Once Upon A Time (5) Before Midnight

by Cameron Dokey

  “Susanne didn’t mean anything, Mathilde,” I felt obliged to say. “Nothing bad, anyhow. And she’s right, you know. Chantal de Saint-Andre does not look well. Do you think she has an illness?”

  Old Mathilde shook her head. “Not one that comes from any outside cause. As for the inside one, well . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Steam began to rush from the spout of the kettle. I took it from the hob, poured a little water into the teapot to warm it. Then I emptied it out, added the tea, and poured the boiling water over all. I set it on a tray, then wrapped the pot in red flannel to help keep it warm. Once upon a time, I had been kept warm in much the same manner. The thought brought a sudden smile.

  “Didn’t you make seed cake this morning?” I asked Old Mathilde. She gave a nod. “Chantal likes that, doesn’t she? Perhaps I’ll take some of that along as well.”

  “That is very thoughtful of you,” Old Mathilde said, as I found the loaf of cake and began to slice it. “She is in the sun room.”

  The sun room was small and filled with light, even in winter. Tucked into a far corner of the main floor of the house, it had windows on two sides. One looked straight out over the ocean, the other, toward the tops of the trees in the orchards. Chantal often spent time there. It was her favorite room in the house.

  I cut two thick slices of seed cake and put them on my favorite plate, one with sunflowers painted on it. I fetched the cup and saucer to match, placed both upon the tray beside the teapot. Sugar in its bowl came next; milk in a sturdy little jug. I added a blue napkin, then hefted the tray.

  “That’s nicely done and no mistake,” Susanne said, her tone approving. “Lovely looking tray like that would cheer anybody up. Look sharp she doesn’t eat too much and spoil her dinner, mind you.”

  “I will, Susanne,” I promised.

  I carried the tray upstairs, careful to hold it level, then made my way to the sun room. Chantal de Saint-Andre was sitting in a chair, a shawl around her shoulders, her legs tucked under her like a child. One of her elbows rested on the arm of the chair. She had her chin on one hand, and her eyes gazed straight out at nothing.

  “I’ve brought your tea, ma’am,” I said from the open doorway.

  My stepmother turned toward me then. “Oh,” she said. “It is you, Cendrillon. I was expecting Old Mathilde.”

  I hesitated, uncertain whether I should go back or forward. “I could fetch her, if you like.”

  Chantal de Saint-Andre seemed to give herself a little mental shake. “No,” she said. “Of course not. You brought the tea, you said? Thank you. Tea will be most welcome. I know that it is spring, but I cannot seem to get warm.”

  I moved forward then, placing the tray on a low table near the chair. “I brought some of Old Mathilde’s seed cake,” I went on, as I began the ritual of pouring out. “But I fear we are both under strict instructions from Susanne. I am to make certain you don’t eat too much cake and spoil your appetite for supper.”

  At this, my stepmother actually smiled. “I seem to recall giving my daughters similar instructions, once upon a time. Tell Susanne that I will be a good girl.”

  I lifted the cup and saucer and extended it toward her. Halfway in the act of reaching for it, Chantal de Saint-Andre’s hand paused in midair.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sunflowers.”

  Not until then did I realize what I had done. I had prepared the tray for my stepmother precisely as I would have for myself. Choosing not the fanciest plate or cup and saucer, but the ones that made me feel cheerful, even on the gloomiest of days. I felt the way my hand wished to tremble, but held it steady.

  “If you do not care for them,” I said. “I can bring you something else.”

  “Sunflowers are my favorite flower in all the world,” my stepmother said, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “In the summer, there are great fields of them along the roadsides on the lands where I raised my daughters, and where I, myself, grew up. The old folks say they have never been planted but, every year, there they are. I have seen many growing things since we came here, but not a single sunflower. I think it is too cold for them to grow.”

  As if to prove her point, she shivered, and drew her shawl a little more tightly around her shoulders.

  “Where is it?” I asked, hardly daring to breathe. “The place where you grew up?”

