Chapter Five
Livia
The bubble of excitement inside of me continues to bloom. I can’t stop smiling even as I check in at The Sweet Haven Lodgers Place, the closest form of civilization to where Secret Hush Valley once stood, and it’s still a two-hour drive away, and god knows how long of a hike.
I do my normal check-ins with my girls at FFF. They’re as excited as I am and completely understand my determination to do this alone.
It’s going to be something cathartic, a therapeutic pilgrimage, and I want it to be mine alone. It’s crazy how relatable we at FFF are, even on different levels. Skyler, Demi, and Kyla all have different reasons for wanting to prove that fairytales, or some elements of the fairytales we know today, are real.
I also check in with Faith as she’s on her way to her shoot, and she’s tracking my live location as well, although I did tell her I might lose connection the deeper into the mountains I go.
With butterflies in my stomach, I don’t waste any more time. I empty my backpack of the clothes I clearly overpacked, then fill it with bottles of water, snacks, and emergency supplies I got from a utility store on my way here. And then I set off.
My car takes me as far as it can before I have to make the rest of the way on foot.
I’m focused and alert. The first part of the journey is fairly straightforward, delineated by an old hiking trail. But then I diverge from the path and ignore the internal signs that tell me I’m off the trail and approaching completely unknown, unventured territory.
From my mom’s journal, I know Barrett Marticus Ursid wrote down their story, everything in detail about it from the very beginning, for Goldenia when she was dying from old age.
Goldenia wanted the pages of her love story to be passed down to her sons. When they were of age, she wanted them to find their little cottage across the sea and preserve it until the end of time.
Goldenia died the very next night after Barrett had written down their story and Bernard, Barrett, and Bruin died of broken hearts within hours of their wife’s death.
A servant of theirs who could read and write, thanks to Goldenia teaching him, had skimmed through their story the night Goldenia died.
Unfortunately, the servant came upon hard times, and with a sick child at home, he produced their story from memory and then sold it to a local publisher.
The money he received was enough to successfully care for his child, but the publisher’s wife declared the story too carnal and fiendish and deemed the servant to be put into an asylum for a severe case of mania after being touched by the devil.
He never once said that the story he wrote had, in fact, happened. He said he imagined it in his mind. In his version, he never wrote down their names. It was just the three bears and their bride. He kept their secrets with him until he died.
He managed to escape with his family before being thrown into the asylum, and traveled to America. My mom said he wanted to find the cottage where the three bears lived.
The publisher’s very pious wife burned the manuscript that the servant had written, but there was still talk about the story itself since a few people had read the manuscript about the three bears and their bride.
A few years later, an author wrote a version for children and replaced Goldenia with an old woman, called Goldi whom the three bears supposedly ate after she broke into their home.
Some versions say Goldi was set alight, doused, and then impaled for trespassing. Then a more tapered version, the version we know now where instead of an old woman it’s a young girl and she just got to run away, is the one that stuck.
I didn’t tell Faith all of this. I haven’t told her about my mom’s journals, the piles and piles of notes she kept in as many boxes, scribbled in a manic frenzy because she was certain my father was going to burn them all if he found out. She also had so many drawings of what she thought the cottage would look like. She was an artist, and her sketches were amazing. But she was never able to discover exactly where it stood.
To anyone else, my mom would have been deemed crazy.
But no one was more wrong than my father because he was the one who sent her away to get better when I was seven years old, while he told anyone who would ask that my mom was at the spa or visiting relatives. He was the one who crushed her pills and mixed them into her soup, making her a ghost in a human body.
He was the one who locked her away in the attic when he thought she needed a time-out. A time-out from being crazy since she had a dirty laundry list of mental illnesses diagnosed by as many doctors over the years, but always in a different state across the continent.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression, attention-deficit disorder... feeling alone in a room full of people.
But this changes everything for me. I want to prove my mom was just misunderstood and not mentally ill. That her love for fairytales, her journals, notes, and drawings were not the rantings of a woman dispossessed of her faculties but someone with a passion for believing in the unbelievable.
The more my father told her she was mentally unstable, the harder she fought to be heard. The more medications she was given.
Is it really such a bad thing to believe that something actually happened? She wasn’t hurting anyone. But she was also fragile, and my father could have just allowed her to be herself and indulged her a little. It would have made her so happy. She loved him so much and asked nothing else of him.
And while I’m doing this for my mom, I’m doing this for my father as well. Not to get a chance to say I told you so, but I think I want him to love her again.
I understand only too well the level of puerility of my thoughts, but if my father could see she wasn’t as mentally unstable as he believed, that she hadn’t lost her mind, that he had only misunderstood her, he could love her again.
The way he loved her in the pictures I had seen of them that graced the fireplace mantle when they were still young and before I was born. The same Polaroid images he had removed the day after her death and refused to give them to me when I begged and cried for them. There is not a single reminder of my mom in the house, except for me.
The day she died, not even hours afterward, my father gathered up her journals and notes, put them into their boxes, and told our housekeeper, Mrs. Rosely, to burn them immediately.
But Mrs. Rosely, who tried her best to look after me and my mom, didn’t burn them. She stored them in the attic of our house, deep inside a wooden chest my father would never think about opening.
What my father called my mom’s embarrassing rantings stayed in our attic for ten years until Mrs. Rosely wrote me a letter, telling me she had kept my mom’s things and maybe I was ready to revisit that side of her.
To this day, my father doesn’t know I have everything of my mom’s that he wanted burned after her death.
And here I am now.
I spent a year pouring over those journals and notes, and my memory was triggered as I remembered things my mom would tell me. I used to be in awe of how she described the garden and the mountains, and the sketches she would whip up so easily made me admire her more. She kept calling the mountains the bear’s beard.
I took everything she said as a clue, and together with the girls at Fairytale Femme Fatales, we scoured through hundreds of images of mountain peaks. I also remember my mom saying over and over that it was a secret, and then she’d place her fingers on her lips as if to shush me.
She would grab me by my skinny arms and whisper that it’s a secret, then shush me, and when I told her I knew, I knew it was our secret, she would get so frustrated, and she’d hit her head so hard against the wall that my father would tie her hands up.
It’s a secret. Shh…
My breakthrough came when Skyler asked me who my mom really was. As in her heritage. And that’s when I cracked the code that lay hidden in my mom’s madness.
Armed with nothing but my mom’s maiden name, Winston, and because I couldn’t risk asking my father anything about her, I did a deep dive into her genealogy. I took DNA tests and I almost lived in the library researching my mom’s heritage when I should have been studying. I went through archive after archive and discovered my mom had European ancestry in her blood.
And suddenly, everything fell into place. When my mom said bear’s beard mountains, she meant if you tilted your head a little, you would see a mountain range that looked like a bear with a beard.
When she said,” It’s a secret, shh,” she meant Secret Hush Valley, a little village at the foot of the mountain that had almost been wiped out during a battle that was never documented, so their enemy remained unknown.
As the village tried to rebuild itself, an Englishman and his family arrived, ready to help rebuild. Alfred and his wife became the owners of a goods store in Secret Hush Valley, and when I saw a black-and-white picture of Alfred’s wife, it was as if I were staring at my own mom.
My mom, Corinne Ann Winston, was a descendant of Alfred Winston—the servant who had worked for the three bears and Goldenia, who later became three gentleman brothers, Bernard, Barrett, and Bruin Ursid, and their golden-haired bride.
It had been Alfred Winston who had tried to sell their story to a publisher out of desperation to help his sick child.
My mom wasn’t crazy. She was right.