Kylie, but each time she approaches her, Kylie runs from the room, slamming the door behind her.

"Can't I have any privacy?" is what Kylie answers to almost any question Sally asks. "Can't you just leave me alone?"

The mothers of other thirteen-year-old girls assure Sally such behavior is normal. Linda Bennett, next door, insists this adolescent gloom is temporary, even though her daughter, Jessie—whom Kylie has always avoided, describing her as a loser and a nerd—recently changed her name to Isabella and has pierced her navel and her nose. But Sally hasn't expected to go through this with Kylie, who's always been so open and good-natured. Thirteen with Antonia was no great shock, since she'd always been selfish and rude. Even Gillian didn't go wild until high school, when the boys realized how beautiful she was, and Sally never gave herself permission to be moody and disrespectful. She didn't think she had the luxury to talk back; as far as she knew, nothing was legal. The aunts didn't have to keep her. They had every right to cast her out, and she wasn't about to give them a reason to do so. At thirteen, Sally cooked dinner and washed the clothes and went to bed on time. She never thought about whether or not she had privacy or happiness or anything else. She never dared to.

Now, with Kylie, Sally holds herself back, but it isn't easy to do. She keeps her mouth closed, and all her opinions and good advice to herself. She flinches when Kylie slams doors; she weeps to see her pain. Sometimes Sally listens outside her daughter's bedroom, but Kylie no longer bothers to confide in Gillian. Even that would be a relief, but Kylie has pulled away from everyone. The most Sally can do is watch as Kylie's isolation becomes a circle: the lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. This Sally knows better than most. She knows it late at night, when Gillian is at Ben Frye's, and the moths tap against the window screens, and she feels so separated from the summer night that those screens might as well be stones.

It appears that Kylie will spend her whole summer alone in her room, serving time just as certainly as if she were in prison. July is ending with temperatures in the nineties, day in and day out. The heat has caused white spots to appear behind Kylie's eyelids whenever she blinks. The spots become clouds, and the clouds rise high, and the only way to get rid of them is to do something. Quite suddenly she knows this. If she doesn't do something, she could get stuck here. Other girls will continue, they'll go on and have boyfriends and make mistakes, and she will be exactly the same, frozen. If she doesn't make a move soon, they're all going to pass her by and she'll still be a child, afraid to leave her room, afraid to grow up.

At the end of the week, when the heat and humidity make it impossible to close windows or doors, Kylie decides to bake a cake. It is a small concession, a tiny step back into the world. Kylie goes out to buy the ingredients, and when she gets home it's ninety-six in the shade, but that doesn't stop her. She's driven about this project of hers, almost as if she believes she'll be saved by this one cake. She turns the oven to four hundred degrees and gets to work, but it's not until the batter is ready and the pans are greased that she realizes she's about to bake Gideon's favorite cake.

All afternoon the cake sits on the kitchen counter, frosted and untouched, on a blue platter. When evening falls, Kylie still doesn't know what to do. Gillian is at Ben's, but no one answers the phone when Kylie calls to ask Gillian if she thinks it's foolish for her to go to Gideon's. Why does she even want to? What does she care? He was the one who was rude; shouldn't he be the one to make the first move? He should be bringing her the damn cake, as a matter of fact—a chocolate chip pound cake with maple frosting, or mocha if that's the best he can do.

Kylie goes to sit by her bedroom window in search of cool, fresh air, and instead discovers a toad sitting on the sill. A crab apple tree grows just outside her window, a wretched specimen that hardly ever flowers. The toad must have found its way along the trunk and the limbs, then leapt into her window. It's bigger than most of the toads you can find near the creek, and it's amazingly calm. It doesn't seem frightened, not even when Kylie lifts it and holds it in her hand. This toad reminds her of the ones she and Antonia used to find in the aunts', garden each summer. They loved cabbage and leaf lettuce and would hop after the girls, begging for treats. Sometimes Antonia and Kylie would take off running, just to see how fast the toads could go; they'd race until they collapsed with laughter, in the dust or between the rows of beans, but no matter how far they'd gone, when they turned around, the toads would be right on their heels, eyes unblinking and wide.

