Everyone was always watching him. Waiting for him to mess up. Even his friends at his last school had acted sometimes like they thought was crazy. Egged him on and then went silent when he didn’t punk out. No friends yet at this new school. No bad influences, his mother said. A new start. But she was the one who had changed. Said things like, “I always wanted a little girl and now I’ve got one!” And, “It will be good for you, having a little sister. You’re a role model now, Peter, believe it or not, so try to act like one.”
Peter’s mother let Darcy climb into bed with her and her new husband. Lay on the floor of the living room with her head in her new husband’s lap. Darcy curled up beside them. Pretending to be a family, but he knew better. He could see the way Darcy wrinkled her nose when his mother hugged her. As if she smelled something bad, which was ironic, considering.
Peter went down the stairs two at a time. That black tide of miserable joy rose higher still, the way it always did when he knew he was doing exactly the wrong thing. As if he were going to die of it, whatever it was that he was becoming.
Darcy wasn’t in the laundry room. Or the dining room. Peter went into the kitchen next, and knew immediately that she was here. Could feel her here, somewhere, holding her breath, squeezing her eyes shut, picking at her sequins. He thought of the babysitter, Mrs. Daly, and how afraid she’d looked when she left. Almost wished that she hadn’t left, or that his mother and stepfather had skipped the movie, come home when they were supposed to. Wished that he’d told them about Mrs. Daly, except that his mother had sounded as if she were having a good time. As if she were happy.
He kicked a chair at the kitchen table and almost jumped out of his skin to hear it crash on the floor. Stomped around, throwing open the cabinet doors. Howling tunelessly, just for effect, except that it wasn’t just for effect. He was enjoying himself. For a moment he didn’t really even want to find his stepsister. Maybe no one would ever see her again.
She was folded up under the kitchen sink. Scrambled out when the door was flung open, and slapped his leg when he tried to grab her. Then scooted away on her hands and knees across the floor. There was a sort of sting in his calf now and he looked down and saw a fork was sticking out of him. It looked funny there. The tines hadn’t gone far in, but still there were four little holes in the fabric of his jeans. Around the four little holes the black jeans turned blacker. Now it hurt.
“You stabbed me!” Peter said. He almost laughed. “With a fork!”
“I’m the evil stepsister,” his stepsister said, glaring at him. “Of course I stabbed you. I’ll stab you again if you don’t do what I say.”
“With what, a spoon?” he said. “You are going to be in so much trouble.”
“I don’t care,” Darcy said. “Evil stepsisters don’t care about getting in trouble.” She stood up and straightened her princess dress. Then she walked over and gave him a little furious shove. Not such a little shove. He staggered back and then lurched forward again. Swung out for balance, and hit her across her middle with the back of one hand. Maybe he did it on purpose, but he didn’t think he’d meant to do it. Either way the result was terrible. Blow your house down. Darcy was flung back across the room like she was just a piece of paper.
Now I’ve done it, he thought. Now they really will send me away. Felt a howling rage so enormous and hurtful that he gasped out loud. He darted after her, bent over her, and grabbed a shoulder. Shook it hard. Darcy’s head flopped back and hit the refrigerator door and she made a little noise. “You made me,” he said. “Not my fault. If you tell them—”
And stopped. “My mother is going to—” he said, and then had to stop again. He let go of Darcy. He couldn’t imagine what his mother would do.
He knelt down. Saw his own blood smeared on the tiles. Not much. His leg felt warm. Darcy looked up at him, her ratty hair all in her face. She had her pajama bottoms on under that stupid dress. She was holding one arm with the other, like maybe he’d broken it. She didn’t cry or yell at him and her eyes were enormous and black. Probably she had a concussion. Maybe they’d run into Mrs. Daly and her husband when they went to the hospital. He felt like throwing up.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” he said. It came out in a roar. He didn’t even know what he meant. “I don’t know what I’m doing here! Tell me what I’m doing here.”
Darcy stared at him. She seemed astonished. “You’re Peter,” she said. “You’re being my stepbrother.”
“Your evil stepbrother,” he said and forced out a laugh, trying to make it a joke. But it was a wild, evil laugh.
Darcy got up, rubbing her head. She swung her other arm in a way that suggested it wasn’t broken after all. He tried to feel relieved about this, but instead he just felt guiltier. He could think of no way to make things better and so he did nothing. He watched while Darcy went over and picked up the fork where he’d dropped it, carried it over to the sink, and then stood on the footstool to rinse it off. She looked over at him. Said, with a shrug, “They’re home.”
Car lights bounced against the windows.
His stepsister got down off the stool. She had a wet sponge in her hand. Calmly she crouched down and scrubbed at the bloody tiles. Swiped once at the blood on his jeans, and then gave up. Went back to the sink, stopping to pick up and straighten the chair he’d knocked over, and ran the water again to get the blood out of the sponge while he just sat and watched.
His mother came in first. She was laughing, probably at something his stepfather had said. His stepfather was always making jokes. It was one of the things Peter hated most about his stepfather, how he could make his mother laugh so easily. And how quickly her face would change from laughter, when she talked to Peter, or like now, when she looked over and saw Darcy at the sink, Peter on the floor. His stepfather came in right behind her, still saying something funny, his mouth invisible behind that bearish, bluish-blackish beard. He was holding a doggy bag.
