Ritual Magic

TWENTY

JULIA woke up in yet another bed that was not hers. There was a window by this one. It didn’t have any curtains, so sunshine poured in. Early morning sunshine, the kind that looks like it’s been brewed up fresh for the day. On the other side of the glass, birds were making a fuss about dawn.

Stupid birds. They were used to not remembering much. For them, everything was now. They didn’t have much then. But she bet even a bird would be really sad if you took him out of his place and put him someplace else, a place where everything was strange and he didn’t know any of the other birds.

Somewhere a floorboard squeaked. She heard voices, but not clearly. Not enough to tell for sure if one of them was Mr. Turner, but probably so. This was his house.

Julia didn’t remember coming here, but Sam had told her she’d wake up at Mr. Turner’s house. She’d forgotten so much, but she remembered everything Sam told her, which was funny because it felt like she’d learned those things a long time ago. She knew it was just yesterday, but she felt as if months and months had passed. Sam had told her she would feel this way. She remembered that, too.

Most of what he’d told her was pretty awful.

Mama, I miss you so much. I wish you were here. I wish it a lot.

That thought was familiar, as if she’d had it thousands of times. The grief was familiar, too, like an old blanket worn thin by use and washing. So was the way her eyes leaked some of her sorrow. There was comfort in that familiarity, like knowing where the cracks were in the sidewalk she walked every day to go to school. Even when a path took you somewhere you didn’t much want to go, knowing where the cracks were made you feel a little better. But there’d be no more counting the sidewalk cracks for her, would there? No more school. At least she didn’t think so. She was fifty-seven years old, even if her memories were only twelve. They didn’t make fifty-seven-year-old women go to school, did they?

Someone turned on a radio or a stereo. Music, anyway. It was the classic kind of music her dad liked, so she pretended to like it, too. Not that it seemed to matter to him.

Why couldn’t it have been him who died, and not Mama?

Guilt bit hard. She sat up and started to throw back the covers, wanting to run, just run, until she didn’t feel so much of everything. And she saw Fluffy.

He’d been pink once. Now he was a dingy sort of no- color that just looked old. But the scrap of ribbon around his neck had held on to some of the pink, and his face and the insides of his ears were black—faded, but still black. Someone had left him here for her. Someone had put him on the bed next to her pillow. Julia grabbed the little stuffed lamb and hugged him tight.

She was way too old for stuffed animals. She didn’t care. Memories were stacked up in him, piled up in layers she could feel, weighty and dense, when she hugged him. She didn’t think, remember when. She held that memory, all sorts of memories, in the rough, tactile form of a scruffy stuffed lamb.

There was a TV table next to the bed. It held a flashlight and a glass of water. The flashlight made her eyes sting. It made her a little bit mad, too. That had to be Mequi’s idea. Mequi was the only one other than Mama who knew she’d slept with a flashlight until she was ten, but she wasn’t ten anymore. Either way you counted up her age, she was too old to need a flashlight to feel safe in the dark. Mequi shouldn’t have told anyone she needed a flashlight, and besides, she didn’t anymore.

But maybe Mequi didn’t remember exactly when Julia stopped needing a flashlight at bedtime. For her, that was a very long time ago.

Julia sniffed and scowled and reached for the glass of water because now that she thought about it, she was really thirsty. She drank most of the water and sighed. Now she’d have to find the bathroom.

She put Fluffy on her pillow and got all the way to the door before she realized she’d almost gone out of the room in her pajamas. In someone’s pajamas, anyway. They were white with little blue flowers, and they weren’t what she’d been wearing when she went to Sam’s lair, which meant someone had put them on her while she was asleep. That creeped her out.

She bit her lip, then put her ear up against the door, wanting to know who was out there. At first she didn’t hear much, but then someone spoke, and it was him. Mr. Turner. She couldn’t hear very well . . . mumble, mumble, few more minutes, mumble. Then someone else spoke. A woman. Her voice was familiar, but even if it hadn’t been, Julia knew who it had to be.

