The Isle of Youth: Stories

THE GREATEST ESCAPE

My father leaving was his last act of magic. He had locked himself in a glass aquarium filled with water. The idea was to disappear from the aquarium and reappear onstage. At the time, my mother was pregnant with me. She saw what happened at the rehearsal, saw it with her own eyes: he vanished but never returned. No one could explain it. It was supposed to have been an illusion, after all. The stage was searched. Even the real police looked for him, but he was gone. Gone where? I asked her, and she said nobody knew, not even the world’s greatest magicians. She once told me there was a cruelty to magic because it takes a thing, transforms it, and then turns it back into what it was. My father had forgotten the turning-back part.

* * *

That wasn’t the only story my mother told me. In 1910, Harry Houdini escaped from a straitjacket while suspended from a crane. Two years later, he freed himself from a nailed-shut packing crate that had been dropped into the East River. That was the kind of magic I dreamed about. I wanted us to make each other levitate and disappear, to perform in Las Vegas and Times Square. And where was I instead? Standing beneath the red lights of a dinner theater stage in Hollywood, Florida, watching my mother balance a globe of fire in her hand.

Of course, the fire wasn’t real. It was a Level 1 illusion, the best she could manage these days, despite having trained at a world-famous magic school in the real Hollywood, out in California. At the school, she had been working her way to Level 3, which was the Houdini stuff — the harrowing escapes, the ability to manipulate reality and time. She claimed her skills had weakened when my father disappeared, and left her almost entirely after I was born.

My parents had met at magic school. In their first class, my father could make a cockatoo vanish from its cage better than anyone. He became the headmaster’s protégé. His stage name was the Great Heraldo. Once I looked up the school online, in the dinner theater owner’s office. The building resembled a castle, with a stone wall and spires. In the photos, the windows glowed with gold light. I spent a long time staring at them and wondering what was happening inside.

After my father disappeared, my mother needed a change of scenery. She’d thought Hollywood, Florida, might be better than the one in California, but here it was swampy and flat and there were hurricanes instead of earthquakes and fires. I’d been part of her act since childhood. We used to have more families in the audience, but now the men who wandered over from nearby hotels and drank during the shows were the only ones who came to watch. According to the owner, there was stiffer competition from new venues in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. He was a slight, stooped man with a thin black mustache, and he’d been pleading with my mother to shake things up. As I watched her hold the fire, the peaked orange flames stretching upward, like a plant toward light, I hoped she was capable of a greater kind of magic. That she still had it in her.

As the assistant, I was dressed in a gold bathing suit and red high heels. My mother wore a black pantsuit with a bow tie and a top hat. Her cape billowed behind her when she moved. She said a real magician would never be caught dead in a bathing suit, but I was seventeen and capable of handling indignity. After the fire trick, she made a quarter vanish and reappear from my cleavage. I liked having her close to me onstage. I could see the mascara crusted on her eyelashes and smell the gel that kept her blond hair shellacked under her hat. When I noticed her lips cracking beneath her red lipstick, I knew she wasn’t drinking enough water. When her pupils looked swollen, I knew she wasn’t getting enough sleep. When one man starting chanting Kiss! and my mother threw out a smile — fast, wide, full of teeth — I knew she was wishing him terrible things.

For the grand finale, I disappeared. My mother opened a trapdoor in the center of the stage. I waved to the audience before crawling inside. She closed the door and said Shazam! — my cue to crawl into the compartment under the stage. The space was the size of a dumbwaiter and smelled like cedar. I sat with my knees pulled to my chest, so I didn’t get splinters in my legs. I listened to the trapdoor open and a volunteer lumber onto the stage to inspect the empty space. Before shows, my mother always dusted me with glitter, which left behind a fine gold grit. My skin felt like it was coated in sand.

When she opened the trapdoor a second time, I popped up like a jack-in-the-box. The audience applauded halfheartedly. I curtsied. My mother took a bow. The heat had made her foundation run. Under the lights, it looked like her skin was melting. A black velvet curtain swung closed in front of us.

* * *

At the bar, men were lining up to buy me drinks. I didn’t care what they were — a beer, a warm glass of white wine, a whiskey sour. Each one made me feel like I was being carried away on a cloud. Before long, one of the men would manage to clear away the rest, the one who bought the most drinks, who told the most jokes. My name was Crystal, but sometimes they pronounced it “Cristal,” like the champagne.

Tonight it was a man in a wrinkled suit with a thick gold band on his left ring finger. He had a fleshy jawline, little blue eyes, and big ears. A soft, decent face. He was in Hollywood on business, staying at a hotel down the street. He had once seen Penn and Teller perform in New York City. In their act, one magician fired a gun and the other caught the bullet in his mouth.

