The Nature of Magic

Meg groped under the bathroom sink with one hand, eyes closed. It was 3 a.m. Lately the baby had been bouncing off her bladder like a trampoline. She had to pee all the time. Night was the worst. Was the baby training her for 3 a.m. feedings? She had thought she would be able to sleep through the night until he was born, but no. Not at all. She didn’t even open her eyes anymore. Didn’t turn on the lights, just heaved her massive torso off the edge of the bed, shuffled the three steps to the bathroom and sat. She could almost — almost! — do it in her sleep. Almost pee in the toilet without waking up. Almost. But not when she had to replace the roll. No, not then. She reached around and sighed at the familiar ritual: puncture the package, rip off the plastic, toss the spare rolls back under the sink. Pop, crinkle, thud: her symphony of the night.

Meg had been excited when she found 62 Cawthra Street. The house was perfect: a bedroom and a half; a bath and a half; tucked halfway up a quiet, leafy street of mature maple trees; a back deck with morning sun; a tiny front yard with the brown stalks of last year’s peonies draped across an iron fence; close to a park with a playground (in case they ever decided to have a baby), yet still convenient to the subway.

Jeff wasn’t as thrilled. It was the classic divide: some people loved magical houses, and others hated them. Buyers were rarely indifferent to the presence of the supernatural. Magical homes were unpredictable. You never knew how they would respond to a new resident, what they would do. They never became clearly, overtly hostile, but there was always potential for the unwelcome and the weird.

She had started reading about magical homes when she was sixteen, even kept a folder of stories about them on her phone for a while. That folder had tales of mysterious treasure chests, musical plumbing, liquid walls (hard to hang pictures!), and moving, shifting closets. One house locked the door to most of the homeowner’s friends; another insisted all the windows be open, even when far-away wildfires turned day to stinky, smoky dark.

The story she liked best was the river that appeared overnight three months after a family of four bought a townhouse in Leeton. According to the internet, it dissected the backyard at an angle and flowed year-round, regardless of the weather, vanishing into nothingness at the edge of the garage. It had minnows and crawdads and showed up complete with a full-grown willow tree on its north bank. All of it in the densest part of Minneapolis.

It was hard to tell if any of what she saw online was real and how much was just AI messing with humanity again, but she believed. She chose to believe. Her real estate agent said that magical homes responded to the energy vibrations of their residents. As long as you were a good person — and she could tell that Meg and Jeff were good people — well then, the magic would be good.

Jeff harrumphed as soon as the door closed behind them. “That’s a line if I ever heard one.” They weren’t even on the sidewalk and Meg worried that her agent, still inside, could hear Jeff scoff. “Of course she’s going to say that. Just trying to flatter us out of our concerns.”

“You don’t know that,” said Meg. She had really liked the house. “Didn’t you love the built-ins? That bread box and the flour bin? They looked original.”

He harrumphed again. “How do you know those are even real? That they aren’t just magic and will disappear before we move in?”

Meg didn’t bother to answer him. Magical renovations were real. Jeff knew that. He also knew the built-ins weren’t magic-craft. The law required that magical homes stand empty for six months before they could be listed for sale or rent. The magical renovations had to have time to fade. It was also illegal for an agent to tell a prospective buyer what magical iteration the house had assumed for the previous tenant. That was considered a violation of privacy — some of the alterations were quite personal — and it was also irrelevant. A home responded to each resident differently. Past magic was never repeated.

But Jeff did have a point. Suggesting to clients that good things would happen if they were good people was a trap. For who didn’t think themselves a good person?

Meg knew only one woman who actually lived in a magical home: a co-worker, Cathy, from accounting. Not the type you would think would be attracted to magical living. But Cathy loosened up a little during the second pandemic. She said the rent was cheap, and if she didn’t like the magic, she could always move.

It took six weeks for the townhouse to respond to Cathy’s habitation. Each night when Cathy slathered serum on the fan of lines crinkling out from the corner of her eyes, all the doors and windows closed and locked on their own, and all the lights went out except the one beside her bed and the one in her ensuite bath. It was something Cathy could have easily set up automatically, and probably would have, but she hadn’t gotten around to it before the house made that decision on its own.

