Dad has a ten-gallon bucket from Lowe’s that he has filled with sand from the dunes. He chants a pidgin language of Latin and Sanskrit that we have heard since we were children. Then he grabs handfuls of bones and shells and shoves them into the sand, sweating with the effort to dig a hollow for his fists. He works a twisting motion until his arms are wrist deep.
When his hands come back out, they are encased in molten glass. They glow softly in the dark, barely brighter than the grill. There is more chanting, and then he moves his hands above an orange paint tray of dirty white feathers, fluttering his fingers until the gull plumage lifts up and arranges itself into wings.
The glowing liquid releases from his skin and pours upwards in rivulets and drops, as though he has reversed gravity. The glass forms a ball in front of him, little ripples on its surface from his breath. Then the wings come to either side and beat on the hot night air until the ball lifts upward in slow, stair-step movements. “Why aren’t my grandchildren out here?” he complains, but they are inside watching cartoons on an iPad.
There is no breeze from the ocean, or if there is one it is blocked by the tall white hotels where the tourists stay. The buildings stack up like white Legos, windowless on the land side, with ninety-buck, ocean-view rooms that rent to marines from Jacksonville. As the night wears on we can hear some of the men, drunk and howling.
The cedar shake houses around us belong to aging baby boomers who moved to the beach in the sixties when it was still rural farmland. Dad moved here in seventy-seven, after our Mom died and our grandparents took us in. Dad swore he would never come back to Durham or any city. He drove the five hours to this place, where his Buick broke down and there was no one for a hundred miles who could fix it. The rusted red Skylark is in the backyard, windows down and doors open, a nesting place for the animals Dad needs for his spells.
Dad said once, before the hotels, that there was privacy here, but there is always a privacy to magic. Any spell is apparent only to magicians and the people they enchant. To everyone else, a summoned thing is just ignored or forgotten or easily explained. Dad’s thunderstorm from two years ago didn’t make the weather report on local TV. Tonight, no one will see the fireworks but the people in this house.
It takes a full five minutes until the ball is a thousand feet above us. The glass detonates quietly, without the concussion of gunpowder, and the sky streaks with burning reds and blue-purples and bright yellows. This one is for you, Ceiling Fan,” Dad says, and even though I don’t acknowledge his nickname for me I can’t stop myself from watching. The phosphorescent lines form pictures of me as a boy, only fat and unpleasantly asymmetrical. I know that I never looked like this sad child, though I can’t help but touch my chin to make sure that I’m not deformed.
I have the time to check because the shimmering lines of this boy’s face and hands do not arc and fall like normal fireworks. They hang steady in the sky, as though they were roped to it. Then they come alive and begin to move, the fat me suddenly animated, and I watch a cartoon highlight reel of the worst moments of my childhood.
The animated me is clumsy and not good at sports. Several girls break his heart and his father prefers his older brother Tommy. Out of three children, he is the only one who sees his Mom die.
Dad would never draw Mom, but he draws me at the car window, upside down in a seatbelt as fire flickers on the glass. I was five, and even then Dad was a mean drunk. He made me walk from the limousine to Mom’s grave on a burned leg that wept yellow fluid. If I was better at spells, he said, I might have been able to save her.
I decide to leave, whatever the consequences.
I imagine myself walking down the road to the beach, growing old or diseased or slowly disintegrating into a gray cloud of smoke. I decide that the last would be my favorite. I am halfway down the steps to the backyard before my sister catches up and grabs my hands. She whispers the five words of the only spell she knows, and it is suddenly quiet around us.
“I wish I could do that one,” I say.
“Everyone thinks I’m rude. I would get in less trouble just wearing ear muffs.” Susan’s face is too close to mine because she can only make the silence two feet wide. The magic seemed bigger when we were children. She still doesn’t wear makeup, and her blue eyes are rounder than I remember. She is the youngest of the three of us, twenty-nine years old and a gastroenterologist at Carolina. If I move even a few inches away we won’t be able to hear each other.