“Can you imagine such a thing?” he said. “How much one would have to trust the other?”

I could not.

He was buying my third martini. At the theater, martinis were served in a clear plastic cup with a trio of tiny green olives, the smallest I’d ever seen. I wore a pink silk bathrobe over my bathing suit, the sash tied in a loose bow. I teetered in my heels. My mouth was slick with vodka and raspberry-flavored lip gloss.

“Do a trick!” The man clutched my martini with his fat, damp hands. This kind of exchange, a little pro bono magic, was always expected. “Won’t you please do a trick?”

I gave him the same smile my mother had flashed her audience — full of teeth and menace — and pulled a blue flower from behind my ear, the first trick she ever taught me. I tucked the flower into his shirt pocket. He handed me the drink. I swallowed the olives whole.

Tea candles flickered on the bar. Ricky, the bartender, was rinsing out beer glasses. I knew my mother was still backstage, in our dressing room. She had an elaborate postshow routine: skin care, hair care, special stretching exercises. I could see her wiping away her lipstick and dreaming of a different life. Where was the magic for that?

I let the man stroke my neck. He rested a hand on my waist. I didn’t know his name, but in my mind I had started calling him Bill. Poor Bill. Didn’t he know that you should never trust a half-naked girl in a bar at this hour of the night?

Bill asked where else I could make flowers appear from. I fluttered my eyelashes. I leaned forward and slipped my hand inside his pocket. He sighed dreamily. I pulled out his wallet, rolled it up my arm, and slipped it into the back of my bathing suit. This was a variation on another trick my mother had taught me, where I vanished a wand by covering it with a handkerchief and sliding it up my sleeve. In the morning, Bill might call the theater and ask Ricky — I threw him a little cash for his silence — about the wallet. But probably Bill’s memory would be too foggy to remember where he’d been or who he’d been with. And even if it wasn’t, he might be a little embarrassed that he’d spent his night pawing a teenager in a bathing suit. He was married. He probably had a mortgage and kids. He wouldn’t want to make trouble.

I leaned in again and told Bill that I needed to freshen up. I kissed his cheek. Why not do him that one small kindness? When I pulled away, he was smiling a sick, stupid smile. Over his shoulder, I caught Ricky rolling his eyes as he wiped down the bar.

Of course, I never went back. Instead I found my mother sitting at the dressing table mirror and removing her makeup with cotton balls soaked in witch hazel. The table had uneven legs and cracked green paint. The oval mirror was fringed with rust. A small chandelier hung from the ceiling, but all the bulbs were missing.

It was July. In a month, I’d be back in school. My classmates were talking about college, but maybe I would go to Hollywood and study magic instead. I would ace my classes in divining and dematerialization. I would become the headmaster’s pet. Brava, Crystal! he would say. Brava! Only I wouldn’t fall in love or get pregnant or disappear or let my powers fade away.

I curled up on the chaise lounge my mother insisted on keeping even though it had moths. Bill’s wallet held seventy dollars in cash, a chewing gum wrapper, and a Polaroid photo of a palm tree. No credit cards, no driver’s license. For the last six months, I’d been saving up. I kept my money in a shoe box from Wholesale Magic. Something had shifted when I turned seventeen; I started to feel like I needed to make my own plans. I kept changing the location of the box — bottom dresser drawer, top closet shelf, under my bed — but that wasn’t enough to prevent my mother from dipping into my supply.

“We should get a rabbit,” she said, out of nowhere. She moved the cotton ball in circles across her face. She had high cheekbones and a long, elegant neck. Mascara had clotted in the corners of her eyes.

“I thought rabbit tricks were low-rent.” I fanned myself with Bill’s photo.

“Well, Crystal, clearly we’d have to do something out of the ordinary.” She rubbed her palm with the cotton ball. The powder that made the fake fire always left a dark ring on her skin. I remembered that Houdini had called fire the most terrible of the elements. He also said his greatest escape was leaving Appleton, Wisconsin.

“Like what?”

My mother told me about a magic-school classmate who trained a rabbit to climb an invisible thread; from the audience, it looked like the animal was levitating. Another time, she had seen a magician place a rabbit on a tabletop, vanish it, and then make it reappear underneath the table.

I pointed out that what she was describing would require expensive new equipment and months of careful rabbit-training, which neither of us knew how to do.

“A nice rabbit,” she continued. “Fat and white.” She picked up the tiny toothbrush she used to exfoliate her lips.

