You Let Me In

by Camilla Bruce

  He was my best friend, Pepper-Man, the one and only I could count on.

  In those dark and painful nights, I felt loved.

  * * *

  The summer following Olivia’s party, Mother and I fought day and night. My diet was a constant topic of debate: not so much sugar, not so much cream, I would grow fat and curve all wrong. I was already putting on, she said, though I knew she was wrong about that. Whatever I ate, Pepper-Man just sucked the energy right out of me again.

  I was a fury of anger and spite; I gorged myself on buttered cookies, drowned my treats in cream. I stole Mother’s lipstick and wore it to church. My usual expression was a sneer, and I perfected chill in the mirror. I didn’t hide my gifts from Pepper-Man anymore, but put them proudly out on display. My room grew into a fearsome wood of twigs and fallen leaves, brilliantly colored feathers, acorns, and sharp rocks.

  Mother didn’t know what to do with me. She kept eyeing me sideways with a mixture of repulsion and worry in her gaze. She never imagined us growing up, I think. She had only envisioned herself as the mother of toddlers. She had never considered that we would blossom and become adults in our own right, slither from her grasp as we had from her womb, not hers anymore, but belonging to ourselves. Who would she be then, when her son grew a glossy beard and her daughters walked in high heels? No longer the blushing bride, for sure. No longer the young and beautiful mother. Her daughters would knock her off the throne, prettier and more desirable, if only by the grace of youth.

  Olivia was caught in the crossfire most of the time. She would crawl up next to our mother and offer soft cheeks of comfort whenever there were tears, perfect pearl-shaped droplets that caught in Mother’s lashes. Olivia would be the teddy bear, the sweet child to hug and kiss and make everything feel all right whenever I had been a horror, hurling dinner plates at the walls. I will never forget the looks she gave me, that little tangerine-marzipan girl; dark eyes throwing daggers across the room, accusing me for making our mother sad.

  Our brother Ferdinand said nothing while the stoneware flew. He did some half-hearted fencing exercises in the garden, read books on chess and World War I. He was still such a quiet and shy boy, and our shouting gave him headaches. He lay like a pale ghost in bed, cold cloth on his forehead, while Fabia brought him tea on a tray. It wouldn’t be long before Mother decided he would do better away from home, and they shipped him off to boarding school, convinced that he would thrive in a more “wholesome” environment with no mad sister running around.

  He didn’t, of course. Our brother never did thrive.

  My father, like a bear, just watched it all. His eyes were peering from behind folded newspapers, or across the kitchen table where pieces of his rifle were laid out to be cleaned, from behind the hooks of his fishing gear, across the clubs of his golf set, he peered.

  Watched.

  It was late that summer, after a very long school break, when the last good china plate went crashing to the wall, Mother finally made good on her threat and set up an appointment with Dr. Martin.

  * * *

  You both know all about Dr. Martin, of course, and that book he wrote: Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. You might even have read it yourselves. You, Penelope—picking it up at work, perhaps—opening it fearfully while chewing your lunch, choking on tomato wedges and sticky cheese whenever something unpleasant came up. And you, Janus—you really ought to read it, if you haven’t already. You would like it, I believe—it would appeal to your analytical mind.

  In its pages, Dr. Martin recounts our time together since I had first appeared in his office as a scrawny girl of twelve, right up until I married and found no further reason to continue our paid discussions. He also tells of those in-between years when he was merely my friend, and how he re-entered his role as my psychiatrist after Tommy Tipp died, and witnessed in my defense at the trial.

  Your mother came to see me after the book hit the shelves. Pale as a sheet, red hair a mess, Olivia was standing on my porch, clutching at a yellow cashmere shawl haphazardly draped around her shoulders.

  “Do you have any idea what you have done?” Her white lips were shivering. “Mother is a mess. She has taken to bed with a migraine—”

  “It’s just a book,” I said. “It’s just Dr. Martin’s words.”

