The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(4)
Luckily for them, their father was preoccupied with his patients, who furtively made their way inside through a separate entrance before descending to a basement office in the Owenses’ town house. While therapy was in progress, Vincent often sneaked down to the coat closet to search a patient’s pockets for cash, mints, and Valium. Then all three children would lie on the kitchen floor, relaxed by the little yellow pills Vincent had found, sucking on Brach’s Ice Blue mints as they listened in to the sobbing confessions that filtered up through the heating vent. Due to these eavesdropping sessions they knew about obsessions, depressions, manias, sexual appetites, and transference long before most people their age knew what a psychiatrist was.
Every year a box of lavender-scented black soap wrapped in crinkly cellophane would arrive from Massachusetts. Susanna refused to say who the sender was, yet she faithfully washed with it. Perhaps that was why she had such a creamy, radiant complexion. Franny discovered the potential of the soap after she nicked a bar one Christmas. When she and Jet sampled it, the soap caused their skin to shine, but it also made them so silly they couldn’t stop laughing. They filled the sink with bubbles and splashed water at each other and were soon soaked to the skin. When their mother found them throwing the slippery bar of soap back and forth like a hot potato, she snatched it from their grasp.
“This is not for children,” she said, though Franny was nearly seventeen and Jet would turn sixteen next summer.
Surely their mother was hiding something from them under the clouds of mascara she wore. She never spoke of her family, and the children had never met a single relation. As they grew older their suspicions grew as well. Susanna Owens spoke in riddles and never gave a straight answer. Uncross your knives, she’d insist if there was a quarrel at the table. Butter melting in a dish meant someone nearby was in love, and a bird in the house could take your bad luck out the window. She insisted that her children wear blue for protection and carry packets of lavender in their pockets, though Franny always threw the packets away the minute she was out of her mother’s sight.
They began to wonder if their mother wasn’t a spy. Russia was the enemy, and at Starling students were often made to crouch beneath their desks, hands over their heads, for bomb-safety drills. Spies had no family connections and dubious histories, just as their mother had, and they spoke in double-talk, as she did. They fudged their histories to protect their true backgrounds and intentions, and Susanna never mentioned attending college nor did she discuss where she grew up or reveal anything about her parents, other than claiming they had died young while on a cruise. The Owens children knew only the slimmest facts: Susanna had grown up in Boston and been a model in Paris before settling down with the children’s father, who was an orphan with no family of his own. Their mother was terribly chic at all times, wearing black and gold sunglasses even on cloudy days, and lavish designer clothes from Paris, and she always wore Chanel No. 5 perfume, so that every room she was in was deliciously scented.
“And then you all came along,” Susanna would say cheerfully, when anyone could tell having children had been a trial for her. It was obvious she wasn’t meant for domestic life. She was a terrible cook and seemed puzzled by all household duties. The washing machine caused her endless grief and often overflowed. The stove was on the fritz more often than not, and every culinary dish she attempted came out half-baked. Even macaroni and cheese was an ordeal. A hired woman came in once a week to mop and vacuum, but she was fired after Susanna found her teaching the children to use a Ouija board, which was confiscated and burned in the fireplace.
“You know the rules!” she cried. “Do not call up darkness when you are unprepared for the consequences.” Susanna looked quite mad, stuffing the Ouija board into the flames with a poker.
Her penchant for the rules only made her children more curious. Why did their mother draw the curtains on May Day, leaving them in the dark? Why did she wear sunglasses on moonlit nights? Why did she panic when they ran out of salt and quickly rush down to buy some at the market? They looked for clues about their heritage, but there were few keepsakes, although one day Franny discovered an old photograph album wrapped in muslim on the top shelf of the hallway closet. There were faded pictures of women in a lush, overgrown garden, a troupe of girls in long skirts grinning at the camera, a black cat on a porch, their mother when she was young, standing in front of Notre-Dame. When Susanna found Franny curled up on the settee in the parlor studying the album, she immediately took it away. “It’s for your own good,” she said tenderly. “All I want for you is a normal life.”
“Mother,” Franny sighed. “What makes you think that’s what I want?”
What is meant to be is bound to happen, whether or not you approve. One June morning, their lives were forever changed. It was 1960, and all at once there was a sense that anything might occur, suddenly and without warning. It had been a great relief when the end of the school year arrived, but life at home was stifling. New York City was a cauldron of pollution and humidity. Just as the temperature climbed into the nineties and the siblings were already bored out of their minds, a letter arrived in the mail. The envelope seemed to pulse, as if it had a beating heart. There was no stamp, yet the U.S. Post Office had seen fit to slip it through the mail slot in their front door.
Susanna took one look and said, “It’s from my aunt Isabelle.”