Saffron knew she had just been dreaming, probably even up to the point when she woke up, about something particularly nasty. Something she had enjoyed immensely but couldn’t remember what right now. What if her mother heard her talking, or worse yet, moaning? It was way too embarrassing. Saffron fake-yawned and fake-stretched. “I’m going to the movies with Mindy tonight.”
“Wow!” Audrey stopped and turned around with socks in her fist. She didn’t restrain her enthusiasm at all. “You’ll have to tell me all about it when you get back. I’m so happy you’re spending time with some friends. It’ll be so much fun!”
Saffron nodded as she unconsciously kneaded her hair, causing the big red mess of it to knot further. “It’ll be great.”
Audrey clapped her hands and walked over to pat Saffron’s knee under the blanket. “Go get ready for your movie. It’s going to take you three hours to comb out that head.”
Saffron realized what she was doing and lowered her hands to her lap.
Audrey tweaked Saffron’s nose. “I’m making chicken pot pie from scratch. I’ll go start on it.”
Saffron stared at the ceiling for a little bit, her hand back in her hair, twirling her fingers around her knots until they tripled and quadrupled. Finally, she got up, lurched out into the hall and headed for the bathroom.
The phone rang with a screech that rebounded off the high ceilings of the farmhouse, making her jump. They kept the ringer on high so they could hear the phone over the loud music any one of them might be playing at any time. Saffron stopped halfway to the bathroom when her mother called out, “Saffron, it’s for you.”
“I’ll get it in my room.” Saffron yelled down the stairs, then turned around and lurched back in the opposite direction. The old phone her mother had put in her room eight years ago was dusty with nonuse.
“Hello?”
“Can you like, (snort) can your mother, like, pick us up? Eve lost her license, Tamara crashed her ride last week, and Rochelle is still high from last night, so we need a ride. You need to go get your license.”
So that was what Mindy wanted. And hadn’t Saffron known that? Why had she defended Mindy to Coco? “Yeah, my mom can give us a ride.” She looked at her mirror, where she found herself glaring back at herself.
“Make sure you get here by seven – don’t be late.” Saffron could hear the other girls laughing and screaming in the background. Mindy hung up.
Saffron took a shower and began to dress for her big night out. She breathed a long, heavy sigh. She sat down in front of the elaborate boudoir mirror, a heavy and ornate piece that Audrey and Derek had purchased at an antique store and lovingly refurbished for her last Christmas. Obviously, they had hoped she’d get a life and primp in front of it. It took Saffron forever to rip the knots out of her hair - no conditioner could conquer them - then another half hour drying her hair with a big round brush. When it was mostly dry, she pulled the long, unheeding tresses back and secured her hair at the nape of her neck with a tortoise-shell clip. One corkscrew at her temple popped out sideways.
The attack began during dinner. She didn’t say anything to her mother or Derek. Her stomach twisted and pulled, twisted and pulled, till a sheen of sweat coated her forehead. And the burning! She wanted to rip her gut out and douse it in ice water. In half an hour she was riding high on the jitters. She had had plenty of anxiety attacks before to know what was happening to her. And always, it took just the smallest thing to set her off. She wasn’t really panicking over the fact that her hair was atrocious. In fact, she had no idea why she was panicking. All she knew was she did not want to go out…not tonight. She began to concoct lies in her head, stories to tell Mindy and her friends, fibs to feed her mother - she was sick, she was tired, she forgot she had to work tonight. Anything to get out of this stupid girls-night-out-thing.
She trudged up to her vanity and sat down hard, slumped and dejected. She had some ideas earlier that afternoon about wearing a moss-green sweater, her favorite. It was a tunic with capped sleeves, which she tied off with a sequined, eggplant-purple kimono sash. Now that the time to leave was approaching, she wondered what in the world she had been thinking. Of course she wasn’t going to wear such a color and combination. Mindy had always told her she dressed like a reject.
