The Magic Touch (17 page)

The sound of a car approached from behind him. Ray turned and yelled, waving his arms to attract the driver’s attention. The car, unable to see him until it was almost on top of him because of his dark clothes and skin, screeched to a halt only yards away. Ray shouted and pointed at the smoking cable, now snaking all over the intersection. The man at the wheel leaned out and looked past him. His mouth dropped open.

“My God! Thanks, kid,” he yelled to Ray.

He pulled back into his car, which shot into reverse, made a hasty three-point turn in the alley, and hurtled off in the opposite direction.

The car was now burning furiously, threatening to involve other vehicles and a tree only a couple of yards away from it. The cable was still leaping all over the place. Where was the electric company? Ray clenched his hands, willing them to hurry. Someone was going to get killed.

“Come on, you guys!” he enjoined the brownie points in his head, “
you
do something! Tie a knot in it!” He envisioned a big glowing rope twisting around the end of the cable, folding into a bow and choking the sparks off dead. The brownie points flew in all directions out of his mind’s eye. Nothing he could do now but wait.

Suddenly, people came running from all directions. Their footsteps clattered on the pavement like the clap of giant wings. Two big men, one black and one white, positioned themselves at opposite sides of the intersection, turning back traffic as Ray had just done. More of them started directing to a safe distance pedestrians and curious onlookers who had come out from the houses and apartment buildings.

A glowing ribbon coalesced out of thin air. It closed around the sputtering cable, which spat one more tremendous burst, then stopped sparking. The long black snake lay still. Ray’s hastily sent wish had done its work. He started to move closer to see. A hand dropped on his shoulder and pulled him back.

“Just a minute, son,” said a man’s voice. “That’s not safe.”

Ray looked behind him at the Reverend Barnes. The minister was a couple inches shorter than he was, but broad and strong. Antoinette said he had been a halfback in semi-pro football just after college. From the strength the man still had in his hands, Ray could believe it.

“I just wanted to look,” he said.

“I know, but it could jump again at any moment,” the minister said. “You stay here with me.”

The two of them waited while emergency vehicles rushed into the neighborhood from three different directions. Fire trucks and police cars blocked off the streets as crews in rubber suits ran up and down, shouting orders. Three men wrestled a hose over to the flaming car, and sprayed it with water. Another firefighter came in with a cylinder of thick white foam, coating the hulk. The big men who had been directing traffic withdrew to the far ends of the intersection, out of the way of the technicians. Water filled the pavement, running right up under the soles of Ray’s shoes.

When it was all over, the police came by to ask questions.

“Did you see what happened? How’d that cable come loose?” asked one of the policemen, an African-American man in his fifties.

“A gust caught it, sir,” Ray said. It wasn’t a lie. He supposed you could classify a tornado as a kind of gust. “It just fell across the street and hit that car. I told my grandmother to call for help.”

“You probably saved some lives, son,” he said. “Good work.”

Ray felt a sudden pinch, like a charge of static electricity. He thought for a moment that the power had come back on unexpectedly, giving everyone a shock, but no one else seemed to be affected. The only clue to its source was the wand in his shoe, now radiating unusual warmth. He shifted, bending down to pretend to scratch his foot. The wand was okay, but its heat must mean something. Ray closed his eyes and thought hard, and was surprised to see that in his mental piggy bank, the brownie points were back, and they had come with reinforcements. There were two extra sparks he was sure hadn’t been there before.

What’s this?
he wondered, then remembered what Rose had said about good people doing good things with magic. The extras were interest on his “investment.”
Hey, thanks
, he thought. The brownie points danced a happy pattern behind his eyelids.

“Thank you, sir,” Ray said. The policeman nodded and went on to the next witness.

When the cable had been reattached and the crews were getting back into their trucks, Reverend Barnes’s heavy hand clapped down on Ray’s back again.

“That’s all there is to see, Raymond. You’d better get along back home, now, son. See you Sunday.”

“Yessir,” Ray said. He looked at his watch. One o’clock! They’d been out there for over two hours. He’d missed his date. Antoinette must be hopping mad. It was much too late to call. “Um, sir? Please say hi to Antoinette.”

The minister smiled, but not at him; past him. “Say hi, yourself, son. Am I supposed to do your courting and make your apologies for you? Don’t keep her out too late.”

“Yes, sir. No, sir,” Ray said. He turned to find Antoinette just a couple of steps behind him.

“Her mother worries,” was Reverend Barnes’s final word on the subject. He turned away and walked off into the night.

