THE MAGIC
THE MAGIC
by Karl El-Koura
Where’s Sophie?
Face-down in the pool, her golden hair floating around her.
Where’s dada?
(She still called him that, even at three, the same word she’d used for him since she’d first learned to speak.)
Dada’s rushing out the patio door, his wife’s cry ringing in his ears (“Where’s Sophie?“). He hadn’t paused to argue with Angela (“I thought she was with you!”), hadn’t paused, not for a second, because a cold terror struck his heart, propelled him out the back door, down the concrete patio steps like lightning. Tall hydrangeas grew between the patio and the pool, obstructing their line of sight when the deciduous plants were in full bloom. He was aware, in a distant way, that his wife was right behind him. One foot hit the bottom step, and now he could see the pool and his little girl floating in it (Oh my God! My God no God!) In an instant he’d launched himself into the pool, kicking furiously to where he knew his daughter was, his vision blurred by the splash of water. His arms wrapped around Sophie, held her up.
“Give her to me!” Angela shrieked. He pulled the precious little body (unmoving, unresisting, unresponsive) to the edge of the pool, handed her up like an offering. Angela took her, brought her out of the pool effortlessly as Mark pulled himself up too.
Mark watched his wife perform CPR on their child, pumping her tiny chest. So small. Why had he forgotten how tiny she was? How fragile, how heart-breakingly precious. His wife breathing air into the little mouth, air but not life. Two deep breaths, then chest pump chest pump chest pump chest pump chest pump.
But it was too late for CPR. What had they learned at the course Angela insisted they take? You had six minutes from the moment someone drowned.
They’d abandoned their little girl for over six minutes.
His wife kept cycling through the routine they’d learned and practiced–deep breath deep breath, pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump pump.
But it was too late.
It didn’t have to be, though.
He pulled himself out of the water.
He’d handed his daughter to his wife like an offering, but he himself would be the offering. He turned around and looked once more at the pool, the scene of so much joy over the last three years, including today. An echo of Sophie’s laughter seemed to ring in his ears. Her face was all smiles from the time her toes hit the water until her parents forced her out of the pool. Today she’d cackled maniacally every time he did a cannonball and sunk all the way to the bottom eight feet below, then pushed off with his feet with so much force that he came bursting out of the water like a leaping dolphin.
“What are you doing?” His wife paused from her feverish work to yell at him. “Call an ambulance!”
He knelt down beside Angela. She had a wild, ferocious look in her eyes. The mama bear. Awakened, but unable to do anything to save her little cub.
“It’s too late for them to do any good, Angel.” It had been a while since he’d called her that. He’d had all sorts of nicknames for her when it was just them, but they’d begun to fade once Sophie was born. She’d been Angel and Golden Blue (the color of her hair and eyes, which Sophie had inherited) and Heart, but slowly she’d become just mama. He caressed her face, wiping away the tears that streamed down the soft cheeks.
The crystalline blue eyes searched his face.
Was he serious?
Of course he was.
What about the vow he’d made her take?
What did that matter now? They’d failed their little girl. Their job was to keep her safe.
“You want me to–?” she said.
“Yes. It’s the only way.” He looked up at the tall trees that surrounded their property, the dream home they’d bought when Angela was seven months pregnant. The tall trees who were their side and back neighbors. He’d miss this world. He’d miss Sophie; he wished with all his heart he could be there to watch her grow up, hear the wonderful thoughts that went through that little mind. Watch her become a big girl and a young woman and a mama herself, like she’d been telling them she wanted to be when she grew up. And–not most of all or especially, but particularly, he’d miss his wife, this woman he’d intended to grow old and gray (well, grayer) with.
“You don’t understand,” Angela said softly.
“I’m willing to pay the price.” He smiled sadly. Boy would he miss looking into those crystalline eyes, miss running his hands through the soft golden hair. He leaned in to kiss her one last time. His wife returned the kiss uncertainly. “It’s all right,” he said.
“I–“
“I know it’s hard. I’m sorry to put you through this. But only you can do it.”
His wife shook her head, lines of confusion and doubt crisscrossing her forehead.
“Please,” he said.
Something in the way he looked at her convinced her, and her face cleared. She nodded, but Mark didn’t like the look of resolution–and sadness, the same sadness he’d been feeling–written in her eyes.
Cold shivers spread through him. “No, don’t you–“
+++
“Where’s Sophie?” his wife shrieked.
