“I’m going to bed.”
“Yeah, that would probably be a good idea.”
“I love you Ribby.” Giggle. “I said ‘Ribby.’ That makes me . . . Rastro . . . I ruv roo, Ribby!”
“’Night, Paul.”
She put the phone down.
Tyler was standing in the living room doorway, looking at her curiously.
“I don’t suppose you brought sheets,” Libby said.
“Nah, that’s okay, Aunt Libby. I don’t need them.”
She sighed. He was missing the point, of course. This wasn’t about Tyler’s comfort. It was about protecting Libby’s almost-new sofa. But to explain the point, she’d have to bring up the issue of how often he bathed.
“I have some twin bedding somewhere. It will have to do. But it’s your job to put the sheets on the couch every night before you go to bed, and take them off when you get up, so that the couch is a couch again.” Libby stood up.
“Sure thing.”
At least having a couple of overgrown kids to look after gave her something to do. Silver lining. Of sorts.
7
Wallace and Libby had started dating in high school. That’s also when he started cheating. And she knew just why she immediately forgave him for it. Because no matter what you might think, fundamentally, they were solid. What they had was solid. And no way was she going to let anything interfere with that.
His dad owned a car dealership. A big one on West Ridge Road, with a huge showroom that smelled like rubbing compound and that was ringed by cubicles where sales staff sit people down in molded plastic chairs and write out deals, and out front the lot with its flags and balloons and an SUV perched crazily on the slanted roof of a huge fake dog house. The doghouse has been there forever, since an ad campaign in the ‘80s, tag line “Drive your way out of the doghouse in a brand new Ford!” With lots of background woofing, you remember probably how big woofing was in the ‘80s, and group photos of people—really the dealership staff and their families—pumping their fists, pretending they were going nuts, they loved their cars so much. During basketball games, kids would woof at Wallace whenever he was out on the court—he didn’t start but was a good enough player to get a fair amount of game time—and he loved it. You could see his face color up and his moves get more intense when he heard the kids start to woof.
And it’s not like he cheated on her constantly. As far as Libby knew, he only did it three or four times. And she always knew in her heart of hearts that the other women weren’t really a threat. And they weren’t. Even the last one, it wasn’t she who broke up the marriage. Wallace was restless for other reasons, career reasons . . . he’d sold off his vending business and was back at the dealership, and he wasn’t happy there. So the affair—it wasn’t the problem. It was a symptom.
♦ ♦ ♦
March was almost over.
She’d stopped walking the land. She told herself she didn’t need to. She’d forgotten about the hallucination thing, pretty much. Anyway, she was busy with the next issue of Skin Tones.
Skin Tones was an amazing newsletter. The concept was totally Paul’s: dedicate a newsletter to people who had been helped by Cal4’s research. Inspiring stories. Imagine a story about, say, a little boy who could finally swim in the family pool without triggering a full-body eczema outbreak. That’s the kind of thing they published. It went to the trade, mostly—skin products wholesalers and distributors, hospitals, dermatologists, companies who licensed Cal4 research. But they also sent copies to consumer publications and health news editors, and sometimes editors used bits of Libby’s articles for their stories.
That’s what made Skin Tones such a brilliant idea. It wasn’t promotional, at all. But it made Cal4 look positively angelic. Robbie, of course, grumbled about it. When he was in a bad mood, he called it Sappy Tones or Stink Tones and complained about how much it cost. But on good days he knew it was fabulous and very, very cheap PR. And he got calls from people about it all the time, which helped. Media bigwigs, some of them. Libby was listed on the masthead as editor, but Robbie got the bigwig calls. Then afterwards, he’d be all gung-ho again and call it Spin Tones for a couple of days.
The newsletter’s main story this month featured a woman who’d been misdiagnosed. She’d been told she had skin cancer, but it turned out it was a garden variety seborrhoeic dermatitis that responded to topical ketoconazole. The only weird thing was, Libby got the feeling the woman didn’t really understand that it had never been a malignancy. She seemed to think the ointment had cured her of cancer. Libby didn’t put that part in the article, though. Just focused on how ecstatic the woman was about her skin clearing up. Nor was there any reason to get into how she felt about the doc who’d pronounced the C-word and scared her almost out of her mind.
But Libby thought about it a lot afterward, about how others’ skewed interpretations of the so-called facts can become other peoples’ nightmares. If people don’t have enough savvy to take a deep breath once in awhile and say, maybe he’s wrong, maybe she’s wrong, maybe it’s not so bad, maybe it’s really nothing at all, maybe it’s not really a malignancy after all.
That doctor who’d diagnosed the woman, something had happened. But what? What had made him decide he was looking at a malignancy instead of a benign and fairly common dermatitis?
There were two kinds of people in the world. People who were faithful to the facts, and people who weren’t. But now a disturbing new thought occurred to Libby.
What if something might come between a fact and someone’s own two eyes? Something out of a person’s control?
Vaguely, she recognized, that during her marriage, she had resisted the temptation to become jealous for this very reason. Had she allowed herself to become jealous of Wallace’s girlfriends, her ability to perceive the facts of their marriage would have been impaired.
