Enough of all this. “Why’d you come here?” I asked Amber directly.
“I started walking,” she said slowly, “nowhere in particular after I left the liquor store. It was … these lights just kept pulling me forward, and I just kept following them. More neurological symptoms.” She slumped further onto the floor. “I’m so sad.”
I knew that already. “How big were the lights that you followed?” I asked. “Firefly sized?”
“Bigger.”
I nodded. “Will-o’-the-wisps,” I said to myself.
“The hospital is in the other direction.”
“The other type of will-o’-the-wisp. The type that’s faerie magic.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Enid. Stop being weird.”
But I’d had it with Amber’s obtuseness and put-downs. “You do too know what will-o’-the-wisps are,” I snapped. “Balls of light that draw people along by staying just out of reach.” Amber, in her state, was ideal for being tricked by will-o’-the-wisps to take down the tree, and even if Amber had left the tree alone, her presence would divert my attention away from the field, where the faeries could then wreak their havoc.
Amber snorted.
“No one asked your opinion,” I said, not that Amber could have had an opinion on my private thoughts. But then why had she snorted at what I had thought? Had the faeries somehow equipped Amber Holden with the ability to read my mind during her will-o’-the-wisp walk? If they had, tinfoil hats aside, I’d have no recourse. The faeries would have won almost before I’d even begun to fight. Calmly, the way one moves around a carnivorous animal with large, pointy teeth, I turned towards Amber.
Who was snorting in her dreams: I’d been quiet long enough that Amber Holden had achieved her goal of falling asleep.
I draped my sleeping bag across her. After putting my water bottle and generic Ibuprofen next to Amber’s head (just like on TV when the main character has had too much to drink), I slowly stood up to creep past. Then I slowly crouched back down to move my water bottle further away in case Amber, rolling around, knocked it over and got my sleeping bag wet. I did not want to get into a wet sleeping bag later, after I’d returned from town, where I was off to because, if the faeries could send someone out here to ruin my plan, I could just as easily send someone into town to ruin theirs: me.
didn’t get back to town until about midnight. (I deduced the time since Mr. Sylvain, who owned the drugstore, was standing on the sidewalk wheeling metal covers down over the windows and hanging his Neither narcotics nor cash is kept on the premises after closing sign on the front door.)
“Tell your mother ‘hi’ for me,” Mr. Sylvain called as I walked by, since, apparently, eleven-year-olds wandering around by themselves as midnight approached wasn’t in any way unusual.
“I will,” I answered, adding it to everything else I was going to tell my mother as soon as I saw her: that she and I and Amber and Dr. Holden and who knows who else were being manipulated by the faeries; that I needed her help to straighten out all the faerie plans that were too complicated for me to untangle on my own; that I knew she was lonely (even though she had me, and my companionship should have been enough for her); that she didn’t need to choose Dr. Holden over loneliness; that we could use the library computer and get her set up on a dating website; that we’d find someone more suited for her than Dr. Holden; that we would find a way to rid ourselves of the faeries; that nothing like this would ever happen again. And that the guy who owns the drugstore says hi.
I ran the rest of the way and let myself into the rental house, which was unlocked still. Love, I guess, made you vulnerable to burglary.
One deep breath. I went over my list again, ready to let it all out. But then, when I marched down the hall and saw my mother and Dr. Holden sitting together at the dining room table, not across from each other but side by side, playing Scrabble with their tile holders tilted away from each other so they couldn’t see each other’s letters, and my mother said, casually, “Oh, it’s Enid,” like I’d wandered down from upstairs in search of a glass of water, I couldn’t think of any words to say.
“Funny.” Dr. Holden broke the nothingness between us all. “In this light, your eyes look brown.” He pushed his chair back with a screech. “Really,” he said, coming too close and staring too deeply into my face. “They’re browner than mud.”
“That’s because they are brown,” I told him.
“Just think, my eyes, your mother’s eyes are blue. But yours are brown, even though with two blue-eyed, recessive-gened parents, the Davenport model insists that yours should be blue as well.”
“What’s he on about?” I asked my mother as Dr. Holden flitted around me, trying to get another look at my eyes.
“Davenport is a simplified model of how genetics work,” my mother said. “Such a model gives that two blue-eyed parents have a blue-eyed baby. It isn’t true, though, as, for example, one of the ways eye color is determined is by how much melanin is in the iris, with one’s genes being the instructions for how much melanin to release. But instructions can be ignored,” my mother said, and I knew she was thinking of how I’d failed to mix the banishing powder. “Perhaps an examination of your DNA would say your eyes are blue, but along the way a signal was garbled. Or perhaps my eyes were meant to be brown, but inadequate amounts of melanin were added to my irises, yet I passed a brown allele onto you.”
“It will be fascinating to try and figure out exactly where this genetic deviation happened,” Dr. Holden said. “My parents are both blue-eyed, and I believe all of my grandparents were too. What about your family, Margery? What color eyes do they have?”
My mother’s lips sunk thinly into her mouth, and she breathed a huff through her nostrils.
