There was no possibility for her. She was like an insect frozen in amber, a fossil waiting to be unearthed.
All because her mother had made a bad deal, and Danaë had paid the price.
In the beginning, she used to cry. She cried so much that she thought she’d fill the entire room with her tears. But the space was too large. It turns out that tears only feel like a lot to the person crying them.
When she’d tire herself out, she’d stare out the window and feel terribly, hopelessly small.
After that, she would scream.
“Help me!” she shouted, in a city where everyone needed help. In a city where people got lost and killed and crushed and swept away in different ways. Who could help her when that city could not even help itself?
Still, it was a particular type of punishment that they couldn’t hear her supplication, but she could hear them. Their voices carried up to Danaë’s window. Lovers sneaking in the dark shadows of Central Park. People screaming. Police barking. Sirens wailing. Bands playing. It was all the same cycle of sounds. New York only changes on the surface, after all.
There were the occasional taunts from the solitary fairies and werewolves that lurked in the trimmed wilderness below. Her entrapment was a discovery of the magical world that existed in the betwixt spaces, the twilight, the midnight, the halves of the world. Unfortunately, her own magic was bottled up.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Let down your hair!” a gnarly troll shouted once. She couldn’t see his face through the foggy view of her spyglass, but he looked like he could be a troll. She wished she had something to throw at him, but mostly, she wished that someone would try to free her instead of chiding her.
While she possessed very little, the tower apartment did come equipped with some necessities: a bathtub, soaps and sponges, a gilded mirror, and a few dresses her mother had left behind.
Danaë had a very meticulous hair routine. When she’d first been locked in the tower, her hair was the fashionable bob of working girls. The year she’d immigrated to New York City had been 1946 and it felt like a new era. With hot curlers at the salon run by a fellow Dominican woman named Yennifer, she’d turn her ribbon curls into the sculpted waves.
The first week without her products had been torture. Being among the clouds meant there was nothing but moisture. The sorcerer, whom she’d met thrice (once when her mother made the deal, once when he’d collected his payment, and once more) had granted her a never-ending coconut oil vase and an ivory comb. Perhaps it was the magic he’d used, but she could never quite remember his face, only the strange weariness that overtook her when he was around. It was as if his power came from some long-gone god of slumber. Either way, for a time she was content with keeping her hygiene. She bathed every day and spent hours brushing tangles out of her hair, until, before she knew it, her hair was down to her ankles. She braided it, and as new buildings were erected and the city changed, her curls spilled in ropes longer than the threads of time.
She slept in a nest of her own hair. Her tower, being enchanted and all, provided magical remedies. She couldn’t age. She couldn’t get sick. She was never hungry. She was perfectly preserved in most ways. Even her menstruation stalled. The things that magic couldn’t take away were the hairs on her head and the strain on her heart.
Why would someone want the heart of an ordinary girl who sometimes worked at a pastry shop with her mother?
At least her heart couldn’t get tangled and snagged on furniture. She once broke the mirror and used a long shard to try to cut her hair. But the strands were like metal cords. The mirror re-formed. The gash on her palm healed. Then she’d tried to bite her hair off, rip it with all the strength she could muster, but only managed to crack her front tooth. It healed that very night.
So her hair grew, year after year, like the berries on her window that gave her the only sustenance she required.
Eventually Danaë had stopped counting how long she’d been in the tower. Sometimes it felt like a century. Sometimes it felt like she was already dead, and this was her punishment from a cruel god for reasons she couldn’t understand.
But then one day, while she sat on her windowsill picking at her split ends and singing a song she’d heard on a jukebox nearly seventy years before, she heard a voice call back.
Not taunting.
Not far, either.
She couldn’t see him well at first, as it was a particularly rainy day and her spyglass was warped. But she knew she wasn’t imagining him.
A strong breeze shoved the clouds away and there he was. He was standing on the edge of the pond behind Belvedere Castle and looking straight up at her. A boy with a flop of black waves, dressed in a brown leather jacket, twisting something in his hands. Everything inside her was torn. Was he real? Did he really, truly see her? Her heart gave a painful pump, like after so many years she’d forgotten that it was actually still beating.
“Hello,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
* * *
Fabían Macías knew about the tower. Every magical person in New York did. They knew it had been built as a prison by those who hunted people like him. It trapped strong magic inside and out of the way. He knew that everyone pretended it didn’t exist because there was already someone in there, and if it ever became empty, then the hunters would want to fill it back up.
But how was he supposed to ignore the structure that split Central Park in half? How could he ignore the girl who sang every night, sometimes off-key? He could hear how lonely she was because he felt that way sometimes too.
That night, he was crossing the park to get to the movie theater and meet his friends, when a strange feeling gripped him. It said, Wait. Listen. Speak.
So he spoke.
He yanked the beanie from his head and wrung it out like fresh laundry as he waited for her to answer. He heard her before he saw her. She was sitting in the south-facing window of the tower, touching the curling end of her hair. He didn’t recognize the song right away. It was one that his grandma used to like to play, but his Spanish wasn’t all that good.
