“Mrs. Delavecchio.” My mother’s body heaved. Her hair fell to the wind. “Your friend,” she panted. “No phone.”
Again, I tried to make my way to her, but couldn’t. The thread coming off her was thicker now, less a thread and more like yarn, then ribbon, then rope. Thick, heavy, intricately woven rope. And I was trapped in what felt like a mime’s box where I banged on sides I could neither see nor break through.
“Don’t let them win!” I yelled. “Fight back! What’s the weather supposed to be like tomorrow?”
No response.
“Come on,” I begged. “You know the best indicator of tomorrow’s weather is today’s.”
She hesitated. “Sunny, I assume.” There was no voice, just the moving of her lips.
“You assume?” My vocal chords were ready to snap from my screeching. “What about accuracy? Assumptions make asses of you and me.”
No grin. No chastisement for vulgarity.
And then she collapsed.
It wasn’t easy to get through the next few minutes. I banged and kicked at my invisible prison, my skin scraped raw by clouds of gravel tossed into the air by my frantic attempts to break free. But I stayed put, watching my mother’s chest rise and fall, although more and more slowly, the breaths more and more shallow.
“No,” I wailed.
Her breathing slowed further.
“No,” I whispered.
Her breath let out.
And with that, the faeries no longer needing to keep me away, the invisible mime box cracked. I fell in my rush to reach my mother’s side, dropping to my knees and sliding the last few feet. I grabbed my mother’s hand, expecting it to be cold, but it wasn’t. It was warm and still lifelike. There was a faint squeeze. With my free hand, I wiped away tears and shifted so I could see into my mother’s face.
Very slowly, very deliberately, and with great effort, she winked.
I wasn’t the only one who had fooled the faeries.
“Oh,” I blubbered. “I think I left the light on in my room.” Swallowing was hard, but not impossible; I managed it with a croak. “Did you turn it off for me?”
Her fingers fluttered.
“Report cards should be available for pickup next week.”
Now her wrist.
“I watered the lawn for you.”
Her hand lifted, just slightly from the grass. Her fingers stretched out, and around them, gossamer thin, she began drawing the blue thread back to herself.
“Did you really think,” my mother said, “that they would forgive me?” It was impossible that I could hear her in her weakened state over the roar of the wind, but I had. I had heard it. It was magical.
She wove more blue thread through her fingers until she had enough, finally, with which to yank herself up. She did so in jerks, like a skeleton reforming in an old horror movie. Trapped pockets of air in her joints snapped and popped. She jolted and fell and pulled herself back up again and again, until, ultimately, she struggled to her feet and released my hand.
“I stole nothing,” she bellowed, gaining the strength and the sound to do so from some deep well of resistance within her. “This —” she pulled the blue thread into her body “— is all mine.”
The faeries retaliated with some sort of punch in the gut. My mother doubled over and screamed. Blood, but not the color of blood, a liquid the color of discount green mouthwash, trickled from her mouth.
“It’s mine,” she howled.
“Do you have a first aid kit on you?” I asked. “I think this cut is infected.” I tried to show her my palm.
“Mine!” she cried.
“No, not exactly.”
“Exactly. Exactly mine!” She pulled the thread harder.
This time there was a crack. My mother’s shins collapsed under her, and she fell to her knees. We were level, face to face, eye to eye, nose to nose. I grabbed her hand again. It was like holding onto toothpicks wrapped in paper napkins.
The wind or the faeries or my mother screeched in anger. She dragged her hand from mine and glared at my face.
“You let them take it from me,” she barked. Her eyes were still covered in milky white cataracts as they stared at a me she wouldn’t have been able to see. “You let them!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that they’d —” I was crying again.
“You let them!”
“It was a mistake. I thought I was helping just like you thought you were helping. The song you sang when I was a baby. You thought —”
My mother’s face contorted and fell and disassembled itself. If before she was a Giacometti, she was now a Picasso. A demoiselle d’Avignon.
“Stop lying,” my mother’s mouth, now closer to her forehead than her eyes, hissed.
“I’ve forgotten when to use which versus that,” I said, hoping to change the subject.
