“So what do I do now?”
“Now you find the Spinner. It shouldn’t be hard—she’ll be on the move since the story broke. Cleaning up messes, looking for you.”
I’m just one big fucking mess, aren’t I. That’s what I wanted to say. But didn’t. Finch deserved better than my self-pity. It felt like he’d become too old for it.
Janet was grilling the redheaded brother on his first escape and my abduction when we returned. “You taught yourself to drive a car and it didn’t kill you,” she said comfortingly. “You’ll do fine without a story. Who needs a story?”
He kept nodding, jittery with cold feet. I got it—life was a big thing to live without a map.
Janet turned her flinty eyes on us. “You off to find your own country?”
“Come with me?” I said impulsively, knowing she’d turn me down.
It still hurt a little when she did, however gently. This was a journey I’d have to take alone.
I hugged Janet, and I shook the brother’s hand. Then I stood in front of Finch. He wrapped his arms around me, and the last burning ember of ice in me melted to nothing.
I was hungry, and so tired the ground moved like waves beneath my feet. But I didn’t trust myself to stop now, to rest. I climbed onto Janet’s red bicycle and set out for the edge of the world.
30
The land beyond the valley was uneven, grass littered with rocky bits where my wheel caught and turned. The sky was a mottled blue, the sunlight strange. I rode for a time alongside a stream that flowed but made no sound. I passed a quarry and crossed a bridge barely wider than a car, stretching over a ravine so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. The earth and sky looked unfinished here, sketches from a restless pen. The air was thick and silent. I wheeled through a tunnel of firs that moved their branches and smelled, disorientingly, like rain on hot pavement. Past them was a dirt road with endless flat plains on either side. Far, far away I saw a glittering line at the horizon. The ocean? I sniffed but smelled no salt.
I rode till the water in my stomach stopped sloshing and I was thirsty again. When I got close enough to see the water more clearly, I realized it was a desert of sparkling sand. At the edge of it sat the Story Spinner, looking like she had the first time I saw her. She wore a baby-doll dress and leggings and sat next to a sprawled-out blue bicycle. She was drinking something from a plastic thermos, and didn’t raise her eyes till I was right in front of her.
She squinted up, head cocked to one side. “You broke your story. It’s not worth being told now.”
“It was never my story,” I said. “It was yours.”
“Not here looking for revenge, I hope?”
The idea made me tired, a fatigue with no bottom. I shook my head.
“Good.” She stood, brushing sand off her leggings. “I can’t make any promises about what you’ll find back there,” she said. “Time works—”
“Differently than I think it does. I know.” I stumbled off the bike, my knees woozy and buckling, and stood in front of her.
Was there a right way to say goodbye to my maker? My captor? The woman who’d funneled me back into my sad and endless story as easily as a wasp led out through an open window?
She smiled at my confusion and gave a two-fingered salute, like a girl in an old movie.
No goodbye needed, I guessed. I turned away from her, knowing her eyes would be the last thing I remembered when all other memories of this place had flattened into photographs.
I stepped onto glittering sand, just over the border of the Hinterland.
The sand was hot as embers. The heat scalded my feet, then scaled my body, hurting worse than the spider sparks. I took a breath in to scream, but the pain was already passing. The sand was glittering white, then dun, then grassy, then just grass. When I looked up I saw an acre of overgrown lawn, running up to the edges of a slumping, tumbledown house. The Hazel Wood.
A terror clawed up out of the tiny part of me that wasn’t too tired to feel. How many years did it take for a place to fall apart like this? From a distance it was picturesque, but as I walked closer I could see its destruction. The great house looked like it had grown up from the ground, and the ground was trying to take it back. Vines grew through cracked windowpanes, and grass crawled over the steps. The swimming pool looked like a frog pond and smelled worse.
When I reached the steps, I lifted the skirts of my princess dress and kicked off the shreds of my slippers. I walked up to the door and knocked.