He saw her get scared. He’d seen boys around the block talk at girls from the street. Call them out from their windows. The girls would stand at the fire escape until their mom or dad or big sibling came out and got tight. Then the guys would run off.
But here, on an evening where the staff had left for the day and there was no one in the park except humans looking for trouble and magical beings coming to life under the moon, he finally worked up the nerve to talk to her.
“Who are you?” she asked. There was something defensive about her voice.
“Um—I’m just Fabían. My friends call me Fabe. Like Gabe.” He wished he could smash his own face against the side of the brick building. Fabe like Gabe? Who said that? He’d never said that in his life.
But then it was worth it from the sound of her laugh.
“What are you doing up there?” he asked.
“Taking in the view, naturally.”
“Yeah, but why are you up there?”
“Someone I loved very much left me behind.”
“You loved a hunter?” Fabían grimaced.
“What? No! What do you want, Fabe like Gabe?” she asked, leaning just slightly out the window.
“The song you were singing reminded me of someone. Usually I just keep walking, but today is different. I felt like I should say something. I don’t know…”
“So you’ve heard me before?”
“Well, yes.”
She set her chin on her wrist. “Then why talk to me now?”
“Because everyone tells me not to.”
“Do they?” She sounded so sad, and he wanted nothing more than to make her not sad.
“Everyone knows that this is a prison and that you never talk to anyone.”
“Who am I supposed to
talk to?”
“Me. If you want.”
“It’s kind of hard to have a conversation while we’re shouting.”
He knew he should go home. If he didn’t leave that minute, he’d miss the movie and his moms would be pissed if he bailed on dinner, but it was ceviche night. He hated ceviche. Fish cooked in lemon juice? No, thank you.
But it had taken him too long to work up the nerve to talk to the girl in the prison tower. He couldn’t turn back now.
“Is there a ladder or an elevator?” he asked. The structure couldn’t just be a cylinder of stacked stones, right? Of course, he knew that though magic had rules, they didn’t apply to everyone in the same way.
“No…but there’s another option. Would you do it?”
His heart felt like the time he took a beating at the boxing ring. Gloved fists popping against his chest. Only now that sensation was coming from within.
“Yes! What is it?”
There was a long pause and she vanished. He could see a silver ripple in Turtle Pond beside him. A slender green creature with a bald head, wearing a lily pad as a skirt, giggled. “But how will you get down, little one?”
“The same way I come up,” he snapped.
She raked her sharp, webbed fingers across the surface. Smiling with pointed teeth, she said, “I’ll be here to break your fall.”
Horns blared in the distance, and a whiff of pretzels and hot dogs somehow made its way here, too. With his true Sight he could see the world come alive. New York City was magic in a way that no one ordinary would ever know. Fey creatures wearing human clothes slunk around smoking cigarettes, and down below across the sprawling green mounds, there were young vampire girls moon-bathing in string bikinis. They drank something dark and syrupy from 7-Eleven Slurpee cups.
He suddenly felt his fragile mortality so much more. There was a reason his mother didn’t want him running around at night, and it was more than the usual human worries. It was more than getting mugged on the 6-train platform. It was getting mugged by a werewolf breaking the peace treaty because he hadn’t eaten in days. Or a renegade cult using his bones to summon an interdimensional demon. It was an old worry, in their time of supposed peace, but it was New York City. Anything could happen. Why was he expected to live afraid all the time? Why was he expected to be the scared one, unlike the great, terrifying, fearless brujos he’d heard of in the past?
Then he saw the rope. It cascaded down in front of him. His heart stuttered, thinking it was a snake or some sort of octopus thing. He needed to stop watching scary movies was the real truth of it.
It was just hair.
He smiled at himself. He grabbed the rope braid and wound it around his hand.
Then he climbed.
* * *
Danaë gasped softly. “He’s really coming up.”
She felt the tug at the roots of her hair, and she yelped like a cat that had been stepped on. She held on to an arm-length chunk of braid and propped a foot against the windowsill. She pulled to help him up, her heart like the tap of tambores in her eardrums. A strangling sensation wrapped around her throat, like the times she’d fallen asleep tangled in her own braid. She’d imagined this moment for years, decades. For so long that it was only ever a fantasy. She had only ever hoped to be like the girl in the stories, but stories never ended happily for girls like her.
Then she could hear him. Did all boys grunt so loudly?
She saw the moment when he looked down and the fear of falling overtook him. His eyes went wide, and then she was reaching for him. He grabbed her hand and tumbled inside. She staggered back, pressing her palms on her thighs, watching him.
He stood to full height. He looked about the age she’d been when she’d been frozen forever—sixteen or seventeen. His dark curls were smooshed at the top, probably from the hat shoved in his back pocket. His nose reminded her of a bird’s beak, but it was lovely on him. High cheekbones and lashes so black she took a step closer to see if he was wearing makeup. It wasn’t something men did in her time, but times changed always. When he smiled, the flutter of wings took off in her belly. Her mother had once said something about beautiful boys with crooked smiles. But her mother wasn’t here. Her mother had left her behind.
