by Ellen Datlow
“I want to see your home,” I say. I stick the gun in my large, floppy handbag. Exhaling in gusts, she says, “Dorrie? What are you doing?”
“I won’t scare your girl,” I say, nestling the pistol against the debris in my bag. “She won’t see this, unless you refuse to do as I ask.” I need to absorb the dwelling that might have been mine, what it looks like, feels like; I want to observe, via Charlotte’s room, how Alicia might be enlivening her own space. The one upstairs is stuck in time.
Charlotte bounces back to us, haloed with the lavender from the bathroom’s soap dispenser. There are three tote bags of presents.
“Good thing there’re three of us!” I trill. “I’m free to help you carry the gifts to your house. It’s a way to keep the party from ending.” I keep one hand in my purse, as if I’m about to pull out my wallet. Betty’s mouth stays open.
“Oh,” says Charlotte. “That’s nice.” But she’s watching her mother and says, “Momma?”
“Yes, my sweetheart,” says Betty/Bird. A damp patch blooms on her white shift. She bends to kiss her daughter’s head. “Let’s go home.”
Out we go, and I fumble with the outer lock, and as Betty glances around, I bring my purse around to face her, and she freezes. Charlotte is merry from the festivities.
I don’t get out much. The air is crisp with fall, spiced and reddened and golden. People stride by, in a hurry. The sidewalk is cracked. “Slow down,” I hiss at Betty.
After a tiny yelp, she starts shaking. She whispers, “I would have invited you. I don’t understand. I would have invited you over.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
Charlotte, carrying the lightest tote bag, stops to adjust it on her shoulder.
“Did you have a lovely birthday?” I ask her.
“The best ever, Mrs. Dias,” she says. Her spider barrette catches a glint. “Thank you so much.”
Betty, color drained, begins to hyperventilate and gasps at me, “I don’t understand.”
“Charlotte,” I say, “didn’t you promise me a picture? Why don’t we get it, once we get home?” The child is slowing, staring at the grown-ups.
“But I haven’t done one specially for you,” she says.
“How about if you pick one you’ve already done, and I can have that?”
She weighs this and speaks with caution. “All right. Momma, what’s wrong?”
My hand rides the pistol, cool, silver. The poor woman loses the starch in her knees and buckles. “Momma!” Charlotte shrieks.
“She’s fine,” I say, gripping her arm to help her along. “It’s just a little too much champagne.”
“That’s right,” croaks Betty. “We’re almost home, honey.”
They live close but at a remove from the racket of the bars. An Indian market offers its scents of turmeric, star anise, and cumin; the fruits on display shine like jewels. I’m a mite faint myself. A boy on a phone jostles Betty, and her cry is sharp and anguished. Charlotte becomes more puzzled. She pats her mother fondly on her back. Leaves scratch the asphalt, and the tips of midtown peer over the streets to watch. The fear in Betty’s eyes has infected her whole being, saturating her. She’s quivering. Charlotte puts an arm around her mother and seems to be humming, singing. I needed to witness a child giving comfort, a mother and daughter bound together to defy terror, while at the same time I protect the girl from the worst of it.
Their doorman in his cap and jacket with golden frog-closures leaps forward to help with the packages. I blurt, “No, we’re fine!”
“Mrs. Lezardo?” he says.
“We’re okay, Ralph. Thank you.” Betty looks ejected from a wind tunnel, and her daughter guides her ahead. My hand trembles on the gun.
Betty collapses into sniffling in the elevator as we shoot up to a top—but not the top—floor. There are mirrors and elegant brass trim, and the unscratched wood is polished. I adjust the angle where I stand to keep the pistol in my bag trained on her. Charlotte hasn’t registered how steadily I’ve kept my hand out of view.
