The book of love, p.31
The Book of Love, page 31
“Malo Mogge punished Bogomil by almost entirely banishing him from the day. He did her great harm and he survived her temper only because without her cup she might not make a new covenant and replace him. Ever since, under her stricture, he lives until nightfall on one side of her door. Should he come by day he suffers great agony to be here. I believe that even when he comes by night it pains him to be in our world. This is his punishment.
“Bogomil and Anabin fell out over Bogomil’s treachery, though my understanding is that they loved each other once above all others. They are still Malo Mogge’s servants, though she no longer trusts them. I have served Malo Mogge faithfully in all things to this day, though, and one day I will kill Avelot, whom you know as Bowie.
“As for the cup, it could not be found. It is contrary and secretive and changes its shape, sometimes a cup, sometimes a coin. Malo Mogge and the others have pursued it all this time, and only in this past year did we have any sense of it in the world. It was here. And now it is not, but the four of you have touched it. Its traces remain on you. Anabin and Bogomil depend upon you to restore it to them in some way, and whoever does that, I suppose, will win their favor. It was in their keeping and Malo Mogge will not release them until they have it back again.”
Thomas finished speaking. He took a bite of toast.
Mo said, “What does this thing do? Malo Mogge’s cup, or whatever?”
“It opens a door,” Thomas said. “But forgive me. You asked for my story and not the story of the cup. Can we speak of other things?”
“Okay,” Mo said. “I guess I was wondering why I’m less hungry than I was. Mr. Anabin said that we were hungry because magic needed fuel. That being alive again was affecting our appetite? But I’m a lot less hungry now.”
Thomas said, “You’re learning to manage what you’re made of. How to regulate what must be regulated.”
“So, like electricity? But magic? I’m becoming more energy efficient?” Mo said.
“That,” Thomas said, “and there are different kinds of appetite. Hunger. Different ways of replenishing or maintaining your magic. One may draw upon sex.”
He was not looking at Mo and his posture did not change, but Mo was suddenly much more aware of Thomas’s body, bruised but beautiful. The lustrousness of his lower lip from eating butter. And then, too, came thoughts of the things they had done the night before.
Thomas seemed to know what he was thinking. He said, “Eventually I will have to go back to Malo Mogge.”
“Like, how soon?” Mo said. “Really soon or in a few hours soon? She’s the one who beat the shit out of you, isn’t she?”
Thomas took Mo’s left hand, turned it up, and traced the longest crease in Mo’s palm. Stroked the pad of Mo’s thumb. He said, “We have a little space of time. Enough to cross a thing or two off your list.”
“Sex in a shower,” Mo said. “And then you can choose. Just let me lock the door.”
“How long have you known her. Your Jenny?” Thomas said.
Mo said, “Most of my life?” He didn’t want to talk about Jenny Ping. Thinking about Jenny meant thinking about his grandmother. “She doesn’t know about any of this Bogomil-Anabin stuff. She’s just a really good person. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d come back and she hadn’t been here. But if we only have a little time, let’s not talk about Jenny.”
Thomas opened his mouth as if he was going to say something else, and so Mo dropped down beside him. He fastened his mouth to Thomas’s neck and got his hand inside Thomas’s boxers. As a result, the sound that came out of Thomas’s mouth wasn’t a question at all. It wasn’t even a word. Thomas wrapped his arms around Mo, and they didn’t make it to the shower for quite some time. When they did, they used up all the hot water and then poor Jenny had none.
The Book of Anabin and Bogomil
Two mirrors the height of a man hang in Anabin’s room at the Seaside Views, one on each side of the beds. In the dark they give the impression of doorways into other rooms, other places where some other one lies alone. There is some comfort in this, knowing that there are doors, even if Anabin may not yet step through them.
He woke just after dawn, Bogomil beside him on the bed, his body at Anabin’s back. He was naked, cooler in temperature; he had evidently not been there long.
