The Hazel Wood

by Melissa Albert

  As all of this hit me, he was already standing up, grabbing his book off the table, and striding out of the café. Before the bells on the door stopped jingling, I was after him. Someone’s laptop cord crossed my path, and I nearly sent the thing flying; by the time I finished apologizing and wrenched open the door, the man was out of sight. I looked up and down the quiet sidewalk, my hands itching to hold a cigarette—my mom and I had quit when we moved in with Harold.

  But he was gone. After a few minutes, I went back inside.

  On the table he’d left an empty cup. A balled napkin. And a feather, a comb, and a bone. The feather was dark gold, with a lacy glass-green tip. The comb was red plastic. The bone must’ve come from a chicken, but it had the shape of a human finger bone. It was bleached perfectly clean. The trio was laid out like a hieroglyph, a vague pi shape that impressed itself on my brain as I swept it all into my apron pocket.

  “Okay, what was that?” I’d never seen Lana so curious about me before. “Girl, your … your lips look white. Did that guy do something to you?”

  He kidnapped me when I was six. I think he might be a Time Lord. “Nobody. I mean, he was nobody. I was wrong, I thought I recognized him but I didn’t.”

  “Nope. Nothing you just said is true, but fine. You’re going to sit here, and I’m going to bring you some food, and you’re not working anymore till you stop looking like crap. Oh, except I have to leave in twenty minutes, so hopefully you’ll look better by then.”

  I sat down hard, my knees giving out partway. One of the engagement ring women frowned at me and tapped her cup, like we were the kind of place that did free refills. Oh, just tempt me, I thought, but I was too weak to get mad.

  Too scared. Call it what it is, Alice. Maybe I could’ve talked myself into believing what I wanted so badly to believe—that he was a man I’d never seen before, who looked a little like someone I’d met briefly a decade ago. And maybe I could have forgotten about him altogether, if it weren’t for the book I’d seen in his hands as he sped out the door.

  I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I knew what it was the instant I spied the familiar green cover.

  He’d been reading Tales from the Hinterland, of course. Of course he had.

  3

  I was ten the first time I saw the book. Small enough for a pocket and bound in green hardback, its cover embossed in gold. Beneath its strange title, my grandmother’s name, all in uppercase.

  I was already the kind of girl who closed my eyes and thumped the backs of furniture looking for hidden doors, and wished on second stars to the right whenever the night was dark enough to see them. Finding a green-and-gold book with a fairy-tale name in the very bottom of an otherwise boring chest of drawers thrilled me. I’d been poking around the attic of a family we were staying with, a loaded couple with a two-year-old son who didn’t mind hiring a live-in nanny with a kid of her own. We’d stayed in their spare bedroom the whole first half of my fifth-grade year, miraculously without incident, until the husband’s increasing friendliness to Ella made her call it.

  I’d sat cross-legged on the attic’s tacky rag rug and opened the book reverently, tracing my finger down the table of contents. Of course I knew my grandmother was an author, but I’d been pretty incurious about her up to that point. I was told almost nothing about her, and assumed she wrote dry grown-up stuff I wouldn’t have wanted to read anyway. But this was clearly a storybook, and it looked like the best kind, too: a book of fairy tales. There were twelve in all.

  The Door That Wasn’t There

  Hansa the Traveler

  The Clockwork Bride

  Jenny and the Night Women

  The Skinned Maiden

  Alice-Three-Times

  The House Under the Stairwell

  Ilsa Waits

  The Sea Cellar

  The Mother and the Dagger

  Twice-Killed Katherine

  Death and the Woodwife

  Being named Alice, of course I’d flipped straight to “Alice-Three-Times.” The pages rippled like they’d once been wet, and smelled like the dusty violet candies my mother loved and I hated. I still remembered the story’s first line, which was all I had time to read before Ella came in, tipped off by mother-radar, and ripped the book from my hands.

  When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.

