“What did you say to him?” I asked her. We were sitting on my porch, watching the sunset, sharing a jar of faerie tea between us. The very same jar that became the beginning of Golden Suns.
“At first I didn’t say much at all. He was in his office, typing, and I just stood there in the corner where the light didn’t reach and watched him.”
“That was not very kind of you. You know how people hate being watched from the shadows.”
“Well, I wanted to see him.”
“And then what? What happened?”
“He coughed a bit, sipped his cocoa…”
“And?”
“I went over to him and stood before him, looked him in the eyes when he raised his head. He made a sound, the kind they make, like an outburst—or a scream…”
“He was surprised, then?”
“Of course. Then I said, real slow, so that I knew that he heard every word: ‘Now you have seen a faerie.’”
“You didn’t.”
“Of course I did.”
“And did he really see you?”
“Of course he did.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. I left. I think I scared him. I hope I did.”
“You shouldn’t have scared poor Dr. Martin.”
“Well, nothing to do for it now.” She sipped her tea. “With him being dead and all.”
“Yes,” I said, “such a shame.”
We finished our tea in silence.
XXIII
We have to talk about your uncle, Ferdinand.
XXIV
I don’t know how much your mother has shared with you about everything that happened. You were still teens then, fragile saplings with tender hearts, she would have wanted to spare you the details.
Neither do I know how close you were to him, what kind of an uncle he was to you. I was rarely invited to your birthdays, as you know. I never had a natural place at the family table, not even while Tommy Tipp was assumed to be alive.
I am not bitter about that. I want you to know that I wanted it that way.
Back when you were small, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy and I took the easy route and went to see the Tipps rather than the Thorns when Santa came to town. It kept our neighbors and friends from asking, and the Tipps never knew the difference; they thought Pepper-Man was their son all along.
No one ever cared to ask why we so rarely saw my family. I have no idea how your mother explained that to you two. She used to bring you to our brown house, though, do you remember? Four times a year, three months apart to the date. I am sure she had it penciled in her calendar: Take kids to see Aunt Cassie and Uncle Tommy. You probably don’t see it that way, but I think you were fooled by that. I think it was your mother’s way of throwing you off the scent. It was the bare minimum she had to do to convince you everything was normal and safe. And if someone asked you, at school or at a friends’, about us, your aunt and uncle, you could always say: “We saw Aunt Cassie just recently, her petunias looks lovely this year,” or “Aunt Cassie and Uncle Tommy just bought a new parasol, we had ice cream in the garden, with strawberries.” That way no one would know that our relationship was frigid as a barren nun, and the two of you would grow up with the illusion that you were part of a healthy family.
Suited her, suited me. Suited Mother, I presume.
I think you’ve been fooled like that often.
The visits stopped, though, after the trial. Despite what she said, Olivia always thought me guilty. I think she worried about letting her chickens near the viper’s nest, and I can’t really blame her for that. I honestly can’t say I’ve missed you much either. Janus, you were always such a sullen child, always discontent. And you, Penelope, afraid to get your hands dirty, so picky about your sweets: too sour, too sweet, too sticky, too much. I have no patience with things like that.
I don’t know how your mother justified it then; how, if ever, she discussed those things with you. If you ever asked: “Are we going to Aunt Cassie’s?” or if you, like me, let out a breath of relief when summer became autumn and autumn became winter without so much as a glimpse of Olivia’s car in my drive. I’ve never really liked children much, except for my own girl, of course. You two are grown now, Penelope childless, I think you can relate.
Just because I lived so apart from you, I don’t know how your uncle was with you. If he was a funny uncle who played with you in the garden after Sunday dinners, a serious uncle you rarely spoke to, an uncle you were afraid of because he snapped and barked, or the kind who made you feel uncomfortable because his jokes weren’t really that funny.
I know that to me, Ferdinand was always more like a shadow; a tall, pale specter that drifted through our childhood home. He didn’t say much, never laughed. I always believed that he had a good heart, but I never really examined it. Between his sisters, he disappeared too easily. He was crumbling under Mother’s thumb and shivered in my father’s fist. I think he spent much of his childhood afraid, worrying about the next day, yet he never moved further away from our shared prison than the house next door, which Mother bought for him when it became clear he did not have the drive to do it himself.
He must have been such a disappointment to her, another one to add to the list. She would never say that, of course, least of all to you, but I can imagine he heard it, more than once. She would have tormented him daily with accusations; how his lack of ambition was the end of them, how he never could seem to succeed at anything, how he could have had it all yet there he was, drifting from one useless job to the next, never finishing any of the countless educations he pursued before he gave up and resigned.
You two can never truly relate to that, what it’s like being broken. How it is to grow up a white-bellied dove among pitch-black crows, a piece that won’t fit the puzzle. You, with your suburban castle childhood home, Miss S— beauty queen mother, and executive father, how could you relate to failure, to being scarred on the inside, bleeding from within?
You can’t.