Mark’s dropped the knife he’d been using to slice onions. He ran ahead Angela, out the patio door, down the concrete steps–there she was! In the pool, God help them. In the pool, in the shallow end, treading water as best she could, her head tilted upward so she could breathe. He dropped into the pool more than dove in, grabbed her (“Dada! Dada!”), held her close, asked if she was okay, thanked God she was okay, told her how much he loved her, reprimanded her for going near the pool without her puddle jumper. She blubbered something about trying to catch a butterfly.
Angela was leaning by the side of the pool, crying too.
“She’s okay,” Mark said, handing Sophie to her mother.
She cried for a full ten minutes, wrapped in a towel in Angela’s lap. She always looked very small when she cried, Mark thought, and today she looked almost like a newborn.
Later that evening, when Sophie was safely in bed, Mark rinsed the last of dinner’s dishes and handed it to Angela . “You know we’re not sleeping tonight, right?”
“She’ll be okay,” Angela said, drying the dish, then mechanically putting it away in the cupboard.
“Are you okay?”
“It was a tough day,” she said, but still didn’t meet his eyes.
“You’re telling me. I’m going to have nightmares about today for years. We came so close to losing her, Angela. Over a butterfly! Thank God you asked about her when you did.”
Angela had been strange all evening, but under the circumstances he’d felt that was understandable. She’d hugged Sophie tight to her body, so that Sophie, who usually loved to cuddle, finally had to squirm out. Angela had cried when they’d sung their goodnight song to Sophie. So? They’d almost lost their daughter that day, and if he wasn’t as demonstrative as Angela, he felt those feelings too, the terror of the near-loss and the elation of the restoration.
Angela was distracted for the rest of the night too. They watched a movie, but she stared ahead almost unseeing, and certainly not laughing when Mark laughed.
“She’s okay,” he said at one point, then touched her lightly on the shoulder and repeated himself when she didn’t respond.
Without turning her head to look at him, she smiled faintly, nodded.
Nine years before, he’d taken Angela to a fancy French restaurant that he couldn’t afford (not until the following year, anyway, when he sold his little company for more than a little money), and while waiting for dessert, he’d gotten down on one knee and asked if she’d marry him. Only then, watching the startled look grow into embarrassment in her eyes, did it occur to him that a public proposal had some significant drawbacks. And yet things had been going very well for almost three years, and he would’ve bet significant money that Angela wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, just as much as he wanted to spend it with her. He would’ve lost the money (money he didn’t have) when, after looking around the small dimly-lit restaurant, her gaze had returned to meet his and she’d whispered, “Can we talk about this later?”
They ate their dessert in silence, and the far-away look on her face at the restaurant was the same one she wore this evening. He hadn’t seen it in almost a decade.
As the night wore on, the distraction turned to something else–to anxiety that manifested itself in little ways, like pacing while she brushed her teeth and the obsessive twirling of her hair once they were in bed, ostensibly reading, though Mark noticed that she hadn’t turned the pages of her book in a long time. Then, as Mark leaned over to turn off his light and said Good night, I love you, he felt her anxiety turn to fear. Her voice broke when she repeated the words.
Nine years before, she’d called him very early the morning after his failed proposal at very expensive French restaurant. He’d expected her to end things. Even when she’d asked him to come over for coffee, her voice was so restrained and distant, so unlike the normal warmth that pervaded it, that he’d figured she wanted to break up in person.
Feeling like a man being led to the electric chair for a crime no one had bothered to accuse him of, let alone convict him, he drove to her house that bright morning, parked in his familiar spot, and walked up the wooden stairs–so the gallows, he thought, not the electric chair.
Angela answered his knock almost right away, as if she’d been waiting by the door. She was still in her pajamas and not made up. “Coffee?” she said.
“Haven’t had one yet,” he said, sending up a winning smile. A part of him felt that as long as she didn’t say the words, she could always change her mind.
“Come and see how I make it.”
He followed her into the galley kitchen. Everything was laid out on the counter–French press, container of ground coffee, measuring glass filled with water.
Angela picked up the glass of water in both hands and handed it to him, like a strange ceremony. He accepted it uncertainly.
“Now put it back on the counter,” she said.
He did as she’d asked. He wondered (jokingly, hopefully) if the thought of breaking up had made her lose her mind.
Angela took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for an ordeal, then she placed both hands, palms down, above the glass and began to wave them back and forth, tracing out figure-eights in the air. Mark was so mesmerized by this strange ritual that he hadn’t noticed anything had happened to the water until he heard it bubbling. Angela kept waving her hands in the transfixing movement, but Mark forced his gaze to the nearly full measuring cup, from which steam was rising to lick her palms. The bubbles had multiplied and multiplied until the water was in full bubbling heat–it had taken less than a minute to boil four cups of water.