Miss Yu. Lily Yu. The FBI agent she’d met yesterday . . . no, not yesterday. Two days ago. Sam said he’d spent twenty-six hours fixing her, then she’d slept, and now it was morning. So it was two days since she found herself outside the restroom in the wrong body.

Miss Yu lived here, too. She was Mr. Turner’s fiancée.

Julia’s stomach felt sort of clenched and curious at the same time. Miss Yu was living in sin with Mr. Turner. He said people didn’t think of it that way anymore because the sexual revolution had changed things. Well, he hadn’t said those exact words, but she thought that’s what he meant. Julia’s mother had not approved of the sexual revolution. She said it was just a bunch of silly hippies who thought they’d invented sleeping around, when really people had been misbehaving that way for thousands of years only they didn’t talk about it all the time.

Miss Yu was trying to find the bad guys who’d hurt Julia, which meant Julia ought to like her. But she was going to marry Mr. Turner, which made Julia not like her very much, even though that was silly. Julia was either too old for Mr. Turner or too young, depending on if you went by her body’s age or her real age, so there was no point in being jealous. But that wasn’t what made her straighten away from the door, rubbing her stomach.

Miss Yu was supposed to be Julia’s daughter.

This body . . . this too-tall, too-old body . . . had had sex. Had borne children. Three of them, she’d been told. Three daughters. This body knew about those things and Julia didn’t, and when she thought about that her stomach felt weird, like it couldn’t make up its mind if it was sick or excited.

She wished she was still sleepy so she could go back to bed. But she wasn’t, not even a little bit. And she really did need to go to the bathroom. She might as well get dressed. She sighed and looked around the room.

It was small and clean and didn’t look finished. The bed she’d slept in was a double, and it had sheets and a blanket, but no bedspread. No rug on the scuffed wooden floor, either. No curtain on the window, and only that TV tray for a bed table, and no mirrors. She was glad of that. She didn’t like looking at herself.

There was a chest of drawers, though. With a bunch of stuff on top. Familiar stuff. Julia’s feet took her there without her even thinking about it.

There was her Magic 8 Ball and the little porcelain figure of a Chinese girl that her grandmother on her mother’s side had given her for her ninth birthday and the silver-plated mirror her grandmother on her father’s side had left to her when she died three years ago. Forty-eight years ago, now. Next to them were two books—the little-kid storybook her mother used to read to her, with stories about Peter Rabbit and the Little Red Hen, and The Secret Garden, which she’d read three times. On top of the books sat the white New Testament she’d been given when she was confirmed in the church, and below them were two photo albums.

When Julia was nine, her parents had given her a Polaroid camera for Christmas and a photo album. After Christmas, she and her mother had put the snapshots in the album together. That was the album on top, with a pink velvet cover. The other album was from their trip to Disneyland last year, or forty-six years ago, depending on how you counted. She’d bought that album with her own money and had embroidered “My Trip” on the green brocade cover ever so carefully, but she wasn’t very good at embroidery. The letters leaned all over the place.

Everything looked old. Old and tired. Except for the sheet of folded white paper on top of the books. She picked it up and opened it. The writing was small and precise, almost like printing:

When I met you, you were twenty-one and long past needing help to ward off the darkness. We dated for several weeks before you trusted me enough to tell me that you used to sleep with a flashlight under the covers. Perhaps the darkness has become frightening again. If not, please forgive me for guessing wrong.

You’re obviously past the age for needing Fluffy, yet I know you cherished him. I hope having him and a few other familiar things nearby will help a little as you adjust to what has to be a very strange new life.

It was signed Edward.

It hadn’t been Mequi who thought of the flashlight. It had been him. Edward. The man she was married to. The man she’d made those three daughters with. Her stomach felt tight and anxious, but some other part of her felt easier. She didn’t understand.

He sounded like a nice man, though. Maybe that was why she felt a tiny bit better. She didn’t want a husband, nice or not, but Edward Yu seemed to know that.

Still, she didn’t want to think about him. She folded the note up again and tucked it inside the Christmas photo album. She was not ready to look at the pictures in either album. She was glad she had them, but she wasn’t ready to see how faded and old those pictures looked. She picked up the Magic 8 Ball and thought hard: Will I get all of my memories back? And shook it.

