Destruction: The December People, Book One (12 page)

“I don’t want you to buy me anything. You have too much stuff. Wizards aren’t supposed to care so much about Earthly things.”

Three full sentences. Score. The fact he’d said anything at all seemed more important than
what
he had said, but David didn’t miss it. With Evangeline safely tucked away in a dressing room, out of earshot, Xavier still called himself a wizard. He believed it too.

“Okay,” David said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about wizards. You’ll have to tell me what I need to know.”

Xavier scoffed pointedly and walked away from David.

David would count that as engaging him in conversation. He had to start somewhere.

David holed up in his home office and forced himself to review the budget projections Liza had sent. He found himself developing a case of adult-onset dyslexia. The numbers swam around the page and lost meaning. It couldn’t be right. One disaster couldn’t bring down his whole business. 347 jobs. 347 people. 347 families. Because of one minor decision he had made one afternoon seven years ago, when twenty million seemed like enough coverage.

And
his
family.

As Xavier said, they had too much stuff. A massive mortgage, three car payments, a boat payment. Private school. Five looming college educations. Why in the hell did they have a boat?

David rubbed his temples and watched the numbers on the screen turn into hieroglyphs until Amanda knocked on the door.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He stared at her.

“The point of working at home to watch your kids is so you can actually watch them.”

He perked up. “What are they doing?”

“Go get your daughter for dinner,” Amanda said. “She’s being odd. And she won’t talk to me.”

Whenever
their
kids did something bad, she liked to refer to them as
his
kids. Now she meant it literally.

“Where is she?”

“Backyard.”

Evangeline sat on the back lawn with her bare legs folded under her. The ground must be wet and cold. From behind, she looked how David imagined Crystal as a child. Evangeline had her thick, brown hair in a messy ponytail, and she wore the lacy white sundress David had bought her. He should have made sure she picked out
winter
clothes.

“Are you all right?” David asked.

“I’m fine.” She didn’t take her eyes off something in the palm of her hand. He thought it might be her magic rock. On closer inspection, he saw a pill bug rolled into a ball.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Practicing.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to get the bug to trust me and unroll while it’s still in my hand.”

“How do you do that?”

She shrugged. “I just focus on making my hand feel safe.”

“Does it work?”

“With some of the bugs, it works right away. With others, it never works.”

“Dinner is ready, if you’d like to come inside.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Why do you ask me about magic if you don’t believe in it? Are you humoring me?” She said the word ‘humoring’ as if she had recently learned the word and wanted to try it out.

David weighed his possible answers.

“Because it’s important to you. I want to know about the things that are important to you.”

She carefully placed the still-rolled pill bug on the ground. She gave him one of her mother’s inscrutable expressions. His chest swelled with grief.
Because she taught it to you
.
Your words are her words. I want to hear her echo.

“Are you thinking about my mother right now?” she asked.

“How did you know that?”

“Your eyes look different. And I can feel you being sad.”

He kneeled down next to her, and as he suspected the knees of his slacks sank into the wet ground.

“We could have a memorial service for her, if you want.”

All of her muscles seemed to tighten at once, and she shrank slightly. “I don’t want to.”

She picked up another bug and the back of her dress shifted, showing more skin around her neck. He saw two tick marks peeking out from behind her dress. His head swam. Good thing he had already knelt.

“We can remember her however you want. Whenever you’re ready.”

She nodded.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked. It sounded stupid when he said it out loud. Of course something bothered her. Lots of things. He had meant,
is there anything causing you to be more bothered than usual right now
?

“Amanda said I can’t do magic anymore. Not while I live in her house.”

A burst of anger made his knees sink farther into the lawn. David couldn’t imagine why Amanda would do something as unnecessary and cruel as taking away her fantasy. Not like Amanda at all.

“You must have misunderstood her,” David said.

“She said magic hurts people and that I should know that better than anyone.”

David stood and knocked the mud off his pants. “No, there is some mistake. I’ll talk to her. Come inside for dinner.”

He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. It had Crystal in it and he thought about taking it back, but Evangeline wrapped the jacket around herself tightly.

When she stood, David leaned down to flick the mud and grass off her legs but stopped himself before he touched her.

Dinner featured no fighting or breaking glass. Emmy graced the table with conversation about student government. She considered running for class President and evaluated her competition. It felt forced, as if Amanda had ordered Emmy to talk about student government at dinner.

Xavier wore some of the shelter clothes. David ignored it, which took some self-control. Samantha sat too close to Jude for David’s liking. She ate her macaroni noodles one at a time.
Weren’t her parents supposed to pick her up today?

“I’m going out,” Jude announced.