Cathy was methodical, prudent, practical, and frugal. It seemed to Meg that the house really had tailored its magic to fit Cathy’s personality, so maybe her agent wasn’t just feeding them a line.

“Magic never really gives you what you want.” That’s what Jeff said in the car on the way home from the showing. And several times a day for the following week. And the week after.

Her mother used the line too. “Magic doesn’t work baby,” she said. “Of course it works Mom. That’s ridiculous.” “No, Meggie. I know it works, but it doesn’t work like you expect. Magic never really gives you what you want.”

Meg wondered if her mother and her boyfriend were conspiring to dissuade her from buying 62 Cawthra. She could see her mother being a little upset, not by the magic, but by the idea that her youngest child was going to buy her own house. The woman had resisted many of Meg’s big first steps. She tried to talk Meg out of going away for her undergraduate degree, disapproved of her first real boyfriend, didn’t even want her to learn to cook or drive.

But Jeff? Meg thought Jeff just didn’t like the idea of not being in control. He didn’t like the uncertainty of living in a magical home, of not knowing what it might decide to do.

Of course magic wasn’t going to give her what she really wanted. What she wanted most was to stop living in anticipation and get on with it, whatever it was: marriage? kids? an absorbing career? Magic wasn’t going to do any of that for her. Magic was a garnish, not the meal. But garnish was important too.

In the end, Jeff’s opinion didn’t really matter. It was her money. They both knew that Jeff was just along for the ride. Until he wasn’t.

He left her on closing day. There was a long speech. He used her decision to buy the house as his excuse. “I hope that house gives you what I can’t. I hope it gives you what you want.”

Meg didn’t believe that he left because of the house. Briefly she wondered if the house itself prompted the breakup. Had it been protecting her from an unworthy future by convincing Jeff to leave? Helping her when she didn’t know she needed help? But she hadn’t even moved into the house yet, so she had to accept that 62 Cawthra didn’t have anything to do with the breakup. Jeff just didn’t want her anymore.

Her furniture fit perfectly, almost magically, except for one small night table that had belonged to her grandmother, the hand-carved black walnut armoire of her aunt, and her collection of vintage toys. The linen closet was too small for her collection of percale sheets, so she packed them into the old flour bin. She sold the night table, boxed up her toy collection and stored it in the crawl space beneath the front steps. She donated the armoire; she had never liked it much anyway. But other than that, almost a perfect fit.

Meg moved in, and waited. She was eager to find out what the house would dream up for her. She had no qualms about the purchase, and no fears about the home’s magic. After all, she was a good person, wasn’t she?

She moved in on May 1. One of her first acts was to prune and fertilize the perennials in the tiny front garden, and, three weeks later, add some anemone along the walk. The irises came first: voluptuous blooms of deep purple streaked with yellow. Then the peonies. It was just one bush, but she had never seen a peony bush so heavy with flowers, nor flowers with so much scent. Each stem held four or five frilly pink heads, each the size of a cauliflower. And the peonies had no ants.

She had never heard of a peony without ants. Could that be the magic? An ant-less peony bush? She was a little disappointed at that thought, but still, that would be a whimsical, delicate sort of magic. Delightful even. Was she whimsical, or delicate? Maybe.

But the neighbors corrected her. Henry lived three doors east. He walked his lhasa apso by her house each morning as she left for work. She met Chuck and Lorraine when they knocked on her door to canvas for the Cancer Society. Chuck was a principal with the National Ballet and Lorraine was a fiber artist. Henry and Chuck and Lorraine all said the same thing: the whole neighborhood was full of ant-less peonies. It had something to do with the soil.

Neither Henry, Lorraine, nor Chuck knew how the magic in her house had manifested for the last resident. They reported that an elderly widower had owned the house for three years before he died in hospital. There was nothing unusual about him, said Lorraine, he was just an ordinary old man. Whatever magic the house has awarded him, it hadn’t been visible from the sidewalk.

The peonies exhausted, a morning glory took off and all but obliterated the iron fence. It grew four or five inches a day, and its flowers turned out to be the same deep purple as the irises. Then came the daisies, the dahlia, the coneflowers, and finally the mums.

