That Touch of Magic (27 page)

“You were in my class?” Ms. Troudt asked.

“Mm-hmm,” Clementine said, nodding cautiously. “A couple of years ago, in the tenth grade.”

Ms. Troudt gave her an appraising look. “Yeah, I recognize the top of your head. You always had it lowered. It’s good to see your face, and you’re right. I was rude. I apologize.” She motioned permission for Clementine to speak. “Go ahead.”

Clementine took a deep breath and shifted her eyes from Ms. Troudt to me. “I, um … it did happen again, but only during the day.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Did Henry come into CCB’s? You gotta tell that kid to keep his distance, Clementine.”

“No, no … it was at home.” She swallowed hard. “My mother and I had a fight, and then I was doing the dishes, and I moved really fast, and I broke three plates, and that only made things worse…”

I paused. “Your mother? But she wasn’t at the IGA that day when everything first started, was she?”

“N-no,” Clementine stammered, and lowered her head. “But Karl called me stupid, and that’s what my mother says … sometimes … and I thought of her and that’s when I started moving really fast and…”

She trailed off. Deidre Troudt and I exchanged horrified looks.

“Your mother calls you stupid?” I asked.

Clementine kept her eyes lowered, and meekly shrugged one shoulder. “Sometimes. But only when I do stupid things. Sometimes … I do stupid things. She’s just trying to make me better.” Clementine’s eyes darted to meet mine quickly, then lowered. “She just wants me to have a boyfriend, you know. Be normal.”

“Your mother says that stuff to you?” Ms. Troudt said, her voice softer than usual.

Clementine raised her head and nodded.

“And that’s why you took the love potion?” I asked. “To get a boyfriend and get your mother off your back?”

Clementine sighed. “I really do like Henry, but … yeah.” And then her posture sagged and she hung her head again.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Deidre Troudt said. She reached over and poked Clementine in the side. “Sit up straight.”

Clementine did as commanded.

“Hold your head up.”

Clementine did that, too.

“Look at me.”

Clementine met my eyes first, and when I nodded encouragement, she timidly shifted her gaze to meet Ms. Troudt’s.

“Your mother’s a bitch,” Ms. Troudt said. “You’re not stupid, and you’re perfectly normal. You were in my class, and I’m telling you, you’re not stupid.”

Clementine sort of half rolled her eyes. “You don’t even remember me.”

“Right,” she said. “I remember all the stupid ones.”

“Okay,” I said, “all this is great, but if your mother’s your trigger, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got to get you out of your house and away from her for a while. How the hell are we going to do that?”

Deidre Troudt waved a hand in the air. “I’ve got it.” She hopped off the stool she’d been sitting on and turned to Clementine. “You’re staying with me. I’ll drive you home to get your things. I’ll tell your mother we’re doing some kind of English summer camp thing. Think she’ll buy that?”

Clementine nodded. “She won’t care. She’ll be glad I’m out of the house. But … are you sure it won’t be too much trouble? I can clean up, and I can cook…”

“It’s no trouble,” Ms. Troudt said, although her voice was more annoyed than comforting.

Clementine nibbled her lip and Ms. Troudt swatted at the air in front of her face. “Stop that. Every time you nibble your lip, you’re ruining your looks because your mother’s a bitch. Don’t let her have that.”

Annoyance flashed over Clementine’s face, and her posture straightened. “My mother’s a bitch. I’m gonna nibble my lip for a while. Back off.”

Ms. Troudt’s eyebrows raised in an expression of respect. “Okay, then.”

Clementine smiled, a real, proud smile. I smiled, too, and entertained the idea of setting up a secret camera in the Klosterman household for when Ms. Troudt returned Clementine to her mother. I kind of wanted to see that.

“This is good,” I said to Ms. Troudt as I walked them out of the garden shed. “She can keep you away from Dr. Feelgood, and you can keep her away from her mother.”

Ms. Troudt pulled her car keys out of her purse and gave them to Clementine. “You go start the car and put the AC on extreme. I hate getting into a hot car.”

“Okay,” Clementine said, then smiled wider than I’d ever seen her smile and disappeared down the path. Deidre Troudt touched my arm, keeping me from following. Once a moment or two had passed, she spoke.

