“Apparently they think some research we own will be good for their, ah, wrinkle creams and stuff.”
Libby rolled her eyes. “Robbie.”
“Robbie.”
He was a smooth talker, that man. Robert Donavan. Could sell a comb to a frog. “So, now what? Is it a done deal, for sure?”
“For sure. He introduced our new masters during the meeting.”
“Are they—what is Robbie’s title now?”
“President. We’re a wholly-owned subsidiary. And Junior’s VP Operations.”
“Business as usual, in other words.”
“Yeah, except that we’re not out to save the world anymore.”
That was how the labbies coped. By telling themselves that they were saving the world. Not in so many words, of course. But they all believed their research was serving a higher good, that it might one day help people live more comfortably. Or, you know, be cured of some skin disfigurement. “Well,” Libby said, “for a woman who wants to, er, look her best, I suppose wrinkle cream is kind of important.” She remembered, all of a sudden, Maisey’s “senior citizen” crack but pushed it out of her mind. This was Paul’s time. Poor guy, he looked tired.
A server stopped by and Paul asked for a combo special, full rack of ribs plus dessert. He overeats when he’s stressed. Which, Libby thought suddenly, seemed to be more and more often these days. Hopefully the relaxed fit corduroys she’d bought him for his birthday last month were relaxed enough to withstand this latest turn of events.
“So,” she said. The server had left. Time to get to the important part. “Your job?”
“Looks like I’m safe, for now.”
“Well, it’s the same products, right?” She tried to sound supportive. “Only a different market.”
He sighed. “Yeah. A different market.”
The waiter brought their drinks. Decaf Earl Gray for Libby. Cola for Paul. “It might be fun. A change.” Try that.
But he just sighed again.
Libby hesitated. Because there was something else that needed to be covered. It would be nice if Paul would remember and bring it up. But he was preoccupied, obviously. . . might as well get it over.
“Paul? What do you think . . . what about Skin Tones?”
Yeah. Skin Tones. The newsletter Libby wrote and desktop published for Cal4 every other month. She’d taken over as editor while she still worked there. Then, when she was laid off, they’d asked her to keep it as a contract job. A minor godsend, since it was now Libby’s only source of income.
“Oh.” Paul looked at her. He’d forgotten about it. That she had a personal stake in Cal4 still. Natural for it to slip his mind, she guessed, given the circumstances.
“Skin Tones. That’s, uh—” He stopped himself. He knew how much she needed the money—that she’d sunk her entire divorce settlement into her new property. But she also knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if, in good faith, he could pay her to do another issue when the company’s entire focus was now in flux.
But then his loyalty to his girlfriend won out. The sweetie. “Look,” he said. “Just go ahead with the next issue. They told us—they told us to just go on, business as usual, until we hear otherwise.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
“Okay.”
“Anyway, it’s budgeted.” He reached for his cola.
“They’re bringing my office furniture tomorrow morning. Satellite Internet service coming in the afternoon, so I’ll be online soon.” Mentally, she was thinking, need to get this issue done, out the door and invoiced ASAP, before someone barges into Paul’s office with different ideas.
5
Libby wasn’t kidding herself that she’d be able to make any real money farming the first year. Not by a long shot. She didn’t even own a tractor, yet. Her plan was to let most of the land lay fallow. Hire someone to plow about a quarter of an acre right behind the house. Her experimental plot. Pick a few things to plant there. Maybe under sow it with white clover. The clover would add nitrogen to the soil and then serve as a green manure, compost. She could work the soil in situ come fall—she’d have a tractor by then so she’d be able to do that part herself.
That was the plan. Along with getting the organic certification process started.
It wasn’t a plan she’d devised overnight. She’d been working on it for over a year, since she was laid off from Cal4. Before that, even, if you count daydreams. And she’d been part of a community supported agriculture farm east of the city for a long time, which meant she’d pitched in summers to help with the planting and mulching and weeding. It had given her some hands-on experience, and she’d made friends with Susan and David, the owners, and had picked their brains about the business—not the CSA piece, she didn’t want to do a CSA—but about the farming part. What to grow, how to market, how to make it a viable business.
It was all daydreaming when she still had her job. But when she got laid off, she thought, “Why not?” Growing things is still biology, right? Granted, it’s on a different scale than peering at cells through a microscope. But still. It wasn’t such a stretch. And she believed in the whole local food thing—that fresh, locally grown vegetables are better for people. Hey, she’d become a biologist to help people live healthier lives. Organic farming can do the same thing. It wasn’t such a stretch.
Plus it was right about then that Wallace filed for divorce. It wasn’t what she wanted. But she wasn’t stupid, either. She knew it meant she’d be eligible for a pretty big chunk of cash.
♦ ♦ ♦
Yeah. Big chunk of cash. She was thinking about the cash the next day. Thinking, That’s what my land is. My marriage. My land is my marriage, every last stitch of my marriage, every second of it, every breath, every ache, cashed out into the divorce settlement and turned into land.
