by Susha Golomb
Just because I grew up here, doesn’t mean I know every nook and cranny of this neighborhood. I carefully ignored the little voice in my head that said `yes, you do, and this isn’t part of it’ and moved to a different compartment in my brain.
Well, I got her here. Now I can relax and let The Six take over. I forgot just how great this place smells. Complex…challenging…always fascinating, with just a hint of delicious. It’s good to be back.
CHAPTER 4
BIG EYEBALL TO LITTLE EYEBALL
My mind wandered back to its usual resting spot -- my mother’s underwear drawer. That was where I found the milk carton last year. I was going through my parents’ drawers for the umpteen millionth time. No matter how often I looked, I always found something interesting.
This time it was a milk carton. It was squashed flat and stuck under a pile of T-shirts. The bottom half had been torn away and what was left was so old that all the milk smell was gone out even when I put it right up to my nose.
This has to be the weirdest thing I ever found in here, I thought, turning it over in my hands. Then I saw the word MISSING on the other side, and I saw the picture that was under it.
My stomach rolled over and kicked me in the chest. I shoved it back under Mom’s t-shirts so fast that my brain didn’t get to register what the rest of me was doing.
The details must have been with the missing bottom half of the milk carton. There was no name. No date. Just the one word and the picture.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t need words. I knew this picture. It was like looking into the mirror of who I used to be. Except for the straight dark hair, it could have been a slightly younger photo of me. Same stupid smile. Same boring brown eyes. It could only be a sister.
A sister. I had an older sister and my parents never told me about her. They never told me what happened to her. How could they? With shaking hands, I closed the drawer and left the room.
My parents were married for ten years before I was born. They’d always said they weren’t in a hurry to have kids. They lied. No matter how terrible it was for them, they should have told me. Lying to make someone happy is still a lie.
At least now I understood why Mom and Dad were so crazy. All those stories about magic in our family. Of course they’re not true. No wonder Mom and Dad make things up. Anybody would prefer living in Fairyland to living in a real world with a missing child. And look at how overprotective they are with me. It all fits. That’s my Mom and Dad, all right. Sweet. Lovable, and flaky. Very, very flaky.
The next day, I came home from school and found Mom’s rear end, dripping dust balls and sticking out of the closet in her bedroom. On the floor behind her was a stack of paper bags from Purple Heart. The closet was practically empty. All the drawers were pulled out and there were loose hangers and piles of clothes everywhere.
“Hi, Mom, I’m home,” I said to her tush.
“Hi, honey,” the tush answered. “I’m spring-cleaning.”
“In January?”
“It’s the best time. Who wants to go outside?”
Spring-cleaning lasted about a week and when it was over, the milk carton was gone. Lost in the mounds of trash that left my parents’ bedroom that week. It wasn’t in the newly reorganized underwear drawer or anywhere else in my parent’s bedroom. I searched through the oldest family photo albums I could find. No pictures. I looked through the even older junk in the attic. No old report cards, health reports. Nothing. My sister had been erased.
Sitting on the bench in a rose garden that wasn’t… couldn’t be… I suddenly wondered if this is what had happened to her, the sister I never met. The sister no one ever talks about. A big sister who would never lie to me like my parents do…like our parents do. Maybe Tefnut fell off the bookcase on her birthday, too. Maybe she followed Tefnut to this place and never come back.
“I should go home,” I said to Tefnut, reaching out to stroke her fur. I had this bad feeling we were waiting for something to happen and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be here when it did.
Tefnut lifted her chin for a scratch. “I shouldn’t be here,” I said, running my stubby nails through the short fur under her chin. “It’s against the rules… all of them.” I leaned a little closer for a two-handed scratch. Both sides of the jawbone at once. Tefnut closed her eyes and started to purr.
“Did you really bring me here, Tif, or did I just follow you?” Tefnut opened her green eyes just a little and angled her chin to get my fingers to the right spot. It was clear where her attention lay at the moment and it was not with my little problem.
“I guess I should be grateful you’re not answering,” I said with a sigh. “It’s okay for me to talk to you. But if you answer back, I’m in major trouble, right?” She didn’t answer. “Of course, this,” I waved my hand towards the sweet-smelling scenery, “is not major trouble. This is only minor trouble. Right, Tiffytoes?”
I knocked on the hard stone of the bench with my knuckles. It made a good, solid, thunking sound. I looked out at the garden. All the regular flowers. Nothing too weird. It was a totally normal bench in a totally normal garden. It just happened to be in the wrong place.
Leaning back, I made myself relax, taking another good look around the garden, leaving one hand resting on the silky fur of Tefnut’s back, like a kind of security blanket.
There was a tree shaped fountain in the middle of the garden, water streaming out of its leaves. I leaned a little to the left to see the smiling face carved into the top of the trunk where the branches began. There it was, just where I remembered it.
Whoops.
So maybe I came here when I was little, and forgot. That would explain why it looks so familiar.
We waited some more. Tefnut curled up and went to sleep.
“Don’t do that, Tefnut. Wake up. Don’t leave me alone.”
