Bad Luck Girl (21 page)

Papa lifted his hands away.

“What did you do to them?” asked Jack.

“I sent them to sleep. It’s about all I can do right now.”

“What do you mean all you can do?” Jack took one step forward. His hands were clenching and unclenching, looking for something to strangle. “Why don’t you wish them better? What’s the matter with you?”

“Jack, I’m sorry,” said Papa gently. “This is a genuine transformation. It came from the heart, and it had all the power a member of the high court could throw into it.” He didn’t say “all the power Callie could throw.” He didn’t say “my daughter.” But he knew who did this. He knew I’d undone the protection he’d laid down against Jack’s brothers. I had put us all on the road to where we were now. “It cannot be undone with just one wish. It will take time, and it has to be worked very carefully if they’re not to be damaged any further.”

“Then let’s get started!” said Jack. “What do we do? What do you need?”

“I can’t,” answered Papa. “Not now.”

“Why not!”

“Because tonight, I have to go to work.”

There aren’t a lot of times I’ve seen Jack at a loss for words, but there he was, with his eyes popped out and his jaw hanging open.
“What!”

“I managed to get in on a gig at the Black Bird tonight. Their man’s out sick. It’s good for thirty dollars, plus tips.”

It was so strange to be standing here, talking about magic one second and work the next. It was even stranger because the magic was what felt real and normal, and the idea of working for pay felt like something from some old story. I might have laughed, except I was watching Jack slowly draw his shoulders back and pull himself up to his full height. He was a half inch taller than my father when he stood up straight like that, and his voice had gone horribly cold and even.

“So, you’re just going to walk out of here and leave them like this?”

Papa didn’t blink, and he didn’t back down one inch, not in his words or the way he stood. “They will take no further harm. When I get back in the morning, I’ll be able to start undoing what was done.” Papa was still not looking at me. He faced Jack squarely. “Do you want me to rush the job? I could make things worse.”

Jack closed his jaw with a sharp click. “I want you to
fix
this.”

“I will. But tonight, I have to work. We need that money to get out of town.”

“But you can just …”

That was all Papa’s straining patience could take. “Will
you get it through your head that magic is not infinite?” he snapped. “The very nature of your world imposes limits on what it can do and how it can work. And trust me, Jack, you do not want me using my power while I am angry or impatient. You especially do not want me remembering your brothers assaulted my wife and daughter while I am trying to free their hearts!”

They were very close, almost nose to nose. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. Who could I stop? This was my fault. All of it. If I’d trusted Papa, if I hadn’t tried to lift the protection … Jack wouldn’t have been happy, but it would have been all right. If I hadn’t gone out following Jack, I would have been here to help Mama and keep her from interfering with Sweeny’s eviction. Mama wouldn’t have been hurt, at least not by his brothers. What would I do if Jack took a swing? What would I do if Papa did? I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.

“Daniel?”

Mama stood at the threshold of our room. If her voice was a little hoarse and she moved a little stiffly, she was at least upright and moving under her own steam.

“It’s all right, Margaret,” Papa said, without once looking away from Jack. “It will be just fine, won’t it, Jack?”

The magic was quick this time. A single smooth twist in the tension that filled the space between Jack and my father. Jack blinked once. His shoulders slumped and he backed up a couple steps, looking down at his hands like he couldn’t remember what they were for.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” He looked at his brothers again, but I couldn’t tell if he saw them properly now. “They’re not going to get any worse, are they, Mr. LeRoux?”

“No.” Papa’s voice was gentle, but it was cold. “That much I can promise.”

“Okay.” Jack was giving in. I could feel him relaxing into Papa’s little twist of power. He didn’t even know it had happened. I imagine it felt fairly natural to him. Jack always tried to look on the brightest side.

The only problem was, this bright side wasn’t Jack’s.

Jack and Papa folded the Murphy bed down from the wall, and wrestled the Hollander brothers onto it. Mama made sure Ben and Simon were covered up then she set about making sandwiches for Papa to take to work. Jack stood by the piano, looking out the window.