In 1898, Ching Ling Foo conjured a small child from a bowl of water. For his Garden of Flowers trick, Harry Blackstone, Jr., made flowers multiply until the stage was brilliant with color. Was it possible to become famous, or even fill our dinky theater, with a rabbit? I didn’t think so.

“This is the kind of magic that’s going to put bodies in seats,” she insisted. Bodies in seats was the owner’s motto. “Only psychopaths dislike rabbits.”

The last time my mother was this excited about a new trick, she ordered a five-hundred-dollar guillotine from a catalogue. Naturally, I was the one in the stocks. It should have been a dramatic illusion onstage. Even though I knew it was designed for magic, I would still get nervous waiting for the blade to drop. But my mother didn’t perform the trick very well. She didn’t talk about the history of the guillotine or place a bucket underneath my head or lead the audience in a countdown. And where was the guillotine now? Collecting dust backstage.

My mother dabbed white cream under her eyes. I examined the photo of the palm tree and wondered why someone would carry around such a thing. Over the months, I’d discovered some strange items in these wallets. One had five bucks and a surgical glove dusted in baby powder. Another held a postcard of people dressed in lobster costumes.

“Is it ever this hot in California?” I asked. We didn’t have air-conditioning in the dressing room. My legs were sticking together.

“It’s a different kind of heat.” She pulled off the fake diamond studs she wore during shows and placed them on the table. “Did you know your father could predict when an earthquake was coming? He’d feel a trembling in his mouth.” She tapped her bottom lip.

I looked again at Bill’s photo and wondered if it could have been taken in California.

My mother spritzed perfume on her throat, then rose from the table and flicked off the lights. This was the part of the night she hated the most: the show was over, the costumes peeled away, the makeup removed. Now there was nothing to do but slink upstairs, to our cramped apartment with the dusty window units and the temperamental stove. Put bodies in seats, if you want new appliances, the theater owner had told us. The apartment was cluttered with supplies: a Bible that sprouted flames, a silk rose that bloomed into a bouquet, collapsible wands. All around us was the promise of magic. I knew my mother would sit in the dark of her bedroom and have a drink. What she didn’t know was that Ricky had slipped me a mini-bottle before I left, so I would be having one with her too.

* * *

In the morning, I woke feeling gummy with glitter and sweat. My window unit was blowing lukewarm air. A poster of the real Hollywood, an image of a white sign nestled in green hills, fluttered on the wall. I got up and wandered into the kitchen, where I found my mother standing by the sink, holding a white rabbit. I’d fallen asleep in my bathing suit and bathrobe. My feet were sore from the heels. I scratched my arm. The glitter was always giving me rashes. In my dreams, she had conjured the rabbit from nothing; in my dreams, we had an endless supply of talent and hope.

“I got him at PetSmart.” She bounced the rabbit in her arms. He had a sleek white coat and quick, red eyes. She had named him Merlin.

“With my money?” In the corner, there was a defunct saw-a-lady-in-half kit covered with a white sheet. Next to it, my mother had set up a large metal cage. The bottom was covered with wood chips. She had even gotten little blue dishes for water and rabbit pellets. A hundred dollars, at least.

“I’m the talent,” she said. “It was never your money.”

I went to my room and checked the shoe box, smoothing the crinkled bills as I counted. I was missing three fifties. I pushed the box back under my bed, wondering if there was such a thing as a place that would be safe from my mother.

Before our next show, she wanted to teach Merlin the levitating rabbit trick. The first step was training him to balance on his hind legs. We began that evening. By then I had showered and put on regular clothes. My mother was wearing a pink tracksuit. Her hair was in rollers. She was not looking especially magical. She placed Merlin on the kitchen floor. The air inside the apartment was heavy and still. The wall clock had been stuck at noon for a week.

She lifted her hand over the rabbit. Merlin looked toward the S-shaped crack in the ceiling. He seemed to be paying attention.

“Up,” she said.

He pricked his ears. For a moment, I thought he was going to meet her hand, a miraculously trainable rabbit, but instead he bolted across the room and tried to shimmy under the stove.

“As I suspected,” she said. “We’ll need lots of practice.”

We went on like this for hours: my mother commanding, Merlin finding new ways to flee. She’d already told the theater owner that we would be unveiling the rabbit in our next performance, which was three days away. I wished my father was here; I felt certain he would have trained Merlin in no time at all.

“Up,” she said for what felt like the hundredth time, looming over the rabbit, her voice baritone. It was dark out. He rolled over on his side, as though we were putting him to sleep.

“Sleeping rabbit,” I said. “That’s a pretty lousy trick.”

“Negativity is not a training tool, Crystal.” She got a Dr Pepper from the fridge and ran the can across her forehead. I stroked Merlin’s belly and felt the thumping of his heart.