This boy was here now.
“Hey,” he said, brushing the front of his leather jacket. It looked soft to the touch, but she kept her hands around her torso.
“Hello,” she said.
He looked out the window and grinned. “You know, I’m glad my friends dragged me to that rock-climbing wall in Brooklyn. It came in handy for this.”
“Rock-climbing?” She searched her memory for something like that from her time before the tower. But the closest she came was from her time in the Dominican Republic. There had been this sea-facing cliff the local kids would leap off on sweltering days. “Is it dangerous?”
He laughed, and his laugh was so sweet and musical. “No. Well, sometimes. My cousins have been trying to get me to conquer my fear of heights.”
The tension of strangers dissipated with every direct eye contact, every moment he fidgeted and his full mouth tugged in a playful way. She found that her whole face ached. Muscles that hadn’t moved were stretching, and it was painful.
“Yet here you are scaling the side of a building a thousand feet in the air,” she said.
“I’m going to be real with you right now,” he told her. “This is scarier. I’ve thought about you for so long and now here you are.”
She walked to the window, around him, and stared at the city night, lit up with a million lights. She reeled her braid back. “Are you disappointed?”
“No!” he said, reaching for her quickly. His fist closed around air, like he was afraid to touch her. “I guess I never got to the part where I actually met you. How long have you been here?”
When she got the last of her hair up into the tower, she sat on the neat pile of it, a throne made of her own locks. She gestured to the pillows on the floor. He kicked off his sneakers, and though there was no door anywhere, he left them neatly pressed against the wall under the north-facing window.
He sat cross-legged across from her and waited.
“I used to count.” She twisted the end of her braid around her finger like a garden snake. Her brown eyes darted to the wall beside him.
He pushed the curtain aside and noticed long scratches in the smooth gray stone. There were dark spots, and it took him a moment to realize they were blood. She’d clawed those tallies, or used something so sharp she drew blood.
“And then I stopped counting,” she said. “I tried to train pigeons to fetch me things, but they’re incredibly flaky. I was brought here in 1947, a year after my—my mother and I moved to Spanish Harlem from a little town outside La Romana.”
“Is that in the DR?”
“Where?”
“The Dominican Republic,” he clarified. “The kids from the floor downstairs call it that.”
“It’s strange having once been from a place and not knowing what to call it anymore. It hasn’t been home for a long time. But then, this tower is not my home either.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
At that she felt her blood run cold, and her words sharpen. “What makes you think I did anything?”
“I—I’m sorry. It’s just. Well. Everyone knows the hunters built this tower as a prison. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone hates them and they hate us.”
“I was put here by a sorcerer.”
“Well, they do employ magical beings when it’s convenient for them. No one is supposed to come near here. That’s what my moms says, though. I don’t think anyone knows the real truth.”
Danaë breathed fast and short. Was that why no one had bothered with her? What did she know about the man who brought her here? “I can’t always remember the day it happened. I
just know I saw him twice more. He’d checked up on me once after locking me up…and then he never came back.”
“And you’ve been here all this time.” He shook his head. It was like his world was inverting.
“What did you expect? A dragon? A witch?”
“I’m a brujo,” he told her. “So that wouldn’t be very shocking.”
She perked up. “You are? That’s why you can see the tower.”
He waved a hand, like he was trying not to brag. “I have the Sight, too. I can See through magical shields and glamours. I can cast some cantos, but my brothers are better than me.”
Tears pricked at her eyes. Her very distant memory remembered magic. It remembered a bright golden light that burned her retinas. Then darkness. Then the tower.
“Fabían, tell me everything.”
* * *
Danaë said his name in a way that didn’t make his shoulders bunch up and his insides cringe. Faaahb-eee-aaahhhhn. She dragged the syllables like she was singing just for him. It made him feel light-headed. He’d had as many crushes as he had digits, but this strange girl made him feel something no one else had. She had a heart-shaped face and a small round nose. With eyes like that and lips that always looked pink, she was the closest thing to a Disney princess he was ever going to see up close. She had the weirdest freckle on the mound of her cheek, misshapen like it didn’t know if it wanted to be a circle or a star. It was pretty, no matter what, and the longer he stared at it, the more he decided it was a star. Definitely. One to guide him back.
He thought of that as he inched back down the tower with her rope of hair wrapped around his ankle and his heart lodged in his throat. The sun was breaking, and when he glanced up at her, she was there in the shadow of the window. How wack was it that she could send down her hair, but never leave herself?
These damn hunters.
As he ran all the way home, trying to beat the rising sun, he thought about his tasks for the day. Gather as much junk food as possible. She could only eat these tiny purple berries growing from the vines at her window. They kept her alive and healed her. He wasn’t sure what kind of injuries she could sustain in a circular room, but he’d heard stories of people who got locked up. People who couldn’t leave their homes because their fears took over. People who had no choice. He shook his head. If she was going to be stuck up there, then he could at least give her a crash course on the last sixty years.
A Universe of Wishes Page 26