By the time the maple trees began to drop their leaves of fire, Meg was beginning to wonder if the house really was magical. Or maybe the magic was very subtle. Or maybe, just maybe, the house didn’t like her. No. That couldn’t be. She felt so comfortable and cozy at 62 Cawthra.

She had hung blue gingham curtains in every room. Her desk was set up in the nook between the kitchen and the laundry (the nook she had hoped to one day repurpose as a nursery, before Jeff took off). The trees were bare and the ground was hard with frost, yet her little back deck was still perfect for morning tea. She thought briefly that was the magic: a special place to enjoy her morning tea regardless of the season. But as early winter gave way to serious winter, it became too cold to sit outside. She realized that the late-fall warmth on her back deck had been a function of the sun reflecting off a neighbor’s brick wall. Physics. Not magic.

Meg went to her stepfather’s house for Christmas, as usual. It was a tradition her stepfather started the year he and her mother divorced. He lured home Meg, her brother, and her two stepsisters by vowing to make each of them a favorite dish. Somehow that menu became frozen in time. Christmas dinner would have macaroni and cheese for her brother; baked squash with marshmallows for Alice, pizza for Barbara, and mince pie for Meg, with homemade hard sauce. Her mother would be on a cruise. That was her tradition.

Her siblings teased her about 62 Cawthra even before they opened presents beside the tree. “Find a pot of gold yet?” asked her brother. “Got a closet full of new clothes?” suggested Alice. She was a fashion designer; her suggestion was well-intentioned.

Barbara’s was not. It was vulgar and mean, and, Meg thought, meant to make her feel bad about the lack of a man in her life. Meg didn’t feel bad about being single. Not at all. She didn’t miss Jeff, and she didn’t need to find a fancy vibrator in her nightstand (Barbara’s crude suggestion) to make up for him.

But Barbara’s taunt did give her an idea: maybe the house had left something for her in a drawer or a cupboard? Someplace she didn’t usually go? She knew she had to do the search immediately, for if the new year rolled around with no magic, well, then, she would have to find a way to move on, find a way to let go of her attachment to the magical properties of the house, let go of hope. It wasn’t an obsession, not quite, but she yearned for the magic she had been promised when she signed the deed. It was an ache that wouldn’t go away.

She excused herself from the Christmas table before her stepfather served the mince-meat pie. She spent the whole train trip home planning the search. It had to be methodical. She couldn’t miss any part of 62 Cawthra. She decided to start high and work down — the same method her mother had taught her for cleaning a house when she was a child. But this time she would start really high — in the attic eaves — and work her way all the way down to the dirt of the crawl space.

She had never been in the attic before. It had no flooring, so she edged along the beams on her hands and knees, holding a flashlight in her mouth. She found nothing but did confirm that the ceiling was as well insulted as the home inspector had described in his report.

The search took five days. She emptied every drawer, closet and cupboard. She moved every piece of furniture to inspect beneath and behind. She rolled up rugs, shook out curtains, ran her hand over the casing of every window, the trim of every door frame. She had decided to clean as she went, so it took longer than it might have, but at least she had a very clean home to show for her failed search.

On the very last day she cleared a bank of snow to get into the crawl space. By then she was feeling foolish and oh-so-disappointed. It took all her strength to drag the tub of antique toys out from under the porch, but there was nothing there either. She emerged from the crawl space with old mice droppings sticking to her leggings and she wondered, just for a second, if maybe the house had left her magical mice droppings. Or magical mice? She laughed, but it was not a happy sound.

Cinderella — the old Disney version — had been her favorite movie as a child because of the magical creatures that helped Cinderella transform: the birds and, yes, the mice. It would have made perfect sense for 62 Cawthra to send Meg magical mice. But it hadn’t. There were no mice — magical or otherwise — just very old droppings from long ago.

Meg did not go out that New Year’s Eve. She stayed home. She did not open champagne, though champagne had been a New Year’s Eve tradition every year since she turned 19.

She knew it was time to let go of her fantasies about the magic the house would bestow on her life. It was time to stop imagining what trick, big or small, the house would conjure to make her feel special. She had thought of thousands of ways the magic might manifest. It was what she had thought about over every cup of morning tea, as she slid into bed each night, and often during the hours in between. Now, she wondered, was the house even magical at all? Agents were required to disclose if a listing had a history of magical events, but there was no guarantee. That was in the rider. After all, who could guarantee magic?

