If Tears Were Wishes And Other Short Stories (6 page)

If only they would grant
her
wishes, but the magic didn't work for her. She only created it.

She wasn't going to survive this. She knew these guys, they were seniors in her high school, a couple years older than she was. They hadn't even bothered to blindfold her when they nabbed her in the parking lot after the tryouts for
All's Well That Ends Well
and dragged her back into the school, into the men's room, to the cold tiles against her knees and the gag in her mouth and the bruises she could feel developing on her cheek and back and thighs.

No, she wasn't thinking straight — of course they couldn't blindfold her. It was her tears they wanted.

She hoped they didn't get Crystal too.

"Damn," the guy holding the vials barked at the one hitting her. "Get Damon in here to hold her face, would you?"

She could tell from his expression that he would have hit her too if not for the vials he held. Vials which held a fortune. The rarest substance in the world: her tears.

****

The twins had grown up in the middle of an extended voluntary family known as the Farm; between remnants of old growth forest and fields of hallucinogenic substances, among the smell of pine trees and marijuana; in a community on the outskirts of a town somehow outside and beyond the mainstream of American culture, a place behind and out of time. Their parents, who might have abused one too many illegal substances in the course of conception and pregnancy, had died in a very conventional American Way — a car accident — when Brooke and Crystal were only six. Perhaps they had unwisely wished to die together after treating a scraped knee one day.

If the twins had any other relatives, no one on the Farm knew about them: most of those who chose to live in the little community on the outskirts of the village outside of Eugene had long been disowned by their biological families.

For a long time, the twins remained normal children with a less-than-normal lifestyle, uncanny perhaps in the affinity they had for each other, but otherwise not unusual. If good things came to those who dried their tears, what of that? It was surely the principle of cosmic karma at work.

It wasn't until Brooke and Crystal were ten that something happened to make anyone think any differently.

Sean, one of their many foster parents, was driving them to Eugene for Saturday Market when his beat-up old Beetle broke down between here and nowhere, spewing stinking clouds of smoke. The twins broke into tears when he told them they wouldn't be able to make it. Sean dried their tears with the back of one rough, hairy hand, and in an uncharacteristic show of temper, kicked the tires of the poor purple bug.

"I wish I had a decent car, a Mercedes or a BMW!" And then as an afterthought, "Even if they are symbols of capitalist pigs. At least they work."

The twins continued to cry.

Sean took their small hands and hitchhiked with them the rest of the way to Eugene. When they got back to the Farm that evening, the notification was waiting for him that he had won a Mercedes in the Oregon Lottery.

"Since when do they give away Mercs in the Oregon Lottery?" Angel asked, tucking a strand of long, dirty-blond hair behind her ear.

"Since when do I play the Oregon Lottery?" Sean asked, shaking his head. "I never bought a ticket in my life."

He looked at the twins, and an unbelieving smile lit up his long face. "Wow, man. It was those two. I don't know how, but we've known for a long time that good things come to us when we help them out."

Angel stared as him, her light blue eyes wide. "Yeah."

"But not all the time," henna-haired Dawn objected.

"They were crying." Sean's voice was slow, amazed. "That's it. It's when they cry."

Few of the Farm members actually believed him. But then Angel told her friend Mandy, who lived in the Real World and was fighting her way through a Real Divorce, what the twins' tears could do. Mandy told Brooke that her husband was trying to take her daughter away from her, and Brooke shed tears of sympathy: the courts awarded custody to Mandy the next day.

Even after the members of the Farm could no longer deny that the tears of the twins were special (although they soon discovered that crocodile tears just didn't cut it) Brooke's and Crystal's childhood continued to be dominated by the Farm's laid-back approach to home schooling, the sweet smell of mildly hallucinogenic plants, and the slinky softness of kittens being given away on the side of the street at the weekly trips to Saturday Market in Eugene. Most of the spaced-out Farm members thought a suit was weirder than tears granting wishes — and certainly more perverse. There was a cosmic justice to it, after all, and the wishes granted were entirely in keeping with the morals of the farm: better harvests, more milk, a previously undiscovered hot springs in the hills. With the exception of Sean's Mercedes, of course.

But even such wonders as Brooke and Crystal could be a major pain in the ass at times and became more so when they reached adolescence. The day came, as come it must, that Angel was totally fed up with their moods.

"I wish I could wash my hands of you!"

"You'll regret it!" came Crystal's teary answer.

The next day, an elderly woman showed up at the Farm. She seemed a bit weak in the head, but she did have papers proving she was a forgotten aunt of the twins' mother, and she was taking Brooke and Crystal away to live in Eugene.

In Eugene, the strange talents of the girls went unnoticed. Aunt Dotty hadn't asked and no one had told her — she probably would have forgotten if they had. The knowledge might have disappeared forever if not for an article in the
Eugene Register Guard
about communes in the region that had a picture of Sean next to his capitalistic Mercedes, complete with a description of how he claimed he'd gotten it.

A week later, KEZI did a tongue-in-cheek story on the evening news about the local wonder twins whose tears granted wishes.

And the next day, Brooke disappeared.