Which is the real reason that she walked it every day, why she wanted to look it over again, every day. Tread on it. Learn it. The ground felt hard and sad under her feet. The hedgerows were laced together by rusty, slack pieces of barbed wire from when someone, years ago, had used the fields to pasture dairy cows. Wind blew in, steady from across the valley. She stood and looked out over it, a vast, simple valley, naked-looking from this height—vast because it had cradled the Genesee River once, but then the glaciers had scoured a new course for that river further west through Nunda, leaving the old river valley naked and empty except for the creek that you know was down there, hidden, winding through the course that the river had once followed . . .
The posted signs were gone.
No, not gone. Mounted on the other side of the tumbled wall.
Good enough.
She continued to walk uphill, to the easternmost edge of the land, and then she turned around and looked down again.
This was her new beginning. Because as she stood there, on that ground, she could see that she hadn’t lost. Hadn’t lost anything. It had just changed shape, that’s all. Marriage into land.
The alchemy of divorce.
She was okay. She was okay.
It was thickly overcast, so the clouds completely blocked the sunset.
She started back downhill toward the house.
♦ ♦ ♦
There’s a ditch along the edge of the field closest to the house. A manmade ditch. Someone had dug it to channel rainwater into a shallow little pond at the other end of the field—the pond was dry, filled in by time— and no doubt it had once been used to water the long-ago cows.
Libby was walking toward the ditch, was maybe 10 feet away from it.
And a little man suddenly stood up in front of her.
From down in the ditch.
“Little.” To be precise, he was about two feet high. Small enough to be hidden completely in the ditch, if he’d stayed crouched down. Which he had been—hidden—until he stood up, which made him seem to appear from nowhere. And yeah, she screamed. A half-scream. Clamped her hand over her mouth as she heard the scream come ou
t, listened to the second half choke off behind her fingers.
He looked at Libby evenly for a moment, and then spoke.
“You’re rude.”
If he’d said anything else—“I come in peace,” “take me to your leader,” even “don’t be frightened”—she probably would have lost it completely and run, shrieking, to her house, locked her door, run to her bed, under the covers. But to be insulted . . .
Indignation kicked in.
“I am not rude.”
“You act like you’re rude.”
“You startled me.”
“You weren’t watching where you were going.”
She stared at him. He was perfectly proportioned, a little on the thin side, and dressed in something brown that looked like paper—like a paper bag, creased all over. “What are you?”
“What am I?”
She glared at him. Her brain hadn’t yet caught up—she wasn’t yet conscious of the sensible explanation, which was that she’d somehow blundered into a waking dream of some kind. Or, less graciously put: a hallucination. But her instincts were still true. No way was she going to refer to this thing—this phenomenon—as a “who.”
Her stubbornness paid off. He gave in and answered. Sort of. “I look after this.” He gestured with his hand so she’d know “this” meant the land around them.
Her property.
Her pulse had slowed a bit by then and she knew, now, what she needed to do. Take herself firmly in hand. And walk away. “I need a glass of water. You aren’t there. I’m going.”
He laughed.
She paused, but not because he’d laughed. She was wondering if she should walk around him, or through him.
She picked around.
Just because she knew he wasn’t real didn’t mean she had the nerve to walk right through him.
She didn’t look back.
She concentrated on walking at a natural pace. But she heard him.
“Watch where you’re walking, Libby.”
A threat?
Her palms were sweating inside her gloves.
It wasn’t real. Certainly not.
What was real, unmistakably self-evident, was that she, Libby Samson, wasn’t as together as she’d thought.
On the contrary. She was finally cracking up.
6
Reached her house. Finally. The air inside felt warm, the light was yellow after the grays of the outdoors’ dusk. She’d warmed up some chicken soup for dinner and could still smell it faintly when she stepped inside.
“Hey, Aunt Libby, c’mere, look who’s showed up!”
Maisey.
Her voice was coming from the living room.
And that’s how discombobulated Libby was: her first thought was, He’s here. The little man is here, with Maisey in my living room.
Get a grip, Libby. There is no little man.
And it wasn’t. It was a skinny teenage boy. That would have been a goatee on his chin, Libby supposed, if he were capable of growing a real beard.
Maisey was grinning ear-to-ear. “It’s Tyler, Aunt Libby! My boyfriend I was telling you about. He just got here!”
“Thanks for giving us a place to stay,” Tyler said, ducking his head and shrugging in the nouveau-hippy equivalent of a handshake.
Libby sucked in her breath. “Oh! Oh, no! No, Maisey, I never—”
“He hitchhiked all the way from Seattle to be with me. Do you believe it?”
“Hold it right there, you two. There is no way. No way.”
Tyler’s shoulders drooped.
Maisey glanced at him, then back at her aunt. Libby could almost hear the whir of the gears in Maisey’s head as she considered her options.
She settled on appealing to pity. She’s no dummy, Maisey. “He doesn’t know anyone, Aunt Libby. He doesn’t have anywhere to go—he doesn’t even have a car.”
Tyler, picking up on the strategy, gave Libby a lost puppy look. Perhaps they’d been rehearsing this.
“You, however, do have a car,” Libby said to Maisey.
