The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(63)

Jet shaded her eyes and looked into the sky. She saw that a man was watching her and quickly scrambled to her feet. Her heart was pounding. She was so close to the hanging tree she felt dizzy. She had the blood of both accuser and accused running through her. The man stayed where he was. He was carrying a bunch of daffodils. They stared at each other, the only people in the cemetery. Before the Reverend could come any closer and chastise her and call out that she was a witch and a demon and had caused his son to die, Jet took off running. She ran so fast all she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears. She wanted to be dead and be beside Levi, but she was alive and so she ran. She didn’t stop in town, she didn’t wait for a bus. Instead, she found her way to Magnolia Street.

She knocked on Aunt Isabelle’s door. The light was on, but no one answered, so she went round to the garden. Isabelle was in the greenhouse beginning her seedlings. She didn’t seem the least surprised to see her niece on the threshold.

“You could have come here if you wanted daffodils,” she said when Jet walked in.

True enough, the yard was thick with them at this time of year, a sea of yellow. Jet saw that the garden was far ahead of the rest of town. The wisteria was already blooming; the climbing roses were budding.

“Looks as though you saw a ghost,” Isabelle said.

“I saw Levi’s father.”

“That Reverend doesn’t own the cemetery and he doesn’t own this town. You have your right to Levi’s memory.”

“I want to get rid of it,” Jet said.

“Do you?”

“I want to have no memory of him. Please,” she said to her aunt. “Please do this for me. I know you can do things like that. And I can pay you.” Jet was in tears.

“Jet, if I did that, then you wouldn’t be you.”

“Good! I don’t want to be me.” Jet had come to sit on a wooden bench, her hands folded on her lap. “I let Franny think I drank courage.”

“But you did,” her aunt said.

Isabelle signaled for Jet to follow her back to the house. There was a woman pacing on the porch. She stopped when she saw Isabelle. “Oh, Miss Owens,” she said. “If you could spare me a moment.”

“You’ll have to wait,” Isabelle told her. “Just sit down and be quiet.”

Jet followed her aunt into the kitchen, where Isabelle put up the kettle.

“I don’t want to keep that woman waiting,” Jet said.

“She’s waited twenty years for her husband to love her, she can wait another twenty minutes.”

When the tea was brewed they both sat down and had a cup.

“Taste familiar?” Isabelle asked.

“It’s what I had before.”

“You asked for caution but I gave you this. It was what you needed. And it’s what you have.”

Jet laughed and drank the rest of the tea. Was this what courage felt like?

“Once you forget a piece of your past, you forget it all. That’s not what you want, dear.”

Jet went to embrace her aunt, who was surprised by the unexpected show of emotion.

“I have a client,” Isabelle said. “Time for you to go.”

“Will her husband love her?”

“Would you want love you had to buy?” Isabelle asked.

Isabelle then called Charlie Merrill, who came in his old station wagon to give Jet a ride to the bus station. As they drove, Jet asked if he would take a detour. The cemetery gates were closed, but Charlie knew the trick to picking the lock with a screwdriver. He pushed the gates open for her and waited in his car, happy to listen to a basketball game on the radio.

It was nearly dark and Jet was glad she knew the way. She cut across the grass, luminous in the fading light. She was entitled to her memory and to this place.

Here lies the life I might have had once upon a time, the man I might have loved for all my life, the days we might have had.

Jet went to his headstone and knelt down. There were two bunches of daffodils. The Reverend hadn’t thrown hers away.

She lay down beside him once more, and this time she told him she would never forgive the world for taking him, but she had no choice but to go on. She was alive. She walked back in the pitch dark, glad she could see Charlie’s headlights cutting through the night.

“Everything all right?” Charlie Merrill said when she climbed back into the car. It smelled like cough drops and flannel.

Jet nodded. “I think I’ll go to the bus station now.”

He drove her there in time for the last bus. When he pulled over, Charlie handed her a paper bag. Inside was a small thermos and something wrapped in wax paper. “Your aunt sent along some tea. I think there’s some cake in there, too.”

Jet threw her arms around the old man, utterly surprising him.

“She’s a good lady,” he said, as if explaining her aunt to her. “Anyone who knows her knows that.”

He waited, his car idling, until the bus pulled away. It was likely Isabelle told him to do so, and he always did as she asked. His two boys had been heroin addicts; one was in prison by the time he was twenty, the other went half-mad with drugs. She’d fixed them both with one of those mixtures of hers. Afterward there’d been a knock at their door even though everyone knew Isabelle Owens didn’t call on people. She came to see the boys every night for two weeks, watching over his grown sons as if they were babies until they were well again. She charged him nothing for doing so. Now when his sons saw her on the street, or when they were working on her house and she looked in on them, the boys would elbow each other and stand up straight. They were still afraid of her even though she’d sat by their beds and fed them soup with a teaspoon.