I waited a long time, but nobody answered. The door was locked, and while I could’ve climbed through a window, there wasn’t any point. The Hazel Wood’s warped clock had finally run down. If Althea was lucky, she was dead.
She wasn’t who I needed to find.
The Hazel Wood’s gates let me out into a normal wood. No ravine, no grove of glittering trees. I walked barefoot to the road, feeling every pebble, every acorn and piece of trash. The first few cars slowed down to look at me in my ragged dress, my hair that fell almost to the tops of my thighs. But none of them stopped. I tried to glean clues about how much time had passed from the make of the cars, without luck. No hovercraft, at least.
Finally a minivan drove by me, stopped, and backed up. In the driver’s seat sat an old woman wearing a rain bonnet over frosted hair. She rolled down the passenger window and peered at me.
“Now why on earth would you wear a dress that lovely into the woods?”
I was out of practice, talking to people. No words came. I tried to smile reassuringly. Don’t be afraid of me, old woman. It probably looked terrifying. I had, until very recently, been a literal fairy-tale monster.
She sniffed. “You don’t need to snarl at me. Either you’ve gotten lost during a costume party or your story is much more interesting than that, but either way—”
“I don’t have a story,” I said. My voice sounded like a rusty hinge.
“Well. Do you need a ride or not?”
I shook my head, then nodded, then walked slowly around the ugly hulk of the car to let myself in. The dashboard lights blinked like insect eyes, and the air inside smelled like nothing that should exist on heaven or earth. New car smell, I remembered. Keep it together, Alice.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, about five minutes too late.
“Good lord, you stink,” she said. “Have you been kidnapped? Did you just escape? Should I be taking you to the police?”
“What year is it?” I burst out.
Her eyes widened. “You poor child. You really don’t know?”
She told me, and I closed my eyes against her words. Two years. Two years had passed since I walked into the Hazel Wood. It was better and worse than it could’ve been; relief and terror warred in my chest and made me shake. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The panic folded over me like a hand, and I gave in.
When I was little I tried to walk across one of the parallel bars on the playground like it was a tightrope, till I slipped and fell onto it stomach first. The wind was knocked out of me, and all I could do was keen, a horrible sound that sent the other kids scattering.
That was what I sounded like now. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stop. Next to the messy specter of my coming undone, the woman’s driving peaked to frantic. She pressed her body toward her window and called someone on her phone. An eternity passed before the car screeched into a diner parking lot, where an ambulance was waiting.
When the paramedics opened my door and laid their hands on me, I went silent. They startled back before grabbing me again, helping me out onto the gravel.
“Can you tell me your name?” one of them asked kindly. He looked like a skinny Harold.
“Ella Proserpine,” I said desperately.
“Okay, Ella, can you walk with me, please? Try to unlock your knees.”
“No, Ella is my mother. I’m Alice,” I said. “Alice Crewe. Alice Proserpine. I’m Alice-Three-Times.”
The paramedics exchanged a glance over my head and half-carried me into th
e ambulance.
Somehow, I fell asleep on the way. When I woke up I was wearing a clean blue hospital gown. I flinched away from a terrible smell, woke up the rest of the way, and realized it was me. I was fully convinced another two years had passed since I’d last been awake.
I filled my lungs, ready to scream out fresh panic, then saw her sitting in a hospital chair. Her head was flopped onto her chest, a fresh starburst of gray running through the dark strands of her hair. She wore a black hoodie, black jeans, and the cracked red cowboy boots she’d had since forever.
My mother. Ella Proserpine.
31
I sat up, let a wave of dizziness pass, swung my feet to the floor. I could feel my muscles running over each other in funny, fucked-up ways, but the cool of the linoleum took the worst of the hot throb out of my soles.
“Ella,” I whispered. “Mom.”
She lifted her head suddenly, breathing in hard through her nose. She smiled when she saw me, then gasped, her eyes spilling over with tears. She stood and wrapped her arms around me, and held me till it hurt.