I don’t think Ferdinand was always like that, though. I think he could have been a crow like all the rest, a magnificent one too, soaring high. But our brother had that one flaw, the heart that I mentioned. To a boy as soft as he, my family was poison. I’m counting myself in this time, I too was a dose of arsenic lacing that poor boy’s veins: too loud, too angry, too wild for him.
We were no fit company for doves.
After I moved to the brown house, I’m sad to say he almost ceased to exist in my mind, became a distant part of Mother, maybe, her silent shadow or willing servant. I remember feeling pity—I do, but never once did I call him or invite to my home. He was a stranger, this brother of mine, even when we shared a roof.
So imagine my surprise, then, when I found him at my door at the lilac house, red-cheeked and ruffled, pale hair a mess. The navy-blue tie with little golf clubs on it hung like a deflated balloon down his chest. His blue sports jacket was unbuttoned.
This was nearly two years after Dr. Martin died. I was nearing my forties then, and looked the part, too. Ferdinand, though, had aged more. He looked as if he were closing in on fifty, with gray temples and sagging skin. I don’t know how long he had looked like that before he came to see me.
Maybe it was all that worrying that did it, all that tossing and turning at night. I was unprepared for his visit—any visit—and remember I felt a jolt of anxiety myself when I heard his car park outside.
“You have to help me,” he said when I opened the door. I had thrown on a satin robe over my pajamas. It was way past noon, but you know what it’s like, us eccentrics like to lounge about and eat croissants for breakfast.
“Ferdinand, what is it? What has happened, is it Mother?” That was my first thought, that the old witch had finally keeled over, the heart of ice shattering in her chest.
He shook his head, looking miserable, biting his lips, flexing his fists. “No,” he said in a thin voice, “it’s worse.”
“Come on in, then.” I ope
ned the door for him. He staggered as if drunk, but he didn’t smell like alcohol. I placed him by the kitchen table and poured coffee in large pink mugs. Then I sat down across from him, wondered if I should take his hand and then decided to let it be, it would simply be too awkward. Instead, I just sat there and waited for him to speak.
He seemed a little calmer then, cradling his cup, blowing on his coffee, but the eyes he turned to look at me were pained. “I think I’m losing it, Cassie. I’m really losing it.”
“What has happened?” I curbed another impulse to touch him. “Why are you so upset? Did Mother do something to you? Did he?”
“No … no, nothing like that. It’s in my mind, Cassie, it’s my mind…”
“Tell me.” A surge of worry began to grind in the pit of my stomach. This didn’t bode well. Not well at all.
He gathered his wits enough to raise his gaze and meet mine. “I always thought you innocent, you know.”
“I know that,” I said, though I didn’t.
“No matter what they said, I never believed it was true. You are not a killer, Cassie. Never were.”
“Why are you bringing this up now?” The worry bloomed and ached.
Ferdinand removed his glasses, dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. “It isn’t right,” he said weakly. “It isn’t right to see such things.”
I suddenly felt cold. “See what, Ferdinand? What did you see?”
“Nothing.” He turned his teary eyes up to look at me across the table. “Nothing for a while—”
“But you did, didn’t you? You did see something.” My heart was hammering fast in my chest.
His gaze started flickering, from the cupboards to the table and back again. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“Tell me, brother, maybe I know.” Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world to have him tell me. To confirm what I suspected.
“It was such a long time ago—”
“Back when we were children? Did you see him?”
“Yes. How could I ever forget that thing?”
Suddenly I was furious, wanted to smash my mug into the wall. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? Why didn’t you say anything?” Why hadn’t he supported me? Verified my stories? Then I felt sad for all the fear he had carried. I knew all too well what that was like.
“I told Father.” His gaze dropped. “I told Father, and I wish I never had … I never spoke of it again to anyone and after a while I stopped seeing … Then you moved away. But I think of it, often. That creature—his ghastly face looming—”
“Oh, Ferdinand.” Finally I touched him, lay my hand on his. His skin was cold and clammy. “What happened now? Did you see him again?”
He took a moment, shook his head and swallowed hard. “Last night, when I was playing the piano, something so strange happened. I had left the patio doors open to let the wind inside. I do that sometimes, so I can feel the night around me while I play.”
“And…?”
“Suddenly I got this feeling like someone was watching me, and when I looked up, there was a woman there, standing just inside the doors where the draft made the curtains billow.”
“Oh no.” I knew at once who that woman had to be.
“Yes … and she looked so strange, but I was too surprised to be really scared at the time. Her hair was all wild and her clothes were old and dirty; long skirts and a cape of hide. She smelled, too, like earth and something bitter, like herbs or sap from needle trees. Her eyes, though, her eyes, they were glowing, Cassie, glowing toward me in the dark … There was something familiar about her face, as if I knew her. She looked a little bit like you did before—when you were young.”
“Oh no,” I said again. A pounding pain had appeared at my temples, and the churning knot in my gut exploded. I could only imagine where this was going. “What did she say to you?”