  It was so creepy it made my heart squeeze, and I was glad to see Ella. I didn’t understand why her eyes were so bright, why she was breathing so hard. “This book isn’t for children,” she said shrilly.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. My mom never told me I was too young for anything. When I asked her where babies came from, she told me in Nature Channel–level detail. If her friends tried to change the topic of conversation when I walked into a room, Ella would wave away their concern. “She knows perfectly well what an overdose is,” she’d say. “Don’t insult her intelligence.” Then, more likely than not, she’d tap her glass and tip her head toward the kitchen, where I’d dutifully shake her up a perfect martini.

  Hearing her pull the age card for the first time in memory made me horribly, burningly curious. I had to read that book. Had to. I never saw the copy from the attic again, but I remembered the title and bided my time. I looked for it at libraries and bookshops, and on the shelves of all the people we stayed with, but I never found it. It showed up on eBay once—I used to have a Google alert set for the title—but the bidding quickly climbed beyond my price range.

  So I turned to finding out more about its author instead. That’s how my obsession with my grandmother, Althea Proserpine, began.

  * * *

  Lana left, and a guy named Norm came in to replace her. He spent the next three hours talking about a hangout he’d had with Lana that may or may not have been a date, not that he was worried about it, but what did I think and had Lana mentioned him?

  I gave him noncommittal answers until finally I cracked. “Jesus Christ, Norm. This is the ‘move on with your life’ dance.” I did a dance like I was imitating a train. “There, did that work? Lana’s literally never said your name in my presence.”

  The injured look on his face gave me a flush of dark satisfaction. “Damn, Alice, that’s cold.” He took off his hat, folded the brim to make it more pretentious, and re-perched it on his head.

  His silent treatment for the rest of the night gave me time to think—time to replay what I’d seen, again and again. When my shift ended, I stepped out into the night feeling skinless. The light was gone, and the houses I passed on the way to the train looked closed and clannish, like that one house you skip on Halloween. I jerked back when a man brushed too close against me on the sidewalk. His skin smelled burnt and his eyes seemed too light in the dark.

  He kept walking, barely acknowledging me. I was being paranoid. Everywhere I looked for the stocking cap, the blue eyes. Nothing.

  There were a handful of people waiting for the Q. I stood close enough to a woman pushing a baby in a stroller that it might’ve seemed like we were together. She didn’t look at me, but I saw her shoulders tighten. When the train came, I got in and jumped out again at the last possible moment, like I’d seen in the movies.

  But then the platform was even emptier. I put one earbud in and played the white noise app Ella put on my phone and made me listen to whenever I started acting like a loaded gun.

  When the next train came, I practically leapt on. The scene from the café kept unfolding like a movie in my mind: the crack of the plate, the blue of his eyes, the way he’d vanished out the door with the book in his hands. But already the edges were rubbing off the memory’s freshness. I could feel it degrading in my hands.

  My neck hurt from holding it tight, keeping it on a swivel. The constant vigilance became a beat behind my eyes. When a guy holding a saxophone case threw open the door between cars, panic made a hot, hard starburst in my chest.

  What if there was an explanation for the man’s unlined
face, the sense I had that he hadn’t aged a day? Botox, French moisturizer, a trick of the light. My own black hole of a brain, writing an image from the past over the present.

  Even so, he would still be a man who had a book that was impossible to find. Who’d told me ten years ago he knew my grandmother and was taking me to see her. What if he really had been? What if Ella had been wrong about him being a stranger?

  What if Ella had been lying?

  Years after I thought I’d buried it, the old obsession stirred. When the train finally rose up from underground and onto the bridge, I pulled up an article about Althea on my phone. It was once my favorite, the longest piece I could find. I even had an original copy of the magazine it ran in, which I came upon by some miracle in a used bookstore in Salem. Vanity Fair, September 1987, featuring a six-page spread of my grandmother on her newly bought estate, the Hazel Wood. In the photos she’s as slender as the cigarette she’s smoking, wearing cropped pants and red lipstick and a look that could slice through glass. My mother is a black-haired blur by her knees, a wavering shadow under the glitter of the swimming pool.

