Whispered Magics Read Free

overheard.
    “Talents,” he repeated when I was done.
    I said, “What if Alisha had been born with some incredible
music talent? She’d be just as lost to us if she were at some studio practicing
her instrument eight hours a day, or being taken by her music coach to concerts
all over the country.”
    “She’d be safe,” Rick said.
    “Not if some drunk driver hits her bus—or a terrorist blows up
her concert hall. We taught them to be fair and to be sensible. But to be
totally safe in this world we’d have to lock them in a room. The world isn’t
totally safe. I wish it were.”
    Rick tossed the sander once more from hand to hand, then threw
it down onto the workbench. “They lied to us.”
    “They didn’t lie. Not until the wand disappeared. And we lied
right back.”
    “That’s love,” Rick said. “We did it out of love. Our duty as
parents is to keep them safe, and we can’t possibly protect them in some world
we’ve never even seen!”
    “Think of Lauren, making friends. For five years we’ve worried
about her inability to make friends—she’s never fit in with the kids at
school.”
    “She needs to learn to fit in,” Rick said. “In this world.
Where we live.”
    I felt myself slipping over to his way of thinking, and groped
for words, for one last argument. “What if,” I said. “What if those people from
the other world find their way here, but they only have the one chance—and they
offer the kids only the one chance to go back? Forever? What if we make them
choose between us and that world? They’ve always come back, Rick. It’s love,
not duty, that brings them back, but they don’t even know it, because they’ve
never been forced to make that choice.”
    Rick slammed out of the garage, leaving me staring at R.J.’s
little-boy bike.
    o0o
    I was in bed alone for hours, not sleeping, when Rick
finally came in.
    “I waited until Alisha conked off,” he said, and drew in a
shaky breath. “Damn! That kid racks up more under-the-covers reading time than
I did when I was a kid, and I thought I was the world’s champ.”
    “You put the wand back?” I asked, sitting up.
    “Right under the bed.”
    I hugged my knees to my chest, feeling the emotional vertigo
I’d felt when Lauren was first born, and I stared down at this child who had
been inside me for so long. Now a separate being, whose memories would not be
my memories. Whose life would not be my life.
    And Rick mused, “How much of my motivation was jealousy, and
not just concern for their safety? I get a different answer at midnight than I
do at noon.”
    “You mean, why didn’t it
ever happen to me ?”
    His smile was wry.
    o0o
    They were gone the next night, of course.
    It was raining hard outside, and I walked from room to silent
room, touching their empty beds, their neatly lined up books and toys and
personal treasures, the pictures on their walls. Lauren had made sketches of a
girl’s face—Princess Elte? In R.J.’s room, the sketches were all of great
birds, raptors with beaks and feathers of color combinations never seen in this
world. He’d stored in jewelry boxes the feathers and rocks he’d brought back
across that unimaginable divide.
    Alisha’s tidy powder-blue room gave nothing away.
    The next morning I was downstairs early, fixing pancakes, my
heart light because I’d passed by the three rooms and heard kid-breathing in
each.
    I almost dropped the spatula on the floor when I looked up and
there was Alisha in her nightgown.
    She ran to me, gave me a hug round the waist. “Thanks, Mom,”
she said.
    “Thanks?” My heart started thumping again. “For pancakes?”
    “For putting it back,” she said. “I smelled your shampoo in my
room that day, when the wand disappeared. But I didn’t tell the others. I
didn’t want them to be mad.”
    I suddenly found the floor under my bottom. “Your dad put it
back,” I said. “We were in it together. We didn’t mean to make you unhappy.”
    “I know.”