“It’s a school night,” Amanda said.

“It’s Halloween,” Jude countered.

“Where do you want to go?” David asked.

“Party at Trevor’s house.”

“Alcohol?” Amanda asked.

“No. Just milk and cookies.”

“Don’t joke around,” Amanda said. “Answer the question.”

“His parents are home. I doubt they’re buying us a keg. It’s not a big thing. Just some people hanging out.”

“Be home by eleven,” Amanda said.

“It’s
Halloween
,” Jude argued.

“Then make it nine.”

“Eleven is fine.” Jude grabbed his plate and left the table in a rush. David guessed he wanted to leave before Amanda changed her mind.

After eating, they all took their plates into the kitchen. While David passed by Amanda, he put his hands on her waist without thinking about it. She pulled away as if he’d burned her.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried.

All his kids, minus Jude, turned to look at them.

“I’m sorry… it was just habit,” he said.

“Break it,” she said, then left the kitchen.

Emmy took Amanda’s spot by the sink and started loading dishes into the dishwasher. Her cheeks had turned red. Samantha rinsed out Amanda’s wine glass. Xavier and Evangeline stood off to the side, not yet having a spot on the after dinner cleaning assembly line. He handed them rags and asked them to wipe the counters and the table. They did.

David followed Amanda out of the kitchen and hoped she had cooled off. His own anger simmered, and he knew approaching her now carried some risk. And even the slightest annoyance in his tone could set off the epic rage she could barely contain.

Amanda folded clothes in their—now her—bedroom. When upset, she liked to get her hands in things. And the house had looked extra clean lately.

“I’m sorry for what happened in the kitchen,” he said.

“It’s okay. I probably overreacted. But you can’t do stuff like that. We’re separated. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea by me letting you live here. We’re not a couple.”

“I never noticed how much I touched you, until I wasn’t.”

She let out a long breath.

“We need to talk,” David said, his tone dark.

She raised an eyebrow that looked like a challenge.

Before she could say anything, he continued, “You said this was about the kids, not us. And what I’m about to say to you is about the kids. Keep that in mind.”

“Okay.”

“Why does Evangeline think you forbade her to do magic?” David asked.

She unfolded and refolded a pair of David’s jeans and didn’t look him in the eye.

“Oh,” she said. “She told you that.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I did tell her she can’t do magic. Not while she lives here, anyway.”

Anger bubbled up from his stomach and hardened in his shoulders. “What’s the matter with you? You said on the first night that they hadn’t done anything wrong, that you were mad at me and not them. She needs her beliefs to cope. Why in the world would you take that away? It makes no fucking sense.”

“David,” she said. Then she stopped. She smoothed out the pants. “David,” she started again.

“What?”

“I understand it’s hard to tell someone you love something you know will hurt them. It’s not an excuse for not telling me about them sooner. But I understand.”

“Okay…”

Her statement didn’t cool his anger, but it did confuse him enough to throw him off track. If he yelled at her, she yelled back, even when they were happy.

“Why don’t you sit down?” she asked.

“I’m not in the mood to sit.” He paced at the foot of the bed.

“You should probably sit for this.”

“Amanda, if you have some brilliant explanation for why you decided to crush Evangeline’s magical narrative, go ahead and spit it out. Or admit that you had no reason and just did it to be cruel.”

“I have a secret, too, David.”

David stopped in his tracks. “A secret? You mean… like my secret?”

“Not exactly. Not an affair. I’ve never cheated on you. But I have lied to you.”

David’s heart raced, and he noticed the rage in his head morphing into something else, something more like fear. His tongue felt too dry.

“To be honest, I never intended to tell you at all,” she said. “But life works in weird ways. Eventually, it will come out, whether I want it to or not. So, I think it’s better that I just tell you.”

“I know I’m just as guilty, but if there’s another man, I swear, I will… kill… him. I don’t care if that makes me a hypocrite.”

“I told you, it’s not another man.”

She finally put down the laundry and stepped toward him. She leaned in and examined his eyes as if trying to solve a riddle printed on his pupils.

“Sometimes I wasn’t sure if it really worked,” Amanda said. “Or if we just didn’t talk about it, but I guess it worked.”

David thought he wouldn’t be able to breathe until she spit it out.

“Amanda.” He said her name like a curse. “Tell me. Now.”

“I asked Evangeline not to do magic because she
is
a witch. Xavier, too. And magic is extremely dangerous. I don’t want them doing it around my family.”

David laughed, the same humorless way Amanda laughed when he told her
his
secret. Amanda never had much of a sense of humor, but this had to be some kind of joke. Some kind of cruel game to get back at him.