The Hazel Wood

by Melissa Albert

  It was a title page I’d seen just once, years ago. “Alice-Three-Times,” it said in a dense script. Inked around it was a geode pattern that made me think of ice. There was a raw edge along one side where it had been ripped from the book.

  7

  I was gripping the page so tightly I tore it. Gingerly I sat down on the bed.

  “Alice-Three-Times,” the story I’d never finished. It sounded like a children’s game, like something girls at a slumber party said into a mirror with the lights turned off. Years ago, when I’d held my grandmother’s book for the first and only time, I hoped I’d been named for her Alice, that she had something to do with me. Now I prayed she hadn’t.

  My mouth was dry as dirt. The redheaded man must’ve been here—must’ve done this. He had a copy of the book. He’d come back from god knows where to find me.

  I had to get out of the apartment. Its walls were too close; they were curling in over me, watchful. I tucked the title page into my bag and ran for the elevator.

  The doorman was still missing from the lobby, so I couldn’t ask if he’d seen Ella leaving. He tended to look at me like I’d come to deliver a pizza one night and never left, so I might not have asked him anyway.

  I paced in tight circles around the lobby, keeping one eye on the street. Ella didn’t answer any of my next three calls. I cursed myself for not having the numbers of anyone she might be with—her coworkers from the catering job, maybe, though they’d fallen out of touch—and tried and failed to reach Harold one more time.

  When I was little I became obsessed with the idea of my mom leaving me behind when she moved. When the fear got so bad I couldn’t sleep, I’d strap myself into the passenger seat of our car, so she’d be sure to remember me if she left before morning. Now I felt the sudden urge to make sure our car was still in Harold’s parking garage.

  Harold hadn’t given Ella a key to the garage elevator yet—probably as worried she’d skip town as I used to be—but the doorman had one. I ducked behind his desk on the off chance there was an extra lying around.

  His big mass of keys lay right next to a half-eaten takeout container of sushi. I turned quickly, expecting to see him coming back with chopsticks in hand, but the lobby remained empty. I held the keys against my shirtfront so they wouldn’t jingle and tiptoed over to the parking garage elevator.

  The first time I’d seen it I’d expected Harold’s garage to be all white marble and inlaid floors. But it was like any garage I’d ever been in: echoing concrete and the wintry smell of exhaust. I could see our car from the open elevator doors, slumped among the Mercedes and BMWs. Some shitty rich kid had written CHOAD in the dirt on its back window.

  I stared long enough to assure myself it was there, long enough for the shadows in the corners of the garage to sharpen and the taste of dust and iron to coat my tongue—the taste of bad luck. I stepped back into the elevator and stabbed at the Lobby button till the doors slid shut.

  It was nearly five when I stepped onto the sidewalk, and New York was doing that perfect early evening thing where it plays itself. It makes you forget the trash piles and the twenty-dollar sandwiches and the time that guy showed you his dick on the F train, just by etching its skyline in gold and throwing the scent of sugared pecans in your face, right as someone who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio slouches by mumbling into his iPhone. Cheap trick.

  Tonight it didn’t work on me, because I was zinging with adrenaline, and my brain kept peeling back the corner of a strange new world I couldn’t imagine living in, one where my mom was just gone. I was being insane. It hadn’t even been an hour. But the wrongness of the envelope in my room and the dread coiling in my gut told me I was right to panic.

  The title page. Was it a warning? An invitation? A clue? The person who’d left it had been inside my room. His hand had hung over my pillow a moment before dropping the envelope.

  Maybe it was a taunt: I see you, and locked doors and elevator keys aren’t enough to keep me out. But if it was a clue—if there was something in that story, some hint or message—I had to read it. And there was only one place I could think of where I might find a copy of Tales from the Hinterland.

  I jogged the eight blocks there, because I wanted to jolt some of the spiky energy from my limbs. I knew where Ellery Finch lived because his dad was Jonathan Abrams-Finch, and richer than God, and therefore lived in a building that not only made ours look like a homeless shelter but had been written about twice in the New York Times style section. Not that I make a habit of reading about the lives of the rich, but Audrey does, and any mention of Mr. Abrams-Finch inspired her to loudly complain about extreme wealth being wasted on non-hot guys.

