Unspun

by Ruth Nickle

  “If it weren’t for the fact that the Stahlbaums liked it enough to haul it to the New World, I think we’d have put it in a yard sale years ago,” she admitted. “I don’t know exactly how to make him feel welcome, but I can start by not putting him in storage.”

  “For now.” Alison leaned forward with an appraising eye to determine how out of place he would be on a dorm desk. “I don’t think he has to be up there until you’re old and grey.”

  “Or year-round,” Erin added. “Maybe he can just come out for special occasions. After all, the original showed up on Christmas Eve and you have no obligation to keep that tradition alive.”

  Particularly since she would not be celebrating December 24th unless it coincided with Chanukah. “I’m not taking him back to the dorms. I’ll check on him at Thanksgiving in six weeks, and he can stand guard over the house until after exams. I don’t think he’ll be too lonely.”

  By the time they had finished eating the lasagna that Meg had made and done the dishes, the nutcracker had been returned to his place by the family portraits where Mom had seemed to think he belonged, and Lena put the doll out of her mind.

  Until a quarter past midnight, that was.

  * * *

  At first, Lena wrote off the man sitting on her desk chair as a dream. It made no sense for her to be visited by a handsome stranger in a uniform that belonged in a Disney movie. When he didn’t disappear, though, she sat up and stared a little more fixedly at the object of her hallucination.

  He simply smiled, as if he had been expecting this reaction. In case he was an illusion, she didn’t try to touch him, but she turned on the overhead light to get a better look.

  Still half-asleep and not prepared for a vision who wouldn’t go away, she blurted, “Can I help you?”

  “It is not your place to be of service to me,” he said formally, “but I hope you will consider me a friend and ally.”

  “You’re breaking and entering.” Instinct demanded that she arm herself, so she wrapped one hand around the edge of her alarm clock. It probably wasn’t the most effective weapon, but Lena had never been the type to keep pepper spray in her purse, much less sleep with a knife under her pillow. “Or maybe you’re not really here.”

  “I am here by invitation of your ancestor, one Marie Stahlbaum,” he said. “My last hostess was your mother, Rebekah Hoffman, but it is your right to turn me away.”

  A text notification chimed, which heightened the weirdness of this midnight rendezvous. Lena had experienced her fair share of dreams that made no sense, but usually technology stayed out of them. A quick glance told her that Erin had decided to invite her to lunch on Monday. She had been expecting something less ordinary to accompany such an extraordinary conversation.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, “but are you, you know, real?”

  “I am not a figment of any imagination,” he stated most solemnly, “but I am not part of your own world.”

  “And this couldn’t have waited until morning?”

  “If you like, I can come at an appointed time,” he said. “I am, after all, your humble servant.”

  Taking a chance on this being more than a vivid dream, she checked her events calendar on her phone. “What are you doing at five tonight?”

  “I will be here if invited.” He bowed his head as if she had just placed an order at an expensive restaurant. “If you would like to introduce me to the rest of your family, I would be honored.”

  “Introduce . . . ” She scrubbed sleep from her eyes. “You haven’t even introduced yourself to me.”

  “I have said I am a friend and ally and your humble servant,” he reminded her. “I was a life-long friend of your mother and of her mother before that. I have known your family since before they spoke English and practiced your faith. I hope that you and I will be able to develop a close friendship as well, even if only for special occasions.”

  At that, she dropped her phone. He smiled placidly while she scrambled to retrieve the device and some of her composure. She now realized why that uniform of his had looked so familiar—she’d seen it sitting on the mantel all these years.

  “You’re . . . you mean . . . I’m sorry, but aren’t you part of a fairy tale?”

  “As are you,” he replied. “You may call me Prince and I will return at five.”

  The lamp flickered as the candles had at Shabbat, and when her eyes focused again, the chair was empty.

  Part 2: Shloshim

  In Lena’s experience, princes were men of their word. All her expertise came from movies or fanciful stories and they had pretty strong opinions on the subject. If he was to be believed, he’d also been reliable for over one hundred years. She fully expected him to arrive at the appointed hour of 5 p.m.

  When the doorbell rang, Lena assumed that the event was unrelated to her appointment and stayed where she was until her aunt’s shout roused her: “Lena, you’re keeping your visitor waiting!”

  She scampered down the stairs to find her mother’s imaginary friend kissing her aunt on the cheek as if he were an old college buddy. He had exchanged the military uniform for a suit and combed his dark hair with a severe parting.

  “You didn’t tell me he was coming,” was Anna’s opening remark.

  “You didn’t tell me you knew each other.” Lena addressed them both. “I thought Mom inherited the doll.”

  It seemed strange that Prince had asked her to introduce him to her family, since apparently, he already knew everyone who remained. But maybe that was just some weird magical formality—Lena really didn’t know the rules of this sort of thing.

  “She did,” Prince said, “but my loyalty is to the family as a whole.”