And then at their threshold—her reaction is worse than I expected—Betty shoves the key in her lock after the fourth try and cracks, disintegrates into a shambles, weeping. She genuflects from trembling and drops her tote bag. I scoop it up. Charlotte bleats, “Momma, are you sick? What’s wrong? What can I do? What happened?” Her pleading eyes on me, she beseeches, “Help us. Help me.”
My turn to shake, rendered speechless. Did some disturbed part of me long to see a cheap imitation of my Alicia’s fear and worry in her last hour, so I could heal it? “Let’s go inside and get her some water.” I can’t look at Charlotte; I’m propelled forward despite knowing I should bolt.
Disappointingly predictable: It is in fact my dream apartment. Large and open, lined with books, flooded with light. The large kitchen at the far end has bar stools so dinner company can chat over appetizers as Betty watches the water boil for pasta. Corked bottles of wine display various levels, half, or a few fingers remaining, or three-quarters, rich purple-reds. How do Betty and her husband Vincent not hear them screeching Drink Me? Under one of those netted domes to deflect insects is a plate of cookies … don’t they shriek Eat Me? In the adjacent dining area, the chairs are wrapped in beige cloth with ties behind them to resemble the backs on the dresses of bridesmaids. An office is visible off to the side, a laptop open. More rooms farther down a hallway. A spiral staircase to a loft.
Crayoned pictures on the living-area wall. I venture slightly out of Betty’s range as I inspect them. A blue cat floats in a sea of red water. I fall in love. What’s in Charlotte’s childhood realm; what are her toys, dolls, books, paints? But I can’t explore that and still keep Betty at bay. I can’t maintain a gun trained on her from another room. She’s slight, but fear might impart the strength she needs to disarm me, or worse.
“I would have invited you in!” Betty shouts, dropping onto the plush red sofa. She unleashes a fresh wave of sobs.
“Momma!” Charlotte screams, and then it happens, what I’ve wanted to see, what I half-sensed—and didn’t—was my reason for doing this worst thing of my life: Charlotte hugs her tight, and Betty clutches her as if she’ll die if she doesn’t and swings her daughter to a tucked-away point, to protect her. “Go to your room, Char,” she whispers.
“Not while you’re sad. I love you, Momma! Don’t cry! What’s wrong? I love you!”
“I’m good,” Betty whispers. “Baby, don’t you worry. I’ve got you.”
I take my hands out of my purse and it’s my turn to crumble, into a Lucite chair with a stylish decal of a teenaged girl with standing-up cobalt hair. There was a lot of pure hate in what I did, I’m aware of that: Such a perfect existence you have, Betty; it’s a replica of the reel I starred in, inside my brain in my youth. What do you look like when you might be in danger of loss?
But mostly: How else can I enact some message to my Alicia that she’s the only one I wanted to comfort me in those days and weeks and months when I sobbed and shook and couldn’t face the terror? What might it look like, my child holding me when I’m afraid, sickened by the world’s violence? She holds me and begs me not to be shattered because she’s here, here to stop my grief. I’ve wanted her consolation.
Does anyone fathom what it’s like to be scared every second walking down the street, afraid a monster will lunge? No wonder I seldom go out.
They’re crooning together, guarding one other, clinging.
There’s one thing—it should have been obvious—I didn’t count on. Brilliant child, attuned, she’s calculating that the only thing different in their home is … this virtual stranger.
“Why are you here?” Charlotte asks me, sitting next to her mother and holding her hand. Betty raises her head.
“I came to carry your gifts, and to look at your pictures.” I get to my feet and calculate the distance to the door. “I should be going.”
The green eyes study me; the sequins on her peach-tinted party dress catch dying
light. “Did you make Momma cry?”
If the windows could open, I would leap out of one.
“Mrs. Dias wanted to make sure we got safely where we belong, bunny rabbit. Isn’t that nice?” says Betty/Bird. She’s sitting straighter, wiping her eyes, turning a hollow stare at me. “Sometimes grown-ups get a little sad.”
The exit is perhaps a ten-second sprint. I’m not sure what she’s doing, other than a masterful job of reassuring a child.
