On her seventh birthday, as a gift, her father had let her read a spell that gave her the ability to float down from moderate heights, and she’d spent the entire hour of the spell’s duration on those swings, pumping as high as she could and then leaping off and drifting to the ground as light as a blown dandelion. Cecily and Abe had watched from the porch, eating Joanna’s birthday cake and laughing, and ten year-old Esther had swung beside her the whole time and cheered her on. If she’d been jealous, she hadn’t shown it.
Usually their parents were careful to only give their daughters magic that Esther could enjoy, too, magic of the environment or of physical objects: the floating spell had been an anomaly. Perhaps in compensation, the girls had woken just days later in their shared room to find their mother sitting in the chair by Esther’s bed, and their father cross-legged on the rag rug at her feet with a blue cloth-bound book in his hands.
Joanna had recognized the book immediately. It was the book that had brought her parents together, the book Cecily had sold to Abe at an antiquarian expo in Boston a year or so after he and Esther had moved from Mexico to Vermont. It was an oft-repeated story in their family: how Abe’s attention had been caught as much by the pretty Belgian woman manning a booth of used books as by the little blue book she’d priced at only seven dollars, not knowing how its magic hummed in Abe’s head; and how, though Cecily had been drawn to the way Abe’s bushy-eyebrowed intensity contrasted with his easy, roaring laughter, she’d been just as interested by the two year-old child on his hip, who laughed every time he laughed, throwing back her small head of dark curls in imitation of grown-up good humor.
“I fell in love with you first,” Cecily always said to Esther. “Your father was a bonus.”
That morning after Joanna’s seventh birthday, when Joanna and Esther woke, Abe was already on the last page of the spell, the air ringing with his resonant voice as the girls sat up in their beds. They’d been told what the blue book did but had never seen it read, and Esther had let out a shriek of delight as the first vines began to twine up the walls, brilliant green and sprouting fat, quick-swelling buds that just as quickly burst into velvet-petaled flowers.
The blooms were as pink as sunset and as large as Joanna’s head and smelled so sweet they brought tears to her eyes. Cecily had leaned forward in her chair to loop her arms around Abe’s shoulders and Esther was standing on her bed, but Joanna stayed perfectly still, watching the vines and their enormous blossoms cover the ceiling and fill the room with their incredible scent — like caramelized roses and the sharp pith of an orange. Even after the petals had withered and fallen and the vines had shriveled up, the whole house smelled sweet for days afterwards.
