by Laura Kenyon
Rapunzel shifted into the cushion. He was describing the exact same Belle she used to find so irritating. The old Belle. The goody-two-shoes with no emotions and a life-size doll’s wardrobe.
Donner crossed the room and leaned into one of the windows near the hall. He stood this way for a few painful seconds while Rapunzel tore shards of skin from her bottom lip.
"At first, I just wanted her to let loose—to see if she was even capable of any sort of emotion. I wanted her to yell at me for something. Break a lamp. Anything. I wanted to know all sides of my wife—not just the perfect ones. Because God knows I'm not perfect."
Another shard of skin, but no response. When did Donner Wickenham become so … deep? Was that why he’d fallen for Belle’s sister? Because she was bossy, unhinged, selfish, and everything Belle wasn’t? Was it ironic or just sad that in order for Donner to fall back in love with Belle, he had to make her despise him?
"Sometimes I just wanted to lie in bed with my wife, you know? Before the shower and the jewelry and the perfume." He shook his head and pushed back off the wall.
“Believe it or not, I get that,” Rapunzel heard herself saying. “I actually do. But if that’s really what you wanted, why did you insist on her dressing up like a porcelain doll all the time? All of those ridiculous dresses … as if we were still living in the eighteenth century and she needed something to prove she was actually royalty.”
He sighed, pinched his nose between both fingers and muttered something inaudible. Then he turned to face her. “There are two sides to every story. But look, that’s not why I brought us up. My point was that if Belle and I had what you and Ethan do—so long as you stop running away from it—things would have been very different.”
Rapunzel rolled her eyes. “You can’t possible know that. Maybe if you married Julianne to begin with, it would have been Belle’s panties beneath that nightstand and Julianne sobbing on my doorstep at two a.m.”
“I know more than you think,” he snarled, his eyes suddenly darker, as if a shadow was crossing over them. “I let other people’s opinions stand in my way once, and it ruined my life.”
“Are you serious? You think losing Julianne ruined your—”
“Dammit, I’m not talking about Julianne!”
Rapunzel heard the roar first, then the crash. Then she saw the blood on Donner’s hand and the shards of glass on the wet floor. He turned his injured palm toward the ceiling but did nothing to stop the blood. Rapunzel’s heart thundered against her ribs.
“I’m sorry,” he said, backing up. “It’s this damn curse. A lifetime sentence for a single stumble.”
Something cold and fluttery shot up Rapunzel’s back. She felt entire body leaning forward, willing him to reveal one of the biggest secrets of the century—the story about who turned Donner Wickenham into a beast six years ago and why.
“If you want to know so badly,” he said, scooping up the shards of glass, “just ask.”
Rapunzel looked up from the chair and gave him an odd look—as if he’d just appeared out of nowhere and she didn't know what to say. Donner glanced at the couch but then retreated to the fireplace. He tossed the glass onto the wood, grabbed a stack of cocktail napkins, and leaned against the brick.
“There was someone before Belle,” he said, applying pressure to the makeshift bandage. “No, there was the one before Belle.” Rapunzel felt her eyes widen. “We had what you and Ethan have. When she wasn’t around, I was a lesser person. When she was around, everything was brighter, warmer, happier.”
Rapunzel migrated to the edge of her seat. She pictured a different Donner—younger, kinder, gentler.
“Then someone killed her.” Rapunzel gasped, then held her breath. “And I spiraled. I couldn’t have cared less about living anymore. I wanted to be in the ground with her, but I was too cowardly to do it. So I drank myself into belligerence every night. I went to bars and started fights, hoping one might solve my problem. Then one day, some high-and-mighty fairy with no idea what I was going through took it upon herself to teach me a lesson instead of help. And before I knew it, poof! The monster raging inside of me switched places with the outside and the rest is Marestam history.”
Rapunzel stared at his shadow, transfixed. “That’s horrible,” she said, suddenly wanting to defend him. “That’s not fair. That’s exactly the sort of thing that makes people afraid of magic. Do you know who it was? Who cursed you?”