  “Why do you hate her so much?” asked my sister. “Why do you want to destroy our lives?”

  I felt a little awkward, seeing her so distressed. Not guilty, mind you, it was never about that. “No one says it’s the truth. I certainly don’t believe it’s the truth.”

  “Then how could you let that doctor say such things?”

  “It made him happy, and he was a good friend to me at the trial.”

  “You let him publish lies! How can you live with that? Have you no love for us at all?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just a story. As good as any, I suppose.”

  “But people believe it, Cassie, can’t you see that? He’s a professional. A goddamn doctor!”

  “People believe what they like.” I considered myself quite the expert.

  “Well, you didn’t have to endorse his lies. You have ruined us, Cassie, this time for good.”

  “According to Dr. Martin—my friend—we were already ruined, a long time ago.”

  “But those are lies, Cassie. Lies!”

  “Oh well,” I said, shrugged. “Maybe you’re all in denial.”

  “Even Father will be cross with you this time, just you see.”

  “Father is never cross with me,” I said, but didn’t feel so sure. He was always there, watching. Looming like a thundercloud, a dark, uneasy presence.

  “You have really outdone yourself with this one,” Olivia went on. “As if the trial wasn’t bad enough. Think about my children, Cassie, they’ll never get rid of this smear.”

  “They will if they grow up to be strong, confident people. The kind that don’t give a rat’s ass what people are saying about them.”

  Olivia shook her head, a sad expression on her face. “No one is that confident, except for you, perhaps, but then you are stark, raving mad.”

  “That is a question of perspective.”

  Olivia shook her head again, anger and pity flaring in her eyes. “Not all of us can run off with the fairies, Cassie. Some of us have to stay put and deal with your disasters.”

  I laughed then; it was a broken sound. “Yes,” I said. “I am sure you wish you were me.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.” She seemed a little taken aback.

  “I know.” I took a few steps closer, forcing her to retreat down the stairs. “I know that isn’t what you meant.”

  * * *

  Mother may have been in a rage about that book, but I was an adult at the time, and had signed all the appropriate paperwork. I don’t believe I cared either way. It was as if that story had nothing to do with me. If it pleased Dr. Martin to tell the world his stories, he was most welcome to it. I knew a thing or two about stories.

  IX

  People loved it, of course. They had all read the newspaper headlines: Murder Suspect Blames the Fairies! Who didn’t want to know more about that? Get all those tawdry, dirty little details, a peek in under the sheets. Never mind that the court cleared my name, or that a scrawny little woman like me could never have torn her husband’s limbs apart like that, not even with a cleaver and an axe.

  Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis remains to this day a compelling study of the long-term consequences of childhood abuse. It’s a strong and personal narrative detailing the patient-doctor relationship between a troubled young girl and a pioneer in his field, or so said the reviews.

  It’s all so very easy in Dr. Martin’s telling; the truth is neatly gift wrapped with a shiny little bow on top. In his truth, faerie cakes become pills to drug me, faerie milk becomes alcohol to make me compliant and unresisting. The gifts Pepper-Man brought me were turned into sweets to bribe me with—to pay for my ob
edience, and my silence.

  In his book, Dr. Martin wrote about that night I’ve mentioned—the night when Mother and Fabia went through my room and threw all of Pepper-Man’s gifts away. He wrote that it was only cakes, caramels, and cupcakes they pulled forth from the nooks and crannies of my room, not crowns of twigs and eyeballs. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment of this transformation from wood and bone to sugar and frosting, but we had talked a lot, Dr. Martin and I, and it could have happened anytime. Maybe it was due to the gifts themselves, enchanted as they were, that their nature changed in the eyes—or ears—of the beholder? Maybe, when I had said “eyeball,” Dr. Martin heard “caramel”; when I said “hawthorn,” he heard “cupcake”? Maybe candy was what he expected, so candy was what he got?

