“Please,” I quietly begged. “Please help her. Like you said you would.”
I blinked. There was a shift, and we were a few feet from where we’d last stood. Closer to the trees. I took this as a sign we were supposed to go in that direction.
“This way,” I said. “Follow me.”
“The car is over there, Enid. The opposite way.”
“There’s some mud on the side. Dr. Holden isn’t going to like that.”
“That does not explain why you want me to follow you away from the vehicle.”
“There’s a flower I want you to see.”
My mother sighed theatrically. “I am rarely enamoured of flowers.”
“That’s why you have to see this one.”
This produced another sigh. “I will assume,” my mother asked me, as she started to follow, “that a lesson has been learned?”
“About flowers?”
“About why you are here,” she clarified.
“What lesson should I have learned?” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I simply needed some space from you and Dr. Holden.”
“And Mrs. Delavecchio?”
“Yes, and Mrs. Delavecchio.” I kept shuffling along. “She turns the television up too loud.”
“Hmm,” my mother muttered. “And this flower is where?”
I stopped walking. To go any further involved trudging into the woods. My mother, wearing her formal nurse’s uniform instead of the scrubs Dr. Holden decreed all his subordinates had to wear (I didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten Dr. Holden to agree to that), would never agree to trompse through the muck in her sensible white shoes. As for me, I didn’t really mind getting my shoes dirty (they were already pretty grimy), but I couldn’t fathom why the faeries couldn’t just do their thing where we stood rather than two feet over. I’d gotten my mother here, hadn’t I; now it was their turn to do something.
“Amber is just going back to get your things from the house,” my mother informed me. “She’ll meet us at the car.”
What? When had my mother talked to Amber? I didn’t know why I was asking this, as she must have talked to Amber in the most recent experience of cut time, or removed-frame time, or whatever it was that was making my time jump forward in random intervals. I wished I’d kept Amber’s phone on me so that I could record, and then review, what happened during these time jumps. I hoped that I was coherent during these gaps, not drooling while staring off into space, but not so coherent that I revealed the plan to get that stolen song magic back from her, although, if I had revealed the plan to my mother, it would explain why the faeries had so far failed to act.
As if they’d heard my thoughts (although, again, I really hoped nothing in the vicinity had developed mind-reading powers), a split, like a spliced-in subliminal message, flashed across my vision, and I finally understood: the faeries were acting, but just not in this vision/movie/layer/whatever was going on. They were acting in the other layer, where all the gaps were going. Maybe they thought letting me know that would be enough, but no; by hook or by crook (ah, the clichés) I was going to get into that other layer and make sure that my mother was appropriately cleansed.
“Actually, it’s over here,” I said, leading my mother back to where I’d stood before the last jump and leaving the subject of my it purposefully vague. I figured that, since that’s where I’d started before the last jump, maybe there was some tear, some weakness between the layers at that precise point where I could squeeze through.
My mother, grumbling, followed behind.
I walked around the spot, over it, side to side, backwards and forwards.
“You look like a dog getting ready to sit,” my mother said. “You will have trampled on any flora you wished me to see.”
“Just a moment. It’ll …” I floundered. The point was the gaps. I had to get in the gaps, into the excised bits of time that kept getting cut when I blinked.
“Enid,” my mother said.
I ignored her.
“Enid,” she repeated.
“Staring contest!” I announced. If I stopped blinking, then, when the holes between the layers opened up and the bits of time I kept losing slipped through, I could slip through with them too. And a staring contest would help me to keep my eyes open, especially in my overtired, throbbing-headached state.
My mother frowned. “Really, Enid?”
“I bet I’ll win,” I said, to spur my mother’s sense of com-petitiveness into action.
“I’m not in the mood for frivolities, Enid.”
“Fine. Then I’ll definitely win.” I linked my mother’s arm in mine; as soon as I spotted a gap, I would pull her through with me.
“Your eyes are watering,” she said to me after a minute. Arms still entwined, we hadn’t moved from the spot.
“I know.”
“You’re going to have to blink soon.”
“I know.” I wiped away some errant tears with the back of my free hand.
“Since we have no method of time-keeping, it isn’t as if your attempt will even be recognized by any sort of record-keeping organization.”
“I know!” I snapped. “Stop distracting me.”
It was then (with many thanks from my desiccated eyes) that we split. In one layer, my mother and I stood there, having a vapid conversation about the Guinness Book of World Records, and in the other, the weird glow of the backlit world intensified and stretched (I admit I don’t quite know how light could stretch, but let’s say it has to do with string theory and light being a projection down from eleven dimensions to our four). Everything pulsed, like blood pumping out of an artery close to the heart. My nausea intensified. Gusts of wind around us spun.
“Enid?” My mother’s voice quavered. She was frightened. I’d never heard my mother frightened before, but the wobble in her voice couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than fear.
“I would say I’m sorry, ” I called to my mother. I had to speak loudly over the rushing sound of wind. “But I’m not. This is for your own good.”