“Actually, I don’t know anything about your parents,” Dr. Holden continued, looking puzzled. “Or any of your family.”
“Dr. Holden,” I said warningly. My mother did not dis-cuss her family.
But my mother, just raised a hand and stopped time.
I learned later that time stops as frequently as a package delivery van the week before Christmas, but almost never at someone’s, a person’s, behest. People who rely on clocks, alarms, television schedules, video game count-down timers, word-of-the-day calendars, etc., will never stop time because they’ve committed to it. But my mother, who had no television, no watch, no computer, didn’t rely on the regularity of time. Her job didn’t fix her in time, working shifts that stacked, overlapped, and were constantly reshuffled. She had enough leverage to break free of time, provided she could garner enough magical energy to do so.
“Calm down,” she ordered, after wrestling me free.
Nothing moved around me. Dust motes, caught in the lamplight, just hung there. Sound stopped too, no hum of the refrigerator or creaks as the house settled into the quagmire, no faint highway noise blowing in over the marsh. Odd, when everything else was calm, how difficult it was for me to be.
“Will he be okay like that?” I asked, pointing at Dr. Holden once I caught my breath.
“He’ll be fine. This doesn’t bother him a bit.” True, neither a frozen Dr. Holden nor my thawed mother looked concerned at all. “Now, make sure to tell me if you’re feeling lightheaded. We can move to another part of the house with more oxygen. Photosynthesis is stopped too,” she said by way of explanation.
“I’m good.”
“So it appears. And I believe you owe me some congratulations.”
“For what? Dr. Holden’s the one who got that triple word score,” I said, glancing over at their suspended Scrabble game. “He’s winning.”
“Any literate monkey can play Scrabble.”
“Some better than others,” I muttered.
My mother’s left eyebrow twitched, but other than that she chose not to respond to my critique of her Scrabble abilities. Instead: “Felici
tations are for this.” She gestured around herself. “I wasn’t sure this would happen. The amount of energy required to stop time is atrocious. Plus, it will alert the faeries, and not the faeries we want alerted.”
“There are faeries we want alerted?”
“Of course, not every faerie is dissatisfactory. Some are useful. Some are on our side.”
“Our side of what?”
My mother clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You haven’t figured this out yet? Think of the magic I can do.” She gesticulated again around the unmoving room before resting her gaze on me. “Compared to some.”
Of course, in her gloating my mother had to bring up how I couldn’t do magic. “Maybe my lack of magic is from him.” I jerked my thumb towards Dr. Holden. “Dominant gene.”
“Don’t be a sore loser.”
“I’m not the one losing at Scrabble.”
“Enough with Scrabble,” she said sourly (losing to Dr. Holden must have really been irking her, considering she always won when we played). “Let’s go. We haven’t got much time.”
“Except,” I said, smug grin in place, “we do. We have all the time. Time is stopped, remember. You stopped time. Or did you forget?”
“Enid —”
I needed to wallop some sense into her; now was as good a time as any. “You can stop time all you want, but it’s all going to backfire.” Stopping time had gone to my mother’s head, blinding her to the reality of what had actually happened. “It’s obviously all part of their plan.”
“Whose plan?” she asked, as obtuse as Amber Holden.
“The faeries’ plan! They’re controlling us, manipulating us. I saw one in the house!” I shouted. “I didn’t tell you, and now look, look at all this mess!”
“I prefer to think of this as repositioning, rather than as a mess.” My mother stuck out her hand. “And so, Enid. This is it.” It was her right hand extended, palm facing in, thumb on top, pinkie finger closest to the floor.
“You want me to shake your hand?” I asked.
“As our relationship is at its end, yes.”
“Excuse me?”
“So, best of luck.” Nope. No joking.
Befuddled, be-puzzled, be-dumbfounded, “You can’t,” I bemoaned. “You can’t just get rid of me. That isn’t how family works. We’re stuck together.”
“I don’t see why that has to be true.”
“People will notice. He,” I said, pointing at Dr. Holden, “will notice.”
“The man who took eleven years to ascertain your eye color? He isn’t the horse on which you should bet your money.” She looked at me. “Don’t you appreciate my phrasing it that way? Poetically.”
“Poetically?” My retorts needed to be more exacting than simply repeating the last word my mother had said, except my brain had gotten stuck on the fact that my mother was firing her own child. “Other people,” I finally said, “not just Dr. Holden, will notice I’m missing.”
“No one will notice.”
“I will make sure everyone will notice,” I assured her. “After you kick me out, I’ll go beg on the corner outside the drugstore, and people will realize that you’ve ousted me. How are you going to explain that?”
“By getting a changeling,” my mother said sedately, without even pausing for breath.
“Then there’ll be two of me. That’s going to be even harder for you to explain. No one is going to believe some evil-twin-locked-away-in-the-attic-until-now or identical cousins explanation as to why there are suddenly two of me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Enid. You know a changeling always needs a childling to be changed with. So.” My mother nodded towards her still-extended hand (like I was going to shake it now). “I’m sure you understand.”
“I understand nothing!” I screeched.
