Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “Well, we did agree to spend the night. And we can climb out of a window if we need to,” Margot said, heading to the kitchen to put the kettle on while Tamar tried to get hold of Miss Maszkeradi on the phone.

  * * *

  —

  DARKNESS FELL—ALMOST AN HOUR earlier than it would have in a house with more windows. That was going to be one of Margot’s greatest obstacles when it came to reclaiming this place as a family home. And the wiring of the Baker House had been so extensively tampered with that the overhead lights in some rooms didn’t function at all—in others they blazed like an accompaniment to sirens, in yet others the lights flickered until it felt as if knuckles had been roughly pressed to your eyelids, and in a couple of rooms there were light switches that nobody wanted to try pressing; none of them was sure why. There was just a “one last booby trap” feel, a snickering suspicion that hopped across the tendons of the hand before sliding down the palm and pooling into sweat. Harriet couldn’t elude a fear that the seven swords nestled between her breasts had disappeared, and not considering what she would do if she found they really had abandoned her, kept looking down the front of her top. They were there every time, and sentencing her companions to death remained an unappealing idea no matter which way she looked at it. The group spread out, Tamar and Margot choosing bedrooms on opposite sides of the second floor, and Harriet and Perdita choosing neighboring and wallpaper-free rooms on the third floor. Once everyone had settled into their rooms, Harriet did an extensive Gretel-check, soft-footing around the house and finding it happily/sadly changeling-free. She occasionally crossed paths with her mother, who was armed with measuring tape and a camera and would then make Harriet read off a number for her or hold something steady while Margot had a think about it. Tamar had stationed herself in a corner of one of the rooms with the bricked-up window frames, and she appeared to be meditating. The lights in the room Perdita had chosen didn’t work, so she’d lit a candle and was doing her homework by it. The lights in the room Harriet had chosen were working, so she went to bed and tried to read the latest batch of essays her students had submitted. When the house felt too quiet, they all called out.

  “Feeling haunted yet, Margot?”

  “No. You, Perdita?”

  “Nothing. What you saying, Mum?”

  “I’m fine. Hang on, who started the ‘Are-you-OK’ chain?”

  “No need to stress yourself out, Mum . . . it was Tamar.”

  “Me? I hadn’t said anything yet. Only joking . . . it was me, it was me. And I’m fine too. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight!”

  “Night.”

  “G’night.”

  “Goodnight . . .”

  And Perdita Lee, who had been counting the “goodnights,” smiled in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  GRETEL WAS IN THE FRONT HALL of the Baker House, arms folded as she surveyed a silver-birchwood grandfather clock from head to foot. The grandfather clock was brand-new; she’d brought it along for that crestfallen hollow beneath the stairs. No, the appointment had not been forgotten, today was the day, nothing had prevented Gretel from coming, she was there, but couldn’t stay long, as a changeling’s work is never done. The knowledge that Gretel was there didn’t seem to be enough to get Harriet out of bed, so Perdita stepped in.

  Get up, Mum . . . get up, get up . . . if you don’t get up right now you’ll miss her.

  Why couldn’t Harriet get up? She wanted to, so very much, but it just wasn’t happening.

  Can’t even raise an arm, let alone a leg . . . it looks like this’ll have to wait until the second house . . .

  Don’t you realize you’ll be even older then?

  I know, but . . .

  She says she’s not going to bother coming to the second house if you don’t show your face downstairs right now!

  Perdita really was shaking Harriet, but she wasn’t talking about Gretel. Perdita was saying, Mum, come next door, my candle keeps going out . . .

  “Surely just a draft,” Harriet mumbled. “Jump in here with me if you’re worried about it, though.”

  Virtually mouthing the words, the way you do to minimize the possibility of being overheard, Perdita mouthed, “I’m not worried. Somebody keeps blowing out my candle. I light it again and then . . . don’t start shouting . . . I must nod off, because I don’t know how it’s happened, but a few minutes later my eyes sort of switch on again and the candle’s out. It’s cute—I think it’s someone worried about health and safety—unattended flames and all that. I just want to catch them doing it and it might take two people to do that.”

  Harriet went next door and got into the bed there, feeling considerably less sleepy than before as she eyed the candle flame and the shadows and every place where the doors, walls, ceiling, and floors joined. How many children do you have, Ma Baker, and in your count have you made sure to include the one who most considerately blows out candles to protect this heritage house from fire? Perdita sat at a desk placed behind the bed, watching some show that was making her laugh . . . usually Perdita did this with her earphones in, but tonight she had the volume up, and every now and again Harriet sat up in the bed and looked back at Perdita—the long, tapered dimensions of that room might have been what made it echoey, but to her ear there were two people laughing.

  Not an echo. There was a second laugher. It was the cupboard door that made Harriet dead certain of this. Behind the bed, behind the desk Perdita sat at, there was a cupboard set into the back wall, cupboard or wardrobe, some cross between the two. Anyway, the door opened softly, softly, wider and wider, because they had a gawker, someone capable of staying out of sight for months and years but seeing these two together, Harriet and Perdita, proved too much for him.

