He let the thought hang in space, uncompleted. Angie said, «Except maybe what?»
Marvyn swung on the doorframe one–handed, grinning his pirate grin at her. «I hate you calling me Ex–Lax. You know I hate it, and you keep doing it.»
«Okay, I won't do it anymore, ever again. I promise.»
«Mmm. Not good enough.» The grin had grown distinctly evil. «I think you ought to call me O Mighty One for two weeks.»
«What?» Now Angie was on her feet, misery briefly forgotten. «Give it up, Ex–Lax — two weeks? No chance!» They glared at each other in silence for a long moment before she finally said, «A week. Don't push it. One week, no more. And not in front of people!»
«Ten days.» Marvyn folded his arms. «Starting right now.» Angie went on glowering. Marvyn said, «You want that letter?»
«Yes.»
Marvyn waited.
«Yes, O Mighty One.» Triumphant, Marvyn held out his hand and Angie slapped it. She said, «When?»
«Tonight. No, tomorrow — going to the movies with Sunil and his family tonight. Tomorrow.» He wandered off, and Angie took her first deep breath in what felt like a year and a half. She wished she could tell Melissa that things were going to be all right, but she didn't dare; so she spent the day trying to appear normal — just the usual Angie, aimlessly content on a Saturday afternoon. When Marvyn came home from the movies, he spent the rest of the evening reading Hellboy comics in his room, with the Milady–kitten on his stomach. He was still doing it when Angie gave up peeking in at him and went to bed.
But he was gone on Sunday morning. Angie knew it the moment she woke up. She had no idea where he could be, or why. She had rather expected him to work whatever spell he settled on in his bedroom, under the stern gaze of his wizard mentors. But he wasn't there, and he didn't come to breakfast. Angie told their mother that they'd been up late watching television together, and that she should probably let Marvyn sleep in. And when Mrs. Luke grew worried after breakfast, Angie went to his room herself, returning with word that Marvyn was working intensely on a project for his art class, and wasn't feeling sociable. Normally she would never have gotten away with it, but her parents were on their way to brunch and a concert, leaving her with the usual instructions to feed and water the cat, use the twenty on the cabinet for something moderately healthy, and to check on Marvyn «now and then," which actually meant frequently. («The day we don't tell you that," Mr. Luke said once, when she objected to the regular duty, «will be the very day the kid steals a kayak and heads for Tahiti.» Angie found it hard to argue the point.)
Alone in the empty house — more alone than she felt she had ever been — Angie turned constantly in circles, wandering from room to room with no least notion of what to do. As the hours passed and her brother failed to return, she found herself calling out to him aloud. «Marvyn? Marvyn, I swear, if you're doing this to drive me crazy … O Mighty One, where are you? You get back here, never mind the damn letter, just get back!» She stopped doing this after a time, because the cracks and tremors in her voice embarrassed her, and made her even more afraid.
Strangely, she seemed to feel him in the house all that time. She kept whirling to look over her shoulder, thinking that he might be sneaking up on her to scare her, a favorite game since his infancy. But he was never there.
Somewhere around noon the doorbell rang, and Angie tripped over herself scrambling to answer it, even though she had no hope — almost no hope — of its being Marvyn. But it was Lidia at the door — Angie had forgotten that she usually came to clean on Sunday afternoons. She stood there, old and smiling, and Angie hugged her wildly and wailed, «Lidia, Lidia, socorro, help me, ayudame, Lidia.» She had learned Spanish from the housekeeper when she was too little to know she was learning it.
Lidia put her hands on Angie's shoulders. She put her back a little and looked into her face, saying, «Chuchi, dime que pasa contigo?» She had called Angie Chuchi since childhood, never explaining the origin or meaning of the word.
«It's Marvyn," Angie whispered. «It's Marvyn.»
She started to explain about the letter, and Marvyn's promise, but Lidia only nodded and asked no questions. She said firmly, «El Viejo puede ayudar.»
Too frantic to pay attention to gender, Angie took her to mean Yemaya, the old woman in the farmer's market who had told Marvyn that he was a brujo. She said, «You mean la santera," but Lidia shook her head hard. «No, no, El Viejo .You go out there, you ask to see El Viejo. Solamente El Viejo. Los otros no pueden ayudarte.»
The others can't help you. Only the old man. Angie asked where she could find El Viejo, and Lidia directed her to a Santeria shop on Bowen Street. She drew a crude map, made sure Angie had money with her, kissed her on the cheek and made a blessing sign on her forehead. «Cuidado, Chuchi," she said with a kind of cheerful solemnity, and Angie was out and running for the Gonzales Avenue bus, the same one she took to school. This time she stayed on a good deal farther.
The shop had no sign, and no street number, and it was so small that Angie kept walking past it for some while. Her attention was finally caught by the objects in the one dim window, and on the shelves to right and left. There was an astonishing variety of incense, and of candles encased in glass with pictures of black saints, as well as boxes marked Fast Money Ritual Kit, and bottles of Elegua Floor Wash, whose label read «Keeps Trouble From Crossing Your Threshold.» When Angie entered, the musky scent of the place made her feel dizzy and heavy and out of herself, as she always felt when she had a cold coming on. She heard a rooster crowing, somewhere in back.
She didn't see the old woman until her chair creaked slightly, because she was sitting in a corner, halfway hidden by long hanging garments like church choir robes, but with symbols and patterns on them that Angie had never seen before. The woman was very old, much older even than Lidia, and she had an absurdly small pipe in her toothless mouth. Angie said, «Yemaya?» The old woman looked at her with eyes like dead planets.
Angle's Spanish dried up completely, followed almost immediately by her English. She said, «My brother … my little brother … I'm supposed to ask for El Viejo. The old one, viejo santero? Lidia said.» She ran out of words in either language at that point. A puff of smoke crawled from the little pipe, but the old woman made no other response.
Then, behind her, she heard a curtain being pulled aside. A hoarse, slow voice said, «Quieres El Viejo? Me.»
Angie turned and saw him, coming toward her out of a long hallway whose end she could not see. He moved deliberately, and it seemed to take him forever to reach her, as though he were returning from another world. He was black, dressed all in black, and he wore dark glasses, even in the dark, tiny shop. His hair was so white that it hurt her eyes when she stared. He said, «Your brother.»
«Yes," Angie said. «Yes. He's doing magic for me — he's getting something I need — and I don't know where he is, but I know he's in trouble, and I want him back!» She did not cry or break down — Marvyn would never be able to say that she cried over him — but it was a near thing.
El Viejo pushed the dark glasses up on his forehead, and Angie saw that he was younger than she had first thought — certainly younger than Lidia — and that there were thick white half–circles under his eyes. She never knew whether they were somehow natural, or the result of heavy makeup; what she did see was that they made his eyes look bigger and brighter — all pupil, nothing more. They should have made him look at least slightly comical, like a reverse–image raccoon, but they didn't.
«I know you brother," El Viejo said. Angie fought to hold herself still as he came closer, smiling at her with the tips of his teeth. «A brujito —little, little witch, we know. Mama and me, we been watching.» He nodded toward the old woman in the chair, who hadn't moved an inch or said a word since Angie's arrival. Angie smelled a damp, musty aroma, like potatoes going bad.