Call after call, she didn’t answer and Fazire finally decided she was not at her ramshackle abode.
She’d graduated from Oxford and declared she could not leave England. She loved it there. Fazire could see why from the pictures she sent home. It looked beautiful.
Nevertheless Fazire hated it. It took away Lily and he wanted her home.
And now she was home, though he would never have wanted her home like this.
After contacting one of her friends who Becky had in her address book, a woman named Maxine, Fazire had eventually found Lily. Maxine said she was staying somewhere in London and gave Fazire the number.
Lily had answered the phone and had been so excited to tell him something, her voice just dripping happiness. He couldn’t bear it, the sound of her happy voice while he was carrying his terrible news. He’d cut her short before she could put three words together and told her his grim tidings.
She’d, of course, taken the first flight home.
She sat next to him at the memorial service wearing a very smart, black suit that looked stylish and cultured and all the people around her didn’t know what to make of her. She was very much not the Lily who had left at sixteen to go to Oxford. She was like a modern day princess, graceful, beautiful, refined and untouchable.
She held herself in a regal way that made Fazire so proud to have her on his arm it nearly edged away his bitter sadness at losing his Becky and Will.
Lily was very brave and kind to people, she nodded and smiled. After the service they went back to Sarah’s limestone house which was now Lily’s and she played hostess beautifully, making people feel comfortable and at home even though Fazire knew from her pale skin and sunken eyes she was exhausted.
There was so much food, it was everywhere and the first time in his life he didn’t eat a bite. Nor did Lily.
Everyone knew Fazire, he’d been around for decades and, of course, not aged a single day. They thought this strange but they figured he was from some foreign land and many of them never left the Midwest so what did they know about how foreigners aged? So they’d accepted him. Being a genie and thus above mere mortals, he didn’t mix with them very often and now he did it only as his duty to Becky and Will and, of course, Lily. He helped Lily by playing host and kindly uncle-type figure (“uncle” was the term Sarah had come up to explain his presence in the family and Fazire liked it, always had).
Finally, hours after he thought it was seemly, the last of them left and Fazire cleaned up with a snap of his fingers because he knew Lily was too spent to do it. He put her to bed and stroked her hair until she fell asleep.
“Fazire?” she whispered right before she fell away to dreamland.
“Yes, my lovely?”
When she replied, she was still whispering but her voice held a deep sadness that scored Fazire’s heart. “I’m never going to wish my last wish so you’ll stay with me forever.”
For the first time in his life he felt tears prick his eyes and maybe he finally understood a little bit of what Sarah was feeling when he first met her.
“That’s fine by me,” Fazire whispered back but her exhaustion had already melted to sleep.
The next days she got up and was immediately sick. Furthermore, any time the phone rang, her face lit up with a strange mixture of expectation and relief and she’d rush to it. But it was always clear it was not who Lily was hoping it would be just a friend or family member wishing to give their condolence or asking how she was doing. Her face would fall dramatically, as if the caller had told her the world was about to come crashing to an end.
The days turned to weeks and Lily’s phone rushes became more desperate. She was also making quiet calls time and again but whatever was said made her all the more desolate.
Fazire found himself concerned.
Lily nor Fazire did a thing to work out what to do next. Neither of them had gone into Becky and Will’s room, they couldn’t face it. And there were a great deal of Sarah’s belongings still there that should be sorted.
Lily had told him she didn’t want to move back to Indiana and he, well, he’d never been in a plane. Nor did he want to after Becky and Will’s awful demise, not that he could die but she could. He could and did (very often, mostly in order to channel his genie friends) go back into his bottle and he could travel that way. But after they had this brief conversation, no plan came about.
Something else was disturbing Lily, something that had something to do with the phone and her early morning sickness that still came every day.
Finally he could take it no more. She’d been home over a month and they were both drifting through the house, Lily reading most of the time, Fazire fretting.
This just wasn’t Lily.
She’d always had purpose, kept her room tidy, helped with the housework, got her homework done on time, pushed forward to submit her writing for competitions, helped with the cooking. She was a very good cook but then again she was very good at everything, Fazire made her that way. She was a well-reared, polite, industrious Indiana girl.
Now she was tired all the time even more cranky than Fazire (and Fazire was the King of Cranky, at least that was what Becky had called him), short-tempered and completely unmotivated.
This new behaviour, Fazire thought, was not going to do.
Someone had to take care of him after all. He couldn’t be expected to do it.
He decided it was high time to confront her. He knew she still had to be hurting about her parents, as was he, but they couldn’t carry on like this forever. She wasn’t even writing anymore.
“Lily, we have to talk,” Fazire announced one day when he’d come upon her reading again.
He’d decided to float during the conversation. He did this on occasion so he wouldn’t get out of practice. He also did it when he intended to put someone in their place, like he was going to put Lily now. He knew she was grieving but life had to go on. Sarah had said that after coming to terms with losing Jim and Becky had said it after coming to terms with losing Sarah so, considering Fazire thought Sarah and Becky the most intelligent of humans, he figured it must be true. And, he realised rather shockingly, he was the only family she had left. There was no one else to snap her out of whatever state she was in.
Just him.
“Fazire, I’m in the middle of a good part,” she murmured distractedly not even looking up at him and twirling a strand of hair around her finger like she’d done while reading or watching television since she was a little girl.
He used his magic to flip her book out of her hands, levitated the bookmark sitting on the table, slapped it in her place in the book and then the book flew across the room and set itself down well away from her.
She shot bolt upright on the couch. “Fazire!”
“You must tell me what’s going on,” he demanded in his best commanding-genie voice.
“I was reading,” she replied, being deliberately obtuse, her elegant face settling into a charming disgruntled look that did not, at all, work on him (it would have worked on Will, her father was a pushover where Lily was concerned).
“I don’t mean now, I mean with you.”
A shadow crossed her eyes. A shadow that was only part about losing both her parents in a plane crash six weeks ago.
“Lily,” he went on, “I don’t know if you realise this but I’m stuck in this world and it is not my world. Since you don’t intend to use your wish then I can’t go to someone else. I don’t even want to. But in the meantime I depend on you to take care of me. I can’t float around this house watching you read your books and twirl your hair forever. We have to have a plan and since I don’t know anything about you mortals, you are going to have to make the plan.”