Aparecium

"Aparecium! Aparecium! APARECIUM!" Ginger took a deep breath and opened her eyes to peer intently at the opened pages of her mother's journal, waiting for the message she was sure they contained to become visible to her.

Nothing.

She looked up at the rest of the Reading Thirteen and shook her head slowly and sadly. Just like when Hermione cast it in The Chamber of Secrets, no secret message appeared on the pages. The unused pages remained stubbornly blank. Still, it had been worth the effort.

It was better than believing that her mother hadn't cared enough to leave her a final message. It was better than knowing that she had just left without any explanation, without saying goodbye.

The others that made up their group: Stacey, Hikaru, Anya, Morgan, Deb, Katie, Zero, Bonnie, Jeneen, Alyx, Marsh, and Gayle, released the breath they had held, as was their tradition while Ginger had chanted.

"Well, now we know one more that doesn't work; that's all," said Alyx. "That doesn't mean there isn't a message. It just means we haven't picked the right thing to say to bring it out." As Ginger's blood-kin, she was the one that usually reacted by speaking out loud first.

"Yes!" peeped Anya and Zero, "there are lots more to try. We made a list of magic words and there's tons still to go!"

"Well," drawled Marsh, "maybe not TONS, but we have some of the ones that actually DID work in the stories yet to go. But first, maybe we should get some nachos, this could be a long night."

~

Nachos (some with chicken, some with ground beef, some with beans, and all with rivers of cheese) were arranged on platters set on the old table in the dining room of Ginger's home. Usually covered with papers, glue sticks, snippets of Velcro, and the other hodge-podge that made up her brother's cosplay obsession, the table seemed relieved to once again hold food. The group snacked as they shared their ideas for the next round of magic.

Bonnie, Gayle, and Morgan were pro-Abracadabra since "it worked when the magician brought Frosty to life!" Stacey, Hikaru, and Jeneen wanted to go all Disney and use Hocus Pocus since they said a sequel to a movie made the power more believable. Katie, however, kept muttering under her breath her personal favorite ever since she started playing Pokemon, which was Alakazam.

It was Deb, as usual, that managed to get them all on the same page. "Okay, everyone. So far we haven't managed to find any messages from Ginger's mom. No, we know that it's impossible that she left without at least saying good-bye. So it's time that we tried something else. Ginger- what's the last thing you remembered doing with your mom?"

Ginger didn't need to take even a second to think before she answered. She would never forget that last day ten years earlier.

Patty sat in the overstuffed chair, with Ginger tucked into a throw and cuddled on her lap. She was tired (Oh! So tired these days!) but not too tired to read a bedtime story to her daughter.

"I love you forever, I like you for always, as long as I'm living my baby you'll be," Ginger said softly as she closed the book while watching her daughter fight sleep. What she wouldn't give in order to stop time and remain in this moment, since she knew she wouldn't have very many like it again.

Patty had tried to prepare her family to go on after she was gone. She knew that Sean would be a devoted father to their children, and at 12 years old Patrick understood his mother didn't want to leave.

But Ginger was only six. How much can a six year old understand about her mother dying? How would she understand that, even when her mother died her love would go on forever?

She opened her arms to let Sean gather Ginger into his arms and carry her into her bedroom and tuck her in for the night. She was too weak to manage that herself. But not too weak to finish the letter she was writing to her daughter.

With determination and only a slight tremble to her fingers, Patty picked up the tablet and continued the love letter to her daughter.

Ginger looked at her friends with tears in her eyes.

"She read me one of our favorite books: Love You Forever. We liked to say the rhyme together, and especially laughed when the mom got old and climbed in the window to rock her son and sing to him. I told her I'd be like him, when I got older. I'd come to visit her and rock her to sleep and sing to her."

"Yes!" yelled Anya and Zero, again talking together.

Morgan nodded enthusiastically, as it was one of their favorite books, too. "Do you still have it, Ginger? My Gramma used to read it to me and we had a game where we'd look for the little cat in each picture."

"A cat?! I don't remember any cats!", said Alyx doubtfully.

"Neither do I," said Ginger. "But I know I have the book in the sunroom, next to our old reading chair. Dad hasn't made any changes there, and I like to sit in the chair and think. I... I feel closer to her there."

"Can we go check?" asked Morgan, still fixated on the memory of cats, standing and wiping their nacho cheese finger tips on their jeaned knees.

~

Surrounded by her friends, Ginger ran her finger over the spine of books on the little white shelf under the sun room window. She made her way to the middle of the shelf and stopped at the spine of the book, familiar even though she hadn't opened the book for years.

Slowly she pulled the book from between the other old favorites, remembering her confusion that morning ten years ago. The last thing she had remembered was sitting with her mother for a bedtime story, and now her grandmother was sitting in the chair in Ginger's bedroom, a sad look on her face as she struggled to explain to Ginger that her mother was gone.

She'd run through the house looking for her mother in every room, with her grandmother trailing behind trying to calm her down. She'd ended up in the sunroom, standing before this same chair. The chair that Ginger's father had found her mother sitting in, all too still, after he'd tucked Ginger into her bed.

Tears filled her eyes as she saw the silly picture of a toddler trashing a bathroom on the cover, one that she had giggled over with her mom. She used to think it hysterical that there was a picture of a toilet on a book.

Almost to herself she started saying the rhyme, wishing with all her heart that her mother was there to say it along with her.

"I love you forever..." Then Ginger stopped; her throat suddenly too tight to speak.

Morgan stepped forward, cats forgotten, and put their hand on her shoulder, picking up the words, "I like you for always..."

One by one, the rest of the Reading Thirteen stepped forward and joined Morgan, placing their hand alongside Morgan's and completing the simple poem: "As long as I'm living, My child you will be."

Smiling through her tears, Ginger opened the book and gasped. She stood, looking at the folded piece of paper with her name on it written in her mother's hand, and knew that they'd finally found the magic words after all.

This was written in response to Vocal's Under a Spell Challenge.

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