“Hi, there, boyfriend,” Antoinette said, getting comfortably close and cozy. “That was better than a movie. Just want to get something to eat?”

“Yes,” Ray said gratefully. “I feel like I could eat a taxi, tires and all.”

“Looks like you could have a roasted Volkswagen if you want one,” Antoinette said, glancing back at the burned-out car, now being hitched up to a tow truck by a city driver.

Arm in arm, they went up the street, away from the scene of the fire. Emergency crews and firemen were still clearing up the mess. A team of three firefighters in rubber suits hosed the white foam off the street and into the sewer. Ray’s shoes sloshed as he walked.

“Heavens,” Antoinette said, when they got close to a light. “What happened to your shirt? You’re all covered with grease!”

“Nothing much,” Ray said casually. “Let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about something good, like you.”

Antoinette let the subject pass, but the matter of his shirt, and how it got that way, stayed on the edge of Ray’s mind all evening. Magic power in the hands of gang members! Nothing would be safe, forever, if the gangs could wreak magical havoc like that.

More than fear, he felt sorrow over Hakeem. Ray had lost his best friend to the Jackals. At last, they had made Hakeem a deal he didn’t want to refuse. How long could Ray hold out by himself? He saved up his questions, to ask Rose later.

Chapter 16

“And it’s a high fly ball!” the announcer shouted. The crowd stood up and went crazy as the baseball arced down toward the bleachers and smacked straight into the little girl’s hands. As people crowded around to congratulate her on the catch, she looked up into the stands where Rose and Ray were sitting, well out of the way of the action. “Two runs batted in by Petone! Cubs advance by three.”

“Yeah!” Ray cheered, standing up with everyone else and waving his arms over his head.

“It’s about over, folks,” the announcer continued, as the organ played the “charge!” music. “The score, at the bottom of the seventh, with two outs to go is Chicago Cubs, 7, New York Mets, 1. And it’s a beautiful Friday night here at Wrigley Field. Next up …”

Rose nudged Ray in the ribs. “Come on,” she said, nodding toward the wall. “Next up is you.”

“Aw, no! I’m enjoying the game,” Ray said, settling down onto the bench seat with his elbows on his knees. What a terrific opportunity this wish had been—for him. They’d picked up on the need string of Penny, probably the most serious Cubs fan in Chicago. They got to crash the game for magical reasons, and they had flown in, which Ray had enjoyed almost more than Penny had enjoyed catching that fly ball. What with work, fairy-godparenting, and seeing his friends, he hadn’t been to a game all summer. The Cubs walkover looked like a sure thing. That was, alas, rare enough that he wanted to be there to see it happen.

The Cubs second baseman went up to bat. The player squared himself across the plate, squinting at the pitcher. Ray wiggled on his bench seat and wrung his hands together, choking up on an imaginary bat, waiting for the pitch.

Rose, with a heavy sigh, reached across and took Ray’s wand out of his breast pocket. She tucked the wand into his folded hands.

Suddenly, Ray was overwhelmed by a sensation of absolute, horrifying desperation so deep it nearly bowled him off the bench. The game, the crowd, and the park all went right out of his mind. He sat straight up, clasping the wand, goggling at Rose.

“What is
that
?”
he demanded. “I have never felt a string like that. It’s … it’s as big around as a tree trunk.”

“Someone who needs you badly,” Rose said. “Let’s go.”

They left the ballpark, going over the wall at a dark spot between two lighting standards. If some of the people sitting on the apartment house roofs across the street saw them, they made no outcry about it. Rose led him higher into the sky, then headed south.

O O O

The sensation of need grew so strong that Ray was continually tempted to put the wand down, so he couldn’t feel it anymore, but he was afraid if he did he would fall out of the sky. He wasn’t surprised when they started to descend toward a cluster of buildings surrounded by parking structures. Someone in that much trouble had to be in a hospital. But what was wrong?

The two fairy godparents descended through a roof, made of tar paper and gravel and steel beams, that felt scratchy like sand paper, etching off more layers of nerves. When he stood at last on a solid floor, Ray dropped the wand into his pocket to give himself a breather. Disconnecting from the emotion was such a relief he trembled. The wand still pulled him down the hallway. The child calling to him was somewhere below. He and Rose hailed an elevator. To the annoyance of a nurse who got on with them, he pushed all the buttons. At each stop, the fairy godparents “listened” for the signal to get off.

