Bliss

  Rose paced to the end of the driveway and saw Mrs. Havegood speeding backward down the street in her silver Cadillac, then screech to a halt at a green light at the end of the block. She spotted Rose out her window and awkwardly managed to lift a foot out the window of the car and wiggle it, as Mrs. Daublin had. “ESOR!” she yelled. “M’I A LACIGOLOHTAP RIAL!” Then the light turned red, and she slammed on the gas and squealed down the road until she was out of sight.

  “Esor?” said Rose. “What does that mean?”

  Sage pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket and wrote ESOR on the driveway. “Esor. Esor.” Then he raised one finger in the air and gasped. “ESOR is ROSE backward! Everyone is talking backward!”

  “So everyone is driving backward, talking backward, waving hello with their feet, and doing the opposite of what they usually do,” said Rose, pulling at her hair.

  Aunt Lily’s eyes darted around nervously. “My goodness. You certainly have a situation on your hands.”

  “We should have made the recipe that sewed people’s mouths shut instead,” said Ty.

  Rose watched in horror as her neighbors stumbled blindly through their morning routines, and she winced to see each one step backward, falter, and fall.

  The four of them grew quieter and quieter on their walk into town. In the schoolyard, pigtailed and cowlicked summer-school students wagged stern fingers at their teachers, who were playing tag and building sand castles in their jackets and ties under the bright moon. At the firehouse, Fire Chief Conklin and his team were trying to climb up their fire pole, without much success. Construction workers unscrewed pieces of drywall from the frame of a house, a landscaper covered well-manicured lawns with heaps of cut grass, a toddler pulled his mother in a stroller. Retirees practicing tai chi in the park looked the same as always, until they tried to meditate on their heads.

  In the town square, Rose walked with her aunt and her brothers past the Reginald Calamity fountain, where passersby were stepping into the water and fishing coins out of it. The librarians Mrs. Hackett and Mrs. Crisp were scooting around the plaza, stealing books from the hands of readers on the benches and carting them back to the library. At Pierre Guillaume’s, Monsieur Guillaume himself waited hungrily, fork and knife in hand, while diners ferried plates of food from the kitchen to his table, backward, most of them tripping over themselves and sending gratins and fillets of sole and crèmes brûlées careening through the air.

  “Am I mistaken,” Aunt Lily said, “or did the woman just sell a plate of filet mignon to Monsieur Guillaume?”

  Rose nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  “I can’t watch this any longer,” Aunt Lily said. “Something has to be done. I have an idea. Perhaps if we give everyone some warm milk it will encourage them to sleep. Sage, come conference with me a moment and tell me where I can get a hold of a lot of milk.”

  As Sage stepped to the side with Aunt Lily, Rose stepped in close to Ty. “We have to call Mom and Dad. They’re the only ones who will know what to do.”

  “No way,” Ty said. “We’ll get in so much trouble.”

  “I think we’ll probably be in more trouble if we say nothing and Mom and Dad come home and get a ticket for driving forward,” said Rose.

  “Can’t we just ask Aunt Lily for help?” Ty said. “She’s one of us. She’s even got that ladle on her shoulder…”

  Rose watched as Lily marched toward their house, tall and proud as a swan, the Bliss family birthmark pulsing as she moved her shoulders back and forth. Of all the people currently blubbering backward through Calamity Falls, Aunt Lily was certainly the one most likely to save the day. And Lily was one of them. Better still, she believed in Rose and had taken an interest in her talents and potential like no one ever had, not even her own mother. Still, there was some niggling fear that kept Rose from wanting the Cookery Booke to fall into Lily’s hands. “I just—”

  That’s when Sage rejoined them, and Rose noticed that there was no longer any key glinting in the moonlight around Sage’s neck.

  “Sage!” Rose hissed, spitting his name out like it was something you couldn’t say on TV. “Where is the key?”

  Sage cowered and shielded his face with his puffy pink hands. “Don’t hit me!” he screamed, even though he had never been hit in his life, except once by the rim of the trampoline on a jump gone wrong. “I gave it to Aunt Lily!”

  “Why?” Rose screamed.

