The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (33 page)

Tonight, he had promised to come in a plumber's van, labeled “
EMERGENCY—24-HR PLUMBING SERVICES,” SO
the neighbors would not be suspicious. He was going to drive himself. He was going to wear a mustache and a blond wig. She was going to make him pancakes while her daughters slept.

They were in love, she and Nikolai, but had always known that their affair could not go on. Often, they spoke in wonder of the strangeness of the affair: It was both essential and impossible. It must cease to exist for it floated between two realities: his star-spangled career, his beautiful wife, his collection of vintage cars; her daughters, her remote and troubled husband, her unpaid electricity bills, repossession warnings, and the foreclosure notice from her bank.

Yet, although they had often blinked tears from their eyes, knowing the affair had to end, Maude had never believed that it would. The realm of the affair was too exquisite. In fact, for the past five months she'd kept a secret from him—easy enough with her plump body. She'd been waiting to share it, knowing that this secret, revealed at the right moment, would bind them forever. It would transform their gossamer love into something real.

The night before, she had told him the secret and his face had crumpled with joy. “No more visits to my hotel, darling,” he had whispered. “This changes everything. Tomorrow, I come to your house.”

Any moment now he would arrive. He would probably help her make the pancakes: He would watch in his reverent way as she cracked eggs and measured out flour. That was the nature of their realm: a collection of precious moments. She loved him so much she felt that
they,
together,
would become the pancake batter. Intertwined, they would spill into the pan, and together they would breathe with slow new bubbles.

The moon tonight, Maude thought idly, was as round as a tablet. It would do very well for cutting pastry. As a matter of fact, so would Fancy's hula hoop, which she could see through the window, luminescent on the lawn. Or her own watch face, here on her wrist, showing Nikolai to be an hour late.

Early Friday morning, the sun just touching the sky, Listen read the final spell by flashlight.

Here it is!

The Final Spell!

Once you have completed this Spell, all will be well!

It's
A Spell to Make Two People Fall in Love Again.

Gather up the following things:

• An overnight bag
  
• Four candles
  
• A bottle of wine
  
• Bread, cheese, olives, and chocolate brownies
  

That's it! Just by gathering these things together you will make the Spell take effect. (And by the way, you will
know
when the time is right to
use
these things!)

Good-bye then. It's been a lot of fun.

(In the next few hours, you should be sure to hide this Book someplace you are never likely to see it again.)

Listen crept out of bed and gathered everything on the list, packing it together in her overnight bag while her dad slept. By lucky chance, she
found bread, cheese, and olives in the Banana Bar fridge, chocolate brownies in the campervan cupboard, and a bottle of wine in a crate underneath the table. Someone had given her candy-pink candles as a Kris Kringle present last year. She added the Spell Book to the overnight bag, so she could hide it somewhere later that morning, and she got back into bed.
A Spell to Make Two People Fall in Love Again.
It was perfect. She fell asleep through tears of happiness.

When she woke again, her dad was already up and gone. She was so excited she could hardly dress or clean her teeth. Maybe he was
already
with Marbie! Maybe he had driven straight to her place when he woke up!

Walking from the campervan to the back door of the Banana Bar, she tried to stay calm but felt the sun on the back of her neck, saw the pale blue curve of the sky, and thought:
It's the beginning of everything!

As she walked into the shop, the phone was ringing, and she reached for it, but her dad, who was behind the counter, called, “Just leave it.”

The answering machine switched on, and there, as Listen knew it would be, was Marbie's voice. She reached for the phone again, but her father said, sharply, “Listen.”

So they both stood quietly while Marbie chatted: “Nathaniel! Sorry, it's me. Sorry to bother you. Sorry, I'm sniffing, I've got a cold, and that's why I'm calling you, not really, that's not really why. But I decided I shouldn't go to work today, and then Mum called and said she and Dad are going away for the weekend, to this Festival of Balloons somewhere in the Hunter Valley, and I thought, seeing as I'm not going to work, I might as well go away for the weekend with them, and I thought, well! Maybe Nathaniel and Listen want to come along! I thought it could be fun for you guys to see the balloons, and you know, and anyway, give me a call if you're interested. We're leaving in the next hour or so, so it's spontaneous. Okay? Great. Hear from you soon, I hope.”

The machine clicked and whirred backward. Listen looked over at her father with shining eyes. Here, now, it was going to happen.

“All packed?”

She raised her overnight bag and swung it around slightly.

