She didn’t like it being up to her. She’d been thinking lately about when it was right to take charge of things. It seemed to her she had a pretty good sense of it. She bought the tractor, didn’t she? It wasn’t an easy decision, either. She had to compare brands and decide if she wanted to buy new or second-hand. Ultimately she went second-hand but top of the line. That way, in theory, it wouldn’t fall apart a nanosecond after the warranty expired.
But it’s harder when there are people involved. That’s what always messed her up—she hated going against other peoples’ wishes. So instead she stalled.
This tactic was beginning to irritate Gina, however. Libby still hadn’t asked the little man about her pineapple operation. Every night, just about, Gina phoned Mr. Hawaii, about midnight our time—on Libby’s land line. Apparently their pineapple plants were dying of some sort of rot. “Here, you talk to her,” she would say, and grab Libby by the arm as she walked by, thrusting the receiver into her hand. So she’d listen to Gina’s boyfriend, Farley, give convoluted descriptions of his operation. His biggest worry was the local gods. He’d hired ethnic Hawaiians and was paying them a living wage and his plants were still dying. Libby would mumble something about how she didn’t think she could help on the wage thing and hand the phone back to her glowering sister.
Yeah. It would have died down. Eventually.
Only Gina didn’t want it to die down.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sunday morning.
Libby’s plan was to lay low and try to sneak out by herself. Ha. She was coming down from brushing her teeth when the front door burst open and in strode Gina, with Alex, Maisey and Tyler trailing behind.
Maisey’s hair had been cut. Bob, high forehead. It looked pretty good, actually. With her piercings she could pull off the goth-chic look pretty well.
“Team meeting!” Gina called. “Time to answer some of your guests’ questions.”
Guests, she called them.
Libby took a step backwards. “I never agreed to this, Gina.”
“We’ll do all the work,” Gina said. “Alex, go up to Libby’s office and get a pad and pen.”
Libby scowled. “I’ll get it.” She didn’t want Alex in her office.
When she got back downstairs, Gina called her into the living room. She’d pulled down the bedspread Libby had over the window. “We needed more light,” she said. “Alex is going to take notes.”
Alex looked at Libby and Libby handed her the pad.
“Okay,” Gina said. “First one.” She was sitting on the couch next to Maisey and Tyler, and had a little stack of papers that she’d unfolded and smoothed out on one knee. She picked up one of the papers. “‘Dear Fairy Lady.’”
Alex sniggered and Gina said “Now, now!” but was smiling at her, so Alex kept going: “Sounds like an advice columnist for gays.”
Tyler let out a muffled snort of appreciation.
“‘Dear Fairy Lady,’” Gina repeated. “‘My question is . . .’” She squinted at the page. “Oh, I see what he’s saying. ‘My question is, all the natural world became by evolving. Did fairies evolve, and what did they evolve from? Thank you for answering my question.’”
“How’m I supposed to answer a question like that?”
“I wonder what they did evolve from,” Alex said.
Gina was studying the paper. “Well, we have to say something. Let’s see . . . Alex, you ready?”
“I really don’t think—” Libby fidgeted nervously.
“Tom, his name’s Tom. ‘Dear Tom. Fairies and humans do, in fact, share a common ancestor—’”
“You can’t say that!” Libby jumped up. “They’re . . . like archetypes. Archetypes don’t evolve—”
“You can’t say ‘archetypes,’” Gina said. “Nobody knows what that means. Did you get that, Alex?”
Alex nodded, her pen poised. Libby sat back down. What could she do?
“‘However, as you . . .’ Hmmm. Scratch that.” She thought a second. “Okay, write it this way—”
“I already wrote ‘however.’”
“We’ll have to copy them over.”
Alex nodded.
“Aunt Libby should copy them over,” Tyler said. “Then sign them. In her handwriting and everything.”
“I am not copying them over. This is your baby, Gina.”
