The Charmed Wife

by Olga Grushin

  “Some . . . someone?” My lips feel numb.

  “Someone.” She shrugs. “Or something. Sometimes it is an act of malicious magic. Other times, it’s just—just life, you know. Joy leaks out when there are enough cracks.”

  “But . . . can I never get it back now?”

  Her face, bereft of the steel-rimmed eyeglasses, appears gentler.

  “Few things are impossible. Still, let us focus on the pressing matter at hand.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve in an oddly familiar gesture, glances at her watch. “I have another client, I must run, but if you aren’t doing anything at present, why don’t you go see Faye. She is quite maudlin at times, but she should be able to help you process your emotions. Here, I’ll jot down the address for you if you don’t have it handy. Talk to her, organize your thoughts, then call me, yes? We should get the bastard before he gets us.”

  And it is only after the rather long-nosed chauffeur in a green uniform with flames on the cuffs drives Miss McKee away in her gray Packard that I remember I have forgotten, again, to ask who Faye is. I look at the address on a slip of paper and, dully, walk to the other side of the park, through a neighborhood of neat little cottages rising bright and square and menacing like rows of well-cared-for teeth, until the street ends abruptly and I find myself beyond the town’s edge, in a thicket of evergreen trees, on a twisting path carpeted in dry fir needles and leading into a chilly emerald dusk. Some minutes later, I make out a small house through the pines. In another dozen steps, a smell envelops me—the light, sweet, delicious smell of a happy childhood. I have no time to think about it, though, because just then I come to an opening in the trees and, at last, see the house clearly—and it is like no other house.

  Its walls are made entirely out of crumbling, sugar-sprinkled gingerbread, and its white roof glistens with frosting. Striped red-and-green candy canes frame the cheerful windows, chocolate hearts dot the door, and the weather vane is shaped like a pink lollipop. I stand gaping with wonder for a full minute, then, cautiously, approach the aromatic door and raise its licorice knocker. When I release it, the sound is the crunch of a cookie devoured by a greedy child, and a voice sweet as molasses calls out: “Just pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up.”

  The door opens softly, soundlessly, as though on buttered hinges.

  Inside, the air is stifling, and it is like Christmas, a confectionery shop, and a doll tea party, all rolled into one and suffused with a warm, rosy glow. Amazed, I stare at the profusion of potbellied teapots, cuckoo clocks, embroidered pillows, needlepoint rugs, porcelain statuettes, plump little lamps with tasseled shades, processions of jeweled eggs along flimsy shelves covered with lacy doilies, everything pink-hued, toy-sized, cozy, crammed—and absolutely suffocating. And I nearly give in to an impulse to dash back out into the woods, when the same saccharine voice exclaims: “Oh, my sweet child, what a surprise, how delighted I am to see you!”—and only then do I notice the round-shaped woman bundled in a multitude of strawberry-colored shawls, seated in a pink armchair under a pink pile of knitting, beaming at me over her rainbow-tinted butterfly-framed eyeglasses.

  “Fairy . . . Fairy Godmother?”

  “The same, the very same!” she confirms brightly. “But I prefer to go by ‘Faye’ now, it has a more modern ring, don’t you think? Sit down, sit down, have some chocolate with me.” Not rising, she stretches her hand to break off a chunk of the wall and, laughing, offers it to me; mechanically, I take it. The puffy pink ottoman I sink into is soft, too soft, and warm, as if someone was sitting there just moments before. “What brings you to my humble abode, my sweet child?”

  For some reason, I do not want to mention the witch, or the night at the crossroads.

  “I just stopped by to talk,” I say, uncertainly.

  “Oh, yes, talk, I love talk!” she exclaims, muffled now, her mouth full of chocolate. “You don’t mind if I knit, do you, my dear? At this time of the year, with the holidays almost upon us, I am always so busy making socks for the poor town orphans . . . Tell me, and how are your own precious darlings? Doing well, I trust?”

  My breath catches.

