Slowly, surrounded by other changelings like them, they are becoming more themselves. The woodsprite’s hair knots together like vines, the mermaid’s gills pulse at the sides of her neck, the ghost boy begins to fade to black and white, and the fairy girl starts to be able to move her wings. They search through the rooms of the huge house—there are hundreds of them, some big, some small, some so well hidden, no human could ever see them. It is in one of those rooms that they find the wolf.
The woodsprite screams. “What’s the matter?” the wolf boy says. “Don’t you love me anymore?”
I feel a stinging slap on my skin, and my eyes open and my head snaps up and the metal man is standing right in front of me. He must have hit my cheek accidentally. When I look at his eyes, they are as hollow as an empty wolf mask. I remember that iron is supposed to be poisonous to fairies.
“You’re the evil stepfather,” I say to the metal man, but it comes out as a whisper.
He smacks my cheek again. He says, “It was just your imagination, do you hear me? Don’t ever let me catch you saying anything like that again. You don’t want to be a little liar like your sister, now, do you? Don’t make me tell you again.”
I nod and nod my little head. “Sure,” I say, uncertain but with a smile. It’s true I do have a big imagination. “Of course, Christopher.”
Someone jostles my shoulder, clamoring down the stairs, and I wake up with a start. There is no one in front of me. There is no metal man. My eyes are blurry and my head is so confused. Too much whiskey, I think. I think, I wonder where Elsie is. I wonder if she’s really here, in all this mess. I go upstairs, but I’m not sure if it is to look for her or to lie down. I feel like I’m sleepwalking. I don’t know what’s real anymore.
In one of the bedrooms a bunch of fourth years are clustered around a Ouija board. The candles flicker. I think I hear somebody scream downstairs. There are throwing-up sounds coming from the bathroom. In another bedroom a game of truth or dare is being played loudly. In a corner, on a mattress dragged off a bedframe, two people are kissing, wrapped around each other like seaweed. I think I see Carl’s plastic Guy Fawkes mask dangling from a green-and-blue scaled hand, but then I tell myself that I must be mistaken. At the far end of the landing Toby and some of his friends are smoking and laughing. Toby gestures at me to join them, but I slip into the last of the small bedrooms. At this point I don’t know who I’m looking for. I think of Elsie. I think of Sam. I think of Alice—and suddenly she’s there, between Nick and the far wall.
Nick’s head is buried in Alice’s hair and his hands are all over her. The straps of her dress are torn and her chest and shoulders look too bare, too cold for this dark room. She is trapped between Nick’s body and the peeling gray wallpaper, and I can tell that her arms are pinned to her sides because she is all elbows. Her mask is askew. Nick’s wolf face is on the ground in front of me. Its eyes are empty sockets. It has no mouth but it is still whispering: If you’re going to do this just give me one last chance you know you want to come on if you really want to end it you owe it to me just give me one last—
In the big black window in front of me I can see blurred reflections of the world outside. I half close my eyes and I can almost see the changelings at their own party.
They look at each other and they can see that they are weak. Back home, their powers were bright and constant like good summer sun, but here in the human world everything they feel and do is watered down. The three remaining siblings don’t know if they have the strength to help their leafy sister. But they know they must try. They come up beside her; they circle her with their arms; they make themselves one creature, all together.
Alice says, “It’s over, Nick, I said it’s over,” like she’s said it fifty times before. Alice says, “Come on, Nick, stop it, please,” and I run right up to him and scream straight in his ear.
The woodsprite’s siblings have given her strength. She gathers up all her powers, casts off the last of her human disguise, and extends her sharpest branch and spears it straight through her wolf lover’s heart. He falls bleeding to the floor.
