How to Disappear Completely

by Ali Standish

  “I went to school, but only because my parents forced me. Every day there was torturous. The rest of the time, I stayed here, safe with my books and my garden. Until night fell. Then I would go for walks in the forest on my own. I liked the quiet. The company of the trees and the moon. How I wished I could be the moon, watching everything from the safety of the distant sky. How peaceful it would be.”

  Her voice trails off in a kind of whisper, and she looks lost in her wish.

  “I liked knowing I wouldn’t run into anyone,” she says after a moment. “Until one night I did.”

  Backward and forward she rocks, all the time staring into the fire.

  “She told me she was a fairy princess escaped from the house where she was being kept by an evil pair of goblins. They had locked her away from the world, and only at night, when they were deep asleep, could she be free from their tyranny. Every night, when the moon rose, she rose with it, and through the woods she ran, laughing into the wind.

  “We became friends, the two of us, the fairy princess and the outcast child. Neither of us belonged to the day, so we lived our lives at night, and what wondrous lives they were. How the world transformed when the fairy princess looked at it. Streams became vast rivers; rocks became castles. The forest became a kingdom trapped under a curse of darkness.”

  “You mean Gram,” I interrupt as the pieces click into place in my mind. “She’s the girl you met in the woods? The fairy princess who had been locked away?”

  Madeline nods.

  “But we thought she was sick,” Fina says. “That’s why she couldn’t go out.”

  “No,” Madeline snaps, slapping her hand down on the arm of her chair. She stops rocking. “Her parents were the ones who were sick.”

  “What are you talking about?” I nearly shout. Why can’t she just say what she means?

  She glances at me again. “You haven’t yet guessed?” she asks. “You do know that your condition can be hereditary?”

  For a second, I don’t know what she’s saying. Then I remember the pamphlet Dr. Howard gave me. The one that said vitiligo can sometimes run in families. “But Gram didn’t have vitiligo,” I say slowly.

  “Some secrets hide themselves away in the shadows like me,” Madeline rasps. “Others hide from us in plain sight.”

  I picture Gram sitting next to me in the Spinney. Her long flowing dresses, fifty years out of style. Her fingers twirling the handle of her parasol. I always thought it was to protect her dove-white skin.

  What had I thought when I first got diagnosed? I almost wish I’d inherited Gram’s skin color instead. Then you would barely be able to see a difference between my spots and the rest of me.

  I think about the pictures I’ve seen online, of people with vitiligo who have lost all their color, who turn the most delicate shades of pale. Pale like Gram.

  The pieces all fit so snugly, I can’t believe I never saw it before. But then, Gram hadn’t told me, had she? And until a few months ago, I had never even heard of vitiligo.

  “She didn’t always look the way she did when you knew her,” Madeline says. “The paleness crept up on her slowly. It took many months for it to cover her completely. At least, the parts other people could see.”

  “I don’t understand. If all that was wrong with her was vitiligo, why did she have to stay inside during the day?”

  “I’ve told you, haven’t I, that her parents were the sick ones? They were the kind of people who did everything for show. All that mattered to them was their reputation. And things were different back then. Conditions like vitiligo were not well understood. They frightened people. People would have talked behind cupped hands. Your gram might have become an outcast, like me. Her parents couldn’t let that happen. So she spent her days with only her tutor and her books for company. They told her they were protecting her. That it was for the best.”

  I feel like someone has punched me in the stomach. I think about everything I went through at school after Edie’s text. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been sixty years ago, before you could google vitiligo and find out what it really was.

  But that’s no reason to keep a child locked away from the world. I feel heat rising in my cheeks as I imagine Gram trapped in Morning Glory Cottage, forced to live behind her curtains. All because of something she couldn’t control. The same something that’s happening to me.

  The pages of my mind flip back once more to the snowy afternoon when I’d run into her room to find her staring out the window.

  I don’t want you to ever feel like you have to come, do you understand? she said. I want this house to be a happy place for you.

