The Secret Ingredient of Wishes (2 page)

“Wanna know what I wished for?” Violet asked before Rachel could pull away.

“If you tell me, it won't come true,” Rachel said, hoping the threat would be enough to tamp down some of Violet's desire for whatever she wanted.

Violet shrugged, her eyes bright with wanting, and leaned in to Rachel's ear, whispering her secret with warm, vanilla-scented breath. She held a sticky finger to her lips for secrecy, then raced back to her parents.

Rachel's laugh bubbled out of her when, with a quick flash of white, a small piece of paper materialized in mid-air. Grabbing the wish, she read it and shook her head.
Leave it to Violet to wish that hard for something that doesn't exist. Poor kid's in for a hell of a letdown when this doesn't come true.

 

2

Rachel dreamed about unicorns. Despite the absurdity of Violet's wish, it had rooted in Rachel's subconscious while she slept, and she awoke the next morning with a stress headache that felt like dozens of hooves bucking against her skull. Massaging the base of her neck, she closed her eyes against the dull grayish-blue light that slithered in between the slats of the metal window blinds and reminded herself this particular wish was not one she needed to worry about.

She hadn't always known she could make wishes come true. At first, they seemed like happy coincidences. Like when she was five and her favorite stuffed animal, a rabbit called Bit, appeared in her bed with both ears still attached—despite having been thrown in the garbage the week before, his fluffy brains spilling out of the hole in his head. When her mom asked her how she'd gotten him back, and fixed, she just smiled and said, “Magic!”

As she grew, she discovered that it wasn't just her wishes that came true. She didn't have to be in the presence of someone making a wish for it to appear, just in the same town, as she discovered one year at sleepaway camp. And most of the time, she had no idea who a wish belonged to. She just knew that when a wish was strong enough, it would pop into existence, written on a scrap of paper like the ones that came out of fortune cookies, and make its way to her. She'd find them floating in the air, and tumbling out of the cereal box when she poured her breakfast, and underneath her pillow at night.

No one else seemed to notice them appear, but once she'd touched them, igniting their power, anyone could see them clutched in her hand or stuffed into the pocket of her jeans. And anyone could read them if they managed to snatch them away from her. Anyone could discover what she could do if she wasn't careful, even if they were unlikely to believe it.

So she waited until no one was looking to pick up the wishes. Then she hid them all in a wooden box on her dresser, the papers stacked a few inches high in neat rows, and smiled to herself when she overheard kids at school excitedly whispering about how they'd gotten exactly what they wanted.

When her mom found the stash when Rachel was eight and asked why she was collecting these bits of paper with wishes written across them, Rachel confessed they weren't hers but that she had made them come true. Her mom nodded, like she believed her, and joked about all of the things she'd wish for. Then she told Rachel to be sure and add her wishes to the top of her pile so they would come true first.

But that was when her parents thought she just had a very active imagination, before anyone said there was something wrong with Rachel's brain.

Rolling out of bed, the headache reined in to a dull ache, she thought as she always did after a wish appeared about wishing things could go back to the way they used to be. Before Michael—the little brother she wished away one rainy, ordinary afternoon because he was irritating her. Before her parents watched her warily and spoke to her in soft, concerned voices, reminding her over and over that she never had a little brother. Before her dad walked out on them and her mom started to believe in Michael too, and, unable to live with the possibility she'd had a son and lost him without even remembering he existed, downed a handful of Rachel's antipsychotics and chased it with a five-dollar bottle of Cabernet a month after Rachel's eighteenth birthday.

But no amount of wishing could change the past. In the eight years since her mom's death, she'd tried countless times to set everything right.

And she'd failed.

She paused in the hallway on her way downstairs. She'd inherited her childhood home after her mom died and hadn't changed a thing. Discolored patches of wallpaper created a mosaic on the wall as if half a dozen frames had been removed from the collage of family photos and the wallpaper refused to blend back into one monotonous shade of green.

