I took a seat on the kitchen floor. My mother stepped out into the hall with the phone, so old it was still a model that attached the handset to the base with a long, twisty cord. Even with her arguments about pizza delivery distracting me, I found the square, the light skewed orange on the tile. Hardly ideal. Plus, the square lay in a non-optimal position: to see it in my right periphery, I had to stare at the window where a faerie would have to be standing to cast a shadow. I sat and waited anyhow. No faeries came. I added that to the list of the day’s disappointments.
y mother considers faeries household pests, like mice or ants. While I have never experienced mice, we dealt with ants last summer when we first moved into this one-side-of-a-duplex we now rent in town. Waking each morning to be creeped out by a gaggle of black ants crawling on my bedsheets. Having to knock my shoes on the floor to force out any ants before slipping my feet inside. Grabbing a book from the shelf to find a whole colony of ants had taken up residence in the binding; they fell onto my lap once I opened my book. I’m not even going to mention what happened with that bag of flour under the sink. Think of an unpleasant experience and multiply it by a googol (which is one followed by one hundred zeroes). That is what having ants in your house is like.
Of course, we couldn’t tell the landlord, who might blame us, and we couldn’t call the exterminator because perhaps the problem originated in the other half of the duplex. (While we are friendly with Mrs. Delavecchio, who lives next door on our non-duplex side, we have no relationship with the people who live in the other half of our duplex. They never smile or wave hello or answer their door when my mother goes over to knock, and we know they are home because we can hear them and their home karaoke machine.) Even after we killed all the ants we could find in the house, new ones kept creeping in somehow. So my mother made lines of spices around the inside edges of our house. Ants, it is said, won’t cross lines of salt, paprika, cinnamon, baking soda, or chili flakes.
Except, of course, they will.
When we were about to give up entirely, my arch-enemy Amber Holden suggested a white silica powder that destroys the ants’ exoskeletons or suffocates them or causes them to go crazy or something, but doesn’t harm other animals. Three weeks later the ants had gone, and they haven’t been back since.
All this to say, I don’t think faeries in the house would be quite as frustrating as ants. I doubt they’d be much more than a slight nuisance (like how sometimes you see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, there is nothing there — that’s how little of a bother I think having a faerie in the house would be). However, my mother is rabid about guarding her magical privacy. Why she is only concerned about this privacy inside our house and not outside of it is still unclear. Maybe out in the world, faeries are less likely to make a scene? In any case, this section concerns itself not with the why but rather the how; my mother wants no faeries in our house, and she has us work diligently to keep it that way.
There are two ways to keep faeries out: permanent and impermanent (although the permanent method can be broken with a degree of effort, but calling the two methods longly impermanent and quickly impermanent adds a level of complexity to the entire process that I do not wish to entertain).
The Permanent Method for Vanishing Faeries: This involves planting trees at certain positions around your house. There is some leeway in the placement, but basically, plant the trees near the foundation (not too close or the roots will wreck your house, but too far and the protection is meaningless; there will be some initial trial and error to determine the right distance for your home). The trees should be no more than six feet from each other. Moonless nights, also free from other types of light pollution, are required for these botanical maneuvers. Should the moon and/or street lights render you visible, any astute night-dwelling faeries will be able to see you gardening at night, and they will sabotage the process by uprooting the saplings before the roots stretch into the soil. (Previous magical wranglings between faeries and nature mean faeries are not permitted to intentionally destroy trees whose roots have stretched into the soil.) Roots need at least four hours to begin stretching into the soil. Thus, if you finish between midnight and 1:00 a.m., by the time the sun rises, it will be too late for the faeries to interfere.
had always found it odd how paranoid my mother was about faeries spying on her, because books (granted, most of these were children’s books) told me that faeries were interested in people who were nothing like my mother.
Children’s books: Young girls.
My mother: Most decidedly not a young girl.
Children’s books: Girls with hair in ringlets and colors that hardly seemed like hair colors — auburn or honeysuckle or cinnamon.
My mother: Straight brown hair kept cut in a sharp bob to her chin, bangs covering eyebrows as bushy as caterpillars.
Children’s books: Girls with voices described in terms of piano notes from the upper register or giggling brooks running through meadows.
My mother: A plain and broad voice.
Children’s books: Girls whose bodies were described as ethereal or ephemeral with skin as pale as weak moonlight.
My mother: She wore heavy, stomping hiking boots outside year round. She bit her nails until they were ragged and cracking. Her skin was a Martian red, rubbed raw by the cheap soap at the hospital. She was fleshy and solid and, from certain angles, had a triple chin. “Ethereal” was a willow drooping over a slow-moving pond. “Ephemeral” was a sunflower as the first petal falls in autumn. My mother was more like the stout, browning shrubs outside the hospital the custodial staff were continually bulldozing out, only for them to almost immediately grow back in.
“The shrubs,” I said. “Those indestructible ones from outside the hospital. Those are what we should use to protect our house from faeries.”
