8. Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin
Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin
HENRY
“I have a question for you,” I said to Great Aunt Isla as we hogged the prime indoor bocce ball court.
Whenever you roved the halls of Sunshine Meadows with Isla Attenborough, you received at least thirteen glares of disapproval from fellow residents.
This time it was because she refused to move our game to the smaller court even though we were two and the askers were eight.
“I may have an answer for you,” Great Aunt Isla said, completely unfazed by the ire she was drawing. Happily, she tossed her red bocce ball toward the pallino some ways down in the manicured turf.
“Playing” bocce ball with Great Aunt Isla was never really playing .
Games, to her, were all about winning. This was why I always threw second to ensure I never performed better, even by accident.
For me, this wasn’t hard because I was garbage at most sports, even the ones they taught to senior citizens to keep them from holing up in their apartments all day.
“I’ve been thinking about one of the days you took me to the beach as a teenager…” I said, purposefully leading. I was hoping for a twinge of something that might prove her speech about magic hour was rooted in real experience.
She held her second red ball down by her waist and stared at me, giving me nothing to work with. “Specificity is clearly not your strong suit.”
“Do you remember when you told me about magic hour?” I asked. It lived so vividly in my memory, reforming with sharper detail each time I mulled it over.
“I barely remember my last birthday,” she said, though it was missing some of her signature oomph. “Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know. I guess, it’s just… It’s Christmastime,” I said, losing my nerve a bit.
“Yes, I can’t forget. Three pitchy middle school choirs have already come through to carol, and it’s only the second day of December.” She trilled her thin lips. “I will not be having a wonderful Christmastime if I have to hear ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ one… more… time .”
“Right, sure, but I guess what I’m getting at is that at Christmastime, there’s magic in the air,” I said. “Good for making wishes, maybe?”
“What sort of wishes?” she asked. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Did anything weird ever happen while you worked at Isla’s Attic?” I asked, changing tactics.
“Once again, you’re going to have to be more specific than ‘weird,’ doll,” she said, growing impatient with me.
This had been happening more frequently since she moved into Sunshine Meadows.
The nurses told me it was nothing to worry about, but her discontent weighed on me.
“There was the clown who came in, without fail, every third Thursday of the month to collect new costume pieces, though he once gave me his clown name and I was unable to find a lick of his party business online. That was more unsettling-weird. Oh, see, there was the time I thought the place was haunted. I kept seeing this silent, scowling little girl out in the backyard hiding among the leaves. I’d close my eyes, and wish her gone, and she’d disappear.
Turned out, the family that had moved into the house behind us had an adventurous daughter who found a hole in the fence. ”
She shrugged, then lobbed her next ball down the lane. It hit the pallino and stopped right next to it. Her slender arms stretched most of the way up in victory.
“I was thinking more like unexplainable-weird. Try as you might, you can’t come up with a reason for any of it–weird.” How many words could I use to dance around mannequin turned man –weird?
Despite my acceptance of Aidan’s existence and our agreed-upon four-week flirtation with possible love, I still couldn’t quite make peace with the strangeness. What mystical powers had I unwittingly awoken? Was this a Faustian bargain? If so, how would I be expected to pay up?
Great Aunt Isla seemed the most likely to know.
In my periphery, her concerned expression grabbed my focus. My yellow ball missed the pallino by a long shot, nearly rolling right off the court itself. “Has something happened to the store?”
“No.”
“The apartment?”
“Nothing. I was curious. That’s all.”
I found it difficult to find the right words, so I relied on our usual telepathy, only she wouldn’t meet my gaze. She stared down the bocce court with keen intensity. Her energy shifted. “You know if the store is a burden on you, you could step away…”
“No! I would never,” I reassured her.
“I’m saying if .”
“Excuse me,” came a voice from behind us.
“We’re not done yet!” Great Aunt Isla snapped. “Oh, Delilah. Sorry, dear. Shirley has been circling this court for the last hour. She won’t leave us alone.”
“Ignore her. I always do,” said Delilah, holding out a plastic bag to me.
“What’s this?” I asked before accepting it.
“I hope it’s okay. Isla showed me some of your old assemblage art pieces.
