I didn’t sit down beside you in the front row. I squeezed in at the back, among his more distant acquaintances and neighbors from my childhood. My purple clothes and moonstone bangles made me stand out like an exotic orchid in the sea of black and somber charcoal. Those who knew me gave me strange looks. Wondering, I suppose, just why it was that I stood there in the back—yes, stood, because the church was crammed with people, quite possibly due to the dramatic circumstances—the family tragedy, as the newspapers called it. He really didn’t have that many friends, but everyone wanted to come and look, at Mother, at you—the grieving family. Survivors is what you were, every last one of you. Survivors of a family tragedy that ended in blood and violence on Ferdinand’s well-kept lawn.
Just as they came to look when Tommy Tipp died that second time.
It’s just human nature. They really can’t help themselves.
I remember the service as hot and smelling of perspiration caught in synthetic fabrics, generously mixed with the scent of roses and candle wax. About halfway through, my mother must have gotten the whiff of me somehow, because she kept turning back, looking. Her lips were thin and white behind the veil.
I kept my eyes on the casket, though; that was why I was there, to see him lowered in the ground, to see him disappear. See the result of my daughter’s anger and assure myself it was true.
I wondered what his last thoughts were. Wondered if he ever realized who she was, that strange and beautiful girl who went out of her way to provoke him out there on the lawn. If he ever saw my face in her face, the family resemblance. And then, when he fell, and the world turned to pain—what did he think of then? Did he have time to think at all? Did he realize his life had come to an end, and did he understand why? Did he understand that his son had betrayed him?
We will never know the answers to those questions, of course, but I do like to think that he knew; that he understood, in those final few minutes of his life, that his time was up and the past came back for him—came for his heart with a spear full of words.
“Truth,” according to Mara.
“Lies,” according to some.
Outside the church, we all stood in a circle, watching the casket go down in the ground. Words were said, dirt was thrown. This hole would be filled to the brim. Just beside the open grave, there was a naked patch of dirt in the grass. That’s where Ferdinand’s ashes were. They would rest side by side, then, united in death. Neither of them would have been thrilled to know that.
When it was all over and time to go home, Mother lifted her veil. Her eyes looked straight at me, blue as the autumn sky. I made to turn and walk away, but she called after me: “Wait!”
I paused, watched as she battled herself free from well-meaning uncles and your mother, who tried to hold her back from me. She strode right toward me through the green grass, her blue gaze like cut glass.
“What did you do, Cassie?”
I smiled, not to be mean, but because I didn’t know what else to do.
“It is lovely to see you, Mother—”
“Oh, don’t you ‘Mother’ me. I know what you are—I know you’re insane, but not even I expected this…”
“Well, Mother, as you well know, it was Ferdinand and not I who—”
“Bullshit and you know it.” My mother was no longer watching her language. “You made him believe in it, didn’t you? Made him believe in that mad doctor’s lies?”
“I never made anyone do anything.” People were moving all around us, mourners walking to their cars. I am sure they stared as they passed us by, sure they walked close to hear what we were saying, but I didn’t pay attention to any of them. Her eyes like glass before me, it was impossible to look away.
“Of course you have,” said Mother. “I know my children well. You are persuasive and he was weak—but I also know it wasn’t your fault, Cassie. It was him all along, filling your head with those dreadful stories, molding everything to fit his dirty little mind.”
“Who? Father?”
“No! Dr. Martin! Writing it all in that awful book. And now he has killed my son.” Suddenly her face cracked open, splintered and fell apart like a china doll ruthlessly smashed to the floor. Her mascara ran in black rivulets, leaving fat trails on her white-powdered skin. “And now he has killed my husband,” she choked. “And ruined you, Cassie, he ruined you, too. That awful man, he ruined you, too…” Her hand clutched at the air, trying to reach me, and I stepped back; I didn’t want those coral nails on me; the wrinkled old fingers; the scent of gardenias …
I could see the uncles coming up behind her. Olivia stayed put, clutching her purse, looking at us with wide doe eyes. When the first uncle arrived and gently took Mother by the shoulders, I used the opportunity to take another step back, away from her and the confusing affection I suddenly saw in her eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she breathed, as they pulled her with them, away from me.
As reconciliations go, I guess it could have been worse, but it was not what I expected.
Not at all.
* * *
Do you remember any of this? That scene at the end of the funeral? What did Mother do after you left the grave? Did she cry, or freshen up in the car to see the day through, head held high?
Did she speak of me again—ever?
I walked by the old house a few years later and saw that there was another family living there. There were swings in the garden, a cat on the porch. Ferdinand’s house too had new inhabitants, someone with a strong stomach, I presume, to live where it all went down.
I don’t know where Mother went after she moved, but I reckon that you do. If she is still alive she must be well over ninety and tucked away in some home, I guess. Somewhere close to Olivia and maybe even you.
