Practical Magic

"You could have taken him to a hospital. Or what about the police? You could have called them." Sally can see in the dark that the azaleas she recently planted are already wilting, their leaves turning brown. In her opinion, everything goes wrong if you give it enough time. Close your eyes, count to three, and chances are you'll have some sort of disaster creeping up on you.

"Yeah, right. Like I could go to the police." Gillian exhales in little, staccato puffs. "They'd give me ten to twenty. Maybe even life, considering it happened in New Jersey." Gillian stares at the stars, her eyes open wide. "If I could just get enough money together, I'd take off for California. I'd be gone before they ever came after me."

It's not just the azaleas Sally could lose. It's eleven years of work and sacrifice. The rings around the moon are now so bright Sally's convinced everyone in the neighborhood will be awake before long. She grabs her sister's arm and digs her fingernails into Gillian's skin. She's got two kids who are dependent on her asleep in the house. She's got an apple tart she has to take to the Fourth of July block party next weekend.

"Why would they come after you?"

Gillian winces and tries to pull away, but Sally won't let go. Finally, Gillian shrugs and lowers her eyes, and as far as Sally's concerned that's not a very comforting way to answer a question.

"Are you trying to tell me that you're responsible for Jimmy's death?"

"It was an accident," Gillian insists. "More or less," she adds when Sally digs her nails in deeper. "All right," she admits when Sally begins to draw blood. "I killed him." Gillian is getting pretty shaky, as if her pressure had started to drop a degree a second. "Now you know. Okay? As usual, everything's my fault."

Maybe it's only the humidity, but the rings around the moon are turning faintly green. Some women believe that a green light in the east can reverse the aging process, and sure enough Sally feels as though she were fourteen. She's having thoughts no grown woman should have, especially not one who's spent her whole life being good. She notices that there are bruises all up and down Gillian's arms; in the dark they look like purple butterflies, like something pretty.

"I'm never getting involved with another man," Gillian says. When Sally gives her a look, Gillian goes on insisting she's through with love. "I've learned my lesson," she says. "Now that it's too damn late. I just wish I could have tonight, and call the police tomorrow." Her voice is sounding strained again, and even littler than before. "I could cover Jimmy with a blanket and leave him in the car. I'm not ready to turn myself in. I don't think I can do it."

Gillian really sounds as if she's cracking up now. She has a tremor in her hand that's making it impossible for her to light another cigarette.

"You have to stop smoking," Sally says. Gillian is still her little sister, even now; she's her responsibility.

"Oh, fuck it." Gillian manages to light the match, then her cigarette. "I'll probably get a life sentence. Cigarettes will just shorten the time I have to serve. I should smoke two at a time."

Although the girls weren't much more than babies when their parents died, Sally made snap decisions that seemed forceful enough to carry them both along. After the sitter they'd been left with became hysterical, and Sally had to get on the phone with the police officer to hear the news of their parents' death, she told Gillian to choose her two favorite stuffed animals and throw all the others away, because from then on they'd have to travel light, and take only what they could care for themselves. She was the one who told the silly babysitter to look for the aunts' phone number in their mother's datebook, and she insisted she be allowed to call and announce that she and Gillian would be made wards of the state unless a relative, however distant, came forward to claim them. She had the same look on her face then as she does now, an unlikely combination of dreaminess and iron.

"The police don't have to know," Sally says. Her voice sounds oddly sure.

"Really?" Gillian examines her sister's face, but at times like this Sally never gives anything away. It's impossible to read her. "Seriously?" Gillian moves closer to Sally, for comfort. She looks over at the Oldsmobile. "Do you want to see him?"

Sally cranes her neck; there's a shape in the passenger seat, all right.

"He really was cute." Gillian stubs out her cigarette and starts to cry. "Oh, boy," she says.

Sally can't believe it, but she actually wants to see him. She wants to see what such a man looks like. She wants to know if a woman as rational as herself could ever be attracted to him, if only for a second.

Gillian follows Sally over to the car and they lean forward to get a good look at Jimmy through the windshield. Tall, dark, handsome, and dead.

"You're right," Sally says. "He was cute."

