The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [109]
Finding herself abandoned like that was lonely, somewhat stunning. She threw herself into books, emulating each character she met. She read a story about a girl who read in her closet while eating chocolate-chip cookies, so she did that. She read her way through Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and looked for clues everywhere she went, noting them down in her Harriet the Spy notebook, though she found their unwillingness to add up to anything a perennial disappointment. She tried to run away, emulating a million children in a million books, but she and her suitcase, printed with the image of a little old-fashioned girl in a bonnet, never made it past the rhododendrons before she lost her nerve.
She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let. As though we could walk in and look around and say to the gray-haired landlady behind us, “We’ll take it.”
The idea of the magic set came from a novel about a boy whose magic set turned out to be really magic, and led him on adventure after adventure into strange worlds, guided by his tiny plastic wand and rescued from peril with a multicolored scarf, or a Gordian knot of string.
Our family was not big on store-bought things. This was part of our parents’ somewhat indeliberate effort to opt out of consumer culture, symbolized by their anti-television stance. Our toys were hand-me-downs, too, puzzles with missing pieces, blocks that never fit together quite right, our dolls not name-brand, their clothes made by our mother on her sewing machine. Our parents greeted Cordy’s request for the magic set with skepticism and the surety that she would cast it aside quickly in favor of the next internal fad.
Except she didn’t. She begged and begged and begged for it, until finally, on her birthday, she was rewarded with one of those rarest of all gifts in our house: something shrink-wrapped.
Mastering the tricks didn’t take long; the set had been made, like the book from whence the fascination had come, for a younger child. She trailed us around the house, knocking on Rose’s closed door, begging for admittance, digging a skirt she used as a cape out of the dress-up box and putting on a show for us in the basement. And then, a few days later, it was forgotten. In Cordy’s defense, the tricks had been somewhat flimsy; the beads slipped off the string and rolled away under one of the couches (where, we assume, they remain to this day), the wand lost its lovely white tip. But soon she had moved on to another fascination: a doll with hair that grew so she could learn how to braid.
Abracadabra.
This was it, of course. To this day, when she expressed interest in something, someone in the family would invoke the cursed magic set, with a roll of the eyes as if to say, “Oh, there she goes again.” So to us, the baby was another magic set, another afternoon eating chocolate-chip cookies in the closet, reading by the light of the flashlight.
But it wasn’t.
Was it?
A pair of students working on campus for the summer came by and ordered iced coffee. As they moved away from the counter, Cordy went to put the money in the till, her fingers pausing on the bills. She’d never stolen like Bean had stolen, but if her boss was particularly awful, she wasn’t above mis-ringing a few orders and pocketing the difference, especially if it meant the difference between a bus ticket and hitchhiking her way out of town.
Why had she defended this place? It was a trap. Our father was tying silken cords around her ankles, tying her to Barnwell with his impenetrable messages. Our mother held