A Gift of Magic

  “That should be good for at least an hour or so,” Greg said knowledgeably. “How’s Kirby doing? She still compensating by being mean to you?”

  “Nope,” Brendon said. “She’s done a real turnaround. She says nice things all the time, and she smiles a big fake smile, and she’s even got a boyfriend. He comes over after dinner and they eat popcorn and watch movies.”

  “Kirby with a boyfriend!” Greg said. “Gross! I’m glad I don’t have sisters!” He generally preferred Kirby to Nancy, but choosing one girl over another was picking between two evils. It was better to go without either of them.

  They made good time on the beach road, but things became difficult when they left it to start across the dunes. The sand was soft, and the wheels of the golf cart sank down into it. One time the skateboard came off and disappeared under the sand, and they had to dig it out again. At last they were forced to look for planks, which they laid out to form runners like railroad tracks. They pushed the boat to the end of them, then pulled the planks out and laid them in front for the next stint.

  It was tiring work, and it was with relief that they finally reached the damp sand near the water’s edge.

  “That took longer than we thought it would,” Brendon said, looking at his watch. He raised his eyes and squinted out at the water, shining silver in the slanted rays of the afternoon sun.

  “Do you think we should wait until tomorrow?” Greg asked.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Brendon said. “You know—dumb piano lesson.”

  “And your mom will be home,” Greg said. “And my mom will be home. And Nancy will be bugging us. And people will be on the beach. You know they do come and walk on the beach on Saturdays, even when it’s too cold to swim.”

  “Yeah,” Brendon said. His eyes were still on the water. The white streak of sand that was the bar rose temptingly against the horizon, there was still plenty of sunlight, and the tide hadn’t begun to turn yet.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get started.”

  They had to lift the boat and carry it to get it into the water. The rudder scraped on the shells, and for a moment they thought they might have disconnected it. Brendon, who was supporting the bow, staggered backward beneath the weight of the pilot’s seat. He felt the cold water lap through his tennis shoes and saw Greg’s face grow red with exertion as he carried the stern.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Greg gasped, and then suddenly, miraculously—they had made it! The boat was in the water! Releasing his hold, Brendon straightened and let the waves take over.

  “She floats!”

  “Boy, does she! She’s great!” Greg cried.

  “She’s better than great!” Brendon shouted. “She’s totally awesome!”

  Working quickly, they loaded the shovels and paddles into the orange crates.

  “All aboard!” Greg cried, and swung himself onto the deck.

  Brendon gave the boat a hard shove and threw himself onto the stern. Icy water splashed his legs, and a wave washed over the deck, soaking his shirt. Shivering with both the chill and excitement, Brendon grabbed one of the paddles and pushed it against the sandy bottom. The boat swung sideways, and Greg caught the second paddle and pushed on the other side.

  The boys poled until the water grew too deep, and then began to paddle. The boat moved farther and farther out, until it had passed beyond the jut of rock. Now when they turned to look over their shoulders, they could see the entire beach stretching long and empty behind them.

  “Hey, this is the life!” Greg’s red hair was standing up straight in the salt breeze.

  “Let’s never come back!” Brendon shouted. “Let’s go on forever!”

  Excitement surged within him, high and bright and feverish. He grinned into the sun and felt the wind cold against his teeth. For a moment he wished that Greg weren’t here with him. If he were alone, he would head for Mexico, or even farther. He would keep on going until he reached the end of the world!

  But that would be another time, another day.

  Now he grasped his paddle tightly and brought it hard through the water in fast, strong strokes. The sandbar grew larger, rushing toward them like a thin white ship.

  “Hang on!” Brendon yelled. “We’re coming in for a landing!”

  The moment the bow touched sand he was over the side.

  “Help me,” he cried to Greg who was trying to collect the shovels. “The current’s strong out here!”

  Hurriedly Greg slid off the side of the deck to join him. Gasping and shivering, they hauled the boat up onto the sand spit.