The wall had once held pictures of Michael next to the rest of her family. She could see his face as clearly as if he were standing in front of her. The curly brown hair and easy smile he'd inherited from their dad. The three-quarter-inch scar through his right eyebrow from when he'd fallen out of bed at age three and cut his head open on the nightstand.

But everyone else insisted Michael had never been real. They said he was just a delusion her mind had created.
The first symptom of her psychotic break.
That was the line the doctors gave her parents when she was ten to convince them to sign the papers and have her hospitalized for a month in the psychiatric ward.

Pinching her eyes shut, she counted to three. With each number, she inhaled long and deep before releasing it.
He's gone. And there's nothing I can do to bring him back.
She touched one of the discolored spots on the wall as if she could will a photograph to appear. Breathing in deep, she imagined what Michael would look like now.
Would his hair still be scruffy and tease the collar of his shirts? Would his baby face have slimmed down so his jaw and cheekbones are sharp and angular like our father's? Would he still smile at me in the way that said we were about to do something silly?

But try as she might, the face remained stubbornly childlike. Something in her brain refused to let him age past four—the age he was when she wished him away.

When she was younger, Rachel told her parents and the doctors she no longer believed Michael had been real—it was less painful than meeting their faces, lined with worry and disappointment. But her memories of him were still very much alive. Especially here, in the house where she'd ended his existence.

She kept waiting for them to disappear like the doctors had promised, but some small part of her refused to let him go.

*   *   *

In the kitchen, she started a pot of coffee and set to work on the dishes that were piled in both sides of the sink. Violet's voice happily shouting “Ray!” broke her concentration. Startled, Rachel dropped a plate into the sink from her soapy hands, but thankfully it didn't break. Her phone's screen lit up on the windowsill when Violet's voice—the ringtone she'd set for Mary Beth—called out her name again. She bumped the faucet handle with her wrist and dried her hands on the towel hanging from the oven door.

“Did you do this?” Mary Beth asked when Rachel picked up.

“Do what?”

“A pony. On my front porch. With a sugar cone strapped on to its head with a piece of elastic.” The words tumbled out in the thick Tennessee twang that always showed up when she was really agitated. “She said it's what she wished for and you made it come true.”

How the hell could Violet's wish come true? Unicorns
do not
exist. There's no way I did that.
Rachel tapped her nails against the ceramic mug in her hand. “Just wait. There has to be an explanation that doesn't involve me.”

“Vi said she wished for a horse with a horn on its head and that's basically what I've got,” Mary Beth said. “Are you sure you didn't do this? Not even accidentally?”

“You know I don't do that anymore.” Rachel ignored the voice in her head telling her she still could do it even if she didn't want to. That she was solely responsible for the pony appearing at Mary Beth's house. That more wishes could start appearing again, and who knows what else she might accidentally cause? What she might do to Mary Beth or Geoff or their girls if she wasn't careful.

The pounding in her head roared back full force at the thought. She'd been so determined in the past few years to keep the wishes at bay. And with one careless action, she'd put everyone she loved at risk.

“I know you don't. I just thought that if you had you might know how to get rid of it. You know, poof it back to where it came from before Vi sees it and gets it into her head that she can wish for more things.”

Hands shaking, Rachel set down her coffee mug. She couldn't blame Mary Beth for being nervous. Not when Rachel was stuck on the fact that wishing something into existence—even a low-rent unicorn—wasn't that far off from wishing something or someone out of it. And she could never let that happen again.

With her brother and parents gone, Mary Beth was the closest thing Rachel had to family. And they protected each other with a fierceness reserved for few others. Even though the thought of leaving her sent Rachel's heartbeat into warp speed, the only way to ensure she didn't accidentally bring any harm to Mary Beth or her family was to leave town. Put space between her and wishes she couldn't bear to have go wrong. Loneliness had to be easier to live with than being responsible for ruining more lives.