  His doorman looked a lot like mine, but older. He scowled through his fancy gray mustache when he saw me.

  “I’m here to see Ellery Finch,” I said.

  He squinted at me. “Who?”

  I sighed. “Ellery Djan, um, something Abrams-Finch?”

  The man sighed back at me, like I’d passed a test he was certain I’d fail. “Whose name might I give?”

  “Alice Crewe. Wait—Alice Proserpine. Tell him Alice Proserpine.”

  The man picked up an old rotary telephone and hit a button, then I swear he started talking in a fake British accent. He apologized for my arrival and existence, letting his mustache droop with disappointment as the person on the other end agreed to come down for me.

  I kept my eyes on the art deco elevator, so beautiful I wanted to cut it up into bracelets. Drama class felt miles away, but now it was creeping up on me: Finch’s question. My answer. The weird thrill and curious shame of it. What would he think of my showing up here?

  I schooled my expression to flatness, but when the elevator doors slid open, my vision blurred over with tears. Finch’s familiar face looked like an island to a drowning swimmer.

  His eyes widened and he made a move forward, maybe to put an arm around me. I put ice in my eyes and walked sideways into the elevator before he could.

  “Thanks for, um. I can come up?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course you can, Alice.”

  He liked saying names, I noticed. First or last or both at once. Maybe in real life it was meant to be friendly, but names were dangerous in a fairy tale. I’d wondered before if that was why Althea had changed hers to something so outlandish. A Potemkin front so good nobody would want to look behind it.

  I blinked away the fairy cobwebs. This wasn’t a book, this was life. I had to tighten my shit up. The elevator doors shushed shut, sealing us inside a tiny, opulent room. There was a low Louis Quinze–looking bench against the wall and a chandelier hanging over our heads. A chandelier. In an elevator. Finch caught me looking at it and laughed before I could.

  “My stepmom’s a big believer in ‘you can never be too loaded or too thin or too covered in ugly diamonds.’ That’s a saying, right? If it wasn’t before, then she made it up.” He seemed nervous again. I saw it even through my self-pity and fear, and it made me feel the tiniest bit better about being there.

  As did the fact that he didn’t immediately demand to know why I was darkening his vintage elevator door. I’d shown up unannounced enough times in my life—with my mom, her face plastered with a smile, our suitcases tucked benignly behind our legs—to know what it looked like when someone wishes you hadn’t come. Ellery Finch definitely didn’t wish I hadn’t come.

  Harold’s place was the nicest I’d ever seen till that point, but Ellery’s was something else entirely. It was like a country manor straight out of a thick English book about pheasant season and eligibility. You almost expected to see Mr. Darcy skulking around a corner looking pissed.

  “Nobody’s home but our housekeeper,” Finch said. “My stepmom’s at soul bikes or whatever, and my dad’s pretty much always out. It’s not easy running a sweatshop empire all by yourself, you know?”

  I startled at this, but he didn’t even look around when he said it. I followed him across the carpet, studded with pieces of t
asteful furniture that would’ve made Harold weep with envy. Finch must’ve been used to showing people around, because he took me straight to the view. It was disorienting to look out the high windows and see not the sweep of a rainy moor, but early evening advancing on Central Park. It made me forget the ugly thing he’d just said.

  Finch let me look for a minute, then smiled. The nervous was back. “So. You’re here.”

  “I’m here.”

  “To … see me. On purpose.”

  Oh, god. He was echoing the words he’d said when he asked me out. “No! No, I just…”

  “I’m kidding. Sorry, I know I’m bad at it, but I just can’t stop.”

  He waited attentively for me to speak, and suddenly I wanted to slow everything down. I had my hand on my phone, ringer turned up, but Harold’s violated apartment felt very far away. Until Ella called back, I had nowhere to go. And the sooner I got what I wanted from Finch, the sooner I’d go right back to being alone. “Can I have a glass of water?” I blurted.