  “Because she asked for it! Because we need her help! Because she knows what she’s doing! She said she wanted to find a way to solve the problem with magic,” Sage said, looking frightened. “I bet she’s consulting the cookbook even as we speak.”

  Rose looked around and realized it was true: Aunt Lily was nowhere in sight.

  CHAPTER 14

  A New Cook in the Kitchen

  Rose, Ty, and Sage burst into the kitchen to find Lily leaning over the Bliss Cookery Booke, which lay splayed out on the countertop. She was wearing a button-up white dress with short sleeves and a collar that made her look like a lab technician or a World War II nurse, or both.

  Rose’s first instinct was to grab the book away, but Lily was leaning on it with her elbows so that there was no way of snatching it up. Besides, Rose saw something else that took the fight out of her: Aunt Lily had the whisk key dangling from her neck.

  Then she spied the little red light on the answering machine blinking. “Did someone call?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Lily answered, not looking up from the book. “Your father. I encouraged Mrs. Carlson to let the machine get it. I didn’t want to have to tell him what was going on. He said they’re coming home the day after tomorrow, so if you burned the house down, you should fix it before then. His words, not mine.”

  Rose rubbed her forehead vigorously with her hands the way her mother did whenever she was truly upset. “I’m dead. That’s it. I did everything wrong, and now I’m dead meat.”

  “Roooooose,” Aunt Lily said, slowly folding her mouth around the word, like she was saying it for the benefit of someone who could only read lips. “We are a family. And we are going to fix this as a family. Remember that part of greatness is admitting that you need help.”

  Rose slumped like an old rag doll, utterly defeated. She had failed: to help her town, to keep her little sister safe, to protect her family’s most important possession. The Bliss Cookery Booke was even more important than their house. It was like a fifth child. And there it sat, out in the open, being squashed by someone Rose didn’t entirely trust.

  Still, she had to admit that seeing Lily there, strong and capable, standing over the book, came as something of a relief. At least now Rose wasn’t the only one in charge.

  “Now. Show me the recipe that made everyone crazy,” said Lily. Ty and Sage rubbed their hands together like determined con artists and surrounded the chopping block. Ty flipped to the back cover, where the section labeled ALBATROSS’S APOCRYPHA lay nestled in its compartment.

  As Lily lifted the booklet onto the table, Rose noticed that the pages were fuzzy. Aunt Lily ran her fingers over the pages and found that they were covered in a gray dust that was neither ash, nor mold, but something else, something rotten. Lily looked genuinely shaken as she discreetly wiped her fingers on the side of her white nurse’s dress.

  “I’d heard about this section of the book,” Lily muttered to herself, “but I thought it was just a legend.”

  Rose perked up and looked at Lily suspiciously. “I thought you said you never heard of the book.”

  Lily froze and backpedaled. “I… heard of my great-great-great-grandfather Albatross writing down some recipes of his own. And these must be them.”

  “Albatross’s recipes are rank,” said Sage, waving a hand in front of his nose.

  Lily laughed. “Your great-great-great-uncle had a flair for darkness and mayhem,” she said. “I’ll bet all his recipes are like that. If we want to fix this town, we should probably look elsewhere in the book.”

  Lily closed the
moldy gray booklet and nestled it back into its hiding place, then took a deep breath and flipped to the very beginning of the book, turning the thick, creamy white pages one by one and studying the etchings in the margins. Winter-Warmth Cookies. Obedient-Children Mousse. Kickstart-a-Small-Business Carrot Cake. The more she read, the more the lines of her face filled with wonder. It seemed to Rose that Aunt Lily was growing younger and younger with each flip of the page. Her milky skin seemed to glow a little pinker and her eyes seemed to shimmer like ripples on a lake at sunset. The corners of her mouth were tacked into a plastic smile that seemed to Rose to smack more of greed than of joy.

  “You know, it’s amazing what this book could do,” Aunt Lily murmured. “Did your parents ever think of sharing these recipes with the world? It’s sort of unfair to keep them cooped up in that little room where only the Bliss family bakery can profit from them, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, they keep it locked in there to protect it from people who want to abuse its power,” Rose said, knowing that Lily’s mind was too lost in an ocean of possibilities to really hear her.