“Come on, Enid. I need a changeling, the faeries need a childling, and you’re standing right here. Please be reasonable.”
“Be reasonable? Be reasonable?” I cried, having returned to repeating my mother’s final words as a question. “You want to replace me with a changeling and you’re telling me to be reasonable?”
“Yes,” my mother said. “I am. View this as an opportunity.”
It took all of my strength not to parrot back, “Opportunity?” at my mother.
“What happens to children spirited away by the faeries? No one knows. But you, you, Enid, soon you will know.”
“Except I don’t want to know.”
My mother’s frown told me that she’d never considered I wouldn’t want to.
“And why do you want to send me away?” I continued. “You don’t need to exchange me for another me when you already have a me right here — me!”
“Unfortunately, you’re not the you I’m looking for.”
“Excuse me?”
“I need a child whose magical abilities echo my own.”
“And, let me guess —” the faeries’ ploy was becoming clearer “— the satisfactory faeries told you that this changeling-Enid is just overflowing with magic, that’s she’s a fountain of magical abilities all ready for you to drink up from?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“So, you’re willing to let a faerie spy into our house all because she’d be able to do magic? This other Enid could be anyone! For all the magic in the world, she could be bad at math or chew too loudly or be a serial killer and you’ll end up hating her. Please.” I hated the sound of my voice as I begged. “You’re my mother.”
“I know,” she said, looking sad. “But also, maybe I’m not.”
“Not my mother?”
“A child of mine would be able to do magic. You can’t.”
“So?”
“So maybe you’re not my child. Maybe you’re a changeling already. Maybe this switch is less of a swap and more of a restoration.”
I knew who had convinced her of this. “That’s what your satisfactory faeries told you, isn’t it?”
“I haven’t been discussing the matter with anyone else.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, brushing it away from my face. “They are playing you. Why can’t you see it?”
“I assure you, no one is playing me.”
“Then what if I don’t want to go? What if other-Enid-changeling doesn’t want to come here? What if we refuse?”
“Refuse all you want,” she said. “It affects nothing. I am only informing you as a nicety, because, if I want to, I could initiate the swap without your assent. I have enough power to do that.”
I didn’t doubt it, especially after this stopped-time business. She’d once told me that spells that affect more than one’s immediate surroundings took exponential amounts of energy.
“Even when you send me away, people will know something’s changed,” I told her. “Faeries aren’t very good at continuity.”
“We’ll spend the summer away. When we come back, we can chalk any changes up to puberty. Or we might not return. You’ve heard, I assume, about the Will O’Wisp’s situation.”
“Yes, because of your behavior, under faerie influence,” I added.
“Because Dr. Sivaloganathan chose to leave.”
“She chose to leave because you are being exploited by the faeries.”
“Bickering with you distracts me, Enid. I cannot be distracted right now. This is a difficult spell to keep going.”
“My friends will notice I’m different.”
“Every day you tell me you have no friends. Which of these non-existent friends will notice in particular?”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” I said, stung. “Even for you. And it’s not true, either. I have friends. Mrs. Delavecchio is my friend. And now you’re saying I have to —” I paused. “You’re forcing me to,” I corrected myself, because I did not want to be considered a willin
g participant in this swap, “you’re forcing me to leave, and I won’t even get to say goodbye to Mrs. Delavecchio, who will think I hate her because I didn’t say goodbye.”
“We may only be absent for the summer. Were you not listening closely?”
“But it may be forever. You said that too. And I’ll be gone forever, no matter what.”
We both waited for the other one to talk first. My mother finally caved.
“True,” she said.
“It’s not fair to make me leave without saying goodbye to my only friend.” I tried to make my face look as pathetic as possible and bit the inside of my cheek hard enough so as to make my eyes tear up. “It’s not fair.”
“Enid, you may have read too much into Mrs. Delavecchio’s interest in you.” My mother finally rescinded her outstretched hand and crossed her arms. “She’s a helpful neighbor. Not a friend.”
“She told me about Lem.”
“Who?” I’d caught her off guard.
“Her son, Lem.” I paused so that what I said next would seem appropriately revelatory. “Who is in prison.”
“She never mentioned that to me,” my mother said.
“Because that’s not something you tell a neighbor. That’s something you tell a friend,” I announced proudly.
For the first time in this fight, my mother didn’t have a response with which to immediately jump in. Her thinking expression (cheeks rounded, eyes focused up, wrinkled nose, slight gap mid-lips) washed over her face.
“Even so,” she eventually said, “it’s too late for you to go over to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house to say goodbye. Then, if we don’t leave right away and she sees you —”
“Not me. Ersatz me,” I interrupted.
“You,” my mother emphasized, “again before we leave for the summer, how would we explain your early leave-taking of her? Additional to this, you can’t interact with her right now because of the spell I’ve cast.”
“Let me write her a note. You can keep it until later and give it to her right before we go. I can write that we’re going away for the summer. That we might not be back. That I’ll miss her and that I thank her for everything she’s done for me. That she’s like the mother I never had.” I hoped saying that would upset my mother, but she didn’t even flinch.
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