“It is not important,” Pepper-Man says when I bring it up, “you will always have me.” And he is right about that, and wrong too.
* * *
“Maybe I didn’t go to the clinic,” I say, when I fall into one of my retrospective moods. “Maybe I only made that up. Maybe Dr. Martin helped me make that up…”
“Why do you think of that? Why is it significant?” Pepper-Man asks.
“It is significant to them: to Mother, to Mara, and to Ferdinand too, who died…”
“Nothing is significant to the dead. They are gone.”
“You are not.”
“I am not like most dead.”
He will take my weary old feet in his hands then. His fingers are gnarled again, from age, not from sap. He massages the pads of my toes, the hard skin on my heels. He has changed some since Father died, become softer and kinder, gentler with me. Less of a faerie and more of a man, vulnerable and brittle with age. “What is done is done,” he says, “and it can never be undone.”
If the night is fair and I’m up for it, we take a stroll around the garden, pondering what was and what will be. Pepper-Man picks plums and apples from the branches and offers them to me; jewels of fall, sweet and taut with juice.
“What will happen later?” I ask, as we walk below the canopy of gnarled branches and glossy leaves, the rich taste of apples in my mouth. His hand is on my back, steadying my steps.
“You are growing weary now?”
“I am.”
“I will take you to the mound, then.”
“And…?”
“You go inside.” He pauses and turns toward me, catches a wisp of my white hair between his fingers, rubs it as if to feel the texture, how it has withered since my youth.
“And then I don’t come out again?” The sky above bleeds a twilight violet.
“No, not for a while. And when you do, you will be different.”
“Will I be like you then, taking life from the living?”
“What is life, Cassandra, really? Would you say I do not live?” He lifts the coil of hair to his lips and kisses it.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, you will be like me.”
“I will feed off a
horse, then.” I imagine the wind through my hair as I race across a meadow.
“Your face would be horribly long. If you still care about such things, after.”
“A cat, then.” I imagine lustrous fur and whiskers.
“A cat would suit you fine.”
“Will you still be with me?”
Pepper-Man’s gaze meets mine. His face is still smooth but ashen and worn; paler somehow, skin paper thin. His hair is dry and steely gray. “We can both feed from cats, together.”
He might not have loved me at first, when he entered my world when I was a child, but he does now, I’ll tell you that. It was nothing he expected, I’ll tell you that too. I was simply a meal at first, a strawberry tart to chew on—but the heart, even a dead one, doesn’t ask before it swells. He needs me, yes, but he loves me too.
Loves me even more than I do.
“I have known you for so long.” I reach up and let my fingers trail the outline of his face. “It’s like you are a part of me, of every breath I take.”
“Two peas in a pod,” he answers and laces his fingers with mine. “I will always be with you, every step of the way, until your last breath is gone, and beyond.”
XXXI
And now you have reached the end of me. The end of this body of words.
Janus, I bet you’re groaning deeply, as you rise from the chair and stretch your stiff limbs. Penelope, you’re just sighing, and let the last pages flutter to the floor. Nothing for you to do now, is there, but lock up the house and drive away, arrive at the solicitor’s early tomorrow morning, fresh and ready after a good night’s sleep, and there you will say the magic word: THORN, and the manila envelope is opened and the treasure is yours. Yes. All of it. You are my heirs, as I have no one else. You are my heirs—isn’t that strange?
“But where is she?” Penelope may be asking, while looking at the pages on the floor. As if the innocent pink paper sheets can tell her.
Janus shrugs before he answers: “I don’t know.”
“Dead somewhere?” Penelope’s gaze is drawn to the window, to the branches of the apple tree lashing at the glass, at the rivulets of moisture from the rain. Imagining my bones, perhaps, licked clean by wind and frost, covered in fungus and crawling with ants.
“She would have us believe she’s off with the fairies,” Janus says. “She would like us to believe that she has mounted the silver stag and entered the woods for the very last time, her fairy protector behind her, gray hair whipping in the breeze…”
“What do you think?” Penelope looks like a child in that moment, lips parted, eyes wide.
“I think the same as you, she was a very confused woman, and she died.”
“That is certainly what Mom would say.”
“And right she would be, too. Did you read the things she wrote?”
“But still.” Penelope is a little enchanted. A part of her always wanted to believe in faeries and ghosts. “What if she is right and we are wrong?”
“Penelope, the woman was a killer.” While Janus speaks, his eyes scan the room. You flipped the light switch sometimes during your reading session, and a golden light spills from the brass chandelier in the ceiling, but the shadows still bleed from the corners. Shadows to hide in, to watch from. Faeries like the shadows best.
“I don’t like this house very much.” A shiver runs down Penelope’s spine. “I just wish that we knew where she was.”