“Hi.” The small voice came from somewhere near my left shoulder. Startled, I jerked my head to the left. Out of the corner of my eye, I could just make out a really big flying bug zooming in on my head.
“Eiewww!” I started to reach up to swat. Tefnut, who I thought was asleep, was suddenly sitting on my hand.
“Hi, Miriam.” This time the voice was in front of me. Turning to face the blur at the end of my nose, I pulled back my neck and squinted it into focus.
Turns out it wasn’t a bug. I was big eyeball to little eyeball with a tiny person of the female persuasion. She had a double set of wings like on a dragonfly, and was about the same size.
“You can’t be real,” I whispered. “You’re a fairy.”
I listened from my spot on the bench with half-closed eyes, feigning sleep. I didn’t want to interrupt this special time for Poppy. She’s waited so long to be able to talk with Miriam.
CHAPTER 5
POPPY
The small person hanging in the air three inches from my nose looked me over carefully before she spoke. Fairies in the garden were most definitely not what I had in mind yesterday when I blew out the birthday candles and wished for my sister to come back.
My carefully built theory about what was happening here collapsed into little pieces in my head. I could almost hear the tinkle of broken glass.
“I’m Poppy.” she finally said, and I snapped back to the present. Not necessarily to reality, just to the present.
Cute name. I thought. Too cute. Animatronics, I second-thoughted, suspiciously. Any minute, the head would start bouncing around on a long spring. The movie cameras would stop while somebody screwed the top back on. I looked out past the tall hedges that surrounded the garden. No cameras. Nice try.
Poppy’s red and black wings positively vibrated with excitement. That makes two of us, I thought. I was practically hyperventilating myself.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Awake, I mean.”
Poppy settled down on the back of my hand, straightening the folds of her short red and black dress nervously. Robot or real, this was not only a fairy, this was
a color-coordinated fairy.
She was narrow and long like the dragonfly her wings resembled and very elegant in spite of her nervousness. You could tell that she had taken a lot of time with her clothes and her bright red hair, as if this were some kind of special occasion.
Whatever she was, compared to this tiny, perfect creature, I was a huge, ugly slob. I wanted to at least smooth out my hair a little, but I was afraid to move.
Late as usual this morning, I had just enough time to pull on a pair of black bike shorts and shove my sneakers into my knapsack before the school bus came. Messy does not describe what my long, curly hair looks like when I don’t comb it, which I hadn’t, and I was still wearing the over sized T-shirt that I had slept in, my skinny arms and legs poking out like a spider in a sack.
There was an awkward silence while I tried to think of something to say other than what I was actually thinking about.
“So…” I started out, fishing for time. “Does this mean that we’ve already met?”
Like in my dreams, I’m thinking, or some kind of out-of-body experience, which is what I’m probably having right now.
“In your dreams,” she said, smiling sweetly at me.
“In my dreams?” I said in dismay.
Not telepathy too, I thought.
“Well, not really in your dreams,” she said more seriously. I guess she noticed I was a little upset. “More like while you dream. I only visit when you’re asleep.”
All right, I’m thinking, as I take a deep breath. This is not telepathy. That’s good. Instead, I’m sitting here talking to the Tooth Fairy. But I didn’t have the nerve to say it out loud.
Seeing as there were no movie cameras, the out-of-body experience theory was starting to look better and better.
“Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “So, you visit my room.”
Oh, no, I thought. That sounded awful, like I didn’t think she should do that or something. Probably because it was true.
“I mean, it’s okay,” I lied. “It’s all right that you visit my room, or me or… you know…” I trailed off weakly.
“I know.”
“Good.”
“Yes.”
Poppy fidgeted and stared at her hands. I tried not to fidget, since there seemed to be a fairy sitting on me, and stared at Poppy.
“If anyone told me that I was going to meet you today,” I finally said, “I would have had a million questions. But I can’t think of anything.” I tried to smile.
“Me, too,” she said. “I had a whole list of things to tell you. But I can’t seem to remember any of them just now.” She reached out and stroked my hand, staring down at the skin and the bone bumps.
“So?” I finally asked. “What do you do in my room?”
“Oh, nothing much,” she said nervously. “Hang around and play with Tefnut. Once in a while…” Poppy turned her head away from me and concentrated on the nearest rose bush, “…if I think you need some extra help, I’ll kind of hint things to you while you’re sleeping.”
She put her hands together and started twisting her fingers. “Like… Don’t forget to hand in your homework, or… Be careful when you cross the street. Regular stuff. The kind of things your parents tell you.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
Subliminal advertising wasn’t exactly the traditional format for the fairy godmothers that I knew from the Brothers Grimm. I didn’t know what to think, so I didn’t.
“Well, uh, what am I doing here, anyway?” I hoped this was on the list of things she was supposed to tell me.
“That’s easy,” Poppy answered with obvious relief. “It was an accident. The gate was left open by accident.”
“It didn’t look like an accident to me,” I said. “Tefnut led me right here, like she knew exactly what she was doing.” I glanced down at Tefnut who was doing her dead cat imitation, sleeping stretched out on the bench, belly up to the warm sun.