  Lily turned to a page where there were two drawings in the margin, one of a town overrun by calamity—like Calamity Falls in its present state—and one of a town where everything looked happy and peaceful.

  Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte: For the Restitution of Prior Conditions

  It was in 1717 in Scotland that Sir Albatross Bliss did feed to the entire town of Tyree a slice of the Upside-Down Cake, and everyone did walk and speak in a manner most unbecoming. This was in order to ruin his brother Filbert’s wedding ceremony. Filbert Bliss did leave the church and run to his kitchen, where he concocted this Blackberry Torte, which undid the chaos that Albatross wrought, and each attended the blessed wedding without remembering his prior folly.

  Aunt Lily looked down, embarrassed at her great-great-great-grandfather’s bad behavior. “Looks like this ought to do the trick, hmm?” She read out the ingredients list:

  Filbert did mix four fists chocolate with one fist butter with one fist sugar and four of the chicken’s eggs over a trouble boiler. Then he did coax the Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep from his perpetual sleep and bade him whisper the secret of time into the batter. He did bake for a TIME of eleven songs at a HEAT of five flames. He did top the torte with a sauce made from blackberries and sugar.

  Ty slapped Lily lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Tía Lily.” He laughed. “We’re hip to the lingo vis-à-vis the fists and flames and songs and stuff.”

  “What on God’s sweet earth is a trouble boiler?” Sage demanded, cocking his head to the side and tossing his arms stiffly in the air.

  Aunt Lily stood straight, pointing out her toes as if she were a ballerina. “That,” she announced, “is where having a magical baker for an aunt comes in handy! I know exactly what a trouble boiler is, and also how to use one. Fear not, young ones—we will be serving up this Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte in no time!”

  Lily extended one of her hands into the air and then lowered it. Quickly, Ty and Sage gathered round and put their hands on top of Aunt Lily’s like they were football teammates about surge onto the field.

  “Rose?” Aunt Lily said, raising an eyebrow and motioning to their hands in the circle.

  But something in Rose still wasn’t sure that she wanted to place her hand on top of Aunt Lily’s. She knew that she needed help, and Aunt Lily certainly did seem capable. But she had seen the glow on Aunt Lily’s face when she looked at the Cookery Booke—it was the kind of glow that meant Aunt Lily would do anything to have the recipes for herself. And Rose knew this because she had felt the same desire before.

  Ty and Sage, though, were oblivious.

  “Come on, Rose,” Ty said, wrapping his free arm around her shoulders and pulling her in close. “We need you.”

  Rose looked at Sage, who was waiting for her to place her hand on top of his as well. She didn’t want to let them down—not now, when they needed her the most. She’d already failed her parents. There was no way she was going to fail her family.

  “We can’t do it without you, Rose. We need your talents,” Aunt Lily said.

  This was the final nail. For the first time in her life, Rose felt pretty. And important. And powerful. She didn’t want those feelings to end—not yet.

  And so, despite her hesitations, Rose placed her stubby fingers on top of Aunt Lily’s long and elegant ones.

  As soon as she did, they all pumped their hands up and down. Aunt Lily said, “All for one—let’s get this done!”

  And they were off.

  Lily sent Sage and Ty off to Poplar’s for one hundred dozen eggs, fifty pounds of chocolate, and every blackberry in town. “We need enough for everyone!”

  “How will we pay for it?” Ty asked.

  Aunt Lily pondered a minute. “Tell them that you are rival grocers. They’ll do the opposite of what they’re supposed to, which is give their food away for free! Do you have anything that looks like what a grocery clerk would wear?”

  Before Lily could finish, Ty was shouting, “I worked at a grocery store for three days once and I still have the uniform!” And he ran up to his room and came down wearing a green apron with a visor on it that said PIGGLY WIGGLY.

  Lily giggled and said, “Go forth and conquer, men!”

  Ty looked at the tiny red wagon. “It’s going to take a lot of trips,” he muttered. Then he and Sage rolled down the driveway to the road, leaving Rose and Lily alone in the kitchen.

  Rose had to admit it: There was something sweetly outrageous about Aunt Lily, how beautiful and in control she was, with just a slight hint of danger. Today Rose felt closer to her aunt than she ever had before. Maybe she needed a role model like Aunt Lily around all the time, someone to help her become fabulous and respected.

