Mom said softly, “I wasn’t at all happy when Val told me about his old charm coming to life again. My mother did not believe in coincidence either.”
“You did not tell me any of this,” said Val.
I stared across the room at Val again. He still felt like the cause of everything that had gone wrong. He was looking at Mom, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to meet—or not meeting—his eyes. His shadows eddied and wrinkled, like a pond you’ve thrown a rock into.
“I know,” said Mom. “Before, it didn’t seem necessary. It was nothing to do with me any more, except for my sisters, and we will see any of them rarely. They behaved themselves around Ber. I would ask them to behave around you too. After . . . after you told me about your charm . . . I still wanted to keep that door closed, you see.”
“Why didn’t your sisters know—about Val?” I said. “Why didn’t they, um, notice anything? Gwenda and Rhonwyn were at the wedding.”
“Probably because they weren’t looking,” said Mom. “They know how I feel about magic—how I felt after Ber died, and how I still feel.”
“I wasn’t looking either,” I said. “I haven’t wanted to see anything that shouldn’t be there!”
“I know,” said Mom again. “I’m sorry. I wish you’d told me. . . . No, don’t,” as I opened my mouth. “I know why you didn’t. I’m sorry about that too. You’ll fall in love some day and—and I hope it doesn’t make you stupid about something that matters.”
“It is not a common skill to see the shadows,” said Val. “Usually you must be trained to see them. And still not every magician can.”
“I can’t,” said Mom. “Even watching Maggie and Mongo, I still can’t see what they see.” I wanted her to say “but I’m not a magician.” She didn’t.
She and Val looked at each other. It was like something in a cartoon. I swear I could see the hearts and flowers rushing back and forth between them like on a golden sunbeam. It was kind of cute. It was kind of icky. Mom said, “I knew I should have told you about my family after you told me about—what happened with Maggie. But I didn’t want to think that the magic I’d renounced wouldn’t leave me alone. That I had married someone with—with magic ability. Which my daughter, who I’d been relieved to believe had no magic in her, was apparently sensitive to—sensitive enough to be seriously disturbed by what she had seen. But I was still telling myself perhaps it was just one old charm . . .”
I tried not to sound accusatory when I said to Val, “But—if you’re a magician, if you’re still a magician, why are you here? Why did they let you in? What went wrong? I mean—”
Val laughed, more a kind of cough, with no humor in it. “I understand what you mean. I tested negative. It is a blood test, yes? It is the same test you had.”
Mom nodded.
“Plus all the scans, the forms, the interviews. My tools were dead—I was dead, to magic. And there was no mention of magic in my background. It is not usually possible to—disable—someone’s magic when they are an adult, when they have used it as much as I had done. I was a special case. My government gave me a new life when it took away my magic—a new life on paper, which I had to memorize. When I thought they had taken away my magic. All my magic. I did not want to tell even Elaine the truth. I too wanted—badly—to keep that door closed.”
“Why?” I said. “Why did they take your magic away? Why did you let them? Why were you a special case?”
Mom didn’t try to stop me from asking this time. She was waiting for an answer too.
The shadows around Val exploded. Even after seven months of watching them creeping and twitching and scuttling around, and flaring up huge and collapsing to almost nothing, I’d never seen anything like this. Even Mongo went very still, watching them: his ears were pricked, but he was stiff and tense against me.
Val said, “I killed my best friend. Upon the order of my government. I said that I would do this thing on the condition that afterward they took my magic away so that I could never do anything like it again. They agreed. I was too blind with despair at the time to realize that this was what they wanted: if I killed him then they would see me as potentially the threat he had become.”
I killed my best friend. I heard Mom suck her breath in sharply. Val looked hundreds of years old as he raised his head, first to meet Mom’s eyes and then mine. I had never seen anything so bleak as the look on his face. Not even Mom after Dad died.
I killed my best friend.
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop hating Val in a minute, or stop being afraid of the shadows, even if one of them had come and said hello, and smelled nice, and was a girl and not an it. Even if Val looked like most of him had died with his friend.
But shouldn’t I be afraid of a man who had killed his best friend? Even if his government told him to do it. Even if doing it had made him hundreds of years old.
And he was married to my mom.
Had he grown up with his best friend, like I’d grown up with Jill? I thought of Jill and me getting piggyback rides from Arnie, borrowing each other’s clothes, helping each other with her homework (Algebra I had almost destroyed me, but William Faulkner had almost destroyed her), being there, even when we were mad at each other. I killed my best friend. What . . . what if Jill’s foresight got really powerful, and she could predict everything? What if our government decided she was really dangerous, and . . .
I couldn’t imagine it.
I looked at the shadow lake again so I didn’t have to look at Val. Hix had sidled farther off to one side so that she was detached from the rest. When she saw me looking at her—if saw is the right word, if what I’d seen was eyes—a little ripple went through half a dozen of the feet I could see. Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. It made me smile involuntarily. So what if she had too many legs, or feet, or hands, or paws, or whatever. Whatever it was she did a great wave.
The shadows had been scaring me crazy for seven months. Could I believe they’d come from Orzaskan with Val, despite whatever his government had supposedly done to him, because they wanted to stay with someone so powerfully evil he’d killed his best friend? What did I know about them? I looked at them, sprawled and splashed and dangling around him. If someone was asking me, I’d say they looked like a flock or a pack clustering around the wounded member of their company.
Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. And Hix, I thought, is trying to bridge the Grand Canyon between him and me.
Maybe I’m just too easily wheedled by anything I start identifying as a critter.
And then—speaking of too many feet—there was a noise on the stairs like a troupe of giants, and Ran appeared. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the big meeting? Maggie”—obviously disapproving—“what’s wrong with you? And Mongo’s on the sofa?”
I sat up straighter, and let my arm drop off Mom’s shoulders. “I have a headache,” I said, which was the first thing I could think of. The idea of telling Ran any of this was way too complicated. Also he told his buddies everything, as I had (horrible) cause to know.