She was proud of that. She’d been in control.
Was the doctor who’d seen a fictional cancer also in control?
Of course he was. He’d been careless. Undisciplined. That had to be the explanation.
♦ ♦ ♦
It had started raining again while she was working. Maisey and Tyler were out, somewhere, in Maisey’s car—when you live in the country, you pretty much have to be out in a car if you’re going to be out at all—and Libby was editing her feature for about the fifth time when the door slammed and Maisey came in, shouting for her.
“Aunt Libby! You should see it out there!”
Libby looked out the window.
Everything was gleaming faintly. And then it hit her: she was looking at a glaze of ice.
Maisey had made it to the office door by then. “It’s totally freezing rain out there! We almost went off the road, like, fifteen times!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re back safe. You made it to the grocery store, I assume?” Their drain on her food stores had become a bit of a sore point.
“Oh yeah. All stocked up. Tyler’s bringing it in.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Libby worked awhile more, massaging the article into shape, then took a break and got up and looked out the window again. A bit of late afternoon sun had broken through the clouds in the west and the ice coating on the trees along the road caught the sunlight and shimmered, a coat of lacquered gold.
She stood for a minute, looking. Rain and sun at the same time, there had to be a rainbow out there to the east.
She wanted to be outside.
Wanted to see the rainbow and have that shimmery gold all around her.
She went downstairs and put on her coat. Maisey and Tyler were standing in front of the stove, pressed up against each other and looking down into a frying pan.
Maisey glanced over. “Going for a walk?”
“Yeah,” Libby answered , and then added, pointedly, “I won’t be gone long.” She didn’t want them to think they’d have time for a quickie while she was out.
She stepped outdoors and turned uphill.
It was
ridiculous, after all, to think that this . . . episode . . . would recur. Whatever had triggered it, it was a fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.
She rounded the house to her front lawn, but the slice of sun had already swept off to the north. No rainbow. The rain fell light and steady, and beneath her feet the ice coating on the blades of grass crackled as she walked. She looked back and her footprints had made dark splotches in the pale iced lawn.
She walked through the first hedgerow and came to the shallow ditch. Where she’d seen that . . . thing.
There was nothing there.
She breathed deeply, deliberately.
It was going to be okay.
But it wasn’t okay.
He was waiting for her.
She turned to follow a deer path along the edge of her property, near where the posted signs had been hung.
And suddenly, there he was. Sitting on one of the rocks from the stone wall. Not five feet away.
She whirled and began walking quickly back the way she’d come.
“If I were you, I’d move my car, Libby,” she heard him call out.
Crazy. Craziness. Feet crunching the ice, hard and fast, her stomach hurt like she’d been punched, her eyes suddenly tearing. And then she was approaching the little ditch where she’d seen him before and she felt her dread intensify—after all, hallucinations aren’t bound by the laws of space, right? But he wasn’t there—he wasn’t there—she broke into a trot and a moment later burst into the warmth of her house, and stood, trying to catch her breath, to calm her shaking hands.
He’d said her name. He’d said it the other time, too. Which proved it was a hallucination. Living inside her head.
She pulled off her jacket and draped it on the back of a kitchen chair.
Maisey and Tyler descended the stairs with elaborate casualness. Perversely, she was glad they’d tried to pull a bit of mischief, it gave her a few seconds to compose herself. Or try to.
They hustled past her to the kitchen and she mustered an elaborate I’m-keeping-an-eye-on-you look, not easy considering how she was shaking.
A moment later she closed her office door behind her, sat on her work chair, and clamped her arms around herself. And sat there, shaking without making a sound.
8
It was pitch black.
Libby sat up in bed.
What was that sound?
CR-RACK.
There it was again.
Her heart pounded.
CR-RACK.
She forced herself to stand up and walk to her bedroom door, stepped out into the hall—and ran smack into Maisey.
“Aunt Libby, do you hear that?”
Libby flicked the light switch.
Nothing happened.
And then she knew what the noise was.
Tree limbs breaking.
“It’s the ice. It must still be freezing rain out there. The weight of the ice is breaking the trees.”
“Tyler’s up, too,” Maisey said.
“What time is it?”
“A little after 3:00.”
They went downstairs. Maisey and Tyler had lit the pillar candles on the fireplace mantel. Tyler was sitting up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. He opened it up, inviting Maisey to sit under it with him.
Libby pressed her face to a windowpane but she couldn’t see much. She went to the kitchen and got a flashlight. Suddenly there was another, huge CRACK followed by the sound of breaking glass.
“Oh no,” she groaned. “The cars.”
The property had no garage. The two cars were parked on the driveway. Right under an ancient sugar maple.
Libby stood on the stoop, Maisey and Tyler behind her. The air felt weird, a swirling mix of warm and cold and dampness and stinging rain. The sound of the trees snapping, now that they were outside, was vivid, sharp, like gunfire, sometimes close, sometimes distant, constant and arrhythmic.