Maisey nodded. “Yeah. But where would I take him?”
“A hotel?”
“He doesn’t have any money. Do you, Tyler?”
He shook his head and Libby sighed heavily. “You hitchhiked from Seattle with no money?”
“I had some when I started.” He had shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and pulled them back out again. In his left hand, a jackknife, a strip of rawhide with some glass beads strung on it, and a compass. In the other hand a few bills. “I got some left. Let’s see. Seven dollars. And some change.”
“Where’s he going to sleep?” Libby directed this one at Maisey, whose eyes darted quickly toward the boy.
Tyler, on the other hand, read the situation perfectly and piped up with the right answer. “On the couch, ma’am. If that’s okay with you.”
“He knows computers!” Maisey chirped at me. “If you ever have any problems, you know, with your computer, he can—”
“Please stay away from my computer! Both of you.” Libby pulled off her gloves angrily. “Please? It’s a work computer. It would really mess things up for me if . . . if you accidentally closed a file that I hadn’t saved or something.”
The last thing she needed was for her computer to be turned into a gaming system. Or being permanently crippled with spyware downloaded from questionable web sites.
“Yeah, sure, sure, ma’am.”
Libby could feel them exchanging glances behind her back as she went to hang up her coat.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Hey, babe. It’s me. Call me when you get in, okay?”
Paul’s land line. She could have dialed his cell. In fact, she wanted, more than anything, to dial his cell. But Libby knew where he was—he was having dinner with his new boss. Interrupting him would have been verboten even for a lucid reason. Interrupting him to tell him she’d seen . . . an alien life form—let’s just say she knew better.
♦ ♦ ♦
She spent an hour or so in her office, sorting and filing folders. Her heartbeat had returned to normal.
Her mind, on the other hand . . .
And yet. And yet. Here in her office, alphabetizing her folders of interview prospects, Skin Tones’ future story topics, past story notes . . . there had to be some logical explanation. Stress. Some psychological trigger. It hadn’t really seemed real, she reflected, not real the way these folders were real.
She thrust one marked “Billington, M.D.” behind another labeled “Babcock & Sons.”
You know, it was a good thing she hadn’t reached Paul. Freaked him out over . . . nothing.
Libby headed back downstairs and heard Maisey and Tyler laughing from inside Maisey’s bedroom.
U-turn, hand on the doorknob, turned it, flung open the door.
Tyler was sprawled on top of Maisey, on her bed.
Maisey pushed him off and he stood up, looking flushed and, Libby was happy to note, guilty. Or at least sorry he’d been caught.
“Door stays open at all times. Unless Maisey is in her room, alone.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she heard Tyler answer as she reached the top of the stairs.
She was going to fix herself a cup of tea. Whatever that was that she’d seen, it was a fluke of some kind. Some sort of mirage, or maybe she hadn’t really experienced it at all . . . it was fading away, and the less she thought about it, the faster it would go.
♦ ♦ ♦
Paul called back a little after 10:00. And Libby had not only calmed down, she’d decided—firmly—that there was no need to mention anything about the . . . incident.
He had enough going on right now.
If she needed any other justification, she immediately found out. He sounded a tad inebriated.
“Hi, snookums,” he said happily when she answered the phone.
“Well, hi. Things went well, then?”
“Free dinner, Libby. What’s to argue with a free dinner?”
They’d discus
sed the meeting some beforehand, of course. If Robbie was taking Paul out for a meal, Paul probably wasn’t on the “to be fired” docket.
Libby decided to stick to safe subjects. “What did you have?”
“Porterhouse. And cheesecake. Coupla pieces of cheesecake.”
She laughed uneasily. “Couple of pieces?”
“It went late, babe. I ordered another slice.”
“Ah. Well. No point in just sitting there.”
“That’s what I thought. Plus it’s not good to drink on an empty stomach.”
“Sensible. So what did they say?”
“You were right, Libby, my darling.”
“I was?”
“What you said the other night. About how much women need to look their best.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“This is big, Libby. It’s important. Women—when you women get old, you just want to die.” He giggled.
“They said that?”
“They didn’t mention whether men do.”
“What, whether men want to die?”
“Uh huh, before they get old. Like in The Who song—” He made some “ner ner ner, ner ner ner” guitar sounds and launched into song, “What a draaag it is getting old.”
“That’s the Stones, actually. And you know, maybe you should get to bed—sounds like you—you need a head start in sleeping this off, don’t you think?”
“Libby, this is important. Libby.”
She waited.
“I was wrong. This isn’t a step backwards. Not at all.”
“Of course not, Paul.”
“Looking good is important for a woman’s self-esteem. And without self-esteem, there would—Libby.”
Libby waited again.
“Libby, without self-esteem, there’d be no steam at all.” He giggled again.
“You’re so right, Paul.” Libby wondered whether he’d offered this bit of marketing insight during the dinner or had saved it up until he’d gotten home. She was hoping the latter. She was also hoping that he’d had enough sense to take a taxi.
“Ribby?”
“Yes, Paul.”
When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae Page 3