Pretty Peg

by Skye Allen

  “Bob, I’ve eaten nothing but Indian food all week,” my mother protested, but she served it all up onto the only plates we had four of, brown glazed ones she’d made when she was first learning pottery. Mine had an uneven edge like the mushroom ears of the dwarves. I sat down across from Laura, who had resolutely sat with her back to the piano and was doodling in her chicken tikka masala with a fork, and I remembered Professor Hill sitting in with the band at Fern’s. That was only two nights ago. My head reeled.

  “Well, here we all are,” Dad said with a mouthful of cauliflower. My mother burst into tears and ran up the stairs.

  “Is she all right?” he asked me.

  “She probably just needs a little time with her herbs and potions,” I said.

  Dad nodded. We ate in silence for a while, with interruptions for soft swearing while Laura tried to manage forkfuls of rice left-handed. “Does it hurt a lot?” I asked her.

  “Mmm, under the Vicodin, probably yeah. Ugh. I give up.” She set her fork at an angle on her plate and reached for her glass of ginger ale. “So, Dad?” she said in a soft voice.

  His shaggy head came up from his plate.

  “Can we talk about Robert?” Laura asked.

  “Oh.” Dad’s face closed for a moment. He was in profile to me, and with his eyes shut he looked like unbaked clay: lined skin, graying eyebrows, light brown beard striped with white. There was a blob of curry in it. “Your mom might not have talked to you about him after we moved,” he said when he opened his eyes again to look at the jade plant. “We thought it would keep you girls safe if I took him away, after we found out about—after your sister. You know.” He looked at me. You know?

  I probably knew more than Dad did, but what I knew was from Margaret’s diary. I couldn’t show him that—it didn’t seem fair to her, even though she was gone. I moved my plate to the side to lean into the circle of light made by the tulip lamp over the table. “Yeah.”

  Dad hunched his whole body around his beer bottle. “I sat on him. Took him straight to school and back every day, made him go to counseling. He took care of the yard and the dogs. Never out of my sight. It was a relief when he joined the service.”

  “But you don’t even believe in the government,” Laura said. She rested her huge eyes on Dad. Her voice was clear. Her face was expectant. Focused. There was no trace of glamour in my sister now, or any of her usual dazed personality either. For the first time I could remember, I felt like she was really there, 100 percent present in the room with me. It was an odd sensation. I wondered what she would be like when the Vicodin wore off.

  “I don’t pay taxes, you’re right, because I don’t believe in these endless wars. But the boy needed structure. God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know how bad it could get,” Dad said.

  He hadn’t answered Laura’s question. I felt a deep rush of emotion: the raw-egg feeling of grief for Margaret and the fresh confusion of feeling about the fact that my brother was gone too. I sighed out a ragged breath to stop the crying before it got started. “What was he like before?” I heard myself ask. It wasn’t the question I thought was going to come out. I wanted to know why Robert followed Margaret to the Faerie Realm. And under that I needed the answer to a more basic and awful question: why did he hurt her in the first place?

  “He wasn’t a happy kid. He had a short temper. He was angry a lot. He’d bully his little friends. I should have known. But—your mother and I—if we’d been looking…. We did know.” Dad’s eyes flickered over Laura, across from us, and then he swiveled to look at me before dropping his gaze back to his stubby fingers, locked around the bottle. I saw a soft gleam in the light. He’s still wearing his wedding ring. When he spoke again, his voice was stiff and distant, like he was forcing himself to talk. “I did some reading, went to counseling a couple times myself. It wasn’t easy. The thing is, your brother was—someone hurt him too. You never met him. That was your grandfather, your mom’s father.”

  My mouth filled with the beginnings of furious crying. I didn’t even know why, not exactly. Laura slammed her glass down on the table and sloshed ginger ale onto the clean newspapers I’d laid down under Mom’s wheel. “He never had a chance! Neither one of them did! Margaret’s life was wasted! Jesus, this family is, like, cursed!” She stared at me, eyes full, lips quaking.

  Dad emptied the last third of his beer into his mouth in one long swallow. Then he just stared at Laura, nodding slowly, fingers in his beard. “I know. You’re right. My boy is gone. My boy and my baby girl,” he finally said in a thick voice.

  But the Grant family wasn’t cursed. My beautiful oldest sister was dead, and so was my sick, tormented brother. They had both run to the Faerie Realm to escape their problems, but it had turned out there was no escape for either of them.

  “No, Dad, it’s okay,” I said, and I reached an arm around his heaving shoulder in its blue T-shirt. I thought about how the Summer Folk had loved Margaret, the shocked joy she’d written about when she fell in love with Jerome. I thought about her quick temper and her kindness and the way she used to put on a terrible Scottish accent to read stories to me and Laura when we were little. “There was good in her life. It was short, and that’s horrible, but it wasn’t wasted. You know that. She knew we loved her.” I kept talking even though I lost track of what I was saying, as Laura scraped back her chair and the three of us sat awkwardly hugging for a long time, and I breathed in the Dad smell of motor oil and beer and didn’t try to hold back the crying anymore.

  I looked up after a while and saw Mom at the base of the stairs, wrapped in her favorite long sweater. “Helen,” Dad said, and put out a hand, and my mother stepped in to the circle of what remained of our family.

  MY PARENTS left together later that night. Laura was leaning in her bedroom door yawning like a lion, but when Mom and Dad headed for the front door together, she managed to get out a “Where are you two crazy kids going on a school night?” I wasn’t used to her sounding so normal. I wondered if it was going to last.