“Peter,” his mother said, knowing right away, the way she always did. “What’s going on?”
He opened up his mouth to explain everything, but Darcy got there first. She ran over and hugged his mother around the legs. Lucky for his mother she wasn’t holding a fork. And now here it came, the end of everything.
“Mommy,” Darcy said, and Peter could see the magical effect this one word had, even on accountants. How his mother grew rigid with surprise, then lovingly pliant, as if Darcy had injected her with some kind of muscle relaxant.
Darcy turned her head, still holding his mother in that monstrously loving hold, and gave Peter a look he didn’t understand until she began to speak in a rush. “Mommy, it was Cinderella because I couldn’t sleep and Mrs. Daly had to go home and I woke up and we were waiting for you to come home and I got scared. Don’t be angry. Peter and I were just playing a game. I was the evil stepsister.” Again she looked at Peter.
“And I was Cinderella,” Peter said. The leg of his pants was stiff with blood, but he could come up with an explanation tomorrow if only Darcy continued to keep his mother distracted. He had to get upstairs before anyone else. Get changed into his pajamas. Put things away in the forbidden room, where the werewolves waited patiently in the dark for their story to begin again. To begin the game again. No one could see what was in Darcy’s face right now but him. He wished she would look away. He saw that she still had a smear of his blood on her hand, from the sponge and she glanced down and saw it too. Slowly, still looking at Peter, she wiped her hand against the princess dress until there was nothing left to see.
About the Author
Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. Since 1996 they have published the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Blood, the realization that Peter has just discovered something horrible, and the sure knowledge that—somehow—there’s not going to be a “happy ever after” for anyone in that fictional kitchen but then do any of these characters deserve to be so rewarded?
Do any of us ever truly live happily ever after?
That’s the thing about Kelly Link’s stories: Even when writing what seems to be a straightforward story for younger readers, there’s a complexity that make you think.
Thinking. That’s a scary thought.
THE JACARANDA SMILE
GEMMA FILES
Saw a dead bird in the fountain I eat my lunch by yesterday, eddying stickily to and fro: Bound loosely together with its own decay in a graceful/awful parody of flight, pre-skeletal wings unraveling on a feed-jet tide while its eyeless head cocked back and forth and up and down by turns, like it was listening for . . . something, whatever. No metaphor immediately suggested itself.
Which is why, after staring at it fixedly for a minute, I eventually just noted it all down—fountain, bird, my own vaguely queasy response—and tucked it away, neatly, for further reference.
Afterwards, I came home late, hot and exhausted, to find an email from Dad waiting in my in-box. It said the hospital had finally agreed to turn the penultimate switch on his “significant other,” Aoife. Since the funeral would be held Saturday, in Australia, he didn’t expect me to get there in time, and would prefer I not waste my money trying.
Three spare sentences, maybe four. The first I’d heard from him in . . . months?
Yes: Two, almost exactly.
I sat there at my computer, frowning slightly; looked at the reply icon, without hitting it. And as I read the message on my screen once more, cursor flashing aimlessly in the corner of my eye like an incipient migraine tic, I couldn’t help but replay that moment when they first told him the extent of Aoife’s damage; how he’d hugged me tight, trembling slightly, while I’d just looked straight down at his sandals, to avoid having to look anywhere else. Because it was somehow less intimate, less embarrassing, to count the sunspots on my estranged father’s feet (with their crepe-like skin and overlong old man’s nails) than to think directly about what was happening. What had happened, already. What was going to happen now.
These miles between us always left open, like unhealed lacunae. There’s still half a world of distance between Canada and Australia: Toronto vs. Melbourne, daughter vs. father, writer vs. writer—my life vs. his life, give or take the few small instances where our very separate histories inform each other. His version, vs. my version.
I closed out, shut down my system. Then made more notes, almost reflexively—followed my own unholy instinct to rape and plunder my every experience for enough grit to make a bright new pearl; to use it, before sheer psychological self-preservation drives me to forget those little details that make a story really snap, crackle and pop. What else is life for, after all, if not to provide that sort of wonderfully fecund raw feed? God knows, given its usual content, it’d be a pretty unbearable trip if we couldn’t at least aspire to make it into something else.
I went to bed. I didn’t dream. In the morning, I got up again, and went back to work. Sat at my desk, did my duty. Ate lunch by the same fountain, in almost exactly the same place.
The bird, what was left of it, was still there.
All stories have to start somewhere: It’s a law, like gravity. But when writers say that, what we really mean is that all our stories have to start somewhere, usually with another story. And I am no exception to this rule.
So: Once upon a time . . .
. . . a little girl saw her parents’ battles finally end when her father packed up and fled the North American continent entirely, leaving both his lost love and the child who reminded him of her far behind. Neither of them were bad people, but they weren’t meant to be married—not to each other, anyhow. That’s how I used to console myself, before I figured out doing so meant acknowledging how much better off everybody involved would be, if only I didn’t exist.