“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know it’s not good,” she said, her voice low. “I’ll take care of the kid. You take care of this.”

I nodded. “I will, Ms. Troudt.”

She rolled her eyes. “You made me a magical Disney princess foster mother. You still can’t call me Deidre?”

I hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Look. You know the whole story with my family, right?”

Ms. Troudt gave me a wry look. “I’m forty-eight years old, and you were in my class ten years ago. No, I don’t remember the details of your family.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, well. My dad deserted us when I was six, which was just as well. I don’t think he much liked being a father anyway. My mother has been pretending he’s dead for twenty-three years, because she’s afraid of how it’ll make her look if she publicly acknowledges that her husband ran off to be a drag queen. Nick played football, he made her look good in town, so she liked him. I didn’t do anything that made her look good, so I got ignored.”

Ms. Troudt’s expression softened, and I had to look away in order to keep talking. “No one aside from Nick gave enough of a crap about me to correct me, on anything. I remember at least three times when you kept me after class to give me a hard time about how I dressed, or what I ate. That mattered to me. A lot. And calling you Deidre, it just … I feel like it makes you into someone else, and that feels like a loss to me. I don’t deal well with loss.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, and pulled me in for a hug. It was warm, and soft, the way a mother’s hug is supposed to be, and I had to fight to blink away tears. “When someone your age calls me Ms. Troudt,” she said into my ear as she held me tight, “it makes me feel like the oldest fucking person in the universe. I will gladly give you a hard time about anything you want. We can start with your hair, which desperately needs cutting.” She pulled back and smiled, and I could see there was some moisture in her eyes, too. “But, please. For me. Call me Deidre.”

I laughed and wiped at the space under my eyes. “Okay.
Deidre.
”

“Excellent,” she said. “Now go fix this colossal clusterfuck and then we’ll have lunch and I’ll tell you you’re too skinny.”

And with that, she disappeared down the path behind Clementine.

*   *   *

We brought the Widow back to Peach and Nick’s house that afternoon. At first, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of needing babysitting, but once she realized she’d be able to torture her new daughter-in-law 24-7 seven, she perked up a bit. Leo and Nick got her settled in the guest room upstairs while I sat in the living room with Liv and Peach and talked about the honeymoon.

“Oh, it was beautiful!” Peach said, flipping through the pictures of white beaches set against implausibly blue water. “We went to this little town called Mijas, and it’s kind of off the beaten tourist track so no one there speaks English, and they were so sweet about Nick’s terrible Spanish…”

I kept one eye over my shoulder, waiting for Nick to come back down, and by the time I looked back, both Liv and Peach were watching me.

“Everything okay?” Liv asked.

“No,” I said. “But it will be.” I reached out and touched Peach’s hand. “I’m sorry I ruined your honeymoon.”

Peach lowered her eyes. “No. It’s fine. Two weeks is too long for a honeymoon, anyway.”

“Four days is too short,” I said. “And now you’ve got the Widow upstairs. This sucks and I’m sorry.”

Peach shrugged. “Nick was already getting twitchy about getting back to work.”

I heard footsteps on the stairs and I stood up. I kissed Peach on the top of the head and said, “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

I left the living room to meet Nick and Leo at the base of the stairs. Nick didn’t even look at me, which was what he did when he was pissed. It wasn’t punishment; he just hated being mad, especially at me, so he tended to avoid me until he wasn’t mad anymore. Ordinarily, I’d give him a few days to cool off, but I didn’t have that kind of time now.

Leo shook Nick’s hand, kissed me on the forehead, and went outside to wait in the Bug. Nick took one quick look at me then headed to the kitchen. I followed him out to the backyard, where I caught up with him.

“Nick, I need to talk to you.”

“Now’s not a good time, Stace.”

He walked all the way to Peach’s garden before realizing that there was no door in the back fence, no way out, and he had no choice but to turn to face me. His eyes were a solid wall of blue ice, and my stomach sank.

“Please,” I said. “Just yell at me and get it over with. I don’t have time for you to be mad at me.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why not?”

I sighed. “This whole thing is really complicated and there’s a chance … there’s a chance I might be going away in a few days…”

“Going where?”

“I don’t know.”

“With who?”

