“That smells amazing,” I say to Bea, not ten minutes into her cooking. I sniff and sniff and sniff. The whole house is flooded with wonderful. “What is it?”

I hover over her, looking interested in what is in her pan, though cooking is not my thing. It’s a good distraction, because while I do want to tell her about my visit to see Anna a little while ago, I’m also not sure exactly how to go about it. She’s not going to like what I have to say. I don’t know her well enough yet to know what her good side is, or how to get on it, so easing in seems a fair tactic. 

“Fried onions,” she says, looking at me like I’m crazy not to know what fried onions smell like.

“Fried?” I ask, trying not to sound shocked. “Did you talk to Sally about that? We don’t do fried anything here. Like, ever.”

Bea huffs. “What she doesn’t know won’t kill her—and what she does know may well. To start, that step-mother of yours is thin as a rail. And to finish, I’ve seen what is in that refrigerator. Low-fat this and reduced calorie that. Chemicals, fake foods, and pesticide-ridden vegetables. It’s a wonder you’re all alive!”

The step-mother comment makes me cringe. I stopped having step-mothers after the first one. Now they are just Dad’s playmates. But I’m not going to say anything, because I know it would make me sound like a brat, and that’s the last thing Bea needs to think of me right from the start.

“All due respect, Bea, but Sally will know first thing tomorrow morning when she steps on the scale. It’s this huge digital monster that measures to the ounce. She won’t even drink a glass of water before weighing in. And if she has gained, it’s the cook who hears about it first.”

Bea stops stirring the onions long enough to look at me like that is even more ridiculous than the fake food.

What can I say? It’s true.

“Well then,” she finally says, “we will have to enlist the help of the onions, the butter, the iron in the pan and absolutely, the flame.”

Okay, not exactly what I expected. Not that I am ever going to know what to expect from Bea. She showed up this afternoon looking utterly professional, and nearly twenty years younger. I’m not kidding. It’s like she’s a young and lively sixty years old. Hair all neatly braided, too.

“Like, um, how?” I ask with a smile, watching her dance between stirring at the fry pan and putting away the bag of groceries she arrived with. She seems to already know the place as well as Mrs. Hamilton ever did.
 
“Well now, that would be the work of magic, wouldn’t it?” she retorts.

“Are you going to teach me?” I ask, feeling all tingly, all over.

“Well I’m surely not here to take care of Sally’s waist line. Now that I think of it, we could skip the cooking magic and just give her a bad case of the runs. With what she eats, she’s got to be used to them anyway. Probably takes those die-you-retics anyway. But that wouldn’t be so nice of us, now would it?”

I laugh, because it’s hard to chose which form of magic I’d rather learn. “Not really,” I say. 

Fortunately, Bea laughs with me. Giggles, really, like it’s a fun but naughty thought. You really can’t know what to expect out of this woman.

“So, we’ll ask for help. First things first. You’ve got to get the elements on your side. The earth, that’s the mother of the onion, and the essence of the onion itself. The animal kingdom, for the cow that produced the butter. I brought the good stuff—offered by cattle that have the free range of the farm and no hormones to make them uncomfortably productive. If you don’t have that kind of goodness to start, it’s a long road to getting the magic to see things your way. We have to do our part. Never forget that.”

I nod, amazed at the things she talks about that I’ve never even thought of.  The earth as the mother of the onion? Magic wanting us to do our part? As for the cow, do hormones really make you uncomfortable? I guess they could, what with all the blame they get for causing every feminine bad mood in the house.

“The iron in the pan will be of enormous help,” Bea goes on, “because it’s such a basic element. Makes your blood strong. Just the iron alone could do the trick, but why leave anything out? You’re asking for trouble in the form of jealousy, and then you have to do even more magic to smooth that over.”

“Right,” I say, though I don’t really get it. An onion jealous of iron?

“Finally, we must enlist the support of the flame, for it is the flame within that burns the calories!” To emphasize her point, she cranks all six gas burners on the stove. “Up, up, up she goes in flames of skinny glory!”

I really and truly hope no one comes in and sees this, not only because it is really strange, but because it is amazingly beautiful and I don’t want it to stop. Bea’s got her hands over the flames like Michael put his over the spoon, and they are leaping to her touch—without adjusting the dials. It makes my stomach churn with both excitement and fear. She could burn down the house.

Bea seems to be nearly purring into the flames, tossing the onions like the gourmet chef she’s supposed to be over each and every one of the six burners. It’s almost like a dance. I don’t know where the magic comes from, but it’s here, for sure. You can feel it.

After just a few moments, Bea is done. She comes back down from her tippy toes onto sure footing, turns down the burners, and gets on with the cooking like nothing has ever happened.

“So now Sally won’t gain weight?” I ask.

“Not an once. Might even lose.”

“And will you have to do that every time? I mean, with every meal?”

Bea looks at me, once again, like I can’t possibly be that dense. “Do you think we have the time for that? Or the energy? No, that’ll cover my full stay. Anything I cook here will be under the magical caloric assistance program. Think of it as an umbrella policy—covers everything. Even ice cream.”

