The Magic People Series

Chapter 2

When we first met the magic people, they’d lived near the farm, just in another time period, Charlie’s time, back in the 1800s. That first trip through time had been a doozy, and it had resulted in them needing a new place—a new time really—to live in. So the Wilsons let them set up that small gathering of yurts at the top of the hayfield.

The Wilsons had built a yurt for me, too. Mine was a bit closer to the farmhouse, but we all lived pretty near one another, near enough to see each other in passing most days. I thought of it as our magical commune, and it was like a dream come true for me, all these people I loved right here, nearby. I’d spent so much of my life invisible to everyone except for Jed. And now that I was visible—unless I didn’t want to be—I loved the chance to casually chat with people as we trimmed the goat’s hooves or walked up and down the farm lane with armloads of vegetables for the farm stand that Sharon now ran for the Wilsons. It felt like we lived in town but without all the traffic.

LaKeemba was the de facto leader of the magic people. A tall, thin woman with walnut-brown skin and long dreadlocks, she had the sort of presence that made you feel both immediately at ease and also like you wanted to impress her somehow but knew you couldn’t. I liked her a lot, and more, I respected her, trusted her. I had to. She’d saved my life more than once.

But it was Sharon, the healer, who had become my dearest friend, next to Jed, of course. She didn’t hold back when she had something to say, and while I didn’t always want to hear the truth—who does?—I was always glad I’d listened. I spent a lot of my days up in the farm stand with her. I’d help her with bagging up vegetables for people who stopped by and organizing the Little Free Library that we’d started up there, too.

This morning, they must have been expecting us—not surprising since everyone who had magic, except me for whatever reason—had a kind of telepathy. It wasn’t really like they were reading one another’s thoughts but more like they worked as hive, anticipating and coordinating with the others.

As the five of us walked up the small hill from the farmhouse to the yurts, LaKeemba came out of her round tent and raised a hand in greeting. “Good to see you,” she said. “I wondered if you would all come.” She put a hand on Charlie’s head, tousling his red hair, and smiled. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Charlie’s arrival in our time hadn’t been simple, and for a long time, he’d been a little bristly around LaKeemba because, I guess, he blamed her for what had happened. Probably easier to blame her than your own daddy. Now, though, he seemed to have let his guard down, and I noticed that LaKeemba always made a little special effort to make him feel at home.

“Please come in,” she said and stepped aside from the door. Her yurt was always filled with the best smells, like the beach and a campfire and cinnamon all wrapped into one. The walls were covered with bright fabrics, lots of purple and red, and to one side of the single room, she’d set up a circle of cushions so guests could sit together and talk. The first few times I’d visited her, she’d offered to find me a chair—I wasn’t the epitome of grace when it came to sitting on the floor, but all the work on the farm had made me stronger—so I slid down to the rug, not easily, but without a groan this time.

Sharon came in while LaKeemba was getting us tea, and my friend sat down beside me and took my pale hand in her light-brown one. “Sounds like big news?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. But maybe.” I squeezed her hand. She had a way of making me feel safe, secure.

Jed, on my other side, was fidgety, all bouncing knees and cracking knuckles. I understood. Like him, I was one of those people who liked to get things over with, even if it meant having to deal with some hard stuff. The waiting was the worst part.

Still, we knew that LaKeemba would take the time she took. She was not a woman to be hurried, which was probably why we trusted her. She gathered information and sat with it a long while before she acted. I admired that . . . but it made me anxious, too.

Eventually, LaKeemba sat down and put out her hand to Jed. He placed the bottle in her palm, and as he did, I noticed for the first time that it kind of glowed. It wasn’t bright like a light bulb but more like one of those glow-in-the-dark stickers that needed a recharge.

She studied the bottle and ran her fingers over the scratches in the glass. Then, she passed it Sharon, who did the same. The two women exchanged a glance, and Sharon said, “I’ll go get him.” My friend lithely stood from her cushion and went out of the door.

“We need Alonso for this conversation,” LaKeemba explained. “Meanwhile, could you tell me where you found this, Jed and Charlie?”

