“You didn’t want them to come, right?” Ferdinand asked, when the clock had struck midnight. Olivia had long since gone home and one beer for my brother had—with surprising ease—become many more.
“Mother and Father? No—of course not.”
“Good. I would hate for them to not show, if you really had wanted them to.”
“Did they say anything, at home? About why they didn’t?”
“She said it wasn’t ‘their kind of celebration,’ the barbecue … You know Mother can be a bit of a snob. I am happy for you, though. Olivia too—we both are.”
“Tell Mother I said thanks for the flowers. Tell them I thought it was thoughtful and sweet.”
See? I was already learning to pretend. Say the right things to appease the beasts.
With a few years, I would master it fully, and so would Pepper-Man-in-Tommy. We were strangers in disguise, living there among them.
No one ever suspected a thing.
* * *
After all the dirty plates were gathered and carried inside, every empty beer can located among the trees and shrubbery in the Tipp family’s garden, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy and I went into the woods, where we married again at the mound.
Pepper-Man and I had no need of rites of blood, to cut and mingle our life-streams, we had already done so long ago. Neither would we jump the broom, knowing there would be no more fruits. We just celebrated ourselves, and looked forward to our life together—and my freedom from the white room. We lifted our cups to Tommy Tipp, to his heart, that hard and stringy organ that had brought us to this bliss.
Pepper-Man left his Tommy-shell, dressed up in red, and danced with me, fast and wild. The piper and the drummer whipped up a shrilling reel, a feisty waltz, and a tango so dangerous it cut our legs with its razor-sharp edges. Mara danced too, skirts a haze, changing partners faster than the music could follow. The honey cakes were plentiful; stacked with red apples far out of season and sugared nuts and violets. Sweet wine ran from barrels down into bottomless cups. My blue silk dress ripped, my left heel broke. The diamond on my finger sparkled. Mara pressed a kiss to my lips, her skin warm and flushed from dancing. She placed a wedding crown on my brow, made from wild roses, hawthorn, moths, and silver bells.
“A faerie bride,” she whispered. “That is what my mother is.”
“A faerie child,” I whispered back. “That is what my daughter is.”
* * *
I guess that through all this you have started to wonder about Mara. Who is this person so dear to me, yet absent from your mother’s memories, this woman who draws me to the mound and calls me Mother? The young girl I have been fighting with—and warning you about, though perhaps not strongly enough?
I’ll tell you about Mara, and how she came to be.
* * *
My little girl came about when I was fourteen. She was an accident—the result of my brief stint as a fertile woman.
I was wholly unprepared for puberty in that way. Didn’t expect to wake up on sticky sheets, see Pepper-Man trail the new blood with his fingers and stare at it, as if mesmerized. I had some idea of how these things worked, of course, I was no fool and I had read books, of course, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so grisly.
“The blood means you are ripe for plucking.” Pepper-Man stretched out behind me, placing a hand on my aching belly, on the faint swell that had appeared overnight. “You can have children of your own now, make life in that tiny cauldron of yours.”
“What if I bleed out.” I pressed my face hard into the pillow; my voice was muffled by the down.
Pepper-Man chuckled behind me. “You will not, women have bled always. It is the curse of your kind to sometimes bleed. Occasionally it will stop, and then it will begin again. There is no escaping the blood now, not before you are all worn out.”
“But it hurts.” I curled around my aching belly like a fetus.
“Who said it would be painless to carry such a gift? The blood is the price for life, it has always been so.” He swept one of his long fingers across the bloody sheets, and lifted the index to his lips to taste.
“Make it stop,” I demanded. “I know you can do that.”
“Why, not even I can turn back the course of time. You are ripe when you are ripe, and your blood will be even fatter for it. Taste better.”
I remember something shattering in me at that moment; breaking into pieces like a kaleidoscope.
For a brief moment, I saw it all, felt it all: how he stole from me. How he reveled in my blood—my pain—and lived on it, and for the very first time, it bothered me.
“I give you life.” I meant it to be an accusation.
He chuckled beside me, fingers back on my belly, resting. “That you do, and what a fine source of life you are.”
“You never asked me if it was all right.”
“It is a natural thing to feed. You never asked your Sunday roast if it cared to be your meal.”
“I thought you loved me,” said I.
“I do! I do! How can one not love blood as rich as yours? You have made me who I am, sustained my very being, and for that I will be forever at your service.”
“For a price.”
“There is always a price. Anything worth having has a price.”
“What is my price tag, then?” I asked. “What do I get in return for what I give you?”
“I am your servant, bound by blood and shadow. Isn’t that enough?”
And it was, because it had to be. Without Pepper-Man I was nothing, just a sad and angry girl. Without him, all I had was the shrinking white room and a family that loathed me. No magic, then, no crowns of twigs—no midnight flights in the otherworld and dancing until dawn. No mound and no woods, just me, all alone. No one would love and take care of me then.