  “Oh, Fairy Godmother! Do you not know? I haven’t seen . . . I haven’t been allowed to see . . .” And suddenly everything, everything, is too much—the hot, unmoving air inside the sweet pink house, the headache still beating at my temples like a trapped bird at the bars of a cage, the woman’s moist, egglike eyes turned upon me in smiling expectation, the chocolate treat I have forgotten I was still clutching beginning to melt, to run down my fingers, the exhaustion of keeping all my deeper emotions eternally locked away while I go about my hopeless task of fighting surface entropy with mops and dustcloths, the bitterness of the knowledge that, unlike all the other fairy tales in the world, mine has proved to be a sham—the old gnawing fear that I will never make sense of anything ever again, the new feeling of violation at having my life’s spark wrenched away from me by something, by someone—and more than anything else, the anguish of this never-ending separation from Angie and Ro, days turned to weeks turned to months, and who even knows what is happening to them, whether they are healthy, warmly dressed, properly fed, whether or not they go to bed every night crying for their mama—and now I am crying, too, tears freely streaming down my face, mixing with streaks of chocolate when I attempt to wipe them away with my sticky hands. “I may never be able to see . . . to hold . . . all I want . . . I love them so much . . . and that cruel, hard-hearted man . . .”

  My words are turning into jerky sobs, become hiccups before trailing off into wet, incoherent shuddering.

  “Oh, dear child! I simply had no idea, no idea!” the fairy godmother cries. She has flown out of her chair and is fluttering about me now, patting my cheeks with her fuzzy pink shawls, petting my back with her plump pink hands. “There, there, a nice long cry is good for you. Here, have a tissue . . . And now, take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on. Let’s start with what happened in the last months of your marriage, after the poor old dear . . . ahem . . . after King Roland died.”

  I blow my nose, shake my head.

  “Child, it’s not healthy to keep things bottled up inside like that.”

  “You can’t possibly understand! How can you, when you yourself never had . . . had any . . . any . . .” Just as the sobs are encroaching again, I choke on a piece of dark chocolate I find wedged in my mouth. It starts sweet on my tongue, then turns so lip-numbingly bitter that I am shocked into silence as I work my teeth around it, laboring to rid myself of its sharp, binding taste.

  The fairy godmother is back in her chair, knitting needles flashing in her hands.

  “True, I never had any children of my own,” she says quietly. “But I know something about the heartbreak of motherhood. Why don’t you sit and breathe for a while, and I will tell you a little story. It’s a story of a fairy who was not always good.”

  Surely, not you, Fairy Godmother? I want to ask, but my mouth is too full.

  “Hush, child, do not interrupt. Just chew that chocolate, there’s my girl.”

  And as I sputter around the sweet bitterness invading my mouth, she begins to talk, her needles clicking in rhythm with her words, the lamps glowing warm and pink around us. Once upon a time—the precise date is of no significance—in a nearby kingdom, there lived a fairy. In most respects, she was quite an ordinary fairy, preoccupied with small, benign workings of magic—infusing liquors with enhanced berry flavors, helping with firebird eggs, sewing dresses out of starlight, dabbling in royal matchmaking, and the like—save for the fact that, unlike most of her kind, she was raising two young children of her own. All fairies could have offspring, of course, but most chose not to, for, being obligated in the course of their professional engagements to spend much of their time at christenings and, subsequently, to watch over their godchildren as the spoiled little brats grew into proud princesses who refused to laugh or t
yrannical princes who sent countless minions on missions of death in search of talking horses, mute brides, and pairs of comfortable slippers, they knew enough about the pitfalls and tragedies of motherhood to prefer vaulting right over the whole sorry mess on their humming iridescent wings. Not this fairy, though—this fairy had a sweet voice made for singing cribside lullabies and a generous heart made for unconditional love, and so she had produced two babies of her own to share her songs and her love with; and thus it was really quite sad when, finding herself the eleventh in line at a routine christening feast gone routinely wrong, she nobly intervened in a curse placed on some royal infant by a resentful old biddy and, after the infant’s father voiced a strongly worded objection to the manner of her intervention, lost her head, leaving behind a ten-year-old fairy boy and a five-year-old fairy girl.