  It was Dr. Martin’s way of dealing with the faeries, I think, to break it all down to ingestible bites—something he could chew on and swallow. I ought to be mad, of course, but it’s not easy to face a reality like mine. I can’t entirely blame him for wanting to create a new one more to his liking.

  But Dr. Martin’s book had ripped large holes in the paper curtains of respectability and normalcy my mother had so strived to keep, despite all my “afflictions,” and even after the horror of my trial. She would never forgive him for that.

  I, on the other hand, admired him, for being so bold that he told his truth. That first edition of his book was pink, and so I have insisted that all my novels are too, to honor the late doctor’s memory.

  In addition, a large percentage of the money from his book sales went to me, to “the Cassie fund,” as Dr. Martin called it, knowing very well that my family would likely cut me off, and what was I to do, already without Tommy’s income? I lived long and well on that money, it pulled me through until I started making money of my own.

  Dr. Martin was a very good friend to me.

  “In many ways, your mother’s delusions run as deep as your own,” he told me once. “She has made herself blind to the things she will not see, especially the things that can somehow direct blame in her direction.”

  It was shortly after the trial, and we were sitting outside a small café, overlooking the ocean, sipping coffee white with cream. Seagulls were soaring high above us; faeries with gills and silvery fish tails were writhing down by the tideline, hair matted with beach sand.

  “It’s not her fault,” I said, sipping my coffee, pushing the sunglasses further up my nose. I remember it was a blazingly hot day, almost as warm as the day I met Tommy Tipp. It was better by the sea, where a salty draft cooled our skin. I was dressed all in white, innocent as a dove.

  “Well,” he replied, measuring me with those intense, brown eyes. “It certainly isn’t your fault either. You have been let down in so many ways,” he said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, popping a capsule for his heart. He was a very old man at that point; his practice had closed and he spent his senior years writing—about me.

  “What you said before, in your draft,” I was referring to the still unfinished manuscript that he’d graciously let me read, “that we will never truly know what happened to me, but that someone, somewhere, knows the truth…”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you thinking of my mother then?”

  “I was.”

  “But if she is delusional as well, maybe her truth will be as twisted as mine, compared to your beliefs.”

  “That might very well be. But that’s why I write this book. It’s all for you, Cassie—in your defense. Someone ought to tell it like it is, even if your mother can’t or won’t. To redeem you.”

  “It’s a little ironic that Mother was the one who called you in the first place, way back then.”

  “To have someone take the problem off her hands, no doubt.”

  “Would she really have done that if she was in on some big, dark secret?”

  “Denial, my dear,” Dr. Martin said. “Denial is a powerful drive.”

  “Mara says that you are the one in denial, and that she will leave a token on your pillow tonight to prove it.”

  “Oh, please, no,” the old man’s face fell in stubbly, fleshy folds. “Please tell her not to. I would hate for my wife to find you squabbling around our house at night.”

  “Mara will. I will stay at home.”

  “Of course you will.” A twinkle in his eyes.

  “Just you see.” I left it at that.

  Mara said later that she had indeed visited the doctor that night, leaving half a leaf and an acorn by his side. Dr. Martin never mentioned it, though, so either he had not seen it, his wife had picked it up, or he thought it was something the cat dragged in.

  Or maybe—just maybe—he too was in denial.

  * * *

  Despite our different opinions, he was a good friend to me, Dr. Martin. Without him, I might not have escaped those first tribulations quite as unscathed, even if it was technicalities more than anything else that sealed the outcome of the trial. It was still nice of him to try to redeem me.

  He was dead by the time those other deaths took place, and I still often wonder what he would have made of those.