Kylie leaves the toad on her bed, then heads off to look for some lettuce. She feels guilty and foolish about having listened to Antonia all those times when they forced the toads to chase them. She's not that silly anymore; she's got more sense and a whole lot more compassion. Everyone is out and the house is more peaceful than usual. Sally is at a meeting Ed Borelli has called, to plan for the opening of school in September, a reality none of the office staff cares to recognize as inevitable. Antonia is at work, watching the clock and waiting for Scott Morrison to appear. Down in the kitchen, it's so quiet that the water from the dripping faucet echoes. Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure. As soon as you let go of it, pride shrinks to the size of a fly, but one that has no head, and no tail, and no wings with which to lift itself off the ground.

Standing there in the kitchen, Kylie can barely remember some of what mattered so much only a few hours ago. All she knows is that if she waits much longer, the cake will begin to go stale, or ants will get to it, or someone will wander in and cut a piece. She'll go to Gideon's right now, before she can change her mind.

There's no lettuce in the refrigerator, so Kylie takes the first interesting edible she spies—half of an uneaten Snickers that Gillian left to melt on the counter. Kylie's about to rush back upstairs, but when she turns she sees that the toad has followed her.

Too hungry to wait, Kylie guesses.

She takes the toad in her hand and breaks off a tiny sliver of the candy bar. But then the oddest thing happens: When she goes to feed the toad, it opens its mouth and spits out a ring.

"Gee." Kylie laughs. "Thanks."

The ring is heavy and cold when she holds it in her hand. The toad must have found it in the mud; damp earth is caked over the band so thickly it's impossible for Kylie to see this gift for what it really is. If she stopped to examine it, if she held it up to the light and took a good look, she'd discover that the silver has a strange purple tint. Drops of blood are hidden beneath the patina of dirt. If she hadn't been in such a hurry to get to Gideon's, if she realized what it was she had, she would have taken that ring out to the backyard and buried it, beneath the lilacs, where it belongs. Instead, Kylie goes ahead and tosses it into the little Fiestaware saucer on which her mother keeps a pathetic example of a cactus. She grabs the cake and pushes the screen door open with her hip, and as soon as she's outside she leans to place the toad in the grass.

"There you go," she tells it, but the toad is still there, motionless on the lawn, when Kylie has already turned the corner onto the next block.

Gideon lives on the other side of the Turnpike, in a development that pretends to be fancier than it is. The houses in his neighborhood have decks and finished basements and French doors leading to well-tended gardens. Usually it takes Kylie twelve minutes to get there from her house, but that's if she's running and not carrying a large chocolate cake. Tonight, she doesn't want to drop the cake, so her pace is measured as she walks past the gas station and the shopping center, where there are a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and a deli, side by side, as well as the ice cream parlor where Antonia works. Then she has a choice; she can walk past Bruno's, the tavern at the end of the shopping center, which has a pink neon sign and a nasty feel to it, or she can cross the Turnpike and take a shortcut across the overgrown field, where everyone says a health club will soon be built, complete with an Olympic-size pool.

Since there are two guys coming out of Bruno's, talking to each other in too-loud voices, Kylie opts for the field. She can cut through, and be two blocks away from Gideon's. The weeds are so high and scratchy that Kylie wishes that she were wearing jeans instead of shorts. Still, it's a pretty night, and the foul smell of the puddles at the far end of the field, where mosquitoes have been breeding all summer, is replaced by the scent of chocolate frosting from the cake Kylie's about to deliver. Kylie is wondering if it will be too late for her to stay and play a game of one-on-one—Gideon has a regulation basketball hoop set up in his driveway, a gift of guilt from his father, right after he divorced Gideon's mother—when she notices that the air around her is growing murky and cold. There's a black edge to this field. Something is wrong. Kylie starts to walk faster, and that's when it happens. That's when they call out for her to wait up.