He is, by far, the best-looking guy Sally has ever seen, dead or alive. She can tell, by the arch of his eyebrows and the smirk that's still on his lips, that he sure as hell knew it. Sally puts her face up to the glass. Jimmy's arm is thrown over the seat and Sally can see the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand—it's a big chunk of silver with three panels: a saguaro cactus is etched into one side panel, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, and in the center there's a cowboy on horseback. Even Sally understands that you wouldn't want to get hit if a man had that ring on; the silver would split your lip right open, it would cut quite deep.

Jimmy cared about the way he looked, that much is clear. Even after hours slumped over in the car, his blue jeans are so crisp it appears that somebody tried hard to iron them just right. His boots are snakeskin and they obviously cost a fortune. They've been very well cared for; if somebody spilled a beer on those boots by accident, or kicked up too much dust, there'd be trouble, you can tell that by looking at the polished leather. You can tell just by looking at Jimmy's face. Dead or alive, he is who he is: somebody you don't want to mess with. Sally steps away from the car. She'd be afraid to be alone with him. She'd be afraid one wrong word would set him off, and then she wouldn't know what to do.

"He looks kind of mean."

"Oh, god, yeah," Gillian says. "But only when he was drinking. The rest of the time he was great. He was good enough to eat, and I'm not kidding. So I got the idea of a way to keep him from being mean—I started giving him a little bit of nightshade in his food every night. It made him go to sleep before he could start drinking. He was perfectly fine all this time, but it must have been building up in his bloodstream, and then he just conked out. We were sitting there in the rest area and he was looking through the glove compartment for his lighter, which I bought for him at the flea market in Sedona last month, and he got bent over and couldn't seem to straighten back up. Then he stopped breathing."

In someone's backyard a dog is barking; it's a hoarse and frantic sound that has already begun to filter into people's dreams.

"You should have phoned the aunts and asked about the correct dosage," Sally says.

"The aunts hate me." Gillian runs her hand through her hair, to give it some fullness, but with this humidity it stays pretty limp. "I've disappointed them in every way."

"So have I," Sally says.

Sally believed the aunts judged her as far too ordinary to be of any real interest. Gillian felt sure they considered her common. Because of this, the girls always felt temporary. They had the sense that they'd better be careful about what they said and what they revealed. Certainly they never shared their fear of storms with the aunts, as if after nightmares and stomach viruses, fevers and food allergies, that phobia might be the last straw for the aunts, who had never particularly wanted children in the first place. One more complaint might send the aunts running to collect the sisters' suitcases, which were stored in the attic, covered with cobwebs and dust, but made of Italian leather and still decent enough to be put to good use. Instead of turning to the aunts, Sally and Gillian turned to each other. They whispered that nothing bad would happen as long as they could count to a hundred in thirty seconds. Nothing could happen if they stayed under the covers, if they did not breathe whenever the thunder crashed above them.

"I don't want to go to jail." Gillian takes out another Lucky Strike and lights it. Because of her family history, she has a real abandonment anxiety, which is why she's always the first to leave. She knows this, she's spent enough time in therapy and paid enough bucks to discuss it in depth, but that doesn't mean anything's changed. There is not one man who's gotten the jump and broken up with her first. That's her claim to fame. Frankly, Jimmy comes the closest. He's gone, and here she still is, thinking about him and paying the price for doing so.

"If they send me to jail, I'll go nuts. I haven't even lived yet. Not really. I want to get a job and have a normal life. I want to go to barbecues. I want to have a baby."

"Well, you should have thought of that before." This is exactly the advice Sally has been giving Gillian all along, which is why their phone conversations have gone from brief to nonexistent in the past few years. This is what she wrote in her most recent letter, the one Gillian never received. "You should have just left him."

Gillian nods. "I should have never said hello to him. That was my first mistake."

Sally carefully searches her sister's face in the green moonlight. Gillian may be beautiful, but she's thirty-six, and she's been in love far too often.

"Did he hit you?" Sally asks.

"Does it really make a difference?" Up close, Gillian certainly doesn't look young. She's spent too much time in the Arizona sun and her eyes are tearing, even though she's no longer crying.

"Yes," Sally says. "It does. It makes a difference to me."