My mother started telling me about when she and my father were living together in California, in an apartment in Toluca Lake. He would hypnotize her and get her to do all kinds of things. He would take photos and show them to her as proof: handstands until her face was purple, squeezing mustard into a bowl and eating it with a spoon, stripping naked and numbing her body with ice cubes. The image of my mother naked made me uneasy. I wondered where that photo was now. I imagined finding it in a wallet, what I would think.

“Maybe we could hypnotize Merlin.” I pictured a hypnotized rabbit waltzing across the stage, or peeling a banana with his paws. That would be something to see.

I could tell my mother wasn’t listening. She was kneeling on the floor and petting the rabbit’s neck, which was glossy and rolled with fat.

“One day,” she said. “One day I’ll tell you things about him that you would not believe.”

* * *

We practiced for two days without success. Merlin was always darting into the bathroom, where he would hide behind the toilet, leaving a trail of wood chips in his wake. Sometimes I pretended to not be able to find him even though I knew exactly where he was.

With our next performance upon us, my mother settled for the usual rabbit-in-a-hat trick. She brought out her stovepipe hat with the false bottom. We just had to train Merlin to sit inside, underneath a circle of black cardboard. Onstage, my mother would show the hat was empty by tilting it toward the audience, then cover it with a handkerchief and say Shazam! Afterward, she would push past the false bottom and pull out the rabbit. Amateur magic. If her classmates from magic school could see her now, they would be ashamed.

One evening, she sent me to the Sizzler for baby carrots. She had decided Merlin needed more positive reinforcement. I brought along a black briefcase, which looked ordinary enough, but opened in two places. In a performance, the briefcase was shown to be empty and then, from the hidden opening, the magician lifted out all manner of things: a baseball, a vase, a hammer. After the Sizzler, my next stop was Coco Cabana, the twenty-four-hour liquor store, where I planned to pinch mini-bottles from the shelves.

The store was owned by Mr. Phillips. He was always engrossed in a paper and never kept his minis behind the counter, the way other liquor stores did. I used to hang around long enough for him to tell me about what he was reading. He didn’t seem to notice the way I now went straight to the back and left without buying anything. He would just say it was a shame that I didn’t have time for stories. His son was a different matter. If he was around, he’d stand in the aisle and watch as I disappeared behind a shelf. Once he demanded I open the briefcase and I was pleased with myself for showing the empty side with a smile and a magician’s flourish. I hoped he didn’t inherit the store anytime soon.

“Hey, Crystal,” Mr. Phillips called on my way out.

I waved but didn’t stop. Four little vodkas were rattling around in the briefcase.

He shook a copy of the Hollywood Gazette. “Have I got a story for you.”

I walked home on Surf Road, past palm trees like the one in Bill’s photo and a long stretch of beach. The tide was coming in; dusk was settling over white villas and the peaks of distant high-rises. My hair was damp. I tasted salt on my upper lip. I drank two mini-bottles and tossed the empties into the recycling bin stationed outside a mint-green bungalow. Once, when I was young, my mother and I had passed a street magician on this very strip. He was making plastic balls disappear up his coat sleeves. I had tugged her hand and asked if he could be my father, and she’d laughed and said he wasn’t even close to the kind of magician my father had been, to the Great Heraldo.

Outside the dinner theater, a man was hanging around the entrance. I didn’t think he was waiting for me — no one was ever waiting for me — but before I could slip inside, he stepped into my path.

“I want my wallet back,” he said.

It was Bill, wearing black pants and a dress shirt, the armpits ringed with sweat. He turned his wedding band on his finger. I was holding the package of baby carrots in one hand and the briefcase in the other.

“I bet the owner of this place would like to know what you’ve been up to,” Bill said. “I bet he’d find it all very interesting.”

The carrots were cold. I pressed the package against my forehead like a compress. Bill touched my elbow, a little roughly. He asked if I was paying attention.

“You’re too late,” I said. “Everything’s gone.”

“Even the photo?” He squinted at me. His cheeks and forehead shone.

It wouldn’t have cost me anything to give the photo back to him, but that would be hard evidence that I had stolen and that was bad for business. I had to look out for myself in practical ways. I couldn’t rely on magic.

“I get it,” I said. “You don’t want your wife to find out you’re a sleaze. Do you know how old I am? No? I’m a minor, for your information, and I bet some people would be very interested to know about that.”

Bill took a step back. His face went slack, as though I had just slapped him. He didn’t stop me when I opened the door and went inside.