My mother looked up from her Reader’s Digest North American Wildlife guide, her untouched plain pizza having grown cold while she flipped through the pages. “A possibility, except they don’t grow above five feet. We’d have to limit our time on the upper floors.”
“We could use thicker curtains upstairs.”
She didn’t answer, having gone back to the book like hav-ing an actual conversation with me would be too difficult.
“You never listen to me about faeries,” I said with as much restraint as I could manage. I would have rather screamed, but figured my mother would find that easier to ignore.
“You don’t listen to me either,” my mother said, eyes still down on her book. “I asked you not to bring any of your faerie projects to school, yet today I find myself sitting in Mrs. Eastman’s —”
“Mrs. Estabrooks,” I corrected.
“Success is hardly dependent on remembering that woman’s name.” She finally looked up again. “You’re supposed to keep your projects here where I can monitor them.”
“What does it matter?” I was spiraling out of control, I knew it, but I couldn’t find a way to stop myself. “You don’t monitor them or me. You have no interest in anything I do unless it makes you miss work, where you’d rather be than here.”
“That isn’t true, although this current snit hardly endears you to me.”
“You’re always leaving me here by myself.”
“I have suggested that while I am work, in case of lone-liness, you go to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house.”
“That’s not the point.” I snatched her nature book from her hands and threw it onto the floor. The spine cracked open to the page my mother had been reading: mollusks. Not even relevant to faerie protection spells. She’d rather read about invertebrates than answer my questions about faeries. “Why are you so resistant to talking to me about faeries?!” I screeched.
“If that’s all you want, Enid,” she said, as calmly as ever, “I can do that. I do have a shift to work tonight, though.”
“Figures.”
“But I have a few minutes before I have to leave. You wrote you’ve seen their shadows as they’ve come right up to the window. Quite gutsy.”
“For them or for me?”
“Both. If you’re so interested in faeries, Enid, why don’t you do some prep work for me, for one of the impermanent methods? It has to be done tonight, and you’d be by yourself.”
I was, possibly for the first time in my life ever, gob-smacked. I’d expected her to try and appease me by parting with only the teeniest piece of faerie lore (like how faeries refuse to eat starfruit, which we couldn’t even buy in the produce section of the very basic, and only, grocery store in town. Besides, I already knew that. Faeries don’t like the shape: too pointy. Dragonfruit, too. And the hard cores of lychees and cherries also annoyed them). But no, not a small piece of faerie lore. She was entrusting me with something magical.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to figure out all about the faeries all alone.
“What do I have to do?” I asked, my heart pattering like the hooves of a racehorse. (A racehorse that’s running a race, not one that’s just standing around eating oats or hay or whatever horses eat.)
My mother passed me a chunky green Hilroy scribbler, the type that would have a blank space at the top of each page for a picture and lines at the bottom for describing the picture drawn in the blank space above. “No,” she said as I gingerly went to turn to the first page. “Wait until I leave before reading the instructions.” She motioned to the notebook. “I don’t want to be late because I am answering all your overeager questions.” A red stain on the front of her scrubs caught her attention. Fresh. Pizza sauce, not blood. “I have to change. Until I leave, you can occupy yourself by doing the dishes before food sticks to them.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” I gave a mock salute, wiggling my hands and smacking both of them into my forehead.
“Sass isn’t becoming.” But my mother was smiling as she walked off, pulling the cotton scrubs over her head. “Did you put away the laundry yet?”
“It’s your week.”
“No,” she called back. “It’s yours. Faerie interests should not distract you from your responsibilities.” Her voice was distant but carried down the stairs and into the dining room. “You should be spending less time on your faerie guide. I know the reason you handed in that chapter is that you spent last night working on it rather than on your school report. I’ve let a few things slide lately, thinking you were … No, never mind.” She came back into the kitchen in a blush set of scrubs that made her look stranger than she was and unflatteringly brought out the redness of her cheeks. “Follow the instructions.” She tapped the cover. “You’ll do fine.”
The impermanent method begins with instructions from a notebook that is completely blank on every page, even held up to the light, even rubbed with lemon juice or ironed to check for secret writing. The only words in the entire book are on the front page, in the spot left for the owner’s name, written in block caps so equal and with kerning so proper that they could have been typed: MARGERY STRANGE.
phoned the Will O’Wisp, the hospital where my mother worked. It was actually called the William O. Wistop Memorial Long-Term Care Facility, but no one called the hospital that except newcomers, who were easy to recognize because they said the William O. Wistop Memorial Long-Term Care Facility instead of the Will O’Wisp. The Will O’Wisp was a government make-work scheme, and somewhat of a boondoggle, but it employed my mother, so it wasn’t one hundred percent useless.
“Psych,” I said to the automated system that directed calls. “Margery Strange, nurse station.”
The system beeped and whirred as I was redirected. Psych was in the Will O’Wisp’s original wing, a building of such an era that it still had a functioning pneumatic tube messaging system threaded throughout. I imagined my call as a vacuumed pod, a whoosh as it shot through the system, clearing the tight angles around gas pipes and water mains, working its way to the —
“Hello.” The voice wasn’t my mother’s. My mother was supposed to be the one to pick up the phone. Instead, Amber Holden had.