  “In the very center of the country,” my stepmother replied. “They say our very first king was born there, and so it is our country’s heart. The land is flat, the fields are fertile, and the sun is warm.”

  For a moment, I thought she would say more. Instead she leaned forward, took the saucer between her thumb and forefinger. I let go.

  “Did you prepare this tray yourself?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

  “Then I thank you, Cendrillon.” She took a sip of tea, closing her eyes as she swallowed, as if the simple action gave her just a taste of the peace she so desperately sought. She opened her eyes, then set the cup and saucer on the wide arm of the chair.

  “Was there something else?”

  “It can be beautiful here, too,” I heard myself blurt out. “You just have to know how to look, and . . .” My voice faltered but I forced it to go on. “I wish you could be happy here. All of you. I’m sorry that you’re not.”

  My stepmother jerked, as if I’d poked her with a pin. I bit down, hard, on the tip of my tongue, my eyes suddenly fascinated by the hardwood floor. Fool idiot, I thought. She thinks you’re a serving girl What difference could it possibly make to you whether she and her daughters are happy here or not?

  “Look at me, please, Cendrillon,” Chantal de Saint-Andre said in a firm, soft voice. I lifted my eyes. For several absolutely silent seconds, my stepmother and I gazed at each other. I watched her cheeks flush, then go absolutely bloodless.

  “You pity me,” she said. And in that moment, I realized that she had seen her own face, reflected in my eyes.

  Before I could answer, she made a quick movement, as if to push what she had seen away. Her hand struck the saucer on the arm of the chair, sending it and the cup flying. Hot liquid arced through the air, then splashed to the floor. The cup and saucer hit the hardwood and were dashed to pieces. My stepmother gave a heartbroken cry.

  Even as I knelt to pick up the shards, I heard the sound of fast-moving feet. Amelie and Anastasia burst into the sun room, one right after the other. But it was Anastasia who spoke first.

  “You dreadful girl,” she cried, as she moved quickly to her mother. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing,” I gasped out. “That is, I didn’t mean . . .”

  To call you here in the first place, I thought. Not at such a terrible cost.

  I had made a wish and it had been answered. Didn’t that make their misery all my fault? I felt a sudden sharp pain as one of the broken pieces of the saucer cut into my hand.

  “How dare you?” Anastasia demanded. “How dare you lie? Look at her. You’ve made her cry, and she never does that. Not even on the day the king made her marry the queen’s man. My mother is not a coward. She is brave and strong. You must have done something truly terrible to make her do this, and I want to know what it is right now.”

  “Oh, stop it, Anastasia,” Amelie said. “Can’t you see she’s cut herself?”

  “I don’t care if she bleeds to death,” Anastasia all but shouted.

  “No one is going to bleed to death,” Chantal de Saint-Andre said in a calm and terrible voice. With the backs of her hands, she wiped the tears from her pale cheeks with quick, angry gestures, as if as furious with herself as Anastasia was with me. “Please stop shouting, Anastasia. My head hurts enough as it is.”

  Anastasia took a stumbling step back, as if her mother’s words had made her lose her balance.

  “You are defending her,” she whispered. “That horrible girl made you cry and now you are taking her side.”

  “Cendrillon is not a horrible girl,” her mother answered, as
she got up from the chair. “And there is no question of taking sides. I broke a cup and saucer, and that’s all there is to that.”

  Before I realized what she intended, she knelt beside me. “Let me see your hand, Cendrillon.”

  “It’s nothing,” I protested, though I knew the cut was deep, a great slash across one palm. Blood flowed over its surface to trickle through my fingers. “If you will just let me go for Old Mathilde.”

  “I’ll go,” Amelie offered now. She picked up the tray.

  “What are you doing?” Anastasia shrieked. “Put that down.”

  “Be quiet, Anastasia,” Amelie said briskly. She walked quickly from the room, her shoes making sharp sounds against the hardwood floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, as I gazed at my hand, cradled between my stepmother’s. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’m so sorry.”

