The next morning, I woke up from another dream and tried to anchor myself to real life. I hummed. I ran my hands over the stitching in my quilt. I looked at the photos on my corkboard and old festival posters on the walls, but it all felt like someone else’s room.
Parrots in the cherry tree outside my window squawked when I pulled my curtain back. Maybe they weren’t upset. Maybe conversations are hard to have with a beak. I slowly opened the window. It didn’t make any noise that I could hear, but the parrots quieted all at once. They shifted on branches, little green and red and yellow heads tilted toward me, dark eyes blinking.
“Hello…” A few hopped from foot to foot. “Hello…hello…hello,” I said over and over, low and slow. I paused for a few seconds each time in case any of them wanted to say it back. I held my breath and waited for one to try. Maybe I could leave little treats on the windowsill like Mom does for the crows. They could have grapes or apple slices when the cherries are gone.
I could get to know them, maybe name them. People in town would get used to hearing parrots talking to each other up in the trees. I leaned out the window. “Hello,” I said again. They looked away, and on an invisible cue, the flock took off together and shook the leaves. The wind from their wings brushed my face as they launched up into a sky as blue as anything could ever hope to be. They turned into specks like sky dust, microscopic birds headed toward the springs, farther and farther away.
Downstairs, Dad stared out the kitchen window. He didn’t know I was there until I opened the cupboard for a cereal bowl. He’d been working on a building that was behind schedule and I had barely seen him for three days. He made oatmeal and asked how it went with Musky. I didn’t tell him about Mr. Mustard at Herb’s. He didn’t need anything else to worry about. I told him about Huxley, but he’d already seen Musky’s ring. He just laughed about the wishes.
“What do you think about Manxadon getting a bubble helmet to go underwater?”
“For what?”
“To help Marvelo fight the Moneywort warriors in the Undercity,” he said without even cracking a smile.
I jumped when he slammed the cupboard I’d left open.
“Relax, mijo.” He squeezed my shoulder.
“There’s a city in the lake now?” He took a conversation about a bear with wish juju and made it even weirder.
“I want to introduce it now, and it can be more of a feature in the second volume.”
“Right. Do you want to make a wish?” I asked. “Maybe for your project to get done?”
“Ha, maybe later. What about you, Newt? Did you make a wish?”
“I didn’t. Not yet,” I said. He filled his favorite to-go cup with black coffee. “It’s strange, though, right? That people would think it could be magic or something?” I wanted someone to say it was absurd, because it felt possible, and that wasn’t right. “What would you wish for, Dad?” Maybe he would say to quit his job.
“What do I need wishes for?” he said. “I’ve got everything I want right here.”
I smiled back at him. “You don’t believe wishing works?”
He looked thoughtful as he drank his coffee.
“Wishing doesn’t hurt. But I like to focus on what’s here and now.” He followed my eyes to the Marvelo comic on the fridge. “Usually.”
“What about birthday candles? What do you think about, if you’re not wishing?”
“Cake.” He handed me my lunch. “I’ll drop you off at school on my way to work.”
I went to the library and worked on the brochure homework. I watched videos and read a dozen articles about water bears. They’ve been found in the Himalayas and the desert. Some had been dried up for eight years, and they still come back to life. Scientists just found a new species in a puddle in Japan. Murphy Island is so soggy, it’s probably a water bear metropolis. I wrote a rough paragraph before the bell rang.
Rocket’s friend Dylan sat with Ethan and me at lunch. He said his sister says they have tacos and pizza in the cafeteria at Lincoln Bay. On Murphy, everybody packs a lunch.
“That sounds amazing,” I said.
“Everyone knows school cafeteria food isn’t that good,” Ethan said. “We’re lucky we don’t have to eat it.” He packed up his sandwich and left. I watched him walk around the rim of the pool, scowling at us the whole way.
I didn’t get to talk to him again until after school.
“Listen.” I sighed. “Somebody made another wish on the bear. And it came true.”
He nodded. “Let’s wait until we can talk somewhere more private,” he said, even though nobody was around. “Low tide is minus three in an hour. You up for a walk to the beach?”