“I hate it here.”
“We’re so close to midnight. Don’t let him …” The night air fills with the sound of the ocean again, and Dad is waving his hands over our heads and calling us pathetic.
“Don’t do that,” he says to her. “Maybe your brother could use his one spell to cool things off a bit. I can’t remember, is it four degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius?”
“I can make anything warmer or colder by four degrees Kelvin,” I say, just to be difficult.
“Any other spells since the last time I saw you? Any growth in your skills? For any of you?”
We are all quiet.
“Like I thought, Ceiling Fan.” He points up to the sky, where my face has been replaced with the slowly rotating blades of a cheap motel fan. “You three are the descendants of one of the great magical families, and it’s one spell for each of you. The quiet one and the cool one and the one who could make flowers grow.”
“My front yard looks terrific this year,” Tommy says.
“Your girls in there will do nothing.” Dad sits down on a bench built into the deck railing, putting his hands on his knees to hold himself up. “I’m hot,” he says to me. “You clearly don’t understand what the words of your spell should do, but why don’t you cool us down four degrees Kelvin?”
I look up at the fireworks. I know there must be strong points in the sizzling lines above us where the mechanics of the spell apply their force, and if I can overheat those points the fireworks will burn out and the spell will collapse. I remember the math of ley lines, taught to me by my grandmother, and as I chant my three words, I push the spell up to the curves and angles of the burning fan blades. There is one bright flare, and then another, and then the drawing crackles and erupts. It bursts into a thousand sparks, finally falling like normal fireworks. Tommy laughs into his fist.
“Ungrateful losers,” Dad says. He is sweaty and pale, and I see that he is holding his left shoulder. He tries to stand up but he can’t, his legs folding underneath him as he drops to the deck.
“Dad?” Susan says. “Does your chest hurt? Is it your chest?” I say my words again, only backward, and a cooler air settles around us.
The nearest hospital is laughably far away. I spend forty-five minutes in the back of an ambulance rattling over rural roads so uneven and potholed that I wonder if my taxes need to go up.
An acne-scarred seventeen-year-old with bloodstains on his EMT patches hooks up EKG wires across Dad’s chest, and from the green lines on the tiny screen I can tell that Dad’s heart is in trouble. The boy’s name is Maurice, and while he works he tells us about the local catfish festival and his dreams of becoming a professional fisherman. He smells of cheap cologne and body wash, and his skinny arms are marked with two tattoos of fish so awkwardly rendered that they look more like dinosaurs.
To say I doubt Maurice’s competence would suggest that I believe healthcare competence is possible in the middle of nowhere. While he sips on a gas station slushy that is turning his lips blue, Maurice manages to give Dad a few medicines that will help. What Dad really needs is to go to a cath lab where they will run wires into his heart to reopen the blood vessels.
Underneath his oxygen mask, Dad chants a healing spell from the Middle Ages that stopped bleeding from sword injuries. If he succeeds, he will stop the blood flow to his own heart, so I tell him to cut it out. I chant my own nonsense words, and I hold his yellow hands against the stretcher so th
at he can’t rest them on his chest. I have to stand up off my bench seat and lean over him, and as the ambulance sways I keep hitting my head on a cabinet that holds IV fluid and gauze. “A little help?” I ask Maurice.
“There’s no need to restrain the patient, sir,” he replies, oblivious to Dad’s attempts. “You are just upsetting him.”
Susan and Tommy were supposed to follow us, but by the time we reach the hospital I haven’t seen their headlights out the back windows for twenty minutes. Grievance County Hospital is a squat six-story building that sits in a parking lot the size of a lake. The building’s windows are the deep narrow slits of prison architecture, and the sliding doors of the ER are jammed as we roll up, so that Maurice has to pry them open with the help of a broomstick and the obese security guard on the other side.