  His eyes registered curiosity before melting into that easygoing Finch expression. The one he wore like armor. “Of course. Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah,” I said, even if it wasn’t quite true. “I’m starving.”

  Finch led me into the kitchen. His housekeeper, Anna, looked like a retired Bond girl and sounded like an unretired Bond villain. She was about sixty, and clucked around Finch while making us an endless stream of tiny sugar-powdered pancakes served with tart red jam. We didn’t talk much, and the friendly sounds of sizzling and the funny conversation she kept up with the batter under her breath made it so it didn’t feel weird. When our hands were good and sticky with jam, she brought little finger bowls to the table, which seemed a bit much for an after-school snack. By seven p.m. she had us de-jammed and the kitchen spotless. She kissed Finch’s forehead, grabbed her big Mary Poppins bag, and let herself out.

  The apartment yawned around us, humming with appliances and wealth.

  “So,” I said. “You’re probably wondering why I came over.”

  “Actually, I’m wondering more about the name you gave my doorman. Proserpine.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m hoping you can help me with something.”

  My voice wobbled and Finch noticed it, going focused and still.

  “I really need to read my grandmother’s book, and I’m hoping you have a copy.”

  He squinted, looking slightly let down. “Wait. You’ve never read it?”

  “Nope. I’ve tried. It’s hard to find.”

  “No kidding it’s hard to find. I only got a copy because of … because of some family shit that went down. It was, like, the one thing I asked my dad for that Chanukah. I think he flew an intern to Greece to get it.”

  Relief made my eyes sting. “So you’ve got a copy?”

  “Had a copy. It was stolen.”

  All those tiny pancakes turned to acid in my gut. “What? Like, out of your house?”

  “No. Out of my hands. I have this friend who owns a rare book shop, and he’s never seen an actual copy of Hinterland. I’m not an idiot, I know this is an expensive book, so I take a cab to get there instead of the subway.”

  Also, you’re too rich to take the subway, I think but don’t say.

  “I’ve got the book all tucked away in this acid-free plastic sleeve, and once I’m in the shop, I don’t even let my friend alone with the book—he’s a nice old guy, I met him when I went through my first editions phase, but some things you don’t let out of your sight. So he’s wearing cotton gloves, turning the pages like we’re in an Indiana Jones movie and they might release a demon or something, freaking out in that quiet way collectors do.

  “Then the door of the shop slams open and this boy runs in. Eight or nine years old, pretty small. I grab up the book just in case, not actually thinking the kid would take it, or has any idea what it is. But the little shit ran up, sprayed something in my eyes—not mace, but like a cleaning product—and grabbed the book. I was so surprised I didn’t keep a good grip on it. I ran after him, but it was too late. He got into a cab that was waiting and beat it.”

  I goggled at him. “Bullshit.”

  “Sadly, no.”

  “Why would he want that particular book? Why would a little kid even be in a rare bookstore?”

  “I’m guessing someone paid him to steal it. For a while I wondered if my friend at the bookstore planned it, but he’s a friend—that felt too paranoid. So then I thought someone might’ve been tracking our emails about it. Maybe specifically tracking emails that mention Tales from the Hinterland.”

  “So that’s less paranoid?”

  “Good point. In my defense, I don’t really believe that. It’s just … that book. Plenty of books are out of print, but you can still find them. Tales from the Hinterland should be all over libraries, rare book rooms, eBay, but it’s not. Either someone’s been hoarding copies, or…” He shrugged meaningfully. “Or something else. You can’t even find scans of the stories online.”

  He was right. There should have been more—someone should have typed the stories up, scanned them, made fan art. But there was nothing like that.

  Almost nothing. I was fourteen when I found a piece of the book online, a scrap of story.

  We were living in Iowa City, and my interest in Althea was my biggest secret, my only secret. Four years spent checking used bookstore shelves and searching out traces of her online, four years disdaining the books Ella tried to get me to read in favor of devouring fairy tales. The classic pantheon first, then broader. Weirder, darker. Tales from around the world. Always wondering how close they took me to Althea.