So I had bled, every month or so, for a year. Those intervals were days of aching, of hunger and fatigue, raging and tears. Mother bought me pads, but said little on the subject. Her furious attitude had turned into a quiet sort of resentment. She would rather not see the woman I became, just as she never wanted to see the child I was before. Her greatest failing, I think, was to always see me for what I was not, never for what I was.
* * *
Motherhood done right is not a thing of beauty. The bonds that bind run deep, are shackles of love forged deep under your skin. Root and thorn; blood and bone; pain and suffering … It’s an instinctual love that has nothing to do with reason, and you can never ask your children for something in return.
Maybe there was something wrong with Mother, who didn’t feel that way about me. Maybe she, too, was broken from the start?
Dr. Martin thought so, back then, and later on. Maybe she was afraid, he reasoned, her rules were nothing but desperate ways of keeping her own demons at bay. She let other demons into my bed, though, and pretended not to see.
I will never forgive her for that.
She made me love my Pepper-Man, because there was no one else to love. Made me rely on him always, because there was no one else to trust.
What kind of mother does that?
* * *
My fourteenth birthday came and went, and suddenly I bled no more. The well was dry, I thought at first. There would be no more bleeding, I had withered before my time.
Then I got stomachaches and threw up before breakfast.
“You carry a child.” Pepper-Man stood beside the porcelain bowl, looking at me as I heaved above the toilet.
“I don’t think so,” I croaked and fished a towel from the rack to dry residue from my lips and beads of moisture from my brow.
“I know these things.” Pepper-Man’s voice was calm as snow. “You carry a child within you.”
I would like to say that my world shattered at that point, that I was struck by lightning and lamented my cruel fate for days on end, but I didn’t. I was still a girl, you see, still stuck in that place in between worlds, that crystalline haze of not-quite-there. Reality didn’t have sharp enough edges
, daylight wasn’t harsh enough to penetrate to where I was. So at first, I did nothing but throw up and wipe my lips, let Pepper-Man soothe me with gifts of leaves and thorny branches. Then my body started to change: a dark trail appeared across my abdomen, from my navel and down to my sex. My small breasts ached and the nipples swelled. I put my hand on my belly and thought I could feel life pulsating through my skin, just below my fingertips. It felt mysterious and alien, yet magical and sweet. The connection to the embryo was instantaneous and strong. It was mine. I felt that.
The child was mine.
XV
This is where things gets ugly, I’m afraid. No good thing—no spell—ever lasted.
I woke up one night, ice cold and sweating. My sheets were sticky again, and this time it was a lot. I screamed when I saw it, or wanted to scream, but it came out just a sad and wailing sound. All that blood pouring out of me; my hopes, my love, just slipping away between my thighs. I writhed on the mattress, on that slick pool of red.
“Pepper-Man!” I cried out. “Pepper-Man!”
“I am here,” he said calmly. He was in the white wicker chair by the window, thin curtains billowing in and obscuring his pale form. His voice was somber, his face chiseled in the semidarkness.
“What is this?” I asked him. “Why is this happening?”
“It is a faerie child you carry. It was never meant to walk this earth.”
“But why?” I sat up shivering; knelt on the mattress with the sheets a twist around my feet, flecked with stains of blood.
“It cannot live like you do, it belongs to the mound, like me. That is the curse of faerie.”
“No.” My voice was just a whisper. “My child can’t die. I won’t let it.” I doubled over in pain again, pressed my face against the pillow while a fresh wave of nauseating pain coursed through my body.
Pepper-Man rose from the chair then, reached out a hand. “Then come with me now, come to the mound. Maybe there is still a chance! Maybe we can save the child!”
Silently I took his fingers. I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t, so he gathered me in his arms and we set off; jumped out through the window and down on the chilly lawn, went into the woods, between the silent trees.
My consciousness was slipping then; the sky above became a blur. The dark blue night and the tall, black treetops bled together, became wings before my vision. My nightgown was soaked through; Pepper-Man’s hands were slick. My child was leaving me, drop by shiny drop.
“You knew it all along,” I accused Pepper-Man in a faint voice.
“Yes.”
“But I have heard of others, half-faerie, half-man…”
“Those are just in your books.”
“I don’t believe you,” I argued weakly, only because I didn’t want to believe.
“Those few who live to birth are weak and sickly. We leave them in cradles and take healthy children back in their stead, to soothe the mothers, mostly. Our kinds were never meant to breed, my Cassandra. We are like day and night, light and darkness, life and death.”
“A twilight child.”
“Just that.” I could hear that he was smiling.
“But it can live in the mound?”
“Maybe it can, if we arrive there in time.”
“You should have told me.”
Pepper-Man didn’t reply to that.
In the mound they laid me on a mattress filled with hay and herbs. Harriet brought me drought to drink. Gwen stripped me of my clothes, smoothed the wet tendrils of my hair and wiped perspiration from my brow. They spread my legs wide and looked at the damage.