When the elevator reached four, there was no doubt that this was the floor. Ray stumbled over the threshold, following the irresistible force drawing him. He dodged nurses, carts full of equipment, and patients on foot, in wheelchairs, and on gurneys, walking faster and faster down the wide, white-painted corridor more and more urgently until he found himself running. The sensation stopped abruptly halfway down the hall past the nurses’ station. Ray overshot the mark by a few feet, and was yanked back to the correct door as if on a tether.

Rose caught up with him as he was raising his hand to knock softly. He listened, but no one invited him in. All that was audible on the other side of the door was the burble, click, and hum of machinery. He looked at Rose.

“Go on,” she said. Tentatively, Ray turned the handle and went in.

The large windows opposite the door were heavily curtained, dimming the room so that all Ray saw at first was a cluster of tall square machines. Each of them had blinking screens showing constantly updating charts in amber or green, and all sprouted strands of clear, thin tubes in every direction. Ray recognized one machine as a sophisticated IV dispenser. Another was a respirator, wheezing like an old man as its valves drew breath. The tubes all led to a small body, almost invisible in the large, white bed. It was a little girl, just about the same size as the one he had just left behind at the ballpark. Some kind of square frame held the coverlet up off her feet, and a padded brace cupping her neck from behind dented the big pillows under her shoulders and head. The small hands resting on the coverlet over her thin chest were swollen and puffy from the fluids that poured into her arms from four different tubes. A translucent, cuplike mask covered the lower half of the child’s face and the tubes stuck into both her nose and mouth, but her eyes were open and clear. She turned them to gaze at Ray.

Ray took the wand out of his pocket. No doubt about it: this was his client. There was also no doubt about her wish.

“She wants to die,” he said, shocked.

“Her quality of life is shot,” Rose said sadly. She picked up the chart at the end of the bed and read it. “Not that she had much to begin with. She was born without kidneys, her spine is malformed, she’s got a dozen diseases. She’s been out of this hospital only six months of her life.”

“That’s horrible,” Ray said. “I guess maybe dying is the best thing that could happen for her.” He stopped short, frightened by what he had just said. He stared at Rose, appalled at himself. “But I can’t let a child die.”

“It’s what she wishes,” Rose said. “She’s counting on you. Her parents love her too much. They refuse to see clearly the truth that she understands so well. She could be on life support, getting weaker and weaker, for another six months or sixty years. Who knows? Her pancreas began to fail today, which is why we heard from her now. But her parents and her doctor have a resuscitate order, right here. They’re ordering more heroic measures. They won’t help.” She handed him the chart, and pointed to a few lines of code and a signature. The scrawls meant nothing to him. The thin little face underneath all the plastic life-support equipment watched him seriously. “It’s her life, Ray. Her decision.”

The child turned her eyes to appeal to Ray. She probably couldn’t move anything else, but even so, he couldn’t countenance a wish like that. He made his protest stronger, raising his voice. “I can’t
make
a child die. That would be murder.”

Rose studied him, and shook her head. “No. You don’t have to take care of this,” the fairy godmother said, gently putting her arm around him and guiding him to a chair. “We have experts to deal with intervention.”

Rose went to the phone next to the bed and dialed four digits. Raymond sat in the chair, clutching his wand between his hands. Who was Rose calling? Was there a terrifying being with bony hands and a hooded cloak that made house calls to cover tough situations for fairy godmothers? Rose gave him a sweet, encouraging smile, then bent to talk to the little girl in the bed, patting her small hands, smoothing her hair. Ray felt like he wanted to burst into tears. He didn’t even know the child, and already he was grieving for her. Her skin was pale, with blue veins showing through on her wrists and temples. She had never been able to play outside in the sun, never ridden a bicycle, never had a best friend. Was it too hard to wish to start over?

The door opened almost silently, and Ray jumped as a narrow shadow fell past his feet. Instead of the tall, skeletal figure he feared, in came a small, scrawny old black woman with sad, loving eyes. She had on a worn, faded cotton dress, and old, shabby, down-at-heel shoes. In spite of her appearance, she had the dignity of a queen. Ray rose to his feet as she approached, walking with a slightly arthritic gait. She touched his arm with her claw-like hand, and an inexpressibly soothing feeling passed between them, giving him comfort. He looked deep into her eyes, and saw nothing there but kindness. When she let go of him, he felt the same woe and aching sympathy he had before. Ray understood the respect Rose had for this old woman. She
knew
how much this hurt. She was hurting for the child, too.