I sat in one of the chairs at the table. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think, beyond the fact that this was my fault, and no one was saying so. It was my bad ideas that created this disaster, with a little help from my bad luck. Now my father had magicked Jack, and Jack didn’t even know it had happened. And I couldn’t do anything about it, because if I tried to undo the knot my father had tied, Papa’d be angry at me again. Worse, Jack would be angry at me. He should be angry. It was wrong that he wasn’t, because it meant his head and heart weren’t his own anymore. Being around me had stolen the one thing from him that no one should have to lose. And that was my fault too, because my father had done this to him, and I hadn’t stopped it.

So here we all were, trying to be normal about things, when none of us, not even Jack, knew what normal was.

Papa took the paper sack of sandwiches from Mama and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back in time for breakfast.” He kissed my cheek as well. “Take care of your mother for me.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t answer. Because the only thing that came into my mind was a question.
Take care of Mama? Like I did this morning?

If I was supposed to be taking care of Mama, she didn’t see it that way. She started making up a pot of chili with beans, and a pan of biscuits. Jack sat down in one of the armchairs by the silent radiator, pulled out his battered notebook, and started writing. He didn’t say anything to me, and I was glad. I didn’t think I could stand it if he’d been all cool and cheerful, with me knowing where that cool came from. I thought about the notebook he’d given me.

“… I was able to get the sugar for the icing,” Mama was saying as she checked on the biscuits. “We’ll have your cake tomorrow when your father’s home. Fifteen! I can’t believe it.”

I couldn’t believe it either. I didn’t feel fifteen. I felt a thousand years old. A thousand bad-luck years old. Jack was sitting there, writing and whistling. Not five feet away, his brothers weren’t even snoring in their enchanted sleep. What if Papa couldn’t fix them? What if he couldn’t even wake them up again? Jack wasn’t the only one who hadn’t figured on Papa’s magic having limits. I mean, the Seelie king had gotten inside a castle and turned it into a dragon. How
could there be anything magic couldn’t do? How could there be anything my father couldn’t do?

I shouldn’t have thought that, because the next thought was what if he isn’t telling the whole truth? Maybe he could have done something, but he just decided not to.

I lurched to my feet.

“I gotta … I’m gonna … I need to use the …” I didn’t even bother trying to finish. I stumbled out the door.

I went downstairs as quiet as I could. I needed to get out. I needed time to think. Twilight had settled in outside and I could hear the voices of women shouting for their no-good kids. Those same women who had helped Mama, even though they didn’t know us from Adam’s off ox. I wrapped my arms around myself. It wasn’t cold, but I needed something to hold on to, and there wasn’t anybody else. I wandered down to the street’s dead end, and past it, out onto the wasteland of clinker and gray dust heaps. It smelled like old tar and burnt-out ashes and shifted like the dust back in Kansas had under my shoes. The kids who used it as a playground ran past me, heading home to their dinners.

I trudged up the nearest pile, and back down the far side. The river stretched out in front of me, muddy brown and black in the last of the daylight. It lapped restlessly at the ashy bank. The crows and the gulls had gone off to roost someplace, and the bank was as quiet as anyplace in Chicago ever got. There was more city standing on the other side, and while I watched, its lights came on one at a time like stars. It looked almost pretty on that far bank.

Something rattled and shifted in the corner of my eye. I didn’t turn my head. I already knew who it was. I felt it.

“There you are,” said Touhy. The wind off the river buffeted her paper body, so she had to twist and turn to keep from being blown away. “I been waiting for you.”

I couldn’t muster any feeling about that. My heart and my head were both plain worn-out. “What made you think I’d show?”

Touhy gave her crinkling shrug. “Sooner or later it was gonna get to be too much for your human friend and he was gonna turn you out. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way it is. We’re too strong for the humans, so they shove us away, and we’re too ugly and strange for the courts, so they swallow us up.”

“Jack didn’t turn me out.”

“Oh, yeah?” Touhy quick folded herself into a question mark and back into a scrap-paper girl again. “Then what are you doing out here?”

“Nothing. Thinking.”

“So, you can think and follow me.” She flipped and folded and shuffled until she became a patchwork arrow pointing downriver. “Come on.”

