Practical Magic (31 page)

“Do we have to?” Gillian groans.

“We do,” Aunt Jet is sorry to say. “Just little things about him. For instance—how did he die?”

Antonia and Kylie are gulping diet Cokes and listening like crazy. The hair on their arms is standing on end; this could get really interesting.

Sally has brought a pot of mint tea to the table, along with a chipped cup her daughters gave her one Mother’s Day, which has always been her favorite. Sally can’t drink coffee anymore; the scent of it conjures Gary up so completely she could have sworn he was sitting at the table when Gillian was pouring water through the filter this morning. She tells herself it’s the lack of caffeine that’s been making her lethargic, but that’s not what’s wrong. She’s been unusually quiet today, moody enough to make Antonia and Kylie take notice. She seems so different. The girls have had the feeling that the woman who was once their mother is gone forever. It’s not only that her black hair is loose, instead of being pulled away from her face; it’s how sad she looks, how far away.

“I don’t think we should discuss this in front of the children, ” Sally says.

But the children are riveted; they’ll die if they don’t hear what happened next; they simply won’t be able to stand it.

“Mother!” they cry.

They’re almost women. And there’s not a thing Sally can do about it. So she shrugs and nods to Gillian, giving her the okay.

“Well,” Gillian says, “I guess I killed him.”

The aunts exchange a look. In their opinion this is one thing Gillian is not capable of. “How?” they ask. This is the girl who would scream if she stepped on a spider in her bare feet. If she pricked her finger and drew blood she’d announce she was ready to faint and then proceed to fall on the floor.

Gillian admits she used nightshade, a plant she always had contempt for when she was a child, pretending it was ragweed so she could give it a good pull when the aunts asked her to clear out the garden. When the aunts ask for the dosage she used and Gillian tells them, the aunts nod, pleased. Exactly as they thought. If the aunts know anything, they know nightshade. Such a dosage wouldn’t kill a fox terrier, let alone a six-foot-tall man.

“But he’s dead,” Gillian says, stunned to hear that her remedy could not have killed him. She turns to Sally. “I know he was dead.”

“Definitely dead,” Sally agrees.

“Not by your hand.” Frances could not be more certain of it. “Not unless he was a chipmunk.”

Gillian throws her arms around the aunts. Aunt Frances’s announcement has filled her with hope. It’s a silly and ridiculous thing to possess at her age, particularly on this awful night, but Gillian doesn’t give a damn. Better late than never, that’s the way she sees it.

“I’m innocent,” Gillian cries.

Sally and the aunts exchange a look; they don’t know about that.

“In this case,” Gillian adds when she sees their expressions.

“What killed him?” Sally asks the aunts.

“It could have been anything.” Jet shrugs.

“Alcohol,” Kylie proposes. “Years of it.”

“His heart,” Antonia suggests.

Frances announces that they may as well stop this guessing game; they’ll never know what killed him, but they’re still left with a body in the yard, and that is why the aunts have brought along their recipe for getting rid of the many nasty things one can find in a garden—slugs or aphids, the bloody remains of a crow, torn apart by his rivals, or the sort of weeds that are so poisonous it’s impossible to pull them by hand, even when wearing thick leather gloves. The aunts know precisely how much lye to add to the lime, much more than they include when they boil up their black soap, which is especially beneficial to a woman’s skin if she washes with it every night. Bars of the aunts’ soap, wrapped in clear cellophane, can be found in health-food stores in Cambridge and in several specialty shops along Newbury Street, and this has bought not only a new roof for their old house but a state-of-the-art septic system as well.

At home the aunts always use the big cast-iron cauldron, which has been in the kitchen since Maria Owens first built the house, but here Sally’s largest pasta pot will have to do. They’ll have to boil the ingredients for three and a half hours, so even though Kylie is always nervous that someone down at Del Vecchio’s will recognize her voice as the one belonging to the wise-acre who had all those pizzas delivered to Mr. Frye’s house a while back, she phones in and asks for two large pies to be delivered, one with anchovies, for the aunts, the other cheese and mushroom with extra sauce.