  They could hear Mrs. Carlson desperately trying to calm Leigh in her room. “Devil spawn! Stop your yapping! Why won’t you sleep!”

  Rose and Aunt Lily looked at each other nervously.

  “There’s not much time,” Lily said. “We need to build a trouble boiler, stat. I have never built one, but I saw one used once, at a family reunion. It was a giant cauldron set inside an even larger cauldron filled with boiling water.”

  “How giant?”

  “Giant.”

  Rose wandered into the backyard and looked around at the refuse that lay near the shed. An old metal rowboat. The freshly torn trampoline. A huge metal satellite dish that had gotten fried in an electrical storm, which Albert had never had the heart to throw away.

  After a minute, it all clicked. “I know!” said Rose.

  What followed was this: Rose and Aunt Lily set to work rigging the biggest trouble boiler that had ever been rigged. They pulled the broken skin from the trampoline and made a fire underneath the frame, using some logs and old newspaper. They washed out the old metal rowboat and set it on top, and they filled it with water. And then they washed out the huge broken satellite dish that Albert had ordered and set that afloat on the water in the rowboat.

  Aunt Lily patted Rose on the back. “As they say in England, Rose—brilliant.”

  All the dark suspicions that Rose harbored about Aunt Lily this past week dissolved in the light of her praise.

  Eventually, the boys pulled into the driveway with their last wagonload filled with eggs and chocolate and blackberries. Sage got to work dumping the pounds of chocolate into the satellite dish and cracking hundreds of eggs. Aunt Lily controlled the head on the fire, and Ty and Sage alternated stirring with one of the old oars from the rowboat. Rose mostly just watched as little sparks from the fire crackled up into the dark of the warm night sky. Trouble boilers were one thing, but she and her brothers baking together, laughing together, on a Thursday night in July? Now that was magic.

  After all the ingredients had been combined and Rose had stuffed the enormous mound of eggshells into a garbage bag, it was time to pull out the big guns.

  “Let’s go get that dwarf
,” Rose said.

  Rose turned the rolling-pin handle. The floorboards detached, and a musty stench rose up into the chill of the refrigerator.

  “The dwarf is down there,” Rose said, leading Aunt Lily by the hand. When they were down in the chamber, Lily waved her flashlight past jars of earth, wind, and fire, flapping butterfly wings, and talking mushrooms.

  Rose felt the wet mist from the grate lap at her ankles.

  Lily must have felt it too, because she stepped in the direction of the grate and knelt in front of it. Rose couldn’t hear it saying anything, but then again, when the thing beneath the house spoke to her, it hadn’t really made a sound.

  Aunt Lily scrambled away a moment later and looked gravely at Rose.

  “Are you all right?” Rose asked.

  “Sure. It’s just a little cold in here.” Lily turned her attention to the collection of jars on the walls, each of which glowed a little brighter as she passed. She approached a jar with a giant dragonfly inside labeled FLIGHT. The dragonfly cowered at the back of its jar as she passed. “This is quite the impressive collection. Not all magic is wands and spells and potions, you know. Some of it—the best kind, I think—is much subtler. Like this.”

  Rose was elated by what Aunt Lily said. She’d put into words exactly what Rose felt. Her parents never talked about magic at all; they just did it. But maybe Aunt Lily was right: Maybe it was selfish of Rose’s parents to keep the Cookery Booke locked away in a tiny bakery in a tiny town. What good could it do here? Maybe there was magic that needed to be done beyond Calamity Falls—subtle magic, gentle magic—that could make the world a better place.

  And maybe Rose could be the one to work that magic.

  Aunt Lily let the flashlight settle on the jar where the Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep sat inside, snoring. “Look at him! He’s gorgeous!”

  Rose wouldn’t go so far as to call him gorgeous, but he certainly was interesting to look at. He wore a pointed green cap on his head, and fuzzy white hair exploded from beneath it like the head of a dandelion. Lily handed Rose the flashlight and gingerly took the jar from the shelf, cradling it in the crook of her arm like a newborn, then she tiptoed up the stairs, whispering all the time to the jar, “Don’t worry, little one! No harm will come to you! My little dwarf! My wonderful little fellow!”