“Felicitations,” Bogomil said. There was nothing in his voice to indicate suffering, and yet Anabin knew what it cost Bogomil to be here. Knowing, he did not tell him to go. There was little point in telling Bogomil anything these days.
In darkness, mirror Anabin met mirror Bogomil’s gaze. “How long has it been?” Anabin said. “How many years?”
“I don’t keep count,” Bogomil said. “Not of inconsequential things.”
“Says one who keeps a museum-caliber collection of grudges and grievances,” Anabin said.
“Oh, but truly my patience is admirable,” Bogomil said. “Your pupils cluttering up the great matter and mystery of our lives like some cloud of gnats and I have not swatted one.”
“If they master this matter and mystery, as you call it,” Anabin said, “then all the inconvenience and mess will be nothing to me. They are in a trap, and we will not let them out of it nor tell them the shape of the trap. No wonder, then, if they are flustered and insolent. They are, after all, children.”
“And which one of these children might we hope will achieve this mastery?” Bogomil said. “Do Nothing, Say Anything; Miss Eyes Bigger Than Her Stomach; or Barely There at All?”
“What they are is not what they might yet become,” Anabin said. “Even you and I are not yet what we might be.”
“I have said this a thousand, thousand times,” Bogomil said. “And now you say it back to me?”
“What I say and what you mean are yet at odds,” Anabin said.
Bogomil said, “I did not come to talk of what might be. I came to see what you might like for a gift this night.”
“Nothing you can give me.” Anabin closed his eyes so he would not see Bogomil’s face.
“Some might think life without end in the company of the one who loves them would be enough,” was what Bogomil said.
Anabin said, “Some might. For a while.”
They lay there in silence, then, and gradually Bogomil grew warmer, his breathing slower. He was asleep or pretending to sleep. Anabin slept, too. When he woke again, there was no one in the mirror except himself.
The Book of Daniel
Lissy and Dakota woke Daniel up in the traditional Lucklow manner on snow days: they threw open his door, jumped on his bed, and rubbed his face with a snowball. “Guess what, guess what?” they chanted. “We made it snow!”
Daniel sat up roaring like a bear and they fled the room. He could hear them giggling in the hall.
When he looked at the clock, he saw it was 9:30, which meant they’d let him sleep in and also that school must have been canceled.
Downstairs was chaos. The house was too small for snow days. There were Lucklows yelling about broken zippers on snow pants, that they couldn’t find their boots, that they didn’t want to go outside, that they wanted to have hot chocolate with marshmallows.
Daniel’s mom still had work; Peter had already gotten the day off.
“Tonight’s the benefit at the Cliff Hangar,” Peter said. “Figure you’re going to want to go to that. Did you hear about the other tiger?”
“Poor tiger,” Carousel said. “Daniel, help me put on my snow pants. Then come outside so I can throw snowballs at you.”
“Sure thing,” Daniel said. “Just let me check my phone first. And eat some breakfast. Hear how my stomach’s growling?”
Carousel stuck her head against his stomach. “Whoa,” she said.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “I’m under a magic spell. My appetite can never be satiated. I roam the earth eating all in my path.”
Peter said, “I remember being under a similar spell when I was your age. There’s oatmeal on the stove.”
Daniel ate two bowls and then made a peanut butter and banana smoothie and drank it out of the blender. Then, while Carousel watched, fascinated, he ate six hot dogs straight out of the package without even microwaving them.
When he checked his phone, he didn’t have any texts at all. So he sent a question mark to Mo and Laura. Laura simply texted back Busy here, quitter and eventually Mo responded, too. Lots to talk about but not right now. Tonight
Sure, Daniel wrote back. Because even if he wasn’t going to learn magic, it didn’t mean he couldn’t help solve the mystery of how they had died. Not many people got to do that.
When he went outside with Carousel, his brothers and sisters were in the middle of an all-out war, Peter in the role of war correspondent. Next door, a car was pulling out of the Hands’ driveway. Laura was in the passenger seat and her dad was driving.