Donner’s head sprung up in surprise. One side of his mouth drifted to the side as his bottom lip slowly opened … then pulled closed again. He looked the other way and shook his head.
Rapunzel had a feeling he was lying. There were only so many purebloods known to exist. Could it possibly have been his own mother?
“Do you know who killed the woman you were in love with? Did they ever catch him?”
Donner sucked both cheeks in and shifted his palm into a claw. Rapunzel pulled the throw pillow into her chest.
“Yes,” he said, escaping into some mental dungeon from which she doubted he’d return anytime soon. “Her husband. She wasn’t the first.”
* * *
After watching him stare out the window and twist his eyebrows in silence for a good twenty minutes, Rapunzel realized Donner had told her everything he was comfortable telling, and was going to keep any remaining secrets locked in his vault. Perhaps that’s the real reason he’d flown across the world—not to provide unnecessary help in the search for Grethel, but because he wanted someone in Belle’s corner to hear his side of the story for a change.
Well, fine. She needed to get some air anyway, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to survey for Ethan from the rooftop. She’d forgotten her phone in his waterproof backpack, and was getting a little worried. She knew he could handle himself, but like Donner said, parts of her were different when he wasn’t around. It was one of many new sensations she was still getting used to. So, with a farewell glance at Donner, she pushed herself up from the armchair, wobbled towards the kitchen, and started up the stairs.
She knew Grethel wasn’t home because she would have rushed out with either a suffocating hug or a vehement tirade. That’s what she remembered most about her childhood: it was an unpredictable dance of cuddles and reprimands, of belly-laugh afternoons and long stretches of complete isolation. At first, it was all the former. She had a mother, a mentor, and a best friend all rolled into one. She had an island paradise at her feet and a clear view all the way to the horizon. Back then, there was no such thing as deception, or bullying, or heartache. She fit into her perfect little world like a cork fit into a wine bottle. Until one day, she didn’t.
Rapunzel held her breath as she stepped onto the landing and saw her bedroom door for the first time in over a decade. It was categorically the same. It was pink. It was covered in stickers. It held a huge cardboard sign with her name scrawled by a dozen different scented markers. As she passed over the threshold, she noted that the blueberry letters still smelled.
Inside, everything looked exactly the way it had the day she disappeared, though no dust had accumulated. Socks were strewn across the floor, but the carpet looked freshly vacuumed. The bed was unmade, the bottom dresser drawer was ajar, and … she gasped … her very first journal sat, open, on her freshly polished desk. A blue pen lay across the right-hand page.
Dear Diary, the first line read. Rapunzel cringed at the lack of originality. I’m torn. I met the most amazing man today—a prince, just like in the storybooks—and he wants me to run away with him. And I want to. I want to see all of the amazing things he’s sworn exist somewhere outside of this island. But I’m scared. It took G years to admit that other people even exist beyond this island. And when she did, she made me promise never to leave. She said we’re safe here. And happy. She said the rest of the world holds nothing but misery. She said that if I left, I’d end up just like my birth parents—desperate, selfish, and enslaved by my own hand. Perhaps even worse, she said she wouldn’t be able to help me. I really
don’t know what to do. Universe, please tell me what to do. The future has suddenly opened up but both paths are murky. And I have to decide by tonight because—
It stopped abruptly. Rapunzel didn’t need a play-by-play to remember what happened next. Grethel had called her down to dinner. Rapunzel, who hadn’t yet learned how to camouflage her emotions, gave herself away by asking too many questions. This led to a fight. In anger, Rapunzel had threatened to run away.
“In fact,” she’d said, “When you wake up in the morning, I might be in another world entirely … on the other side of that reef you put up to pen me in.”
“Reef?” Grethel had repeated, forming an expression of such profound sadness, it seared into Rapunzel’s memory for the next dozen years. “Who told you there was a reef?”