“Why?”

Touhy folded herself back into the pink-and-paper-bag girl again and grinned. “So you can see what your old man’s so afraid of.”

I looked back toward the clinker piles. The smokestacks and the sawtoothed skyline jutted out of them like a smoking
nightmare of a forest. I couldn’t even see Jack’s building from here. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t go back there. I was the Bad Luck Girl. I couldn’t bring any more of that onto Jack. If I was gone, my father would only have to worry about taking care of Mama, and neither of the fairy courts gave a darn about her. They could leave Chicago, and set up someplace else, and be safe. Maybe they could even go back to Kansas. Without me, or my family around, Jack could get back to being a normal human being with normal human problems. He wouldn’t have to worry about magic or fairies or prophecies or anything. Him or his brothers.

I hunched my shoulders up to my ears and followed Touhy down the bank of that slow, black river, and I didn’t look back.

If I’d had room inside me for something other than my own misery, I might have been surprised that Touhy took us up to an El platform. As we climbed the two flights of stairs, she put on a complete young-lady shape. Her pink dress unfolded to a long, straight skirt. A matching cloche hat covered her straggly paper hair, and white gloves that were only slightly crumpled covered her wrinkled hands. By the time she pulled the fare out of her tissue-paper pocket, she could have been a girl around my age, maybe even a little older. Not that anybody was paying attention. The people around us on the platform were filled with their own plans and worries, or just trying to get home to their suppers.

That suited me fine. I huddled in my seat by the window and watched the skyscrapers flashing past. The train muffled up my magic, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything, and that felt almost like freedom. I could feel the flat outline
of Jack’s birthday present notebook in my pocket. I told myself I’d get rid of it as soon as I found a good spot for the words and the papers. I didn’t want anything of Jack’s anymore.

Touhy and I got off the El on the good side of town. Stone town houses lined a broad and well-lit street. She took us across Lake Shore Drive and into a green stripe of open lawn she called Lincoln Park. People strolled on gravel paths between the fountains and the statues, enjoying the summer evening. Every last one of them ignored me and Touhy as completely as the folks on the train had.

Not everything was carefree, of course. We skirted the Hooverville shacks that hunched at the edge of the park. Men in thin shirts and battered hats bunched together around oil-drum fires and watched us warily as we walked past. I couldn’t help looking for a tree in the middle of the shacks, just in case.

Past the Hooverville, Touhy turned us through a kind of maze made up of hedges and beds of flowers all shut down for the night. Out of sight of promenades and hoboes both, Touhy scrunched herself into a ball, and became the scrap-paper girl again. She tumbled along, twisting and turning for the sheer fun of it. The wind off the lake tossed her up high. Touhy spread herself out like a patchwork kite and glided on that fresh, cold breeze. Jealousy flashed through me to see her so happy with herself. I grit my teeth against the feeling, and broke into a trot to keep her in sight.

I didn’t see the boundary we crossed, but I sure felt it. It was like walking into a wall of pure heat. I gasped and gagged and staggered backward. But Touhy wafted up behind, gave me a surprisingly hard shove, and I stumbled through.

“Don’t the cops run into that?” I asked, rubbing my arms. Touhy laughed and tumbled past.

“It only gets solid if there’s magic coming at it. For humans, it just … guides their eyes away.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but it was cut off by a shout from up ahead.

“What says the ’ville? Fair?”

“Fair!” roared back a whole crowd of voices.

The voices were coming out of a cluster of the broad, sprawling trees. Their branches had been strung with lights; electric bulbs of all sizes and colors bobbed in the breeze alongside neon tubes and bits of electric sign. The colored lights and their shadows danced over a whole set of little houses. Some had been wedged into the crooks of the branches; others took shelter next to the sturdy trunks. They’d been built out of whatever came to hand, but what came to hand had been squared up and made tight with good roofs and brick chimneys.

“It’s a Hooverville,” I said, staring. “A Hooverville for Halfers.”

Touhy was beside me again, little more than scraps and bits and a pair of green eyes. “It’s home,” she said. “Come on.”