She sees exactly who they are and what they want when she looks over her shoulder. The two men from the tavern have crossed the Turnpike and are following her; they're big and their shadows have a crimson cast and they're calling her Baby. They're saying, "Hey, don't you understand English? Wait up. Just wait."

Kylie can already feel her heart beating too hard, even before she starts to run. She knows what kind of men they are; they're like the one they had to get rid of out in the garden. They get mad the way he does, for no reason at all, except some pain deep inside that they're not even aware of anymore, and they want to hurt somebody. They want to do it right now. The cake hits against Kylie's chest; the weeds are thorny and scratch at her. The men let out a whoop when she starts to run, as if she's made it more fun to track her. If they're smashed, they won't bother to run after her, but they're not that drunk yet. Kylie throws the cake away, and it splatters when it hits the ground, where it will be food for the field mice and the ants. She can still smell the frosting, though; it's all over her hands. She will never again be able to eat chocolate. The scent of it will set her heart racing. The taste will turn her stomach.

They're following her, forcing her to run toward the darkest part of the field, where the puddles are, where no one from the Turnpike can see her. One of the men is fat, and he's fallen behind. He's cursing at her, but why should she listen? Her long legs are worth something to her now. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the lights of the shopping center, and she knows if she keeps on going in the direction she's headed now, the one who's still after her will get her. That's what he's been telling her, and when he gets her, he's going to fuck her brains out. He's going to make certain she never runs away from anyone again. He's going to take care of that little pussy of hers, and she won't ever forget it.

He's been calling out horrible things to her all along, but suddenly he stops talking, he's dead silent, and Kylie knows this is it. He's running really fast, she can feel him; he's going to get her now, or he's not going to get her at all. Kylie's breathing is shallow and panicky, but she takes a single deep breath, and then she turns. She turns quickly, she's almost running to him, and he sticks his arms out, to catch her, but she loops around, toward the Turnpike. Her legs are so long she could sidestep ponds and lakes. With one good leap she could be up there where there are stars, where it's cold and clear and constant, and things like this never, ever happen.

By the time he's close enough to reach out and grab her shirt, Kylie has made it to the Turnpike. A man walking his golden retriever is just down the street. At the corner, a gang of sixteen-year-old boys is heading home from the town pool after swim team practice. They would surely hear Kylie if she screamed, but she doesn't have to. The man who's been following her stays where he is, then retreats, back into the weeds. He'll never get her now, because Kylie is still running. She runs through the traffic, and along the opposite side of the street; she runs past the tavern and the supermarket. She doesn't feel she can stop, or even slow down, until she's inside the ice cream parlor and the bell over the door jingles to signify that the door has opened and is now closed tight behind her.

She has mud all over her legs, and her breathing is so shallow that each time she inhales she wheezes in some strangled way, like rabbits when they pick up the scent of a coyote or a dog. An elderly couple sharing a sundae look up and blink. The four divorced women at the table by the window appraise what a mess Kylie is, then think of the difficulties they've been having with their own children, and decide, all at once, that they'd better set out for home.

Antonia hasn't been paying much attention to the customers. She's smiling and leaning her elbows on the counter, the better to gaze into Scott Morrison's eyes as he explains the difference between nihilism and pessimism. He's here every night, eating rocky road ice cream and falling more deeply in love. They have spent hours making out in the front and back seats of Scott's mother's car, kissing until their lips are fevered and bruised, getting their hands into each other's pants, wanting each other so much that they're not thinking of anything else. In the past week, Scott and Antonia have both had incidents where they crossed the street without looking both ways and were frightened back to the sidewalk by a blaring horn. They're in their own world, a place so dreamy and complete they don't have to pay attention to traffic, or even to the fact that other human beings exist.

