He floated closer. “Lily, tell me.”
“I… I, Fazire, I don’t know what’s going on. He was supposed to call. I had to leave so quickly and I wrote him a note, gave him my number here, told him what happened, told his
brother
what happened so
he
could tell him and he hasn’t called.” She stopped looking at Fazire and stared at the floor. “I can’t believe he hasn’t called, not after what I explained happened to my parents. And I’ve called him and the number isn’t working. I know it’s the right number but it’s been disconnected. I called his office but he isn’t returning my calls.” She finished, speaking as if to herself.
“Who?” Fazire asked.
Her incredible blue eyes lifted to his and there was a world of worry and hurt in them.
Then she said, “Nate.”
“Who, pray, is
Nate?
”
She fidgeted with her hands, dropping her head to stare at her nails.
“You remember my wish?” she asked.
How could he ever forget the most complicated wish ever?
“Yes,” Fazire answered.
Her eyes lifted again and in them was something that made Fazire’s genie heart beat a little faster.
“Well, it came true. His name is Nathaniel McAllister and he’s the most wonderful man ever. And, I think… Fazire, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have his baby.”
Fazire immediately stopped levitating and dropped heavily to the floor.
Then he screeched, “
What?
”
Lily shook her head and bit her lip before saying, “It was… I don’t know. I can’t think straight. It all happened so quickly. One second I was just, well, in London doing my normal London things. Going to museums, a little shopping…”
Fazire doubted it was a “little shopping”. Lily could shop like Jackie Robinson could steal a base.
She kept talking. “The next thing I knew I was going to fancy dinner parties and he was taking me out to romantic restaurants and midnight walks in the park and we made love again and again and again and it was so, it was…” she leaned forward, her eyes lighting before she whispered fervently, “
spectacular
. Mind-boggling. You
cannot
even imagine.”
Fazire tried floating again but could only get three feet off the floor. This was mainly because most of his concentration was spent on keeping his ears from burning and possibly dripping blood at his Lily-child talked about mind-boggling love-making.
“Then Mom and Dad…” She couldn’t finish. They both still could not talk about it.
“He hasn’t called,” Fazire finished for her.
“No.”
“Has he called, maybe, your thingie-ma-bobbie?” Fazire tried.
“My what?”
“The thing that records voices on the phone.”
“My answering machine?”
“Yes, that.”
“I picked up my messages, none were from him. He doesn’t know my number anyway. I was always in London with him, he never had to phone me and I’m not listed.”
Fazire thought for awhile. He was, although out of practice, very good at what he did. Sometimes genies could go for years and years without having their bottle rubbed so they knew there might be magical delays and any good genie prepared well for them. Fazire, if he did think so himself, was very, very good with his wishes.
And he’d made absolutely certain sure Lily’s was the best of all.
Something else must be happening with this…
Nate
.
Fazire peered at his mistress and made his decision.
Decision made, he declared, “Then we must go and find him.”
* * * * *
Fazire walked up the short staircase to the beautiful white house that Lily told him was something called “Georgian”. It had black shutters and in every window there were window boxes filled so full with startling red geraniums, you couldn’t tell where one flower stopped and the other started. Each box was trailing lacy, green ivy. There were fancy wrought iron fences in front of each house all were painted a shiny, perfect black.
All the houses looked exactly the same. It was almost as if they had a pact that everyone on the whole street would have the same coloured geraniums with trailing ivy so the street would look tidy and splendiferous.
Fazire very much wanted to hate this place called England and he was pretty certain he’d really hate London for although Jim had found his bottle in a market in London, Fazire had actually come from a bazaar in Morocco and never been released in Europe at all. But even though some of London was rather shocking, busy, grimy and graffiti-filled, this street was quite lovely.
During their terrifying plane ride (neither Lily nor Fazire had a good time on that plane after what happened to Becky and Will,
and
it had far more than two engines), Lily told him some people lived in this house that knew her Nate, a man and woman named Victor and Laura. She said they were nice people, kind and caring and they’d taken care of her after Nate had saved her life. Or, she’d understated the story when Fazire had been struck dumb at the idea that her life was in danger, and she explained this Nate saved her and her purse from a purse snatcher.
Lily was nervous, he could see her shaking and he stood two steps behind her. He was certain everything would be all right. This Nate had come to her through Fazire’s wish so of course it would be all right.
She knocked, using the hoop that went through a brass lion’s face nose. Fazire thought that was peculiar, he’d never seen a lion with a hoop through its nose but he figured he’d mention that titbit later maybe use it as an opening gambit to some future conversation with Lily’s Nate.
A dark-haired woman answered the door. Fazire was surprised that she was young, not much older than Lily. She was also crying, her face wet with tears and a mottled red with the force of her emotion. Fazire thought she might have been pretty without the tear-stained face but then decided she was not when she looked at Lily and her face contorted with repugnance and her eyes filled with hate.
“Oh, hello, Danielle, I was…” Lily paused then asked, “Are you all right?”
Lily stopped speaking and Fazire heard her voice was concerned as she lost all track of their quest and asked after the girl who was looking at her with such venom. Fazire wanted to grab Lily back but he stayed where he was in order to let her do what she needed to do.
“No, I’m not all right,” the girl snapped. “What are you doing here, Lily?”
Fazire found himself thinking these people who lived here weren’t very kind and caring at all.