Saffron settled on an old high school standby - a black, fitted t-shirt and black cargo pants. She smoothed some lipgloss on her trembling lips, her jelly arms taking ten times the usual effort to do the small task. She inspected herself in the mirror and decided her lips looked greasy. She wiped off the lipgloss with her forearm. She sat for a beat staring glumly at her reflection, then picked up the tube of lipgloss and put it in her pants pocket. She took it out and slapped it back on the vanity. As she stood, she grabbed for the tube of ChapStick that lay on her dresser. She wouldn’t take the gloss. She’d look stupid putting on makeup in public, she knew, better to reapply ChapStick; at least it was practical. Saffron now contemplated the concealing powder that she had fished out from her mother’s stash. Just a little, she thought, try and cover those freakin’ rings under your eyes. You look like a raccoon. The makeup wasn’t very effective. Of course, this had much to do with the fact that she didn’t know how to apply it. She wiped the powder off with a tissue and stared at herself again. “Man, Saffron, you have got to get some sleep,” she breathed the words out. Just tell them you’re sick. Yeah, and how many times have you used that excuse? Do you want them to look at you one more time like that? Like you’re the most pitiful moron on earth? Can you even stand it one more time? No.
She decided the hairdo wouldn’t do, too teachery or maybe too lawyer-like. But that wasn’t it either. Something about the way she had raked her hair up in back was unsettling to her, though she couldn’t imagine why. But it started her thinking about Ny. Then she started thinking about Li and how Li would not want her going out tonight. And wasn’t this, in the end, the very reason why she was forcing herself to go? Just so Li wouldn’t get her way? Was all of this tension worth that? Yes.
Why?
Quickly, Saffron let her hair fall free, and as soon as it curtained her neck and back, she felt somewhat better. She tried six other styles before finally settling on loose and flowing with just a tiny section pulled across her forehead and held fast with a tiny glitter clip. She crossed the room to the door, then ran back in front of the mirror and pulled some hair forward to cover the clip. It was too shiny. She tripped downstairs, grabbed her jacket off the newel post, crossed the hall, and went out onto the farmer’s porch where Audrey and Derek were stringing up grapevine wreaths decorated with tiny pumpkins and ivy. Audrey stopped moving when she laid eyes on Saffron’s whitewashed face almost hidden within the puff of her great red hair. The hair looked like it had suffered severe abuse.
She wanted to reach out to Saffron and hold her like she did when Saffron was little. But the child Saffron was always rigid in her embraces; this new woman before her seemed even less receptive. Saffron looked more stricken than an innocent in the guillotine. So Audrey didn’t move toward Saffron, instead she leaned her weight on the support beam of the farmer’s porch and let Derek have at her.
“Oh, good. The fricken commandant is back.” Big, hairy Derek chewed his gum with his mouth open.
Saffron crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her tongue out at him.
“Honestly, what happened? You were doing better for a bit. So much flair, such pissass! Now who the frick stands before me in all her midnight, bottom-of-the-pond, inside-the-gut-of-a-fish, blackness and gloom? Hm?”
“Mom, control your boyfriend.”
“I don’t know, Saffron…are you okay? You look…,” Audrey indicated her own face with a flutter of fingers but said nothing more.
Figures, Saffron thought. All they could do on “the big night out” was to remind her that she looked like a wreck. When did mothers stop inspecting their daughters, anyway? When did mothers stop giving unwanted commentary about holes in jeans and bad bras? T
oo much makeup, bad makeup choices. This should be more, that should be less. If Saffron could have cried, she would have. All she could do was quake, her eyes bugging out like a marmoset’s.
She could feel it coming, something coming. A freight train with no brakes, screaming toward her through the black, a smile on its grilled lips, ready to smash into her and run her through three miles of night, stuck like a bug to its cold, steel nose.
Out of the corner of her eye, Saffron saw an old man wearing overalls leaning on the rail at the other end of the porch. Through the man, Saffron saw the last of the sun as it sank into the ocean. She rolled her eyes.
“Let’s just go, Mom, okay? Time ta hit the open trail!”
Derek swore as he stuck himself with a pushpin meant for the vine.
