by Jon Cohen
Stu had more than nailed it. She stared at the email from Steve Jones, the bastard down at the savings and loan. Stu’s bastard.
Dear Valued Client:
This letter is a formal notification that you are in default of your obligation to make payments on your home equity loan, account #382W904. Per our records, you failed to pay your home equity loan, $265.09, for three consecutive months. We intend, therefore, to initiate preliminary foreclosure proceedings.
The words on the screen went in and out of focus.
Because it wasn’t just the bank loan that she hadn’t paid. She was behind on her oil bill, her electric, and come June 1, three weeks, she’d be hit by the real estate and school taxes. Why had she allowed things to get this far?
Because she’d been in a damn daze. This year without Dean, she’d been so into survival mode—living, breathing, working, struggling with Oriana—she hadn’t kept her eye on lesser things that weren’t lesser things at all. Like paying your bills on time. She’d been living day to day, week to week. And let’s face it, paycheck to paycheck. That her financial humiliation would come in the form of Stu Giptner was almost too much to bear.
She heard a skittering in Oriana’s bedroom. She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Oriana?”
A faint voice, in reply. “Yes.”
“What’s up?”
“Going to the bathroom.”
Stupidly—she was not just financially negligent but parentally, too—she’d let Oriana have a Cherry Coke Zero at dinner. Why do I even have Cherry Coke Zero in this house? What’s wrong with me?
“You okay?” said Amanda. Please say yes, because I can’t deal with no.
“Yes.”
Amanda sighed, stared at the computer again, the rows of ugly numbers. Nothing uglier than debt. Except goddamn foreclosure. She didn’t want to stare at numbers. She wanted to go to the tree house. Wouldn’t that be nice? To go to the tree house and sit on the deck with Harry and listen to him talk about trees on this moonlit night. Something about the way he talked about trees, a sort of sensible poetry to it. And she didn’t even like poetry. She turned and looked into the kitchen. The window above the sink. The window to the forest. She couldn’t see the tree house, but he was out there. Was he looking this way, toward her house? Was he thinking, possibly, of how nice it would be to sit with Amanda watching the moon silhouette the trees?
Amanda, she said to herself, you’re thinking about Harry. Thinking about him, you know?
All right, okay, so what? She was openly thinking about Harry. But what’s the deal here? He wasn’t like Dean or Cliff, the kind of guy that was in her native blood. She couldn’t even put her finger on what kind of guy Harry was, exactly. He seemed to be constantly changing before her eyes. He was kind of ridiculous and kind of brave. Ridiculous enough to live in a tree house. Brave enough to climb to the top of the tallest tree in the forest. To not throw a punch. To put aside his own tangled grief and allow Oriana, in her grief, to reach out to him.
The question is, Amanda thought, am I brave enough to do anything about him? And what do I want to do? Is this because he’s nice to Oriana? Am I grateful, or am I attracted?
I’m attracted.
Okay, all right. But am I attracted because he’s so refreshingly not attracted to me? Except he is attracted to me. Because the few times I have dared to touch him, he has closed his eyes, as if in prayer.
Whoa. Heavy thoughts here, Amanda. Poetic thoughts. It’s midnight, you’re tired, you’re swimming in deep waters. But.
This widow, widower thing. This protective wall we’ve put between us. What are we walling in or walling out? And it was a wall, where she’d first met Harry. That first day, the sugar maple, the stone wall. She remembered the sight of him, rising into view, the stone wall between them. And did the wall stop her that day? No. When he started to pass out, she caught him. She vaulted the wall and took hold of him. From the very start, her instinct was to hold him.
And then Amanda took a swim in deep waters. What would it be like to kiss Harry? To move forward, like it was so obviously time to do. Did he know how to kiss? Really know how?
Plink.
A sound from above, bringing Amanda back to earth. Oriana in her bedroom, dropping something on her floor. Please just go to bed, Amanda thought. Don’t make me come up. She stared at the computer staring back at her. The foreclosure letter throbbing on the overbright screen like a migraine. The overdue bills. She clicked helplessly back and forth in the mire of bad news. She couldn’t take it anymore, so she did what everybody does when faced with an insurmountable and unpleasant task on the computer—she began to surf the internet. She typed the word on the keyboard without really knowing she was doing it. S-A-N-T-A.