The mixture on the back burner starts to bubble, and by the time the delivery boy arrives, the sky has grown stormy and dark, although beneath the thick layers of clouds is a perfect white moon. The delivery boy knocks three times and hopes that Antonia Owens, whom he once sat next to in algebra, will appear. Instead, it’s Aunt Frances who yanks open the door. The cuffs of her sleeves are smoky, from all the lye she’s been measuring, and her eyes are as cold as iron.

“What?” she demands of the boy, who has already clutched the pizzas tightly to his chest simply because of the sight of her.

“Pizza delivery,” he manages to say.

“This is your job?” Frances wants to know. “Delivering food?”

“That’s right,” the boy says. He thinks he can see Antonia in the house; there’s somebody beautiful with red hair, at any rate. Frances is glaring at him. “That’s right, ma’am,” he amends.

Frances reaches into her skirt pocket for her change purse and counts out eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents, which she considers highway robbery.

“Well, if it’s your job, don’t expect a tip,” she tells the boy.

“Hey, Josh,” Antonia calls as she comes to collect the pizzas. She’s wearing an old smock over her black T-shirt and leggings. Her hair has turned to ringlets in all this humidity and her pale skin looks creamy and cool. The delivery boy is unable to speak in her presence, although when he gets back to the restaurant he’ll talk about her for a good hour before the kitchen staff tells him to shut up. Antonia laughs as she closes the door. She’s gotten back some of whatever she’d lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind.

“Pizza,” Antonia announces, and they all sit down to dinner in spite of the awful smell coming from the aunts’ mixture boiling on the rear burner of the stove. The storm is rattling the windowpanes and the thunder is so near it can shake the ground. One big flash of lightning, and half the neighborhood has lost its electricity; in houses all along the street, people are searching for flashlights and hurricane candles, or just giving up and going to sleep.

“That’s good luck,” Aunt Jet says when their electricity goes as well. “We’ll be the light in the darkness.”

“Find a candle,” Sally suggests.

Kylie gets a candle from the shelf near the sink. When she passes the stove she holds her nose closed with her fingers.

“Boy, does that stink,” she says of the aunts’ mixture.

“It’s supposed to,” Jet says, pleased.

“It always does,” her sister agrees.

Kylie returns and places the candle in the center of the table, then lights it so they can go on with their supper, which is interrupted by the doorbell.

“It better not be that delivery boy back for more,” Frances says now. “I’ll give him a real piece of my mind.”

“I’ll get it.” Gillian goes to the door and swings it open.

Ben Frye is on the porch, wearing a yellow rain slicker; he’s holding a box of white hurricane candles and a lantern. Just seeing him makes a chill go down Gillian’s spine. From the first, she’s been figuring that Ben was taking his life in his hands each time he was with her. With her luck and her history, anything that could go wrong would. She’d been sure she’d bring disaster to whoever loved her, but that was back when she was a woman who killed her boyfriend in an Oldsmobile, now she’s someone else. She leans out the front door and kisses Ben on the mouth. She kisses him in a way that proves that if he was ever thinking of getting out of this, he’d better stop thinking right now.

“Who invited you here?” Gillian says, but she has her arms around him; she’s got that sugary smell anyone who gets too close to her can’t help but notice.

“I was worried about you,” Ben says. “They can call this thing a storm, but it’s really a hurricane.”

Tonight, Ben has left Buddy alone to bring the candles over, even though he knows how anxious thunder makes the rabbit. That’s what happens when Ben wants to see Gillian, he has to go on and do it, no matter what the consequences. Still, he’s so unused to being spontaneous that whenever he does something like this he has a slight ringing in his ears, not that he cares. When Ben returns to his house he’s bound to find a telephone book shredded or the soles chewed off his favorite running shoes, but it’s worth it to be with Gillian.

“Get out while the going’s good,” Gillian tells him. “My aunts are here from Massachusetts.”

“Great,” Ben says, and before Gillian can stop him he’s inside the house. Gillian tugs at the sleeve of his rain slicker, but he’s on his way to greet their guests. The aunts have serious business ahead of them; they’ll flip their lids if Ben careens into the kitchen assuming he’s about to meet two dear old ladies. They’ll rise from their chairs and stomp their feet and turn their cold gray eyes in his direction.

“They arrived this afternoon and they’re exhausted,” Gillian says. “This is not a good idea. They don’t like company. Plus, they’re ancient.”