First it said, “Reply hazy, try again.” When she did, it said, “Better not tell you now.” That made her mad enough to throw it across the room, but she didn’t. She didn’t have many things from before. She wouldn’t break one just because it made her mad.

Her bladder reminded her that she still needed to get dressed, so she opened the top drawer. Pajamas. Panties. Bras. She grimaced. She’d started wearing a bra this past summer, which was really a whole bunch of summers ago. She hadn’t especially needed one, but all the girls wore them, so she had to, too. But these bras were bigger than what she’d been wearing.

Of course they were. She had boobs now. When she’d gone to the bathroom at the hospital she’d checked them out. They were not very good boobs, being kind of droopy. That made her mad. At some point she’d probably had great boobs, but now she didn’t remember it.

Funny. She didn’t exactly like her body, but she didn’t hate it as much as she had at first. Maybe Sam had done something about that, too.

A bra would help with the droopiness. She sighed and took one out.

Even though she didn’t remember this body, it seemed to know what it was doing. It was taller than she remembered, but that didn’t make her trip over things. Muscle memory, one of the doctors had called it. Her muscles remembered how to walk, and it turned out they remembered how to put on a bra, too.

The panties were not the plain white cotton she was used to. These were grown-lady panties, several of them with lace, a couple of them nothing but lace. She pulled out a pair of black ones and put them on the bed, then looked for stuff to wear on top of the bra and panties.

The next drawer held shorts and tops. Good enough. She got out some khaki shorts and a green top.

Someone knocked on her door. She jumped. “Yes?”

“It’s Lily Yu,” a female voice said. “The FBI agent. Rule says you’re awake, and I . . . may I come in?”

A little thrill of panic shot through her. “If he knows I’m awake, how come it’s you instead of—” She flushed. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

“It’s okay. I know you’re more comfortable with Rule, but I wanted to talk to you before I leave.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“There’s a robe in the closet.”

Lily Yu wasn’t going to go away. She lived here. Reluctantly Julia went to the closet. It was small and full of clothes, but not like anything she’d ever worn. Grown-up clothes. They made her sad, so she was glad when she found the robe. That was pretty—lots of fuzzy watercolor flowers all over, and silky. Maybe it was real silk. She slipped it on and stroked the slinky fabric. Real silk was expensive. Was she rich? Or maybe her . . . maybe Edward was.

Julia scowled. She was not going to think about him. “Okay,” she said to the stranger on the other side of the door.

It opened. The woman who was supposed to be her daughter was wearing black slacks and a stretchy black shirt under a bright blue jacket. Her hair was long and shiny, but she’d pulled it back in a plain old ponytail. It didn’t look like she’d used any makeup. She really ought to. With a little effort she’d be gorgeous. Right now she mostly looked tired.

She did not look anything like Julia. Julia had a heart-shaped face. Lily Yu’s face was more oval, plus she had a better chin. Julia hated her chin. “Hello,” Julia said cautiously.

“Hi. I, ah . . . this is pretty weird, isn’t it?”

“It is super weird! I mean, I’m supposed to be your—your—” She couldn’t even say it.

“But you aren’t.” Miss Yu’s voice was matter-of-fact. “You look just like my mother, but you’re someone else. Someone named Julia Lin, who I never really had a chance to know. We both have to get to know each other, don’t we?”

“I guess so.” Julia tucked her hair behind her ear and wished she’d had a chance to brush it. Lily Yu looked very pulled together, even if she wasn’t wearing any makeup. “Miss Yu—”

The woman winced. “Could you call me Lily? I know that’s not what you’re used to, and I know we’re basically strangers, but it sets off my freak-o-meter for you to call me Miss Yu.”

Freak-o-meter. Julia liked that. She repeated the phrase mentally so she’d remember it. “I’ll try, but you have to promise not to get mad if I forget.”

“Deal.”

“I asked Mr. Turner if I could stay here, but I didn’t ask you if that was okay. I should have.”

“Don’t worry about it. You didn’t have a chance to ask me, did you?”