I hadn’t walked that far since my leg got chewed, but I could handle it. Ethan went ahead of me, not even slowing down the whole way. But he looked calmer once we got there.
The water pulled the sand, and the sand pulled our feet. I rolled up my pants and waded in to cool the ache in my knee. Ethan watched, but concerned, not staring.
“I don’t see your imaginary girlfriend,” he said. My cheeks got hot, but I didn’t take his bait.
“Musky wished on the bear to find his wedding ring. He found it right afterward.”
“What?” Ethan moved sugar kelp off an old brick and turned it over with a stick. “So that’s three. Me, Lyric, and now Musky.”
“Four. Carlos wished for a raise, and then he got one.” I snagged a sandwich bag that was drifting toward an orange jellyfish. I put it in my pocket to throw out later.
“Admit it,” said Ethan. “There’s something awesome happening!”
“Something funny is going on.” My feet slurped. I tried not to let on how hard it was to balance in the incoming tide.
“No kidding! You have to make a wish. What do you want? A new knee?” Ethan scooped up a handful of sand.
“A new life,” I said. No magic could change the past, but if I was somewhere new, like at my grandma’s, everything could be different.
“What?” Ethan dropped the maybe-golden sand, and I held my breath. If I didn’t tell him now and he found out from someone else, he’d hate me forever.
“Don’t get mad. I’ve been thinking I could wish to leave. Not just to go to Lincoln Bay but to move off of Murphy. At least for the summer. But if I liked it, I could maybe stay in Lincoln, since my grandma’s house isn’t too far. I would still come back and visit. And you could come see me in Lincoln.”
His face twisted up, and I had to turn away. I picked sand off my hands like I was thinking about it. “I’m sorry, but nothing has felt right since last summer. Something needs to change. But I’ll miss you a lot.” My throat burned. Ethan’s best friend before me moved away.
Ethan smiled at me, but it didn’t spread around his face. The parrots screeched somewhere over the bluff.
“Just figure out if that’s what you really want, because you only get one chance,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t want to tell you until you believed.” Ethan threw another handful of sand into the surf and cleared his throat. “The bear only gives one wish per person. I tried another one. I enunciated, just in case I mumbled for the hedgehog wish.” He turned over a piece of driftwood. I squinted out at the waves. Little pieces of broken day floated away.
“What did you wish for?” I thought I already knew, but I asked anyway.
“I thought I could wish to have my dad back. Or to miss him less. I don’t know how strong the bear magic is. And I worried that it would be another half wish and I’d make it worse somehow. But I wished anyway.” Tiny waves reflected in his shiny eyes. I could barely hear, but I think he said, “I had to.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t work. Nothing changed.” He bit his lip. “I wasted my chance before we knew for sure. What if my dad knew I could change things, to get him back, and I wished for a hedgehog?” He squatted down and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“I think he’d like Boxwood,” I said, but he shook his head. It hurt to look at him. Sometimes sadness comes out of someone like breath, even when they don’t talk. Especially when they don’t talk at all.
“I’m sorry, Ethan. It must be awful to miss him so much.” He already had more missing than most kids should have to deal with, and now I was going to make it worse.
“Some days it’s fine. Other days I feel guilty that it’s fine. And other days…” He tucked his chin down and sniffed. I waited for him to say more, but he stood up and wiped his hands over his face. “That leaves two possibilities.” He held out two fingers. “The bear is selective in which wishes he grants—”
“Like there’s no way he could bring your dad back. He probably can’t change something that already happened.”
“Exactly, and he couldn’t stop what happened to you last year. The other possibility is that I only got one wish, and I used it on Boxwood. So maybe think about it real hard before you wish to get away from here.”
“All right.” I nodded. I could wish for a bike instead of the truck, or for my leg not to hurt, or to never have another dream about it again, but none of that felt like enough. The tiniest hope that I could change everything made me feel like all the little pieces of warm light came off the water and washed over me. “So people should be careful what they wish for. Maybe we shouldn’t let people tell the bear their wishes.”