  The shore looked surprisingly far away when they gazed back at it. They could see Mr. Duncan’s cottage with its dock out in front. The roof of the Garrett house rose over the top of a dune, looking as though it were perched upon it. Past the beach, the sea grasses moved like a rippling forest.

  The light slanted low across the water between.

  “We won’t have much time,” Brendon said. “We’d better start digging.”

  Greg glanced down at the sand at their feet.

  “Where should we dig first? Did your mom say what part the stuff was buried on?”

  “Of course not,” Brendon said. “If people knew that they’d have dug it up years ago. Let’s start in the middle and work out in both directions.”

  “That could take us a year,” Greg said, but he got the shovels.

  They started their hole in the center of the bar as Brendon had suggested.

  “What kind of treasure do you think it will be?” Greg asked after they had been working for a few moments. “Pieces of eight and stuff? Jewelry, maybe?”

  “Gold and silver,” Brendon said. “They stole it off ships, you know. And I bet there’s a lot or they wouldn’t have bothered to bury it.”

  “What are you going to do with your share?” Greg asked him. “If we find it?”

  “Oh, we’ll find it,” Brendon said. “It just might take a while.” Until Greg’s question, he hadn’t thought past the thrill of the actual digging.

  Spending the treasure was something he had not really considered.

  “I’ll give it to my mom, I guess,” he said finally. “She can buy herself clothes and stuff, and maybe some books for Nancy.”

  “I’m going to get myself a car,” Greg said. “And an airplane. And flying lessons.”

  “Hey, cool!” Brendon was disgusted with himself for not having thought of it. “I’ll do that, too, with part of it. Mom doesn’t need that many new clothes. She’s got some pretty nice stuff already.”

  They stopped talking then to save their breath for digging. The task was proving more difficult than either boy had anticipated. The sand was wet and heavy, and the water level was so near the surface that the holes began to fill up almost immediately. Then the sand from the edges would slide down into the water.

  “What we need to do,” Brendon said finally, “is brace the sides like they do in mine shafts. We should have brought some pieces of wood along for braces.”

  “We can use the orange crates,” Greg suggested.

  Straightening, he leaned on his shovel and turned to look at the boat. “Hey, the tide’s coming in pretty fast. The stern’s afloat.”

  Brendon sent his shovel down once more into the hole he was digging.

  “Greg!” he said. “Greg, I hit something!”

  “Really?” Greg yanked his gaze back from the boat. “What sort of something?”

  “It’s metal, I think!” Brendon was down on his knees, dipping into the hole with his hand.

  His heart was pounding with excitement. “Oh, no! The sides are caving in again! Hurry, Greg, get the crates!”

  Dropping his spade, Greg dashed over to the boat where it sat bobbing, half in, half out of the water.

  As Greg clambered on board, Brendon cried, “It is metal! I can touch it with my fingers!”

  “We tied them on too tight!” Greg began wrestling with the plastic boxes. Suddenly he gave a sharp cry
. “Hey, Bren, I’m drifting!”

  “You’re what?” Brendon raised his head. To his horror he saw the boat with his friend aboard it a good three yards out past the end of the sandbar.

  “Pole it back!” Brendon yelled. “Where’s the paddle?”

  “Over here!” Greg scrambled to the other side of the boat. He caught up the paddle and thrust it into the water. “I can’t touch bottom! It’s too deep!”

  “Then paddle!” Brendon was standing on the sandbar edge now, the hole in the sand forgotten.

  Desperately Greg began to use the oar on his one side. The boat swung around in an arc. The distance between the boys was growing every second.

  “The current’s too strong!” Greg shouted. “I can’t handle the boat myself! It’s too heavy for one person.”

  Brendon contemplated plunging into the water and trying to swim. Even as he thought it, he knew he could never reach the boat. The current was pulling it toward the open sea.