  But it was in Iowa that my secret pitched over into betrayal: in Iowa I started communicating with Althea’s fans.

  Fans was a word Ella spat out like a cherry pit. And it made sense: the ones I had met—my sixth-grade English teacher, the batshit grad student who accosted us at a Fairway during our first stint in New York, the biographer who tracked Ella down and tried to get to her through me, the worst possible move he could’ve made—were cartoons, nutjobs with bad breath and no lives of their own.

  It was different online. There I met fans who felt like me: people who’d read the book and loved it, or who couldn’t find it but got hooked on Althea anyway. The idea of her, like a comet’s tail glimpsed just before it’s gone. I’d stay up getting dry-eyed and hungry, lost deep inside an internet rabbit hole, while Ella worked at a bar on the ped mall. She’d come home each night smelling of cheap beer and lighter fluid, and I’d slap her laptop shut, faking boredom.

  She believed me, because we didn’t lie to each other. Except when we did.

  My memories of Iowa are as flat as the state. A gray spring, frat houses, bright pieces of girlness discarded in gutters—glittery slip-ons, headbands, once a pair of pink terry shorts. But one night stood out, because it was the night I jumped from message board to message board, blog to blog, finally landing on a DeviantArt page featuring excerpts of Althea’s stories, painted like illuminated Bible pages.

  I’d run my fingers over their pixels. They were beautiful, and more of her writing than I’d seen in one place since that day in the attic. My heart beat sideways as I clicked to enlarge a long page of “The Sea Cellar.”

  I started to read. I was tipsy, a little, on nasty apple wine Ella’s then-boyfriend had made in his backyard press. It was sad and scuzzy being drunk alone, and the story felt like companionship—like reaching out to Althea for the thousandth time, and finally feeling her reach back.

  The story opened on a young bride traveling a long way to her new husband’s house, and arriving to find it all lit up, but empty. I’d read a few paragraphs—the bride, the journey, the opulent, lonely house—when the light of my laptop cam switched on.

  I’d stared at its apple-green eye for two hot beats, then slammed the laptop shut.

  The house was silent; a frail string of tinnitus sang a warning in my ear. I’d looked at the blanks of the windows, fel
t eyes on my neck and sandy fear pinning me in place.

  I cracked the laptop just enough to stick my thumb over the camera, then opened it the rest of the way. The green light was off, the browser was closed, and my internet history was wiped clean. I darted to the kitchen to grab a piece of black tape to stick over the camera, drew all the curtains, and lay in bed with the lights on, waiting for Ella to come home.

  By then I was old enough to know Althea wasn’t really watching me. But that was when I started to wonder if someone else was.

  Ella didn’t ask about the black tape, but a week later I fell asleep in front of an open thread about Althea’s use of numerology, and woke to Ella’s intake of breath, her smoky black hair in my face as she leaned over me to slam the laptop shut with her fist.

  “What. The fuck. Alice.”

  Ella didn’t talk that way to me. She talked that way to drunk freshmen trying to get served at her bar, and boyfriends who got shitty when she told them we were gone. Landlords with a knack for stopping by too often, and always when one or the other of us was in a towel.

  You never told me I couldn’t was the first stupid thing I wanted to say. But she hadn’t had to. The taboo was baked into me. It was in everything she didn’t say, the flinch in her shoulders and the way her head lowered like a boxer’s when people tried to talk about Althea.

  In that moment I hated her, so I said something worse.

  “Why are we alone?” It was a question that had lived in me for years; I didn’t think I’d dare ask it until I did. “Why are we alone if we don’t have to be?”

  Ella’s mouth opened, soft and surprised. She sat down slow, like her bones hurt. Then, for the first and last time in my life, she was cruel to me.

  “You think she wants to be your grandma?” she said, in a voice that wasn’t quite hers. “You look at her big house in that magazine you think I don’t know about, and you think, Oh, if only she’d ask me to come live with her?” She shook her head. “Not a chance. Althea doesn’t want you. So stop torturing yourself about what could be. In this life, it’s you.” She pointed at me, then stabbed her finger hard into her breastbone. “And me. Got it?”