“Enid —”
“No,” I called back. Air whistled around us. I shielded my eyes and found myself kicked out of the faerie layer.
“Like there’s a difference between yellow zucchini and green zucchini,” I said.
“Of course a difference exists,” my mother said, with a toss of her head. I didn’t reply. “Their color,” she elaborated.
Eyes wide open, I found another tear and clawed my way back through.
“It’s inside you,” I called. “It’s like a growth. A malignant power tumor.” I talked in medical jargon to appeal to her rational side. “They’ll remove it, and everything will be fine.”
“They won’t,” my mother cried. “Nothing is going to be fine.”
“If you don’t let them take the magic from you,” I said, “it’ll destroy you.” More wind, like mini-tornadoes, spun around us.
“I would hardly call Agatha Christie’s stories magic. They’re excessively formulaic.”
We were back in the “real” world.
“There were a stack of them for sale at the thrift shop. I picked them up for you on my way home,” my mother said.
“What if I have some of them already? And I don’t like the Miss Marple ones that much.”
“They were twenty for a dollar. You will survive if a handful are not to your liking.”
“How come you always find good things at the thrift store? Every time I go it’s just all hand-knitted doilies and —”
“Enid?” my mother cried out in the other layer. “It’s so bright. Where are you?”
“I’m here.” I tried to make my way over to her, but a mini-tornado pushed so hard against my legs I feared for the structural integrity of my knees. “Think of it like a vaccination booster,” I reassured her. “It’ll hurt
for a minute and then all those antibodies are going to jump into high gear to get rid of the magic you stole from me.”
“I never stole magic from you.”
“You did. You didn’t mean to. It wasn’t what you thought would happen.”
“I didn’t,” she insisted.
“Just think of it like conflating correlation and causation. It’s fine. Everyone does it at least once in their lives. It’s a learning experience.”
“My magic,” my mother whined. “It’s mine.”
A zigzag, like changing the channel on an old TV. My mother’s skin turned sallow, and then back to normal.
“You’re doing great,” I reassured her. “It’s almost over.” I hoped so. This process was definitely causing her to look sub-par and, I imagined, feel sub-par as well.
“The weather says rain,” my mother hissed, halfway between layers. “Did you bring an umbrella?”
“Stay in this layer. Please,” I begged. “Let them —” But I could feel myself shifting back to the quotidian one.
“So, now you’re dancing?” my mother asked.
“I’m …” I was wiggling my foot around to try and find a toehold in a rip. But whenever I thought that my foot had slipped through a groove deep in the ground, I looked down and it was still on the grass. “My toes itch,” I explained.
“This is ridiculous, Enid.”
“Well, maybe. How many anagrams of ridiculous can you make?” I asked her, attempting to keep her occupied.
“You’re not blinking again,” she answered.
“I’m practicing for the world record. Maybe we can use Amber’s phone to time me.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean ‘Who?’ Amber. Amber who.” I shifted my focus from my toes to my mother’s face. Her hairs had thinned and whitened. Wrinkles creased her cheeks, and pounds dropped away with muscle until she was stretched skin falling from osteoporotic bones. Her mouth opened and closed in an attempt to entice her lungs, but the muscles around her ribs were becoming too weak to aid in pulmonary inflating and deflating. Like a fish out of water, she was drowning in the air.
And all this was happening in our layer. We weren’t, not even partway, between the layers while this diminishing was happening. Firmly on the human side, and still the faeries’ magic was hurting her. Maybe even worse than hurting.
“Stop it,” I screamed. “You’re killing her.”
“Don’t be absurd.” My mother’s voice was like a wisp of smoke. “No one is trying to kill me.”
But trying or not, the faeries were killing her. She was back to normal for a second, and then again she looked like death. The magic must have been leaking into our layer, and in our layer it must have been toxic.
“You said you weren’t going to hurt her,” I cried. “Or wrote that you weren’t or whatever!”
But in the time it took me to say that, my mother had deflated even more. Her back hunched, and she shrunk at least an inch.
I clawed my way back into the faerie world; she looked even worse there. Her hair whipped around her, caught in the wind, which had risen to the point that it could even flutter the hem of my mother’s thickly starched nurse’s uniform. She curved even more in on herself with a moan while I was still held in place by the wind shackles. I couldn’t even reach out to touch her with my hand, and she was frail, so frail that there wasn’t any scenario in which she would last much longer.
“Why are you doing this?” I screamed. “You didn’t want to hurt her! You said you weren’t that other faction!”
But what if (my stomach plummeted) the faeries in here were from the other faction? What if I’d pulled the wrong faeries in with me? What if the other faction had bodychecked my faeries out of the way right as I yanked their world in over top of mine?
Oh no.
“Really, Enid, I must say—”
We were back in the regular world.
I had to get my faeries in here to stop this.
