Page 73 of The Rules of Magic

The sisters packed up and called a taxi. They went to the Tuileries and walked down the gravel paths. The leaves were turning brown. They had their suitcases with them, so they stopped at the first café they came to in the park. They ordered white wine, but they didn’t drink much. They were thinking about their mother when she was young, and the rules she’d made up to protect them. They had their own rules now. Franny cast a circle in the gravel beside their table. Then she took one of Lewis’s feathers that she had in her pocket. She let the feather fall. Outside the circle, and their brother was gone. But it landed inside, right in the center. Jet let out a sob. Franny reached for her hand. It was good news. He was somewhere close by, but when the feather blew away they knew the other side of the truth. He was lost to them now.

When the sisters returned to New York, Franny took to spending the night in Vincent’s room. From here she could hear the echo of children in the school yard in the mornings. She let the crow remain inside. He was aging and he liked to perch on the desk near the heater, where he dozed in fits and starts. The dog followed Franny around, but she was a poor substitute for Vincent, and he began sleeping at the front door, waiting for his master to reappear.

Both sisters slept uneasily upon their return, disturbed by sounds of the city, the rumble of buses, the shrill sirens, the ever-present traffic on Seventh Avenue. When Franny opened the window she found that New York City had only one scent now and it never changed. It was the sharp tang of regret. She longed for something darker and greener, for a silence that might allow her to find some peace.

One night she dreamed that Isabelle was sitting on the window seat of the old house in Massachusetts.

You know the answer, Isabelle said. Fate is what you make it.

When Franny awoke, she realized she was homesick. She was at the kitchen table when Jet came downstairs. To Franny, Jet seemed even more beautiful with her white hair, for her beauty was rooted inside of her now.

“I’m ready to go,” Franny told her sister. In fact, she had already packed up her room.

Jet looked at her surprised. “Go where?”

“The place we feel most at home.”

“All right. We’ll shut down the store.”

“I’ll call the attorney. He can manage selling this place. It was temporary for us. Now the rightful tenant can have it.”

Jet understood her sister’s wish to leave New York. 44 Greenwich Avenue was already becoming the past as they sat there. It was disappearing in front of their eyes. It had been a home for the three of them, but they were three no longer. She thought of Vincent playing “I Walk at Night” for the first time, of April visiting with Regina and eating chocolate cake in the kitchen, of the plumber who did work for them in exchange for a love spell, and of the night when Vincent came home and told them he was in love. As for Franny, what she remembered most was standing outside on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows, knowing that lilacs grew here and that she would buy this house and that for a while they would live here and try to be happy, and, in a way, they were.

During the course of two years Franny collected 120 letters from Haylin, all wrapped in string, kept in the bureau in the dining room. The house on Greenwich Avenue had been sold and divided into offices. A literary agent had taken the rooms on the third floor, and her desk was now in the space where Vincent’s room had been. She was a lovely woman with a beautiful smile who filled up her bookshelves along the wall where his bed had been. For a while the shop was a mystery bookstore and occasionally the owners found red thread and wishbones in unexpected places. The ramshackle greenhouse Vincent had built was pulled down and carted away, but some of the seeds scattered through the neighborhood so that foxgloves and sunflowers grew in the alleys for several seasons. They took the tilted kitchen table that had been in their family house on Eighty-Ninth Street, and they took Edgar, the stuffed heron, whom they kept in the parlor of Aunt Isabelle’s house and decorated every Yule with silver trimmings and gold tinsel.

The sisters settled into the Owens house on Magnolia Street. It felt like home in no time. Franny took Aunt Isabelle’s room, where Lewis, now so aged his feathers had begun to turn white, nested on the bureau. Jet was happy to have the guest room where April Owens had stayed when they refused to share a room with her. The attic, where they’d spent their first summer, was a place for young girls, not for grown women who needed more comfortable beds, so they used it for storage. Harry still slept by the door, waiting for his master, while Wren kept to the garden, where she chased off rabbits and mice.

They had an entire winter in which to restore everything that had been ignored for so long. Charlie came to clear out the gutters, cut back the vines on the porch, and deliver a cord of wood for the fireplace. He said it was grand to see people in the house again.

“I miss your aunt,” he told the sisters. “She was one of a kind for certain.”

On days when the sky was spitting out snow, Jet took possession of the window seat to read from one of her beloved novels. Magic came back to her slowly, like a long-forgotten dream that hovered nearby.

Now that she lived in town, she visited the cemetery every Sunday. She walked no matter the weather. Some children called her the Daffodil Lady, because she always carried a bunch of the blooms. Sometimes the Reverend gave her a ride home, especially if it was raining hard. He was there every Sunday as well. In nice weather he brought two lawn chairs, and when the sky was overcast he brought a large black umbrella.

They didn’t talk very much, although the Reverend noticed that Jet still wore the moonstone ring Levi had given her, and Jet saw that the Reverend kept one of Levi’s swimming medals pinned to his jacket. When they talked, they talked about the weather, as people in Massachusetts often do.

“Cold,” he would say.

And she would agree with a word or two, and then one day she brought mittens she had knitted for him out of soft gray wool. The next time he brought the scarf she had made for Levi, which made her cry. She ducked her head so that the Reverend wouldn’t see, although he could tell all the same. He carried a handkerchief, and gave it to her, and gently said, “This comes in handy.”

In the spring he handed her a new business card he’d had printed. He had gone back to work and was now a justice of the peace. He had already married six couples. He told her that one couple had phoned him in the middle of the night, desperate to marry, so he had performed the service in his living room dressed in his pajamas.

One day he said, “Maybe you should move on with your life.”

Jet was grateful for his kind thought. Years had passed. She still met Rafael in the city several times a year. For a while he saw another woman, and thinking he wanted a family, he was married briefly. But in the end he divorced. His wife didn’t know him the way Jet did. They could talk with each other in a way they couldn’t with anyone else, and so they began to see each other again.

Rafael was the principal of a school in Queens and several times a year they went to the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel for old times’ sake. They often spent the night together in his apartment. Once he had suggested marriage, but Jet told him she thought it was a bad idea. It would get in the way of things. The truth was she still worried about the curse; even though she hoped such things could be broken, she didn’t want to chance its ill effects. She thought it best if Rafael was only a dear friend. He agreed to this, even though he was in love with her. He didn’t tell her so, but she knew, just as he knew what her intentions had been that night at the Plaza Hotel. They didn’t need the sight to know how one another felt.

“I’m fine,” she told the Reverend on the day he told her to get on with her life.

And she was. She did not discuss her grief with anyone, but she could share it with the Reverend. But then one Sunday, Jet failed to appear. The Reverend scanned the field, waiting for her to arrive, but she didn’t. It felt strange without her there, not right somehow, so he drove over to Magnolia Street and parked outside the house. He sat there in his idling car, until Franny came outside. The Reverend rolled down his window. He’d never spoken to Franny, he’d only see her walking through town in her black coat, her red hair piled on top of her head. People were afraid of her. They said she was not one to cross. Up close, she was taller than he had expected, and prettier.

“She has pneumonia,” Franny said. “I wouldn’t let her go to the cemetery.”

It was a damp, drizzly day and the Reverend more than understood. He nodded. “Tell her I’ll see her next week.”

“Tell her yourself,” Franny said.