  “And I shared a room with your mom.” Anna shrugged as if the answer should have been obvious. “One year, when Rebekah snuck out of bed, I followed. After that, he would bring me something to make up for the oversight.”

  “It was ungentlemanly of me to not extend you the same courtesy as your sister.” He bowed and presented a box that looked wrought from spun sugar. “My people send their regards, their condolences, and their finest sugar plums.”

  To Lena’s surprise, Anna swept one leg behind the other and curtsied. It was a startling move for someone who reserved dresses for weddings and funerals and had, once upon a time, faked stomach cramps to avoid dance classes.

  “I hope you will take our thanks back,” Anna said. “And I hope that our emissary will be able to visit your world soon. Meaning you,” she added, glancing at Lena. “It’s worth the trip.”

  Lena refrained from replying that until she had more answers, she wasn’t willing to leave even the house with him, much less her dimension. “That will be up to me, thank you very much.”

  Anna glanced heavenward, probably lamenting Lena’s surliness, but tucked the sugar plums into the crook of her arm. “I will leave you to it, then. Call if you need my input.”

  Prince offered an arm, but Lena strode ahead of him into the living room. Once she had claimed her usual spot on the loveseat, she gestured expansively.

  “Sit anywhere you like.”

  Mom would have balked at her casual tone and her refusal of the gentlemanly escort, but she had never insisted that Lena act like some kind of debutante. She had just shared behavioral advice when the mood struck her and let Lena decide how to implement it.

  Mom’s friend apparently found this amusing instead offensive. “You are much like your great-aunt.”

  Grandma’s older sister had worked in print journalism and had a flair for treating every conversation like an interview. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Am I the only one who was left in the dark about you?”

  After a moment in which he looked both startled and wary, he frowned. “My apologies. I did not mean to cause offense.”

  “You’ve caused confusion,” she corrected him. “The
family who kept this a secret are the ones who caused offense, but I’m not about to cut off all ties to my extended family just because they neglected this part of the family history.”

  “I am not surprised at the secrecy. As I understand it, when Herr Drosselmeier brought me to his goddaughter—your Nana Marie—he was the only adult who knew of my first visit. Her parents would have been alarmed at the uninvited guest, and her brother was not very imaginative. Those who kept an open mind believed, and they chose their confidantes well.”

  “Was my father in on it, too?”

  “Your mother insisted that he know before they married, and he never begrudged us our friendship.” There was a moment’s hesitation. “I have not spoken to him in some years, but we parted on good terms.”

  The same could not be said for father and daughter. Dad had tried to reconnect when it became apparent that he was about to be the only parent she had left, but his efforts had not made up for the estrangement that followed the divorce. Since Prince seemed to have opinions on everything, she waited for him to nudge her towards reconciliation or attempt a lecture, but he said nothing for several moments and she didn’t feel like making small talk about family relations.

  “What other questions do you have?” he prompted.

  “You’re not going to tell me about my obligation to the Hoffman legacy or give me marching orders?”

  “Your family’s friendship has been a gift that I have repaid with my protection,” Prince replied without responding to her challenging tone. “I hope to pass that protection on to you.”

  That sounded more like a greeting card than a genuine sentiment, but it grated on her nerves only a little and that was a good sign these days.

  “I have questions you might not like to answer.”

  “I never said you were to ask me comfortable questions.” He smiled for the first time since entering the house and suddenly looked closer to her own age, but that might have been a deliberate illusion. The toy who could turn into a real prince might have the power to alter perceptions as well. “I will do my best to give you whatever answers you are looking for.”

  “Then where were you when she went to war?”

  He had probably expected something about the long battle with cancer, not the months Mom had spent in a different kind of life-or-death struggle.

  “I was here on her orders.”

  “Why?” Lena blurted out.

  The smile that had humanized him faded, and she recognized the look that followed as one from her own repertoire of guilt. “I tried to be what you might call a white knight. I would have fought in her place and let her come home.”

  Shloshim was a month of mourning, and gaiety was still discouraged. Lena hadn’t felt much like getting back to normal things like enjoying life yet, but a disbelieving laugh escaped now before she could stop herself. “And you thought that was what she would want?”

  He nodded, looking remarkably embarrassed by the memory. “I misunderstood her reasons for serving her country. That changed when she refused to leave unless the rest of her unit went with her.”

  “And you couldn’t bring the whole unit? Some of them died over there.”

  “I know.” His gaze never wavered, even if the memory was not a pleasant one. She appreciated the vulnerability, even if she wasn’t sure that she accepted the answers. “The next time that I offered to bring her home was after one of her comrades was killed. She would not leave without her unit, and her unit would not think of leaving before their orders demanded it.”

  Lena was nodding before he finished the explanation. “She didn’t like coming home when there was still work to do there.”

  “For that reason, I went where she commanded in turn. She said I could not fight a war for her, so she asked me to give her a different kind of peace.”