When we’d cried enough, and studied each other’s faces, and I’d counted her new crow’s-feet and gray hairs and decided I could live with losing two years, she asked me. “You know, don’t you?” Her eyes were nervous, scanning my face.
“Know what?”
“Who I am—what I did. How I’m not really your, not your…”
“You are.” I said it like a vow. I repeated it till she believed me.
A long time after that, once the doctors had come in to examine me, and Ella chased off a policeman who wanted to take a statement, and I ripped like a wild dog through the contents of a hospital tray and half a vending machine, she told me her side of the story.
The Hinterland had taken her from Harold’s and put her in a dingy, empty studio apartment in the Bronx. No phone, no fire escape, no neighbors, no way to pry open the windows or door. After three days she was nearly starved and all screamed out when she tried the front door for the thousandth time.
It opened. Nobody was guarding it, and nobody stopped her as she walked down four flights of stairs and emerged, trembling, onto the sidewalk. She made her way back to Harold’s, but the doorman called the cops on her. A friend from her old catering job gave her some clothes and some cash—her credit card was canceled, and the old card she’d used before Harold was attached to an almost empty account. She sold the jewelry she was wearing and followed the same path as Finch and me: renting a car and heading to the Hazel Wood.
But the Halfway Wood wouldn’t let her in. She lived in a motel at first, before finding a place above a hairdresser’s in Birch, of all places. She worked at a diner, hiking the woods looking for an entrance on her days off. Months passed without luck or hope, until the day I walked out of the woods and gave the paramedics her name before I told them mine.
She never saw any sign of the Hinterland, in the woods or out of them. Her bad luck days had ended after I disappeared—not that she’d put it that way. But she mourned being locked out of the Halfway Wood, I could tell. “Maybe I’m too old now,” she said. “Maybe that’s how it works.”
“It’s not Peter Pan,” I said firmly. “It’s freedom.”
She looked at my eyes and smiled. “All the ice is out of you,” she said. “Even that little bit I could see way down at the bottom. My angry girl.”
She never made me feel like she missed it, but I could tell she did, a little. I was slower to anger now, more circumspect. I didn’t live like each day was a fuse to burn through and forget.
We cooked up a paper-thin amnesia story for the police, my face was in the news for a while, and I was told the county would be in touch when they had a lead on what, exactly, had happened to me.
I was home for a couple of weeks when Ella told me the rest of her story: She hadn’t found the Hinterland in her wanderings, but she’d found the Hazel Wood. Not the dreamlike place I’d walked through, but a tumbledown mansion full of cat shit and broken windows. She’d let herself in and found Althea in her writing room, a few days’ dead.
Her hands shook only a little when she told me. “When I thought she was dead the first time, I thought it was over—the bad luck. I thought it was her all that time, sending the Hinterland to bring you back. I didn’t think it was…”
Me. She didn’t think it was me, the dark magic in me tugging it along behind us like a fish on a hook.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she’d continued. “Don’t take a letter’s word for it when it comes to death. And don’t run away from your inheritance.”
It turned out the Hazel Wood was ours, as I’d once wished it to be. Ella sold it to a woman looking to start a writers’ retreat, and bought us a condo in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn.
She got another job waiting tables, and I stocked shelves for a food co-op when I wasn’t floating around pretending to think about going back to school. On paper I was nineteen, and Ella didn’t want to push me.
But the empty days, all in one place—they made me restless. I walked for hours, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, or down to Coney Island. I started rereading the books I’d loved when I was younger, all those paperbacks picked up in musty shops, off stoops, from library shelves, then shed like leaves on the road.