Jed looked over at Charlie, and I saw the kindness in his eyes. He so badly wanted to claim this bottle as his own, but he knew Charlie needed to be a part of this. “You tell them, Charlie.”

A small smile passed over Charlie’s lips before he began to describe the construction site and the pile of dirt. “The top was just sticking up, and we thought it might just be some trash.” He looked at Mrs. Wilson, who smiled. “We try to pick up trash whenever we see it. But once we dug it out, it didn’t look like trash at all.”

Jed let him finish before he added, “It’s carrying something.” He stared at the bottle on the floor in the middle of our circle. “But I can’t see what. It’s like it’s hiding from me.”

LaKeemba nodded. “I think you may be right, Jed. Someone has taken time to obscure what is inside.”

The door of the yurt opened, and a large black man entered with Sharon. I couldn’t help but smile. Alonso was special. His magic was that he could touch someone and ease their discomfort, and while I enjoyed that I could become invisible at will—especially when sneaking up on Jed—I thought that if I could have my choice of powers, it would be Alonso’s. Giving comfort seemed like a special kind of magic.

But then, I kind of thought that Alonso was maybe magical in general. I hadn’t told him that, though. I didn’t know how. He gave me a wide smile before he folded himself down on the cushion beside Mr. Wilson. Then, he reached over, picked up the bottle, and said, “Memory.”

I waited for more information, to hear about the memory that Alonso was talking about. But as the silence grew longer, I wondered if he’d seen a bottle like this before, or maybe even this bottle. That would be weird, but weirder things have happened. Yet, when he started to speak, the story wasn’t about him at all.

“You all know the stories about the genies in the bottles. You rub them and get three wishes,” Alonso began. Alonso’s voice had taken on a gentle rocking sound, a lilt I think you’d call it, and I felt myself settle into my bones a bit more, ready for the story.

“Well, this bottle is like those, but it doesn’t hold a genie. In here, is the central thread of memory.”

He paused, and I was, as always, about to ask questions when he spoke again.

“Many years ago, more years than any of us can remember, a magical person bound the center of memory into this bottle. Then, they etched a warning about opening the bottle into the side. I expect they thought everyone would be able to read it because everyone could read magic-speak then, even a little. But most of us have lost the gift.”

I couldn’t help myself. “You can read it though?”

Alonso’s soft eyes met mine. “I can. It says, ‘Be wary. Herein rest all the memories of the world. Open at your peril.’” He set the bottle back in the middle of the circle and let out a long sigh. “I’ve heard tale of this bottle, of the way that it looses memories forgotten but also those hidden out of peril. We must be wise here.”

Mrs. Wilson cleared her throat. “Am I understanding this right? If we open it, every memory will return to every person in the world? No one will be able to forget anything?”

“That’s right. But not only will they not forget in the future, but they will also remember everything they’ve ever known or experienced,” Alonso’s voice was solemn.

Next to me, Jed stirred, “Remembering is good, right? Our history teacher Mr. Muir is always quoting something about being doomed to repeat history if we forget it. He says that if we don’t remember what happened with things like Wounded Knee or the h*******t, it becomes too easy for them to happen again.” His voice was high with excitement, “So if we let this out, then no one will be able to forget again, right?”

“True enough, Jed,” Sharon said, “But it’s not that simple. Some things need forgetting.”

Mr. Wilson furrowed his brow. “I don’t know about that. I believe in the truth, in how the truth will set us free.”

Jed nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but it was Charlie’s voice that entered the circle. “I don’t think I will survive if I remember everything.”

A wide-open silence of pain entered the tent then as we thought about Charlie’s father, about his hatefulness, about how he’d cast out his own son just because he was magical. I didn’t know all of Charlie’s story; I didn’t think anyone did, maybe not even he did. I could see what he meant.

We sat in that quiet a long time, and I weighed the truth of history against the truth of pain. I kept coming back to the good of the many versus the good of the few, and I couldn’t find my way through that question, not with Charlie right there. The good of the many just couldn’t be more important than my friend. It couldn’t be more important than someone I loved and saving him from memory that might kill him. Could it?

After a while, Alonso spoke again. “Maybe we need to consider why the bottle is here, now.”