Nick shouts at my scream and covers his ears with his hands. I grab his wrists and scream again, and he turns and runs off into the night. Alice turns to run after him, down the stairs and into the crowd. I try to catch her, to hold on to her, to hug her, but she jumps up and runs away. She runs in the same direction as Nick and I wonder if I made a mistake, if it’s all my imagination (it’s true I do have a big imagination). I wonder if maybe Bea is right. I think about Bea’s bare, blue-painted legs entangled with another pair of legs on a mattress and a Guy Fawkes mask hanging from her hand. Then I remember that there is only one way out of the house, so of course Alice followed Nick; there’s no other way to leave. You have to go down the stairs to get to the ground floor. And the girl on the mattress looks too much like the sea. She must be the changeling mermaid girl from my dream. Love is never worth it. She could never be Bea. My mind is a thick strange soup.
Everyone has run away and I have nowhere to go. I try the doors to the master bedroom (I remember vaguely that I haven’t been in there since I closed them), but they are stuck. I push at them with my shoulder; they don’t budge. I shrug and make my way back down to the ground floor, to the floor that I end up sitting on when I miss a step and fall bump-bump-bump down the rest of the stairs on my backside. I laugh. I laugh at my fall. I laugh at the accident season, at the accident of Alice hitting her head on Nick’s mantelpiece, at the accident of the bruises on her legs, at the accident of the cuts on her arms. I laugh at the accident of the broken glass a few years ago that somehow managed to slice her wrist in a perfectly straight line. I laugh at the accident of Sam punching the wall in the secrets room. I laugh at the accident of the day I almost drowned. I laugh at the accident of my uncle’s death. Seth knew too, I think. That’s why he pushed him in. Then I wonder where that thought came from. I stop laughing.
I stumble into the garden, where the river runs away like I run away. The music is still loud. There are flashlights in the grass, and even though it’s freezing, people are lying in the weeds. I walk unsteadily around to the back of the house, where the garden is even more wild and overgrown, and I go to the very edge of the property where the river resurfaces from underground. I crash through brambles and bushes and over to the water and he welcomes me like my only friend.
I sit on the bank and dip my fingers in the water and I remember swimming in a lake on a summer vacation, Sam and my mother back on the man-made beach, Christopher teaching us how to swim, Alice uncomfortable in her bathing suit, keeping her chin below the water. I remember asking an innocent question about something I’d seen and Christopher slapping my cheek (or maybe that is a different memory). Water filling my lungs and the hands holding me shaking. A hundred apologies afterward, and ice cream. Three big scoops in a double cone.
Then, across the water, I see Elsie.
She is holding a butterfly net and she’s staring right at me. I know I need to go to her. The river is shallow here, not much more than a stream, and I splash over to the other side. When I walk out, I imagine that I look like some lost alien thing: wet and winged, masked and melancholy.
Elsie looks at me like she’s not sure what to make of me. I look down at myself. My tights are muddy and my shoes squelch as I shift my weight. I am still covered in bruises. I can feel that my makeup has run from the sweat. I wouldn’t know what to make of myself. I look at Elsie—her worried face, her sensible brown boots, her tartan skirt, her misshapen sweater, her hands holding a butterfly net.
I ask, “What are you trying to catch?”
Elsie gives me a very serious look. Suddenly my heart sinks. I feel like I had this one question I could ask out of all the questions I want to ask her, and I’ve wasted it on this one and I’ll never get another chance.
Behind me, somebody calls my name. For a moment I think it is the rive
r, but then I see that it’s Bea. When I turn back, Elsie is gone, but I hardly expected her to stick around anyway. I wish I had asked her why she is in all my pictures. I wish I had asked her if anyone has the answers I’m looking for. My reflection is distorted in the water at my feet.
“Cara!” Bea yells again. There’s something in her voice I rarely hear. It’s almost like an edge of fear. “Cara, get back here!”
I splash back across the river. Bea is running toward me. She has my bags in her hands. Behind her, other people are running. They are all sweat-soaked and panting, they are all costumed, but some of them are more undressed than dressed up; they are all carrying bags and bottles and they are all running away. The garden is a mess of masks.
