Chapter Two
Livia
I always prided myself on being strong, stronger than my mom had been, but now I know it’s nothing but a myth.
If it were true, I wouldn’t still be here, in this same house, still trying to please my father; just like my mother had done all her life. The thing about a narcissist is that they remain unpleasable. It’s their whole modus operandi, I’ve learned, but I’m too entrenched in it now to do anything about it. They will always move the posts and do it right in front of your eyes too, while telling you, you’re the crazy one.
My mom was a victim of her own affection. She loved my father until the last breath she drew when I found her splattered on the stone edging of the garden right above the balcony of my parent’s bedroom on the second floor, her body like a pretzel broken in half, soaked in blood, and surrounded by her favorite hydrangeas under a soft summer sky.
I feel my skin start to pull tight as my blood rushes frantically through me to get to my heart to deliver its next beat. I managed to hide that image of finding her broken and dead from my mind for years, but now that it creeps into my head so suddenly, it feels foreign. Like it shouldn’t have happened. She shouldn’t have died.
My father immediately sent me away to boarding school following my mom’s death. The day after, to be precise. In the car on the way to the school, he told me that my mom was standing on the balcony, and because of structural issues, the balcony gave way, and she fell to her death.
But I knew that didn’t happen. I was the one who found her. Nothing had happened to the balcony. But as he drove me away that day to boarding school, while I soaked the front of my dress crying for my mom, my tear-flooded gaze noticed that the balcony of my parent’s bedroom was no longer there. It lay shattered on the ground, just like my mom had been the day before.
My father had isolated us from everything and everyone, but he did it in such a way that it wasn’t even something I questioned because he was trying to keep my mom’s mental illness secret from the rest of the world. The mammoth lengths my father went to hide the fact that my mom had committed suicide give me chills now.
All the brainwashing he had done to me into believing that saying anything other than my mom was fine would be opening her up to ridicule and unkindness worked since I started to believe that my mom didn’t throw herself off the balcony. She wouldn’t have left me alone in this world. It was an accident. The balcony gave way, and she fell.
My mom was the most beautiful person I knew. She was also the coolest. She let me play dress-up and eat ice cream for dinner. She let me sit in the bath until I pruned, just so I could giggle at my fingers. And when she came downstairs to breakfast once when I was six years old, with her head and eyebrows shaved… she thought her hair had turned to worms, and it made perfect sense to me.
I take two forced breaths in succession and remind myself of what I’m doing and why everything is going to be okay. I’m going to complete what my mom started, so her soul can finally rest in peace.
“I think I may have found the house where the three bears lived,” I say slowly. It still sounds surreal to my ears.
I think I may have found the house—the cottage—where the three bears had actually lived.
Saying it gives me goosebumps. Goldilocks and the Three Bears was my mom’s favorite story; now I can say it truly happened, and the cottage stands to this day.
Obviously, I’m expecting nothing but a derelict, decayed, and crumbling edifice in its place, but it will be proof enough that it existed once upon a time right here on American soil because this is where the story of the three bears originated.
But my declaration isn’t met with the same enthusiasm that still sends sparks of excitement through me. Faith is naturally as skeptical as hell.
“The three bears? As in Goldilocks and the Three Bears? That fairytale?”
“What other three bears could there possibly be?” I ask saucily.
“Wait. So you’re saying that if fairytales really happened, then bears lived in houses? I mean, if that in itself doesn’t tell you it’s freaking made up, nothing will.”
“No silly, of course bears don’t live in houses and they didn’t back then either. We at Fairytale Femme Fatales are time scientists. We deal with facts, not fiction.”
“But you said—”
“I meant bear shifters.”
“Bear shifters?” Faith’s lips curl into a bow of incredulity. “And you say you don’t deal with fiction, only—”
“Facts,” I say confidently.
“And that’s where you’re going? To the cottage,” Faith uses air quotes for the word cottage, “where these three bears lived. And there’s nothing crazy about that, right?”
“Yes, I am, and no, there’s absolutely nothing crazy about that.”
I have indisputable evidence that proves my mom was right.
“Okay. Indulge me. And I want a live location wherever you’re going. No. I’m canceling my photoshoot and coming with you.”
Faith reaches for her handbag, but I stop her from getting her phone. She had been waiting forever and a day to get this campaign—to be the face of a very popular cosmetic brand—and I’m not going to let her miss her dream job and possibly get replaced because of me.
“No. I’m just going to have a look. I’m booked in overnight at The Sweet Haven Lodgers Place, which is like… ten minutes away from the cottage. It’ll take me five more minutes to just look at it, and then I’ll get back in my car and drive home. Simple.”
That’s the plan. That’s all I need. If not the house itself, where the Three Bears lived, then at least the land on which it once stood. That’s all.
“I still don’t like it.”
“There’s even a game ranger, and you know what, I’ll ask him to escort me. I promise.”
I’m lying. The cottage is not exactly ten minutes away from the lodge—more like a good couple of hours, but possibly more, and around some treacherous terrain—but Faith doesn’t need to know that. When I say it’s in the middle of nowhere, I mean it, but it also explains how it wasn’t found before.
There’s also no game ranger on hand that I know of who’s just going to escort me up the mountain. I’m doing this alone. Nothing is going to happen to me.
I’m more at risk being here in the house I grew up in than out there in the wilderness in the middle of no man’s land looking for a cottage that housed three bear shifters eons ago.
“I’ll be back before you are from your photoshoot, and then we’ll celebrate,” I say as I slip into my en suite bathroom and collect a tube of moisturizer I can use on my face and body, shower gel, and a miniature bottle of shampoo. I’m not going to need any makeup.
“Fine. I want two whole pizzas for myself and a whole tub of ice cream,” Faith shouts from my bedroom. “I’m never eating another salad once this shoot is over. Where is this cottage anyway where pappa bear, mama bear, and baby bear lived?”
“Somewhere in the mountains. And also, they weren’t a family. They were three bachelors.”
“Shut up. Three bachelor bear shifters? Seriously?”
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a derivative of the original story.”
It feels oddly liberating to finally talk to Faith about my mother”s version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, even though she doesn’t know it’s from my mom. It had been our secret, and my mom made me promise not to tell another soul about it.
People wouldn’t believe me, she said, and the same thing that happened to her would happen to me. She worried most about that for me. She feared people would think I was also crazy like they thought she was.
They were all wrong, though, about my mom. She may have been eccentric, but she was extremely smart and super intelligent. She could recite everything she had read. And her sketches were amazing. She understood things that made me look up at her in wonder. But more than anything, she loved me fiercely, just the way I was. A girl.
“Okay, tell me everything.” Faith gets comfortable on my bed.
I start with the origin story. Their genesis.