The Deepwater Bride & Other Stories Read online

  “Don't,” he said again. Her mouth was very close to his mouth. Danny's dark eyes were fathomless and closed. “We can't handle change, Rosamund. I love you too much and know you too well. Think about this.”

  The room closed down claustrophobically on her. She wanted to say: Do you know how long I've thought about this? Or: I want you more than anyone I ever thought I wanted. And: I'm so sorry. Instead she accidentally said, “I —  ”

  “Well?” Danny Fourteen said. “Did worlds collide?”

  Dr. Tilly quit wasting time. She shot to her feet, made a beeline for her notebook, laptop jabbing into her thigh and irritated at the faint smell of chinchillas as she wrote. He said, “What,” as she flipped over pages, pretty patient as she gestured him away from trying to look — all he did was eventually get up and get himself a glass of water, as though this were a perfectly normal evening.

  “Just nod your head for all's well and shake it for things not well,” said Daniel, “maybe flailing a little for something in the middle, God knows, I didn't learn how to deal with this in school.”

  Now used to gestures, she jabbed a finger at him until he sat back down on the squashy sofa and looked up at her expectantly. Dr. Tilly did not expect to feel so shaky. She tasted nervousness in her saliva as she flipped up the notebook —

  Don't stop me, Daniel.

  “Oh, yes, that calms me down,” said Danny. “That makes me feel perfectly at ease.”

  Flip. We need to talk.

  “Okay. Any reason you're using flashcards?”

  Flip. & what I'm saying here is all true and nothing to do with any house magic.

  Danny still looked pretty buttoned-up and patient, but his voice had that overly reasonable cast people took on if they thought you were a bit loopy. “Okay. Go on.”

  what did you have for lunch today??

  “Rose, you already asked, and it was a peanut butter protein bar.”

  Mr. Daniel Tsai, are you in love with me?

  He didn't even take it in. He read it, looked at her face, saw the question there as well, and smiled as gently as a chartered stockbroker could when faced with a woman for whom the date was over — self-effacing, running one hand through that gray-sprigged hair as though trying to consider how best to put things. “So that's what you're worried about,” he said carefully. “Rosamund, you know I care about you, don't you? You and the girls are the most important people in my life who don't share my genetic code.”

  This was not going well. She had made some mistake. When Danny decided the best defense was a good offense, he went in with irritated guns blazing. “I know we joke around a lot,” he was saying. “Is it the flirting? We can stop if it makes you uncomfortable. To be honest, I do love you. But I haven't been in love with you since I was eighteen.”

  It was incredible. She hadn't thought you could physically feel your heart breaking, a sort of sucking sensation near the aorta as it imploded into itself. Dr. Tilly hadn't thought her heart would break at all. “Don't worry,” he added, “nothing's going to change, Rose. Nothing.”

  “Let me try this again,” she said.

  “Well?” Danny Fifteen said. “Did worlds collide?”

  It was a little funny, even, how his reactions didn't change, how she noticed the quirk of his eyebrows once he got to halfway through her litany. Her handwriting had perhaps been a little messier this time. There was only one change now, a question of semantics —

  “Rose, you already asked,” said Danny, “and it was a peanut butter protein bar.”

  Mr. Daniel Tsai: I am in love with you.

  Dr. Tilly held that one for the longest time, gripped between her knees. Once she'd gotten to forty she thought she'd been an emotional bulwark, but now she felt as though all her insides were scooped out and replaced with packing peanuts. She felt thick and heavy. Danny re-read the sign six times, eyes darting to her face before going back and reading it again, and she thought she imagined him swallowing.

  “Well,” he said, with admirable calmness, “what do I do with that information, Dr. Rosamund Tilly?”

  She scribbled inanely: I'm not sure? Romantic embraces??