As they went by, Laura rolled down the window and gave Daniel a look. The look said, I’ll deal with you later.
“Where you off to?” Daniel said.
“The mall,” Laura said. And was gone.
A snowball hit Daniel in the back of the head. Dakota yelled, “Turn and face your doom, varlet! Your great height will not save you.”
He turned away and got another snowball in the face, and all of his siblings cheered. Susannah was standing there in a T-shirt, black leggings, and an old pair of boots he knew had once belonged to her father. Her long hair was stuffed under a red hat. “Gotcha, sucker,” she said.
When everyone was satisfyingly soaked through, they went in for hot chocolate.
Susannah followed only as far as the door. She said, “Are we friends?”
Daniel said, “Do you want to be?” and then felt incredibly stupid. She was going to say, “Do you?” It was like they were six years old.
But instead she said, “Yes. So, good. That’s settled. I missed being friends.”
He couldn’t help it. He said, “What if I wanted to be more than friends?”
“Seriously, Daniel,” she said, “if you ever figure out what you want, let me know. Send me a postcard from Ireland. I’ll put it on the fridge.”
“Come inside,” he said. “Come have some hot chocolate with us.”
Susannah shook her head. “I have to go home and do laundry,” she said. “My sheets smell like poor decisions.”
The Book of Ethan
“It’s really, really nice of you to take me to the mall,” Laura told her father.
“My pleasure,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, this is one thing I didn’t miss in California. All the snow.”
The roads had been plowed and the snow was supposed to stop by noon, but on the other hand, it hadn’t been supposed to snow at all. In tenth grade, Laura and the rest of her class had taken an aptitude test meant to give them insight into careers they might enjoy or something. Laura had gotten meteorologist, as if she wanted to spend the rest of her life telling people things that usually turned out not to be true.
Daniel had gotten funeral parlor director, which was apparently because he was good with people. And Susannah had refused to take the test entirely. She said what was the point when she already knew what she was going to do with her life? What that was, exactly, she refused to say.
Which, look at her now. Wandering around in the middle of the night, dressed like Stevie Nicks’s sexy pet bat and talking to the worst kind of strangers. What business did Bogomil have with Susannah? Couldn’t he be satisfied with ruining Laura’s life and Daniel’s and Mo’s?
Her father said, “You okay over there?”
“Fine,” Laura said. “Just, everything’s complicated right now.”
“Gotcha,” her father said.
Laura hadn’t known, exactly, what she was doing the previous night until she’d done it. She’d woken up because of the cold. The last few days, no one had ever turned on the heat—it was so warm they hadn’t needed to. But when she woke, the house was so cold it reminded her of the time Ruth had taken them to Miami over winter break and how, when they got home, the old boiler took so long to heat the upstairs they’d all ended up sleeping in Ruth’s bed with glass jars of hot water wrapped in towels at their feet.
The thermostat in the hallway was at fifty degrees; she bumped it up to sixty-five. When she went downstairs, the lock on the porch door was open, and a familiar stink was seeping in through the keyhole and all around the frame. That was Bogomil.
When she stepped outside, she heard voices. Saw someone standing in the Lucklows’ yard, back turned. Susannah. But who stood there with her?
She called to Susannah, and then her sister was running to her, Bogomil loping away in the opposite direction. She’d never seen Susannah afraid of anything before, so Laura had done her best to calm her down. She’d also, somehow, made Susannah forget that she’d encountered Bogomil at all. She’d made her think that it had all been a dream. It had been like making the fly walk in circles.
This, too, was something Laura could do with magic, apparently. Maybe it wasn’t as spectacular as turning white shells into moths had been, but it was definitely a more practical application. This morning, Susannah had seemed entirely normal for Susannah. When Laura asked her how she’d slept, Susannah had shrugged. She’d said, “Bad dreams.” But sounded almost cheerful about it, as if she enjoyed having bad dreams.