Jed was a smart kid, but sometimes, he was a little literal. “It’s here because I dug it up, and I dug it up because they dug that big hole for that house up the road.” He sounded grumpy, like he was a toddler again and one who needed a snack.

“True, Jed. But there hasn’t always been a pit for a foundation just up the road, right? And you have ridden there many days and never found this, right?” LaKeemba’s voice was firm but gentle. “You two found the bottle, and if someone else had, they likely would have thrown it away or maybe kept it as an antique. They wouldn’t have known it held something. Only you could see that.” She gave Jed a long look. “There are too many coincidences—the when and the where and the who—for this to be happenstance.”

I looked over at Jed, and he was blushing. I couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or pride.

“Someone wanted us to find it?” I asked.

LaKeemba nodded. “I think so.”

A flash of insight passed through my mind. “Someone who walks time, too.” I felt a chill of fear and exhilaration pass through me. Someone had come into our time and left the bottle for Jed and Charlie specifically. I could spend a long time trying to puzzle out whether that person had been from the future or the past, but really, the when didn’t matter. As always, what mattered was what we were being asked to do right now.

Mr. Wilson let out a long stream of air through his pursed lips. “Then, I guess we need to decide what to do.”

“Open it or don’t open it?” his wife added.

“I vote ‘don’t,’” Charlie said quickly, and when I looked at him, I saw the terror in his eyes. Mrs. Wilson must have seen it too because she scooted closer to him and put her hand on his back.

“I’m with Charlie. I mean, I want to prevent horrible things, like Mr. Muir said, but this seems like too much, too much all at once. I have a bad feeling,” Jed added.

Mrs. Wilson’s voice was very soft when she spoke, and her eyes were sad when she looked at Jed and Charlie. Still, she didn’t hesitate. “I think we should open it.” It felt like the air vibrated around her words, a little like they were a bit pointy, shaped to reach deep into the ear of the one who heard them. “We were given this gift—or maybe this curse—for a reason. I don’t know how we can see the reason until we know what happens when we open the bottle.”

I tensed up, and Charlie set his jaw. Jed looked from his mom to his foster brother and back again.

“We can’t know the result of opening it either,” Mr. Wilson’s voice was dark. “I vote no.” I saw him give his wife a sad look, and I sighed. I hated when people disagreed. I especially hated when people I loved disagreed.

A long silence stretched out into the room, and I was just about to voice my argument for why we shouldn’t open it when Alonso saved us from a debate. “This is not, in my opinion, something we debate. This is something we come to a consensus on. Either we all agree, or we do nothing.”

“Yes, we cannot take this to a vote like we’re choosing what to have on our pizza,” Sharon added. “We talk it out and think about it until we all know.”

Jed groaned. “That could take forever.”

“It could, but big choices are worth holding, Jedidiah.” Sharon’s voice was low and firm. “We held the one about whether to trust you, and it was a good choice. It wouldn’t have been if we’d forced some of us to go along.”

That flush of color went up Jed’s face, and I knew it was embarrassment this time.

“Time is of the essence, though, so we will meet back here later today to talk again,” LaKeemba’s tone signaled our gathering was over, so we all stood and made our way into the spring sunshine. I didn’t know why, but sunshine always helped.

I spent the rest of the day outside. The flower beds around the farm needed to be weeded, and I loved weeding. It was so simple, kept my body moving, and gave me a sense of accomplishment. Nothing says, “I’ve done something,” like a clean flower bed and a huge pile of weeds to feed the chickens. When Mrs. Wilson had first told me that, I’d been skeptical, but she was right.

Plus, weeding was good for thinking, and I needed to think. As I began tugging out the clover and grass from around the big stump that Mrs. Wilson had turned into a planter and the flower bed, I tried to remember everything I’d ever known like Alonso said I would if the bottle were opened. I pushed hard into those first days with Jed when I’d appeared here on the farm. He was tiny then, just back from the hospital, and he couldn’t even see me. I tried to sit with him because I knew that’s what I was supposed to do, but it was so boring and so exhausting since he never slept. I had been really lonely, lonely and worried. I thought maybe I hadn’t been doing my job right.