  “So you immediately assume I'm in love with you, in a fit of o'erweening hubris,” snapped her best friend, but even as she gaped and horrible dread filled her he made the queerest half-smile expression. The smell of sofa and dusty chinchillas no longer irritated Dr. Tilly. “Don't mind me,” he said, and Danny leaned over to kiss her. He kissed her kindly until she didn't want to be kissed kindly any more, at which point he smeared her chapstick from her top lip to her bottom lip. “Please just talk,” he said, and she was too busy trying to memorize the way that his mouth felt and how the cradle of his hips were against her own. “I love you. Say it again.”

  “I've never loved anyone else,” said Dr. Tilly.

  “Well?” Danny Sixteen said. “Did worlds collide?”

  This time all she did was unfold herself: got up wearily off the sofa and could not look him in the eye, had that quizzical expression of his burned repulsively into her brain forevermore. Dr. Tilly stood up and paced around the room, hating every hair on her head and every brick in 14 Arden Lane's walls, and at one point kicked the chimney grate until it hurt her big toe. Danny just watched.

  The cellphone buzzed for the umpteenth time in the pocket of her skirt, and now she yanked it out savagely to read:

  8:18 PM

  Sent from: Sparrow

  Dont forget to fix the fridge mum!

  Dr. Tilly imagined that the house was a little sorry as she got the hairdryer and proceeded to defrost everything up to and including the freezer, cartons of milk and meat sitting on the countertop as Danny watched and provided towels. If there had been a Queen's Award for feeling exhausted, she would have won it. Feeling tired made one feel sadder and when one was sad one felt tireder, and she got down on her knees and scrubbed out the remnants of old carrots as she half-daydreamed about being kissed.

  “There,” she said, “are you happy now, you wretched house?” Nothing happened. Her brain burst into tears.

  Danny looked at her expression and said, “All right. Plan B,” and did what he did every time she had a pressure headache, which was to turn off the lights so that only a thin filter from the kitchen made its way into the sitting-room. He spread the sofa blanket out on their laps and put his arm around her, and they listened to the far-off roar of cars in the street and the tiny squeaks of chinchillas dust-bathing. Dr. Tilly thought she understood why he was angry: There they were, two people who knew each other so well that just by an expression he could tell what she needed, and all they did was stand and stare at opposite sides of the crevasse.

  “A time loop?” he said, when she finally told him. “You've got to be kidding me. A time loop? You met my doppelgangers?” The expression on her face must have been like a coffee stain that couldn't be wiped clean, so he relented: “Well, I suppose worlds really did collide.”

  The house tried to get back into her good books by making tiny mandarin-coloured lights appear like fireflies, and she nearly forgave it when Danny reached out and let one alight on his finger. When he passed it to her it was sweet and warm like tumbledryer lint. So was his hand.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Tilly, “they did, now that I think about it.”

  When everyone else in the faculty asked about her tired face the next day, she said “House troubles,” and everyone nodded as though that made any sort of sense. The neighbours had stuffed two notes about the hedge in 14 Arden Lane's letterbox, and the house had retaliated by covering them in snails; the water pressure in her morning shower had been shocking; the house had made jasmine bloom from the ivy trellises, but Rosamund Tilly informed it that this was a poor show and botanically incorrect. It was Danny who had to call her at lunchtime as she sat down to mark some coursework, and she hadn't any lunch.

  “Tuna salad and three crackers,” said Daniel. “You?”

  She looked in her desk drawer.
“Five Peppermint Tic-Tacs.”

  “Rose, that's disgusting,” he said, and she could hear him drumming a pen on his desk. Danny didn't mince words: “Look, you can't go on like this, and I don't mean your lunch. God only knows what your house will do the next time.”

  “It's lonely,” she said, though her heart wasn't really into defending it. “The girls are too far away. I was thinking of getting another chinchilla.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a roommate,” he said a bit crisply, “and before you say anything else — I was thinking of me. For one, I'm at your house so often I think I'm legally your common-law friendship-bracelet wife. What do you say?”

  Her eyelids undrooped. Her headache cleared. Dr. Tilly's Tic-Tacs melted on her tongue, sharp and clean and sweet. “I think that might do the trick,” she said.

  It did. The plumbing was still terrible, but in Rosamund's opinion 14 Arden Lane was good as gold.