Lily hesitated, somehow not surprised at this reaction from the woman, then she went on. “This is a little embarrassing but I had to leave town unexpectedly and now that I’m back, I went to Nate’s and his doorman says he doesn’t live there anymore. I was just –”
The woman didn’t allow her to finish, her face changed to what looked somewhat sly and scheming to Fazire but he lost those thoughts at the next words she said.
“Nate’s dead,” Danielle informed them coldly.
Then, without further ado, she slammed the door right in Lily’s face.
Lily stood staring at the door, frozen to the spot.
Fazire stood behind her, just as frozen.
And then, after what seemed like an age (and Fazire had lived many of them so he knew exactly how they felt), slowly she turned and stopped and simply stared down at him, every bit of colour had drained from her face.
Two years ago she’d lost her beloved grandmother. Barely two months ago she’d lost her parents. Now her new beloved boyfriend, the romantic hero that was supposed to sweep her off her feet and at the sound of their meeting and courtship he certainly did that, and love her more than the earth was dead.
She was twenty-two years old, pregnant with only a genie to call family.
And the expression on her face showed every bit of that pain and agony.
Fazire ascended the two last steps and carefully put his arm around her fragile, tense shoulders.
“Let’s get home,” he murmured to his Lily-child.
She didn’t move. In fact she seemed rooted to the spot.
Then she whispered, “But Fazire, where’s home?”
He had no answer for that, for he didn’t know.
Then it came to him.
“Wherever we make it, my lovely.”
Nathaniel
There were no genies in Nathaniel McAllister’s life.
Nathaniel’s father died before he was born. A knife fight in a pub brawl that had started because of his father’s bad temper and penchant for fisticuffs and ended with him in a pool of his own blood.
Not that Nathaniel’s mother, Deirdre, would have known that was his father. It could have been one of three, maybe even four, candidates. She did figure it out in a hazy way as he grew older and she’d look at her son and had some recollection of that drunken, drug-fuelled night with his tall, lean, muscular, good-looking father.
Without genies or a parent who wasn’t inebriated or incapacitated due to drugs all the time, Nathaniel learned early how to take care of himself. His mother was usually sleeping it off when she should have been getting him up and getting him cleaned and fed. Instinct and survival taught him to do the most basic tasks and he could never remember a time that he didn’t do all of those things for himself. Indeed a great deal of the time he had to steal from his mother’s purse or, somewhat more dangerously, one of her lover’s wallets, to go to the news agent and get himself some milk and food. If his mother didn’t have any money or there wasn’t a lover around, which was often in the case of the former, but luckily, depending on how you looked at it, not the latter, sometimes he had to steal the milk and food from the news agent. However, he learned quickly to pick ones further away from home.
Nathaniel McAllister learned everything quickly.
His mother got him into school though and he liked it there. He was smart, very smart. He knew this because the teachers told him so. Even the headmaster brought him into his office to have what the head called “a chat”. They tried to tell his mother. Nathaniel, they said, should go to special schools. He was far, far brighter than most children, far more advanced, even perhaps a genius. Nathaniel remembered everything, absolutely everything and he only needed to be told or shown once and he had it down pat. They said he was remarkable. They called him “gifted”.
Deirdre had no money for special schools for her son and no interest in her son at all, gifted or not. So there were no special schools for Nathaniel. There was nothing special for Nathaniel.
Thus forced to learn like normal not gifted children, Nathaniel became bored and restless. The teachers tried to help but there was only so much they could do. He didn’t skip school, not at first that came later. Being at school was better than being on the streets and definitely better than being at home.
Deirdre was a rather remarkable beauty and remained that way a lot longer than others would have, regardless of the booze and drugs she poured, swallowed, smoked, snorted or injected into her body. She might not have taken care of her lungs, nostrils, veins and liver but she took care of her appearance. She also had the advantage of her good, strong Scottish blood. She attracted men like a magnet and used them as best she could for whatever money, food, pills, drink or anything else she could get out of them. She allowed them to use her, debase her, abuse her, push her around and hit her, so these things would stay available in as much abundance as possible. She also allowed them to push around her son who, after awhile, got pretty damned sick of it and learned to dodge the fists agilely and later, defend himself skilfully with his own.
Finally, when Nathaniel was eleven, she got herself a man who stuck around awhile. This man was named Scott. Scott hung around mainly because he liked Nathaniel or Nate, as he called him. Scott was the kind of man who recognised the promise in the boy and thought he was destined for great things. Or the kind of great things that came about in Scott’s world.
Scott was not wrong or at least not entirely wrong.
He gave Nate “jobs”. Jobs that he would pay Nate to do sometimes even as much as twenty pounds.
Usually it was just taking packages and dropping them off at places or with people. This happened all the time in the light of day, even during school hours, or the dead of night. Although no adult in their right mind, although Nate knew very few adults in their right minds, would send a boy of eleven out in the early hours of the morning on the dangerous streets of London, Scott had no qualms about this. Nate was fast as lightening and learned quickly to melt into the shadows, not to mention he could take care of himself. Nate was young and knew no fear.
And Nate was very, very smart.
One night, months after Scott came into Nate’s live, the drop did not go well. Nate sensed the danger with an instinct that was not only bred but born in him. He was cautious, he was quiet and he became invisible as he watched. When he knew the drop was a bust, he exited the scene swiftly and without being seen. Instead of panicking, he kept a cool head, found one of his many hiding places and stashed the package.