Gina shrugged. “Let’s just get this done, okay? Alex. ‘The human and fairy lines split about three million years ago . . .’”
Libby could have just about screamed.
“‘. . . humans embraced violence and a doctrine of subjugating nature, while the fairies retained their kinship with all living things.’ There, is that enough, do you think?” She was asking Alex, not Libby.
Alex held up the pad to show how much room the dictation had taken. “But I think this pen is running out of ink,” she said.
“I’ll get you another one.” Tyler sprang up and headed toward the coffee tin of pens and pencils Libby kept by the phone. When he brought a new pen back, he perched on the arm of Alex’s chair and read over her shoulder. “That’s pretty good, you guys,” he said.
Traitor.
Libby guessed she couldn’t blame him. But then, all of a sudden, she noticed Maisey. Before, Tyler had been seated between her and Gina. Now that he’d moved, Maisey put her feet on the couch and rested her chin on her knees. Her eyes were kind of unfocused. Whatever she was thinking about, it wasn’t Libby. Or letters about fairies.
“Hey, Maisey, I like your haircut.”
The girl looked up at her aunt. “Thanks.” But then the far away look came right back.
“Okay, next one,” Gina said.
The phone rang.
“Excuse me, folks.”
It was Paul.
“Hey, babe, want some company?”
Company?
“I’m—hang on,” he said. “Let’s see. Just passed the Avon exit. See you in, what, twenty minutes?”
“Oh!” Libby gasped “Oh, no, Paul, I—the place is a mess.”
Of all the things, this was the one she hadn’t planned for. Yeah, she knew, stupid of her. But Paul was at best indifferent about her little operation, and at worst slightly hostile about it. Right? Sure, he’d come that one time, a kind of obligatory gesture on his part. But she hardly expected him to make the 40-mile drive on a Sunday, just for the hell of it. They’d fallen into such a nice steady routine, Libby driving to Rochester Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, dinner out, Saturday nights too, sometimes; sometimes a couple of hours back at his place after they ate. It had never occurred to her that he might—
“It’s been awhile,” he said, sounding awfully cheerful. “I thought I should make the drive this time. You know, see your new tractor.”
“Really, Paul, it’s not a good time!”
Damn damn damn.
She hung up the phone. “You guys have to leave, NOW.”
“Libby, we have all these to do.” Gina waved the papers at her sister.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You have to sign them.”
“I’m not signing them.”
“We’re signing them with your name, then.” Gina stood up. Libby was in her stocking feet, so Gina seemed even taller than usual.
“Please don’t sign them with my name,” Libby said. But she knew Gina would anyway, if she wanted to.
“We’ll work on it more tonight,” Gina said, taking the pad from Alex. “I’ll take that for now.”
“You want a ride downtown, Ty?” Maisey asked.
“I’ll drive,” Alex said. “What do you guys want to do, now?”
♦ ♦ ♦
Libby was still frantically straightening up her house when Paul got there. Mistake. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to cut him off right at his car—she should have run out, jumped into the passenger seat, told him to drive off, go somewhere else, give them a chance to talk.
But she was that discombobulated. Running arou
nd inside, making the beds, scraping toast crusts off the breakfast plates into the pail she use to carry stuff to her compost pile. And then she heard his car and ran to the door and he was getting out, looking around in astonishment as campers walked over to see who he was.
No point in her joining him out there, at that point. So she waited inside the door.
He didn’t look very happy.
“Alright, Libby. Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
Gina had disappeared while Libby was cleaning up. Of course. Now she reappeared just as Libby let Paul in the front door, and, being Gina, of course didn’t know enough to keep her nose out of it.
“Oh!” she said. “Paul doesn’t know?”
“I meant to tell you,” Libby said to him.
“Suppose you tell me now? What have you done? Opened a campground? Do you have a permit for all that?”
“No! I mean, no, I haven’t opened a campground. It’s not—I didn’t invite them.”