“What’s going on?” I reach Bea and she grabs my arms and pulls me after her. We aren’t heading for the open gates but for the side fence. It looks higher than the gates ever have.
“Hold on,” I say to Bea. I try to stop her. “You want us to climb?”
“Somebody called the police,” she says breathlessly. “We have to get out of here.”
Now I can make out the sirens that I thought were just part of a song. I say, “Oh shit,” and I help Bea to hoist our bags up and sling them over into the field on the other side.
“Where are Sam and Alice?”
“I couldn’t find them. Niamh heard the sirens first. She and Kim legged it out, but I thought Sam was in the kitchen . . .” Bea pauses for breath as we start to climb. We wedge our feet in between the bars and pull ourselves up inch by inch. “But I couldn’t see Joe or Martin either,” she says, panting. “So they must’ve gotten out before me.”
Her words are slightly reassuring, but then I make the mistake of looking back toward the house. The mess of masks and bottles and bags and people running and police running makes me feel sick. When we get to the other side of the fence, I throw up into the ditch. Bea and I hold hands and run home. I am wet to the skin, I am shivering and my wings are shaking. I am cold stone behind my mask. I might not be human at all.
14
Sam and Alice don’t come back to Bea’s house all night. We call and call their phones, but both numbers go straight to voicemail. We don’t dare call my house phone in case my mother picks up and they aren’t there.
Bea and I sit on her bed and talk and smoke out of her bedroom window for hours, watching the rain fall on the conservatory roof below. By morning our voices are hoarse and our lungs are black, but we are sober. I don’t remember anything we talked about during the night. We fall asleep just as the sky begins to lighten and the last of the rain eases off.
***
In my dreams, at the changelings’ party, the house is in chaos. Creatures run and scream in a thousand languages, there are roars and howls and whinnies. There is a dead wolf on the floor. His blood soaks into the carpet. As the huge house empties, the changelings turn and see the man made entirely of metal standing in front of the door. The people crowd past him to get outside, the surge of changelings parting like a river around his iron body. Those who touch him accidentally begin to burn and smoke. The hinges at his mouth work and he smiles an eerie smile.
The four siblings look from the bleeding remains of the wolf boy to their stepfather and a crazy fear fills their hearts. They have used up the last of their powers killing the wolf and now there is nothing left. They take each other’s hands and hold on tight. They begin to realize that they are never going home.
***
When we wake up we walk to the ghost house. The way is longer than it ever has been before even though the rain didn’t continue through the morning and the ground is almost dry. Bea and I meander like rivers, like we’re almost afraid to reach our destination or like we wish it’d change, just for a while. Sam and Alice still aren’t answering their phones.
It’s early afternoon and the sky is a washed-out gray. There is no one on the roads. In the fields, the sheep bleat damply. When we get to the river, there are no workers repairing the wooden bridge; it lies there alone and broken. It’s propped up by poles and beams and pulleys, but it’s still completely uncrossable. Bea stands on the riverbank and her hair curls red in her eyes. She still has a few painted scales stuck to her face. It makes her look dirty and beautiful.
“Are you in love with Alice?” I ask her suddenly.
Bea doesn’t answer. “You know she’s probably at Nick’s place, right?”
I shake my head. “No way she’d go back to him.”
Bea runs her hands through her hair. “You don’t know that,” she says.
I think about the way Nick was crushing Alice into the peeling paint of the wall. I think about her elbows. I think about her as a little girl, bundled up warmer than October every summer, afraid of showing her body. I remember her asking me to sleep in her room some nights. “No,” I say to Bea. “I’m sure of it.”
Across the water, the trees whisper. It’s a keening, lonely sound. “Let’s not go to the ghost house just yet,” I say.
We sit up on the picnic table and throw small stones into the water. I tell Bea about seeing Elsie last night. I’ve been searching for the faintest trace of her all week, but when I finally found her, we hardly talked at all. The whole night feels so surreal already. Then I remember something and I ask Bea if she saw anyone go into the master bedroom during the party.