Several hours later, after screaming and crying until her head felt like it might explode, Rapunzel got what she requested but didn’t actually want—to be as far from Grethel as humanly possible.
“I’m sorry, G,” she whispered now, closing the journal and dropping the pen into a mug she and Grethel had made together one rainy afternoon. It said Daydreamer in raised blue letters and was about as lopsided as it could get without toppling over. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t really want to leave.” She sniffled. The tears came fast, welling up and tipping over her lids without the slightest pause in between. She stared out the porthole window and slammed her wrist on the desk. “I never thought you’d actually get rid of me so easily.”
“You think it was easy?”
Rapunzel jumped. She dried her eyes with her wrists and spun around. The figure in the doorway was slightly blurry from the remaining tears, but she knew exactly who it was. Her heart leapt up and splattered against her rib cage.
With one turn of the head, she was suddenly a child again, caught storing broccoli in her dinner napkin for an eventual flight out the window. She was a teenager, losing her ring in the liquor cabinet she wasn’t supposed to touch in the first place. She was a thirty-year-old bachelorette, slumped over her journal looking at the woman who’d fed her, bathed her, read to her, sang with her, tucked her in, and one dark day decided to wash her hands of her.
“Punsy,” Grethel said, though the sound was so soft, she only recognized it by the way her lips moved. The only things she heard clearly were the pounding of her heart and the rustle of Grethel’s ankle-length skirt as she crept forward. It stopped halfway and waited, either out of caution or respect, but her eyes seemed to advance the remaining six feet anyway.
Rapunzel swallowed hard and looked at the carpet. She wasn’t ready for this … this what? Reunion? Rematch?
“Letting you go was anything but easy,” Grethel said, rubbing a chunky silver heart dangling from a leather cord around her neck. It seemed to glow blue the more she rubbed. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
Rapunzel exhaled and immediately tried to shake the words away. She glanced up for just a second to see those eyes still staring back at her—those emerald green eyes with the orange ring around the pupil, the only ones that had looked at her for eighteen years straight. “You didn’t have to,” she said. “I was angry when I said those things to you. I didn’t realize I was so expendable that—”
“Expendable?” Grethel rushed forward, her head shaking and the ruffles of her skirt flowing like brown lava. “No. Is that what you think?” She stopped suddenly and took Rapunzel’s face between her hands. “There is nothing in the world I love more than you. But this tower was built for a bitter, lonely woman with no faith left in the world. It was wrong of me to ever think I could have kept you here.”
Rapunzel bit back the sting and pushed her hands away. She jumped to her feet. “Wrong for who? Since when do you care about being wrong? You attacked people to keep them away from this island. This entire house is filled with things you stole—me included. You’re telling me you couldn’t fight the temptation to swipe someone else’s coffee table, but kicking me out over one teenage tantrum—no problem?”
The outburst acted like a mushroom cloud, ballooning out around the room and continuing to rumble long after the initial explosion. Grethel stepped back, her shoulders hunched and her hands poised in front of her. They were significantly more wrinkled now, as if her skin was in the middle of a drought, and all of her veins seemed to jut too far above the surface. But her eyes were still intense. Her hair, while interfused with white, still looked primarily chocolate. And Rapunzel could still see a little youthfulness in her face, though it seemed to be retreating—quickly—at the moment.
“You’re absolutely right,” she said, her voice trembling. “I’m not a good person. I don’t do what’s right. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I have no friends. That’s why the world makes up stories about how evil I am, and I don’t even care. But there is one thing I care about more than myself.” She looked up. Their eyes magnetized. “You’re not a coffee table, Rapunzel. You have free will. I wanted you to want to stay, forever. But eventually, forever would mean all alone. It killed me to set you free, but I had to do the right thing just that once. I had to do the right thing when it came to you.”
“But …” Rapunzel’s voice felt tiny. “If you wanted me to have a life outside of here, why didn’t you just let me go with Ethan?”