  It opens like this: “Althea Proserpine is raising her daughter on fairy tales.” It’s an odd opening, because my mom barely figures in the rest of the article, but I guess the journalist liked the double meaning. My mom was raised hearing fairy tales, like anyone else, and she was raised on the money that came from them. Althea’s estate, the Hazel Wood, was bought with fairy-tale money, too.

  Before she wrote the strange, brief volume that made her name, my grandmother was a writer for women’s magazines, back when the job was less “20 Sexy Things to Do with an Ice Cube” and more “How to Get That Spot out of Your Husband’s White Shirt.”

  Until she took a trip in 1966. She doesn’t name names, but she doesn’t stint on telling the reporter the good stuff: she was traveling with an older man, a married editor at a men’s monthly, lazing around the Continent with a group of other bored American tourists. After nine days spent drinking their liquor hot (couldn’t trust the ice cubes) and writing letters to their friends at home, things went sour between her and the married man. She took off on her own. And something happened.

  She doesn’t say what, exactly. “I chased a new kind of story through a very old doorway,” she told the journalist. “It took me a long time to find my way back.” Not another word is said about what she did between 1966 and 1969, while her houseplants died and her job dried up and her New York life got mossed over and swept away.

  When she returned to the States, the world had forgotten her. She felt, she said, “like a ghost moving through a museum of my old life.” (She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.) She found a friend to stay with, a former Barnard classmate with a spare room, where she sat down and tapped out twelve stories on a typewriter. They were collected into a book called Tales from the Hinterland, and published by a tiny independent press in Greenwich Village that focused on female-penned fiction nobody read.

  But somehow, my grandmother’s was. Her lovely face on the back cover couldn’t have hurt: level eyes, blue in color but pale gray in black-and-white. Her eyebrow is quirked, her lips lined and slightly parted. She’s wearing a man’s white shirt, open one button too many, and a heavy onyx ring on her right first finger. She’s holding, of course, a cigarette.

  The book got a few write-ups in smaller journals, and became a word-of-mouth sensation. Then a French director looking to make his first American picture optioned it for development.

  The film shoot was infamous, plagued by high-profile affairs, professional squabbles, and the disappearance of two crew members in unrelated incidents. But the film itself was an art-house hit. It was rewritten as a psychological drama about a woman who wakes up in the woods with no memory of her former life; my grandmother’s stories play out as dream sequences, or flashbacks. According to the reviews I could find, it bore zero resemblance to its source material.

  The movie’s success, partly fueled by infamy, led to several short-lived stage productions, a miniseries that never came to be, and Althea’s failed stint as a TV development consultant in Los Angeles. When she got back to New York she bought the Hazel Wood, going for a song after its last owner had died under seamy circumstances in a fire that damaged part of the estate.

  She’d picked up a couple of husbands along the way, the first an actor she met on the set of the movie. He left his wife for Althea, and was killed by a junkie in their apartment in the Village when Althea was pregnant with Ella. She met her second husband, a displaced descendant of Greek royalty, in LA, and took him with her to the Hazel Wood.

  So yes, you could say my mother was raised, in part, on fairy tales. But death played a part. And money. Dead-husband money, fairy-tale money, too. Enough of it must’ve ended up in my mother’s pockets to get us by despite her sketchy employment history and all the leases we’ve run from partway through. Staying in motion was as much a part of who we were as my mom’s sharp laugh, my angry streak. Our bad luck days that abated with every move, then slipped back in like red dirt on our shoes.

  But no matter how bad it got, the Hazel Wood was always at our backs. It was always the place Ella would never return to. She took care of me, and I took care of her, in a symbiotic sisterly relationship that looked cute on TV but felt fucking exhausting when you’re moving for the third time in a year and don’t even have a bedroom door to slam.