  The Magician's Apprentice

  When she was thirteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “There's never more than two, Cherry. The magician and the magician's apprentice.”

  That was the first year, and she spent her time sloo-o-owly magicking water from one glass to another as he read the newspaper and drank the coffee. Magician's apprentice had to get the Starbucks. Caramel macchiato, no foam, extra hot, which was a yuppie drink if you asked her (but nobody did). “Quarter in,” he'd say, and she'd concentrate on the liquid shivering from cup to cup. “Now half. Slower.”

  For Cherry Murphy, the water always staggered along. She'd seen him make it dance with a twitch of his fingers. “When do I get to stop bullets? My hypothesis is that stopping bullets would be friggin' sweet.”

  “Maybe when you do your homework,” said Mr. Hollis, and so she'd take out her homework. It wasn't even magic homework. It was stuff like The Catcher in the Rye. Mr. Hollis was big on literature, so after they cleared the table of glasses he'd trick her into arguing about Holden Caulfield. Could've been worse — to make her feel better, he'd given her Catch-22, and Cherry had read it approximately a million times. He said she easily read at college level, though he also said that didn't amount to much these days.

  “All right,” said her master magician, when her chin had started to droop. “Now you eat.”

  Magic wore terrible holes in you. Just shunting water around would give her a headache and throbbing nosebleeds, so he'd fry up a steak or fresh brown eggs and watch her gobble them down while saying, “Elbows off the table.” The steak was always bloody. The eggs were always soft-boiled. Food would take the edge off, but not enough. Second lesson: Magic feeds off your soul, said Mr. Hollis. There's only two ways to not be hungry, Cherry. I'm sorry.

  “Two ways? How?”

  “One, quit magic, Harriet Potter,” he said, but then he pushed the plate of eggs at her. Her master magician never seemed hungry like she was. “Second's simple: eat more.”

  After dinner, they usually had a little time. She'd told him over and over that Mark wouldn't notice if she came home at midnight covered in blood, but he always said: “Don't disrespect your dad,” which was why she thought he was kind of a stiff. Then he'd follow it up with, “He does that enough on his own,” which was why she loved him. So until six-thirty hit, they'd watch the last fifteen minutes of a Golden Girls rerun — or listen to some Led Zeppelin, his iPod strung earbud to earbud between them both. Only then was she really content.

  Mr. Hollis was a bachelor with a girlfriend downtown, so his apartment always kind of smelled like Old Spice and dead body, only she would have knocked back neat bleach before saying so.

  When six-thirty came, he'd say, “Put on your jacket,” even if outside it was the average surface temperature of the Sun and she'd die of heatstroke. Then he'd say, “See you later, alligator,” and she'd say, “In a while, crocodile,” or, if the day had been crappy, she'd just make a series of grunts. Then she'd skip home through the dusk to her empty house or her passed-out, empty father, and read Catch-22 until she fell asleep.

  There were spells on which everything hinged, he said; to move, stop and make. The spell that year was “move.” Cool, fine; she was always on the move. Cherry had long spindly limbs like a juvenile spider, and before she'd been an apprentice, she'd taken track and baseball. Her fingers did drum solos if she wasn't given things to do with them. All of that nervous energy went into her spells, and she worried her lips skinless as her water dripped, her winds scattered, and any attempt to lift stuff embedded it in the far-off wall. Mr. Hollis primly mopped tables dry and set her to roll a marble around on the slick linoleum.

  But he made it look so easy. There was not a flicker in those paper-grey eyes as a curl of his hand coaxed a hairbrush out of his drywall, beckoning it to remove itself and have the plaster rework to pre-Cherry wholeness. Objects put themselves back in his hands, ashamed. His marble rolled in perfect madman's circles.

  Once — wild with frustration and knees scored with tile lines — she ignored him when he said: “Leave it. Stop.” Her marble wobbled in a wide spiral. “Cherry.” She feigned deafness. Her head suddenly spun towards him, yanked by invisible iron fingers, and worst of all her marble rolled away lost under the fridge forever.