  I was here on her orders, he had said. He hadn’t been running errands or defending them actively, so there was only one other reason that her mother would have sent him to her home address.

  “You spied on us?”

  “I looked after you,” Prince said. “I never interfered in your home life, but she heard my first-hand account of your sports achievements, and for the dinner you helped prepare for Thanksgiving, I brought her—”

  “An apple pie.” Lena remembered it well; Anna had baked it because it wouldn’t have been a holiday without Mom’s favorite dessert and had been miserable when it went missing. “One went missing while she was deployed, and we all agreed that Cousin Mark must have enjoyed it himself.”

  Prince’s mouth twitched, and he nearly smiled again. “He was wrongly accused, but she saw to it that I returned the pie plate like a noble thief and asked many questions about your happiness.”

  He was making this sound like a quaint children’s tale instead of petty mischief while there was a war on. Had he involved them in that task, they could have done much more to support their soldier. Instead, they had made do with other means of communication and worried about what they should divulge about life back home. It had always felt inadequate, and harboring resentment years later was completely pointless, but Lena had too recently felt helpless to give her mother what she really needed.

  “And it would have killed you to—”

  Her voice had grown shrill on that half-finished sentence, and she fell silent, momentarily appalled by the outburst. He did not respond, nor did he look away, and it would have perhaps been easier if he had done so. Instead, she found herself balking at the severity of her own pain and broke eye contact.

  “Will you excuse me?”

  “I await your convenience.”

  Lena could have escaped the house at that point. The seven days of mourning in which others had come to her were over, and she had ventured into town. Nothing about Shloshim, the rest of this first month of mourning, forbade her from going anywhere she pleased.

  It would make Anna unhappy and uncomfortable if she stormed out of the house, and when Lena returned, he would probably still be awaiting Lena’s convenience. Then she would only feel worse for having run away from the problem. The freshness of her anguish would probably lead to more anger and would solve nothing. Moreover, she’d be immersed in a new round of guilt trips and take it out on anyone who crossed her path.

  Welcoming this man had been anything but easy so far, but the only thing she could do to change that was to turn away from her frustration.

  She locked herself in the bathroom instead of fleeing and shut her eyes until some of the pulsating anger had faded and the throbbing in her head eased. Breathing normally was still a challenge, but that was nothing new. The house had felt suffocating every time she had visited before Mom died, and no matter how few people were under this roof, it felt overcrowded these days.

  In her current state, she couldn’t promise anyone that she would be able to deal rationally with this new burden, but she could start small and resolve to not turn her back on this legacy.

  Anna had joined Prince in the living room by the time Lena felt ready to articulate her needs, but she allowed Lena to be the one to resume the conversation.

  “I am angry,” Prince’s new liaison confessed.

  “We all are,” Anna murmured. “You’re entitled to feel that the world isn’t right at this point.”

  The show of empathy was unexpected, but welcome.

  “I’m entitled to be angry at you too,” she said, turning first to Anna. “There was no reason to keep me in the dark. There was nothing to be gained from it and you could have at least mentioned something after the will was read.”

  Anna was quick to reply. “But that’s not what Rebekah wanted. She wanted you to welcome him, instead of feeling some sort of obligation.”

  It wasn’t her habit to speak to family in an accusatory tone, but Anna’s response came close to attempting a guilt trip and it seemed justified. “But you won’t
rest until I’m his best friend as I was always meant to be.”

  “I won’t be happy,” her aunt confessed, “but it’s none of my business what choice you make.”

  “Then why are you in on this conversation in the first place?”

  “For moral support,” Prince interjected. “In spite of what you assume, I suspect that she is here to see that I respect your wishes.”

  “And I want to know those wishes,” Anna explained. “If I hadn’t been here to show you I already knew about the nutcracker, I’m not sure you would have told me about meeting him. I don’t think you’d lie to me, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was your little secret for years to come.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been surprised if you started pestering me about the bequest tomorrow,” Lena said. Well-meaning meddling was something practiced by everyone in the Hoffman family. “You want me to be happy as long as you get some say in how that happens.”

  “Of course.” Her aunt’s shoulders hunched as if warding off a blow. “Your dad’s not as supportive as I’d like, your mom just died, and I want to be the person you feel comfortable coming home to when life gets rough. I don’t want you turning down anything that can help you.”

  “I don’t know that anything you do will help me,” she responded, squaring her shoulders in opposition of Anna’s posture. “I don’t need a bodyguard and I don’t need a knight in shining armor. I especially don’t want a babysitter.”

  Anna didn’t relax, but the prince looked less at ease than he had the first time Anna had sided with Lena. She had never thought it possible for royalty to look nervous, but after generations of alliance, her inconvenient resistance seemed to be outside of whatever comfort zone he had.

  “And I know that neither of you are trying to make it worse,” Lena continued in a quieter tone. “But it’s going to take me some time to make peace with the family legacy and make plans for what’s to come.”