I hesitated, then said, “Desmond.”

His eyes went wide. “Desmond? What about Leo?”

“I wouldn’t be going
with
Desmond … not romantically. It’s just something I might have to do and I might not have much time for good-byes before I go and if that’s the case, I don’t want to go away with you being mad at me.”

He shook his head. “You’re something else, you know that?”

“I know,” I said. “So yell at me and get it out of your system now because if I go…” I drifted off and Nick filled in the empty space.

“You might not be back? Is that what you’re saying?”

I didn’t answer. He turned away from me, slammed his open hand against the fence, and then turned back, eyes glittering with anger.

“You want me to yell at you? Fine. I’ve been protecting you and taking care of you my whole life, and I took
one thing
for me, and look what happens. You blow it up. What, Millie dying last year wasn’t enough for you? You had to go poking around in magic some more, see what else it could fuck up for us?”

My breath caught; I wanted to defend myself, but I couldn’t. He was right. Last summer Nick had been unwittingly central in everything, and I knew that even now, it all frightened him more than he cared to admit. Millie, who had loved Nick since we were kids and had never told him, didn’t take it well when Peach and Nick got engaged. She turned to magic to get her vengeance, hurting Peach and almost ruining Nick’s life. Still, Nick had been close to Millie, she’d been his secretary for ten years, and when she died, it hit him pretty hard. I think that was also partially because he understood the least out of all of us what had happened and why. And now he stared down at his shoes, fuming and furious with me for bringing this all back into his world, and I couldn’t blame him.

“Last summer,” he said slowly, his voice sharp as steel, “Peach got hurt. Millie got killed. Liv…” He huffed and shrugged. “Okay, fine, Liv made out all right, but still. We survived that whole mess last year by the skin of our teeth, and you gotta go overturn that rock, see what’s crawling under it? And now you got Mom involved…”

“None of that was my intention,” I said, my voice shaky. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Yeah,” he said, his words hard and cold. “But you didn’t take a lot of time to think before you just rushed in, did you? Magic, it spreads, like cancer. It touches everything around you, like it did with Liv last summer. Did you even think about that before you started this mess?”

“I’m trying to fix it,” I said, working to keep my voice level. “I’m telling you I’m sorry. What else can I do?”

He let out a hard breath, then shook his head. “You can be done.”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,
done.
” He sliced his hand through the air like an ax. “No more magic. After this, it’s over.”

My mind went blank. I hadn’t even considered that as an option. “Nick,” I said finally. “It’s what I do.”

“You’re a librarian!” he shouted.

“I got
fired
!” I shouted back.

“
Laid off.
Not the same thing. You could get a job at another library. Commute to Buffalo, go to Erie, whatever. They’re looking for a librarian at the high school. You could do that. You could get a job. Instead, you do this. You’re doing it to Mom, to me, you don’t care. Like always, you just do whatever you want and who gives a fuck about anyone else?”

“Wow,” I said, and tried to catch my breath. “That’s what you really think of me?”

Nick went silent, his eyes on the ground, unable to meet mine. I took that as a yes.

“Okay,” I said, and started toward the fence gate next to the house.

“Wait,” Nick said, and I stopped where I was. I listened as his footsteps came up behind me, until he was standing at my side, neither one of us looking at the other.

“If you go with him,” he said, “if you leave without saying good-bye to Peach and break her heart, don’t expect me to do a jig if you ever bother to come back.”

And with that, he went through the gate. I stood outside, listening as his steps stomped up the porch, as the front door slammed behind him. I stood in the dark for a while, trying not to fall apart, and once I thought I had a handle on myself, I went out to the street where I found Leo, leaning against the Bug, waiting for me.

“Everything okay?” he asked when I reached him.

“Yeah, sure,” I said on a jagged breath, forcing a smile.

Leo didn’t smile back. He’d seen Nick storm out from the backyard, and they had been friends long enough for him to know how bad it had to get for Nick to get mad. “You sure?”

“No,” I said, and when I didn’t say any more, we got in the car in silence and drove home.

Chapter 15

I spent the rest of the afternoon futilely searching the Internet for anything I could use against Desmond until I got so tense that Leo sat me back on the bed and … well. Relaxed me.