  He was southern Mediterranean in appearance, like the rest of his family, and he was about twenty years old. He was tall and slender and his eyes were really beautiful—I mean that they conferred beauty—you felt that when he looked at you. Perdita said that he had the eyes of a bear; there was that mixture of strength and a strange humility (was it just that he didn’t know or care about his strength?) in his gaze. He gave them a lot of aliases at first, trying out names with the shy excitement of one who doesn’t often get a chance to introduce himself, but after Tamar and Margot had given him a lot of Look here, young mans they learned that his name was Jonathan Baker, and that he was the sanest member of his family by dint of having escaped his mother and younger sister’s notice altogether. When he was still quite small, one of his brothers had told him he mustn’t answer if either Tara or their mother spoke to him and to simply flee if either one of them approached. A few years of this persuaded Tara and her mother that Jonathan was some by-product of the repugnance they felt for the rest of their unacceptable family. So the sibling who’d given Jonathan the good advice helped him keep on the move between cupboard fortresses and box-room fortresses, and the same sibling made sure Jonathan always had something to eat and drink and some educational material, as well as entertainment every now and then. “I still visit him every week, and he’s still a bit shifty with me . . . I’ve had to promise him I won’t tell anybody that he was the one who helped me out.”

  “Oh, so your brother thinks you’re imaginary too?”

  “It’s hard to be certain, but I’m leaning toward yes, that is what he thinks . . .”

  Tamar and Margot were roused from sleep, and the five of them gathered in the sitting room. Harriet and Perdita wanted to know everything about Jonathan Baker and how he had been making a living—he had been making one, and had been able to prove to himself that he wasn’t imaginary through certain scaled-down, though determined, interactions with the world. Recently there had been more good days than bad days. Tamar cut through the chitchat with a question: “So the house isn’t even for sale? I don’t think I can settle for less than seeing this Miss Maszkeradi behind bar
s.”

  “You’d better not harm a hair on Miss Maszkeradi’s head,” shouted Jonathan. Drahomíra Maszkeradi was a friend of his. She’d told him about the Kercheval-Lee housing plan, and things had played out this way because he needed room to back out if anything about it felt wrong. But now he felt almost sure that his home was ready for another family, as long as the new family didn’t mind him being a non-imaginary member of it this time.

  “I think that’ll work, Jonathan,” Harriet said.

  Margot said. “Do you really? I’m not impressed by the way this young man hung around inside a cupboard without saying a word while my granddaughter was presumably changing into her night things and whatnot—”

  “He didn’t look,” Perdita said, and Jonathan shook his head, silently condemning these low thoughts of Margot’s.

  That was the first house, and the first of the missed meetings between Harriet and Gretel. It was also around that time that the doll named Sago and the doll named Bonnie moved in with Jonathan Baker. Perdita thought their personalities would complement each other, and Sago and Bonnie thought it was nice for Perdita to have an excuse to visit Jonathan. Apparently for the first three weeks Jonathan and the dolls didn’t converse, but they comfortably observed each other from beneath tables and through banisters—this is going to happen all over again when other people move in with these three. As far as being alarmed goes, weeks of wordless hide-and-seek won’t come anywhere near some of the situations the newcomers will have already outlived. But ideally the newcomers will also enjoy the settling-in experience just as much as Jonathan and Sago and Bonnie.

  16

  The second unhaunted house was in western Bohemia, a low-lying structure easily missed amid fountain sprays of autumnal greenery, reddery, orangery, brownery, &c. It seemed to have been assembled in adoration of the castle that stood higher up on the riverbank—the length and width of each window was filled with the view of the castle. Not the soaring semicircular arches—you had to leave the house and look up if you wanted to see the castle’s spire and turrets—but you could probably signal to certain windows that peeped out of the castle walls, if you and your counterpart in the other room had flashlights or lanterns. The bad reputation of this converted lodge, like the bad reputation of the Baker House, had been incurred in modern times. And just as with the Baker House, the estate-agency portfolio photo of this Bohemian house was very close to the version Harriet had seen in Gretel’s atlas. Miss Maszkeradi met them outside this house too, with the notes she’d prepared, but Tamar knocked off the estate agent’s turban with her umbrella and Margot pulled off the wig the estate agent was wearing beneath the turban. There was another wig beneath the first wig, and Tamar or Margot would have pulled that off too, but Miss Maszkeradi saw which way things were going and fled into the woods, sending Tamar an email a few hours later to say that she was back in London and understood their feelings toward her but would nevertheless be sending an invoice for a replacement turban and wig.