  Because it hadn’t been a happy one for Gram. Morning Glory Cottage had been more like a prison. And Gram had been just like Rapunzel, locked up in her tower.

  “Madeline?” Fina asks softly. “You said that it was Emma’s gram who came up with the story about the fairy princess captured by goblins and a world that’s been cursed with darkness. But that’s—that’s the story from The World at the End of the Tunnel.”

  An electric jolt goes through my heart. The World at the End of the Tunnel had sat there that snowy day, right on Gram’s lap. Along with the shoebox containing the picture of her parents, the book of poems, and the sketchbook.

  A sketchbook full of fairies and gnomes and palaces. I had thought they were drawings Gram had done of the charmed folk in the Spinney.

  But what if they were creatures from the Goldengrove? Characters from The World at the End of the Tunnel?

  Barely able to breathe, I look over at Madeline. Glistening tears are gathering on her cheeks. The wrinkles on her face catch them like silver fish in a net.

  “When your gram lost the last of the color in her skin, her parents rejoiced. She was normal again.” Madeline spits the word out. “They told everyone she’d miraculously recovered from her illness. It had been so long since anyone had seen her properly, no one even noticed that her skin was a different color. Besides, it would be pale, wouldn’t it, after months and months stuck inside? The curse was broken. She no longer had to live her life by night.

  “She went back to school and made other friends. She was so very good at it. Oh, she and I were still friends, too, of course, but it wasn’t the same. It was never the same. Then she grew up and went away to college and met her husband. I was the only one who still remembered the fairy princess and the world cursed to darkness. I was the only one who still lived in the Dimwood, yearning for the day it would transform into the Goldengrove.”

  “But—” Fina says, “I mean, why did you write the story?”

  “She left the story!” Madeline cries. “She pulled me into it and made me believe. She finally gave me a world where I could belong. And then she left! So one day, I sat down, and I began to write. I invented a boy and a girl to go into the Goldengrove, and I used the tales your gram had spun to create their adventures. And then I—I sent it to a publisher.”

  “You stole her story?” I whisper.

  “I had nothing else,” murmurs Madeline, rocking again. “I didn’t know—I had no idea—what it would become. I didn’t think she would ever see it.”

  “But she did,” Fina says. “Everyone saw.”

  “Her copy of the book,” I say suddenly, another puzzle piece lodging in place. “There’s an inscription in it. ‘For my muse and best friend.’”

  It had never even occurred to me that the inscription was from the author. That it meant that Gram was the muse for the book itself.

  “She asked me to sign it,” Madeline says miserably. “I didn’t want to. It was the only copy I ever signed. You see why I signed no more. You see why no one can ever know the truth about R. M. Wildsmith.”

  Madeline’s hand floats to her mouth as a sob escapes her lips.

  “B-b-because there is no R. M. Wildsmith,” she says, hiccuping. “There was only a girl who was bitter in her loneliness and a better girl who found it in her heart to forgive the other. Sh
e was never even angry with me. After her parents died and she returned to Lanternwood, she came to see me. She told me she understood. She said she was happy for my success, as if it were ever really mine. I thought she had forgotten me, you see, but I was wrong. She was the only one who didn’t. Until the very end, she came. She visited. She kept my terrible secret. And now I am alone again.”

  Tears are rolling down my cheeks, too. Because all at once, I understand why Gram kept so much from me. Not because she didn’t trust me, but because she didn’t want to betray Madeline’s secret. And my heart is nearly bursting with pride. Gram, my Gram, was the one who dreamed the Goldengrove and the Dimwood into life.

  At the same time, though, I feel heavy with the weight of knowing everything she had to go through. Everything that Madeline is still going through. I’m not the only one who misses Gram terribly. She was Madeline’s best friend, too.

  “Did you leave the flowers on her grave?” Fina asks. “Was it you we saw in the graveyard on Halloween?”