* * *

The first time I went to Coco Cabana, I was fifteen. The night had brought a particularly bad show: we were still doing the saw-a-lady-in-half trick, and my mother had fumbled the reassembly. I was scrunched inside a wood box on wheels, which should have been reconnected to another box with plastic feet — surprisingly lifelike from a distance — attached to the end. My mother hadn’t been able to get the blocks to click into place, and before I knew it, I was drifting across the stage. The audience started booing. Under the glare of the lights, my mother’s eyes widened with panic. Her skin paled beneath her makeup. I could feel her sinking, could feel our lives sinking, like someone had weighted us down with rocks and tossed us into the ocean. When the curtain fell, I was still inside the box, and my mother still looked empty and afraid.

The first time, I didn’t bring the suitcase. I didn’t take anything from the shelves. I didn’t even know why I was there. I just walked the aisles, gazing at the bottles and the liquids inside. It was November, but still warm and humid. I kept thinking how nice it would be to have something cold to drink.

Mr. Phillips was the only person in the store. He stood behind the counter with his paper. I was surveying a display of neon lighters near the front. I picked up a hot pink lighter and made it flame.

“It’s two for one,” he said without looking up. “But you look too young for those.”

“I don’t smoke.” I put the lighter down. I didn’t yet have money of my own.

“Listen to this.” He tapped his index finger against the paper. I walked around to the counter. He wore a gold chain under his white T-shirt and had tufts of gray hair on his knuckles.

“A man is on his way to work, is hit in the head, and gets amnesia. He wanders away, not remembering anything, and goes on to start a whole new life. A year later, he gets his memory back, remembers where he used to live, and shows up on his family’s doorstep.” Mr. Phillips took off his glasses and started cleaning them on his shirt. “What a story!”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “How did he get hit in the head?”

He put his glasses back on. He looked at the article again and frowned. “Well, it doesn’t say exactly. But look, his picture’s right here.”

He passed me the paper. There was a black-and-white photo of a man with his arm around a woman. Two young girls stood in front of them. Both had braces and pigtails. Everyone was smiling. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mother this story and ask if something like that could have happened to my father. I had no way of knowing that when I described the photo with the smiling family, she would hide her face in her hands and begin to cry.

* * *

To no one’s surprise, our next show was a disaster. Backstage, Merlin hadn’t wanted to get into the hat, and once he was inside, he wouldn’t hold still. When my mother tilted the hat toward the audience, a white ear peeked through and people snickered. A woman and her young son, the first family I’d seen in months, walked out. Bill was in the front row, holding a beer and smiling. So far he hadn’t said anything, but I imagined it was just a matter of time. Beyond the lights and the audience, I could see the dinner theater owner standing by the bar, swirling a drink and shaking his head.

When my mother pulled Merlin from the hat, he leaped out of her arms and scurried around the stage for a few minutes before diving into the audience. One man — just the kind I would have liked to buy me drinks later — shrieked and jumped out of his chair. It didn’t take long for the rest of the audience to scatter. In the end, I caught Merlin with the help of a baby carrot and stashed him in our dressing room. Through the closed door, I heard the owner shouting at my mother, telling her our days were numbered. When she came into the dressing room, she didn’t go through her usual routine. She just sat at her table, her cape pooling around her knees, and stared at herself in the mirror.

It was too sad a scene. I left Merlin on the chaise and my mother at her dressing table and went to the bar. Bill was still there, nursing another beer and reading a pamphlet on manatees. Ricky looked at Bill and then back at me, like Now you’re in trouble.

“Are you stalking me?” I stood next to Bill and retied my bathrobe sash. “Do I need to call the police?”

He looked up from the pamphlet. “I’m the one who should be calling the police.”

“I could have you murdered, you know.” I leaned against the bar and crossed my arms, trying to look worldly and assured, which of course I was not. “I know people who do that sort of thing.”

Bill just laughed. “You’re a kid. You don’t know anything.”

“I know you want your wallet back. I know you carry a picture of some stupid tree around. I know you won’t go back to your family and forget all about this like you should.”

“I had a family,” Bill said. “A wife and a daughter and a little dog and a goldfish.”

“Where did you come from, anyway?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Appleton?” It seemed unlikely this man could be from the same place as Houdini.

“Sturgeon Bay. But I like it here, in Hollywood. I think I might stay for a while.”

“Just because you like Hollywood doesn’t mean Hollywood likes you.”

Another man came into the bar, drunk and swaying and asking about the show. Am I too late for the magic? His shirt was untucked, his hair mussed. I sidled up to him and swiveled my hips and soon I was drinking old-fashioneds on his tab.