Absentmindedly, you gorge on Amazon or Netflix or Spotify, or you Google something just to Google it. Brownies. Mercedes Benz. Snow boots. Ten Hottest Vacation Spots. Amanda’s tired brain, craving relief from bad financial mojo, wanted to believe in Santa for a moment or two. She clicked.
Boom, a million links to “Susquehanna Santa” came up. Amanda leaned into the screen, reading. Then she wanted to see it, see a photograph of one of those bags of gold that had landed in Elkdale and Halfordsville. Her fingers on the keyboard. G-O-L-D.
As she typed, the search bar auto-filled. And she stopped. Like any parent would. You check to see what sites your kid is visiting. Look at all these sites coming up for “gold,” Amanda thought. Those are all Oriana’s, not mine. It was odd. Oriana not talking about gold very much, but she had read tons about it.
And odder still, the gold searches were all variations on: how to buy gold. Where you buy it, how you buy it, the legalities of gold ownership. Amanda clicked left and scrolled down the search history. A little prickle of electricity went up her spine when she looked at the dates. It wasn’t her intent to spy on her child. She was simply interested. Then she was very interested. And then she spied. Because those first dates, when Oriana was checking out gold...
A little anxious now, Amanda typed in: “Elkdale first bag of gold.” Susquehanna Santa handed out the first bag seven days ago, April 27. But Oriana had typed: “Can anyone buy gold coins?” on April 8. A few weeks before the gold landed in Elkdale, Oriana was researching gold. Gold coins.
Amanda leaned back in her chair and hugged herself. Stared at the ceiling. Stared at the screen again. Oriana’s searches weren’t idle. She didn’t type in “fairy tale gold” or “gold ring” or anything childlike. What she had typed was businesslike. Full of intent. Something more than curiosity. Was her daughter psychic? Amanda swallowed. I am not the parent of a psychic child. What am I the parent of?
Plink. Oriana in her bedroom. Something falling onto a floorboard, rolling, settling.
More than a prickle shot up Amanda’s spine. She was up and out of the chair in an instant, her feet silent on the stairs. She knew how to move in stealth. How often had she been at Dean’s side as he stalked deer or bird-watched? She reached the second-floor landing, crept down the hallway toward Oriana’s closed bedroom door. A furtive shadow passed back and forth in the light under the door. Oriana scurrying like a creature in the underbrush.
Amanda put her hand on the doorknob. And pounced.
Oriana was on her hands and knees, reaching under her bed, her hand touching what she had dropped. She brought it into the light just as her mother burst into the room. Oriana yelped and tried to hide the object in her hand. But it was like trying to hide the sun.
Blinded by the magnitude of what she saw, Amanda thought for a disoriented moment that she had stepped into a fairy tale. That her daughter was not from this world, but some other. What was this being, clutching in her hand a large golden coin? A princess, an elf? What lair had Amanda stumbled upon? What magic was happening in this room? What was happening here, what?
“What—?” The overwhelming q
uestion voiced in a garbling panic.
Oriana had never heard her mother make such a sound. Or seen such a look on her face. Confusion. Fear. Oriana stepped forward, holding the coin out to her. Her mother shrank back.
“It’s just gold,” Oriana cried.
Amanda breathing out of her mouth, staring.
“It’s just one,” Oriana said. “I’ll put it back.”
And were those words a comfort? No, they were not. “Put it back...where?” Amanda whispered.
Oriana burst into tears. She pushed the coin into her mother’s hand, and wrapped herself around her. The coin was as heavy as a planet. Amanda stared at it, as she clutched her child to her. She held her tight, as if to protect her from the gold. That was her instinct. This gold is a danger and I must protect my child. Amanda worked to return to herself. To her parent self, to her nurse self, to the person who knew how to deal with chaos. She was the mother of a child who had somehow gotten herself into inexplicable trouble. She let Oriana sob for exactly one more minute, then uncoiled her, walked her across the room and sat her down on her desk chair.