She stopped then, and without a word emptied the hot water into the French press, made the coffee, then poured it into the cups.
“Please,” she said, indicating the small round kitchen table.
He sat. “What did I just see?” His voice was curious and mystified, but nothing more–he hadn’t known enough, understood enough, for any more. Not yet.
She stared at the table for a while before looking up at him. “First I want to tell you that waving my hands was for your benefit. I didn’t have to do that.”
“To boil the water?”
“I just need to think it.”
“And it happens? Whatever you think?”
She took a sip before responding, and for a moment he had the sense that she was thinking of holding back, of mitigating either how crazy or how powerful she sounded. But finally she seemed to force herself to nod.
He leaned back in the chair. The hot cup of coffee had started burning his hands, so he set it down on the table. He opened his mouth to say something, then quickly shut it, resisting the urge to put her to the test–All right, move this cup toward you without touching it. Instead, he said, “How long have you been able to do that?”
She took a long deep breath, and he had the sense that was the wrong question to ask. At least I didn’t try to make you perform like a circus monkey. “It’s hard to say,” she said. “I was very young when I became consciously aware of it, around six. It’s possible I was capable of it all my life.”
“I see,” he said, at a loss for other words. In three years he’d never known Angela to deliberately lie to him.
“By the time I was nine,” she went on, distantly, a little coldly, “I decided that I’d never use them again.”
“Really? Why?”
She flinched at the questions, and again he had that feeling of having said the wrong thing. “I didn’t like the way it made me feel.”
“How did it make you feel?” he tried.
Strike three by the reaction on her face. “Whenever I used the powers, I’d pay the price that night. I’d vomit everything in my stomach, or feel that my head was so heavy there’s no way my neck could keep holding it up, or have a stabbing pain in my foot that nothing would make go away. Listen,” she said, still speaking to him in that reined-in voice that made him feel like a stranger, “I’m going to explain it to you the way I understood it at the age of nine, okay?”
He nodded.
“I’d felt then, and I still feel now, that the powers didn’t come from a good place. I felt that they were given to me by a dark being”–she paused, looked hard into his eyes for the reaction these words provoked–“who delighted in my suffering. And he allowed me to use these powers–his powers–but the price is that he’d visit me that night and torment me.”
“That’s terrible,” Mark said, reaching out for her hand unconsciously. “Terrible that a child would have to think those thoughts. Did you talk to anyone?”
Her forehead creased. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told. The first person who has ever seen me do–that.” Her gaze pointed at the kitchen countertop where the magic of the boiling water had occurred.
“I’m so sorry, Angel,” he said, then pulled back his hand as he realized she hadn’t taken it. “It’s a terrible burden to carry all by yourself. Would you talk to someone now?”
“Like a therapist?”
“If you think it’d help,” he said, ignoring her disdainful tone. “Or how about a priest?”
“I tried,” she said. “I went to different churches, spoke to priests. I didn’t find any that I felt would believe me. I felt they’d have me institutionalized as fast as a therapist would–or my parents.”
“This is when you were nine still?”
She nodded.
“I’m sure you were a very smart child,” he said. “But maybe you were wrong about them? Maybe they chose not to reveal the full depths of their feelings on the subject of evil to a strangely curious nine year old?”
She smiled. Finally the crust she’d built around herself, like a beautiful moth deciding it was safer in the cocoon after all, was starting to crack.
But now, almost ten years later, that protective crust was back.
“What’s going on, Angela?” he said, staring up at her in bed.
“I just want today to be over. Go to sleep. I love you.”
She turned out her light and lay her head on her pillow, but even before his vision adjusted to the darkness he knew her eyes were open and, from the stiffness of her body, that she either wasn’t planning on sleeping or she was convinced she couldn’t.
Nine years ago, at her old apartment’s small kitchen table, he’d said, “Did you try wishing it away?”
The crust, which had started to crack, now fell back even more. This, somehow, was the perfect question and Angela nodded. “I thought about it,” she said, shrugging as if admitting to a personal failure. “But I was afraid.”
“That it wouldn’t work?”
“That it would. That I’d lose my powers.” She looked away. “This will sound strange to you, maybe insane. But they’re part of who I am. Even if they were a dark gift from him, they’re mine now and . . . I don’t think I’d be me with them gone. I know what–“
“Angela,” he said, sudden realization flashing in his mind like lighting. “What about tonight? You just used your powers.”
She shrugged again. “It’s not much, boiling a cup of water. I don’t think it’ll be too bad.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I wanted you to know.”
“I would’ve believed you,” he said, and in the moment he meant it, “if you just told me.” Then he said, “Can you send him to me instead?”