The old man crossed his boots at the ankle and smiled at her. Saffron curtsied and turned away from him, Derek, and her mother. She headed toward Audrey’s Rav4, hysterical laughter bubbling up from her throat and blowing out like a plume on the chilly autumn air. She trotted her imaginary horse across the gravel drive and beneath the orange-leafed maples.
The garden gnome darted out from under the farmer’s porch, ran between her legs, and howled with glee as Saffron stumbled and struggled to keep herself from smashing face-first onto the gravel and first-fallen leaves.
Audrey, who was watching Saffron’s every move, gasped as Saffron suddenly stopped her horse play and tripped for no reason across the driveway. “OhmyGod,” Audrey muttered, “I can’t take this.”
“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt…”
Saffron had one foot in her mother’s car when she froze and turned toward the voice. It was a deep voice and one she had never heard before. Audrey and Derek stopped short too, he with his hands in the bag of tiny pumpkins and she with her hands on her hips.
“Hi, hello…” The man was coming toward them from out of the woods, their woods. He must have been six feet tall, with wide, wide shoulders, messy, dark hair and a five o’clock shadow that begged to be shorn. He carried a walking stick as he made his way toward them.
Saffron looked quickly to her mother, and then to Derek, who made no move. When the man got closer, Saffron gasped. First, his clothes were so weird. His pants looked like they were cut from some castle’s dark tapestry, and his black top was long-sleeved, with no visible seams, stitching, or weave; like a sweater but not. It had a heavy drape and looked like alien sportswear. They couldn’t accuse him of being some high-fashion European with a thousand-dollar ensemble because the clothes were clearly well-worn and faded, even tattered around the ankles. High-Fashion Europeans wouldn’t wear worn thousand-dollar outfits.
But what she saw in his eyes made her clutch the car door for balance. As he walked up to Audrey he gave Saffron a good, long look; and in his eyes (they were light-green turquoise with a star of bronze shooting out from the black center), she saw recognition. Her bottom lip went slack.
“So sorry to trouble you. I’m searching for the Bucknell family. I heard they live here in this house?” He looked at Saffron again, as if he couldn’t stop, while he waited for Audrey to reply.
Saffron turned away and fell into the passenger seat, shutting the door like a gunshot in the crisp, peaceful, golden afternoon.
“Bucknell?” Audrey’s murmur was slow and troubled. “John Bucknell built this house…in 1860…”
The man frowned. He sighed. He looked down at the ground and slid his hands into his pouchy pockets. The walking stick rested in the crook of his right arm. He looked up quickly and grinned. “I guess I’m a little late, then. I’ll try back later.”
Now Audrey eyed Derek, and like a shot, he was by her side. “Is there anything else we can help you with?” Derek was all man, ready to kill for his wife and cub. (Since it looked like he wasn’t about to get a date.)
“No, no.” The man paused, looked up blankly at an oak tree. “Thank you! I’ll be on my way, now.” His head turned slightly in Saffron’s direction but he never actually looked at her again. He started down the gravel drive toward the main road. Halfway down, he spun around and gave a little wave. Then, one hand in one weird pocket, the other on the walking stick, he hiked off.
Audrey and Derek never moved as they watched him walk all the way down the drive and out of sight. Saffron stared too, out the back window of the Rav4, biting her bottom lip.
“Is there some bylaw that says, ‘You can trespass on anyone’s land if you’re hot.’?” Derek fanned his face.
Audrey nodded. “Do you think he got separated from his biking group? They’re always on this road.”
Derek scoffed, “Audrey, he didn’t have a bike. And what was that stick; is he Jolly Old St. Nick?”
“Well, I don’t know. What the hell was he doing here? What the hell was that all about?”
“I’ll tell you what it was about. It’s time for a glass of wine. I’ll feed the animals; you get her to the bitches three. I’ll guard the house in case Hot n’ Crazy returns.”
Audrey ribbed him with her elbow. “Don’t call her friends that. They’re young; they’ll change.”
Derek rolled his eyes. “Oh, spare me, Audrey.”
“And don’t protect the house in your birthday suit, armed with a bottle of Mumm.” Saffron was in the car, checking her teeth in the rearview mirror. Audrey watched her. “If he comes back, it won’t be for you.”