In time, it had gotten easier, but still, there had been a lot of sad days—days when the Wilsons went on vacations, and I couldn’t go. Days when they were caught up in something as a family and Jed didn’t even glance my way. Days when I wished with all my heart that someone would just see me and talk to me, someone besides a kid who mostly wanted me to play with cars and read him books. Just remembering those days was painful, even though everything got better for me, something I’d realized would happen even back in those hard days.

But then I thought of Sharon’s life as a little girl. She’d been a slave at Charlie’s dad’s plantation. Mostly she didn’t talk about it, but when she did, she told tales of having to fetch water for the house from the stream. She had carried bucket after bucket of water up the hill all day long. I’d asked her once how old she’d been when she started working. “I don’t rightly know, Mavis. Maybe six. Seven.” A seven-year-old girl doing hard labor all day. Would Sharon want to remember that all the way? Were there harder things she’d lived through that she did not remember? Did she want to?

As I made my way to w**d around the marigolds by the barn, I thought about what Jed’s history teacher had said. I wondered if remembering could keep another little girl from going through what Sharon had gone through. Would it keep another little boy from being hated by his father as Charlie had been? Would it keep s*****y from happening again?

I wasn’t getting much of anywhere in my thinking, but I’d already pulled enough weeds to feed the chickens for two days. So I loaded up the wheelbarrow and took the birds their treats—they loved to scratch at a pile of weeds to find their favorite kinds, and I loved to watch. After dumping the wheelbarrow, I went into the farmhouse and got a glass of ice water before sitting on the Wilsons’ deck and staring across the farmyard. My thinking hadn’t gotten me closer to an answer. So maybe not thinking would.

The birds had spread the weeds out like a carpet in the pen when I heard Jed and Charlie talking from the other side of the coop. They’d been out in the goat pasture checking fence-line, a chore they’d both grumbled about when Mr. Wilson assigned it this morning but one that I knew they kind of enjoyed, too. Those boys needed to move around. If they sat still too long, playing video games and such, they got grumpy, and having two grumpy teenagers around is brutal. It was like being trapped in a house with two giraffes who whined a lot and never liked what there was to eat.

Plus, checking fence lines meant they got to play with the baby goats, and all of us liked to play with those kids. They bounced around like they had springs for legs, and they butted your legs to try and knock you down so they could jump on you. Ask me how I know.

The boys didn’t sound particularly playful today as they came up the last stretch of fence behind the chicken coop. “I know, Charlie. It would be hard for you to remember all of that, but could it help to remember, too?”

Charlie’s sigh was so loud I could hear it all the way around the small building between us. “I don’t know. Maybe. But Jed, I think there’s a reason I can’t remember things. Maybe they’re too hard or something; maybe my brain is protecting me, like putting up a force field so I don’t fall apart in remembering.”

There was a silence, and then I heard the fence puller ratcheting the welded wire tight again as Jed grunted under the effort. “Okay, like repression, right? Did they talk about that in your history class?”

There was another grunt, this time from Charlie. He must have been attaching the fence holders to the posts. “No,” he said. “Mr. Greer doesn’t talk about anything but the Vietnam War.”

“Oh, right,” Jed answered, and I pictured the thin, wild-haired teacher who ran the school’s theater program and showed war movies instead of teaching most days. “Well, repression is when your mind hides things from you, painful things that might be too hard for you to handle. Mr. Muir calls it a trauma response. It’s your mind’s way of protecting you.”

Their voices came a few steps closer. “Well, maybe that’s what’s happened to me. I don’t remember many things, or if I remember, the details are unclear, as if I dreamed them,” Charlie said.

“Have you tried to remember?” Jed’s voice was soft, easy, but still, that was a big question. I sat forward in my chair, ready to go to them if this was too much for Charlie.

I heard a soft thud in the grass, and then Charlie said, “Kind of, but not really. If my mind is protecting me, maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s better to remember on your own terms, when you want to. Especially if . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Especially if we decide to open the bottle.” A long pause stretched out across the farmyard. “Okay.” Charlie’s voice was quiet, and then I heard him take a deep breath.