Bea thinks for a second. “No,” she says slowly. “Come to think of it, I didn’t. And I didn’t go in there all night. Not after we got changed.”
“Neither did I.” My stones land heavy in the water. Some miss completely and scuttle away along the riverbank or get lost in the grass. “I asked them to close.” I don’t look at Bea.
“You asked what to close? The doors?”
I nod.
“And they did.” She doesn’t phrase it as a question. “Why?” is the question she does ask.
I shrug. I fling a stone as far as I can. It lands in the middle of the river with a satisfying splash. “I don’t know,” I say. “It just didn’t feel right to have anybody else in there.”
When I raise my head, Bea is giving me a funny look. “And they call me a witch,” she murmurs.
I fling the next stone even harder. I remember Bea saying that every witch needs somebody to kiss on Halloween. When I think about it, I feel guilty for having kissed Toby, but when I think about it even more, I just feel angry. I can kiss who I want, I think. And then I remember that technically I can’t. I can kiss whoever I want, except Sam, because he is pretty much my brother, and you can’t kiss your brother. Except that I did. My world is so tangled, I don’t know what to make of it. A tiny little voice deep inside me reminds me that Toby’s kiss was less than nothing compared to Sam’s. A matchstick against a bonfire.
Then I remember seeing Bea kissing Carl last night. I turn to face her. “Were you making out with Carl last night?”
Bea throws a pebble up and catches it again. She slides off the picnic table and over to the water. She flicks her wrist and sends the pebble flying over the surface of the river. It skips five times. “I guess,” she says with her back toward me. “I was a little drunk, maybe.”
“A little drunk?” I say, like that’s her excuse. The river eats Bea’s next stone before it gets the chance to bounce. “Why did you do it?” I ask her. Bea doesn’t answer. The river’s hungry. It cries out for more stones. “Bea, what happened last night?”
Bea comes back over to the bench, but she doesn’t look me in the eye. She takes out her cards. I don’t want to know what her cards have to tell us. I want to know what’s going on with her.
“No.” I grab her arms before she can shuffle them. “Not the cards. Not the cards. You tell me.”
Bea wrenches her arms away from me.
“You tell me what you’re thinking,” I say as she takes a few quick steps away. She winces. I raise my voice. “You tell me yourself. D
on’t hide behind them.” I’m almost shouting now. The river’s shouting with me.
Bea turns to meet it head on. She shakes and shakes her head. When she speaks, she’s louder than the water flying over the tallest rocks.
“I’m a goddamn coward.” She spins around to face me. Her sleeves fall over her hands. She holds out the deck of cards and points it at me. “But so are you. You’re a coward, Cara Morris. You’re a goddamn coward and a liar.” I feel like I’ve been slapped.
“You’re just like me,” Bea is saying. “Only with you it’s worse because you won’t even admit it to yourself.”
“What are you—?”
“Why did you kiss Toby, Cara? Why did you kiss him?”
“I don’t know,” I say, agitated. “I was drunk, he was nice. Why shouldn’t I have kissed him?”
Bea just stares at me. I wonder if she knows. I wonder what her cards said to Sam that time he kissed her. I wonder if he kissed her like he kissed me. I jump down from the picnic table and I walk right up to Bea and I take her face in my hands and press my lips to hers. She tastes like cigarette smoke and toast and black coffee. When we break apart, she shakes her head. She turns around and walks away. My eyes are dry, but I feel like I’m crying. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
I go on alone. There’s nothing else I can do, so I pick myself up and walk on. I go to the ghost house. The gates are locked again with a big new padlock, probably put there by the police, but I climb over like last night, and at the top the gates waver and I’m not sure they’ll let me through. I freeze up there—one leg on the side of the house and one on the side of the road, and I let the gates sway me while they make up their mind. They must have decided I’m okay to go through, because the iron underneath me stills for a moment, long enough to let me lift my other leg over and quickly climb down.
The Accident Season Page 17