  “I think that’s enough apologies for one afternoon,” Chantal said, her tone the brisk match of Amelie’s. “It is only a cup and saucer.”

  Oh, no. It is much, much more than that, I thought. And if she knew how much, one thing seemed certain: This woman I had wished for could never learn to love me.

  “There is still the plate” I said.

  Chantal sat back, still cradling my hand in hers. “I believe you are growing light-headed,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “The plate,” I said once more. “With the seed cake on it. It has sunflowers, too. Not everything is broken.”

  “I see,” my stepmother said, and for the second time that day, she looked into my eyes. This time, I was the one who saw my own reflection: an image of a girl just on the cusp of womanhood.

  A girl with tears and secrets in her eyes.

  NINE

  There were no more chores for me the rest of that day, nor for several more besides. The cut was both long and deep; my hand was stiff and sore. At Old Mathilde’s insistence, I slept on a cot in a corner of the kitchen, much as I had done when I was a child. She could keep a better eye on me that way, she said, without having to climb up and down all the stairs to my room at the very top of the house. Too many stairs were hard on old bones, or so she claimed.

  The days slid into August, and the weather stayed hot and fine. Still the ice inside my stepmother did not quite thaw. Anastasia stopped speaking to me altogether, not even to give me orders. The day she discovered that Amelie had traded a fancy dress to one of the village girls so that she might have a simple one to tramp around outside in, she all but stopped speaking to Amelie, as well. In her new dress, which she felt free to get as dirty as she liked, a sturdy pair of boots, and her sun hat, Amelie took to prowling the grounds. She was always popping up in unexpected places, poking into long-forgotten corners both inside and out. There were times, and many of them, too, when it seemed to me that she was searching for something.

  Slowly, the wound on my hand healed. But I could not quite forget the wound I had seen in my stepmother’s eyes. A wound I greatly feared I had helped to inflict myself.

  “I just keep thinking it’s all my fault,” I said one day to Old Mathilde. It was midmorning, the heat of the day not yet upon us. Old Mathilde was standing at the stove stirring a great kettle of blackberry jam. My hand back to normal now, I was shucking ears of corn.

  “If I hadn’t wished for them, they wouldn’t have come. And if they hadn’t come, they wouldn’t all be so unhappy.”

  “Tut, now,” Old Mathilde said, as she added sugar to the pot. “Nothing is ever quite as simple as that and you should know it. You sound like your father when you speak so.”

  I yanked at a corn husk. It gave way with a shrieking sound. “There’s no need to insult me,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what to do to make things right.”

  Old Mathilde’s spoon circled in the pot like a hawk after a mouse. “What makes you think that responsibility lies with you alone?” she asked. “You made a wish, that much is true, but you did not wish for anyone to be made unhappy. You made a wish for love. In my experience, such wishes have a way of coming true in the end, which is not the same as saying the journey isn’t difficult and long.”

  I sat for a moment, pondering her words. The noise of Old Mathilde’s spoon, swishing against the bottom of the cast-iron pot, was the only sound.

  “Have I ever told you the story of how your parents met?” she inquired at last. If she had asked me if I realized I had suddenly grown two heads, I could not have been more surprised.

  “Never,” I said. “And you know that perfectly well.”

  “No one ever dreamed that they would love each other,” Old Mathilde went on, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Least of all Etienne and Constanze themselves. Their marriage was arranged to help secure an alliance, of course. But I think it’s fair to say that your father loved your mother from the first moment that he saw her, and that for her to love him took no longer.”

  “Love at first sight,” I said, my voice hushed, the ears of corn I should have been shucking entirely forgotten. “It really happens, then?”

  “On occasion.” Old Mathilde nodded. “I’ve heard it runs in families, if you must know. Your mother’s love was much like her garden. Its roots went deep, though it wasn’t always showy. But your father’s love was like a diamond, hard and bright, so dazzling it hurt the eyes to look upon it. His love for your mother, hers for him, were the greatest astonishments, the greatest treasures, of his life.”