Grethel’s lips rose a bit on both sides, then parted. “I didn’t know Ethan,” she said, saying his name as if she was flicking an ant. “And I wanted you to find yourself first. I wanted you to get to know the world before deciding what you wanted out of it. You spent your entire life eating nothing but bread and suddenly got a taste of pineapple. But I didn’t want you eating only pineapple for the rest of your life either—not without ever trying chocolate or strawberries or steak. I mean … you’re the wordsmith here, but … does that make any sense?”
Grethel looked desperate for an answer. She wanted Rapunzel to open her arms and say, “Yes. I forgive everything you put me through. The desolation. The tears. The feeling of complete worthlessness. The men who took advantage of me because you left me with nothing and no clue how to get by. I forgive you for all of it because you were just trying to set me free, like the bird in that poem.”
But that isn’t what she said. Instead, Rapunzel shook her head slowly and thought about how she used her first job—fetching coffee at the Mirror—to research every registered fairy in Carpale and the realms around it. She thought about how she wrote freelance travel pieces about every known destination that even remotely resembled the island she stood upon now. She thought about Grethel’s threat to plunge Ethan back into darkness if he didn’t keep its location a secret—even from her.
“I tried to find you,” she finally said. “For years. I looked everywhere I could think of. Why didn’t you want me to? I still could have had a life outside this island without losing you completely. We could have talked or written or visited. Crap G, you’re a pureblood fairy. You could have zapped in for a nightcap and then zapped right back here in seconds. You didn’t have to cut me off completely.”
Grethel pressed her thin lips together and clutched the locket again. This time, it seemed to pulse a faint green. “There was a time I thought I could keep you here forever—when you were a baby, when you lit up every time you saw me, when you raced across the room, arms spread open, and crashed into my legs to hug them. I thought we could be best friends forever, a mother-and-daughter duo. But that's not natural. Rapunzel, you are a remarkable woman. Always have been. It would have been wrong of me to hold you back.” She glanced away. “But for what it’s worth, I never actually left you. I was there for everything. The ups and the downs. The lazy, comfortable days, and the brand new beginnings. You just didn’t recognize me. You weren’t supposed to. I didn’t want to be your burden.”
“Burden?” Rapunzel’s head shook a dozen times in two seconds. “What are you talking about? You wouldn’t have been a b—”
“Punsy, I’m dying,” she said, stopping Rapunzel’s tongue as effective
ly as a meat cleaver.
“What?” Her heart was racing. She could feel and hear every blood vessel in her body.
“I need to show you something,” Grethel said, pulling slowly away. “Upstairs. It’s been locked long enough.”
* * *
For years, Rapunzel imagined what could be hiding inside Grethel’s top-secret office. Was it gold? Guns? Bodies? Did she keep a secret lover locked away in there? Was Grethel even more into bondage and submission than she was?
But when the key finally penetrated the lock and the deadbolt clacked aside, Rapunzel saw a cluttered office filled with newspaper clippings from Marestam, photos of Rapunzel as recent as two weeks ago, and medicine—shelves and shelves overflowing with medicine.
“You should have told me,” Rapunzel said for what seemed like the fifth time since coming downstairs. A goblet of wine sat between her hands, but for some reason she didn’t feel like drinking it. The mention of cancer tended to take away even liquid appetites. “I could have helped. I could have been there for you.”
Grethel shook her head. “All you missed out on was twelve years of nagging and power struggling.”
Rapunzel frowned. “Well, I’ll take that as an I.O.U.” She moved her glass pointlessly along the table. This was so much harder than she’d expected. “But are you absolutely sure you can’t stop it? You can’t cast some kind of spell to reach inside and pull all of it out?” She thought of Ethan, who was in the living room with Donner. “Is it because all your powers are being used to power Ethan’s sight? Because I don’t think he’d want that. He knows how much you mean to me and—”
“That’s not why,” Grethel said, looking down to conceal a humble smile. “His spell isn’t taking much from me.”