“Where do you live when you’re not doing this?” I asked, once she had finished up a conversation with a store employee about quantity.
I swear her pupils practically dilated like a surprised cat. “Um…I’m usually on the road.”
“Just wondering where home base is.”
“I’ve been trying to decide if you live in a McMansion or a condo where the fees are higher than your mortgage but you picked it for the gym.”
“Well, you noticed,” I said. “So I suppose it was worth the fee.”
“No, no…” She jerked away from me.
“You’re right,” I said. “I have a condo, and it’s just a place to lay my head mostly. It’s messy too. I work too hard, and I suspect you do the same.”
“Yeah.”
I could tell that she missed having a home. It was just right there in her eyes. She said she had a big family. I didn’t know what that was like. She spent all her time making homes for other people, and I had a feeling that she didn’t have any end game in mind. It was just work, work, work all the time.
It couldn’t be comfortable sleeping in a truck.
Meanwhile, my campaign manager Sandra kept texting me, and she was rightfully pissed that I had skipped a campaign event with no good explanation. Of all of my team, Sandra was the one you really didn’t want to annoy. She was a self-described “broad” born and raised in Philly who seemed to be thirty-seven going on seventy, in the sense that she would berate me lovingly and loudly like a mom, and also, that she was a millennial named Sandra.
I felt like I was standing on a precipice. This was my year. My district was hotly contested, but our internal polling was looking good, and by next January I might be walking through the halls in Washington DC on the national stage. From there, who knew? I was young. Senator, governor…
Is it true, what she implied? All my ambitions actually come from a drive to gain magical power?
But as much as I was running toward, I’d also been running away. I’d always known there was something weird about my family, stuff I just wasn’t told and didn’t care to find out. I knew Grandpa had other children, and when he married my grandmother, those kids went to live with their grandparents and they never saw him again. My grandmother had died under some mysterious circumstances. There was Dad’s suicide, with no explanation. And after my parents separated, my mom tried to keep me from seeing my grandfather. She remarried when I was sixteen and while I was in college, she moved to Costa Rica.
My whole family seemed to be running from something.
And whatever it was…
When I went through the house before the auction, I could hardly even cope with
Grandpa’s stuff. I only took a few things. But those books were what hit me. I had the weirdest feeling when I looked them over, although I couldn’t read a word in them.
I should run away from all of this. It was going to ruin me, everything I’d built and worked for. Wizards? Come the fuck on.
I couldn’t deny that this was the best day I’d had in a long time. The time I spent with Helena felt real, and she was stunningly beautiful, but in a way that felt real too. There was no pretension about her, no fuss. She didn’t need me, but I hoped she was having as much fun as I was.
I helped Helena load up her truck bed with boxes upon boxes of tile.
“I’m glad you were here,” she said, slapping dust off her hands. “That makes the job go so much faster. So are you coming back with me?”
“I can’t. I have to get to a meeting tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Her smile was lopsided. “Well, I’m sorry I dragged you shopping, but it had to be done.”
“I’ll come see the house—well, not this weekend, but next weekend.”
“You definitely won’t be able to afford it by then,” she said. “Unless you want to sell your condo.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’m making it gorgeous,” she said.
She drove me back to my car, after a coffee break. She told me all her plans for the house. I was glad she didn’t try to talk about ‘magic’ anymore. I wasn’t sure if I could handle too much at once. It had to be real. It made too much sense. It was almost like I’d known all along, in hindsight. But it was also a lot to process. Right now I just wanted to listen to her voice, getting quite loud with enthusiasm as she went on about the new bathroom and what great shape the roof was in and so on.
Before I knew it, we were back at the BMW.
“Well, see ya. Thanks again.” She pointed her eyes forward, and pulled away as soon as I shut the door. She wasn’t going to give a hint that she would rather have company, but I could tell, and for the first time in a long time, I cursed all the obligations I’d gotten involved in when I could have stopped off for a bottle of wine and…well, some takeout diner food. I had no idea how to use my grandfather’s stove.
Anyway, I guess she has company, I remembered. She has a ghost.
Well, as long as it isn’t my grandfather’s ghost, I guess it’s all right. A ghost is no competition.
IT WAS A LONG DRIVE HOME. I had time to let some things sink in.
Wizards. Magic. Bats. She claimed that I stopped her truck with my mind.
One part of my brain kept trying to explain it away, but it was quickly getting shoved aside by the reality of what I’d seen, and all the strange things in my family history.
The fact that I had not called Sandra back and skipped a fundraiser was going to cause