Meg wondered if Jeff would still be in her life if 62 Cawthra had not been listed as a magical home. Would she even have bought it?

Meg woke up on January 1 knowing that no magic had occurred in 62 Cawthra while she slept. In fact, she thought she felt the absence of magic. The temperature had plunged overnight. A frost of lacy ice covered her bedroom window, sending shards of rainbow light across the wall. She wrapped herself in her grandmother’s three-stripe blanket and sat in the wooden chair on the deck with her tea. Her breath huffed out in great chunks of steam. She was cold, but the sun was bright, and she was almost comfy. The house was not magical — at least not for her — but it was still right.

Her boss’s boss called her into a meeting on January 14 and put her on a twelve-month contract with one of the firm’s biggest clients. Her job was to coordinate the contributions of the offices in Miami, Singapore, London, Florence, and Buenos Aires. No one said it out loud, but it was her final test. If the project went well, Meg would be shifted to the partner track.

She had all of her travel booked — 24 flights over five and a half months — when the pandemic hit. It was the third in a decade, so there wasn’t the confusion of before. Everyone knew what to do. Meg had been looking forward to the travel but shifted easily to managing the project online.

The health emergency hadn’t cancelled the project itself, thank God, but there was, obviously, no more going to the office. She did all her usual preparations: the cans of proteins and greens, basic medicines, purified water, flour, sugar, oil, beans. The Cawthra house didn’t have much storage, so it got a little cramped, with cans and jugs stacked in lines along the living room wall. She put the paper towel and toilet paper in the attic on a piece of plywood resting across two beams.

When her stepfather called to say that his city was running short of toilet paper and would she share some, she said sure. He drove all the way up on a Sunday and loaded her Econo-Jumbo packs into his Toyota while she made them tea in the kitchen. She wondered if he was taking some of her toilet paper for her stepsisters, though he hadn’t asked. Probably. But she wasn’t worried. There was no toilet paper shortage in her city and she was single. How much could she need?

But this pandemic was worse than the others. Her stepfather got sick seven days after his trip to Meg and was dead two days later. Her mother, insisting she was impervious to infection, made the unusual decision to nurse her ex-husband and followed him to the grave within a week.

Mortality rates were close to 90 per cent. The government decided to shut down not just public life, but private life too. You needed a special permit to leave your home. Grocery shopping was strictly regulated by address. You had one hour once a week to shop and too bad if you couldn’t go that week, or if there was a snowstorm, or if the store didn’t have what you needed. There were no buses or subways any longer, and precious little gasoline. Everyone was forced to shop at stores within walking distance. People who owned bicycles, bundle-buggies, or wagons were the new elite.

Meg’s local grocery store was a place she had only bought candy, milk, wine, and chips before the pandemic. The store had always sold vegetables, but she had never understood why; they were bruised, wilted, and sad even before the world shut down. The store was run by an ancient woman who had always been brisk but friendly. Now she only let in one shopper at a time and required an appointment. That meant Meg only had 10 minutes of actual shopping time per week. The old woman presided over Meg’s hurried visits from behind a double mask and black swaddling, inside a glass cage with filtered ventilation. Meg was grateful that she stayed open at all.

The courier showed up at Meg’s door three months into the pandemic. It was marker of how important her project was that the government had granted the firm an exemption for deliveries. The courier’s name was Steve, maybe. It had been six weeks since Meg had seen anyone other than the ancient shopkeeper in the glass cage. It had been two and a half months since she had touched anyone, and her last touch had been a brief hug from her stepfather before he left and then died.

The courier was wearing only a mask, no face shield, and no hood or gloves. She could see his bare neck at his open collar, his eyes, his hands, his flesh. She had no idea if he was just responding to her hunger, or if he had reasons of his own to step across her threshold. He was willing, and even beautiful, and Meg was grateful.

After, she surprised him. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” No one had coffee anymore. She drank only tea. Her coffee was old, purchased long ago for guests, but it was a fine Sumatran blend. He sat at her little kitchen table beneath the blue gingham curtains holding the cup of steaming coffee in both hands, sipping slowly. They didn’t talk.