Rose moved away from the head of the bed to make room for her successor and came to stand next to Ray. The old woman sat down beside the girl and raised a forefinger to touch the child’s still hands. There was no burst of magic, no rumble of thunder. The child simply stirred and sat up to look at the old woman. Ray goggled. He didn’t think the girl had the strength to move on her own. It was magic, but was this a good thing? The little girl studied the old woman, with the first expression Ray had seen on her face: curiosity. The old woman just smiled the warm, weary smile. The girl looked into her eyes with total trust on her face. She wore the kind of smile one had when summer vacation is only minutes away, when one is about to be given the treasure one wanted most of anything in the world. Ray felt his throat tighten. He ought to stop this, make the girl back away from that threshold. He could cure her! She had a miracle coming. Why not that?

The old woman leaned over and gathered up the cords of the respirator, the kidney machine, and the monitors. She showed them to the child in the bed. The small hands reached out for them, closed around them so hard the swollen flesh turned pale. Ray cried out and reached for her hands to take the cords away. Rose took his arm firmly and held him back.

With a sudden burst of strength, the girl yanked hard. The plugs flew out of the wall and clattered on the floor. The chattering, burbling, wheezing machines fell silent. The girl’s face became wreathed in a beatific smile, and she settled down on the bed, as limp as she had been before. Her narrow chest rose once, jerkily. It was much harder for her to breathe without help.

“People will come running when they see the monitors have stopped,” Ray cried. His voice sounded as loud as a thunderclap in the room. The girl was dying now. Ray saw blue tinges begin to show around her mouth and fingernails. All he had to do was hurry up and plug in all those machines again, and she would be saved, just as her parents wanted her to be. But he remembered her overwhelming despair that had brought them here. The child drew another labored breath, not as deep as the first. Having seen the chart, and the girl’s resolve not to go on, he didn’t know whether or not he wanted the doctors to come. “They’ll save her!”

“No, they won’t,” Rose said. “They’ll be too busy.”

Before she finished speaking, the lights started to go off all over the floor. Through the partly open door Raymond heard cries from other rooms, and saw the shapes of nurses rushing in every direction in the corridor.

“They won’t get in here in time,” the old woman said, speaking for the first time. “It’s almost over.” Her voice was the soft, dry, gentle whisper of autumn leaves. She smiled at Ray. “You’d better go now.”

Her face blurred in his vision. Ray reached up to wipe the tears away, and she gave him that understanding smile. Her kindness was the last straw. A great, tearing sob burst up from his chest. Rose reached up to pull his head down against her shoulder, and he began to cry like a lost child.

Murmuring to him like a baby, Rose led him out of the hospital room. The voices of the nurses and patients faded out of his hearing like the noises in a dream. He didn’t know how long they walked, but when he finally opened his eyes and wiped his face, they were in front of a bench on the lakeshore. It was full night now. Behind them were the lights and noise of Lake Shore Drive. Before them was the light gray, heaving mass of Lake Michigan. Reaching far out to his right was a tiny, thin row of lights like a diamond necklace. He stared at the lights until they blurred into a wavy line. Rose tucked something into his fingers. He identified it by touch as a handkerchief. He blotted his face with it, still staring out over the lake.

“Sit down, honey,” Rose said, her arm still around his shoulder. Obediently, he plopped down on the bench. She sat beside him, and waited quietly until he spoke.

“Why me?” he asked. “Why me, and not one of your kids? How come you have to train
me
to go out and save the world, when it’s impossible anyway. I’m wasting my time!”

“Because my kids don’t want to save the world,” Rose said, patiently. “You do. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to accept the inevitable. I know it took me years. Ray, you have so many rare talents. You have a heart big enough to care for everybody on Earth, and that’s a quality not to be wasted. I’m glad you want to work with us. What you are doing is worthwhile. Never think it’s not.” She had another handkerchief ready the moment the one he was holding became too soggy. He took it and blew his nose hard.

“I don’t want to do it no more,” he said.

“Anymore,” Rose corrected him automatically. “You know better. You’re an honor student, Raymond.”

Ray turned on her furiously. “Why didn’t you tell me things like that could happen? That
hurt.
That child was just a baby.”

“But she made the decision for herself,” Rose said. “I
did
tell you it wasn’t always easy to do this job. She’s not the first one I have met who knew the end was coming and wanted to make it as painless as possible for everyone. Children are almost always more clearheaded than adults are about the really important things. Adults have an overlay of their experience that blurs the truth. Children don’t. She felt the pain outweighed all possible benefits.”

“You don’t know that!” Ray said, turning on her accusingly. “You’re just guessing.”

“
I know
,”
Rose said. “I felt it through the wand, and what’s more, I felt it in my heart. You would, too, if you let yourself. That’s why you’re so angry. You know you couldn’t have changed anything.”