She pushed herself away from the table. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“You’re lying,” he said simply, then got up and held her by the arms. She’d started shaking. “Send him to me,” he said, trying to sound reasonable.
“No,” she said, firmly.
“I’m staying. You won’t go through it alone.”
“No,” she said, but less firmly.
He stayed the night, and what he saw–the “light” price she’d paid for boiling a cup of water–made him grab her tear-stained face in a way he’d never done before, stare deeply into her eyes and ask her to wish away her powers, right then and there.
“I can’t,” she said, weakly, hoarsely, still holding her palms up–as if in prayer, but he knew it was because the skin, burned pink and white, hurt less when she positioned her hands that way.
“Then promise me you won’t use them, not ever again, not for any reason.”
And now, nine years later, he knew with certainty that she’d broken her promise of that night. He also felt sure that Angela, beside him in bed with her eyes wide open, was waiting for him to fall asleep.
“Good night,” he said with a deep sigh, then turned away. He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and pretended to fall asleep.
After a few minutes, Angela got out of bed quietly. She went to the ensuite bathroom and closed the door, but didn’t turn on the light. A few minutes more, she opened the door but didn’t come back to bed. She–so quietly–opened their bedroom door just enough to slip out. Mark sat up and out of the corner of his eye saw that his phone was blinking to indicate he had an unread message.
“I know the vow I made to you,” Angela had written in the bathroom, “but I had to use my powers one more time. This was a big one, Mark, the biggest of my life. I’m a bit terrified. Of what will happen but also that you won’t understand if . . . something serious happens. But I hope with all my heart that I’ll be okay and we’ll be together again. But if that doesn’t happen . . . Mark, you have to believe that this is something I had to do, and I love you and Sophie more than anything in the world.”
Heart pounding, he stepped out into the hallway, looked into the guest bedroom, which was empty, then into Sophie’s room but saw only her tiny form in that little wooden castle bed he’d made for her. He went downstairs, into the kitchen–the patio door was unlocked.
Outside, the night air was crisp and quiet. A full moon shone brightly, illuminating the trees, casting somewhat ominous shadows across their concrete deck. Angela had gone into the forest. Why? But it was obvious–to get away from them, so they wouldn’t hear her torment or maybe her cries for help.
He started running then, out the back gate, into the forest, his bare feet scrunching squishy things and sharp things, but ignoring everything else as his wide-eyed gaze swept through the trees and bushes for signs of his wife. He heard a noise up ahead. There she was, on the ground, her back against a big trunk, her legs stretched out in front of her, her eyes closed but tears streaming down her cheeks. Her body shook with tremors.
“Angela?” he said, hesitantly.
Her eyes came open. “Go back,” she said. “You can’t see this. Go, take care of our daughter.”
He bit back the questions that came rushing to his lips. Why had she broken her vow? What could possibly be so important that she would risk this?
“No, Angel. We’ll get through this together, like the last time. But come back home and let’s go through it and be warm, if nothing else.”
“Mark–” she said, then her eyes went wild.
He’d been crouched down beside her, leaning in to help her up, but it was such a startling transformation that he fell back.
Angela started flailing her arms, like a drowning person looking for something to grab. Her mouth was closed but she didn’t look like she was breathing from her nose either. She began to scream wordlessly, a guttural throaty scream, as if her mouth was fused shut. Her eyes were in wild panic, as wide as he’d ever seen them, in constant jittery motion, darting side to side like a trapped animal looking for means of escape.
“Breathe!” he cried, stupidly. “What’s happening? What can I do?”
He tried to grab her but a flailing arm connected with his face, knocked him down. He got up and made another attempt to reach for her face, in some half-developed idea that he could try to force her mouth open. But her panic seemed to only increase whenever he invaded her space and her mad, waving arms struck him and her kicking legs tried to push him away, as if he were the cause of her trouble. Her eyes were unseeing as they darted from one corner of their sockets to the other.
Mark stood up and looked around frantically. “Show yourself!” he yelled, spinning around, knowing how futile it was, the implacable trees waving slightly in the wind. “I’ll pay the price! Leave her alone! Do this to me! Please!”
Angela’s foot kicked him hard in the knee and he went down. He crawled over to her, and forced himself past her defenses, forced her into his arms.
“Listen–” he began, but she convulsed, her entire body jerking and writhing. Then everything went still. The wordless, mumbled screaming, the rustling leaves under her kicking legs, the trashing of her arms. As if she were a robot who had gone haywire and someone had flipped her switch to off.
Nine years ago, still feeling the sting of public rejection, very grateful it hadn’t wrecked their relationship, and perhaps a bit confused and unsure what to make of this strange woman with her strange powers, he’d locked up the engagement ring in floor-bolted safe at the back of his closet.