  Madeline is blank for a moment, then gives a nod. “From my greenhouse,” she says. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I don’t like talking to people. It’s very—difficult for me.”

  “That’s why you wear your headphones when you walk,” I say. “So no one will try to talk to you.”

  “Music,” she mumbles, her voice childlike now. “It calms me. I go to church to hear it. And it gives me the courage to go out walking. I don’t like them to go to waste, you know. The berries and the apples. Flowers and the trees—I understand them. Being with them makes me feel less alone. It’s people that make me feel lonely.”

  I cross the room and kneel down in front of Madeline. “You’re not alone,” I say.

  I take one of her hands. Her skin is thin and soft as silk. I squeeze her hand—gently—because I know it’s what Gram would do if it were me sitting in that chair crying. Because when I was alone and afraid after Gram died, it was Madeline who wrote back to me in the journal.

  “Such a kind child,” she says. “Just like your grandmother. Who else would be so kind to an old fraud?”

  “But you aren’t a fraud,” I say. “Not really. People don’t just read that book for the story. It’s the way it’s written, too. Besides, if you hadn’t turned Gram’s stories into a book, nobody ever would have gotten to read The World at the End of the Tunnel. Gram loved it, you know. She must have read it to me a dozen times.”

  Madeline gives a little sniff, and for the first time since we’ve come, her face seems to relax a bit. “Your gram told me everything about you when she came for her visits,” she says. She reaches her free hand out like she’s going to stroke my cheek, but then she folds it back in her lap. “She told me when she took you to the Golden— Ah, but she called it something else with you. The Spinney, wasn’t it? She told me when she took you there the first time.”

  “And the journal?” I ask. “Did you always know about it?”

  “She told me how you took turns writing in it. I still walk in the woods at night, and sometimes I would go there and read the stories in the journal. I read the chapter you wrote after she died. I don’t know what possessed me, but I thought—I thought you would be missing her, like I was. I thought perhaps you would be less lonely if someone wrote back.”

  “You were right,” I reply. “I did miss her, and it did help. A lot.”

  Madeline says nothing to this. Like the idea she could actually help someone sounds impossible to her. Like she really does think of herself as a fairy-tale witch.

  “We can keep visiting you,” I say. “Just like Gram did.”

  Fina nods. “Definitely.”

  “No,” Madeline says. “No, I couldn’t ask that of you.”

  “It’s what Gram would want,” I reply. “And—” I hesitate for a moment. But I know what I’m about to say is true. And I think Gram would want me to say it. “She would want you to let your publishers do that new edition of The World at the End of the Tunnel.”

  “Yeah,” Fina says eagerly. “It’s like the letter says. Think of all the kids who would read it!”

  “No,” says Madeline again. “I am done taking credit for someone else’s ideas.”

  “You wouldn’t have to. You could tell the truth. You could write it in the new edition. Maybe—maybe it would make you feel better?”

  Then I think about all the people who would come in droves to see the Spinney—the real Goldengrove—if they knew the whole truth.

  “You could stay anonymous,” I add quickly. “No one would know your real name or even Gram’s.”

  She gets that faraway look again as she stares into the fire. “I—I hadn’t thought . . . ,” she starts, but then her voice trails off.

  Suddenly my phone begins to ring. Madeline jumps in her chair like a bird startled from its branch. “Sorry,” I say. I pull the phone out of my pocket. It’s Lily.

  I silence the call and look at the time. Seven o’clock. We’ve been gone almost an hour and a half. I glance over at Fina. “We have to go,” I say.

  Madeline clears her throat. “Your parents will be worried,” she replies, standing up.

  She’s right. They will be worried. And I’ve never been so grateful in my life to have someone to worry about me like that. Someone who cares about me enough to worry.

  I help Fina to stand. “I’ll tell them to come get us at the top of the driveway,” I say. I don’t want them pulling up in front of Madeline’s house and knocking on her door. Something tells me she’s had enough company for one night. “Can you make it that far?”