“No. Not now. The first time. When you were a baby.”
Suddenly, my head was filled to bursting with a flood of long forgotten memories.
“I remember,” I cried, sending poor Poppy spinning in the air from the force of my voice. “I remember.
“It’s one of the stories my parents used to tell me when I was little,” I told her. “They said that magic runs in our family and that I had been touched by fairies when I was a baby.
“I loved that story. It used to make me feel so special. But I thought that’s all it was. Another lie. You know, something they made up, like the story about my mother having been a mermaid, or that…”
I paused. It didn’t feel right mentioning the other lie, the big one, the one they told me the day I asked them about my sister. The big lie that made me see all the other little lies for what they really were.
“…But they told me all about the bridge,” I said instead, “and the path and this garden, everything.”
So Miriam thinks her parents have been making things up? Well, that explains her cynical streak for the last year. Her mom and dad have been worried sick. They knew something was bugging her. But every time they asked, she clammed up tighter than a can of cat food with no can opener. Surprise, Miriam. Welcome to Fairyland.
CHAPTER 6
THE DAY MOM AND DAD FLUNKED THE HONESTY TEST
“What you didn’t know from the story your parents told you,” Poppy said, “was that there were more than a dozen of us that had met you in the garden that day and that we decided to keep you.”
Keep me? My heart skipped a beat. I half stood up. I think it was time to go home.
“Didn’t you say that your parents used to tell you that magic runs in your family?”
“Yes, but…” I bumped back down again, leaving Poppy temporarily airborne.
“Well, it does.” She automatically drifted back down to my hand. “At least on one side, probably your mother’s, since you said she used to be a mermaid.”
“My mother was not a mermaid,” I said emphatically. I’m not usually this easily distracted, but that story is as old as I am, and it pushes all the wrong buttons.
“My parents are weird. They think I still like those stories. They think I’m the same person I was when I was five years old. They even pretend to save photos for my mermaid grandparents.
“Anyway,” I said, putting the conversation back where I wanted it, “Just what did you mean when you said you decided to keep me?”
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t be true, considering your background,” Poppy said, ignoring my question. My extremely important question.
“How… how can you be so sure?” I said. I was starting to feel very confused. That is to say, more confused than I already was. After all, it hadn’t been that long since I figured out that this garden was one of the many stories Mom and Dad had invented.
I thought a lot about asking my parents about the milk carton I found in their room, but it was no good. I knew they would just make something up, like they did with everything else. Either that or, more likely, they would lose it completely and I would be the one who had to cart them off to the loony bin.
No, they had to pass the test of telling me on their own, or at least with a little prompting. So I prompted.
They failed.
It was about a week after I found the missing-kid picture of my sister. I went as far as I could. I asked them point blank if I had ever had a sister. An older sister. That was the day Mom and Dad flunked the honesty test. They were good. They even managed to look confused.
No. No sister, they had insisted. I was an only child. Then, they changed the subject.
They have a list. I’ve heard it before. I got the standard lecture on how they knew I always wanted a little sister or brother, but that I had to accept that it was never going to happen and look at all the good things about being an only child.
Talking is how we deal with bad things in my family. We talk so we don’t have to listen to the scary stuff and boy, did they talk. B
y the time they finished, the only thing I knew for sure was that it was a waste of time telling them anything.
I think I knew what their answer was going to be even before I asked. It’s not like they’re dishonest or anything, it’s just that their honesty is based on insanity, just like their reality is based on fantasy. It’s their protection.
The truth is, I never minded being an only child. I don’t want a sister. I want this sister. The real person who already belongs to me. It took me a long time to forgive Mom and Dad. But I did. I still love them. I just don’t trust them anymore.
Now, after all that, I have to rethink everything again? I mean, I can see that the story about the bridge and the garden could be true. I’m here, aren’t I? But mermaids? That’s not real. That’s a Disney thing. I don’t think so.
“You have elf ears,” Poppy said as if that was all she needed to prove anything.
“I do not! Everyone knows that elves have long, pointy ears like Mr. Spock. Next, you’ll be telling me that I’m a Vulcan or something.”
Poppy, who had been jarred off my hand, flew around to my ear.
“Not the top, silly,” she said. “The bottom.” I felt a sharp tug on the flat space where most people have regular earlobes. Mine are tiny. Multiple piercings are out of the question.
“It makes us cousins,” she said, giving my ear another tweak.
I wondered if my big sister had elf ears, too. I got that bad bumpy feeling in my stomach that I always get when I think of her. I never figured out how I can miss someone that I never met. But she is so real to me. A lot more real than this little person that I could see and feel.
“Why earlobes?”
“Feel how your earlobe is attached to the side of your face all the way. No flap. That’s the sign.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, what did you mean when you said you decided to keep me?”
“Well, the first thing we did,” said Poppy, ignoring me again, “was to anchor the gate.”
“A gate?” I was puzzled. “What gate?”
“Here, everything. The tree, the meadow, it’s an in-between place. The footbridge you crossed over is kind of like a door. Of course, it’s kept closed when it’s not in use. But every once in a while…” She shrugged.