“Well, when she saw that I was looking at her she crossed the floor and stopped right by the piano. ‘So you can see me, even uninvited,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’ I asked her, felt cold to the bone. ‘I am one of my mother’s lies,’ she replied. Why did she say that, Cassie? What did she mean?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, one of my worst. “Go on…”
“Well, she leaned in and I pulled back, and then she said, very slowly, ‘Never say I wasn’t here, my mother’s brother,’ and then she left. Just slipped out the patio doors and was gone.”
“She said that?”
“Yes.” Ferdinand slammed his mug down on the table. “What did she mean by that? Is it you that she’s talking about? Who is she? Some stray you picked up, some fellow patient from the psychiatric ward that felt kinship to you? Her eyes, though, those eyes…”
“Who do you think she was?”
He shook his head, looked at me with horror and despair. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“A stray?” I raised my eyebrows. “A patient?”
“What else could she be?” His voice was thin. “She couldn’t be it, could she?”
“It as in what? My daughter? A faerie?”
“Don’t say that!” His whole body began to shiver. “It’s not possible—she couldn’t be. Father has forbidden me to speak of it—”
“Has he now?”
“Who is she?” He removed his glasses to dab at his eyes with the handkerchief.
“My daughter, Mara.”
“Mara, huh?” he tested the name. “Why did she come to me?”
“She has her own reasons, I don’t always follow them.”
“Is it her, the daughter in that book?”
“Yes.”
He took a moment, put down the crumpled-up handkerchief and put his glasses back on. “I always knew Tommy wasn’t right. I always knew there was something odd about him. He didn’t feel like he was real. It still confuses me that he had everyone fooled.”
“People only see what they want to see.”
“No. Sometimes we just see, and have no choice in the matter.”
“True.”
“But what about those other stories in the book? Mother and Father and—”
“I don’t know,” I cut him off. “It was all very confusing back then. I don’t know what really happened and have long since stopped caring.”
“But Father—”
“I don’t know. She thinks so, Mara does. She is angry with him, so angry…”
He sighed deeply, drew a hand across his brow, brushing away stray strands of blond and gray. “I still have nightmares about him—your Pepper-Man.”
“He isn’t so bad. He has changed quite a bit.”
“I only remember him in my dreams—tall and thin and scary, black lips and long nails, clothes all in tatters…”
“He had been intimate with a tree for some time.”
“How can you be so flippant about it?” His gaze across the table was imploring.
“Habit,” I shrugged. “You get used to it.”
“I don’t want to get used to it.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“It’s real, though, isn’t it? It’s there!”
“Yes, it most certainly is there. I’ve been telling you that for some time now.”
* * *
Your mother would of course tell you that this kitchen table exchange of ours never happened. She would say that I’m making it all up, because I can. Because Ferdinand is dead and can never say different, and that I’m taking advantage of that.
I can’t prove her wrong.
I never recorded my conversations with my brother, and they won’t appear in any doctor’s notes. All I have is myself and my memory, which Olivia will caution you to doubt.
She will say it never happened.
I will tell you that it did.
That, and all the rest that followed.
Every single thing.
XXV
I spoke to my daughter about it at length when she came around to see me next. It was a windy day and her skirts were
spinning around her ankles when she came in through the door, picking debris from her hair with her fingers.
“You can’t go around scaring people like that.” I was sitting on the champagne-colored sofa, pink ink pen in hand, editing my new book. “Whatever were you trying to accomplish?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t do anything, I just visited, that’s all. I didn’t want him to see and made no effort that he would. He just did.”
“And now he’s terrified.” I pushed my purple-rimmed glasses on top of my head.
“Well, I can’t do anything about that. I would think you’d be pleased, truth be told. At least now someone knows you were telling the truth all along.”
“It doesn’t matter what they think. I don’t care if they think I lie. I’ve been called a liar my whole life, why would it matter to me now?”
“Don’t you think he deserves to know, though? Deserves to know that his sister isn’t mad?”
I shrugged. “I can’t see how that would make any difference to Ferdinand. I hardly think he’s been lying awake at night pondering the state of my mind.”
“But still, doesn’t it make you happy to know that he knows?”
I straightened up on the sofa and put my pen down. “If Ferdinand had been a bolder man, he would have known all along. He saw Pepper-Man when he was a boy.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Then why didn’t he say something?”
“He did—to our father. That was a great mistake.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it wasn’t good. He never spoke of it again, decided it wasn’t real, I suppose. Decided not to believe.”
“Oh, that man,” she scoffed, plunged down beside me on the sofa, manuscript pages flying. “Then why was he so surprised to see me, if he knew all along we were real?”
“He doesn’t want to believe, and I can’t blame him. Look at what happened to me.”
“But still, isn’t it good, Mother, to know there is someone else out there who sees?”
I sighed. “What do you want, Mara, a revolution? For the faeries to rise up and claim their existence? For the veil to come down so you too can all have nice houses and Sunday roasts?”
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