“I have a posse?”
“Yes. And as a spokeswoman for the posse, I say you shouldn’t go back to Florida. There’s nothing for you there. You may have to face the fact that, despite all your best efforts, you actually do belong to Brooklyn.”
“But it’s dirty here, and cold, and there’s trash in the streets, and the subways don’t run on time, and you have to go grocery shopping every single day because nobody has a car . . .”
“Yeah,” she says, punching me in the arm. “We’re not perfect, by any means, but we’re your city. You might as well save yourself some trouble and accept it now.”
But Patrick, I think. I can’t tell her that part, that there’s a hole in my heart.
FORTY-FOUR
MARNIE
As soon as I unlock the front door and walk into the house, I nearly have four kinds of heart attacks. There’s Noah standing there in the entry hall, holding a cardboard box. I let out a blood-curdling scream, and he jumps in the air.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (That’s me.)
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” (Not his most original moment.)
We stare at each other. Then he says, “I came to get the rest of my great-aunt’s possessions. Now if you’ll just move out of my way, I have to take these to Paco’s before the UPS guy comes.”
“Wait. Wait just a minute here. What makes you think it’s okay for you to do this?”
He sighs. “My mother wants Blix’s clothes.”
“Why? Why? What is she going to do with all this stuff? You’re just doing this to get back at me, is all. I did not talk your aunt into leaving me this building, I did not interfere with her will in any way, shape, or form—and why do you have to be instrumental in contesting a will that you know from Blix’s lawyer is legitimate—”
He sighs again. “Listen. My family is freaked out. Okay? They know that you asked her for a spell, and they think that was tampering with the will. Or something. I actually can’t bring myself to pay attention.”
“So what, I asked her for a spell? I missed you. I wanted you back. What does that prove?”
He looks confused for a moment. “Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe she felt sorry for you and mad at me, and so she changed her whole will.”
“That was her choice, not mine.”
“Well, my mother wants the building, and my father has called his attorneys, and now they want all the evidence they can find, and also the contents of the house.”
“No,” I say. “No. The contents of the house go with the house. You are not removing another thing.”
“Look,” he says. “This is weird, okay? I couldn’t give a crap about this house or the will or any of it. I don’t even care if my parents get it, or you get it, or it falls into the sea, frankly. But my mom is on her high horse. She—well, if we had all day, I could tell you the whole story, but it’s pointless and stupid, and—”
“I happen to have all day.”
He lets out one of his huge sighs again, and gives me one of his guilty-conscience looks, and we go into the kitchen. I get the feeling somehow that he wants to tell me the whole story, to get it off his chest.
He grabs a beer from the fridge and admires the shininess of the turkey-fat–sparkling floor, and he actually laughs about that a little. Ha ha—wasn’t that something—you and your fiancé, and the way the turkey skidded across the room just at the moment Jeremy realized you’d been living with me!
“Hilarious,” I say.
I’m still so mad at him, but fascinated by him, too, in the way that I always have been and probably always will be—and we sit down at the scarred old table, and he drums his fingers on the table and then he begins, “So Blix was the one who was supposed to get my family’s mansion, the one that got passed down through the generations, oldest daughter to oldest daughter. But she got cut out of the will after what were probably high-level shenanigans, knowing my parents, and—well, whatever. My mom’s mom ended up with the house instead.”
After that start, he has to get up and pace around, and the story is like something from some Southern Gothic network TV miniseries. It all started back with robber barons and war heroes and wills and pistols at dawn—but basically the part that meant something was that Blix got cheated out of the family mansion, and Noah knows that his mother has always been squirrelly (his word) about Blix, maybe because she feels guilty for what they did. She was always proclaiming how, in her own defense, she took much better care of the house than Blix would have—and how she was so much more connected to the community, and had so many charitable causes.
But meanwhile Blix traveled around the world and then went off to Brooklyn, of course, and the family watched with consternation as she took up with all those alternative things: “magic and mayhem,” Wendy called it.
“She would never admit this, but I think she was kind of worried that Blix was going to do voodoo on her or something. Get the house back, or expose her. And so now that Blix has died—and this is strictly my theory—my mom is desperate to get Blix’s papers and find out what she was up to all those years. And if she has to, she’ll prove that Blix was never in her right mind, and therefore, for that to happen, you should be cut out of the will.”
“Speechless,” I say. “I am utterly speechless.”
“Yeah. It’s ugly. This is why I never wanted to have much to do with my parents. My dad wanted me to go into business, learn all the ropes of his firm—but nope. I picked teaching school. And going to Africa. And now I just want to do more of that. I’m scheduled to leave the country next week. Going to Bali this time.”
“To Bali? Aren’t you in school?”
He grins. “Actually . . . ah . . . that would be a no.”
“But you said that was why you wanted to stay here—” I see his face. “No? You were never taking classes?”
“No. I told you that so I could stay. I didn’t have anything else going, and besides, I kind of was intrigued by you. You know. You’re hot. Aaaand . . . well, my mom wanted me to keep an eye on what was going on here.”
“Wow.” I sit back in my chair. “Okay, so let me get this straight. So basically you’re dismantling this house to help your mom get it away from me, then? You have no stake in it.”
“Pretty much.” He ducks his head. “Sorry.”
“Well, then why don’t you stop? Why don’t you right now just this minute stop it?”
“I would. I really would. But you don’t know my mom. She’s relentless. She talks to me every day, getting more and more worked up.” He gives me a guilty little smile. “Also, I’ve already sent her a whole bunch of boxes of Blix’s stuff. Including—and I’m sorry about this, Marnie, I really am—I sent her that letter Blix wrote to you. And her book of spells.”
I think for a moment of telling him the truth, that those things are never, ever going to make it to Virginia. But I decide not to.
Noah is, among other things, an ex-husband. An opportunist. A havoc wreaker. A double agent. The best lover I’ve ever had. And I am so ready to be rid of him forever.
I decide right that minute that if he heads out to Bali, Wendy Spinnaker can always just wonder what exactly her aunt’s wacky career in magic consisted of, and why nothing ever turned up in those boxes. She can text him over and over again while he’s lying on the beach somewhere, and he can turn over on his towel, adjust his sunglasses, take another sip of his mai tai or whatever, and gaze out at the azure sky.
But he’ll never be able to tell her for sure what happened, because he’ll never know.
FORTY-FIVE
MARNIE
Blix’s nefarious magic career is still on my back patio. Just so you know.
Shall I put on the tinfoil hat and come down and tackle it?
Ahem. I believe, if you will check your popular culture references, tinfoil hats only protect you from electromagnetic waves and therefore cannot have any effect on magic spells.
Oh.
Still, if you have one, bring it. It might look cute.