  “Paddle on the far side!” Brendon called. “Switch back and forth! Try to keep it moving in a straight line!”

  “I can’t!” Greg cried. His face was contorted with strain.

  It was too late now to even try to swim. Brendon stood quiet, feeling the last faint warmth of the afternoon sun upon his shoulders, watching the boat draw farther and farther away.

  Then suddenly he grew aware of the lap of water against his feet. The tide was coming in.

  Nancy was home alone when the letter arrived. It was a real letter this time, not an e-mail.

  She had almost gone with her mother and Kirby to the doctor.

  “Come with us, dear,” Elizabeth had suggested. “We can stop somewhere afterward and celebrate. We can get ice cream or something. Your sister doesn’t get a cast off every day!”

  “Come on, Nance,” Kirby had echoed. “We can call this my coming-out party!”

  She might really have gone if Kirby hadn’t said that. There was something about Kirby being cheerful that was even worse than Kirby being sorry for herself.

  The change in Kirby had taken place in Mr. Duncan’s car. From that moment on, she seemed to have become a different person. The first thing she did when they got home that day was call Madame Vilar.

  “I’m sorry for not calling you back before,” she said. “Please thank everyone for the cards and things.” Then she had sat there listening for a long time.

  “Thank you,” she had said finally. “I might like that—sometime. Not right now, but sometime. I’ll—I’ll think about it.”

  “What did she say?” Nancy asked after her sister had hung up the phone.

  “She offered me a job,” Kirby said, “helping to teach at the studio. Like Miss Nedra does, and Miss Julie. I wouldn’t have to actually dance or anything. I could just teach, and use a demonstrator to show the steps.”

  “Would you really like that?” Nancy asked her in surprise. It was hard to imagine Kirby teaching.

  “I guess I might,” Kirby said, “when I’ve had a chance to get used to the idea a little. After all, I’ll have to do something, won’t I?” She smiled a quick, bright smile and went out to help in the kitchen.

  At school the change in Kirby was even more miraculous. For the first time, she seemed to look around her and see the other students. Instead of dreaming through lunch hour, she deliberately seated herself at crowded tables. She joined in conversations and made little jokes and listened attentively to gossip.

  Before long, girls who had previously written her off as “stuck-up” began to refer to her as “sweet” and “nice” and “funny.” The magnetism that had always made her dancing so special was irresistible when she turned it on for her fellow students.

  Her grades improved as she began to do her homework. She looked alert in class and kept her eyes on her teachers. She even allowed Jessie’s brother, Paul, to come over and help her study.

  “Now you won’t have to do it,” she said to Nancy. “Besides, it’s time we started thinking about boys. The other girls do, and if I can’t be a dancer, maybe I should start dating so I can get married and have kids. That way I can have a daughter, and she can be a ballerina.”

  To Elizabeth, the change was some kind of miracle.

  “I was right to send her back to school,” she said. The lines of worry that had begun to show in her face since Kirby’s accident smoothed away. “She must just have been going through an adjustment period. Thank goodness she’s found herself now and has started to be happy.”

  Nancy snatched gratefully at her mother’s words. Maybe it’s going to work out all right, she thought. The things she had always dreamed of for Kirby were now beginning to materialize.

  She was popular, she was sociable, she was paying attention to boys. Just like any other pretty girl.

  Her life isn’t ruined at all, Nancy kept telling herself. When she gets used to it, she’ll love being nice and normal. She’ll be glad someday that she didn’t waste her whole life flitting around the stage.

  The thought was comforting, and if she repeated it to herself often enough, it made her guilt more endurable.

  She was careful when she was with her sister never to open her mind to Kirby’s. The one time she had, a terrible feeling had poured in on her, a thick, gray fog of emotion so heavy and strange that Nancy had nearly strangled. She can’t really be feeling that way, she had told herself frantically. She couldn’t act so happy all the time if she did! It must be left over somehow from the way she felt before.