“I'm sorry, Mae. I'll fix it. I promise.”

*   *   *

She had a little money saved. Not much, but it was enough to get her out of town and keep her from going hungry until she could figure out a permanent solution to her wish problem. From the hall closet, Rachel unearthed the spiral-bound map her parents had used to plan all of their vacations when she was little, and she carried it to her room. The pages were smooth and sturdy from lack of use. They made a low slapping sound when she pulled her thumb along the edges. Closing her eyes, Rachel fanned through it again. After a few seconds, she stopped and looked down at the page. Ohio.

“No,” she said and tried again.

Delaware.

“Don't think so.”

Missouri.

“Shit,” she grumbled. She tossed the map onto the foot of the bed. A few pages fluttered from the impact and the blue of the Atlantic Ocean caught her attention. Grabbing the spiral, she pulled the map back into her lap and studied it. North Carolina. She traced her finger across Tennessee and farther along I-40 as it stretched the length of both states, ending at the coast. “A beach could be nice.”

Half an hour later, Rachel had a duffel bag of clothes on her shoulder and a box of keepsakes, including her box of collected wishes, which she couldn't leave behind, tucked against her side. After one last check of her room to make sure she had everything she wanted, Rachel pulled the door shut behind her. She ran her hand along the smooth stretch of wall at the top of the stairs where her brother's door would have been—if she hadn't made him disappear. She stopped herself from whispering goodbye, and then she walked away.

 

3

Not long after Rachel passed the North Carolina border, her relief at finally making it out of Tennessee evaporated. A rockslide had taken out part of the interstate that wound through the mountains and forced her to detour onto a smaller highway that headed more south than east. Her map sat abandoned on the passenger seat as she focused on following the steep, curving mountain roads.

She must've missed the signs signaling the end of the detour after the road flattened out again because the other cars she'd been with since somewhere after Knoxville had disappeared. Most of the towns she drove through now were blink-and-you'll-miss-it small, and she cringed at the thought of living somewhere where everyone knew you. Rachel had grown used to the anonymity that came with living in a larger city, and even though she'd lived in Memphis her whole life, she kept to herself and no one besides Mary Beth noticed.

She was just thinking about the new places she would discover at the end of her drive when her car sputtered to a stop in the middle of one of these tiny towns. She glanced at the car's dashboard, where the needle on the gas gauge hung below E. She was sure the last time she'd checked, barely fifteen minutes ago, she'd had close to half a tank. “Shit.” She slapped her palm on the steering wheel, heaving a frustrated sigh.

Rachel's right calf, stiff and sore from hours of driving, cramped as she got out of the car. Even lifting her feet as high as she could, her shoes still scraped the concrete as she walked. Branches from knobby oak trees hung across the narrow street, their leaves creating a dense canopy overhead. The houses tucked back behind wide lawns were old and elegant, even as their faded paint and lopsided porches begged to be restored.

She ran her fingers over the vines of honeysuckle clinging to the fence in front of one of them. The red, pink, and yellow flowers looked like flames licking along the wood fence. Their sweet perfume permeated the air.

“You lost?” a gravelly voice called.

A gray-haired woman wearing an oversized men's plaid shirt watched her from the front yard of an old Victorian-style house, leaning on a shovel handle. The spade sunk a few inches into the dark soil of a pepper patch.

“No gas,” Rachel replied. She stopped in front of the white fence, its paint blistering and peeling. “But now that you mention it, where am I exactly?”

“Didn't you see the sign? You're in Nowhere, North Carolina. Home of the world's largest lost and found.”

“Must've missed it. Is it really home of the largest lost and found?”

“Among other things.” The woman walked toward her, limping slightly like she had a stitch in her side. “Catch Sisson,” she said, extending her gloved hand.

The old woman's firm grip surprised her. “Rachel.”

“Well, Rachel-with-No-Gas, c'mon in. I'll get someone over here to help you out.”