  The requisite night in the Bohemian house passed, and Harriet’s meeting with Gretel was missed. The next morning, at breakfast, Margot rolled up her bad-cop sleeves and Tamar rolled up her good-cop sleeves and together they attempted to persuade this house’s secret dwellers (a couple brought together by their discovery of their spouses’ joint plot to kill them for insurance money) that it was better for ten guilty people to go free than for one innocent to face punishment. “I congratulate you on the success of your counterplot, I really do—convincing each that the other was the one who really killed you both and getting them to point the finger at each other for all these years, I like it, but all four of you have lived with this long enough now, so what about letting all that water pass under the bridge and taking on a new project? Well, what we have in mind is this . . .”

  Harriet rose from the breakfast table and said she was off to see about this river that kept running by . . . it looked as if rowing boats and stepping-stones were readily available and she thought they should be made the most of. “Yeah, why not,” Perdita said, and, in accordance with Harriet’s hopes, she was the only one who came along.

  They picked a pea-green boat and rowed past the castle complex, slowing down to wave as they passed the house where Margot and Tamar were not yet prevailing over the desire for revenge. They rowed in perfect rhythm and at a temperate pace that bordered on the desultory; stone houses and other boats drifted by.

  “Perdita, I want to ask you something,” Harriet said. She’d been thinking—the night thoughts Perdita’s dolls disapproved of, but also day thoughts . . . she’d been thinking about Perdita saying she’d put her hand inside her own hand and brought forth Gretel’s ring . . . that had been all Perdita seemed able to say about having gone to/been in Druhástrana.

  “Mum, if you drag this out I’m going to jump overboard,” said Ari Kercheval’s granddaughter. (Funny to think that she’s also Simon Lee’s.)

  “Do you remember my saying Gretel Kercheval was a changeling?”

  Perdita nodded. They were face-to-face and couldn’t turn away from each other without messing up the rowing—ha-ha, Perdita, you just try evading your mother now.

  “And you remember me saying that she talked as if she could change too . . . bodily, I mean . . . be born as different people?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I’ve been thinking I wouldn’t put it past her to treat two whole families as clients of hers—the Lees and the Kerchevals—I wouldn’t put it past her to try to change their relationship by switching sides . . . I mean getting born on one side and then getting born on the other . . .”

  They’d veered off center—Perdita put a leg over the side of the boat; it tilted against the bank, and wet grass brushed them all along their left sides. “Mother! Ask your question! What is it?”

  “All right, keep your hair on! I was just thinking. About the two houses,” Harriet said. “Those houses where we were going to meet, Gretel and me. She wasn’t there, but I was, and you . . . so were you . . .”

  “And?”

  “And . . . when you were little . . . with the gingerbread . . . I mean, before you, I only knew of one other person who would probably die for gingerbread. Wasn’t that some sort of announcement . . . ?”

  Perdita leaned forward.

  “Are you asking me if I’m Gretel?”

  “Fine. Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”

  Without blinking, Perdita asked: “Why? I mean—is that an important thing?”

  This, for Harriet, was more perturbing than a straight “yes” or “no.” Water-sky roulette, water-sky roulette . . .

  “Mum?”

  Perdita’s being (or not being) Gretel was of importance to Harriet because Harriet needed to know that Gretel was well, that she had a friend, that . . .

  Actually, Perdita’s being (or not being) Gretel was of importance to Harriet because Gretel was the cause of Harriet’s inability to be a proper friend to anybody else. Consider all the friendships that have gone unmade by and with Harriet Lee because she was saving herself for great amity that was on pause, that had not properly begun. Why, if Gretel Kercheval was here right now, she’d get told off. How dare she make a friend of Harriet and then just leave the rest for later . . .

  “I see,” Perdita said. “Can I just check that I’ve understood? You think that because of Gretel Kercheval you haven’t been a good friend to anybody?”

  When Harriet nodded, Perdita said she didn’t buy it. “Is this really the line you want to take—that you never met anyone you liked as much as that girl, and that you never met anybody who seemed to care for you as much as she did? Also . . . ALSO . . . if you really have been letting this keep you from making other friends all this time, if you really think Gretel Kercheval would quietly take the blame for that, then there’s nothing to be done about you . . .”

  “Interesting. That’s a very Gretelian thing to sa
y . . .”

  “Listen, Mum. If I was or had at any time been a changeling, and I’m not saying that’s the case, but if it was, this is what I’d say: First off, Tamar’s given me some idea of what you’re going to be like once you go into retirement yourself. Honestly . . . in your own way, getting all interpretative like this makes you just as much of a loose cannon as she is . . . I just think you should know that. The other thing I’d say is this: Here you are rowing on this river with a nice bit of mountain behind us and a nice bit of forest ahead, and maybe some commuting salmon on either side of us. Here you are with your daughter, who thinks worlds of you . . . not just a world but all of ’em, every last one. And—”

  Harriet interrupted her: “Yes, here I am with this Perdita I love so much and truly . . . hair’s already gone gray so what more can your behavior do to it . . . all this plus fine weather . . . yes, I’m sure you’re right. Why insist on pinpointing who was who and what is what and when was when?” That’s what Harriet Lee said aloud, but her inner resolve said something else: Gretel Kercheval, I am warning you. The third house is our last chance. Our last last last last chance.