“You need to leave now, or do you have time for breakfast?” he asked next.

“I guess I need to go now,” she said. “But I've got a minute if you want to call Marbie back.”

“That's okay,” he said, and switched the sign on the Banana Bar door to
BACK IN TEN MINUTES
. “Hang on,” he said. “Left my keys in the campervan.”

Listen stood on the path in front of the Banana Bar, the hot wind brushing at her face. She leaned against the glass door to wait.

When her dad pushed the door open again, jangling his keys in her face, she said, “So, are you going to call Marbie?”

“Nope.”

She watched his back as he opened the car door.

“What do you mean
Nope
?”

“Listen, I'm sorry, I'm not going to call her.” He was standing with the door open, waiting for her to come across to the car.

“You should go to the balloon festival,” she said, beginning to panic. “You
have
to go to the balloon festival. Don't you get it? Dad, it's perfect. I'm going away for the weekend; What are you going to do if you don't go to the balloon festival?”

“Run the Banana Bar, for one thing,” he said. “Listen, I'm sorry, baby, I thought you understood. I'm not getting back with Marbie. Not ever. It's over.
Finito.
” Then he slammed his car door closed.

They drove toward Redwood Elementary, where coach buses would collect the girls to take them to the mountains for their camp. Listen
watched her father's profile, but it was set and calm. There was nothing she could do to change it.

She looked into her overnight bag, at her pajamas, shorts, T-shirts, swimsuit, and beneath them, the glint of a bottle of wine, the lid of the jar of olives, the candy pink of the candlesticks.

She was not going to the school camp.

She knew where she was going instead.

It was just like the Spell Book had said.
You will know when the time is right to use these things.

The time was now. She was supposed to hear Marbie's message, not because it meant Dad and Marbie would fall in love again, but because it told her that the Zings were going away. She would hide in their place for the weekend. She would hide in their garden shed. She would live on olives, bread, cheese, and chocolate brownies for the next few days.

But what were the candles and wine for? They suggested some kind of ritual. Did she have to perform a ritual? She pictured the Zings' back garden: the large wooden shed, the sagging trampoline, the scribbly gum with its old rope swing. She thought of the old rope swing, how it swayed sometimes, white against the nighttime, when she watched through the Zings' kitchen window. She thought of rituals with candles.

She thought:
A Spell to Make Two Happy People Have a Fight.

It was her fault that Marbie and her dad had split up.

She thought of the school counselor saying, “It's not your fault that your mother left.”

But it must have been her fault. Why else would the counselor have raised it? Who knew what she did as a baby to scare her mother away, maybe cried too much or didn't sleep enough. That was what she did: She caused mothers to leave. Her father would always be lonely as long as she was around.

She thought:
Two's company, three's a crowd.

She thought:
You will know when the time is right.

She thought:
This book will make you strong.

And the whole thing fell into place.

Fancy found it too hot in the kitchen, and took her breakfast outside for the breeze.

She sat on the edge of the porch, which burned her thighs, and carefully set her breakfast bowl, orange juice, and coffee around her. Radcliffe had offered to drive Cassie to school on his way to work, which was unusual. But she expected him back any moment. He had forgotten his lunch: She had just seen it in the fridge.

She was thinking vaguely of her prize-winning novel. The book she had finished reading the previous night had employed a lyrical tone. The one she had finished last week was written with startling coarseness. You had to choose your tone, she realized. That was one of the rules. You chose slapstick, pastoral, melancholy, magical, lyrical, poetic, or flatulent. But, she wondered, wouldn't you
increase
your chances of a prize if you combined some of these?

She began to formulate a sentence: “Pressing its delicate hoof into the mist-curling grass of the copse, the deer breathed the stench of gingivitis”—But then Radcliffe's car turned into the driveway, and he called through his open window, “Hey, Fance! Can you grab my tuna sandwich?”

When she opened the front screen door again, carrying his sandwich in a brown paper bag, she had an
aren't you silly?
expression ready on her face. But he was standing on the porch.

“Oh,” she said. “I was going to bring it to your car.”

The shape of him was dark against the sunlight.

“Right,” he said. “But, Fancy, I've got to tell you something. I can't stand this deception.”

She felt the familiar leap of excitement—
He's having an affair!
—but was so weary of that leap that she dispelled it with a breath of mocking air. “Ye-e-es?” she said almost tauntingly.

“Can we sit down?”

Obediently, she sat beside him on the edge of the porch.

