The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (popular romance novels .txt) 📕

turn around, expecting Toby’s stepmother to return to the stove.

“I think it took her a few days to notice I’d gone. She’d stopped whatever she was doing in here to bang out some Beethoven. At the crescendo, I ran away.”

“To join the circus?”

“Pretty much.”

I try to picture the house filled with music. I want to imagine Beethoven pouring from the music studio, disrupting the unnatural silence. Toby senses my discomfort. “It was always like this. Music or silence. The silence was unbreakable.”

We leave the kitchen. The living room has a conversation pit in front of a small fireplace. Framed photographs on the mantel show a small woman with her arm around the shoulders of several different children—none of them Toby. The living room has a subtle musical theme—a lamp made out of a clarinet, cocktail napkins with bass clefs, brass paperweights in the shape of trumpets. There is nothing to suggest the presence of a teenage boy. There is only music and its absence.

Toby is still looking at the mantel. “Pia kept exactly one photo of her husband after he died. And one of me.”

“Playing the piano?”

“I was terrible.”

At the back of the living room, near the sliding glass doors that lead to the yard, there’s a well-polished dining table. “Holidays only,” Toby says, pointing at the table. “And recitals.”

We pass the table and enter a small room at the far end of the house.

I clap my hands. The sudden noise startles me. “Your room.”

“You’re the first girl I’ve brought home.”

“Ever?”

“Absolutely,” Toby says with a wink. “And my parents are away.”

As I knew it would be, Toby’s room is unlike the rest of the house. There are several books on a table next to the bed. One is a child’s edition of Gray’s Anatomy. The shelves that line the walls are cluttered with objects—from someone else’s family photograph to a small antique hand mirror. I pick up the mirror.

“The collection of a young magician?” I ask.

“All of it,” Toby says, gesturing toward the shelves. He picks up a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. He opens the largest doll and finds the smaller one inside, then a smaller doll inside that, until he comes to a doll so small, it doesn’t open. He replaces all the dolls in order, then reopens the outermost one, only to find that it is empty. “Pia loved these. There’s a set in every room. I don’t think she knew what she was getting into when she gave them to me.” He places the nested dolls on the shelf and lifts the top half of the outermost one again. The smaller dolls hop out of the big one like an orderly army. “I spent hours with these. It made my stepmother nuts when she’d open one to find it filled with pennies or soap bubbles.”

“I always wondered whether there’s something hidden in the smallest one,” I say.

“There might be.”

Among the knickknacks are two identical blocks. Toby and I notice them at the same time—though, of course, he must have known they were there.

“My blocks.” The magician gathers them into his hand. Then he flops back onto the single bed and beckons me to join him.

“And now I have a girl in my bed,” he says. I can’t see Toby’s face, but I know he’s smiling.

I close my eyes and feel Toby’s hands start to move through the air. There’s a comfortable rhythm to his movements, like a pianist playing a favorite piece in the dark. With his shoulder, Toby gently nudges my chin. I look up and see his blocks floating over the bed. With one arm wrapped around my shoulder, he reaches into the air. His fingers fan wide as he conducts the blocks. They orbit each other. They inscribe invisible spirals and loop into figures of eight. Then he snaps his fingers. One of the blocks disappears. The other still floats. The hand around my shoulder wiggles, and I feel the pressure of smooth wood.

Toby tosses this block into the air, and together the small wooden cubes resume their dance. Sometimes the blocks become one. Sometimes they multiply. Sometimes they disappear and then reappear between my feet, beneath the small of my back. I want the trick to go on forever.

When it seems the blocks have gone for good, Toby lets his hand fall to his side then reaches over, pulling me on top of him. Next he covers my mouth with a kiss that fills the emptiness of the Dissolving World. The kiss breathes life into the silent objects staring at us from the shelves. And in this timeless world, this kiss lasts so long, I fall asleep, perhaps for hours. When I wake, the blocks are back on the shelf. It is quiet again.

Toby stands up and pulls me to him. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To your house.”

“Ten miles?”

“Distances can be as close or as far as you wish,” Toby replies.

“How will you know which one is my house?” I ask as we step outside. The winter trees are swaying silently in the silent wind.

“You will tell me.”

How can you describe a visit to a place that exists in someone else’s imagination? Once we leave Toby’s part of the river and head downstream, details become fuzzy or misaligned—the rapids are out of place, a bridge is too far north. But others are perfect, like the boat houses I’d always admired when I was young. We are walking out of the magician’s memory and into his imagination.

“Tell me about your house,” Toby reminds me.

I begin by describing the porch that overlooked the river. I tell Toby about the leaky roof, the unsealed basement, and the sunken picnic table. I describe the rusted iron gate that led to the small path down to the riverbank. I tell him how my bedroom was next to Max’s. There was a drainpipe between them. That was how Max escaped at night to swim with whales or whatever else he did. In the middle of my story, I turn to Toby.