“Oh, Mom,” I say. I squeeze her hand.

“Yeah. I’m processing it all now, as you young folks say.”

“Well, I guess so,” I say. “You must have a lot of—”

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand this,” she says, interrupting me, “which is why I’m going to tell you now so if you ever come up against this in your own life, maybe you’ll handle it differently. I’ve realized that none of what I was feeling was about your father, not really. Sure, I felt neglected by him, and taken for granted, and ignored a lot of the time—but I now see that what was really happening was that I was the one taking the easy way out. I was being lazy with my own life. Not taking responsibility for my own happiness.”

“Please. Don’t even tell me that you’re going to say it’s your fault because you needed to try harder because he had lost interest in you.”

Her eyes search mine. “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Listen, because this is important. What I’m saying is that I expected him to provide all the excitement for me, all the praise, all the . . . attention. I didn’t think of myself as a person who had any right to any restless feelings, or unpleasant feelings, or longings—so I just kept pretending and acting like I was perfect and happy, while I was burying my real self. And at the same time expecting him to come and excavate me. But it wasn’t his job. Never was.”

“I’m not sure . . .”

“Marnie, unlike you, I haven’t ever done anything that’s really hard. You’ve gotten married and divorced, you’ve broken off an engagement, you’ve moved far away and started your own business, you’ve decided to believe in magic, you’ve made a million new friends. And I . . . I’ve never upended anything. I got married young, I bought a house, had kids, threw dinner parties, joined the PTA, got my hair done every week, baked cookies and dusted the lamps, and basically just let myself go along a road that I never even looked at. I aced the big things, don’t you see? I got myself a great husband and two daughters. He’s nice to me and he makes a good living, and so what if he got grumpy sometimes? I just accepted everything about my life. I didn’t ever do anything outside of what was expected. I didn’t have to think about my life. Don’t you see? Somehow I realized I never even ice-skated or kissed another man or went to the top of the Empire State Building or asked myself what wild and reckless thing I wanted to do with my life if I had the chance. I’ve never even lived alone, much less smoked dope or gotten really, really drunk, or bodysurfed in the ocean, or told anybody off or even disappointed anyone on purpose so I could suit myself.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“What? What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. It’s just so sad. That that’s what it comes down to.”

“Well, it’s less sad now. Because now I’ve done some of those things. And no matter what happens, I know I’m going to do more of them.” She sits back in the black plastic airport seat and folds her hands across her purse. She smiles. “I’m no longer this upright person I was so smug about being. I’ve had a little extramarital fling—and I would thank you to not look shocked, young lady, but I did—and even more than that, I smoked some dope and I went to a Broadway show, and I went up to the top of the Empire State Building.”

“Good lord, Mom.”

“I had me some good, good days,” she says. “I know you’re the expert matchmaker and all, but I want to tell you one thing. I can see that things are broken between you and Patrick right now”—she holds up her hand to stop me when I start to protest—“and, let me finish, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to put things right between you or not. I hope you are if that’s what you want, but whatever you do, I hope you’ll never do what I did and narrow your life down to fit his. Or let yourself be so dependent on his attention that you pretzel yourself around to fit his view of how life should be. There are so many ways to live life. It’s not only one way. We get ourselves thinking that we have to make something work because we’ve put so much time into it already . . . but you have free will. Remember that.”

“He doesn’t want to get back together, even if I asked him to,” I say. “When the school year is over, he’s told me he’s going to move out.”

She pats me on the hand. “I’ve seen what’s happening. He’s a wonderful man, Patrick is, but I know he’s not easy.” Her eyes search my face. “Do you want my advice?”

“Okay.”

“My advice is—don’t listen to anyone else’s advice.” She smiles. “No, really. I mean this. Trust yourself. No one knows whether you and Patrick can weather all this. This could be a trial you’re in right now that will lead you to something deeper. Maybe it’ll still work and maybe it won’t. Don’t think it’s necessarily over. Love can survive worse than this.”

“Not if one of the people doesn’t want it to,” I say.

“Well, that’s true,” she says. “But it sounded good, didn’t it? And you can’t give up on magic.” Then she smiles and reaches into her carry-on bag. “Just so you know, I brought along Blix’s spell book. Just in case you might need it.”

She hands me the old, worn-out volume that I’ve checked and rechecked so many times, the book with the vines and flowers on the front that I’ve always kept nearby. Inside, I know, it’s stuffed with handwritten pages that Blix wrote when she was thinking up spells for people. There’s also a page in there on which she wrote PATRICK AND MARNIE. PATRICK AND MARNIE. PATRICK AND MARNIE, long before he and I knew of each other’s existence.

Blix thought he was my destiny when she was writing that down. But she was wrong about a lot of things. And Patrick just may be one of them. He was my destiny for four years, maybe, but not beyond that. And I have to let it go.

I feel myself flush. “Thank you, but I don’t want that stuff anymore.”

“Take it,” she says in her mom voice.

So I do. I shove it in my bag and roll my eyes at her. I’m not going to let it pull me in again, though. Magic didn’t cure Blix’s cancer, and it didn’t save Patrick from the aftereffects of the fire. I think the evidence is in that it’s not worth a whole hell of a lot.

There is no such thing as destiny or meant-to-be. We’re just all out there, slogging through as best we can, and some of us aren’t doing so well at it just now.

We find my father in the Cardiac Care Unit, sitting up in bed, looking like a grayer, tinier version of himself. He gets a big smile on his face when he sees us, and holds out his arms to my mother, who goes over to his bedside and leans down and kisses him on the forehead and holds his face in both hands as she kisses his cheeks and looks into his eyes.

“Look what I had to do to get you home!” he says. “God, I sure hope the insurance covers this, because otherwise it’s been an awfully expensive way to get your wife back.” Then he looks at me. “And, ducky, how are you doing, baby? Thank you for bringing her home to me and saving me from having to go up there and endure me some winter. I saw on the Weather Channel they got some snow up there today even.”