When I reread Boy, Snow, Bird I remembered Iowa City, living with Ella in a cramped prefab a few blocks from a frat house. Howl’s Moving Castle was the converted barn in Madison where we camped out for three lonely months after the terrifying end to our time in Chicago. As I read the words I felt memories reasserting themselves like letters drawn onto misted glass. On a frozen day in February I carried a pair of tallboys onto the Long Island Ferry and read Wise Child as we chugged through the water. I closed my eyes and remembered the red flowers that grew around our guesthouse in LA when I was ten. Then I opened them and put my tongue out to catch New York snowflakes. They tasted sick and gritty, like chemical rain.
I went to bed in my own room, but night after night I found myself waking up next to Ella, her hands in my hair. I’d shaved the whole brambly mess off when I got out of the hospital, and it was growing back wispy and darker. More like hers.
“Shh,” she’d whisper, the way she always had. “It’s over. It’s over now.”
I saw Audrey once on the High Line. She’d changed her style. Out with the bronzer and the flat-ironed hair, in with precise red lipstick and a pea coat with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it. She looked like Amy Winehouse dressed as Jackie O.
We sat on a deck chair in the sun and shared a cigarette, a French brand with a box that looked like pop art. Because she was Audrey she didn’t ask right away about Ella, or whether I was okay, or what the hell had happened to us since her dad pulled a gun on me and tossed me out into a long, cold night full of things worse than muggers.
I loved her for it.
She smiled when I coughed on the fancy imported smoke, watching me from behind Fendi shades. “Not so tough now, are you?”
I seized onto this piece of intelligence—what I’d looked like from the outside, two years ago. “Was I tough? When you knew me?”
“You were scary as fuck. You know that. You looked like a haunted china doll.” She peered at me over the tops of her sunglasses, eyes lined like Isis. “Now you seem a little … I don’t know. Lost?”
“How’s Harold?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, he’s fine. In love again. As always. How’s Ella?”
I paused, letting the cigarette burn down between my fingers. How was Ella?
“Resolved,” I said, finally. “All that shit with the … all that scary shit. It’s resolved.”
“Good,” Audrey said, with a note of finality. She plucked the cigarette from my fingers and took a last drag, then pinched it out and put it into her pocket. She gave me a hug that was all elbows, then walked away without looking back.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help walking by Ellery Finch’s building, stari
ng up at the windows. Of course he’d disappeared, too, the same time as me, but his father must’ve written him off as a runaway. As far as I could find, he hadn’t even made the papers. Maybe they’d hired a private investigator. Or maybe they really had cared as little as he thought. But I doubted it. I didn’t know how you couldn’t care for Ellery Finch.
I had dreams about him sometimes. In my dreams we did things together that we never did in life—walked through parks, held hands in bookshops. I woke up from a dream in which we’d waded in water up to our knees with the realization that I could picture him now without seeing his near-murder in the trees. It had played and replayed till it burned itself away.
I would’ve gone on like that forever, I think, using paperbacks to shake old memories loose and roaming around as if permanently sun-stunned. But when I’d been home for just over a year, I ran into Janet and Ingrid drinking iced coffee outside an East Village café.
My vision went full dolly zoom, and I stopped so fast a woman ran her stroller up onto the backs of my heels. I got out of the way, muttering apologies but refusing to peel my eyes from Janet’s face. I walked toward her with my arms stretched out like a zombie’s, like she might get away.
She seemed happy to see me, but mildly so. Like it was a pleasant surprise, not a seismic shift in reality as she understood it.
“You look much better without the frostbite,” she said, standing up and taking my hands. Ingrid nodded coolly from beneath the brim of a Mets cap.
“How did you … what did you…?”
“Shh. Sit. Eat something. Ingrid?” Her accent was more British than I remembered it. Less … Hinterlandy.
Reluctantly, Ingrid handed over a square of oily cake wrapped in parchment. It slid like wet sand down my throat, but it did make me feel better.
“How did you get here?” I asked when I could talk again.
Janet reached her fingers down her front and pulled out a flat purse on a strap, like the money belts old ladies wear when they vacation in big cities. Which, I guess, is what they were. But she didn’t pull out a stack of traveler’s checks—she pulled out a flat booklet.
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