"Here's the thing." Gillian turns her back on the Oldsmobile, because if she doesn't she'll remember that Jimmy was singing along to a Dwight Yoakam tape only a few hours ago. It was that song she could listen to over and over again, the one about a clown, and, in her opinion, Jimmy sang it about a million times better than Dwight ever could, which is saying quite a lot, since she's crazy for Dwight. "I was really in love with this one. Deep down in my heart. It's so sad, really. It's pathetic. I wanted him all the time, like I was crazy or something. Like I was one of those women."

In the kitchen, at twilight, those women would get down on their knees and beg. They'd swear they'd never want anything again in their lives, if they could just have what they wanted now. That was when Gillian and Sally used to lock their pinkies together and vow that they'd never be so wretched and unfortunate. Nothing could do that to them, that's what they used to whisper as they sat on the back stairs, in the dark and the dust, as if desire were a matter of personal choice.

Sally considers her front lawn and the hot and glorious night. She still has goose bumps rising along the back of her neck, but they're not bothering her anymore. In time, you can get used to anything, including fear. This is her sister, after all, the girl who sometimes refused to go to sleep unless Sally sang a lullaby or whispered the ingredients for one of the aunts' potions or charms. This is the woman who phoned her every Tuesday night, exactly at ten, for an entire year.

Sally thinks about the way Gillian held on to her hand when they first followed the aunts through the back door of the old house on Magnolia Street. Gillian's fingers were sticky from gumballs and cold with fear. She refused to let go; even when Sally threatened to pinch her, she just held on tighter.

"Let's take him around the back," Sally says.

They drag him over to where the lilacs grow, and they make certain not to disturb any of the roots, the way the aunts taught them. By now the birds nesting in the bushes are all asleep. The beetles are curled up in the leaves of the quince and the forsythia. As the sisters work, the sound of their shovels has an easy rhythm, like a baby clapping hands or tears falling. There is only one truly bad moment. No matter how hard Sally tries, she cannot close Jimmy's eyes. She's heard this happens when a dead man wishes to see who's next to follow. Because of this, Sally insists that Gillian look away while she begins to shovel the dirt over him. At least this way only one of them will have him staring up at her every night in her dreams.

When they've finished, and returned the shovels to the garage, and there's nothing but freshly turned earth beneath the lilacs, Gillian has to sit down on the back patio and put her head between her legs so she won't pass out. He knew exactly how to hit a woman, so that the marks hardly showed. He knew how to kiss her, too, so that her heart began to race and she'd start to think forgiveness with every breath. It's amazing the places that love will carry you. It's astounding to discover just how far you're willing to go.

On some nights it's best to stop thinking about the past, and all that's been won and lost. On nights like this, just getting into bed, crawling between the clean white sheets, is a great relief. It's only a June night like any other, except for the heat, and the green light in the sky, and the moon. And yet, what happens to the lilacs while everyone sleeps is extraordinary. In May there were a few droopy buds, but now the lilacs bloom again, out of season and overnight, in a single exquisite rush, bearing flowers so fragrant the air itself turns purple and sweet. Before long bees will grow dizzy. Birds won't remember to continue north. For weeks people will find themselves drawn to the sidewalk in front of Sally Owens's house, pulled out of their own kitchens and dining rooms by the scent of lilacs, reminded of desire and real love and a thousand other things they'd long ago forgotten, and sometimes now wish they'd forgotten still.

ON THE MORNING of Kylie Owens's thirteenth birthday, the sky is endlessly sweet and blue, but long before the sun rises, before alarm clocks go off, Kylie is already awake. She has been for hours. She is so tall that she could easily pass for eighteen if she borrowed her sister's clothes and her mom's mocha lipstick and her aunt Gillian's red cowboy boots. Kylie knows she shouldn't rush things, she has her whole life ahead of her; all the same, she's been traveling to this exact moment at warp speed for the duration of her existence, she's been completely focused on it, as if this one morning in July were the center of the universe. Certainly she's going to be a much better teenager than she ever was a child; she's half believed this all her life, and now her aunt has read her tarot cards for her and they predict great good fortune. After all, the star was her destiny card, and that symbol ensures success in every enterprise.