In hindsight, before fixing the situation maybe Laura should have asked Susannah to tell her exactly what Bogomil had been talking to her about. She had a feeling Bogomil wasn’t going to say.
She could, too, have impressed upon Susannah the need to be nice to Daniel. To be his friend. But it was undoubtedly wrong to make people be kind to each other, even if it would solve a lot of problems. Laura was a respecter of free will, even if other people’s poor decisions and petty, shortsighted grudges were causing them (and Laura) nothing but grief.
But she hadn’t been able to resist mentioning laundry. Susannah could be a real pig sometimes.
* * *
—
When they got to the mall, her father said, “You mind if I hang out in the food court? I’ve got a couple of work calls I need to make.”
“No problem,” Laura said.
“Whenever you’re done, just call or come down and find me and we’ll have lunch. What do you think, you need more than two hours here?”
Laura said, “An hour and a half, tops.”
Her father said, “Take as long as you need. Need any cash? I’ve got a couple of spare fifties in my wallet.”
Laura almost said no, because did he think he could buy her affection? Her forgiveness? But that was stupid. It didn’t matter what he thought. She was willing to spend time with him right now to figure out what kind of relationship she wanted to have with him in the future. In the end it was up to her. And if her father wanted to spend money on her, well, she’d spent a lot of years wondering why he didn’t love her or Susannah enough to send them Christmas cards, let alone presents. So this was a nice change.
She held out her hand. “Hand it over,” she said, and when her father grinned at her affectation of brattiness, she grinned right back.
On the way out of the food court she examined the tips of her fingers. If she was going to look at guitars she wanted her calluses back. She used her magic to do this and found the results quite satisfactory.
* * *
—
The first thing she did when she got to Birdsong Music was check to make sure the Gretsch Electromatic was still hanging on the wall. This was habit.
On a stand on the floor was the Epiphone Casino Coupe, which she’d already tried out many times. She’d never quite had the nerve to ask the guy who was always behind the counter if she could play the Gretsch, though she’d watched a ton of videos on YouTube. He had intimidating facial hair and a surly glint in his eye. He was the owner, so he didn’t have a name tag, but Laura and Susannah had spent quite some time coming up with possibilities. They’d settled on Ethan.
Laura went over to the Epiphone and then realized that she was being the old Laura. Maybe the new Laura was going to walk out of here with the Epiphone, but this didn’t mean she wasn’t bold enough to ask if she could play the Gretsch.
“In the market for a new guitar,” she informed him. “Like, the Casino Coupe is really sweet and I’m definitely leaning toward that. But maybe I ought to try out the Electromatic?” She hated how her voice made it a question.
The asshole behind the counter didn’t make it easy. “You come in here a lot,” he said. “But you never buy anything except a pack of Ernie Ball Nickel Plain every once in a while.”
Laura crossed her arms. “Yeah, well, I’ve been saving my money. But if you don’t want it, I could go buy it somewhere else, I guess.”
He gave her a sour look. “Everybody comes in here and plays around. Then goes and buys their guitars at Walmart or online. You think I don’t know how it works?”
Laura said, “Ever think maybe they don’t buy a guitar here because you’re mean?”
At this, he almost looked hurt. “Okay,” he said. “But keep it down. I was listening to Clapton this morning and I don’t need to get some shitty version of an Avril Lavigne song stuck in my head.”
“Avril Lavigne?” Laura said incredulously. She’d died last year, not in the ’90s.
The guy got the Gretsch Electromatic down off the wall. It was not the biggest axe out there, but then Laura wasn’t a giant like Susannah. It was pearly white, and all the hardware was gold. The weight of it was so very satisfying that when Laura held it she almost wanted to cry. Was this what some women felt like when they held a baby? Maybe, but nobody liked to hear a baby cry. When a guitar made a lot of noise it was the opposite story.
