Ritual Magic

that her stomach felt weird, like it couldn’t make up its mind if it was sick or excited.
    She wished she was still sleepy so she could go back to bed. But she wasn’t, not even a little bit. And she really did need to go to the bathroom. She might as well get dressed. She sighed and looked around the room.
    It was small and clean and didn’t look finished. The bed she’d slept in was a double, and it had sheets and a blanket, but no bedspread. No rug on the scuffed wooden floor, either. No curtain on the window, and only that TV tray for a bed table, and no mirrors. She was glad of that. She didn’t like looking at herself.
    There was a chest of drawers, though. With a bunch of stuff on top. Familiar stuff. Julia’s feet took her there without her even thinking about it.
    There was her Magic 8 Ball and the little porcelain figure of a Chinese girl that her grandmother on her mother’s side had given her for her ninth birthday and the silver-plated mirror her grandmother on her father’s side had left to her when she died three years ago. Forty-eight years ago, now. Next to them were two books—the little-kid storybook her mother used to read to her, with stories about Peter Rabbit and the Little Red Hen, and
The Secret Garden
, which she’d read three times. On top of the books sat the white New Testament she’d been given when she was confirmed in the church, and below them were two photo albums.
    When Julia was nine, her parents had given her a Polaroid camera for Christmas and a photo album. After Christmas, she and her mother had put the snapshots in the album together. That was the album on top, with a pink velvet cover. The other album was from their trip to Disneyland last year, or forty-six years ago, depending on how you counted. She’d bought that album with her own money and had embroidered “My Trip” on the green brocade cover ever so carefully, but she wasn’t very good at embroidery. The letters leaned all over the place.
    Everything looked old. Old and tired. Except for the sheet of folded white paper on top of the books. She picked it up and opened it. The writing was small and precise, almost like printing:
    When I met you, you were twenty-one and long past needing help to ward off the darkness. We dated for several weeks before you trusted me enough to tell me that you used to sleep with a flashlight under the covers. Perhaps the darkness has become frightening again. If not, please forgive me for guessing wrong.
    You’re obviously past the age for needing Fluffy, yet I know you cherished him. I hope having him and a few other familiar things nearby will help a little as you adjust to what has to be a very strange new life.
    It was signed
Edward
.
    It hadn’t been Mequi who thought of the flashlight. It had been him. Edward. The man she was married to. The man she’d made those three daughters with. Her stomach felt tight and anxious, but some other part of her felt easier. She didn’t understand.
    He sounded like a nice man, though. Maybe that was why she felt a tiny bit better. She didn’t want a husband, nice or not, but Edward Yu seemed to know that.
    Still, she didn’t want to think about him. She folded the note up again and tucked it inside the Christmas photo album. She was not ready to look at the pictures in either album. She was glad she had them, but she wasn’t ready to see how faded and old those pictures looked. She picked up the Magic 8 Ball and thought hard:
Will I get all of my memories back?
And shook it.
    First it said, “Reply hazy, try again.” When she did, it said, “Better not tell you now.”
That made her mad enough to throw it across the room, but she didn’t. She didn’t have many things from
before
. She wouldn’t break one just because it made her mad.
    Her bladder reminded her that she still needed to get dressed, so she opened the top drawer. Pajamas. Panties. Bras. She grimaced. She’d started wearing a bra this past summer, which was really a whole bunch of summers ago. She hadn’t especially needed one, but all the girls wore them, so she had to, too. But these bras were bigger than what she’d been wearing.
    Of course they were. She had boobs now. When she’d gone to the bathroom at the hospital she’d checked them out. They were not very good boobs, being kind of droopy. That made her mad. At some point she’d probably had great boobs, but now she didn’t remember it.
    Funny. She didn’t exactly like her body, but she