“They came because Libby talks to fairies,” Gina said. “Coffee, you guys?”
In a weird way, Libby almost felt grateful to her sister right then. She didn’t know if she could have gotten the word “fairies” past her own lips, not to Paul’s face. Now she didn’t have to.
Still, it didn’t go over very well. He was staring at her. “Come again?”
Gina said something else but Libby couldn’t hear her anymore. “I’ll explain,” she whispered.
“What did your sister just say?”
Libby pointed toward the living room. “In there.” At least she’d remembered to pin the bedspread back up. So they’d have some privacy.
♦ ♦ ♦
He sat down. She did too, but then stood back up again. “I didn’t know how to—I didn’t mean to keep it from you. But I never expected it to get so out of control.”
“Libby. This is not helping. What is going on here?”
Libby took a deep breath, and then gave him the abbreviated version of everything. Starting with the night the little man had popped up out of the ditch, and the warning to move her car, and then about how she’d begun using his advice to take care of her crops.
She hadn’t gotten too far before Paul was looking at her rather as she’d expected he would. Like she was from another galaxy far, far away.
“I didn’t ask for this, Paul. I don’t know why it happened—”
“Libby, have you talked to your doctor about this?”
She shook her head.
“Well that would be a place to start.”
Libby’s shoulders sagged. No way did she want to tell her doctor about this. He was a nice guy, of course. But . . . he was the sort of doc who thought taking Vitamin C was weird and far out. There was just no way she could walk into his office and start talking about talking to magical beings. That nobody else can see.
“Look. Paul—”
“So what’s the story with them?” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the direction of her front yard. And the tent village. “Do they talk to . . . fairies, too?”
“Oh, well—word got out. On the Internet. They are . . . fans. Kind of.”
“Jesus.”
“It will blow over. It’s not like I encourage it, Paul. I don’t even talk to them, hardly ever.”
“Do you realize what could happen?”
Libby looked at him, trying to swallow the dread in her throat. Could she be in trouble with the law for running an unauthorized campground? Could her property be seized? Or was he talking about her health—was it possible—could she have a brain tumor, like in the movie when John Travolta developed those bizarre mental powers? He’d died in that movie—was she going to die?
“What?” she whispered.
“My boss could find out. He could find out that Skin Tones is being edited by . . . a New Age freak case.”
Gina had been eavesdropping, of course. Now she flounced into the room and came to Libby’s defense. Thanks so much, Gina. “Knock it off, Paul. What do you know about it? Libby’s got a gold mine, here, if she’d just go with the flow instead of fight it. Mind your own business.”
Paul stood up. “Look. I have to get out of here. I need to think this over.”
“I’ll fix it, Paul. I swear, I’ll get it—”
He looked at Libby a second, opened his mouth, shut it, then tried again. “I’m sorry, Libby. I’m not being very sympathetic here. But—I just can’t believe you let things get to this pass without . . . and you have to understand. Dormet’s image is very important.”
Libby needed that gig. To make her mortgage payments. She’d lose her farm if she lost Skin Tones.
“I’ll do whatever needs to be done, Paul. I promise. I understand what you’re saying.”
“You need to start by talking to your doctor.”
“We can take my name off the masthead,” she said. “That way—”
He waved her suggestion away. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. You need a full physical. Probably an MRI or something. And you need to get rid of these . . . freaks on your property. That I can tell you.”
She followed him to the door.
“I’ll phone you later,” he said, and she watched him glare at the campers as he walked to his car.
“Wow. That’s one up-tight boyfriend you got there,” Gina’s voice came from behind her. “He makes Wallace look like a prince.” And then, “Christ, are you crying over that asshole?”
♦ ♦ ♦
He wasn’t like this. Not before. He was a prince, the sweetest guy you could imagine.
Libby knew what had happened, and it was all her fault. It was her buying that property that did it. Changed him.