“What made you sad?” asks Charlotte.
“Oh,” she says, gathering her daughter’s hands back once again in her own. “I was crying because … well.” Betty bites her lip, drawing a spot of blood. Her aura of stellar cheer roils with darkening shades, and she peers at me with downright tenderness. No wonder her writing wins prizes: She reads deep; she kindles; she is aware of others.
Her words float into the air. “Mrs. Dias once had a little girl, too, and some very bad things happened.”
“What?” asks Charlotte, scarcely breathing; she turns her attention full at me.
I’m arrested, immobile, unable to inhale.
“Well, just some bad things,” says her mother. “The little girl went to heaven. It’s too bad we can’t visit there, while we’re here on earth. So this lady wanted to spend more time with someone who reminded her of—” and she stops. No need to finish.
It is my turn for water to stream from my eyes. I can’t blink it away. Easy enough to Google my name and learn my nightmare. Betty did that. Like everyone who knows my story, she had no blooming idea how to bring it up or convey how she wished she could take away my pain: Surely the birthday party was her trying to share with me a fleeting memory of joy. And this is how I repaid her. Charlotte dashes to me, and I kneel, and the size of my baby when I lost her is in my embrace. Betty trembles on the sofa.
How long do I hold on?
Another shock awaits: As I rise to go, Charlotte patting my back as she did her mother’s, a stirring, a rustling, happens above.
A girl aged about thirteen or fifteen appears at the railing cordoning off the loft. Her hair is tousled, as if from sleep. She’s in those jeans ripped to shreds and a loose shirt, with a black bra strap drooping. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“You’re home from school early, Elsie.” Betty’s voice is subdued.
“Flu, I think.” Elsie regards me and says, “Hello. Do you know my mother?”
My mouth opens, fish on the shoreline, last air, nothing coming out.
Elsie says, “Dad’s at the airport, I think, Mom. He’s on his way.”
“I was just leaving,” I manage, barely loud enough to be heard.
Charlotte tells her older sister that she had a great tea party thanks to me, and that I’m sad.
“No,” I say to the birthday girl. “I’m happy I met you.”
I run a hand through my hair. Elsie is the age my Alicia would be. Charlotte isn’t my stand-in for Alicia; Elsie is. And it’s like standing in the surf, when it drags its curling self back to the sea and a person feels she’s sailing backward even though she’s not moving. I’ve barreled through the worm-hole, speeded forward in the time machine, gone through the glass, lost my grip on make-believe: This would be my baby now.
They let me stumble away. I don’t look back, not even at Elsie, rumpled and blossoming, self-possessed, appraising me from on high.
* * *
I ask Time to dash forward, and He obliges in spades; the months bunch up in heaps. The slightest crashes still startle me, either at work in Wonderland or in my upstairs rooms, with the compounded fear that the police have come to drag me off. This never happens: This is how thoroughly Betty and Charlotte—and Elsie—want to be shut of me. I should be glad for the immensity of Betty’s forgiveness. No wonder her existence in the world-at-large is more vast and far-reaching than mine.
I’ve turned Alicia’s shrine into a study, to write in. Mr. Bun sits on a shelf, watching over me. My spirit thanks Betty for reminding me that words matter. I touch the pictures Alicia did ages ago, so the colors enrich my blood. I eat and drink normally, or close enough. I speak less and less to Bill, my ex-husband. I’m happy alone. The stars over the city are pinpricks that soothe me. All the heavens do. When the moon shines in a curved rim at its bottom, it’s called the Old Moon Holding the Young Moon in Its Arms.
An editor who read a story of mine in a small magazine asked if I’d write about The Real Thing That Happened to Me. I replied that it’s bad enough those boys will be free in a few years; why do I want to bolster their notoriety? I’d submit page after page of:
Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias
The accent marks can serve as a guide to letting it be sung.
