Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
“Maybe we’re just bitter and old,” says Gertrude, “because I don’t see a way for either of us to ever have made different choices. I don’t see how it ends differently, Hans.”
Neither do you, but maybe that’s because neither of you are trying.
You’ve lived in your stories for so long you can’t see what details are malleable.
You inhale deeply, taking autumn into your lungs.
As you and Gertrude walk forward through a maze of royal hedges, you take yourself back to the start.
“Let’s say: My father doesn’t abandon me and my sister in the woods.”
Gertrude peers up at you. “I forgot you had a sister. What was her name?”
“Gretel.”
The thing you love about Gertrude is she doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t want to vivisect a tragedy—she accepts it, categorizes it into her understanding, and moves on.
“Good thing she died,” she says. “Her name’s similar to mine, it would have gotten confusing if she’d lived.”
You grin, but she maintains a delightfully straight face. The only hint of her humor is the wicked sparkle in her eye.
“As I was saying,” you continue, “my father doesn’t abandon me and Gretel in the woods. Your father doesn’t abandon you in the woods.”
“All right. Then we never meet.”
“You want to be abandoned?”
“I don’t want to be abandoned, but I would argue it’s a little necessary for this story.”
“That’s the whole point, Gertrude, we’re trying to imagine a different story.”
“We can’t exactly go back and force our fathers to make different choices. We can only change what we did.”
“Fine,” you say. “Our fathers abandon us in the woods.”
You and Gertrude come to a point in the maze where you can either go left or right. She rolls her eyes, then leads you left.
“Our fathers abandon us in the woods,” you say. “But I never run toward the gingerbread house.”
Her eyebrows raise and her mouth twists, but she doesn’t interrupt you.
“I run in a different direction instead, and my sister and I end up finding you and Cyrus and the others. All nine of us decide to leave the woods. We make a plan. We’re very safe about it. We make it out of the woods, completely unscathed.”
“Well done us.”
“We find a village where people are willing to take us in and raise us. We get to grow up there and stay there. The Fair Queen doesn’t take me away. You aren’t carried off by a king you don’t love. None of the worst things happen. It’s a very normal life. A story so normal it’s not worth telling.”
The lefthand path leads to a fountain. A copper fish on a wave spits water high into the air. Gertrude leads you over to a bench, and once she arranges her heavy green skirts, she pats the spot beside her for you to join.
“There’s a story I know,” she says, “called ‘The Fisherman and His Wife.’”
“Here we go.”
“If you get to tell a story, so do I.” She elbows your ribs.
“Though you’ve probably heard this one before, haven’t you?
A fisherman and his wife live in a cramped little hovel.
I know what that’s like. One day, the fisherman catches a fish who grants wishes, and his wife asks him to wish for a cottage.
Understandable request. He wishes for a cottage, and they’re happy for a little while, but then the wife decides she’d rather have a castle.
So the husband asks the fish for a castle, and their wish is granted: a castle they now have.
Then she wishes to be king, and when that’s not enough, she wishes to be God. ”
“And they end up back in the hovel,” you say.
“And the fish never grants them another wish.” She clutches your hand, your bare skin against the warm leather of her glove. “I like your story, Hans, but it’s not really a story. It’s a wish. It’s a wish that can never be granted because nothing will truly satisfy it.”
The fish keeps spitting water.
The water keeps falling back into the fountain.
Endless. Endless. The same cycle, over and over again.
“Let me live in my version for a while,” you say.
“No,” says Gertrude. “Hans, listen. If none of the worst things happen, none of the best things happen, either. None of the necessary things.”
Like breaking out of your story to find another one.
“Let’s pretend your version happened. Cyrus will still want to be a swan too much to be with you.
If I never become queen, if I’m just a princess-turned-peasant all my life, I’ll never feel like I have power, never, not once in all my life.
Maybe I’ll have other children, maybe I’ll have none, but I like the ones I have.
I like who they are. I like what this kingdom might become because of them.
So what if their father didn’t mean anything to me?
I am scarred, and I shall always be scarred, and sometimes I shall feel that pain more keenly than others—but I don’t want a life without scars.
I wear these gloves because it keeps my pain my own.
It’s not anyone else’s to witness or interrogate.
If I wanted to pretend my pain didn’t happen, or that my pain didn’t mean something to me, I’d cut off my hands and wait for God to give me new ones. ”
She stands and smoothes down her skirts. There are four ways back into the maze: the way you came, and three others. She gestures for you to choose a direction.
It doesn’t feel like the choice matters.
You choose to go forward.
Gertrude loops her arm through yours.
“We can’t go back,” she says. “Our beginning is already written in stone. Some of the stories we were thrown into—they’ve already ended. I broke a curse, you disobeyed a queen, you saved a girl from inside a wolf. They’re finished. Some endings exist before the story even starts.”
She tugs on you so you stop walking and face her.
“Other endings… I think other endings can change. I think other endings depend on us. Maybe the best endings depend on us to invent them.”