  Mom was the one who answered, or she tried to. “My boy. My firstborn is gone now.” And then her voice turned into a high whine of a sob, and she ran to the door.

  Dad’s keys jingled in the pocket of his faded blue coat. I hoped he was sober enough to drive, but I figured Mom had at least one Valium in her. Better him than her. “Girls, we won’t be long. We need to go to.” His mouth twisted. Talking must not have been easy for him either. He tried again: “We need to go to the hospital where your brother and sister were born. We just need to go do this together. Your mother has something she wants to set down there, say a few words, just us this time. Something she needs to do. All right?” His eyes asked for my permission, or for my blessing, or for something.

  “Don’t be gone for another six months this time,” Laura said.

  “Kid, both you kids,” Dad said, taking us both in with his pouchy eyes, “I’m in your life now. No promises about where I’m going to live, okay? But you’re my girls, and I’m in your life.”

  There was no way I could answer that. I kissed his scratchy cheek and pushed him out the door.

  Two minutes later the doorbell rang. This time it was Nicky. She had a bakery box in one hand and a fat bundle of cooking herbs tied with a ribbon in the other, and she had a thinned-out look to her, like if she were human, there would be bags under her eyes. Neil was standing behind her. I pulled them both inside, and Nicky dropped the box to put her arms around me.

  After a long cinnamon-scented hug, I extracted myself long enough to say hi to Neil.

  “Where’s all the Grants?” he said.

  I ticked my fingers. “In bed, out, and out.”

  His dark eyes went wide. “Together?”

  “It’s to do something with my brother and Margaret. I mean, Mom needed to go to the place where they were born, and Dad’s taking her.”

  “Is he going to hang around?” Neil asked.

  “I doubt they’ll get back together, if that’s what you me
an. But I might see him more now. I don’t know.” I wasn’t prepared to ask myself how I felt about that right now. It was enough that he was here, they were both here—my last sister and both my parents were temporarily in the same place at the same time.

  I slipped into my room to make sure my phone was on. Dad had lived in Oakland up until ten years ago, but he still might get lost and need directions.

  I found my phone on my dresser in front of the puppet theater. I looked inside the little cardboard box. It had never looked more ordinary. Simple. Was all the magic gone? The floor was clear of redwood needles, and the wire across the top only held a few ornaments: the solar system made of cereal, a handful of foil stars, a speckled feather. There were no little paper people on the stage. But the blue-green horse was still there, nosing the velvet curtain. Margaret. I feel you here every day, you know. I touched the horse’s coppery mane with a fingertip. I turned out the light and headed back to the living room.

  Nicky’s bakery box turned out to contain a rainbow of tiny macarons. “We need a toast to go with these,” Neil said, and he skittered into the kitchen to dig under the sink. He came out with spiderwebs in his hair and a bottle half-full of light brown liquid. “Just what the doctor.” He poured into three teacups he must have pulled out of the nether reaches of some cupboard.

  “I’ll break it,” I said, warily regarding the blue people on tiny blue bridges painted on the thin white china. The teacup handle had an elbow. Bone china. I’d heard Mom call it that. I wondered how long it would be before Robert was reduced to bones, although I knew it would actually be ashes. Mom and Dad were planning to have him cremated. Nicky had explained to me yesterday that Robert had been carefully left in a part of the park where the ranger would be likely to find him, and the necessities of what authorities did with a dead body had already been taken care of.

  Neil ignored me. “To Margaret. May she finally rest,” he said, and he threw his head back with the cup.

  I drank. It tasted awful. “Rest, Pretty Peg,” I whispered. I wondered if I should wake Laura up for this, but that was probably impossible.

  Nicky refilled the cups with a solemn face. “No,” I said, but she topped mine up anyway.

  She said, “Timothy. His life should not have been taken from him.” We drank.

  None of us wanted to say much after that. I didn’t know about the others, but when I stared into the blurry tulip lamp over the kitchen table, my thoughts were all on Robert. I held my teacup to my mouth and whispered his name.

  “Robert,” they both echoed. We drank. Rest, big brother.

  “Why herbs?” I asked Nicky when she filled my teacup a third time. We were sitting on the floor in front of the couch. I squirmed to let a bare chunk of couch frame massage a sore spot under my right shoulder blade.

  “It’s rue, mugwort, balm of Gilead—stuff that will protect the house. You hang it over the door. A gift from the Lady.”

  I probably don’t need any more magic security now. “So—am I done? The whole family? We’re not going to be, uh, pressed into service anymore?”

  Nicky considered her cup as if there were tea leaves in it instead of whisky. “The Lady sent a message too. The Summer Folk will be in the debt of the Grant family for the length of your lives.”

  I knew enough by now about how fey promises worked. The good guys had won, and they’d do what they could to give me good luck. “So I don’t have to be involved anymore.” I wondered if I would miss the fey.

  She looked at me for a long time, until I felt my body stir. “Some ways of getting involved with the Folk are different from others.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, mortal wench, you’re just getting started.”

  “Oh my God, will you two get a room?” Neil said, and he reached across my legs for the bottle.

  About the Author

  SKYE ALLEN has had short fiction published in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and poetry in Insomnia and Sinister Wisdom. She works as a singing teacher and has a master of music from Notre Dame de Namur University, and she occasionally performs Irish music around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife, two cats, and four chickens. Visit her website at http://allenskye.com, be her friend on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter at @eppiemorrie.

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