Kylie's aunt Gillian has been sharing her bedroom for the past two weeks, which is how Kylie knows that Gillian sleeps like a little girl, hidden under a heavy quilt even though the temperature has been in the nineties ever since she arrived, as if she's brought some of the Southwest she loves so well along with her in the trunk of her car. They've fixed the place the way two roommates would, everything right down the middle, except that Gillian needs extra closet space and she's asked Kylie to do a tiny bit of redecoration. The black baby blanket that has always been kept at the foot of Kylie's bed is now folded and stored in a box down in the basement, along with the chessboard that Gillian said occupied way too much space. The black soap the aunts send as a present every year has been taken out of the soapdish and has been replaced with a bar of clear, rose-scented soap from France.

Gillian has very particular likes and dislikes and an opinion about everything. She sleeps a lot, she borrows things without asking, and she makes great brownies with M&M's stirred into the batter. She's beautiful and she laughs about a thousand times more than Kylie's mother does, and Kylie wants to be exactly like her. She follows Gillian around and studies her and is thinking of chopping off all her hair, if she has the guts, that is. Were Kylie to be granted a single wish, it would be to wake and discover that her mouse-brown hair has miraculously become the same glorious blond that Gillian is lucky enough to have, like hay left out in the sun or pieces of gold.

What makes Gillian even more wonderful is that she and Antonia don't get along. Given time enough, they may grow to despise each other. Last week, Gillian borrowed Antonia's short black skirt to wear to the Fourth of July block party, spilled a Diet Coke on it accidentally, then told Antonia she was intolerant when she dared to complain. Now Antonia has asked their mother if she can put a lock on her closet door. She has informed Kylie that their aunt is a nothing, a loser, a pathetic creature.

Gillian has taken a job at the Hamburger Shack on the Turnpike, where all the teenage boys have fallen madly in love with her, ordering cheeseburgers they don't want and gallons of ginger ale and Coke just to be near her.

"Work is what people have to do in order to have the bucks to party," Gillian announced last night, an attitude that has already hindered her plan of heading out to California, since she is drawn to shopping malls—shoe stores in particular tend to call out to her—and can't seem to save a cent.

That evening they were having hot dogs made out of tofu and some sort of bean that is supposed to be good for you, even though it tastes, in Kylie's opinion, like the tires of a truck. Sally refuses to have meat, fish, or fowl at their table in spite of her daughters' complaints. She has to close her eyes when she walks past the packaged chicken legs in the market, and still she's always reminded of the dove the aunts used for their most serious love charm.

"Tell that to a brain surgeon," Sally had responded to her sister's remark about the limited worth of work. "Tell that to a nuclear physicist or a poet."

"Okay." Gillian was still smoking, although she made new plans to quit every morning, and was well aware that the smoke drove everyone but Kylie crazy. She puffed quickly, as though that would lessen anyone's distaste. "Go on and find me a poet or a physicist. Are there any in this neighborhood?"

Kylie was pleased by this putdown of their formless suburb, a place with no beginning and no end, but with plenty of gossips. Everyone is always giving her friend Gideon a hard time, even more so now that he's shaved his head. He said he didn't give a damn and insisted that most of their neighbors had minds as small as weasels', but lately he got flustered when anyone spoke to him directly, and when they walked alongside the Turnpike and a car horn honked he sometimes jumped, as though somehow he'd been insulted.

People were looking to talk, for any reason. Anything different or slightly unusual would do. Already, most people on their street had discussed the fact that Gillian did not wear the top half of her bathing suit when she sunbathed in the backyard. They all knew exactly what the tattoo on her wrist looked like, and that she'd had at least a six-pack at the block party—maybe even more—and then had gone and turned Ed Borelli down flat when he asked her out, even though he was the vice-principal and her sister's boss as well. The Owenses' neighbor Linda Bennett refused to have the optometrist she was dating come to her house to collect her before darkness fell, that's how nervous she was about having someone who looked like Gillian living right next door. Everyone agreed that Sally's sister was confusing. There were times when you'd meet her at the grocery, and she'd insist you come on over and let her play around with her tarot cards for you, and other times when you'd say hello to her on the street only to have her look right through you, as if she were a million miles away, say in a place like Tucson, where life was a lot more interesting.