And, as if to mock me, in my periphery, a shadow that was all too familiar. I’d seen it on my bedroom wall. I’d seen it on the playground at school. I’d seen it by the Will O’Wisp’s fish tank. The rogue faerie.
“You,” I hissed.
“Yes, Enid. Me,” my mother replied.
“No, not you.” I shook my head. The shadow vanished. But I’d seen it: the faerie that wanted a replacement to usurp me and who had usurped the faeries that I wanted to help me usurp the usurp-enabler (without a thesaurus and in this extremely trying situation, my vocabulary was suffering).
I needed to fight faerie with faerie. So, I gulped in some air and dashed down the drive, closing my eyes as I burst through the black wall that was keeping the faeries I wanted out and the faeries I didn’t want in.
Out there on the road, I found myself in the midst of a nice day. A bit mild. Sun, a few clouds. No real breeze. The buzz of summer insects. The remnants of my lighting setup were still in the field, but the road was smooth, all LIES erased. It all seemed so boringly ordinary and not at all what I expected.
Well, well, well.
My font nouveau inner voice chose right then to reappear.
I leave you alone and look at what happens.
The tone was somewhere between a sulk and a gloat (a glulk) and was extraordinarily condescending.
I’m trying to fix it, I told myself. Get the other faeries and stop the other other faeries from hurting her.
What other faeries?
The ones that said they’d help her.
Again, I ask you: What other faeries?
I couldn’t believe I was being so dense. The ones that promised they weren’t going to hurt her. The ones that promised they weren’t going to kill her. Obviously.
No faeries promised you that.
Yes, they did. They said —
Wrote.
I threw my head back in dismay. Fine, they wrote that there were two factions, and their faction agreed with me that the idea of using a changeling to get the magic back from my mother was too complicated.
And?
And.
I stopped.
You see?
No, I didn’t see in the literal sense of the term, but I definitely understood: the faeries I’d been corresponding with had never actually explicitly said that they weren’t going to hurt my mother. Just that they thought the changeling plan was ridiculous.
“Oh no,” I whispered, before turning and running back to my mother.
f I had been the faeries, I would have made the path from the driveway to the road like turnstiles at a subway station exit, i.e. once you exited, you couldn’t get back in (although, you could get back into a subway station by going around to the entrance and paying for a new fare. In that case, and in prime punniness, I was going to make sure that the faeries were going to pay for their lack of securing the perimeter, except I was the one who had exited, so I would have to pay in this metaphor … )
Enid?
Right. Focus.
“Hey!” I shouted, running back to my mother. “Did you like my jog? Wasn’t it worthy of one of your acerbic remarks?” If I could draw her fully into this layer, then maybe she could escape the magical noose that had tightened around her in the other.
No response.
“What are your shifts like this week?” I asked.
No response.
“If I was a tree,” I began, purposefully ignoring the subjunctive tense, which could only serve to aggravate my mother.
No response, plus a time jump. We stayed in the same spot, but the shadows around us had shifted. Shifted significantly, at least an hour’s worth. My mother was still managing to hang on, but only just.
“Pizza toppings,” I shouted. “Power bills. Rent payments. Report cards. Cotter pins. Overdue library fines. Plastic clamshells of Me
xican strawberries at the grocery store.” I kept going with my list of commonplace stuff, but to no avail: my mother didn’t react in the slightest. So I moved on to Plan B: instead of talking about usual things in our usual layer, I would try talking usual things in the magical one.
But the layers had calcified during the last time jump. I pushed my elbows out to make some more space and kicked here and there, like having a tantrum, to rip a hole. I clawed at the air, hoping to tear a hole even though I knew doing so was useless; I always kept my fingernails short and sweet, cut below the tips of my fingers.
“Why won’t you let me through?” I hissed.
(Likely because they were worried I’d interfere somehow.)
Fortunately, faeries weren’t the only ones adept in the art of deception.
“Come on,” I whined, slipping on my poutiest face. “I want to see her punished as much as you do. She stole my magic, you know? It isn’t fair that I don’t get to see her comeuppance.”
A beat.
And I slithered through.
Most excellent.
As much as I wanted to smugly gloat over my deceiving the faeries, there wasn’t time, my mother’s decrepit state becoming more pronounced as each second ticked by.
Added to this: a thin blue thread was being dragged from her. I tried to follow it, but the end always rested just outside my vision, just off in my periphery, and I knew what was always lurking, just off in my periphery: faeries.
“Now you really look like a dog trying to sit,” my mother muttered. She was watching me with empty white eyes as I spun, trying to catch sight of the end of the thread, trying to catch sight of the faerie that must have been winding the thread round and round like a bobbin, while my mother slimmed down to Giacometti-statue-dimensions.
“Ruff ruff,” I replied.
“Did you bring a raincoat?” My mother’s voice mixed into the wind, almost lost.
She was trying. My heart pounded in relief. She was trying to drag herself back into the mundane world with her talk of dogs and raincoats, I just knew it.
“All my friends have smart phones,” I said. “I want one.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
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