I’ve been going through bits and bobs in my apartment that I’d hate for my kids to have to pick through when I’m gone.
Just useless things, mostly. Empty perfume bottles I thought were pretty, old newspapers, gloves with holes in them,” she said.
“I thought they might be of inspiration to you.”
At first, I was touched Great Aunt Isla was showing someone my art.
I hadn’t realized she and Delilah were spending time together, either.
Regardless, I wasn’t really making any new art at that time.
Delilah wore such a warm expression, though, that I didn’t have the heart to say so. “Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. Please get back to your game,” she said. “Isla, I’ll see you at dinner.”
Great Aunt Isla threw her last bocce ball and then gave me the runway.
To keep the illusion of the game alive, I gave it the old college try, which did little to sway the outcome. I didn’t even bother grabbing the measuring tool. She won, and we both knew it.
While I was fine with the loss on the bocce court, I couldn’t stomach the loss of Isla’s Attic.
As she inched up in age and her health spiraled downward, it became increasingly clear that Isla’s Attic was her bid for immortality.
She might die, but her name would live on forever on the signage of the store.
Loss touched her life when my grandma, her only sister, died, and I wasn’t going to burden her by confessing that I might lose the shop because I couldn’t afford the rent and one of our mannequins had sprung to life.
Earlier that day, after a super-slow afternoon at the store, I flipped the sign to CLOSED and locked the door. Aidan came bursting back to life. “How’d we do?” he asked with a broad smile, bounding down off the platform on wobbly legs once I’d shut the curtains.
Since we’d agreed to try out this perfect-man scenario, I owed him honesty. He sagged to hear it.
His posture reflected my internal monologue. I needed to get creative, infuse positivity back into the store to attract customers. I struggled with the how .
Finally, we yielded the court to the impatient Shirley and her team of fellow elders and walked back to Great Aunt Isla’s apartment. As I filled two water glasses and grabbed us a small snack of Wheat Thins, Great Aunt Isla said, “You never showed me the new holiday window, doll.”
While this shouldn’t have made me nervous, it did. Something about her seeing Aidan in his plastic form made my gut seize up. I handed her my phone with the picture up anyway.
“Classy, with a great use of the merchandise. You’ve outdone yourself,” she said, zooming in. “Our main man looks like quite the party animal.”
Aidan filled the frame. I’d repositioned him to the center of the scene. When he came back to life, he often stumbled or shook. I didn’t want him hitting or breaking anything else, so I adjusted. Now my heart dashed ahead at the sight of him.
At first, when Aidan proposed his plan to me, I hesitated.
But the pros slowly revealed themselves like the inner petals of a desert flower.
Aidan was malleable, a blank canvas, putty.
He was learning and committed to being a good person and my perfect man.
He wasn’t going to go back to his ex or tell me he wasn’t ready for anything serious or cheat on me.
He depended on me. He complimented me. He thought I was sexy .
For better or for worse, I was his world. I was perfect to him, and in a way, that was its own sort of miracle.
Great Aunt Isla handed me my phone back before snagging a Wheat Thin from the plate I’d set out. Immediately, she choked. I rushed to bring the water glass to her lips.
Water dribbled down her chin as she coughed. “I’m okay.” She swatted my hand away.
“Are you sure?” I asked, worry rising in my throat.
“Wrong pipe, doll,” she said. But every wheeze, every cough, every muscle spasm or eye twitch, made me worried I was losing her sooner than I was prepared for.
Each disturbance thrust me back to that morning when I found her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs to her apartment and I thought she was gone.
The anxiety of an existence without Isla hung over me like a piano in a Charlie Chaplin movie, except no one would be laughing when it fell.
She handed me a stack of crackers and practically pushed me toward the door. “There are pulleys and buttons everywhere in this room. If I need help, I’ll get help. Go home. Call me tomorrow.”
Usually, I’d look for any excuse in the book to stay so I didn’t have to go back to that empty apartment, but Aidan swam to the front of my mind. There’d be someone—a strange someone, but a someone nonetheless—waiting for me when I arrived, and that made the trek back to my car much less leaden.
AIDAN
I discovered the Christmas Movie Channel—CMC—entirely by accident.