“You don’t get to take what I earned!” My attempt at subject-changing thus denied, my mother grabbed even more thread in her skinny fingers and brought the whole ball to her mouth, tried to suck it back down into her gullet. Her neck and her collarbone snapped, and her arms, at the elbows, bent at angles that made my own joints wail in sympathy. The air smelled of scorched ozone, and still my mother kept on pulling the blue thread to her. “I never thought,” she muttered, “that she’d be so vindictive.”
“Who? The faerie you stole the song from?”
“It’s mine,” she mumbled.
“No.”
“Mine,” she repeated.
“Stop it!” I managed to stand despite the wind pushing me down. I towered over my mother’s prone form. “It isn’t yours. It’s mine. And your trying to keep it is killing you! Just let go!”
“Mine,” she whispered again, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Enough!” I wrenched a stick from the ground and swung. It cut through the air with a swoosh, slicing the thread before making contact with the marionette twigs that had once been my mother’s hand. I swung and I swung and I swung.
“I am,” I shouted, still waving the stick back and forth like I was Babe Ruth, “so tired of your stubbornness. Why can’t you just accept what the world is? Why can’t you just accept me? Why can’t you —”
“Honestly, Enid, your melodramatic tendencies are more endearing when they aren’t directed at impugning my behavior.”
I dropped the stick. We were back on the drive. The world was one layer. The sun shone as normal and time had smoothed out. There was no more blue thread. There was no more slim mother. There was no more clamoring magical wind. Everything was normal, except I’d been swinging a stick around without any discernable reason.
“But we —” I began. “Are you —”
“Am I what?”
I reached my fingertips towards my mother’s lips. “Your mouth is underneath your nose.”
“As it always has been.”
“No,” I shook my head. “Not always. There was —”
I stopped. Was my mother pretending? Was this a ruse? Did she really not remember what had just happened? Or did she want me to pretend that what had happened was nothing?
“You don’t remember the other world? The one that was here?” I asked.
“No,” she said wryly.
“The faerie world. It was overlapped and —”
“Our location relative to the trees provides protection from faeries. Honestly, you know that, Enid.”
“Yes. ” And it was a stick, from a tree, that had cut through the magical blue thread, that had severed the worlds’ connections. “But —”
“But nothing. I did not drive all the way out here in order to be subjected to your shouting harassments at me, followed by me having to re-teach you magical rules I know that you already know.”
“You didn’t drive out here just for me. You also drove out he
re for Amber.”
“Who?”
“Amb—” But I stopped. A worry, like at itch, tingled at the base of my skull, and whatever I was going to say evaporated into the ether. “Nothing. I-I-I don’t know.” Something was missing, wasn’t it? Maybe going back and forth between the layers too many times was playing tricks on my brain. “I thought for a second someone else was here with me.”
“Someone else is here with you.” My mother grinned. “I am here with you.”
“You are,” I conceded.
“Good.” My mother nodded. “Let’s go home.”
“I still think of here as home,” I admitted.
“You know what?” my mother said, her face faintly sad. She pressed the unlock button on the key fob, making it beep three times in succession. “So do I. So do I.”
The whole ride home, I looked for the faeries.
But they were gone.
o, I don’t know.
I don’t know if the faeries were aiming to harm my mother or if it was her refusal to let go of her power that hurt her in the overlapped world. I don’t know if I was tricked or if my mother was tricked or if the faeries were tricked. I don’t know why the faeries had to be at the farmhouse for their plan to work. And I don’t know if there’s any real way to find out.
I don’t know exactly what happened between my mother and Dr. Holden, but after camping out with us for a few weeks he promptly decamped back to Dr. Sivaloganathan. While I never asked, and no one ever told me, I suspected that Drs. Holden and Sivaloganathan broke up and got back together with the same frequency as teenagers “in love.” I don’t know what initiated my mother and Dr. Holden’s initial romance (although it begat me, so I can’t be too critical of the liaison), or whether the faeries were involved with their recent abortive attempt, although my mother seems far less aggravated with Dr. Holden since his move-in/move-out, even though he still insists she wears scrubs instead of her nurse’s uniform on shift. I’m supposed to see him Wednesday and Sunday nights, but usually one of us cancels. It’s still too weird.