32
She had no real reason for hating Paul’s “see a doctor” advice. No rational reason, anyway. And to be perfectly honest, if it had been Paul, not Libby, who was seeing supernatural visitors, she’d probably have had the same reaction.
Still, she wished he wasn’t pushing it so hard.
But he was. Pushing it. He phoned the next morning to push, in fact.
At least he agreed that maybe Libby’s G.P. wasn’t the right choice. But then he called back, twenty minutes later, with the names and phone numbers of three shrinks. “A psychiatrist is your best bet,” he said, “since they’re medical doctors too, they can order up the same tests, or meds if you need them.”
Meds.
She copied down the names and phone numbers, but after they’d said good-bye she just sat there. She couldn’t bring herself to pick up the receiver again.
Maisey wandered in, trailing the smell of her morning cigarette. “Who called? Hey, Aunt Libby, you don’t look too happy.”
Libby folded up the paper with the phone numbers on it. “I’m fine.”
“Was it Paul?”
She nodded, then stood up and looked out the window at her car. “He thinks I need a medical check-up. You know, maybe I’ve got a tumor.”
Maisey was standing by the coffee maker, but now she turned, her mouth dropping open. “A tumor? Oh! Aunt Libby—”
There, Libby, you’ve done it again. “Relax, Maise. I don’t have a tumor.” She walked to the sink and turned on the water. “Why am I the only one who does dishes around here?”
“I’ll do them, leave them, it’s my turn.”
Libby sighed. “The problem is, I have to humor him, so I really need to see someone. Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“I’d like to find a doctor who would have, you know, the right perspective.”
“Someone who doesn’t think you’re crazy.”
“Someone who doesn’t think I’m crazy. Exactly.”
We looked at each other.
“You need to ask Dean,” Maisey said.
“Dean.”
“He’ll know someone.”
Libby shook her head. “I couldn’t—”
“I’ll drive you. Let me get dressed.”
“I couldn’t—”
<
br /> But Maisey was already halfway up the stairs.
Maisey was right, of course. Dean was the person to ask.
And it would have been such a huge relief. If only Libby didn’t still feel ashamed about how she’d behaved the last time she’d seen him.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Looks like the coast is clear,” Maisey said from the living room. “There’s a bunch of them standing around but they aren’t really watching the house or anything.”
“Got your keys?”
Maisey answered by dangling her keys in the air.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
They let themselves out and Libby eased the screen door closed noiselessly. Then she nodded and the two started down the steps and trotted across the lawn to Maisey’s car.
“Hey!” someone shouted from the direction of the tents. “There she is!”
“Get in, get in!” But Maisey had locked her car—they’d all taken to locking their cars ever since Libby had found a half-full beer can in her cup holder one morning—and now the teen was fumbling with the lock. And campers were now heading toward them, the ones in the front breaking into a run.
“Libby! Hey Libby! Can I ask you a question?”
“Where are you going, are you leaving? Are you coming back?”
“We’re just going to the store,” Maisey called as she slipped into her seat. “Chill out, guys.”
She flicked the inside latch to lock the doors just as a camper pulled on the passenger side handle.
“I can’t pull out!” Maisey said. She was parked directly behind Libby’s car. She needed to back up a bit to get around it. But there were campers pressing up against the rear bumper.
They weren’t going to let the car leave.
“Aw damn, damn—Maisey, you’re just going to do it—they’ll move if they see you’re . . .”
Maisey put the car in reverse and it started to move. The guy who’d tried to pull Libby’s door open banged on her window. “Hey, you can’t leave!”
“We’ll be back, you nitwit!” Maisey yelled.
“Just ignore him.” Libby noticed the campers were falling back as Maisey’s car nudged toward them. “Good, good, I think you’re clear.”
Maisey nosed out past Libby’s car and toward the road. A couple campers were in front of them now but they stepped aside, one of them waving frantically, the other pulling faces at Libby through the windshield.
When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae Page 16