Tonight, it takes a while for Antonia to realize it's her sister standing there, dripping mud and weeds onto the linoleum floor that Antonia is responsible for keeping clean.

"Kylie?" she says, just to make certain.

Scott turns to look and then understands that the weird noise he's been hearing behind him, which he thought was the rattling air conditioner, is someone's ragged breathing. The scratches along Kylie's legs have begun to bleed. Chocolate frosting is smeared over her shirt and her hands.

"Jesus," Scott says. He's been thinking on and off about med school, but, when it comes right down to it, he doesn't like the surprises human beings can throw at you. Pure science is more his speed. It's a whole lot safer and more exact.

Antonia comes out from behind the counter. Kylie just stares at her, and in that instant, Antonia knows exactly what's happened.

"Come on." She grabs Kylie's hand and pulls her toward the back room, where the cans of syrup and the mops and brooms are kept. Scott is following.

"Maybe we'd better take her over to the emergency room," he says.

"Why don't you go behind the counter?" Antonia suggests. "Just in case there are any customers."

When Scott hesitates, Antonia has no doubt that he's fallen in love with her. Another boy would turn and run. He'd be grateful to be released from a scene like this.

"Are you sure?" Scott asks.

"Oh, yes." Antonia nods. "Very." She pulls Kylie into the storeroom. "Who was it?" she asks. "Did he hurt you?"

Kylie can smell chocolate, and it's making her so nauseated she can barely stand up straight. "I ran," she says. Her voice is funny. It sounds as if she were about eight years old.

"He didn't touch you?" Antonia's voice sounds funny, too.

Antonia hasn't turned on the light in the storeroom. Moonlight filters through the open window in waves, turning the girls as silver as fish.

Kylie looks at her sister and shakes her head no. Antonia considers the countless horrible things she's said and done, for reasons she herself doesn't understand, and her throat and face become scarlet with shame. She never even thought to be generous or kind. She would like to comfort her sister and give her a hug, but she doesn't. She's thinking, I'm sorry , but she can't say the words out loud. They stick in her throat because she should have said them years ago.

All the same, Kylie understands what her sister means, and that's the reason she can finally cry, which is what she's wanted to do since she first began running in the field. When she's done crying, Antonia closes up the shop. Scott gives them a ride home, through the dark, humid night. The toads have come out from the creek, and Scott has to swerve as he drives, and still he can't avoid hitting some of the creatures. Scott knows something major has happened, although he's not clear on what. He notices that Antonia has a band of freckles across her nose and cheeks. If he saw her every single day for the rest of his life, he would still be surprised and thrilled each time he looked at her. When they get to the house, Scott has the urge to get down on his knees and ask her to marry him, even though she has another year of high school to go. Antonia's not the girl he thought she was, a bratty, spoiled kid. Instead, she's somebody who can make his pulse go crazy simply by resting her hand on his leg.

"Turn your lights off," Antonia tells Scott as he pulls into the driveway. She and Kylie exchange a look. Their mother has come home and left the porch light on for them, and they have no way of knowing that she's gone off to bed exhausted. For all they know, she may be waiting up for them, and they don't want to face someone whose worry will outweigh their own fear. They don't want to have to explain. "We're avoiding dealing with our mom,'' Antonia tells Scott.

She kisses him quickly, then carefully opens the car door, so it won't creak as it usually does. There's a toad trapped beneath one of Scott's tires, and the air feels watery and green as the sisters run across the lawn, then sneak into the house. They find their way upstairs in the dark, then lock themselves in the bathroom, where Kylie can wash the mud and chocolate off her arms and face, and the blood off her legs. Her shirt is ruined, and Antonia hides it in the trash basket, beneath some tissues and an empty shampoo bottle. Kylie's breathing is still off; there's a ripple of panic when she inhales.

"Are you all right?" Antonia whispers.