Eight years ago, flush with joy and success at his young business’s purchase agreement, he’d taken her back to the same French restaurant and made her wait until dessert before he proposed again.
Three years ago, he’d brought his very pregnant wife to the CPR class she’d insisted they take before they closed on a house with a pool.
Now, holding his dead wife in his arms, his own tears splashing down all over her face, the memory popped back into his mind and shook him out of the haze of grief and confusion.
“You have six minutes,” their CPR instructor, a nurse from St. Michael’s named Martha, had said.
It had been six seconds.
“We are now ready to rescue our drowning victim,” Martha had said in her dry but very authoritative British voice, hovering over her legless, naked mannequin. “We lift up his chin and tilt his head back.”
Mark grabbed his wife from under the arms, put her down tenderly on the mossy forest floor, kneeled down beside her. He tilted her head and pinched her nostrils shut.
“Rescue breaths are like this: dee-eee-eeeeep breaths! Slow and steady!”
Deep breath. He watched Angela’s chest out of the corner of his eyes. Deep breath. Deep breath. Please, he thought. Deep breath. Please, please, please. Deep breath.
“We find the center of his chest.”
Mark laid her head down gently, scurried down to her torso, placed one hand over the other, crossed his fingers over his wife’s chest.
“Thirty compressions, like this,” Martha had said. “Like this–slow, steady!”
Slow and steady, he pushed and released, pushed and released, pushed and released, counting to thirty.
“Two more breaths now!”
Two more breaths.
“Thirty more compressions!”
Thirty more compressions.
“Two more breaths!”
Two more breaths.
“Thirty more compressions!”
Please, please, please. Thirty more compressions.
“Two more breaths!”
He felt something, her arm moving.
“Angela?”
He scurried back to her head, and in the dim moonlight heard water dripping onto her face. It took him a moment to realize he was sweating. He’d imagined it, imagined that she’d been responsive. His arms ached and his legs were cramping. How many cycles had he completed already? He had no idea. It didn’t matter. He leaned in to start again, to give more breaths when her body convulsed and fluid dribbled out of her mouth.
He turned her to one side, and she vomited, her body convulsing with fits of coughing.
“Get it all out,” he said.
She raised a weak arm, put it on him and gently pushed him away, needing space. She turned over a little more, convulsed, and vomited once more.
He stood up, lifted his head to the dark sky. “We don’t want you!” he yelled, with a roar that seemed to still every other noise in the forest so that even the wind rustling the leaves seemed to freeze in place. “Do you hear us? We don’t want your powers!
“Tell him,” he said, dropping to his knees again, whispering now as he cradled his wife’s living face in his hand. “Please Angel.”
“They’re not his powers,” she said weakly, the tears in her eyes glinting in the moonlight. But then, before he could beg her further, she closed her eyes tightly. He felt her jaw clenching and unclenching against his hand.
After a few moments, she opened her eyes again and he asked her if she was okay.
“I’m okay,” she said, the words triggering another fit of coughing and vomiting.
When she felt well enough to stand, Mark walked her back toward the house. He led her with slow, tentative steps, not only out of concern for Angela’s regaining strength, but because large, dense clouds had obstructed the moon, and the dark night seemed ominous, the half-seen shifting shadows teasing at hidden danger.
“When you closed your eyes,” he said, “did you–?”
“I wished him away,” she said. “I commanded him to leave me and never bother us again.”
“Do you think it worked?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and he heard the fear and trepidation in her voice. “I don’t feel any different.”
“It’s dark,” he said. “Can you turn on the patio lights?”
They stopped walking. He watched her face, that familiar but ever mysterious face, as she stared uncertainly at the back of their house in the dim distance. She closed her eyes and, a moment later, he knew she’d made the attempt. She kept them shut for another moment and, when she finally opened her eyes, he saw a new glow in them.
“What happened?” he said, unable for the moment to turn his head and see for himself.
A small but deep and happy smile slowly spread across Angela’s face.
He turned his gaze to the house finally. The lights were still off. “It worked,” he said with relief. “It’s gone.”
Angela took his hand into hers. “The magic isn’t,” she said.
Then, as he stared at the silhouette of their home where their little girl slept safely snuggled in her bed, the lights flickered on.
Fiction © Copyright Karl El-Koura
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
Karl El-Koura lives with his family in Canada’s capital city, holds a second-degree black belt in Okinawan Goju Ryu karate, and works a regular job in daylight while writing fiction at night. Visit www.ootersplace.com to learn more about his work.