  X

  I remember, a long, long time ago, when I first told Pepper-Man about seeing Dr. Martin. We were lying in our meadow at the edge of the woods; it was a warm night, but twilight was settling. It was our favorite time of the day, that silent hour before night arrived. Our chosen spot was so peaceful, no strollers or dog walkers ever went there. I suppose that was due to Pepper-Man; his presence felt unsettling to most people. When I lay on my back and looked up, I could see the treetops swaying, the birds rushing across the sky. He held my hand. It had changed over the years. Where he used to look gnarled, he was smooth. Where he used to be pale, he held a soft, pink pallor. His warts were gone; his lips were red. His white, white hair had turned to silk. It was my doing, I know that now, it was due to my blood, which sustained him.

  He was becoming more like me.

  “What if the doctor thinks I’m mad?” I squeezed his fingers. “What if he locks me up somewhere?”

  “I would find you.” Pepper-Man squeezed my fingers in return. His eyes didn’t look so murky anymore, but had become a deep and warm forest green.

  “Would you break me out of the asylum?” I was only half joking.

  “I would break you out no matter where you were kept. Do you recall the night of the first feast? I came for you then.”

  “That is true,” I admitted.

  “Nothing they can do to you is important. All that is important is here, between us.”

  “Mother would disagree.”

  “Mother does not know you.”

  “But you do?”

  “I do.” He turned over so he lay on his side, looking down at me, head resting in his hand. His tattered rags were gone by then, replaced by clothes of charcoal gray. “Here.” He handed me a mason jar that I recognized from our pantry. The orange spread it used to contain was gone; instead there was a sprig with two black berries, a dead white butterfly, and four dry pine needles inside.

  “What is this?” I looked at the curious contents.

  “What you wished for, my Cassandra. It is a story for you to tell people—something they will believe.”

  He was right, I had said that. I shook the jar gently. “A story, huh?”

  “Indeed. You might enjoy that more than crowns now, maybe.”

  “You mean I have outgrown your necklaces and rings?”

  “A little.” Pepper-Man smiled. Despite his new beauty, the smile still looked cruel; his teeth were too sharp and his lips too red.

  “How do I get it out?” I turned the jar over.

  “Boil it in water and drink it as tea, or you could eat it as it is, from the jar.”

  “Water it is, then.”

  Pepper-Man sat up on his knees and lifted my skirt away from my thighs, searched with his finger for an unmarked patch of flesh.

  “Do not fret about the doctor,” he said before his head dipped down to feed.
“Nothing they can do can ever hurt you.”

  * * *

  Faerie gifts can be many things. Sometimes they come as inspiration. Trinkets and baubles and crowns I can go without, but I find myself addicted to the faerie tea; liquid stories delivered in jars. There is nothing like the feeling of its power unfurling inside, petal by petal—a fresh story. Faerie magic is the purest kind of magic, blending nature skillfully. Faeries know everything that lives around them, are drawn to life—and death—itself. They feel the essence of every bone and every tree. In my jars, an angry spruce and a melancholy willow meet a burst of happy buttercups, or the bitter decay of a dead wasp. No one knows quite how the stories will turn out, not even the faerie who makes them. That’s a part of their alchemy—to never quite know the outcome. It makes it as interesting for them as for me, to see how a particular blend will turn out. Faerie magic is fickle magic: there are no guarantees.

  He knew what he did, Pepper-Man, on that late and lazy summer’s day, he bound me with powerful shackles. He was always good at that, my friend, finding new ways to please me. New gifts to dazzle me with, new chains to bind me. Was in me, always, tooth and claw.

  There is no escape from Faerie.

  * * *

  Those faerie gifts did save me; they made my miserable life feel worthwhile. Though I loathed my mother’s house and the walls of the white room, at least I had an escape. Between the enchanted stories and my Pepper-Man, I felt like I could breathe. For years, it was all I had: Pepper-Man, those jars—and Dr. Martin.

  * * *

  That idea of escape—that desperation—is why I threw all my caution overboard, I think, when Tommy Tipp came along. Golden of hair, blue of eyes. I so desperately wanted to be saved then, for someone to show me the way out.

  I wasn’t so much enticed by the idea of love as such; even back then it never rang true to me.

  “True love.” “Meant to be.”