“Because you’ve been working. Trying to find whoever did this to me.”

She nodded. “And to some other people, and I have to leave pretty soon so I can keeping working on it. Rule will stay here today, unless something happens that changes things. I know you feel better when he’s around.”

Julia nodded, feeling awkward.

Miss Yu smiled a little bit. It was the kind of smile grown-ups use when something’s sort of funny, but mostly oh, geez. “I feel better when he’s around, too. Ah . . . I wanted to see you before I left, only now I’m not sure what to say. What to do.”

That made two of them.

Miss Yu—Lily—looked around the small room. Her gaze lingered a minute on the bed. “I see you found something to wear. The woman you grew up to be is . . . was a bit of a clotheshorse. Very stylish. But her clothes probably aren’t the sort of things you’re used to wearing.”

“They’re pretty, but they aren’t . . . they just . . . I don’t know how to be an old woman!” All at once she felt horridly close to tears.

“Then don’t try. You don’t have to make yourself fit what you think your body says about you.” This smile wasn’t oh, geez, but it wasn’t happy, either. “You may want to get some different clothes later. Are you hungry? The kitchen’s out of commission right now, but we’ve got—”

A ridiculously loud noise interrupted her. “What’s that?” Julia had to raise her voice to be heard.

“I think it’s the wet saw. They use it to cut tiles. Rule did tell you that the house is a disaster area, didn’t he? We’re having a lot of work done. Most of the work’s downstairs, but they’ll be up here, too, trying to get at least one of the bathrooms finished. That’s why you don’t get eggs this morning. No kitchen. But we’ve got croissants and fruit and cereal and bacon.”

“How do you fix bacon if the kitchen isn’t working?”

“In the microwave. Um . . . I guess microwaves are new to you.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she said, indignant. “That’s another word for electronic oven, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Want to see how it works?”

“I guess.” Some bacon would be good, too. Her stomach didn’t feel icky anymore, but it did feel empty. “I need to get dressed. There, uh, there seems to be a lot of people here.”

“Grandmother is staying with us, too, and her companion, Li Qin. They’re still asleep. You met Grandmother.”

Julia nodded. “She said to call her that, even though she isn’t my grandmother.”

“Then you probably should.”

“That’s okay. I kind of like her.” For one thing, Grandmother was really old—even older than Julia’s body, which made her feel less of a freak. Plus, she made Julia feel steadier. Not the way Mr. Turner did, but it was like you knew you could count on her. She’d boss you around a lot, but you could count on her. “I thought I heard Mr. Turner talking to another man, too.”

“That would probably be Scott. He’s one of the guards. Did he explain why we have guards?”

Julia’s eyes were big. “Guards? Does it have something to do with him being . . . uh, I think I’m not supposed to say werewolf.”

“They prefer to be called lupi. He told you about that?”

“Sam did. He didn’t tell me about any guards, though.”

“Rule is the Rho of one lupus clan. That means he’s their leader. He’s also sort of the assistant Rho for another clan. Rhos always have guards. You don’t seem upset about him being lupus.”

Julia shook her head. When she thought about Mr. Turner being able to turn into a wolf it made her feel like when she stood in line for the roller coaster. As if something exciting was going to happen, even if she wasn’t sure if she’d like it. But it didn’t upset her.

“I guess I’d better let you get dressed.” Miss Yu—Lily—moved to the door, but then stopped with her hand on the doorknob and looked at Julia. Her face said there was more she wanted to say, but instead she shook her head and smiled in that I’m-making-myself-smile way and left, closing the door behind her.

Julia didn’t go to the bed and get her clothes. She grabbed the almost-empty glass, drank the last of the water, and went to the door. She put the glass on the door and her ear on the bottom of the glass. She used to do this at Mequi’s door when her sister and her friends were giggling about boys. You could learn a lot that way.

On the other side of the door, Lily Yu dragged in a deep breath that broke in the middle, like when you’re trying not to cry. Then Mr. Turner said something quietly, but he was close enough that Julia heard him. “Was it as hard as you feared?”

