How I picture it, Magda was in free fall. Like at Tar Creek swimming hole, when she jumped into the sun, a blur of brown skin and creamy cotton. Back then, she insisted on wearing Christmas pageant angel wings six months after the holiday had passed. When she emerged at the surface, matted feathers clung to her shoulders. She looked like a baby bird and the sun looked like a yoke and I thought about the birth of our mother’s miracle baby, how she was called angelita, more heaven than girl.
    At six, she thought she could fly. For her birthday, we went to Monterey. Our parents fed her hard candies and my mother must have found pet names in the foil, Mi Cielo in the lemon drops, Belleza in the bon bons. When our mother was opening a box of Sweethearts, Magda tried to jump off the pier. Abuelita pulled her back.
    “If you could fly, you wouldn’t need gravity to get you off the ground,” she said.
    “What’s gravity?” asked Magda.
    “Gravity’s the way you die, querida.”
    Abuelita said to our mother, later, something in English. She wanted us to hear, but Magda was asleep on the couch and I never told. But Aublita said, “Kids these days are all special, all angels. Now look! She thinks she knows God. No one knows God.”
    Our mother took the angel wings off the next day and Magda knelt on the bathroom floor and prayed, as if the glass sink basin was her altar. Afterwards, her knees were bruised with small squares, the imprint of shimmery, blue, tile.
    “Never have I seen such a devout child,” said our mother.
    “Never have I seen such a stupid one,” said Abuelita.
    The two of them washed dishes and swept the floor. Magda recited Padre Nuestro, because once, Abuelita had said God listened better if we spoke in Spanish. Nevermind that we spoke English and didn’t go to church until Abuelita came to live with us. When Spanish prayers became too much for Magda, she made up words and rocked back and forth with her eyes closed and her palms pressed. I watched her as I brushed my teeth and then brushed hers so she didn’t have to leave the floor of her make-shift basilica.
    “What are you saying, angelita?” asked our mother, when she found Magda in the bathroom at midnight.
    Magda rested her head against our mother’s shoulder and let her pet down her soft, dark hair. All the while, she prayed.
    “She’s speaking in tongues,” said Abuelita.
    Our mother stood. She sucked on her lower lip. “Mami,” she said, “please.” Then, to me, she said, “Lola, take your sister to your room.”
    I could carry her. She was not more than forty pounds and I had already hit the one hundred at eleven. She mumbled about God. She said her back hurt from where her wings used to be. She tossed the covers off and sobbed. Our mother must have taken a pill to sleep. 
 
 
    Abuelita woke us up early by opening the blinds. She pulled Magda out of bed by her skinny arm and told me to dress her.
Later, she said, “I worry, you know,” and poured me a glass of orange juice.
    And I said, “I know.”
    Abuelita hugged me tight and I smelled sage and caught a glint of the gold cross buried in her blouse. In the car, I could see it bounce on her breast by watching the rearview. And, when she pulled us into Silvia’s house, (which we did not know was Silvia’s house, but was), I stared up at it and thought that if, like she said, no one knew God, it wasn’t right to wear his Son around her neck.
    Inside, Silvia served us tea and rubbed Magda’s shoulder blades.
    “I see,” she said, when Abuelita told her that Magda spoke in tongues.
    Silvia stripped Magda to her underwear. The Virgin Mary watched from the coffee table as Silvia beat rue against Magda’s little body, ran an egg from her head to the tips of her fingers and lifted her foot to place the egg in the arch. She rubbed oil on her skin.
    “What is she doing?” I asked Abuelita.
    She shushed me, but later, when Silvia was making tea, she told me about the Devil and his hexes.
    “Shouldn’t we do more?” asked Abuelita.
    Silvia smiled and shook her head. “Magda’s young,” she said. “Hexes will lift off her easy.”
    When Abuelita told our mother the good news, she had to steady herself by clutching the lip of the counter.
    “We don’t do that in this house, Mami,” she said.
    “It wasn’t in this house.”
    That was the beginning of Magda’s free fall. Afterwards, she was hexed and cursed half a dozen times and Silvia burnt all kinds of herbs and once, killed a frog. With each spell Magda cut her hair shorter, and, by the time she was fifteen, she was slicking it up with gel and running glitter through the roots. I helped her line her eyes and she went through a pencil each month.
Once, after Abuelita had hidden all of Magda’s pencils, our mother slipped me a fifty dollar bill. We stocked up on makeup at rite aid, neon wrapped pencils and lipsticks piling against the baskets bright red bottom.
We cut everything open with the door locked.“Do you remember the wings I wore when I was little?” she asked me, fluttering her eyelashes in the mirror. “Do my liner like that.”
I laughed. “Everything that comes out of your mouth sounds like you're speaking in tongues. No wonder Abuelita thinks you’re cursed. You could just say, I want winged eyeliner, you know.”
“I know.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “Can you do it or not?”
From then on, I slept with Magda’s mascara and blush and other plastic palettes under my pillow like milk teeth. If Abuelita was on a crusade, our mother and I passed it behind our backs until she got tired and went to sun herself on the porch, leaving the two of us in the kitchen, clutching two dollar eyeshadows and laughing. Of course, she sobered up when Abuelita caught her grinning.
“Mami,” she’d sigh, and rub the lines out from her forehead. “This is my house. I can’t keep you both in line.”
“Por favor,” Abuelita would say. “We both know I’m raising you and your children. Because you feed them fifties to become heathens, you’re a saint? Who’s feeding them at the dinner table every night?”
Even the almost weekly visits to Silvia became a game, until Abuelita got her hands on us. We’d steal candies from the coffee table when she wasn’t looking and stuff our pockets with winter green and peppermints. Once, Abuelita made us turn our pockets out, and fifty red and green candies poured out, still in their clear, crinkling wrappers. She marched us back inside to apologize, and when we did, Silvia decided the spell must not have worked and stripped us both to magic away the devil.
Abuelita said Magda hit rock bottom when she dropped out of highschool and moved to San Francisco, but when I saw her at Christmas, she flew in on a jet and I joked she looked airborne enough to me.
    “Lola,” she said, “you have to get out of that house. Soon there will be three mothers living there and no daughters.”
    “I guess that means I’ve gotten fat.”
    She laughed. “I know you’re not pregnant. I mean, you mothered me.”
    I made her eggs for breakfast the next morning.
    “Maybe,” said Magda, “they’re witch craft eggs. Maybe we’re eating hexes and sins.”
    Maybe we’re eating Padre Nuestro spoken in tongues. Maybe we’re eating pet names, angelita, mi cielo, belleza, in the form of hard candy. Maybe we are eating eggs.