“I can’t argue with that, it would certainly be comforting to have her safely buried.” In his mind, he sees me—well, not me, because he hasn’t really seen me for a while, and doesn’t know exactly what I look like, but some blue-haired woman in a faded pink cardigan running wild in his house with an axe.
“She went through so much, there’s so much pain in there.” The tip of Penelope’s high-heeled shoe gently touches the pages on the floor. “At least I hope her death was painless—if she is dead, that is.”
“Of course she is.” Janus would rather think of me that way, and erase the axe murderer from his mind.
“Why didn’t they find her, then?” Penelope is thinking of the search party that doubtlessly combed through the woods last summer. “Why are there no traces of her body?”
“Because she went into the fairy mound?” Janus is aiming for sarcasm, but the tremble in his voice gives him away. He is frightened of the mound. The idea of a place like that gives him the shivers, touches something tender in him that makes him feel things he hasn’t felt for years: that the night is vast and very dark and something lives in the closet.
Penelope speaks, “Uncle Ferdinand, though … do you think—”
“I don’t know, Penny … Something certainly happened there, but we will never know the truth.”
“Mom blames her, Aunt Cassie is right about that.”
“Mom always blames her. I don’t think she is very rational either, when it comes to this whole dratted mess. If a fuse pops or she runs out of hot water, what does she do? She curses Aunt Cassie, as if her sister was some evil witch, cooped up in the woods muttering spells. That whole generation of our family is deranged, if you ask me … At least Aunt Cassie made some money from it.”
“Thorn,” Penelope says the password out loud, as if to test it on her tongue.
“Just that. Let’s just hope she hasn’t fooled us … Even if she is alive, running about the woods somewhere, we have done everything by the book. We have legal claim to that money, all her instructions are followed to the letter.”
“I know.” Penelope’s gaze has glazed over, looks out in the room, dreamy and soft. It makes her brother worried.
“You don’t really believe it, do you? That she had a supernatural companion and visited the fairies? Come on, Penny, don’t buy into the madness.”
“It would explain a lot.” The poor girl is halfway down the rabbit hole already.
“No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even make sense! Why would there be a fairy mound in the woods surrounding S—? With thousand-year-old dead people in it, no less. Where did they come from? Were there even people here a thousand years ago?”
“Maybe they can travel.” Her eyes are shiny with excitement, spots of red have appeared on her cheeks. “Maybe the fairies can move and resettle like everyone else.”
Janus shakes his head. “Careful now, Penny. You really don’t want to end up like Aunt Cassie—”
“I’m only saying that it would be neat if it did exist.”
“Would absolve Aunt Cassie from all the crimes, wouldn’t it?”
“Would absolve us all, I reckon … I’m not saying that Dr. Martin was right about everything, but Uncle Ferdinand snapping like that … Maybe there was something to what the old man wrote?”
“Never let Mom hear you speak like that.”
“Mom is old and biased. Maybe we should be open to new perspectives.”
“Like the ones Aunt Cassie proposes? Fairy magic and angry dead daughters?”
“Maybe, maybe not … but we may at least be open to the possibility that something was rotten in Grandmother and Grandfather’s house.”
“It always looked normal to me, if a little stiff.”
“Yes, they weren’t the kindest of people.”
“Didn’t make them child molesters, though.”
“It just seems a little too easy to blame it all on Aunt Cassie. How much damage can one person wreak, even a slightly insane one?”
“Quite a lot. Look at Hitler.” Janus thinks himself very clever.
“It had to have come from somewhere, though. All those ideas she had—they had to come from somewhere.”
“Or not. The mind is a curious thing, and she has a shelf full of books to prove that she was capable of making things up.”
“Let’s pretend for a moment that she was right—that she really paired up with Pepper-Man and that everything she wrote is true. Where would Aunt Cassie be now?” Penelope just can’t let go.
“Hibernating in the mound, I guess, waiting to
be reborn as a fairy.”
“And Mara? Do you think she’s still around? Do you think she visits this house?”
“No. She isn’t real so she isn’t here, or anywhere else for that matter.”
“It’s a cruel and horrible story,” Penelope shudders. “It must have been terrible living with a truth like that, even if it wasn’t true.”
Janus collects the sheets of paper littering the desk. “Be that as it may, it’s not really up to us to judge, we have done what she asked and now it’s time to collect.”
“You really think that’s enough? To step into the solicitor’s office and say the word?”
“That is what it says.” His knuckles hit the stack of paper.
Penelope looks a little confused. “It seems so easy. After all this—just too easy.”
And right she is.
I am pleased that you have read this far, even if you have discovered the password. You could have been on your merry way right now, manuscript in the trash, password dancing at the tip of your tongues, ready to be spit out and used. There is a catch, of course there is—it would be too easy if there weren’t. I can see what you are thinking now, but don’t you worry, hatchlings, I won’t have you swearing off your mother or make you clear my name or any such nonsense. The catch has to do with the money itself.
You Let Me In Page 18