****

Crystal fought her way through the students and teachers and police crowded around the door of the men's room, pushing ahead to a woman she presumed was an officer kneeling next to some spots of dried blood on the white tiles of the floor near the urinals. A cleaning woman was being questioned by a second officer.

"What did you find?" Crystal asked. She barely registered that she was in the forbidden territory of the boy's john, with the odd fixtures she before had only spied through half-open doors.

The officer looked up. "Are you the sister of the missing girl?"

Crystal nodded.

The woman rose. "Good. We can take a blood sample from you and use it to match the DNA. I'm Officer Anderson." She held out her hand. Crystal stared at it a moment. The palm was square and the fingers long, the fingernails cut off short.

Crystal took the hand, cool against her own. "Have you found anything yet?" she repeated.

"No. But there isn't much blood here. I can't offer you any guarantees, but my instincts tell me your sister is still alive."

At the word "blood," Crystal closed her eyes, imagined Brooke bleeding on the smooth tiles, tied up, gagging from the cloth in her mouth.
No, no, no
. What had she bled from? Had they broken her nose, cut her to make her cry?

She opened her eyes again, forcing herself to be calm. If they wanted Brooke for her tears, they wouldn't kill her. They would make her cry, but they wouldn't kill her. She had to hold on to that.

"I'd like you to go with Mr. Rehnquist to the station so that we can get that blood sample from you," Anderson was saying now.

Crystal nodded, numb. But she couldn't be numb, she had to make plans. The world where she'd grown up in wasn't the Real World, this was, and she had to find her way into it, find Brooke.

Find whoever had done this to her sister and make them pay.

But how? She couldn't use her own magic, only someone else could. She cast a speculative glance at Officer Anderson, with her suit and her logic and her laws, her square palm and her practical fingernails. The police wouldn't be interested in magic. Her old aunt would be useless too — the twins called her dotty Dotty behind her back — and besides, she couldn't stay there and put her aunt in danger. Whoever wanted Brooke for her tears would want Crystal too. She had to hide.

And she had to find someone to help her.

****

Dotty met her on the front porch of the big old house on Alder Street when the police car dropped her off. The smell of the roses in front filled the air, a smell much too happy and hopeful for the way Crystal felt.

"Have they found her, dear?" Dotty asked, her voice quivering. She looked much more down-to-earth than she was, her figure generous, her cheeks rosy, and her short hair steel gray shot with black. But if you looked at her eyes long, you saw they always wandered, and her hands were often moving, as if searching for something to do. The twins had hated leaving the Farm at first, but soon they understood that Dotty was a gentle, lost lady who needed them to take care of her.

Crystal wished she didn't have to go, but she might be the only one who could find Brooke.

"They have some ideas," Crystal said. "I'll have to help them night and day and won't be home for a while. You know how connected Brooke and I are." She didn't normally lie, but this was serious, and she didn't want Dotty worried.

Besides, it wasn't a
complete
lie.

"Oh, yes. They will find her with you." Dotty gave her a relieved smile as they entered the house together, the safe world their great aunt had created for them: the world of cinnamon buns and fried chicken and mashed potatoes, smells that lingered in the house night and day, from dishes that had become the girls' favorites — right alongside alfalfa sprout-avocado sandwiches and veggie burgers.

Dotty trusted her. Crystal couldn't let her down. Not her, not Brooke.

Early the next morning, while Dotty's regular snoring still punctuated the silence of the house, Crystal got up and pulled out the small package she'd bought the day before, tore open the thin cardboard and took out two bottles, one brown glass and an even smaller one of plastic. After spreading the instructions out on the counter in the bathroom, she took her long, dark-blond hair in one hand, the silky-rough tresses sliding across her palm. Could she become the person she had to be to do the job she had to do?

She could. Rage would help her.

"Bye," she whispered and pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer, her hand steady.

Snip, snip.

She tossed 14 inches of blondness into the plastic bag that had held the dye. The first step in her new armor.

Snip, snip, snip, snip.

When she was done, she screwed the plastic bottle onto the brown one and shook it. The stinging scent of the dye made her eyes water. Using the slick plastic gloves, she smeared the vile-smelling mixture into the hair that was left, the uneven tufts that stuck out all over her head.

Vile, like herself now, the person she hadn't known had been there until the fury took over.

The fury and the hatred — hatred for people whose names she didn't even know.

After the required time, she stuck her head under the faucet, girding herself. The first shock of the barely warm water against her scalp sent goose bumps popping up along her arms. Although Dotty slept like the dead, Crystal still didn't want to use the hair dryer, so she towel-dried her hair, rubbing the soft terrycloth against the newly black locks.

It was barely dry when she shook it out and finally turned to look in the mirror.

It would do. It would definitely do. Better than she had expected, actually. While before she'd looked like a gentle flower child, she now looked like a street-wise punk. There was no messing with the chick in the mirror, man.

She was ready.

She took the plastic bag with her blondness and her bottles and let herself quietly out of the back, taking care not to let the screen door bang against the frame. She would throw the hair and the dye away somewhere where Dotty couldn't find them. A note waited on the kitchen table, and all the money she possessed was in the wallet in the back pocket of her jeans.