The Magic Trap Page 2

  Jessie liked Peggy all right. She just didn’t like it that her mom was going away.

  It was the last week of May, but it already felt like the dead of summer. All in all, it had been a strange year, weather-wise. The winter had been so mild and spring had come so early that everyone said this was the winter that never was. Mrs. Treski had been shaking her head and worrying even more than usual about global warming. And now, at the end of May, the air was hot and humid. The windows in the front room were wide-open. As Jessie walked by, a breeze lifted the curtains and let them fall again, as if the window were sighing with pleasure. Jessie could hear a basketball bouncing in the distance and kids shouting. Maybe the person at the door was someone from the neighborhood coming over to ask Evan to play. Maybe it was the mailman with a special package for her.

  The Treskis’ front door always stuck in the summertime. Jessie gave it a good yank, but the door wouldn’t budge. She grabbed the doorknob with both hands and pulled again with all her might. With a loud screech, the door flew open—and ­Jessie screamed when she saw who was standing on the front steps.

  Chapter 2

  Sleight of Hand

  sleight of hand (n) a trick performed with the hands, requiring quickness and skill, such as making a coin appear or disappear; also called legerdemain or prestidigitation

  Evan heard Jessie clomp downstairs to answer the door. If it was Peggy, he would just stay in his room. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Peggy; it’s just that he felt as if he was getting a little old to have a babysitter. In three months he was going to be eleven. That was old enough to be a babysitter. In fact, sometimes Mrs. Nevya, who lived on their street, paid Evan to play with her two little boys while she did housework and made important phone calls. She knew Evan could be counted on to keep the boys safe.

  Evan flipped to the section of the book that explained how to do sleight-of-hand tricks. There were seven basic techniques for sleight of hand, and Evan wanted to master them all: the palm, the ditch, the steal, the load, the simulation, the misdirection, and the switch. Today he was working on the palm. It was a technique that fooled the audience into thinking that your hand was empty when really you were holding something.

  There were two ways to palm something: the finger palm and the classic palm. Evan examined the pictures carefully.

  He could do the finger palm, no problem, but it was the classic palm that gave a better show. With the classic palm, you had to squeeze the muscles in your hand in just the right way—so that your palm held the coin or ball or whatever you were hiding—while making your hand look completely relaxed. It was hard.

  Evan spit on his hands, then rubbed them together. He pulled out the quarter from his pocket and held it in his left palm. He waved his hand in a flourish. The quarter fell out and onto the floor. He picked it up and tried again. He didn’t mind practicing. You had to practice if you wanted to be good.

  Evan had always loved watching magic acts, but until his grandmother gave him a magic kit for Christmas, he had never thought about performing magic himself. As soon as he learned a few tricks—and discovered that he was pretty good, a natural—he’d been hooked. Every time he mastered one skill, he couldn’t wait to jump to the next. Each skill was harder than the last, and pretty soon he was performing tricks that left Jessie and his mom asking, “How’d you do that?”

  And magic was a lot like basketball. In basketball you had to move fast, you had to think fast, you had to drill over and over so that your muscles knew what to do before your brain even gave a command. And you had to know how to fake, to misdirect your opponent so that you could perform magic on the court. In Evan’s mind, basketball and magic were almost the same thing. There was a feeling he got when he sank a shot, the way the ball left his fingertips, sailed through the air, then fell through the basket with barely a whisper. It made him feel as if everything was in its proper place, everything in the whole world was right where it belonged. Performing a magic trick—perfectly—made him feel the same way.

  Evan heard the doorbell ring a second time and then the loud screech of the front door opening. Jessie shouted something, but Evan couldn’t hear what. A minute later, his mom knocked on his door and came in.

  “That must be Peggy,” said Mrs. Treski. “I don’t know what she’s doing here so early. Maybe she thought there was going to be traffic on the drive. Can you help me close my suitcase?”

  “Sure,” said Evan, putting the quarter back in his pocket and following his mom.

  “Wow,” he said when he walked into her bedroom. “I didn’t hear the bomb go off!” The drawers of her dresser were hanging open, and clothes were draped all over the bed, the chair, and even on the floor. There was a pile of books and magazines on her night table that looked as if it was ready to topple over, and at the foot of the bed was a small mountain of shoes.

  “I had trouble deciding what to take. And I still can’t close my suitcase.” There was something in her voice that made Evan nervous. That made him put on his grown-up voice.

  “Relax, Mom. It’s not like you’re going to the moon.”

  “Try to zip while I squeeze,” she said, pushing down on the scratched purple suitcase. “It feels like I am. It feels like I’m going all the way to the moon.”

  One of Mrs. Treski’s clients had asked her to attend an important conference in California so that she could write the promotional materials for a new product they were introducing. Evan didn’t even know what the product was. Some kind of software. Mrs. Treski had lots of clients, and Evan couldn’t keep them all straight. But this client was very big and very important.

  At first she’d said no, explaining that she couldn’t possibly leave her children for three whole days. “Family comes first,” she had said to Evan and Jessie, which was pretty much her number one motto in life.

  But the client had offered to pay her big money to do the job. And there were some serious repairs that needed to be made to their old house. So after a lot of thinking, she had finally agreed to go.