I also don’t know how I’m supposed to go about paying the hardware store back. Do I just go in and surreptitiously leave the money somewhere? Do I find the manager and explain the whole story? Should I take my mother in with me so it seems more official? I’ve been avoiding the hardware store since June because I simply don’t know.
Not that I don’t know everything. I do know that:
Dr. Sivaloganathan didn’t leave, and the Will O’Wisp didn’t close. Plus, the new CEO (who knew government-subsidized nursing homes had the same power structure as multinational corporate conglomerates?) signed some partnership with two overseas training colleges, and now nurses come from the Philippines and Malaysia to the Will O’Wisp while they work on getting their Canadian credentials. There are three (three!) new restaurants in town catering to our new residents, and each is amazing. The addition of new food options might be the greatest thing that has happened to this town ever in the history of all time.
Dr. Holden realized he could charge higher rent to the nursing students and asked us, quite politely due to our non-payment of rent, to find a new place to live. So we moved, but not far. Turns out Mrs. Delavecchio owns both sides of her duplex, and now we stay on the right side of her duplex, rather than the right side of Dr. Holden’s. The layout is exactly the same. The view is different, though, since this house is two halves of a duplex and a driveway over from our old duplex half, with the result that the street lamp no longer shines right in my window! And we share a wall with Mrs. Delavecchio, whose deafness means that she doesn’t mind when I turn the volume up on Internet videos (we have WiFi at home now! It came bundled with Mrs. Delavecchio’s new cable package that gets about eighty billion Berlusconi-owned channels from Italy) or when Margery drops a bunch of plates onto the floor and then punches a wall.
My mother went back to work, acting like her reduced magical capabilities had always been the norm and she’d never once been so powerful as to stop time. As for threatening to exchange me for a better model, she claims no memory of that, that whatever made her say it was struck away when I detached the blue thread from her. But she’s said, numerous times, that even without remembering saying it she’s sorry that she did (although in more lofty language: she uses the word contrite a fair deal). I’m working on believing her. She’s working on making it up to me. But the wound is still raw, and the prognosis is still middling. We’re trying, though. Some days.
Lem wrote me a few more times. I wrote him. Mrs. Delavecchio sent him a prayer card. He sent word back that he did not appreciate being lectured at. Mrs. Delavecchio denied that she was lecturing him. Their bickering continues, in epistle form, weekly.
Mrs. Estabrooks, the principal, still thinks I’m a nuisance and my new teacher can’t remember my name and school is still as boring as ever. To wit: our first English assignment of the year is Write what you did on your summer vacation. Seriously? Seriously.
I’ve never managed to completely shake the feeling I got at the farmhouse that I’ve forgotten something important. It comes and goes, and mostly it’s just a hum that I can ignore, but other times I feel like I should know better. I tried describing the pull to my mother: it almost has a color, a golden yellowish brown. Sticky like honey. Hardened like butterscotch candy. My mother said I’d probably left behind a pen and am welcome to walk back by myself any time and pick it up. I have not yet taken her up on the offer.
So that’s what I know.
But about the faeries — I still don’t know that.
h! One more thing I know:
“Can you pass me that book, Enid?” my mother asks.
Without looking up, I wiggle my fingers. The book flits out of existence momentarily, then pops back up inches away from my mother.
“No need to show off,” she mutters.
So, there’s that.
Thank you to my early readers, my #ftd friends: Lane Clark Bonk, Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, A’Llyn Ettien, Kristen Oganowski, and Molly Westerman, as well as Piper Sparling, Eric Sparling, and Patricia Kelly-Spurles.
Thank you to the team at #DCB, especially Barry Jowett, for all their hard work.
Thank you to my teacher Aritha van Herk.
Thank you to Neil and Rebecca McKay for being the first people to tell me they had pre-ordered my book.
And thank you to my family, especially Geoff and Tesfa.
Meghan Rose Allen writes stories for young readers and adults, and has had her work published in numerous literary journals across Canada. Born in Peterborough, Ontario, she has lived in Calgary, Ottawa, and Halifax, and currently lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. Enid Strange is her first novel.
We acknowledge the sacred land on which Cormorant Books operates. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibway and allied nations to peaceably share and steward the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.
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Enid Strange Page 17