Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn’t eaten in days — which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, “What’s malcriado mean?”
“What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up — troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn’t call you. Why?”
“Well, that’s what that lady called… him. The baby.”
“Right,” Angie said. “Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?”
“Uh-huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.” Marvyn’s voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. “Angie, he’s so old.”
Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, “I couldn’t follow you, Angie. I was scared.”
“Forget it,” she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. “If you just hadn’t had to show off, if you’d gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way—” Her entire chest froze solid at the word. “The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!” She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. “Did you forget? You forgot, didn’t you?” She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. “Oh, God, after all that!”
But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. “Calm down, be cool — I’ve got it here.” He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis — more than a little grimy by now — out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. “There. Don’t say I never did nuttin’ for you.” It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. “Take it, open it up,” he said now. “Make sure it’s the right one.”
“I don’t need to,” Angie protested irritably. “It’s my letter — believe me, I know it when I see it.” But she opened the envelope anyway and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at… then stared at, in absolute disbelief.
She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.
“Well, you did your job all right,” she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack-jawed brother. “No question about that. I’m just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.”
Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.
“I didn’t do it, Angie! I swear!” Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. “I just grabbed it out of your backpack — I never even looked at it.”
“And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn’t matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.”
Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, “You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn’t. That’s what happened.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn’t matter”
“It matters.” She had grown so unused to seeing a two-eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, “You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.”
This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, “I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets — okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What’s he care about that? But he knew you’d come after me, so he held me there — back there in Thursday — until he could grab you. Only he didn’t figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that’s how it happened, Angie! That’s how I know you’re the real witch.”
“No,” she said, raising her voice now. “No, I was just pissed-off, that’s different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off woman, O Mighty One. But you… you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You’re going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he’d get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.”
Marvyn’s chubby face turned gray. “But I’m not like him! I don’t want to be like him!” Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. “It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn’t letting me come forward I’d go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I… ” He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. “I don’t want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don’t want to! And I don’t want you being a witch either… ”
Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. “It’s all right,” she told him, with one ear listening for their parents’ car pulling into the garage. “Shh, shh, it’s all right, it’s over, we’re safe, it’s okay, shh. It’s okay, we’re not going to be witches, neither one of us.” She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. “You go to sleep now.”
Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards’ wall beyond her shoulder. “I might take some of those down,” he mumbled. “Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team’s really good.” He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, “Angie? The baby?”
“What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.”
“It was bigger when we left,” Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. “I looked back at it in that lady’s lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He’s starting over, Angie, like Milady.”
“Better him than me,” Angie said. “I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he’s got it coming.” She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, “Go to sleep, don’t worry about it. After what we’ve been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is — no witch stuff.”
Marvyn smiled drowsily. “Unless we really, really need it.” Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, “Ick! Blow your nose!”
But Marvyn was asleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of innumerable SF and fantasy classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and A Wizard of Earthsea (and the others in The Earthsea Cycle). She has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, and is the winner of five Hugos, six Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and twenty Locus Awards. She’s also a winner of the Newbery Medal, The National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.