As far as Kylie was concerned, Gillian had the ability to make any place interesting; even a dump like their block could look sparkly in the right kind of light. The lilacs had gone absolutely wild since Gillian's arrival, as though paying homage to her beauty and her grace, and had spilled out from the backyard into the front, a purple bower hanging over the fence and the driveway. Lilacs were not supposed to bloom in July, that was a simple botanical fact, at least it had been until now. Girls in the neighborhood had begun to whisper that if you kissed the boy you loved beneath the Owenses' lilacs he'd be yours forever, whether he wanted to be or not. The State University, in Stony Brook, had sent two botanists to study the bud formations of these amazing plants going mad out of season, growing taller and more lush with every passing hour. Sally had refused to let the botanists into the yard; she had sprayed them with the garden hose to make them go away, but occasionally the scientists would park across from the driveway, mooning over the specimens they couldn't get to, debating whether it was ethical to run across the lawn with some gardening shears and take whatever they wanted.

Somehow, the lilacs have affected everyone. Late last night, Kylie woke and heard crying. She got out of bed and went to her window. There, beside the lilacs, was her aunt Gillian, in tears. Kylie watched for a while, until Gillian wiped her eyes dry and took a cigarette out of her pocket. As she crept back to bed, Kylie felt certain that someday she, too, would be crying in a garden at midnight, unlike her mother, who was always in bed by eleven and who didn't seem to have anything in her life that was even worth crying about. Kylie wondered if her mother had ever cried for their father, or if perhaps the moment of his death was when she'd lost the ability to weep.

Out in the yard, night after night, Gillian was still crying over Jimmy. She just couldn't seem to stop herself, even now. She, who had vowed never to let passion control her, had been hooked but good. She'd been trying to muster the courage and the nerve to walk out the door for so long, almost this whole year. She had written Jimmy's name on a piece of paper and burned it on the first Friday of every month when there was a quarter moon, to try to rid herself of her desire for him. But that didn't help her to stop wanting him. After more than twenty years of flirtations and fucking around and refusing to ever commit, she had to go and fall in love with someone like him, someone so bad that on the day they moved their furniture into their rented house in Tucson, the mice had all fled, because even the field mice had more sense than she did.

Now that he's dead, Jimmy seems much sweeter. Gillian keeps remembering how scorching his kisses were, and the memory alone can turn her inside out. He could burn her up alive; he could do it in a minute flat, and that's not easy to forget. She's been hoping that the damn lilacs will stop blooming, because the scent filters through the house and all along the block, and sometimes she swears she can even smell it at the Hamburger Shack, a good half-mile down the Turnpike. People in the neighborhood are all excited about the lilacs—there's already been a photograph on the front page of Newsday— but the cloying smell is driving Gillian nuts. It's getting into her clothes and her hair, and maybe that's why she's been smoking so much, to replace that lilac scent with one that's dirtier and more filled with fire.

She can't stop thinking about how Jimmy used to keep his eyes open when he kissed her—it shocked her to realize he was watching her. A man who doesn't close his eyes, even for a kiss, is a man who wants to keep control at all times. Jimmy's eyes had cold little flecks in the center, and each time she kissed him Gillian wondered if what she was doing wasn't a little like making a pact with the devil. That's what it felt like sometimes, especially when she'd see a woman who could be herself out in public without fearing that her husband or boyfriend would snap at her. "I told you not to park there," some woman would say to her husband outside a movie theater or a flea market, and those words would move Gillian to tears. How wonderful to say whatever you wanted without having to go over it in your mind, again and again, to make certain it wouldn't set him off.

