The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog (16 page)

Then Izzy sat up, and The Dog put his paws on the bed, and the three anxious faces stared down at Peter. Anxious, and expectant, too, Peter thought; he had been awake for a few seconds only, and already they wanted something from him. If only he could go back into that calm darkness!

“I'm so happy you're awake!” said Izzy. Her small
arms wrapped around him, squeezing. “No matter what we did, you wouldn't wake up.”

Something wet shoved itself into Peter's elbow. “Glad to see you with your eyes open, Peter,” said The Dog.

Peter pushed himself into a sitting position. “Why is Celia crying?” he asked, or tried to, anyway. His voice, rusty from disuse, was barely audible even to his own ears.

“Huh?” said The Dog.

“Why is Celia crying?” Peter repeated, and this time his words shot out more loudly than he intended, loudly enough that Celia's tears abruptly stopped and Izzy's smile disappeared from her face.

“She's crying because she was worried about you,” said The Dog. “We were all worried about you. Will you tell us what happened?”

He couldn't talk to them, Peter thought. Not yet. There was something he had to do first.

“I need a minute alone,” he said.

“But, Peter—” said Celia.

“I want to get dressed!” Peter said. At least his pajamas gave him an excuse.

“Oh,” said Izzy, and she obediently moved toward the door. Celia, too, followed, but her still-wet eyes lingered on Peter's face, questioning.

The Dog, on the other hand, was staring at Peter's closet. “Peter, we should explain—”

“Please?” said Peter, his voice cracking. “I just . . . I want a minute alone. To change.”

The Dog looked at Peter, looked back at the closet, then stood up. “Okay. If that's what you want.”

The door swung closed; Peter was by himself. He hurried to his desk and turned on his computer; while it powered up, he grabbed the first pair of shorts he could find in his drawer. As he pulled them on, the background image on his desktop came into focus: his father, dressed in his air force uniform, smiling back at him. Peter clicked on his email icon. And waited.

The first message to load was from a friend from New Jersey. The second was an update from a NASA kids' site. And then it was there. The message Peter's father sent each evening; the one that, because of the time difference, showed up on Peter's computer in the morning. Peter clicked it open, skimming the words about a storm in the desert; a card game his father had planned for later that night. It wasn't much, but it was enough to know that his father had been alive to send it, that the images he had seen of his father's death had been the magician's creation and nothing else.

It had seemed so real. So very, very real. He could still see his father's helmet falling from the sky.

“Are you dressed yet?” Celia called from outside Peter's door.

Peter fought an urge to use the magic he could feel vibrating around him to think himself invisible. His sisters and The Dog would find the room empty; they would hurry off to look for him while he went back to sleep. Instead, he shut his computer down, then sprang to his feet. “Just a second,” he said. Yanking open his closet, he reached for a shirt.

And froze. From within the closet, the mouse who was also a waiter stared back at him, unblinking.

The mouse-waiter made no immediate move. So Peter didn't move, either. Instead, he just stood there, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The waiter didn't seem aggressive; in fact, he mostly looked scared. “Umm, Dog?” Peter said after a moment or two had passed. “Could you, um, come here? “

The Dog, Celia, and Izzy flew into the room. Izzy spoke first. “You found Henry!”

“Why is the waiter in my closet?”

The Dog shook his nose exasperatedly. “Don't blame me. This one is all on your sisters. After the dinosaurs froze, we dragged you into the hallway. We were stuck there, discussing what to do next, when the waiter—”

“Henry,” Izzy interrupted. “He didn't have a name, so I gave him one. And he says he likes it.”

The Dog sighed. “When
Henry
came along. Apparently you'd left him walking the hallway looking for the magician's open door. Did you know he would keep going until someone told him otherwise? I think he was pretty relieved to stumble on us.”

“He asked if he could help,” said Izzy, “and I told him we needed a ride home, so he picked you up and carried you on his shoulders to this ginormous garage, and then he drove us home. And, Peter, you should have seen the car he drove us in. It's little and yellow, and it doesn't have a roof. And Henry drives it very fast, and he swerves around a lot. He's really fun. I think he should live in your closet forever.”

The story made sense of what Peter remembered from being in the soup. It also explained how they had gotten home, which he probably should have wondered about
but hadn't; he had been too worried about his father. Still . . . “Why is he in my closet? I mean, why doesn't he come out?”

“He likes it in there,” said Celia. “He says he likes places that are quiet and dark.”

The waiter, who still hadn't spoken, nodded.

“And the magician?” Peter asked. “What did you do with the rock? Did you just leave it there?”

“Oh, no,” said Celia. “We brought it with us. It's in the backyard. I put it under the birdbath.”

“It's
here?
”

Celia's smile faded. “I was trying to help. I thought that this way you wouldn't have to go back to the magician's house to make him human again. And I was careful not to touch it after I saw what it did to you. I carried it wrapped in my shirt.”

“I'm not trying to make him human again,” snapped Peter.

“But what about Dad?” asked Celia. “I thought you were going to change the magician so he would help you bring Dad back.”

“That was before I went into the rock,” Peter said, “and saw what he was like. He'll never help us with Dad. And even if he would, I wouldn't make him human again. Not ever.”

In front of him, The Dog dropped to his haunches and, to Peter and his sisters' shock, began to yowl. The heart-wrenching sound filled Peter's room. Then The Dog turned and stalked out the door.