  “And I took them away,” I said, as I felt a swift, hot pain spear straight through my heart.

  “That is certainly what Etienne believes, or what he says he does,” Old Mathilde answered. “Help me with this now.”

  She lifted the pot from the heat, and, together, we worked to ladle the steaming liquid into jars. Carefully, Old Mathilde spooned hot wax atop each one to seal the jam in, then set them in a neat row on the pantry shelf. They glowed like purple jewels.

  “They are beautiful,” I said. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow morning?”

  “I believe we might do that,” Old Mathilde answered as she put an arm around my shoulders.

  “I’ll do the washing up,” I said, as I leaned against her. “You should go sit down. You’ve been standing up most of the morning.”

  “I believe we might do that, too,” Old Mathilde said with a smile. She sat down in the chair I had vacated. I filled a pitcher of water from the kitchen pump, then poured it into the jam kettle.

  “Wait a few minutes,” Mathilde instructed. “Let the water do its work while the pot cools down. Come and sit beside me for a moment. There is something more I wish to say.”

  I dried my hands on my apron and sat down across the table from her. Old Mathilde reached across the table and took my hands in hers.

  “Your mother loved your father, Cendrillon. To the end of her last breath, with all her heart. And she loved you just as much as she loved him. That kind of love does not simply pack its bags and depart, even when the heart that brought it into being ceases to beat. Love so joyfully and freely given can never be taken away. It is never truly gone.”

  “Then where is it?” I whispered. “Why does it seem so hard to find?”

  “It is all around you,” Old Mathilde said. “It lives in every beat of your own heart. This is what your mother knew your father would never understand, for she saw him truly, and she foresaw that his grief would dazzle just as his love did. It would blind him.

  “To heal, we must do more than grieve. We must also find a way to mourn.”

  “I’m not so sure I understand the difference,” I said.

  Old Mathilde gave my hands a squeeze. “I am not surprised, for the difference is a fine one. But when you figure it out, you will know what to do about many things, I think.

  “Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.”

  Late that night, I could not sleep. I might have convinced myself it was because my bedroom was too hot, for my room was righ
t beneath the roof and the day had been warm. I might have convinced myself it was the light of the full moon, shining through my window, that was making me toss and turn so often.

  I might have convinced myself of many things, if I had been willing to lie.

  But because I was not, I threw back my rumpled sheet and got out of bed. I made my silent way down to the kitchen, slipped my shawl from its peg, and tucked my feet into my wooden garden clogs. I took the long, thin knife Susanne used for boning chickens from its slot in the wooden block and wrapped the blade in a towel. Then I let myself out the kitchen door, heading in the direction of the pumpkin patch. I had no need to take a lantern, for the face of the moon shone like a beacon in the clear night sky.

  Though they were far from ripe, anyone with eyes could see that, unlike last year’s wide variety, this year, each and every vine in the pumpkin patch was busy producing pumpkins of precisely the same kind. Ones just like those I had planted on my mother’s grave, in spite of the fact that I had saved no seeds from them. They glowed a deep and mysterious green in the moonlight.

  I took a deep breath, then knelt down among them. Before I would be able to sleep, there was something I must discover, a task I must perform.

  Sliding the knife from the towel, I sliced neatly through the stem of the pumpkin at my feet and set it upright in front of me. Then, without stopping to think and so lose my nerve, I plunged the knife through the pumpkin’s skin and into the flesh beneath, slicing first through one side, and then the other. Setting the knife on the ground at my feet, I wiggled my fingers into the gap I had made in the top, then pried the pumpkin open. The two halves parted with a high, tearing sound. The pungent smell of pumpkin rose up sharply.

  Not rotten inside, I thought. Not rotten at all, but firm and pure and sound. And in that moment, I had the answer to the question that had driven me here in the middle of the night in the first place. I began to weep in great choking sobs.