“Settle down, commander,” Ethan said. “You can’t stop people from making wishes. This isn’t a dystopian wasteland. Are we all going to start wearing gray jumpsuits and get divided into factions?” He combed through the sand.
“What have you been reading?” I laughed, but he kept frowning. “We shouldn’t tell them about the bear. About your theory about the bear.”
“The bear is out of the bag, man,” he said. “People are going to find out. Unless we put him back in the water, they’re going to keep wishing around him.” I wanted to keep Huxley just for me. Not because of any magic, but I liked talking to him. Ethan held up a sandy C shape, about the size of a plate.
“Do you know that moon snails protect their eggs by making casings like this out of sand and mucus? Sometimes people think they’re plastic litter and throw them away. They disintegrate, and thousands of moon snail babies are born.” Ethan laid the casing gently back onto the sand and headed down the beach. I didn’t follow. We left after he found a rusty lunch box and a rubber duck with Japanese writing on it. He wanted to look up the writing online. I wanted to go home.
The next morning I put dishes away while Mom made soap. I used to help her. I liked smelling the vanilla and lemon mint she adds. And I liked to pop the soap out of the molds. I don’t volunteer now, and she doesn’t ask. She’s around more, but we’re together less. She still wore her vest from work.
“Mom, what would you wish for?” I asked. She mixed milk and lye and oils together until it all looked like cake batter. Enough time passed that I thought she wouldn’t answer.
She stirred the mixture. “What do you mean?”
“If you had a wish, what would you use it on?” I watered the sad little avocado pit on the windowsill. Mom plants them, but it’s always the same: the pit grows a stick with a couple of long leaves before it notices that it’s not warm here and dies. Maybe she would wish for an avocado tree. Or for all of us to go to Mexico. Or New York, where she could ride the subway like she did in college. She told me about the turnstiles, the crowds moving together lower and lower under the city, the whoosh of air as trains rattled by. She could be reminded of how everyone leaned together as the train rocked through dark tunnels, barreling toward a hundred different adventures. She loved it.
Mom peeled her glove back and scratched the faded D.S. tattoo on the base of her thumb. I asked her what it was when I was younger, and she said it stood for “cautionary tale.” She likes mysteries.
“Don’t we always have wishes?” She held out her hand for a clean spoon.
“Well, sure. But what would you wish for if it was a real wish? If you knew it would come true?” I said, and passed her the spoon.
“Maybe you shouldn’t wish for anything unless you want it to come true,” she said.
She poured the soap into little round molds. A new goat milagro hung with the others on the purple ribbon, probably for Margie’s cold. Mom had a new flaming heart too.
Leti came in with a pencil and a notebook “Did the mail come yet?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you spell indubitably?” she asked.
“What are you working on, Let?” I told her how to spell it. I think.
“I’ve got a new pen pal in Texas!” She hugged the notebook to her chest. “Some of them don’t write back that often, so it’s okay.” She went back to the dining room table. Sometimes she adds drawings or stickers to the letters.
“Why would you have only one wish?” Mom asked.
“That’s the rule. You have to use it on something important. Something that would make your life better.” I took a deep breath and said it. “Ethan thinks the wooden bear I found on the beach grants wishes.”
I stayed quiet while she stamped shapes into the line of soaps down the counter. Feathers and milagros and little coils of wire imprinted on each circle of soap. She’d give them to neighbors, and we’d get salmon, fruit, maybe an oil change or some hand-me-down clothes.
“One wish. Well, in that case, I would wish to fly.” She took off the gloves and held her arms out like wings and flew out of the kitchen.
I finished the dishes. Mom’s sewing machine rattled and hummed in the basement. I guess she expected me to put everything away and wipe up the soap spills. I started to, but I left the mess behind.
My grandma sent a card with a cartoon of a horse eating grass that said, “Just a little hay.” She wrote about having lunch with my tías and planting beans and corn in the garden. She also slipped in a coupon for an ice cream place in Lincoln, thinking we might like a treat next time we visited. I traced my finger over her careful cursive before sticking the card up on the refrigerator.