The flashlight beam was just strong enough that they could tell it was Libby’s car that had been hit. She couldn’t see exactly how much damage had been done, but she knew it wasn’t good. The top of the maple had snapped off and her Toyota had taken a direct hit.
“Oh, Aunt Libby!” Maisey was giggling, excited. “Your car is soooo totaled!”
“C’mon. We need to shut the door. It may be awhile before they get the power back on. We don’t want to cool down the house.”
“Good thing you have the fireplace,” Tyler said.
There was a half face cord or so of wood stacked up along a shed in the back yard. But Libby shook her head. “The chimney hasn’t been cleaned or inspected. We can’t use it. But it’s not very cold out, fortunately.” She remembered something else. “Just don’t open the fridge, okay? If we keep the door closed, it will stay cold until they get the power back on.”
“Sure thing.”
“There’s nothing we can do until morning. I’m going back to bed. You too, Maisey.”
“Should I call the power company?”
“Is the land-line working?”
Maisey picked up the phone in the kitchen. “Dial tone!” she reported.
“Okay. Call them. Stay off your cell phone, though, just as a precaution. Conserve the batteries.”
Libby climbed back into bed.
And she remembered.
That thing—that creature—had told her to move her car.
She lay there, listening to tree limbs break, and wondering how the hell a hallucination had known that a tree was going to break off and fall in one particular spot nine hours in the future.
♦ ♦ ♦
When she woke again it was light out.
But it was still going on—the crack of tree limbs snapping under the weight of ice.
Libby shivered as she checked a light switch.
Nothing.
She put on her robe and headed downstairs.
Maisey grinned when she saw her. “Morning, Aunt Libby. Guess what Tyler’s doing? Making coffee!”
If anything could have made Libby change her mind about her two unwanted houseguests, those last words came pretty close. “How’s he doing that?”
“Gas grill,” Maisey said proudly.
“Ah.” The grill had come with the house. Along with a lot of other junk Libby hadn’t had a chance, yet, to clear out. It had been left uncovered, up against the shed, she’d barely paid attention to it, much less considered trying to run it. It was pretty rusty. “What did he use for water?”
Maisey looked at Libby like she was asking a dumb question. “What do you mean?”
“Did he use tap water?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Okay.” Libby thought a moment. “Look, we need to be careful with using the water. What we have now—it’s whatever is in the compression tank in the basement. But the pump on the well can’t refill it until the power is back on. Once the tank is empty, we’re out.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll tell Tyler.”
They watched him from the kitchen window. Tyler and the shed and the grill were the only things out there that still had their normal shape. Every plant, bush, tree was disfigured, drooping under the weight of ice, sagging, and where the branches had touched the ground, they were fused to it by the shield of ice, pulled by the ice down from the sky and trapped against the ground.
“There must be an inch of ice, at least. Has the plow gone by?”
“Not that I’ve seen. The phone’s out now.”
Libby lifted the handset in the kitchen to hear for herself. Silence.
Tyler came in, carrying the coffeepot—a white enamel stovetop percolator Libby had picked up at a garage sale. Because it was decorative. Country chic and all that. He poured coffee into the three mugs lined up on the counter and handed one to Libby. Polite of him. The warm mug felt good in her hands and the coffee smelled sharp and bitter.
Maisey glanced at the fridge—she took milk in her coffee.
“No,” Libby shook her head. “If we keep the door clos
ed, stuff will keep for a few hours—until the power’s back on. Otherwise . . .”
She paused. It suddenly occurred to her: it might not be realistic to assume they’d have power again in a few hours. “Ty, how much propane is in the tank, you think?”
“Dunno. Half a tank, maybe?”
Another tree branch snapped. It was from a tree near the house. They could hear the clatter of ice shards against the ice-clad ground as the branch fell.
“Hey, Ty, would you mind walking out to the road to see if the plow’s been by? Stay away from the trees.”
They watched him walk down the driveway. He had trouble keeping his footing. On the way back he took a little detour and looked at Libby’s car.
“There’s a power line down across the road,” he said when he was inside again. He gestured toward the north.
“I’m calling Paul,” Libby said.
♦ ♦ ♦
Fast busy signal on his landline.
She tried his cell.
“Hi! You got power?” she said.
“You’re joking, right?”
Not the answer she’d expected. “No.”
“Whole area got slammed. Aren’t you listening to the radio?”
“Huh? How am I supposed to—”
“Aw, Libby, don’t tell me. Living out in the middle of East Jeepers and you don’t have a radio?”
“Paul, it’s the 21st Century. Not Little House in the Prairie.”
“For crying out loud—”
“You don’t have to be like that about it!” She noticed Maisey and Tyler were paying close attention to all this and turned her back to them, lowering her voice. “What’s your problem?”
“I’m sorry, Libby. It’s just that—this is bad. Really bad. State of emergency. People are in a panic. And you—you’re too far away for me to . . .”
Yeah. He’d wanted her to buy a place in the city. Actually, he probably wanted her to move in with him. But she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Okay. “I’m fine,” Libby said. Then remembered her car. “Well . . . except my car.”
“What happened to your car?”
When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae Page 4