“Listen.” I took a whiskey out of my front pocket and placed it on the counter. “If I can make this disappear right now, before your very eyes, will you let me go?”
Phillips Jr. laughed. He looked at Bill, who raised his beer and shrugged.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
I closed my eyes. My feet were sweating. I curled my toes inside my sneakers. With my hands I made a circle around the bottle and tried to feel the workings of every nerve, every cell, every membrane. I tried to bring that energy upward, into my mind, where I was willing the bottle to disappear. Oh, how wonderful it would be to look at Bill, at Phillips Jr., and say: See what I can do.
I kept my breathing deep and slow. My fingertips burned. My hands were shaking. I had never concentrated so hard before. I heard voices ask if I was okay, and I felt myself whisper, My father is not a magician; my father is dead. All of it sounded very far away. I saw Merlin sitting on the theater stage, his nose twitching. I saw my mother aiming her wand at him and saying Shazam! I saw my father in an aquarium, his hands pressed against the glass, feeling weightless and free. I saw the bottle dematerializing with a faint hiss and a puff of smoke. I saw myself vibrate and glow before all my particles scattered like pollen in the air.
THE ISLE OF YOUTH
1.
I arrived at my sister’s apartment just before the hurricane. My plane had been one of the last to land at the Miami airport. From the taxi, I saw banks of black cloud settling on the horizon and palm trees bent from the wind. Bushes flapped like invisible hands were shaking them. The roads into downtown were empty. On the radio, a reporter said the hurricane would skim the coast before spinning into the Gulf of Mexico, that it would all be over by morning. I didn’t believe him. The sky looked frightening. I’d never been to Florida before. My sister, Sylvia, and I were identical twins. I had not seen her in over a year.
“Does the hurricane have a name?” I asked the driver as we rolled down Sixth Street, scanning apartment buildings for the address I’d been given.
“They’re always named after women,” he said.
This wasn’t true. I remembered Hurricanes Andrew and Floyd, but figured he was trying to make a statement.
He parked in front of my sister’s building. It was tall and made of bright orange stucco. I paid the driver and got out, pulling my carry-on behind me. In the front lobby and in the elevator, the lights buzzed and flickered.
When Sylvia opened the door, I didn’t enter right away. She looked like me and she didn’t look like me. She had the same dainty nose and rounded chin, but she was thinner and had better posture. She had a ring in her bottom lip and carefully styled bangs. Sweatpants, a sheer white tank top, pink socks. Chipped black polish on her nails. I had no idea what my sister was doing for work. I was a research librarian and lived in D.C. My suits were poly-blend, and I hadn’t been to a hair salon in months. When my sister asked me to come, I had not considered our many differences. She said it was an emergency and I told her that I had some vacation days saved. I didn’t tell her that my husband and I were on the brink, and I’d been looking for something to take a chance on.
“Sylvia,” I said. “How are you?”
“Looks like you brought the weather with you.” She opened the door wider.
Inside, unlit candles sat on top of the coffee table and the stereo and on the ledges of bookcases. I squeezed my suitcase handle, taking in everything: the sectional sofa and flat-screen TV to my left, the kitchen to my right, the balcony with sliding glass doors, legions of candles. Even with the lights on, the apartment was dim, the storm having brought on a premature night.
“Is that safe?” I pointed to the bookcases. “To have candles so close to all that paper?”
She shut the door. “You’ll thank me when the electricity goes out.”
I asked my sister what I should do with my luggage. She pointed to a hallway past the kitchen. The guest room was empty, save for a futon bed, and had been converted into a storage space for musical equipment: a guitar, amps, stacks of records. I had to clear away cords and a plastic box of guitar picks to find the mattress.
I found Sylvia on the balcony. I stood beside her and looked out at the empty streets and the windblown palm trees and the distant gray swirl of ocean.
If someone were to ask about my sister, I would say she was a dangerous person. The signs started showing in junior high, when she sent a neighborhood boy, who was in love with her, into a catastrophic depression by sleeping with him and then his best friend. At thirty-four, she had been through three fiancés, countless jobs and cities and hair colors. Bankruptcy. Names. Call me Lisa Anne, she said one time. Call me Suzette, she said another. It wasn’t just that my sister behaved badly — she was a shape-shifter, someone who bounced from one life to the next like a drug-resistant virus changing hosts. The longer I went without seeing her, the more comfortable I had become with the idea that she simply didn’t exist, that I had no other half, no shadow self. But, after all those years, there she was, there she undeniably was, reaching for me at a time when I already felt like throwing myself under the rails.
“What’s with all the music stuff in the bedroom?”
“I used to be in a band,” she said. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll have to board these up soon.” She pointed at the sliding doors behind us. “In case the glass breaks.”
“Is this going to be a bad one?”
“A Category Two,” she said. “Small potatoes around here.”
I crossed my arms on top of the railing. “What’s this hurricane named?”
“I’ve named her Marie Antoinette,” she said. “The weather people call it something else.”
“Marie Antoinette? As in let them eat cake?”
“More like off with their heads.”
* * *
The power went out at nine. We had already boarded the doors; I’d held small sheets of plywood across the glass while my sister pounded in the nails. When the apartment went dark, Sylvia started lighting the candles. She did it effortlessly, as though she had practiced walking around her apartment blindfolded.
“That’s it,” she said. “Not much to do now but wait it out.”
I sat on the couch, facing the bookcase filled with blazing candles. Rain and wind lashed the building. My sister stood in front of me and swayed. The ring in her lip glowed.
“Will you need to call Mark?” she asked. “Sometimes the reception is spotty during a storm.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I take it things aren’t so good at home?”
I looked up at her. “How would you know?”
“I’ve called a few times in the last month,” she said. “You weren’t around. Mark brought me up to speed.”
I took one of the decorative pillows and tossed it across the room. It grazed Sylvia before hitting the floor. The last time my sister visited, she and Mark went out together one night, while I was working late. They came home drunk and vicious. They sought me out in the kitchen, where I was going through my day planner, and mocked me about everything from my thick-heeled pumps (Like a witch’s shoes!) to my habit of grinding coffee every night before bed (Look who’s so organized! So grown up!). Even after I left the room, my sister showed no mercy. She knew how to turn people, how to get someone to abandon loyalties, to change sides. She should have gone into espionage.
“And what did Mark say?”