Ben Frye pays no attention, and why should he? The aunts are Gillian’s family, and that’s all he needs to know. He lopes right into the kitchen, where Antonia and Kylie and Sally stop eating the minute they see him; quickly they turn to see the aunts’ reaction. Ben doesn’t catch on to their anxiety any more than he notices the fiery scent rising from the pot on the stove. He must presume the smell emanates from some special cleaning fluid or detergent, or perhaps some small creature, a baby squirrel or an old toad, has curled up to die underneath the back doorstep.

Ben goes over to the aunts, reaches into the sleeve of his rain slicker, and pulls out a bunch of roses. Aunt Jet accepts them with pleasure. “Lovely,” she says.

Aunt Frances runs a petal between her thumb and forefinger to verify that the roses are real. They are, but that doesn’t mean Frances is so easily impressed.

“Any more tricks?” she says in a voice that can turn a man’s blood to ice.

Ben smiles his beautiful smile, the one that made Gillian weak in the knees from the start and that now reminds the aunts of the boys they once knew. He reaches behind Aunt Frances’s head, and before they know it, he has pulled from thin air a chiffon scarf the color of sapphires, which he proudly presents.

“I couldn’t accept this,” Frances says, but her tone isn’t quite so cool as before, and when no one’s looking, she loops the scarf around her neck. The color is perfect for her; her eyes look like lake water, clear and gray-blue. Ben makes himself comfortable, grabs a piece of pizza, and begins to ask Jet about their trip down from Massachusetts. That’s when Frances signals to Gillian to come close.

“Don’t screw this one up,” she tells her niece.

“I don’t intend to,” Gillian assures her.

Ben stays until eleven. He fixes instant chocolate pudding for dessert, then teaches Kylie and Antonia and Aunt Jet how to build a house of cards and how to make it fall down with a single puff of air.

“You got lucky this time,” Sally tells her sister.

“You think it was luck?” Gillian grins.

“Yeah,” Sally says.

“No way,” Gillian says. “It took years of practice.”

Just then the aunts both tilt their heads at the very same time and make a very little noise low in their throats, a kind of click so close to silence that anyone who wasn’t listening carefully might mistake it for the faint call of a cricket or the sigh of a mouse beneath the floorboards.

“It’s time,” Aunt Frances says.

“We have family business to discuss,” Jet tells Ben as she leads him to the door.

Aunt Jet’s voice is always sweet, yet the tone isn’t one someone would dare to disobey. Ben grabs his rain slicker and waves to Gillian.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he declares. “I’ll come over for breakfast.”

“Don’t screw this one up,” Aunt Jet tells Gillian after she’s closed the door behind Ben.

“I won’t,” Gillian assures her as well. She goes to the window and takes a look at the backyard. “It’s awful tonight.”

The wind is tearing shingles from the roofs, and every cat in the neighborhood has demanded to be let in or has taken refuge in a window well, to shiver and yowl.

“Maybe we should wait,” Sally ventures.

“Bring the pot around back,” Aunt Jet tells Kylie and Antonia.

The candle in the center of the table casts a circle of wavery light. Aunt Jet takes Gillian’s hand in her own. “We have to see to this now. You don’t put off dealing with a ghost.”

“What do you mean, a ghost?” Gillian says. “We want to make certain the body stays buried.”

“Fine,” Aunt Frances says. “If that’s how you want to look at it.”

Gillian wishes she’d had a gin and bitters herself when the aunts did. Instead, she finishes the last of her cold coffee, which has been sitting in a cup on the counter since late afternoon. By tomorrow morning the creek behind the high school will be deep as a river; toads will have to scramble for higher ground; children won’t think twice about diving into the warm, murky water, even if they’re dressed in their Sunday clothes and wearing their best pair of shoes.

“Okay,” Gillian says. She knows her aunts are talking about more than a body; it’s the spirit of the man, that’s what’s haunting them. “Fine,” she tells the aunts, and she swings open the back door.

Antonia and Kylie carry the pot out to the yard. The rain is quite near; they can taste it in the air. The aunts have already had the girls bring their suitcase over to the hedge of thorns. They stand close together, and when the wind rustles their skirts the fabric makes a moaning sound.