“Aren’t you going to ask me my name?”
Milo paused at this, chewed back those words he had all lined up for the show. “Nuh-no, Missus Felder. They all nuh-know it already.”
She nodded at this, like it was what she had been expecting all along. We all breathed a sigh of relief, but half of us were saying something pretty foul with that breath, let me tell you. Milo smiled a little wobbly smile and got with the shuffling again until he was all good and ready.
This time he got three words into the patter—three perfect words, three flawless, ordinary, magical words—
Then: “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m from?”
Milo shook his head, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His hands missed the cards and three of them went flying out: an eight of spades, a red jack, and the two of diamonds. Milo tried snatching them out of the air, but he missed with those little hands of his and they fluttered like white doves to the grass.
He placed the deck down steadily on the card table, and all the while Missus Felder was watching him with a look as wide and innocent as his own. There was a hush. We all knew something was coming. The kid knew something was coming. The kid was the kind of kid born with enough sense to know when something was coming but not enough to figure how to get out of the way. We could see the poor kid’s hands were trembling. He stooped to grab the cards, and as he was stooping, off slid that the black magician’s hat.
Missus Felder was faster than a rattler. Like lightning striking or tragedy.
The hat was in her hand then. She was holding it up to the audience. She was squinting at the inside of the brim of it.
“My boy,” she said, squinting away, “my boy, it seems as if you’ve dropped this.”
Milo straightened up right away with only the red jack in his hands. He was staring at the hat. He was staring at Missus Felder.
“Aww, c’mon,” someone whispered in the audience; we didn’t know who, but we loved that person.
“Come now, Milo, we can’t have the magician without his hat, can we?”
Milo didn’t move. No one moved. No one dared to. Only the breeze tickling at the edges of his star-spattered cape.
“Come here, boy. Now.” Her voice cracked like a whip. Milo couldn’t ignore it. None of us could ignore it, our feet itched to stand. Ellie Hawley went so far as taking that first step forward before she caught hold of herself and paused.
Milo, though, he was too young to know better. He had been trained to obey voices like Missus Felder’s. He was stepping forward, he was stepping forward, and there—he was forward, he was just in front of her, and she was putting down the hat, she was resting it gently on his head, and she was tugging just so at the brim to set it straight.
And she was tugging at it.
And she was tugging at it.
And down came the hat an inch farther.
And down came the hat another inch.
She was still tugging at it, still smiling like she was doing a favour for Milo, but none of us could see his face anymore. The hat was past his nose. The hat was past his mouth. The hat was past his chin, but Missus Felder just kept tugging it down and down and down. Now his shoulders were gone, and it was taking the boy up into it, Milo, he was just disappearing into the hat, disappearing to his knees and his shin and his ankles until the hat was resting on the ground.
Missus Felder blinked as if she was confused. She blinked as if she didn’t understand what had happened. Then she picked up the hat. Quizzical. She held it out to the audience, showed us all the inside and it was empty. Perfectly empty.
“Well,” she said, almost apologetically. “I guess that’s that, then.”
And she stepped off the stage.
The thing about magic is it only works when you let it. It only works when you believe in it entirely, when you give yourself over to it entirely. Magic can only give you a thing you want that badly, that desperately. No one can work magic over you. You can only work magic over yourself.
Cheryl Felder knew something about magic.
There were stories about Cheryl Felder, stories that poor Sandifer kid ought to have known the way that all kids know whose trees not to filch apples from and which backyards shouldn’t be ventured into for Frisbees and baseballs. Some might say that these sorts of stories were nonsense and spoke only to the curmudgeonly tendencies of the grumbles who reside in any town block.
But those people would be dead wrong.
After Sayer disappeared not a single soul spoke, not a bird twittered, not a skirt fluttered in the breeze. You could see those faces, each of them white as snow, white as a snow-woman caught in a melt.
Lillian trembled, but she said nothing.
She watched Missus Felder pluck a crustless tuna fish sandwich off the platter and vanish it with three remorseless bites.
“Could use some cayenne,” she said with a sprung smile, “but all around, fine work, Lillian. Thanks for the show.”
Cheryl Felder knew something about magic, and the biggest trick she knew was that people don’t like messing with it. Messing with magic was like sticking your hand down a blind hole, you never knew if there might be treasure at the bottom or if it might be some rattler’s hole. And all those women, they had something to lose, they had sons of their own, they had husbands, they had pretty hair or blue cotton frocks—something they didn’t want vanished. So after a while each of them stood up and collected leftover plates still piled high with uneaten liquorice strands or oatmeal-raisin cookies and then each of them filed silently past Lillian Sandifer with neither a glance nor a touch nor a whisper of comfort.
Don’t be too hard on them.
They had loved that boy. We had all loved that boy.
They tried to make up for it over the next couple of months, knowing as we all did what a bad time Lillian would be having with that empty room at the top of the stairs, the room filled with arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. They dropped off casseroles. Their sons took over the raking of the lawn and the watering of the flowerbeds. Ellie Hawley brought over a fresh-baked apple pie every Sunday. But it was never spoken of, why this neighbourly hospitality was due.
And Missus Felder, she did the same as she had always done. She shopped at the grocery store, squeezing peaches and plums to be sure they were ripe. She got her hair done once a week at the salon at the corner of Broad and Vine.
The missuses of the neighbourhood never spoke to her of it. None could manage it. I wanted to. I did. That little boy had a way of being loved that seemed a brand of magic all his own, but if there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t meddle in this.
Once I saw Lillian try, but only once.
This was about three weeks after it had happened. Poor Lillian was looking wasted and fat at the same time, her cheekbones sharp as fishhooks but her chin sagging like a net. Joe had gone on one of his business trips out of town, leaving her by her lonesome for the big old holiday weekend. All the ladies of the Hollow were bringing out bowls of punch and wobbling gelatine towers filled with fruit and marshmallows, while the children lit up Burning Schoolhouses and Big Bertha firecrackers. There was a fizzy feeling to the air on those kinds of days, as it exploded with pops and whistles and sparks and the smell of hamburger sizzling on the grill.
Missus Felder, she came out too for the block party and she brought with her a bowl of plump, red strawberries. She set them up at the end of her driveway on a little wooden table with a lace cloth thrown over, and she handed them out to kiddies as they whizzed by.
Now she was trimming the hats off them, one by one. Snip! A little stalk and a flourish of leaves went skidding onto the sidewalk. Snip!
And there was Lillian standing in front of her, trembling, thin-boned, in a yellow print dress that made her skin seem old as last year’s newspaper.