He swiveled toward her, and began haltingly: “The reason I offered to drive Cassie to school this morning was that—now, you might think it was nice of me to make that offer, but the
reason
was that…”

“Ye-e-es?”

Then he told her his secret in a breathless rush. “The reason was that I didn't want you to see Cath Murphy! Because you're waiting for a call from her, and maybe you would say something to her about it, but you're never going to get a call, Fancy, I made the whole thing up.
I
went to the parent-teacher night in your place! When Cassie got stung by a bee, and you took her off to the hospital, well, that's what I did. I just went. And I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it. I just couldn't stop thinking that the bee sting had happened for a
reason.
The reason being that
I
was meant to get to meet Cath.
Me.
A non-Zing family member. The first of us to meet her.
I
wanted to talk to her, to see her, to have
her
see me.
I
wanted
her
to meet me! Fancy, I am
so, so
sorry.”

Fancy stared at her husband. She shifted away from him slightly. “So, I didn't get to meet Cath first,” she said. “And Cath is not going to call me. Right?”

“Right,” he agreed. “I am so sorry.”

“Fine,” she said, “it's fine, Radcliffe. But can I just check something with you? When Cassie got stung by a bee—our Cassie who is allergic
to bees, who could die from a bee sting—when that happened, Radcliffe, all you could think about was going to the parent-teacher night?”

“Mmm,” he nodded mournfully.

Marbie left her message for Nathaniel, hung up the phone, and breathed in sharply. The sound of the phone clicking back onto its hook had struck her with the truth. Nathaniel would never call her back.

She could send as many letters as she liked, she could leave apology messages, and messages inviting him to hot-air balloon festivals, she could invite him on a trip to the moon, but Nathaniel was never coming back.

Then she had to stop this unfurling chain because she was sneezing. Her sneezes were immense and shivery.

She thought she might just get back into bed for a while before she packed for her weekend with her parents.

She saw herself in the bedroom mirror—bleary eyes, pink nose—and gathered her bedclothes around her. She had used up a whole box of tissues in the night, but felt around the cardboard bottom, hoping for a single loose tissue. She found something odd and crackling.

What was this crumpled piece of paper doing in the bottom of a tissue box?

Cath arrived early on Friday morning and sat on a bench in the sun.

The weather reminded her of her early meetings with Warren: the day he stood at the opposite end of the second grade balcony and pulled his funny face; the day he brought her a coffee, saying, “White, no sugar, yes?”

Such a soft, warm breeze, such a tender, blue sky. It was spring, and the weather had relented, promising gentle surprises. The warmth made
her long for the touch of Warren's hands and, for the first time in a while, she was confident of that touch. Today could easily be someday!

A voice behind her said, “White, no sugar, yes?” and a coffee appeared in the air.

Warren Woodford straddled the bench like someone riding a horse, and now he was facing her shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the coffee and smiling at him.

He smiled back. There was something so generous in his smile that she almost wept with relief. “Cath,” he said, “I need to tell you something.”

She continued to trust in his smile.

“This morning something happened,” he explained. “Something amazing. Bree and I woke up really early, and we looked at each other, and I'm sorry, Cath, but we fell in love again.”

“Ah-hah!” she said, kindly, as if a child had shown her a magic trick.

“I'm so sorry about all this, Cath, but I've got to say, for me, it's a relief. I couldn't go on this way much longer. It just happened, out of nowhere, we fell in love again.”

“You're not in love,” Cath began her speech, carefully but firmly. “You're not in love because she doesn't know what you've been—”

“That's the thing,” said Warren. “I told her last night. Well, she kind of already knew, she says. She says she sensed something—that there was a secret just out of her reach—and that's why she's been feeling so nervous and on edge. It's so much better to know than not know, she says. Still, she's pretty upset, but we talked and talked and we both cried, and it was great. It was like we'd never talked before. And that's why, this morning, early, we woke up and fell in love again.”

“That's why, is it?” Cath was suddenly outraged. “Lessons on how to save a marriage by Warren Woodford. Lesson one, cheat on your wife.
Lesson two, tell her about it. She'll fall head over heels! You just
talked
and you
cried,
and now you're both in
love,
and I really, really think you should
trust
that feeling, Warren, that must be
so real.
”

She saw his panicked expression and adjusted her face. “Warren,” she said, “come on, seriously. I see how it must feel like a relief, but she
can't
love you now she knows. She must hate us both.”