  The two children had a miserable time growing up. The hapless fairy’s friends took turns raising them, but, being flighty and callous by nature, they could not make up for the warmth that the siblings had lost when deprived of their own doting mother. In spite of the other fairies’ meager parenting skills, however, the brother and sister survived to young adulthood and, acquiring sufficient knowledge of their private history, swore revenge. They went about it in different ways. The brother, favoring a direct, blunt approach, as men often would, chose to wreak havoc within the family of their mother’s actual murderer. Insinuating himself into the palace under the guise of a celebrated physician, he proceeded to cast a sleeping charm upon the king’s sixteen-year-old daughter; then, having gorged himself on the king’s rage for so long that his gloating turned to boredom, he ensured the man’s death by conjuring a pointy fish bone in His Majesty’s throat. At that point, with the royal line essentially snuffed out, the brother took a parting stroll, in the same spirit of gloating, through the slumbering princess’s dreams and, unexpectedly, found himself so fascinated by what he discovered in her pure maidenly head that he declared the dreams of impressionable virgins to be the new object of his ambitions, and, bestowing a bristly kiss upon his sister’s dewy forehead, donned a bowler hat and left for greener pastures and darker nights.

  The sister, on the other hand, possessed of a much subtler intellect and nurturing grander designs, set out to destroy the tranquility of each and every royal family in the vicinity, swearing to render each and every royal child a motherless orphan by the age of five—the age at which she herself had been deprived of maternal love. She worked at it tirelessly, relentlessly, for decades, initially getting the neighborhood queens to succumb to sickness and waste away in a plain, old-fashioned manner, but in time becoming more and more inventive at disposing of the royal consorts, turning some of them into frogs at the precise moment when they kissed their newborn babes for the first time, trapping others in magic mirrors, condemning them to report on the sordid doings of others in all perpetuity, making still others lose their hearts to donkeys or scarecrows or brooms and run off into the sunset with their tragically unsuitable seducers. There was a queen who, in a bout of uncharacteristic insanity, leaped into a well after a golden ball and lived out the rest of her life as a petulant herring. There was another who fled from her spouse and children to join a circus, first as a lion tamer and subsequently (after a local magician known as Arbadac the Bumbler caused an inadvertent accident during a coughing fit at a performance he attended) as the lion. The fairy celebrated each malicious accomplishment with chocolate bonbons and grew quite plump.

  The final court she would ever visit appeared similar to all the others—a confection of a palace; a striking queen with eyebrows dark and glossy like strips of luxurious fur; an ineffectual king who dozed on his throne, entrusting the running of the kingdom to his ministers; a joyful five-year-old boy. Posing as a chaplain’s long-lost third cousin on a brief visit, the fairy learned the lay of the land, decided on a spell, prepared the groundwork. And then something happened: she found herself procrastinating at the king’s court, for a week, another week, a month. She lingered in the company of the queen, who sang sad, tender lullabies to her son, stirring up the long-buried memories of the fairy’s own childhood in her hitherto hardened breast; for thus had her own mother sung to her at each bedtime. Then, too, she had to confess to growing quite fond of the king, who was not in the least like other kings of her acquaintance, not irate or oblivious, but mild and courteous, often overwhelmed, and given to occasional bouts of existential despair, which she found worthy of sympathy and, if truth be told, rather romantic. And last, she was—much to her surprise, for she had never shown any affinity for children—drawn to the boy himself. He had the face of a stained-glass angel, a sunny disposition, and a generous spirit. One day, he brought her a present—a watercolor quite advanced for his age, for he had a marvelous aptitude for art. He had depicted a beaming boy standing between beaming parents; the three of them held hands, while a pretty, if slightly plump, young woman hovered above the group on immense butterfly wings.

  “This is me with Mama and Papa.” He pointed. “And this is you. Because I can see that you aren’t just a girl, you are a fairy. A good, beautiful fairy, the kind that grants wishes. And now, will you please grant my wish?”