I could wish for a rocket ship
, Peter thought. It would
carry him into space. He could see Jupiter and Mars—and leave all this behind.

For the rest of the afternoon, The Dog didn't speak to anyone. He curled up on the mat by the back door and refused to move, his long, warty nose resting miserably on the carpet. After trying everything they could think of to coax him from his silence, the children held a hasty conference in the kitchen.

“Do you think he's sick?” asked Izzy. “Why won't he talk to us?”

“He's not sick,” declared Celia. “He's mad. At Peter. That's why he won't talk. Peter could help him if he wanted to.”

The Dog was not the only one who was mad at Peter. Peter and Celia had been arguing ever since Peter's announcement. “I can't change the magician,” Peter repeated now, for the fourth or fifth time.

“You can't or you won't?”

“I won't,” Peter admitted.

Celia shook her head, her curls bobbing wildly. “No matter how evil he is, it's still the right thing to do if it means Dad will be home.”

“He'll hurt you and Izzy,” said Peter.

“I don't care.”

“Well, I do.”

For a moment, they glared at each other. Then Celia's gaze dropped to the floor. “If the magician won't help, do you think you could become powerful enough to bring Dad home yourself?”

Peter felt his hands clench into fists. “I'm not doing any more magic.” Only Izzy's presence kept him from shouting.

A tear slid down Celia's face. “But I miss him.”

“No.” Without another word, Peter stomped down the hallway to the living room, then turned on the TV with the volume up high to make it clear that he was done with conversation. Eventually, Celia and Izzy joined him, all three staring at a program that none of them was interested in.

And that was where Peter's mother found them when she arrived home from work, her arms weighed down with grocery bags. She took one look at their unhappy faces, and her lips pursed with worry. She had called several times during the day: first Celia and then Peter had explained that everyone was feeling better; no, she didn't need to hurry home from work; it just seemed to be a short-lived flu, really. But Peter could tell by the way she stood there, staring at them, that she knew something was wrong.

For a moment, all thought of magic, of The Dog, even of his father slid from Peter's mind. The only thing that mattered was reassuring his mom.

“Let me take those,” he said, grabbing the grocery bags. “Izzy, Celia—you want to help me unload?”

Izzy and Celia jumped up from the couch. “Mmm,” said Celia, poking around in one of the bags. “You bought stuff for chicken noodle soup.”

“Can I help make it?” asked Izzy.

“Yes,” said Peter's mom, looking between them with confusion. “If you're feeling better?”

“Much better,” said Izzy.

“We're good now,” added Celia.

Peter could see the doubt in his mother's face, but for the rest of the evening, the children acted as though everything were fine, and Peter's mother acted as though everything were fine, too: all in all, it would have seemed as if they were a perfectly normal family if it hadn't been for The Dog lying motionless on the doormat. Peter thought his mother hadn't noticed until he went to tell her good night.

“Did you feed the dog?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Peter. He didn't add that The Dog hadn't yet touched his food.

“I don't think I've seen him get up since I got home. Do you think he's okay?”

“I don't know,” said Peter. “He's been really quiet today.” This, at least, was the truth.

Peter's mom frowned. “Let's see how he is tomorrow. If he's still not acting like himself, we can call that young man—Timothy.”

“Sounds good, Mom.”

“I hope . . . I hope you're feeling okay, honey.”

“I'm fine. Thanks.”

Peter's mom reached out and smoothed his hair. “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?” she asked. “I know you try to take care of me and your sisters when your dad is gone. But you know I'm here for you if you need me, don't you?”

Peter felt something twist painfully in his chest. “I know.”

Peter crawled into bed wanting nothing more than to fall asleep quickly. Instead, as he lay there, tossing and turning every few minutes, he found himself forced to confront the truth he had been avoiding all day. The truth that he wouldn't tell his sisters. That he could barely admit to himself.

He had told Celia that he wouldn't change the magician back because he didn't think the magician would help them and because he was scared of what the magician would do. And neither of these was a lie, exactly. But the hard and ugly truth that faced Peter now, lying in his bed, was that it wasn't just these facts that kept him from making the magician human. It was the fear of what performing more magic might do to Peter himself.

How could he explain to Celia what he had seen when he looked at the magician, who no longer bore any resemblance at all to the boy in the photograph The Dog had shown him? A year, perhaps less, and that might be Peter, too. How could Peter tell Celia that as much as he wanted to save his father, he didn't want to pay the price?

Every time Peter closed his eyes, he saw the magician's face before him, until he finally fell into a restless, dream-filled sleep.

He woke up some hours later to the sensation that he was being watched. He turned his head to find two large, glowing eyes inches from his.

“Hey!” he said.

“It's just me,” said The Dog. “I didn't mean to startle you.”

“If you don't mean to startle me, you shouldn't stare at me in the middle of the night.” Relieved to see The Dog up, Peter almost reached out to scratch his ears but then thought better of it. “Are you feeling better?”

The Dog thumped his tail against the floor. “I didn't come in here to discuss me. I put a spell on your mom so we could talk without waking her up. I've been thinking all day, and there's something I need to tell you.”

“What?”

The Dog opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. When he finally spoke, he seemed to have changed his mind about what he wanted to say. “Can I ask you something first? Do you know how you've managed to stay you?”