  It was Evan who convinced his mom that she should stay an extra two days and have a little vacation. See the sites. Meet up with her old college roommate who lived in San Francisco. Have some fun.

  “You never go anywhere, Mom,” he had said to her. “You never have any fun.”

  She had looked at him strangely. “I have fun,” she said. “I have fun all the time.”

  “Not grown-up fun,” said Evan. “You just have fun with me and Jessie.”

  “I like you and Jessie,” she said, laughing, but also messing up his hair, as if she wanted this conversation to end.

  “Parents need to go off by themselves sometimes,” he had said, repeating something that Megan had said to him. Easy for her to say. Her parents were married, and they seemed to have plenty of money. At least more than the Treskis did.

  Somehow he’d convinced her. If she had to fly all the way to California for business, she might as well stay an extra two days and have some fun.

  But now that the suitcase wouldn’t close, and the room looked like it had suffered an alien ­invasion, and there were reports of a tropical storm developing in the Caribbean that could move up the East Coast later in the week, making airplane travel difficult, Mrs. Treski was obviously having second thoughts.

  “Maybe I should cancel this whole thing,” she said, pressing all her weight onto the top of the suitcase. No matter how hard she pushed, Evan couldn’t get the zipper to close.

  “No!” he said, tugging with all his might on the stubborn zipper. “You can’t cancel now. Peggy’s here already and Grandma’s with the Uptons and even Jessie has stopped squawking about it. You have to go. Just take something out,” he said, pointing at the suitcase.

  There was a loud clattering on the stairs, and then Jessie pounded into the room. “You have to see! You have to see! You have to see!” she screamed, grabbing her mother by the hand and pulling her toward the door.

  “Jessie! Jessie! Slow down! What�
�s going on?” Mrs. Treski allowed herself to be pulled out of the room. Evan paused, staring at the suitcase, wondering if he should open it and take something out while his mother wasn’t looking. There was no telling what Jessie was so excited about. Sometimes it was something small that set her off. Maybe Peggy had brought a surprise with her. Maybe she had brought her cat, even though Jessie was allergic. Oh, brother! That would throw a monkey wrench in the whole plan. His mother was never going to make it out of the house.

  Evan heard his mother say something, and then there was a laugh. A man’s laugh. A loud, booming, man’s laugh. Evan felt a wave wash over him. It seemed to swell up through his stomach, drain all the saliva out of his mouth, and crash down to his toes.

  He took a deep breath, pushed himself onto his feet, and headed down the stairs. By the time he reached the first floor and rounded the corner into the front hall, he knew what he would see. But he still couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Evan hadn’t seen his father in over a year. The last time he’d come for a visit was a rainy, cold day in March, and he’d stayed for only half a day. He’d had a flight to catch. Evan couldn’t remember where to. It was a country Evan had never heard of that had a lot of z’s and k’s in the name. Evan’s dad was always flying somewhere, and he never carried more than a backpack with him. He liked to travel light. Over the years, Evan had come to think of that black backpack as just another part of his father’s body. It was always there.

  “Hey, Evan, my man!” his dad called to him.

  Jessie was literally spinning like a top around him, shouting, “You’re home! You’re home!” Sometimes a wire tripped in Jessie, and she could go a little bananas. Evan’s mom was trying to get Jessie to settle down by catching her shoulders so she would stop spinning. Evan looked at his mom and wondered if his parents had hugged when they first saw each other.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said, still standing on the stairs, eyeing the familiar backpack that leaned against the front door. Why was his dad here? Why today, when there were all the days that he hadn’t shown up—birthdays and Christmases and whole summers. What made this the day?

  “Come here!” his dad said, his voice friendly but a little too loud.

  “Jessie! Quit it!” Evan commanded. Jessie was spinning so fast her arms were flying out from her sides like propeller blades on an old-fashioned plane. She spun too close to the wall and knocked over the wooden coatrack that stood in the corner. It crashed onto the floor, just missing hitting her on the head on the way down.

  Evan’s mother caught hold of her, but Jessie fought to wriggle out of her grasp. Evan hurried over to his little sister and grabbed her by the wrist.

  “Come on, I have to show you something. It’s important!”

  “No! I want to stay with Daddy!” Jessie shouted, squirming away from Evan. But he was an expert at holding her by the shoulders in just the right way. It helped her slow down her breathing.

  “We’ll come back in a minute,” said Evan firmly. “But I need to show you something first. Okay?” He steered Jessie toward the stairs, and she went along.

  “We’ll be right back, Dad!” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere! Don’t, okay?”

  Evan took Jessie into her bedroom and told her to sit down on the bed. Her cheeks were bright red and her face was sweaty. A strand of her hair was stuck to her chin.

  “What do you have to show me?” she asked, her eye on the door.

  “Wait here,” he said. He disappeared into his room and came back holding a deck of cards. Then he arranged Jessie’s desk chair and night table so that he was sitting in the chair with the night table between the two of them. Evan spread the cards on the table.

  “A trick! That’s not important!” she said.

  Jessie got up to leave the room, but Evan said, “It’s a good one. And I’ll explain the secret at the end.”