I won’t turn my child or criminals into cash. To atone for my own violence, I’ll do something that stays known only to me. Aid to a victims’ support network, I’m thinking.
The serving girl who replaced Kumiko is exasperating. I fired Alex. It’s a revolving door. We lack enough sign-ups for a tea ceremony, though I hope for a reason to contact Kumiko. One day I’ll marvel at bumping into her by chance and confess I need her as my psychiatrist.
The Dormouse remains missing.
Now and then, I picture Charlotte growing, attending school. Does Elsie get in some harmless teenaged trouble? Vincent, their father, loses hair. At the dinner table, he entertains his wife and daughters with anecdotes that leave them hysterical with laughter.
One day, on Facebook, I note a picture on a friend’s page and gasp. It’s Betty Lezardo. In another fashionable dress, at a literary event. I enlarge the photo, clicking until I can better countenance her face. There’s no mistaking it, and it’s my doing, I’m sure: A slight but definite sidelong glance distorts her eyes, as if fearing what’s behind or not trusting what might be gaining on her. She clutches a glass of white wine with a burning marble of fluorescence in it, from the lights overhead. Her face screams forty-ish more than when I saw her, like a time-lapse. She appears completely haunted.
Next to her is Elsie, in an LBD, a gateway garment to female adulthood. The skirt flares. Elsie Lezardo, the person who pried me out of fantasy and hurled me into the reality of forward history. Is she sixteen? Has that much time sped past? What are her crushes and career plans, her despairs so enormous she refuses to believe they’ll subside with time? There’s no Charlotte, because this is a grown-up party.
Once, thinking of Alicia as she’d be—Elsie-sized now—I fell asleep in Central Park in Sheep Meadow, on a sloping lawn, and leaves like crisp scuttling crabs walked sideways over my face. I sat up with a start. I am alive, I thought.
I’ll never behold Charlotte, Betty/Bird, or Elsie again in the flesh. If we happen upon each other by accident, I’ll cross the street unless they do it first. When I awaken in the morning, I put on a kettle and answer it when it screams. And then I open my front door to Wonderland, and the strangers come in, good and ill, and I serve them the best of what I’ve made from my hours in the night.
RUN, RABBIT, RUN
Jane Yolen
He left his hole for a whole new life,
spats and hats and chats with the queen,
ticktocking into the human world.
Such shocking developments, then,
when the dogs caught his scent.
He’d forgotten his wild.
Had no more tricks, just ticks,
caught soon after. The dogs devoured him,
with a good red wine, cigars, laughter.
ALSO EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW
A Whisper of Blood
A Wolf at the Door (with Terri Windling)
After (with Terri Windling)
Alien Sex
Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales
Black Heart, Ivory Bones (with Terr
i Windling)
Black Swan, White Raven (with Terri Windling)
Black Thorn, White Rose (with Terri Windling)
Blood is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism
Blood and Other Cravings*
Children of Lovecraft
Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror
Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Fearful Symmetries
Haunted Legends (with Nick Mamatas)*
Haunted Nights (with Lisa Morton)
Hauntings
Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural*
Lethal Kisses
Little Deaths
Lovecraft Unbound
Lovecraft’s Monsters
Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy
Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
Nightmare Carnival
Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror
Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex
Omni Best Science Fiction: Volumes One through Three
Omni Books of Science Fiction: Volumes One through Seven
OmniVisions One and Two
Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells (with Terri Windling)*
Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (with Terri Windling)
Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy (with Terri Windling)
Silver Birch, Blood Moon (with Terri Windling)
Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers (with Terri Windling)
Snow White, Blood Red (with Terri Windling)
Supernatural Noir
Swan Sister (with Terri Windling)
Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories
Teeth: Vampire Tales (with Terri Windling)
Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology
The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People (with Terri Windling)
The Best Horror of the Year: Volumes One through Nine
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (with Terri Windling)
The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen
The Dark: New Ghost Stories*