"No," Kylie whispers back, and that makes them both laugh. The girls put their hands over their mouths to ensure that their voices won't reach their mother's bedroom; they wind up doubled over and out of breath, with tears in their eyes.

They may never talk about tonight, and yet, all the same, it will change everything. Years from now, they'll think of each other on dark nights; they'll telephone one another for no particular reason, and they won't want to hang up, even when there's nothing left to say. They're not the same people they were an hour ago, and they never will be. They know each other too well to turn back now. By the very next morning that edge of jealousy Antonia has been dragging around with her will be gone, leaving only the faintest green outline on her pillow, in the place where she rests her head.

In the days that follow, Kylie and Antonia laugh when they meet accidentally, in the hallway or in the kitchen. Neither hogs the bathroom or calls the other names. Every evening after supper, Kylie and Antonia clear the table and wash the dishes together, side by side, without even being asked. On nights when the girls are both at home, Sally can hear them talking to each other. Whenever they think someone might be listening, they stop speaking all at once, and yet it still seems as though they are communicating with each other. Late at night Sally could swear that they tap out secrets on their bedroom walls in Morse code.

"What do you think is going on?" Sally asks Gillian.

"Something weird," Gillian says.

Just that morning, Gillian noticed that Kylie was wearing one of Antonia's black T-shirts. "If she catches you wearing that, she'll tear it right off your back," Gillian informed Kylie.

"I don't think so." Kylie shrugged. "She's got too many black shirts. And anyway, she gave this one to me."

"What do you mean by weird?" Sally asks Gillian. She was up half the night making lists of what could be affecting the girls. Cults, sex, criminal activity, a pregnancy scare—she's been through every possibility in the past few hours.

"Maybe it's nothing," Gillian says, not wanting Sally to worry. "Maybe they're just growing up."

"What?" Sally says. Just the suggestion makes her feel skittish and upsets her in a way pregnancies and cults simply can't. This is the possibility she's avoided considering. She cannot believe Gillian's talent for always saying the exact wrong thing. "What the hell is that supposed to mean? They're kids."

"They've got to grow up, eventually," Gillian says, stumbling in deeper. "Before you know it, they'll be out of here."

"Well, thanks for your expert parenting advice."

Gillian doesn't catch the sarcasm; now that she's begun, she has another recommendation for her sister. "You need to stop focusing so much on being just a mom, before you shrivel into dust and we have to sweep you up with a broom. You should start to date. What's holding you back? Your kids are going out—why not you?"

"Any more words of wisdom?" Sally is such pure ice even Gillian can't fail to notice she's getting frozen out.

"Not one." Gillian backs off now. "Not a syllable."

Gillian has the urge for a cigarette, then realizes she hasn't had one in nearly two weeks. The funny thing is, she's stopped trying to quit. It's looking at all those illustrations of the human body. It's seeing those drawings of lungs.

"My girls are babies," Sally says. "For your information."

She sounds a little hysterical. For the past sixteen years—except for the one year when Michael died and she went so inside herself she couldn't find her way out—she has been thinking about her children. Occasionally she has thought about snowstorms and the cost of heat and electricity and the fact that she often gets hives when September closes in and she knows she has to go back to work. But mostly she's been preoccupied with Antonia and Kylie, with fevers and cramps, with new shoes to buy every six months and making sure everyone gets well-balanced meals and at least eight hours of sleep every night. Without such thoughts, she's not certain she will continue to exist. Without them, what exactly is she left with?

That night Sally goes to bed and sleeps like a stone, and she doesn't get up in the morning.

"The flu," Gillian guesses.

From beneath her quilt, Sally can hear Gillian making coffee. She can hear Antonia talking to Scott on the phone, and Kylie running the shower. All that day, Sally stays where she is. She's waiting for someone to need her, she's waiting for an accident or an emergency, but it never happens. At night, she gets up to use the toilet and wash her face with cold water, and the following morning she goes on sleeping, and she's still sleeping at noon, when Kylie brings her some lunch on a wooden tray.