  She hesitated, then sat back down.

  “An ordinary deck of cards,” he said, picking up the cards and fanning them out again so Jessie could see that the cards were in no particular order. “Now I’m going to tell you a story of four kings who were brothers.” Evan quickly searched through the deck of cards and pulled out each of the kings.

  Then he placed them face-down on his lap. “Once again, notice that there’s nothing unusual about this deck of cards.” He fanned the deck out in his left hand and waved the cards in front of ­Jessie’s face.

  “Now the kings are going to travel to the four corners of the earth. The first king will go to the North.” He slid the first king card, face-down, into the deck near the top. “The next will go to the South. The third will travel to the West, and the fourth will journey all the way to the Far East.” As he spoke, he slipped the remaining three king cards into the deck.

  “But the kings’ troubles are just beginning. An evil sorcerer has decided to create chaos by mixing Up with Down, In with Out, Right with Wrong! Watch as I shuffle the cards with half the deck face-up and half the deck face-down.”

  Evan turned half the deck face-up and shuffled the two halves together so that the cards were all mixed up: face-up and face-down. He shuffled again and again. “How will the kings ever find their way home? Can you help them? Can you find the four kings and bring them home?”

  He looked at Jessie. Her breathing had slowed. Her eyes were on the deck of cards. Her hands were still at her sides.

  He held the deck in front of her and said, “Put your hand on the cards, close your eyes, and say, ‘Kings! Come home, come home, you will no longer roam!’”

  Jessie was quiet, staring intently at the deck of cards. She placed her hand over them and whispered the magic words.

  “Okay. See if you can find them.” Evan spread out the cards on the night table, face-up. All of them were facing in the same direction. Except for four of them.

  Breathlessly Jessie plucked each one of the four face-down cards and turned them over. There were the four kings.

  “How did you do that?” she whispered.

  “I didn’t do it,” said Evan, shrugging and gathering up the cards. “You’re the one who made them come home.”

  “What’s the trick?” she asked.

  “The trick is . . .” said Evan, “that I got you to quiet down. You were going nuts down there, Jess.” He started to shuffle the cards.

  “But how did you . . . ?”

  “I’ll tell you later, I promise. But right now we have to go back downstairs. Can you keep calm or are you going to start spinning again?”

  “But he’s come home, Evan! He’s finally home!”

  “Yeah, I know. So?” Evan kept his eyes on the cards and made sure his voice was steady. “He’ll be gone later today. Or tomorrow.”

  “No. Not this time,” said Jessie, shaking her head. “He brought a suitcase.”

  Evan laughed, a short, sharp laugh. “He did not!”

  “He did. I saw it. It’s on the front steps, right outside the door.”

  “You’re loco. Dad doesn’t—”

  “He did. Go look for yourself.”

  Evan stood up and stuffed the deck of cards in his back pocket, then headed for the stairs. At the top, he paused and said, “Jess, don’t go nuts again, okay?”

  “I won’t,” she said, and she grabbed hold of the back of his T-shirt, which was Jessie’s way of holding hands because she didn’t really like touching.

  When they got to the kitchen, their mother and father were sitting at the kitchen table. Their father had a cup of coffee in front of him. Their mom was drinking a glass of water.

  Evan’s dad stood up to give him a hug. “Hey! Evan! Come here, man!”

  “Everything okay?” asked Mrs. Treski, looking at Evan.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. He walked over to his dad and they hugged, his dad lifting him off the ground. Evan wondered if his dad had hugged Jessie in this same way and if that was what had set her off. Why couldn’t his dad remember stuff like that?

  “I’m just go
ing to check the mail,” he said to his mom.

  “It’s kind of early, Evan,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll find anything.”

  “Well, I’ll look anyway.”

  Jessie had crept around the kitchen table and was now following Evan to the front door, holding on to his T-shirt again. Evan pulled hard on the front door. It was old and hung crooked on its hinges, so getting it to open and close was sometimes a project.

  And there it was. Sitting on the front steps. Just as Jessie had said. An enormous black duffle bag, stuffed full of enough clothes to last . . . forever.

  “See,” she whispered. “He’s finally come home.”

  Chapter 3

  Cups and Balls

  Cups and Balls (n) a classic magic trick that is more than two thousand years old, in which several small balls seem to appear and disappear under overturned cups; in his book, Professor Hoffmann called this trick “the groundwork of all legerdemain”

  Jessie was sitting right next to her father when the phone rang. He had been telling them about something called an IED, which sounded to Jessie like a bomb because it had exploded in the road right in front of the transport vehicle he had been riding in. “If we’d been even twenty feet closer,” he said, “we would have all been dead. I’m not kidding you.”

  “Jake!” Jessie’s mom looked angry and tired at the same time. Mixed-up emotions. Hard for Jessie to read. “I don’t want you telling the kids stories like that.”

  “Why not? They’re old enough. They’re not babies, right?” He turned to Jessie.

  She nodded. “I’m not a baby.” She glanced at Evan, who was slouching in the doorway. He was practicing with his quarter, making it dance across his knuckles, then disappear into the palm of his hand.