Dad went, I stayed. Eventually, he invoked his due visitation rights. Mom didn’t contest. And thus I ferried myself back and forth between two hemispheres each Christmas as an “unaccompanied minor,” trading day for night, night for day. Went down to Van Diemen’s Land, where Outback and Bush alike are clogged with red dirt and empty roads, flora and fauna nothing but a carnival showcase for evolutionary dead ends. Australia, where winter is summer and fall spring, and when you uncork the plug, the water spins the wrong way down the drain.
Since I don’t interact with my dad on a regular basis, it’s become fairly easy for him to rest out of sight and mind for me, most days; same as me for him, I’m sure. Whenever we do think of each other, meanwhile, it’s probably less as ourselves than as a matched pair of long-distance fantasy versions. For me, it’s him when I was nine. For him, it’s me when I was nine.
Too bad, for both of us, that I’m not nine anymore.
So yes, I have a life, and yes, he plays little part in it; I’ve spent the last thirty years going through things Dad had nothing to do with, all of which have shaped the adult I am today far more than any genetic component he and I may still share. Oh, he thinks he “thinks” of me, but does he think of me? Do I “think” of him? Not like he’d like, and not like I’d like. And if my aunt had nuts she’d be my uncle, and if things weren’t the same they’d be different . . .
Nostalgia means “our pain,” in Latin. That’s memory for you, in a big honking nutshell. It’s a curse, osmotically infectious, a shared hallucination, the madness of crowds, the haunted and the haunting. Another country, half the whole wide world away, populated by nothing . . .
. . . but ghosts.
The first time my mom read “The Jacaranda Smile,” she looked up at me with her eyebrows knit and her eyes ever-so-slightly narrowed—not mad, simply quizzical.
“That’s not how it happened,” she said.
“Which part?”
“Any of it.”
So she didn’t like it, which was a pity. But I gave up on getting my mother’s approval long ago, right about the same time I made it clear that—whether I wrote “what [I] know” or not—nothing I hammered together out of my own highly subjective life experience was ever going to get me onto Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club list.
Here’s how it works: I’m a writer, which means I lie for a living—take things I think I remember happening and spin tales from them, then sell what’s left behind. I fabricate until I move from what might have happened to what never did, which is where I finally gain control over my own material, to shape it as I will.
“They’re giving you a prize for this?”
“Three hundred dollars U.S., publication in their anthology. Plus a trip to Melbourne.”
“Will there be a dinner?”
“Formal, yes. Got any fashion tips?”
Another look, like she wasn’t sure if I was joking, or whether I actually meant it. Or both.
“If you’re thinking about patterns, try a vertical one,” she said, finally. “It’ll make you look slimmer, from a distance.”
After Dad left, Mom got a job at Wintario. We moved from Hocken Avenue to Wychwood, further west along St. Clair, where just being in the front yard made me nervous. A certain tree grew there, dead center. When winter came, it shed its leaves to reveal a horrible secret—a stunted branch that thrust itself from the main trunk and raised fistfuls of twigs to a pewter sky, howling. This, to my child’s mind, was the “witch” in Wychwood. It watched me slouch off to school every morning, then hesitate at the corner every night, trying to get up the courage to scuttle past it towards safety.
I got sick a lot. Early one morning of Year One, I woke with a splitting headache, turned over, and vomited into my own bed. My mother held me over the toilet until the sun came up. It was stomach flu, but I thought I was going to die. Every headache was a brain tumor. At Hillcrest Elementary, wh
ich was under repairs, I shared a portable classroom with twenty or so other children. They found me sullen, strange and arrogant. I found them hideously stupid.
Our teacher, Mrs. Rudnick, told us that if Ronald Reagan were elected President that year, the world would end. He was. At night I lay awake, wondering what it would be like: Would somebody, somewhere, simply flick a switch, and make everything I knew disappear? And even worse—
—what then?
It’s hard, sometimes, to remember just how passionately I used to love my dad and how deeply I felt his absence, after he went back to Australia for good—an intimate hurt, one that left no visible scar. I set up an altar to him in my closet, where I’d write little notes on the backs of old scripts and burn them in what used to be his ashtray, when he still smoked. I’d watch the smoke spiral upward, hoping it might translate itself to the other side of the world and crack that aching silence wide enough for him to suddenly “know” what I wanted him to do or say, without my ever having to ask at all. Make him want to, without question or regret, as naturally as though he’d thought of it himself.
Magic: At bottom it’s all just nursery-school science. Every magician is nothing but a kid in a tantrum writ large, who draws dirty pictures of their enemies in wax, or cloth, or sand, and then rips them limb from limb.
When I was a child, I used to cut pieces out of things, as small as I could manage, and then hide them where they wouldn’t be found until later, if at all: Cushions, plants, photographs. After I turned nine—the year of the divorce—my acting out became shaped by my increasing addiction to books on Witchcraft Made Easy. One time, I saved my menstrual blood in a bottle, kept it until it turned black and stinking, then dropped it down a dusty grate in Dad and Aoife’s bedroom with its stopper pulled out, right before I got on the plane back to Canada. Took them a week to figure out where all those ants were coming from, and why.
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