“Yes. How did you trick me into doing that, anyway?”

“I didn’t.”

“I was pretty fuzzy last night, but I remember enough. You tricked me.”

“No, but I did expect you to change your mind. You’re not very good at refusing to deal with things, nadia. It took everything I had to persuade you to stop dealing with every damn thing long enough to get some sleep.”

“That was the trick.”

“Mmm,” he said, which was not an answer but seemed to satisfy Lily Yu, who didn’t sound mad when she said she had to go if she was going to stop by the hospital first to check on Nettie. They moved away from the door then, and though they were still talking, Julia couldn’t hear what they said.

Julia straightened, feeling guilty for eavesdropping and angry for no reason she could tell. And alone. So horribly alone. There were people on the other side of that door, and some of them knew her and seemed to care about her. But she didn’t know them. She didn’t want them.

The people she wanted didn’t exist anymore. Even the ones who were still alive—like Mequi, who looked so old—weren’t the people she remembered.

Someone knocked on the door. “I’m not dressed,” she said crossly, but she grabbed the clothes again.

“If you don’t let me in,” a young voice said, “Dad will be back upstairs in a minute and he’ll make me go away. He didn’t tell me I couldn’t talk to you, but that’s what he meant when he said it wouldn’t be a good idea. He thinks I’ll say something to upset you.”

Everything upset her. Some dumb boy probably wasn’t going to make it any worse. Julia yanked up the khaki shorts. “Hold on a minute.”

Shorts fastened, T-shirt tugged down, Julia opened the door. The boy who slipped inside was a lot shorter than her. How old had Mr. Turner said his son was? Nine, she thought.

A big tomcat slinked in behind him. The cat was orange and missing part of one ear. He ignored her to stalk past and jump on her bed.

“Is that your cat? Does he have fleas?”

“Of course he doesn’t have fleas. Dirty Harry is really Lily’s cat, but he’s adopted me. That’s what Dad says, anyway.”

She watched the cat making himself comfortable on her bed. Mama didn’t like cats, especially not in the house. Houses are for people, not livestock, she said . . . used to say. Julia frowned at the boy. “I’ve forgotten your name. Mr. Turner told me, but I forgot it.”

“I’m Toby. And you’re . . . well, I used to call you Mrs. Yu, but now you’re just Julia, I guess.”

Toby looked a lot like his father done up smaller, with a softer face. “How come you aren’t in school?”

“It’s Saturday.”

Saturday. Saturday was for cartoons. She still watched Tom and Jerry, anyway, with Deborah, who was little enough to watch a lot of cartoons. Saturday was also for getting together with Ellen and Ji after she’d done her chores, and . . . and Ellen and Ji were old ladies now.

“Are you going to cry?”

“Maybe.” But she jutted her chin out instead. “So what did you want? Curious about the freak?”

“I thought you might like to hang out with another kid. Maybe you’re not sick of being around grown-ups every minute. I would be, but maybe you aren’t.”

Her stomach loosened up a bit. “I guess I am. I haven’t even seen another kid since . . . since everything changed.”

“I guess you’re all weirded out. Do you know about PS3? I really want a PS4, but Dad says not yet, which means wait for my birthday. I’ve got some cool games. You might like Ratchet and Clank or Lego Pirates or Skylanders. Skylanders is my favorite. Or we could play online stuff, though Dad won’t let me sign up for a lot of those games. He says no graphic bloodletting on-screen until I’m old enough to understand about bloodletting in real life, and then I probably won’t want the on-screen kind, which kind of sucks. But that’s what I do when I’m upset if I can’t go run or something.”

Julia’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What’s what you do?”

“Play games on my PlayStation or computer.”

Whatever that was. “Why did you say that about bloodletting?”

“Did I upset you? Grandad says humans think about that sort of thing different than we do ’cause they sublimate their violence. Wolves don’t sublimate very well.”

She blinked. “Are you a . . . I forget the word, but like your dad?”

“Yeah, but I won’t turn wolf for another couple years. Do you want to play Skylanders?” He studied her a moment. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. C’mon. I’ll show you.”