Inside, the front desk is a green counter encased in hazy bulletproof glass, and we register with a geriatric secretary so thin and bony that her tiny yellow dress sags down from the points of her shoulders. Her hair is a soft fluff of fine blue-white and her skin, despite her obvious age, is pale and unmarked. She is small but perfectly upright, and she considers us in a way I find familiar and uncomfortable.
“Mo, dear,” she says. “Can you hold the patient’s hands while I talk with this young man?”
“Of course, Ma’am,” he says. The woman’s eyes are very blue. After all the rocking in the ambulance I am dizzy, so I lean forward and hold onto the cracked Formica of the counter between us. The woman is smiling, which crinkles the corners of her eyes.
“He’s having a heart attack,” I tell her. “Right now, he is having a heart attack.”
“Yes sir,” the woman says. There is a sharp country twang in her voice that I don’t commonly hear. “Our interventional cardiologist is driving in to the hospital, and his nurse is upstairs setting up.”
“I’m a doctor at Duke,” I say. “I’m an anesthesiologist. I’m just visiting my dad.”
“Of course you are, John.”
“I hate him,” I say, and she smiles a little more.
“Let’s send them to bed two,” she says. “Mo, be a dear and help them put him in restraints?” One of the nurses comes behind me and guides me to the bed space, sitting me down in a chair. Dad has given up on his spell and is glaring at me. The nurse and the EMT tie Dad’s hands to the rails of the stretcher while another nurse runs wires to him from the monitors on the wall. The world becomes steadier than it was a minute ago.
“Dad,” I say. “You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay.” I suspect that none of this is true. I wonder if the helicopter from Duke can land in the parking lot and take him to a better hospital.
“Keep the one at the desk away from me,” Dad says. He turns his head to the wall, then shudders and starts to vomit.
In the bed across from us, a child is having an asthma attack. She heaves at the air as if it were made of thick liquid, her neck muscles tight from the effort. Her oxygen mask gurgles from the fog of medicine running through it, and she keeps trying to pull it off because she is breathless and scared of anything too close to her face.
A young black woman in a white coat sits beside her, rubbing the girl’s back and speaking in a low, soothing drawl. She tells the girl to look at the wall, where the bricks are painted bright colors and covered with stickers from Disney movies. “Where’s Nemo now?” the woman asks. “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”
I find Nemo. The sticker of the cartoon fish is dirty at the edges, and his tail is peeling away from the orange-painted concrete block underneath it. The orange block is on the edge of the wall closest to me, with a red block beside it and a blue block beside that, until suddenly the order has changed. Now the orange block is where the red block was, and on the red block I am looking at a sticker of a cartoon princess. A few seconds later the red block replaces a green one, and as I listen carefully I can hear the doctor’s pidgin just under the bubbling sound of the mask.
It’s a rearrangement spell, the switching of objects that are side by side and touching, but what the doctor is doing is even more interesting. In the girl’s lungs, the bronchioles are so constricted that the girl struggles to move air. At the narrowest spaces the doctor is trying to speed the exchange of oxygen, getting good air in and bad air out. Impressed, I lean into the hallway between us, holding the arm of my chair for balance.
“That’s fascinating,” I say, “but it’s not helping.” The woman turns to look at me, and I can see her blush, the round upslope of her cheeks turning warm. She has a high forehead, and soft, shoulder-length curls tied loosely behind her. She looks familiar, but I am terrible at recognizing people. Her coat says she is Dr. Aylee Jackson.
“Do I know you?” I ask.
“My mother is at the front desk. And why do you think my calming distraction of this child isn’t helping?”
“The distraction is charming, but the rearrangement spell won’t do much in her lungs. You are exchanging contiguous objects, but in the lungs you are exchanging air. This means you are exchanging molecules, and only the molecules that are in contact with each other. Diffusion does the work faster. Your spell is good magic, but like most good magic, it’s ineffective medicine.”
“Like your Dad’s healing spell?”
“Well, better than that.”