  “Cherry,” he said evenly, “I don't ask twice.”

  “I can do this! Screw you!”

  That got her grounded for a week before she realised he technically didn't have the authority to do so. Cherry sulked to bed each night at nine o'clock anyway.

  June. In the summer evenings, Mr. Hollis went off with his girlfriend, so they'd spend three brilliant breakfast hours down at the beach rolling grains of sand from palm to palm. Her skinny arms and legs grew browner if not less skinny, and he made her wear a one-piece instead of a bikini (“Nice try, but no cigar”) but each of those days was more perfect than the last. Homework was John Knowles's A Separate Peace (“You could give me something with a good movie, Mr. H”) and he sat shirtless under the beach umbrella as she read aloud.

  Mr. Hollis had rangy bones and a nerdy fishbelly farmer's tan, lots of crisp dark hairs on his arms and his chest. It was possible that somebody found him hot, but only theoretically so; the fact that he had a girlfriend was mystifying. Possibly being a magician and the ensuing squillions of dollars, or at least the squillions as was her understanding, sweetened the deal. That summer she also rolled marbles until her nostrils squirted blood and she found herself eating raw hot dogs from the freezer. It was pretty gross. Cherry was hungry until her mouth hurt.

  After August, she struggled at his kitchen table, pushing ball bearings. Her head hurt. Sometimes he would ignore her and it was a kindness, as she had her pride even if she was in seventh grade, and sometimes he would briefly ruffle his hand through her short dark hair and say: “Be zen.”

  “I'm never going to get this.”

  “You're going to get it, emo kid.”

  “If I die, I leave you all my stuff.”

  “Try ‘bequeath.’ You bequeath me all your stuff.”

  When she did start to get the magic, in between Knowles and A Separate Peace, Mr. Hollis gave her a single brief smile that made the rest of it a cinch. The marble rolled its circle. The water halved into its glass. As a test, he set his Honda Civic in first gear and she pushed it inch by burning inch nine feet forward: she puked bloodied bile afterwards like a champ, him holding her hair, but once her stomach settled he took her out for lobster. It was the kind where you picked your sacrifice out of its tank and were eating ten minutes later. It tasted incredible.

  “Congratulations, cadet,” said Mr. Hollis, gesturing with the fork. “Here's my toast: I'm proud of you. First we take Manhattan, Cherry, then we take Berlin.”

  Her joy was wild, and her Coke sweet like imagined champagne.

  When she was fourteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “The apprenticeship only ends when you know everything the magician knows, and understand everything the magician understands.”

  Cherry took this to mean
that she'd be an apprentice until she was like thirty. He switched from caramel macchiatos to skinny vanilla lattes, which this year she pointed out was “totally gay,” and earned her a long, indifferent look. Mr. Hollis was an award winner at indifferent looks. He could scratch you with a word, or by flicking his pale aluminum eyes away at any place but you. The hunger still boiled low in her belly as she jumped water from cup to cup to cup, but crushingly all he'd say now was, “Cute one trick, pony.”

  Instead he got her to empty the glass out over the sink and try to divert it upwards. Cherry spent most of her time on her feet and mopping at her t-shirt when this proved to be a son of a bitch, and all he did was sit at the kitchen table reading his newspaper. That had started to drive her a little crazy, too. Mr. Hollis was a slob who left the Sports section lying around and never dusted, but when she started scrubbing his stove and looking for his Dustbuster, he said: “Don't go there. Jen doesn't even go there.”

  He'd been dating Jennifer Blumfield over a year now. Cherry had been introduced as his niece. Jen did accounting and was sweet without being patronizing, but she hated her a little anyway and bullshitted her best smile to hide it. Only complete dumbasses weren't nice to the girlfriend. Mr. Hollis wasn't prehistoric, and even though his five driver's licences showed four different ages, he was allowed to date.

  “Are you going to tell her about the magic thing?”

  Cherry hadn't expected the cold shoulder. “You never tell anyone about what we do, Charlene. I didn't think you capable of being this big an imbecile.”

  Her eyes had smarted, and his were turned away.