The Line Between

and clumped over to her. He said, «Ma'am, I think this is yours?» Adults always commented on Marvyn's excellent manners.

The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.

All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn't returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish — Angie learned a few words she couldn't wait to use — and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, «What happened?»

Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn't eaten in days —which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, «What's molcriado mean?»

«What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up — troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn't call you. Why?»

«Well, that's what that lady called … him. The baby.»

«Right," Angie said. «Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?»

«Uh–huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.» Marvyn's voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. «Angie, he's so old.»

Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, «I couldn't follow you, Angie. I was scared.»

«Forget it," she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. «If you just hadn't had to show off, if you'd gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way — " Her entire chest froze solid at the word. «The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!» She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. «Did you forget? You forgot, didn't you?» She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. «Oh, God, after all that!»

But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. «Calm down, be cool — I've got it here.» He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis — more than a little grimy by now — out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. «There. Don't say I never did nuttin' for you.» It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show,

and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. «Take it, open it up," he said now. «Make sure it's the right one.»

«I don't need to," Angie protested irritably. «It's my letter — believe me, I know it when I see it.» But she opened the envelope anyway and with–drew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at … then stared at, in absolute disbelief.

She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.

«Well, you did your job all right," she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack–jawed brother. «No question about that. I'm just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hooha for a blank sheet of paper.»

Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.

«I didn't do it, Angie! I swear!» Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. «I just grabbed it out of your backpack — I never even looked at it.»

«And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn't matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.»

Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, «You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn't. That's what happened.»

«Oh, right," she said. «Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn't matter.»

«It matters.» She had grown so unused to seeing a two–eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, «You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.»

This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, «I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets — okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What's he care about that? But he knew you'd come after me, so he held me there — back there in Thursday — until he could grab you. Only he didn't figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that's how it happened, Angie! That's how I know you're the real witch.»