“Faerie births are never easy.” Harriet shook her head.
“Oh, she comes through just fine.” Gwen was looking at the bloody mess.
“Her?” I asked.
“It is a girl.” Gwen’s eyes were shimmering gold.
They had cleared the space before one of the fireplaces, the very same spot where we would make Tommy Tipp some years later. There was a fire blazing, water and herbal concoctions boiling in copper pots. The air in there was dense and warm, scented of blood and greenery, faintly of decay.
The other faeries had withdrawn to the other side of the room or left the mound altogether. I was grateful. It felt like a courtesy, them doing this for me, giving me some space in my desperate hour of need.
Pepper-Man was there, though, quiet sentinel, feeding the flames with oak, ash, and thorn, aiming for a smooth passage.
“If she pulls through, she must stay here with us.” Harriet caught my gaze with hers, warning me, perhaps. “She can never live out there with you. She would wither then, be gone for good. She was never meant to live.”
I nodded silently, gulped down what I could from the wooden cup presented to me. It tasted harsh and bitter. Tasted like defeat. Any life would do, though. Any life for my girl.
“Now you must sleep,” Harriet said, and when the herbal brew laced my system, I did. Even through the pain, through the waves that ripped me apart, I slept.
Then, when I woke up again, my life had changed forever.
* * *
She was such a tiny thing at first, my Mara, lying there on an oak leaf. We fed her my milk from a rosy red petal and covered her body in soft downs. Pepper-Man made her a cradle from twigs, and the spiders spun her a dress of silk. Every day after school I walked to the mound to take care of my little daughter. I let Harriet take my milk and my blood to feed her when I was gone. She grew fast, though: within a month, she was the size of a newborn child. Within the year, she looked like a girl of five; brown of hair, blue of eyes, beautiful in every way. She stopped aging when she reached adulthood, has been a young woman now for years. Radiant and healthy, always.
Isn’t that what all parents wish for their children? That they will grow up and be strong?
There would be no other children, though. Faerie births are hard, and I was never quite the same again after. The medical exam Dr. Martin had me do before the trial only confirmed that fact: my womb is broken—torn and poorly mended.
The mound itself is a womb for the dead, spewing out twisted life, and that is where my daughter lives, safe and protected, always.
* * *
There is another version of this story, but I am not sure of its origins.
It could have been Dr. Martin, coaxing me and twisting my mind. He did that sometimes, asked and asked until I gave in and made up other stories, just to make him stop.
In that story, I am sitting at the table with my family. It’s another Sunday dinner; roast or ham or something glistening at the center of the table. Olivia is sullen for some reason. Her pouty lower lip quivers as she chews through the meat. Her long lashes fan out on her creamy skin, her gaze is glued to the plate.
Ferdinand, home for the weekend, is just at the onset of puberty himself. He is a pale shadow by the table, playing with the brussels sprouts on his plate with the fork; rolling the green balls back and forth between the heaps of meat and the sickly white potatoes. No gravy for Ferdinand, he likes things neat.
Mother at her end is folding and refolding the napkin in her hands. Her coral-red fingernails are smoothing the soft paper repeatedly. She isn’t eating, she is chewing her lips. All her lipstick is gone and I can see her swallow and swallow. Her eyes look wrong, like shattered crystals; something is broken in there. I think she might have been crying—or if she hasn’t already, that she is about to very soon. This is a rare thing, it barely happens.
Father is somber. He’s serving himself more potatoes, pours more gravy on top. He doesn’t look at us. Doesn’t look at Mother. He is looking at his food, and his lips stretch, and he eats. Mother looks at him, though, expression somewhere between pleading and fury. Occasionally she looks at me and her face goes blank. She is ice and smooth, like white stone.
“I’m doing better in school this term.” Ferdinand’s voice is very quiet.
“Good,” says Mother. “That is good.”
Father chews. Olivia sulks. Ferdin
and falls back into silence.
“Cassie, how are you these days?” Mother’s voice has a shrill edge to it.
“Fine,” I say, or rather whisper. Truth is I am not fine. I am sick a lot, I throw up. I have a baby in my belly.
“No more trouble at school, I hope?”
It hasn’t really been more trouble than usual—those days I kept the snide girls and bullies at bay by being scary, by telling stories about Pepper-Man. I would glare and scowl and say he had taught me to perform a curse: How to make beauty fade. They would snigger and roll their eyes, but stay away; no one wants to be ugly. The teachers were always complaining about my lack of effort, about my poor attention span. Even the ones who appreciated my “considerable imagination” had given up on me, but I didn’t grieve the loss. I had too many things going on, too many things to think about.
None of this is new, though, which is why I get suspicious when Mother asks.
“Have you gotten any new friends?” She folds the napkin, unfolds the napkin.
“No.” I am surprised by the question. She really ought to know better than that.
“No?” She repeats it as a question, biting into her lip. “No … boys?”
“No,” I blurt out, eyes widening—the idea is silly.
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