  As I pored over the article about Althea for the nth time, it didn’t read to me the way it used to. I once pictured Althea as a distant but benevolent star, a fairy godmother who watched me from far away. My fevered kid brain cooked together fairy tales and my missing grandmother and the mystery of the man who took me into a superstition I never voiced aloud. When I looked into mirrors, I secretly believed Althea could see me. When a man watched me too long through a car window or at the grocery store, I didn’t see a perv, or the first harbinger of the bad luck coming: he was one of Althea’s messengers. She watched me, and she loved me, and one day she would show herself to me.

  But now I was reading her story with fresh eyes. She wasn’t a fascinating fairy queen, she was an arrogant fantasist. Who hadn’t once, from my babyhood to her death, tried to contact Ella. Ella, who had me at nineteen and hasn’t had anyone but me to hold on to since.

  Because that’s what the article doesn’t get to. Just months after it ran, Althea’s second husband killed himself in the Hazel Wood. After his death, Althea closed its borders. She and Ella were shut up in there alone, living on fairy tales and god knew what else, with only each other for company. This is the part Ella really won’t talk about, the fourteen years she spent rattling around in a place cut off from the world. She didn’t even go to school. Who my dad is, and how she met him, is a secret so buried I’ve stopped asking.

  My head was buzzing when I reached the apartment.

  Wait. Apartment doesn’t put the right image into your head. The … estate? Not quite, but closer.

  Harold’s place smelled like discreet cleaning products, my stepsister’s perfume, and whatever takeout Ella ordered that night. I think Harold had some idea she would be cooking dinner for him, maybe from the dented tin box of recipes that lived in the kitchen, inherited from his mother. But he was disappointed there: Ella and I could live for weeks on cereal and popcorn and boiled edamame.

  I heard the high murmur of raised voices down the hall and followed it to their closed bedroom door.

  “You didn’t embarrass me tonight, you embarrassed yourself.”

  Harold’s voice ended in a hiss. I used the sounds behind the door to place them: Harold to my left, a soft shift that was Ella on the bed.

  I pressed my back against the wall outside their bedroom door. If he moves any closer.

  “You can look like trash on your own time, but tonight was about being my wife.” Wife burned even worse than trash, but I stayed still, biting back the cold metal taste of rage. Ella asked me again and again to trust her. That she co
uld handle Harold. That she loved him. That this grab at stability wasn’t just for me.

  Her silence was louder than Harold’s voice. It’s her greatest power, though she never used it on me. She’ll stare at you as you try to pull your thoughts together, to say something that’ll reach her, but she’ll never reach back. I’ve watched her pull things out of people—secrets, confessions, promises to let us stay an extra month—with her silence alone. She wields it like a weapon.

  “Ella.” Harold’s voice was suddenly desperate. I was lanced by a pity I didn’t want to feel. “Ella, say something, goddammit!” I heard the rush of his clothing as he moved across the room, toward my mother on the bed.

  I waited a beat and a breath, and tried to wrench open the door.

  Locked.

  “Mom! What’s going on?”

  “Jesus Christ, is that your daughter again?”

  “Mom.” I pounded the heel of my hand against the door. “Let me in.”

  Quiet, a creak, then Ella’s voice was close. “I’m okay, baby. Go to bed.”

  “Open the door.”

  “Alice. I’m fine. We’re just talking. You can help me by going to bed.”

  Rage was running through my blood. “He called you trash. Open the door!”

  Harold threw it open, and I startled back. He was rumpled, partly undressed. His shaved head looked shadowy and his eyes were bloodshot. Harold had Captain Hook eyes—mournful and cornflower blue, with a phantom glaze of red when he was angry.

  Next to him, in a dark strapless sheath and shock of wild hair, Ella looked like a black poppy. Her dress seemed designed to call attention to the tattoo climbing up her arm and almost to her throat: a psychedelic flower on a spiny stem that could’ve been a botanical illustration of a blossom found on Mars. I had its twin tattooed on me in mirror image—a misguided Mother’s Day gift Ella had blindsided me by hating.