“Oh,” I say, disappointed. Not that you can eat ice cream without weight gain. It’s just that I don’t know how I am going to learn that kind of magic if we only do things once.

“Don’t be so let down,” she says, no doubt reading my expression. “There’s a thousand chances for magic a day, especially in the kitchen. That was just a one-size-fits-all need we had. Now we can get on to more important things. Have you ever spoken to an egg?”

“I don’t think so,” I admit, trying not to laugh.

“Well, that’s your first mistake then, Miss Mayden. Because the egg is the whole of it. You’ve heard folks say it’s a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Yes,” I say.

“And there’s no answer, now is there?” She turns to me with a wooden spoon, waving it in the air like it’s a do or die question.

“Not really.”

“Indeed! Because the eggs the beginning of it, and the continuation of it, and the end of it. So you’ll be wanting the blessing of the egg, I promise you.  You know, in the ancient times, having egg on your face was a good thing. Like most things—Friday The Thirteenth, Halloween–they twisted it all around.”

“You’re going to put egg on Sally’s face?” I relish the thought!

“It is a wonderful face cleanser,” Bea says with a totally straight face, “especially with oatmeal and a little lemon. But that’s for another day. Tonight, it’s a caramelized onion and shitake mushroom frittata with a Burgundy glaze. That’ll start things off right, now won’t it?”

“It sounds great,” I say, not at all sure what it will taste like but going with it because, what are we going to do, start over?

She looks at me square on, as if assessing just how far I have to go. “Alright,” she says, “out with it. What’s hammering at the back of your mind? Something about Anna.”

Oh, that. I guess my meeting with Anna still is hammering away at me.

“You are sort of in touch with her, right?” I ask, wanting to get my feet wet before taking the full plunge.

“You might say,” she acknowledges, turning to get on with her work. Maybe it’s something she doesn’t really want to know.

I move to get in front of her so she can read my lips.

“You don’t need to do that,” she says, turning away again.

“But I thought you couldn’t hear, only read lips?”

“I hear you, just not with my ears. Some people are hard to hear, but you’re one of us. You get in. So you get through.”

I can’t speak. Her words have utterly blown me away. It’s not the magic of her hearing. It’s being one of them. It’s getting in. I feel my whole body buzzing and the hair on my arms are standing straight on end.

Does she know what she just said? Could she possibly know what it means to me? To have a real heart family? To belong to a magical world? Could you ever hope for such a thing, let alone imagine it happening in the summer of your sixteenth year?

“What do you want to say about Anna?” Bea says gently, like she knows what her words just did to me.

“Um… Um…” I stammer.  But I have to find my voice. Anna is no longer just a nice old lady in trouble. Now she’s my nice old lady. I take a deep breath and go for it. “She wasn’t well today. They didn’t have her out of bed and nothing I did worked to get her to even blink at me. I think they have her drugged up really bad.”

“I know,” Bea says sadly. “We agreed she had to be taken even further down, so as not to raise suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?” I ask, shocked to hear Bea not only knows of Anna’s demise, she is in on it.

Bea speaks slowly, cautiously. “That we are now connected to Michael. Helene would know. We had to create a weakness to balance the strength of the connection he brought with him. Anna is in full agreement.”

“But how can you let her live like that?” I blurt out. “It’s not fair!”

“No, Mayden, it’s not. But it has to be this way. Helene could destroy any chance we have of the magic surviving to live another generation, let alone throughout time. She’s more than proven what she’s willing to do to be sure the family progresses her way, or no way at all. Michael’s awakening to his gifts, and contacting us, means that the magic is on the move. But you must keep in mind that magic has a mind of it’s own. We respect that, but we are wise to also protect ourselves.”

“From what?” I struggle to understand.

“The spirit of magic is a powerful force, and it does not see or understand the smaller needs of an individual family—even if it is the last family standing. It will blow over us and kill everything in it’s wake, if we are not smart.”

“How do we protect ourselves?” I ask.

“For now, so long as I am here in this house, Michael must stay at the distance provided—from me and especially from Anna—and you must be my connection to my great-grandson. Everyone will lay low so that I can teach you. Even Jake is on notice not to practice at all, and you can be sure he’s not pleased about that.”

“I bet not,” I muse.

She turns to look at me directly with about the kindest eyes I can imagine anyone ever having looked at me with. “Collectively, we are a danger. Separate, we can keep the overwhelming power of the magic, and just as importantly the opposing forces of Helene, at bay.”

“So you’ll teach me, and then it’s okay if I teach Michael?”

“I’ll teach you. And whatever you do with Michael will be your business and no one else’s. If you catch my meaning.”

I do. She can’t break her promise, but once-removed, there’s a loophole.

“But what if I do it wrong? What if…”

“Trust yourself, Julie Mayden,” Bea interrupts. “You were not placed on this strong a path because you are a novice. There is far more to you and your own magic than you know yet. We trust the wisdom you carry. We trust you.”

Again I am speechless. My body feels stunned, delightedly frozen in place. It’s a big thing, to be trusted. I don’t think I ever really have been. Ignored? Yes. Assumed doing okay? Sure. But really trusted?

No. Not until now.