Again, Amanda asked. “Put it back where?”
Between gulps and gasps, Oriana said, “It’s Harry’s. He’s the grum.”
Amanda gripped Oriana’s desk, as the room tilted and swirled. She dropped the gold coin onto the desk as if it was poisonous. Because it was.
“What do you mean, ‘it’s Harry’s’?”
“He’s the grum.”
Amanda gripped her daughter’s shoulders. “What is that? What’s a ‘grum’?”
Gulp, gasp, sob. Amanda ran into Oriana’s bathroom, unfurled a mile of toilet paper, flew back into the room, pressed it to her daughter’s nose.
“Blow.” Oriana blew, long and hard and messily.
“What’s a grum? What is this gold? Oriana, tell me what’s going on!”
“The Grum’s Ledger.” And then the fairy tale came tumbling out of her. The whole, nightmarish fairy tale. It took time. A lot of shouting. And the rest of the roll of toilet paper. Because between the two of them, there were a lot of tears.
Amanda blew her nose, angrily tossed the wad to the floor. Then picked it up and put it in the wastebasket, because she was a nurse and used Kleenexes were germ bombs.
Harry Crane was the grum. Harry Crane was Susquehanna Santa. Harry Crane was everything but the dull bureaucrat he was supposed to be. Harry, who was supposed to bring Oriana back to earth, had instead pulled her into another world. For a year, her daughter had wandered in the forest. And then it ended. With the arrival of Harry Crane, it ended. That was the truth his sudden arrival promised. Harry will save my daughter. And it was a lie. He did nothing of the kind. He betrayed me. Like an ogre—like a grum—he pulled Oriana even deeper into the forest.
There was too much to process here, and it made so little sense. How much of what Oriana had told her was true and how much was just batshit crazy? What was the truth, what was a fairy tale, and what the hell was going on in a world where a forestry bureaucrat lands in my backyard and hands out four million dollars in gold? That was their plan. That’s what he was doing right now. Or was about to do.
Amanda looked out Oriana’s window into the deep of the forest. Was he out there, or had he already left on his Santa rounds?
Amanda reeled around the room. All she knew for certain was that she was going to put an end to Harry Crane. Now. She was going to find him. And what—turn him over to the state police? Drag him to the quarry and throw him off the edge? Toss his bags of gold after him?
She was going to find him, now.
“He’s not there, Mom. He’s gone.”
Her daughter privy to Harry’s every move. It weakened Amanda’s knees. Her scheming daughter and her scheming grum. Amanda calmed herself, so that she could calmly find out from her scheming daughter where she might find Harry, so she might calmly wring his neck.
“Where has he gone?”
“It’s after midnight. He’s handing out bag three.”
Deep breath. “Bag three. And now tell me, because I know you know—” Amanda leaning in, speaking slowly “—where exactly will our grum be handing out bag three?”
Oriana, who was a very bright girl capable of outfoxing adults, knew she had better not outfox this one. She began to sniffle again, because she hated to give up Harry, but she also hated that she had lied to her mother. “I did this for Daddy, I did this for him.”
Wingèd Dean, the red-tailed hawk. Do not be moved, Amanda. Your child’s welfare is at stake. “Now do something for Mommy, Oriana. Who gets bag three?”
“Somebody in Wynefield.”
Wynefield. The next town over. Four miles east. “How does he choose the house?”
“There’ll be a tree,” Oriana said. “And he’ll know.”
Of course, Amanda thought. The tree man.
“Let me come,” Oriana pleaded.
“No.” Amanda would absolutely not allow her to become further entangled. Tonight was the great untangling. “You stay right here. You know the drill.”
The drill was this. She and Oriana had to make their way through the wilderness of life. Sometimes, Amanda had to leave Oriana alone. Oriana was a latchkey kid. Tough enough to stay in a house alone. Tough enough to explore the forest alone. Of necessity, independent, self-reliant, able to fend for herself. Fending for herself, Amanda thought in bitter amazement, Oriana found a grum in the forest and cooked up a plan to hand out millions in gold.