  “And what is your wish?” the fairy asked, smiling, as she scooped him up into her lap and pinched his little chin between her finger and thumb, a trifle too hard. “A new hobbyhorse, maybe? Or ice cream for every dinner?”

  The boy’s blue gaze was clear and serious.

  “I wish for you to stay with us, always. I love you.”

  And at that very instant her injured heart melted and mended, filling with love in return. But tragically, it was too late. For just as the fairy cried great tears of repentance and relief over the child’s radiant chestnut curls, over his drawing of the happy family, of which she suddenly believed herself a part, frantic servants ran through the palace calling for their queen, yet calling in vain, for the queen had vanished. The fairy realized, then, that her spell had been accidentally set into motion, that the harm had been done, that the queen must have somehow chanced upon the enchanted apple and bitten into it—and worse, deep within herself, she understood that she might have meant for it to happen, for had she not, in a supposed fit of absentmindedness, left the poisoned apple on the queen’s vanity table only the night before? Had she not, in truth, been hoping to get the sweet-voiced beauty with the sable eyebrows out of the way so she could have the king and the boy all to herself?

  Horrified, newly heartbroken, she remained at the scene of her crime for a while after, striving to do what little she could to right the wrong. She failed. She watched the king fall into grief so gray and impenetrable that he became like another ghost haunting the royal cellars. She watched the light leak out of the boy. She fled their palace in shame, swearing to atone for her dark, terrible sins with everything she did forever after, determined to dedicate the rest of her immortal life to performing selfless deeds, dispensing miracles, making sweet little orphans happy. And she tried, and she tried, she tried so hard—but everything she did seemed to go awry, quite as if she were cursed. Her wards were not grateful to receive what gifts she gave, and babes wailed at her approach. She built a wondrous gingerbread house in a shady pine forest, hoping to create a peaceful haven for hungry lost children—yet the only ones who came her way were an ungrateful, boisterous, poorly raised mob of boys, five or six brothers, who treated her abominably, nibbled away half her house, and in the end escaped her tender attentions to return to the woods, where they now led wild, undisciplined lives, swinging from trees, playing barbaric games, transforming into ravens when the mood was upon them, making regular assaults on her sugar windowsills and candy-cane fences, and spreading malicious rumors that she was a wicked witch intent on cannibalism and other unnatural practices. And still, she has not given up—oh, no—she has been knitting socks for the local orphanages, has been turning up at every christening, whether invited or not—“so many godchildren I have, all sweet, motherles
s orphans . . .”

  She trails off.

  “But what . . .” My voice is a croak when I find it at last. “What happened to that queen? The queen with the loving boy? What did you do to her?”

  The fairy godmother wrings her hands in anguish.

  “She turned into a chess piece!” she wails. “Such an elegant spell it was, too, a proper, elaborate spell, came with a flash of lightning and everything, a pity there was no one nearby to appreciate . . . That is, of course, it was dreadful, just dreadful . . . The poor dear . . . I found her on the floor of her bedchamber, rolled under a dresser, and I dusted her off the best I could and put her on display with some other knickknacks they kept in the palace library. For all I know, she is still there, I never did have the heart to check when I came back. Because, you see, I did return some twenty years later, when I felt that I’d rehabilitated my character with enough good deeds to earn me a second chance with the king and his son. Neither of them recognized me—true, I had become a bit matronly with time—but perhaps it was just as well. The king was still depressed, so I counseled him, and . . . and I was kind to him in other ways, too, and it did cheer him up, if less than it might have. But the boy—the boy had grown into a man in my absence, and the man was not nearly as nice as he could have been. Cold. A bit shallow. Uncaring, some might have thought. So I decided the best thing I could do for him was find him a perfect bride, the kind who was meek and quiet and patient and would bring out the best in him after a while—and, well—”

  She falls silent and, pressing her hands against her chest, stares at me with eyes made enormous by the butterfly frames. I stare back, speechless. I think of the small glass cabinet in the library of my own palace, with its unassuming display of dusty objects—the bleary mirror, the blood-encrusted key, the apple with a bite taken out of its shiny red side, the ivory chess queen, and, in the place of honor, the crystal slipper.