The little girl’s purple hospital gown is covered in footballs and rocket ships and is soaked tight to her skin. The sweat beads on her forehead, so I do my thing with temperature. The doctor smirks at me, amused.
“Do you tell all your colleagues how to do their work?”
“I work at an academic hospital. I train medical students.”
“And do I look like a medical student?”
“You looked like someone who hadn’t thought through the physiology of what she was trying to do.”
“You’re kind of a jerk, aren’t you?”
“Probably.” I look back at my Dad, who now holds an emesis basin and is catching his breath. “It’s been a rough day.”
“Well, doctor,” she says, “I will be in to see you in a minute.”
The nurses draw blood from Dad for labs, and a technician runs another twelve wires to his chest, to better define which parts of his heart are dying. Even pale and nauseated, Dad can still laugh at me. “She called you a jerk,” he says.
The woman from the front desk leans out her window and yells at him. “Sir, if you don’t want your son here, he can wait in the lobby or we can ask him to leave.”
Dad snorts and yells back, “I’d love to see him try. He has to be here.”
“Had to be,” I remind him. “My obligations ended when you got into the ambulance.”
The woman comes out from behind her counter and walks down the hall. She stops at the foot of the bed, then glances at me and raises her brows.
“My grandmother insisted on a yearly visit. There was rope and a drink and the full moon.”
The woman considers this with a grave expression. “Your grandmother was trying to help your father,” she says, “but I’ve always hated that spell, especially with children.” She leans over Dad in a way that makes him cringe. “If I help you, will you let them go?”
Dad tries to move away from her, tugging on the restraints. “They promised my mother.”
“Who is dead, so that promise herits to you. You know the law.”
“They owe me.”
“They won’t owe you if I let you die.” She leans in close, whispering. “You are dying. Can you feel it?”
“Mother,” Dr. Jackson says. She hands the child to a nurse and walks over to us, putting her hand on the bony ridge of her mother’s back. “Fine, fine,” the old woman mutters.
She pulls a necklace from beneath her dress, a crystal on a thin silver chain. She drops the pendant into Dad’s hand, folding his puffy fingers around the hard edges of it
in a way that looks like it hurts. “Say it,” she demands, and he says a pidgin word I should know but have forgotten. The woman stands up and backs away, tucking the crystal back into her dress with satisfaction.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Can she actually do something to help him?”
“Of course my mother can help him,” the doctor says, giving the woman a hard look. “She can go do the paperwork they will need in the cath lab.” She waves to a young orderly in pale-blue scrubs. “Please take Mr. Crayton upstairs.”
“I guess I won’t see you again,” Dad says. “I guess you’re going to leave Hickville General right now, get back to your fancy hospital?”
“I’ll be here when it’s over,” I tell him, but even with the right words I sound irritated and spiteful. I put my hand on Dad’s shoulder and he turns away from me, spitting into his basin. The orderly unlocks the stretcher and they roll away down the hall.
“The young man’s hungry,” the yellow-dress woman says over her shoulder. Dr. Jackson looks at me.
“You already smell like burgers and something dead.”
“Didn’t eat either.” I raise my hands awkwardly as if surrendering. She doesn’t smile, just considers me for a minute. Her eyes narrow, and she pulls her closed lips between her teeth, chewing the inner edges as she considers me. “Elise is an old southern woman, you know. She thinks everyone is hungry.”
“And me telling her everything?”
“Well yeah, that’s a spell. She knows more than a hundred.”
“How many spells do you know?”
“Just the one,” she says, with a chuckle. “You really don’t know? No one in our generation can do more than one.”
The girl with asthma has improved, so Aylee takes me to a vending machine that sells microwave hamburgers. Even with ketchup, they are awful.
She drinks a Coke with me while I eat, and I tell her about every failed spell my grandmother tried to teach me. I tell her about hours at the red painted kitchen table, rewriting ancient runes and trying to float pennies in the air. I tell her I’ve never met a magician outside of my own family. I tell her about Tommy and Susan, and about my Mom.