Holy mother of God. You teach a kid to be independent, and they step through a door into a state of independence you never dreamed possible. Through sheer force of will, Oriana had brought a fairy tale to life.
Amanda jumped in her truck and sped grimly into the night. Oriana stood watching at the upstairs window. She was as forlorn as Rapunzel, imprisoned in her tower.
Ten minutes later, roaring into the sleeping town of Wynefield, Amanda was dead certain that fairy tales were disruptive nonsense, introducing into the brains of children the harmful hope that magic exists in the world. What she wanted Oriana to know was that life was hard, life was real. Fathers and husbands sometimes die, houses can be foreclosed on, strangers who appear in the forest are there to undermine and betray you.
Life will never be smoothed over by magic, because magic does not exist. These were Amanda’s unyielding and determined thoughts, as she turned the corner onto Lindmore Street, the last of seven streets down which she had careened in search of Harry Crane.
Alice through the Looking-Glass.
Dorothy in the Land of Oz.
Amanda on Lindmore Street.
When she saw it, Amanda almost crashed her pickup into a fire hydrant. In the front yard of the last house on Lindmore, caught in the high beams of her truck headlights—golden stars flying up toward the moon, crazy dazzling fireflies, the twirling lanterns of elves. There was no making sense of it. What was she seeing?
In the center of the shower of impossible golden light, two beings. One was Harry. The other, circling him, was a large black blur.
* * *
Harry had turned onto Lindmore Street five minutes earlier.
When he first entered Wynefield, he saw SUSQUEHANNA SANTA PLEASE STOP HERE! signs on several front lawns. He avoided those houses. He remembered himself as a child on Christmas Eve, waiting up for Santa. How many Wynefieldians, young and old, were waiting up for Santa?
He had not scouted Wynefield beforehand, as he had Elkdale and Halfordsville. The gold deliveries would all be made in darkness now, after midnight. Even in the dark it wasn’t hard to find the best tree. It was not always the tallest or the grandest, but the one that truly belonged to a house. A sort of dream pairing. The tree had to be the kind a child might climb. That Harry himself might climb.
In Wynefield, the perfect tree was a towering white oak in the front
yard of the last house on Lindmore Street, where the paved road gave way to gravel. In rural small towns, paved streets often end as gravel roads that snake off into the countryside, through woods or past farmland.
Harry didn’t like back roads. Too easy to get lost. Or they turned into dead ends. Not good roads for making your escape.
It was a moonlit night, a few clouds. Light enough to see, dark enough to obscure. The moon would be approaching full for another week. But he didn’t need a week. His plan was to hand out one bag a night for the next four nights. Tonight’s bag, and tomorrow’s, numbers three and four, were the small ones—if $300,000 could be called small. The final two bags would be the big boys, over a million each. The relief that would come when he got rid of all the gold: mission accomplished, the adventure achieved, the permanent smile that would affix itself to Oriana’s soul.
Through Harry, Dean Jeffers performing great and otherworldly magic. This was a fine thing, Harry thought, this was a good thing. And no Wolf! This was a perfect thing! The grum, back on his shelf in the library, maybe even he’d crack a smile. Why wouldn’t he? At the end of his story, he uncovers his great love.
A compelling idea. Dig deep enough and you find love.
And what would Harry uncover when the last of his gold was plinked away? He was not in love with Amanda, not even romantically involved—despite Oriana hoping it, Olive Perkins at the stone wall alluding to it, the guys at Green Gables thinking it. He was not involved but he was intertwined. He was very thankful he had landed in her world. He allowed himself this. That it was a fine thing, a good thing, to be in Amanda’s world. There was no one for him but Beth, of course. But he needed to be with Amanda. She was the perfect woman for this moment. They were in the same exclusive club, The Year One Club, and she understood the liberating rules of membership—that it brought them just close enough. He could let go of Beth just enough to allow a little bit of Amanda.