"A stomach virus," Gillian suggests when she comes home from work and is informed that Sally will not touch her chicken noodle soup or her tea and has asked for the curtains in her room to be drawn.

Sally can hear them still; she can hear them right now. How they whisper and cook dinner, laughing and cutting up carrots and celery with sharp knives. How they wash all the laundry and hang the sheets out to dry on the line in the yard. How they comb their hair and brush their teeth and go on with their lives.

On her third day in bed, Sally stops opening her eyes. She will not consider toast with grape jelly, or Tylenol and water, or extra pillows. Her black hair is tangled; her skin pale as paper. Antonia and Kylie are frightened; they stand in the doorway and watch their mother sleep. They're afraid any chatter will disturb her, so the house grows quieter and quieter still. The girls blame themselves, for not being well behaved when they should have been, for all those years of arguing and acting like selfish, spoiled brats. Antonia phones the doctor, but he doesn't make house calls and Sally refuses to get dressed and go to his office.

It is nearly two a.m. when Gillian gets home from Ben's house. It's the last night of the month, and the moon is thin and silvery; the air is turning to mist. Gillian always comes back to Sally's place; it's like a safety net. But tonight Ben told her he was tired of the way she always left as soon as they were finished in bed. He wanted her to move in with him.

Gillian thought he was kidding, she really did. She laughed and said, "I'll bet you say that to all the girls, after you've fucked them twenty or thirty times."

"No," Ben said. He wasn't smiling. "I've never said it before."

All day long Ben had had the feeling that he was about to either lose or win, and he couldn't tell which it would be. He put on a show at the hospital this morning, and one of the children, a boy of eight, wept when Ben made Buddy disappear into a large wooden box.

"He'll be back," Ben assured this most distraught member of his audience.

But the boy was convinced that Buddy's reemergence was impossible. Once someone was gone, he told Ben, that was the end of him. And in the case of this boy, the theory was irrefutable. He'd been in the hospital for half his life, and this time he would not be going home. Already, he was leaving his body; Ben could see it just by looking at him. He was disappearing by inches.

And so Ben did what a magician almost never does: he took the boy aside and revealed how Buddy sat quietly and snugly within a false bottom of the disappearing box. But the boy refused to be consoled. Perhaps this wasn't even the same rabbit; there was no proof, after all. A white rabbit was an everyday thing, you could buy a dozen at a pet store. And so the boy continued to cry, and Ben might have wept right along with this child had he not been lucky enough to possess the tricks of his trade. Quickly, he reached to pull a silver dollar from behind the boy's ear.

"See." Ben grinned. "Presto," he announced.

The boy stopped crying all at once; he was startled out of his tears. When Ben told him the silver dollar was his to keep, this boy looked, for a brief instant, the way he might have if awful things had not happened to him. At noon, Ben left the hospital and went to the Owl Cafй, where he had three cups of black coffee. He didn't have lunch; he didn't order the hash and eggs that he liked, or the bacon, lettuce, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitresses watched him carefully, hoping he'd soon be up to his old tricks, setting the salt shakers on end, starting fires in the ashtrays with a snap of his fingers, snatching tablecloths from beneath their place settings, but Ben just went on drinking coffee. After he'd paid and left a large tip, he drove around for hours. He kept thinking about the life span of a mayfly, and all the time he had wasted, and frankly he wasn't willing to waste any more.

Ben has spent his whole life afraid that whoever he loves will disappear, and there'll be no finding her: not behind the veils, not in the false bottom of the largest wooden box, the red lacquer one he keeps in the basement but cannot bring himself to use, even though he's been assured he can drive swords through the wood without causing a single wound. Well, that had changed. He wanted an answer, right then, before Gillian got dressed and ran back to the safety of her sister's house.