He was too drunk to be coy, to ask for a magic trick. After two cocktails, he was grabbing my ass and pulling me toward him. His wallet was one of the easiest. It was sitting at the top of his pocket and went straight up my bathrobe sleeve. There was a weird kind of intimacy to the whole thing, with Bill right there, and I’d had just enough to drink to feel invincible. No one else was around. What could he do but watch?

Quite a bit, it turned out.

“Thief!” Bill stood from his barstool. He pointed at me with the manatee pamphlet. “This woman is a thief!”

The drunk man clutched his pockets. Ricky looked up from restocking maraschino cherries and lime wedges. I slipped the wallet down my sleeve and slapped it on the bar.

“It was just a trick,” I said. “You know, magic.”

“Don’t believe her,” Bill said. “Don’t you believe her at all.”

“Thief!” the man slurred.

“Looks like the show’s over,” Ricky said.

A good performer always knows when it’s time to make her exit. I turned on my heels and ran. I went up the middle of the audience section, between the velvet curtains. The lights were off backstage. My heels clacked on the wood. I opened the trapdoor and climbed inside the space. I wedged my head between my knees and breathed in the cedar smell. I would stay there for as long as it took for everyone to go home.

* * *

As a child, I searched for my father. I would wander down to the beach, where I checked behind garbage cans and underneath picnic tables and white lifeguard stations. Once, a lifeguard found me questioning sunbathers about my father and made me promise to go straight home. I did as I was told, but came back the next day. It was summertime. I was ten. For my birthday, my mother had given me a map of Florida, which she said would keep me from getting lost. I would study the highways and the lakes and the dark swampland. Could he be in Lake Istokpoga? Weeki Wachee Springs? Gatorland? The map made Florida seem vast and mysterious. All these names I had never heard before, all these places I had never been. This was before I understood that my father had disappeared in California, that he’d probably never made it this far east. The thing I remembered most from those days was the shape of the map. I thought Florida looked like an upside-down L.

* * *

My mother and I were awoken by a call in the middle of the night. The phone was in the kitchen, but its ring was as shrill as an alarm. I found her facing the fire escape, wearing a sleeveless cotton nightgown. The phone was pressed against her ear. She was nodding and pulling at the cord. I touched her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to know I was there.

“Get dressed,” she said after hanging up. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”

“To go where?” It was three in the morning.

My mother went into her room without answering. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and gathered my hair into an elastic. I forgot to put on socks before lacing my sneakers. Late last night I’d collected Merlin from the dressing room and now he was asleep on my bed. I found the leash I’d made from red silk ribbon and looped it around his neck.

In my mother’s old Camaro, we drove north on Ocean Drive. The sky was dark and starless. The streetlights glowed phosphorescent white. We were heading toward Dania Beach, toward Fort Lauderdale. She rolled down the windows. Normally she listened to Donna Summer in the car, but this time the radio was silent. Merlin stood on his hind legs and sniffed the warm air.

“Will you fucking look at that?” She swerved a little when she saw him doing what we’d tried to get him to do for hours in the apartment. She hadn’t taken off her makeup; mascara was smudged under her eyes and there was a halo of red around her lips. She was still wearing her black pants and white tuxedo shirt.

“Where are you taking us?”

“To the police,” she said, which made me afraid to ask more questions. Had Bill reported me? Had Ricky? I slumped down in my seat and watched the buildings pass.

At the Hollywood police station, we trailed my mother through the glass doors. She asked for a Detective Swan. The station was quiet and bright and deliciously cool. Down the hall, a man was sitting on a bench, his hands cuffed behind his back.

Detective Swan was a woman, tall and broad-shouldered. Her blond hair was wrapped into a bun and stuck through with a pen. She wore a black pantsuit with a blue T-shirt underneath. She looked surprisingly alert for the hour.

“Is that a rabbit?” She pointed at Merlin.

“Does it look like a rabbit?” I held him in my arms, the leash wrapped around my hand.

My mother flicked my shoulder, her way of telling me to not be such a smart-ass.

Detective Swan led us deeper into the station. We passed the handcuffed man, who appeared to be asleep. At her desk, she pulled over two chairs and we all sat down, my mother and I side by side, the detective across from us.

“Is this your daughter?”

I felt her looking me and Merlin over. I wondered what she was seeing.

My mother nodded. “This is Crystal.”

I was more certain than ever that someone had reported me, that I had overestimated the silencing power of shame. Detective Swan handed my mother a manila file folder. She opened it and stared at the contents for a while. She blinked a few times, like she had something in her eye. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“That’s him.” She gave the folder back to Detective Swan.

“Him who?” I said.

Detective Swan asked if my mother would be willing to identify the body.

