Petty Magic by Camille Deangelis

Author:Camille Deangelis [Deangelis, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Occult & Supernatural, Literary, Thrillers, Espionage
ISBN: 9780307454256
Google: d03SwEpmAL8C
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Maxwell Faust

20.

I DON’T EVEN have a photograph of us. What I would give for a single dog-eared snapshot, sunburned arms round each other’s shoulders and heads thrown back midlaugh! I wouldn’t care if it was only the size of a business card, water stained and criss-crossed in Scotch tape. What I would give for some small proof of all those happy memories we never got the chance to make.

It’s marvelous, the resemblance. Sometimes I just sit there staring at him until he starts to look at me funny. Of course, they aren’t alike in every respect—Jonah didn’t have any freckles but Justin has loads of them, and we spend so much time together that I’ve begun to pick out the constellations on his arms. He’s got the Pleiades on a right-hand knuckle and Cassiopeia just above his elbow.

But the similarities are so striking that I believe if I can find some quirk of Jonah’s in Justin—something even more uncanny than a confluence of hair, build, and features—that perhaps I can prove it to myself beyond all doubt. There was that weird little knob of flesh Jonah had behind his right ear, and one night when I ventured to touch a soundly sleeping Justin in that same spot, I found precisely what I was hoping for.

The next day I told Morven all about the ear knob. “He is Jonah,” I said. “I’m sure of it.” Morven rolled her eyes as she picked up my hand and guided it to her face. She pressed my fingertips to a spot behind her ear, and she’s got a knob there as well.

“You’d think I’d have noticed that long before now,” I’d sniffed. “You didn’t grow it just to spite me, did you?”

“Unlike some we know, I do not squander my energies on such petty things as growing squishy bumps behind my ears for the sole purpose of spiting my sister.”

So I would need something else to prove it, and one Saturday night in February I decide on a new test.

Some nights we go into Manhattan and other times we just spend the evening at the Blind Pig, but either way I’ve got to make my exit before the oomph runs out. On this particular evening we’ve eaten at a darling little trattoria in the Village and come home early. In his room above the toy shop I watch his eyelids grow heavy. He gives me a sleepy smile. “Will you stay the night?”

“Sure I will.”

“You never do. I wish you would. I’d like to wake up beside you.”

I smooth his hair away from his face and he smiles with his eyes still closed. “Oh, you dear, sweet boy.” I watch his face, the face of a grown-up cherub, as his breathing gets slow and even.

Death is somewhat easier to meet when you believe, as we do, that to end is to begin. You will learn to walk and speak again, lose your teeth (but hopefully only once), bite into apples, count stars lying on your back in the dewy grass—and you will know, again, what it is to lust and to love.

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