  From then on, though, Nancy had kept her mind tightly closed. She knew she couldn’t bear to face that grayness again.

  It was because of this that she didn’t go with Kirby and her mother to the doctor and was instead at home alone, trying to read, when the special delivery letter arrived. It was addressed to all three of them—herself and Kirby and Brendon. She stood holding it for a moment, staring down at her father’s bold, black handwriting, thinking, He’s safe, since he must be all right and safe to have written it. My feeling was wrong! He’s all right and safe!

  She thought about waiting until the others got home so they could open it together.

  But even as she thought it, her hands were tearing open the envelope. She drew the pages out and spread them flat and read the opening lines:

  Dear kids,

  This will come as a surprise to you, but I hope that after you get used to the idea, you’ll be happy for me. Maggie Courtney and I were married last weekend.

  Nancy reread the words with a feeling of bewilderment. It was a joke, of course. Her father, married? Impossible! He’s just trying to be funny, she told herself. Farther down, he’ll say he’s joking.

  But as her eyes flew down the page and line followed line, there was no reference to a joke.

  Maggie, he said, was a fine woman, a top-notch correspondent, a terrific photographer. “Your mother has met her,” he wrote, “and will tell you all about her.” Maggie had never been married. She had always been afraid that getting married would mean giving up her career and having a family.

  “I thought that I would never marry again,” wrote Richard Garrett, “because my kind of life isn’t stable. But neither Maggie nor I have ever felt the need to put down roots somewhere. In our own strange way, we fit each other perfectly. My hope is that your mother is as lucky as I am and soon finds the person who can give her the happiness she deserves.”

  He would be home in the summer as originally planned, he said, bringing Maggie with him. He knew that they would like her.

  It wasn’t a joke, then. It was true—it was horribly true! Maggie Courtney and I were married last weekend! Nancy turned back to those incredible words and forced herself to read and reread them. Her father was married. There was no chance now that he would ever come back to her mother.

  There had never been a chance, she realized now. She had been fooling herself into believing something that could not possibly be.

  Oh, Dad, she cried silently, how could you do this? How could
you do it?!

  With all of her mind she reached out to her father. For the first time since Kirby’s accident, she let herself open completely. Dad! she cried. Dad!—and her mind was stretched wide in all directions, a great, groping emptiness, aching with the shock of loss, screaming, Dad, Dad, come back to us, tell us it isn’t true!

  And into this openness came a voice calling, “Nancy!”

  For a moment Nancy was too startled to comprehend. It’s Dad, she thought, but it wasn’t her father’s voice. Kirby? Was it Kirby? She found Kirby in an instant. She was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, leafing through a magazine, trying to pretend that she was reading. Elizabeth was seated across from her. Neither of them was thinking about Nancy.

  But if not her father or her mother or her sister, that left only Brendon. Surely it wouldn’t be Brendon—and at the thought of her brother, a feeling of cold shot through her, so sudden and violent that it left her shivering. It was Brendon! Something was wrong with him! Very wrong!

  But wasn’t he over at Greg’s house? He was always at Greg’s house.

  Dropping her father’s letter onto the coffee table, Nancy hurried to the phone. The Russo number was scrawled on the front of the directory in Brendon’s own sloppy handwriting.

  Nancy dialed it, and after a moment, a woman’s voice answered, “Russo residence.” It must be the cleaning lady the Russos had come once a week.

  “Hello,” Nancy said. “This is Nancy Garrett. Could I speak to my brother?”

  “Brendon’s not here,” the woman said. “At least, I don’t think so. The boys came through here earlier and ate half the cake Mrs. Russo made for dinner. Then they ran off somewhere. They ought to be back soon, though. Mrs. Russo likes Greg home before it gets dark.”

  “Do you think they told Greg’s mother where they were going?” asked Nancy.

  “No, dear,” the woman said. “I’m sure they didn’t. Mrs. Russo was gone until just a few minutes ago. Would you like to speak to her?”