She'll give herself credit for fighting the best battle she could against what she simply couldn't defeat on her own. She tried everything to stop Jimmy from drinking, the old cures as well as the new. Owl eggs, scrambled and disguised with Tabasco sauce and hot pepper as huevos rancheros. Garlic left under his pillow. A paste of sunflower seeds in his cereal. Hiding the bottles, suggesting AA, daring to pick a fight with him, when she knew she couldn't win. She had even tried the aunts' particular favorite of waiting until he was good and plastered, then slipping a tiny live minnow into his bottle of bourbon. The fish's gills stopped dead the instant the poor thing hit the liquor, and Gillian had been racked with guilt about it, but Jimmy hadn't even noticed anything amiss. He drank that minnow in one big gulp, without even blinking, then was violently ill for the rest of the evening, although afterward his taste for alcohol seemed to have doubled. That was when she got the idea for the nightshade, which seemed such a modest plan at the time, just a little something to take the edge off and get him to sleep before he got good and drunk.

When she sits beside the lilacs at night, Gillian is trying to decide whether or not she feels as if she's committed murder. Well, she doesn't. There was no intent and no premeditation. If Gillian could take it all back, she would, although she'd change a few things while she was at it. She actually feels more friendly toward Jimmy than she has in ages; there's a closeness and a tenderness that sure weren't there before. She doesn't want to leave him all alone in the cold earth. She wants to be near and tell him about her day and hear the jokes he used to tell when he was in a good mood. He hated lawyers, since none had ever saved him from serving jail time, and he collected attorney jokes. He had a million of them, and nothing could stop him from telling one when he had a mind to. Just before they'd pulled into the rest area in New Jersey, Jimmy had asked her what was brown and black and looked good on a lawyer. "A rottweiler," he'd told her. He seemed so happy at that moment, as if he'd had his whole life ahead of him. "Think about it," he'd said. "You get it?"

Sometimes, when Gillian sits on the grass and closes her eyes, she could swear Jimmy is beside her. She can almost sense him reaching for her, the way he used to when he was drunk and mad and wanted to hit her or fuck her—she never quite knew which it would be until the very last moment. But as soon as he'd start to twist that silver ring on his finger, she knew she'd better watch out. When he feels too substantial out in the yard, and Gillian begins thinking about the way things used to be—really—Jimmy's presence doesn't feel friendly anymore. When that happens, Gillian runs inside and locks the back door and looks at the lilacs from behind the safety of the glass. He used to scare her pretty good; he used to make her do things she wouldn't even say aloud.

Truthfully, she's glad that she's been sharing a room with her niece; she's scared to sleep alone, so she's happy to make the trade-off of not having much privacy. This morning, for example, when Gillian opens her eyes, Kylie is already sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her. It's only seven o'clock, and Gillian doesn't have to report to work until lunchtime. She groans and pulls the quilt over her head.

"I'm thirteen," Kylie says with surprise, as though she herself were mystified that this has happened to her. It's the one thing she's wanted her whole life long, and now she's actually got it.

Gillian immediately sits up in bed and hugs her niece. She remembers exactly what a surprise it was to grow up, how disturbing and thrilling it was, how all-of-a-sudden.

"I feel different," Kylie whispers.

"Of course you do," Gillian says. "You are."

Her niece has been confiding in her more and more, maybe because they share a room and can whisper to each other, late at night, after the lights are out. Gillian is touched by the way Kylie studies her, as though she were a textbook on how to be a woman. She can't remember anybody ever looking up to her before, and the experience is intoxicating and puzzling at the same time.

"Happy birthday," Gillian announces. "It will be the best one yet."

The scent of those damn lilacs has mixed in with the breakfast Sally is already cooking in the kitchen. But there's coffee, too, so Gillian crawls out of bed and gathers the clothes she left scattered on the floor last night. ,

"Wait till later," Gillian tells her niece. "When you get your present from me, you'll be completely transformed. One hundred and fifty percent. People will see you on the street and they'll flip."

In honor of Kylie's birthday, Sally has fixed pancakes and fresh orange juice and fruit salad topped with coconut and raisins. Earlier in the morning, before the birds were awake, she went out to the rear of the yard and cut some of the lilacs, which she's arranged in a crystal vase. The flowers seem to glow, as if each petal emitted a plum-colored ray of light. They're hypnotizing, if you look too long. Sally sat at the table staring at them, and before she knew it she had tears in her eyes and her first batch of pancakes had burned on the griddle.

Last night, Sally dreamed the ground beneath the lilacs turned red as blood, and the grass made a crying sound when the wind rose.