  “Yeah,” Fina says, putting her foot down and wincing. “I think so.”

  I text Mom where to get us. Then we follow Madeline back to the door, where Fina hands her the letter from the publisher. “So, will you think about the new edition?” she asks. “And what Emma said?”

  “I will,” Madeline says slowly. “I will . . . think about it.”

  I smile at her as she opens the door and cold air rushes in. Fina hobbles out onto the porch.

  “Madeline,” I say, “thank you for telling us the truth. It means a lot. But can I ask you one more thing?”

  We need to go—Mom is probably going to be really mad at me—but I just have to know. There’s one thing Gram kept from me that I still don’t understand.

  Madeline looks at me, waiting.

  “Why do you think Gram didn’t tell me about her vitiligo? Is it because she was ashamed, like her parents were?”

  She blinks, slowly, then shakes her head. “Your grandmother was never ashamed of who she was. But I think she wanted people to see the color she put into the world. Not the color that had been taken from her skin.”

  “Yeah,” I reply, imagining Gram sitting by the river, a paintbrush in her hand. “That sounds like her.”

  “Interesting that your vitiligo should come on after she died,” Madeline murmurs just as I turn away.

  “Why?”

  “My understanding is these things are often brought on by—what’s the word?—traumas.”

  I’m pretty sure Dr. Howard’s pamphlet said something about vitiligo getting triggered by certain things—except it used the word “stress.” I never thought about it being triggered by Gram’s death, though, because “stress” is a word you use to describe how you feel before a big test. Not how you feel when your grandmother—who also happens to be your best friend—dies.

  “I thought I was cursed,” I mumble. “First Gram and then my skin.”

  Madeline reaches out once more, her hand trembling slightly, and this time she does brush it against my cheek. “You are not cursed,” she says. “Every spot you get is just more proof.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Of how much you loved your gram, of course. Of how much you’ll always love her. And there is nothing in this world more beautiful than love, Emma Talbot.”

  As I turn to go, my heart feels like it’s splitting open and being mended back together at the very same time.
>
  45

  Mom and Dad aren’t just worried when Fina, Boomer, and I appear at the top of Briar Hollow Lane. They’re furious. Then they see that Fina is limping, and they go back to worrying.

  “What happened?” Mom says breathlessly. “Why didn’t you call us? What are you doing out here?”

  Instead of answering, I throw my arms around her, then Dad.

  “Let them get in the car, hon,” Dad says over my shoulder. I release him, and he opens the back seat door and helps Fina in, Boomer jumping in after her.

  He and Mom ask Fina about a dozen times if she thinks her ankle could be broken, and by the time she’s finally convinced them that it doesn’t hurt that much, we’re home. So it’s not until we’re back sitting around the table in the kitchen of Morning Glory Cottage—me, Fina, Mom, Dad, and Lily—that I get to explain where we’ve been.

  I tell them everything.

  Well, almost everything. I don’t tell them about sneaking out of the house on Halloween or about our stakeout. I do tell them about the journal, though, and how someone was writing to me and how we figured out that it was Madeline Mitchell.

  I tell them what we heard from Old Joe, Gloria, and Ruth, and Dad’s face goes pale. Mom brings her fingers to her lips.

  “Sick?” Dad asks. “What was she sick with?”

  Fina and I take turns explaining everything Madeline told us. About The World at the End of the Tunnel and Gram’s vitiligo.

  Then a few seconds tick by in silence.

  Dad rubs his face with his palms, shaking his head. “I can’t believe she never told us.”

  “Which part?” Mom asks.

  “Any of it,” Lily says. “All of it. How could Gram’s parents be so cruel?” She bites her lip. Her eyes shine.

  Mom, who is sitting between me and Lily, puts an arm around each of us, but she looks at me. “I know. The world was a different place back then, but I can’t imagine doing something like that to a child, then or ever. I really can’t.”