“Mom,” I said, louder than I meant to. Merlin flinched in my lap. “What body?”

My mother and Detective Swan both stared at me.

“Do you want Crystal to come?” the detective asked. “We can’t have a rabbit back there.”

My mother leaned over and tucked my hair behind my ear. It was a tender gesture, but her eyes were not kind. “Stay here and watch that terrible rabbit. I’ll be right back.”

I stood when they stood. I wanted to tell them that I was old enough to make decisions for myself, but instead I just watched as they walked down the hall.

Detective Swan had left the folder on her desk. It contained a thin stack of paper and two photos: a mug shot of a man and another from the morgue. I had never seen a dead body before, not even a picture of one. His skin looked blue and rubbery. I balanced the open file on my knees and kept reading. Merlin nibbled the edge of the folder.

Knowledge is a curious thing. People talk about realizations coming in jolts and flashes, but this was more like a gradual creeping. I imagined a water stain on a ceiling, the way it darkens and swells before it starts spreading. The man’s face — the angular jaw, the sleek dark hair, the flared nose — was familiar because it was the face my mother had been describing for years. The face she claimed to have seen for the first time at magic school, in a conjuring class. She even drew it for me once, on a magic chalkboard that disappeared its drawings as soon as they were complete. Also: he had the same arch in the eyebrow, the same dimple in the cheek, that I saw in the mirror every morning and night.

Here was what I made of the evidence: there had been no magic school. No cockatoo or hypnosis. My father had never been anyone’s protégé, had never been the Great Heraldo. He had not disappeared from a water-filled aquarium. His name was Derrick Gibson and he lived in North Miami Beach and he had been shot outside a Chinese takeout at midnight.

* * *

In the car, I tried to get my mother to answer my questions. Was the dead man really my father? Had he always lived in Florida? Had they ever even set foot inside a magic school? She held the steering wheel with both hands. The heat had turned the mascara into little black puddles under her eyes.

“We did meet in California,” she said as we turned back onto Ocean Drive. “Once we took a tour of a magic school in Hollywood. They had a theater filled with beautiful chandeliers and red silk draperies. I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.”

“How did you get into magic if you didn’t go to the school?” It was close to dawn. The sky was pale with light.

“I took a free class once,” she said. “At a community center.” She had been trained by a woman who made a living doing tricks with cards and dollar bills at children’s birthday parties.

My eyes were watering. Merlin felt heavy on my lap. I was breathing, but not holding on to any air. “Why did you tell so many lies?”

For that, she had no answer.

She pulled over onto the side of the road and got out of the car. She left her door open and the engine running. I followed. Merlin stayed in the passenger seat. A part of me couldn’t help but admire the way he’d rejected our life choices, the way he had taken one look at us and known he didn’t want to be part of this act, of this family.

“Your father came to a show once.” She rolled up the sleeves of her tuxedo shirt. “About a year ago.” She’d glimpsed him in the back of the theater, but by the time she looked up from her next trick, he was gone. I wondered why I hadn’t known he was there, hadn’t felt something inside me shift. Why he had seen me onstage and decided not to stay.

“Why did you bother telling me any of this?” In the distance, I could hear waves coming and going. “Why didn’t you just keep lying?”

My mother said soon I would be eighteen, no longer a child, and she could see me daydreaming about magic and Hollywood.

“People have to be realistic about their options, Crystal.”

I asked if she was being realistic about her options when she decided to be a professional magician, the most impractical fucking job anyone had ever heard of? Or when she bought the five-hundred-dollar guillotine or the rabbit? Or when she didn’t like the way her life had turned out and decided to just make up a new one?

My mother told me it was time to go home.

“It won’t be our home for long,” I said.

She rattled the keys in her hand, then went back to the car.

At the apartment, she locked herself in the bathroom. I sat on my bed and tried to explain to Merlin what had happened. The more I told him, the angrier I became. Angry at her for wanting me to know the truth, but not telling me herself. Instead she had left the evidence in plain view, knowing I would put it all together. Angry at her for building us a life, a history, out of smoke and air. And angry at myself, because wasn’t I too old to believe in stories?

When I left the theater, it was six in the morning. I stepped around broken glass on the sidewalk and a woman sleeping on a bench in an overcoat, even though it was already ninety degrees. As I walked, I looked for Bill and imagined all the men I had ever robbed filling the dinner theater like ghosts.

At Coco Cabana, I did not have my briefcase. I was just hoping for some luck. Mr. Phillips wasn’t at the counter. I went to the back and wedged three mini-bottles under the waistband of my jeans. I should have stopped there, but then two little whiskeys went into my front pocket. Two more in my bra. I couldn’t keep myself from plucking bottles off the shelves.