When Audrey sat in the driver’s seat she turned to Saffron. “Did you recognize him?”
Saffron shook her head, no.
“Huh. That was the strangest damned thing. He recognized you.” Audrey’s words untethered Saffron. And, while she wanted to float blissfully in that stratosphere forever, she hummed tunelessly to bring herself back to the uncomfortable place and time she was used to.
Audrey and Saffron picked up Mindy and Co. The other girls chattered nonstop, never saying a word to Saffron until they got to the movie theater. Audrey gave Saffron her cell phone and told her to text when they were ready to be picked up. Saffron frowned at the phone. Audrey sighed, put the car in park, and explained to Saffron how to use the phone. The other had girls snickered and walked off. Audrey gave Saffron a minty kiss on the cheek and drove away. If Audrey had noticed the pot stink and alcohol breath of “the girls,” she said nothing.
Saffron slouched through the double glass doors of the theater and quick-scanned the lobby. Her face reddened every time she made eye contact with strangers, dead and alive, until finally, she found the group of girls. They were flipping their hair, talking animatedly, and coughing out greatly exaggerated laughs. To Saffron, they seemed so free and easy. They also seemed to be unaware of their actions, their bodies, and the attention they were gathering. Saffron ground her teeth.
“Saffron, are you really friends with those cackling hens?”
Saffron startled like a baby bird and turned around. She was face-to-face with Markis. She crossed her arms across her chest. He smiled at her encouragingly.
“Actually, I babysit them. This is our Friday night outing.” She nodded and chewed on her bottom lip. She was trying to keep herself from grinning like a fool, her first genuine smile of the day, of the week. She felt her mind claw through the fog of sleep deprivation and carry her to a place where she could feel again - feel him warming the center of her.
She was so glad she didn’t wear her mossy-green sweater tonight. It was too old-looking anyway, like she was thirty or something. But what about her ass? These were the pants that gave her wide-ass. But she had no choice! The other black pants, the jeans, rode so low they showed her coin slot when she bent over, admittedly trendy right now, but not her thing. She seized up, there was something else…she hadn’t checked her breath before she left the house. Sure, she had brushed, flossed, used Listerine to kill the germs, and Scope to kill the Listerine, Plax, and her electric tongue-brusher. She had taken one last look/see in the rearview mirror, but she hadn’t actually checked her breath. She took a step back from Markis.
; He was still smiling. And looking good, too, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. He was in great shape, his new thing was mountain bike racing, and Saffron ached to just reach forward and manhandle him. She realized she probably looked a mite maniacal at the moment and tried in vain to tone her smile down.
“What are you and the kids going to see?”
Her cheeks burned scarlet as she answered in a mumble. Markis bent forward to catch the last of it. He frowned and said, “I wouldn’t imagine that would be your kind of movie.”
Heat prickled under her black t-shirt and she knew in a minute it would make her face look splotchy. He imagined about her? Markis Bryant imagined about her? She wanted to cry. She wanted to thank him and bring him gifts. While she hyperventilated, she caught a whiff of him, one of those water scents. Like “Bubbling Water” or “Man Water” or “Ravaged Ocean Man.” Nothing in the world would ever smell better to her than this moment of cheap cologne, musky theatre carpet, and modified popcorn chemical number 5 as the scents mingled and rhapsodized her senses. She looked around to see if anyone saw them standing together. If anyone saw him talking to her.
Now, in a higher-pitched, more-confident mumble, she said, “I don’t really want to see it, but I’m with them.” She thumbed the cackling horde. “They’re looking for sex and violence.” Her throat erupted on ‘violence’ when she realized she had just said “sex.” To Markis. Oh, my God, you idiot - don’t say sex!
He leaned forward again, his manner intense, his voice husky, “What are you looking for?”
Saffron leaned back and made a noise somewhere between a bark and a hiccup. She turned red all over again and realized that the short window of opportunity that would have allowed her to say something cool had closed with a bang. Since there was silence between them, her mouth began working but no sound came. And so easily, he smiled again, his eyes bright and intense moving over her face.
Fairy Circle Page 11