“I’d like to speak with Chief Nurse Strange, please.” I put on my best British accent, the voice of a relative who had consigned a mother or an aunt or a distant cousin with a claim to family fortune to a place as far away as possible so that there was no way that the indisposed relative could possibly arrange to be back in time for the reading, and then contesting, of the will.
Amber heard right through me. “Regulations say nurses are not allowed to take personal calls on shift. You know that, Enid.”
“Her shift hasn’t started yet.” The clock on the oven read 6:59. “She has a minute to come to the phone.”
“Oh, sorry, it’s already seven o’clock here.” The smirk on Amber’s face was loud enough to be heard all the way down the line.
“Can you give her a message, then?”
“No.”
“Even in an emergency?”
“You sound too calm for it to be an emergency. Are you just lonely and want your mummy? All alone in your house by yourself?”
“Well, that’s redundant,” I said. “Alone by myself.”
“How’s this for redundant?” There was a click as Amber hung up on me. As per additional hospital regulations, my mother’s cellphone would be off and stored in her locker, so calling her on that would come to naught. Other than walking to the Will O’Wisp and planting myself in the chairs outside my mother’s secure ward, hoping some-one would notice me, then violate more hospital regulations to let me in to find her, there was nothing to do but wait until my mother came off shift and could show me how to make the notebook work. I flipped through the pages. Still empty, except for a series of doodles I’d made while on the phone with Amber: a stick figure with pigtails doing jumping jacks when I flipped quickly through the pages to animate her. She smudged as I erased each of her; too bad erasing Amber Holden wasn’t that easy.
Amber Holden disliked me. I didn’t really like her either, and maybe in a town larger than our fishbowl-sized one we wouldn’t have had much occasion to run into each other. But in this one, we did. Constantly. Me being in middle school and Amber being in high school, the six-year age gap between us, and the fact that we strove to avoid ever meeting did nothing to prevent our frequent encounters.
Plus, Dr. Holden, Amber’s father, and my mother worked together. More precisely, Dr. Holden, geriatric psychiatrist, was my mother’s supervisor at work. My mother, in turn, supervised Amber Holden, who volunteered on their floor in preparation for her future career in medicine. On all sides, we were surrounded by Holdens. Assailed by them, even.
Worse still, my mother was on friendly terms with Amber. Whenever we saw Amber about town, she and my mother would have some tedious conversation that always ended with Amber proclaiming how great her family was by relating some syrupy family moment of all of them together, even Amber’s brothers, who had long since moved on to more prosperous climes. Gloating completed, Amber always gave me a fake smile before taking her leave, a fake smile my mother chose to believe was real. When Dr. Holden saw us, he also smiled, but his lips barely curled up and his eyes darted away. At least my mother was never fooled by that paltry grinning attempt. Plus, Dr. Holden never came over to chat.
The only Holden family member who ever seemed genuinely happy to see us was Dr. Sivaloganathan, who was Dr. Holden’s wife and Amber’s mother. She too worked at the Will O’Wisp, but as an orthopedic specialist in a wing as far away as possible from my mother, Dr. Holden, and Amber’s ward. Upon noticing us, wherever we were, Dr. Sivaloganathan would bound over, crossing traffic from one side of the street to the other or banging her shop-ping cart into shelves and promotional displays in a rush to greet us. Then another chat about how great the Holden-Sivaloganathan family was, and finally peace (at least until the next encounter with either her or her daughter.)
But back in the here and now, the air smelled of close-by rain, that rotting vegetable stench. Trash cans clattered down the street and banged into the sound barrier separating the highway from the end of our cul-de-sac. Mrs. Delavecchio (who despised rain like most old people) would be grumbling about the changes in barometric pressure aggravating her arthritis. I considered going over there so she’d have someone to complain to.
Then a thump. A loud one against the side of the house. And another, this one in the back. The wind gave an additional banshee shriek before everything, for a few short seconds, calmed.
“No one knows you are here,” I told myself, willing the patter of my heart to relax. “You are fine.” I sometimes gave myself pep talks like this, and I sometimes answered (since you did what you had to do when you often had only yourself for company). My retorts were in what I always imagined to be an art nouveau font, thin and rounded and the cat’s pajamas.
Maybe.
“You have a hair dangling over your nose. It’s a nui-sance. Do something about it,” I said. “Move an arm. Brush it away.” I didn’t, staying frozen with one foot in the kitchen, one foot in the hall. The hair tickled. I sneezed as best I could without moving.
“Oh, Enid,” I said. “It’s just a trash can. You heard them rolling around the street, the way they always do in a storm.” I went to the staircase to look through the side window. It was high up and shaped in a hexagon with the glass warped at the edges like the eye of an insect. I peeked out into the kaleidoscope world.
Nothing. The trash cans that had smacked into the house must have rolled off down the street.
Enid Strange Page 2