I felt hands on my back, right as I was reaching for a miniature gin. I turned and found Phillips Jr. squeezing my shoulders. He wore pressed khakis and a white polo. He smelled of cheap cologne. His hair was combed in a center part. I tipped my head back and smiled.

“Don’t even try it,” he said. “My father has no business sense. And he thinks you’re cute, with that briefcase. That’s the only reason he’s let you get away with this for so long.” He let go of my shoulders. He stepped back and stared at the bulges in my jeans and under my shirt. “But even he would think this is ridiculous.”

Phillips Jr. took me behind the counter and told me to stay put. He dialed a number on his cell phone. Maybe the handcuffed man would still be at the police station and together we could wait for my mother to come. Maybe she would take me in her arms and apologize for all the lies. Or maybe she would decide I was just like my father and, in the years to come, tell people stories about her daughter, Crystal, who disappeared into thin air one night, in the middle of a show.

After he hung up, Phillips Jr. brought me coffee in a foam cup. For a moment, I thought he might be softening his position, but it was clear from the way he stood by the door, phone still in hand, that he thought it was time for me to learn about consequences.

“You don’t have any doughnuts, do you?” Suddenly I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. “Like a bear claw?”

“What kind of question is that?” He shook his head. Wing-shaped sweat marks darkened the back of his polo. “This isn’t a Seven-Eleven.”

A small fan stood on the counter. I leaned into the breeze. Once, I took a poetry class in school and even though I hadn’t been very good at writing poems, some of my similes came rushing back: time is like a house on fire; time is like water draining from a tub. I heard faraway sirens and started to worry about Merlin. If I went to jail, who would take care of him?

The door jingled, but it wasn’t a police officer: it was Bill, slouching and bleary-eyed. He was wearing the same clothes from the last time I saw him. His hair clung to his scalp. His ring was gone. My father could have been a man like this, I kept thinking.

“Well,” he said, sauntering over to the counter. “Look who it is.”

“Do you know her?” Phillips Jr. asked.

He rocked back on his heels. “I’m sorry to say that I do.”

“We’re waiting on the police and she just asked for a snack. Can you believe it?”

“Nothing would surprise me.” Bill picked up a six-pack and paid in cash. He asked Phillips Jr. if he could hang around for a while. He said what was about to happen would be too good to miss.

“What’s your real name?” I asked Bill, who of course didn’t know that all this time I’d been thinking of him as Bill. “Why did you carry around a picture of that tree?”

“It looked alive,” he said.

“Of course it’s alive,” I said. “But why else?”

“Crystal,” he said, popping open a beer. “What are you doing with your life?”

Here was another story my mother told me: once, my father hypnotized her and walked her up to the top of their apartment building in Toluca Lake. When he brought her out, she was standing on the edge of the roof. She blinked, cupped a hand over her eyes. She saw Hollywood in the distance, the sidewalk below. She felt an unfamiliar breeze, the sensation of her stomach dropping. What am I doing here? she asked, stepping back toward safety. Don’t worry, he said. I wouldn’t have let you fall. For years, I had believed the story demonstrated the power of his magic.

In the 1800s, Robert-Houdin dazzled all of Paris by casting a spell over his son that made him float. William Lance Burton conjured doves from his sleeves that perched on the shoulders of audiences. If David Copperfield could vanish the Statue of Liberty, couldn’t I make just one of these bottles disappear?

“Listen.” I took a whiskey out of my front pocket and placed it on the counter. “If I can make this disappear right now, before your very eyes, will you let me go?”

Phillips Jr. laughed. He looked at Bill, who raised his beer and shrugged.

“It’s a deal,” he said.

I closed my eyes. My feet were sweating. I curled my toes inside my sneakers. With my hands I made a circle around the bottle and tried to feel the workings of every nerve, every cell, every membrane. I tried to bring that energy upward, into my mind, where I was willing the bottle to disappear. Oh, how wonderful it would be to look at Bill, at Phillips Jr., and say: See what I can do.

I kept my breathing deep and slow. My fingertips burned. My hands were shaking. I had never concentrated so hard before. I heard voices ask if I was okay, and I felt myself whisper, My father is not a magician; my father is dead. All of it sounded very far away. I saw Merlin sitting on the theater stage, his nose twitching. I saw my mother aiming her wand at him and saying Shazam! I saw my father in an aquarium, his hands pressed against the glass, feeling weightless and free. I saw the bottle dematerializing with a faint hiss and a puff of smoke. I saw myself vibrate and glow before all my particles scattered like pollen in the air.