It was that afternoon — hours after he left — that Meg discovered she was down to one twelve-pack of toilet paper. She could kick herself. She had not monitored how much her stepfather took from her attic supply. Idiot. But easily solved. Toilet paper was rationed in her city now too: two rolls a week. But that would be plenty for her. She was single. It would do.

But her store had no toilet paper that week. Meg had learned in the first two pandemics that limiting her news consumption was a key to her own strong mental health, so she had missed all the news about the toilet paper shortages. And this time — unlike the previous two pandemics — the shortage was real.

Meg did not panic. She researched where and how to access more toilet paper legally. When that produced no results, she researched black market supplies. It wasn’t until she was down to her last roll that Meg felt the panic begin to creep in.

And the panic didn’t fully arrive until she was sitting on the toilet, having peed on a stick. There was no shortage of pregnancy tests at the store. No one wanted to get pregnant in a pandemic. She didn’t even get off the toilet as she waited. She sat there with her pants around her ankles staring at the stick for what seemed like forever. And then, those two lines. She was pregnant and there was nothing she could do about it. Not now, not in the worst pandemic of humankind. She wouldn’t even be able to see a doctor in person until the delivery.

That was her first worry, but then. Oh God. How was she going to get through nine months of pregnancy with no toilet paper?

She pulled up her pants, threw the stick in the trash and took a deep breath. Should she save the last roll for emergencies? Use gathered leaves now? She knew that’s what her neighbors were doing. She had seen Henry defy the curfew to pull leaves off the hedge outside his house. Should she? Yes. There was a mat of not-yet-rotted maple leaves still covering the little patch of grass beyond her back deck. She would hide her last roll so she wasn’t tempted to use it before the leaves ran out.

She opened the cabinet below the bathroom sink to retrieve the last roll and there, somehow, was a brand new six-pack of Charmin two-ply extra soft, still wrapped in pristine plastic.

Meg blinked, closed the cabinet door and opened it again. She had so thoroughly disengaged from her desire for magic that it took her a moment to realize what had happened. The house. The house had brought her toilet paper. She hugged the unopened pack of Charmin and thought she might cry.

It took Meg several weeks to confirm it was a never-ending supply. She thought about sneaking some out to Henry, or Chuck and Lorraine. Could she slip out in the middle of the night and leave some on their front steps? But what if she was caught violating curfew? And, more important, what if the house disagreed with her largesse? What if the magical toilet paper was meant for her alone and sharing it would cut off the supply? Would the toilet paper even exist beyond the boundary of the property line? Meg did not share her toilet paper.

Meg’s belly kept her from tying her shoes, sweeping crumbs up off the floor, or walking for any time at all, but it didn’t keep her from reaching the toilet paper under the bathroom sink. She didn’t open her eyes as she reached around the door of the cabinet in the dark. She knew what she would find: a brand-new six-pack of Charmin two-ply extra soft, still in its package.

The cure for the virus had been swift and complete. People resumed their old lives as if it had never happened at all, just as they had before. Meg was showing by the time they were released from their homes. Henry was the first neighbor she saw, out walking his lhasa apso. “How’s it going?” The words died in his mouth as he saw her belly. A mid-pandemic impregnation spoke to so many broken laws, broken taboos. But he recovered quickly. “Congratulations.” He nodded at her bump. It was a gracious thing to say.

She hadn’t planned her response. It just came out. “It’s magical, really.” Had she just suggested the magical home had impregnated her? Shit. That could cause all sorts of problems. She knew that. But she hadn’t actually said as much. It wasn’t yet a lie.

Meg punctured the plastic wrap on the Charmin with her thumb nail and extracted a roll, fully awake now. She had at least another month of peeing in the night. Why hadn’t she replaced the roll before she had gone to bed? She knew she was down to a nubbin. If she had done that, she’d be tumbling back into sleep now after an almost-somnolent pee. Instead, she was wide awake, the plastic wrap crinkling noisily in her hand, a familiar shadow of disappointment hovering over her night.

Why hadn’t 62 Cawthra provided toilet paper rolls that were already unwrapped? Why did they have to be in a package? Why did they have to be under the sink? If only she could just flush and sleep. Yes, she had needed toilet paper then. But now? Forever? This was her magic? Really? This? Just this? Her mother was right. Magic never really gives you what you want.