Chapter Twelve
I needed a moment to gather my thoughts, and it came in the form of a scalding shower. It had been surprisingly easy to convince Fauna to wait.
I’d told her that I needed to scrub myself clean after all I’d been through, and she agreed that I reeked of pus and trauma and that I could use a good soaping. I’d practically collapsed with exhaustion the moment the boiling-hot water hit me. It burned my skin, which I welcomed. Each scalding droplet reminded me that this was real. I was real. I was alive. I sank to the shower floor, struggling to shampoo my own hair. A distant, painful memory of Caliban holding me in the shower years ago while I’d cried tugged at my heart.
You’re not happy.
I missed him so intensely whenever I ran the hot water—each droplet like a rain of memories, drowning me in him. He’d never tried to get me to change. He hadn’t scolded me or told me to clean up my act or been disappointed when I came home wasted or with a stranger on my arm. He’d only cared whether my choices were bringing me joy or stealing it from me. And he knew that half of what I did was a bandage to patch the bleeding wound of the one thing I’d believed at my core to be true: none of it existed. An imaginary friend can’t take corporal form. I needed to drink, get laid, date, medicate, fly across the globe, to run as fast and far as I could to get away from him, and none of it had worked.
Nothing, except telling him not to come back.
I squeezed my eyes closed, forcing the images from my mind.
When I finally opened the shower curtain, I gasped at Fauna leaning against the sink, eyeing a piece of paper. I could scarcely make out her shape through the dense steam that filled the room. I scrambled for a towel, but she didn’t bother to look at me.
“This was in your pocket?” she asked, flashing the hastily scrawled sigil with fold creases down the middle. My crumpled pants, shirt, and underwear remained balled on the floor. I couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to let herself into the bathroom and dig through my pockets, but then again, I was the crazy one.
I yanked the towel from the hook and tucked it against my still-dripping body. Hair drenched against my neck and shoulders as I gaped at her. “Don’t you know about privacy?”
“No,” she said dismissively, then waved the paper again. “You had this in your pocket when you were out of the house, and you saw both Silas and the parasite?”
Water plastered my hair to my forehead, dribbling into my open mouth as I stared at her.
“Fascinating,” she whispered. She brought the sigil close to her face, turning it over as she examined it from different angles. “I can’t believe that worked. But then again, if anyone could make something so powerful, it would be the Prince. Come on, sweetie. I have questions. And I’m hungry.”
I’d barely stepped onto the bath mat, soaked hair dripping loudly onto the floor as she flung open the bathroom door. The cold shock of the hall beyond hit me as the steam rushed from the room. She left it open as she stalked to the kitchen with purpose.
“It’s after midnight,” I called after her.
She gave me the time I needed to towel off my hair and change into an old T-shirt and sweatpants. At her very specific request, I ordered a number of doughnuts, pastries, and deep-fried sweets from a twenty-four-hour dessert shop. She wasted time with cartoons, not questioning the way I gaped at her like she was a dog walking on its hind legs who’d learned to talk. It took forty-five minutes of colorful children’s shows before the food arrived. I turned off the TV the moment the delivery man showed up at our doorstep. She was elbow-deep in sweets before she was ready to hold a conversation.
“So, let’s talk about your true sight,” Fauna said, mouth smacking through bites of sticky pastry.
I wondered how she managed to make tearing into a glazed doughnut look dainty.
“True sight?”
She shook crumbs from her fingertips. “It’s in your blood, of course, but when combined with this sigil…I’m just fascinated it worked on you even while out of the house. And a piece of paper, no less! I have theories.”
When I’d left the church, I’d rejected all facets of the spiritual. Anchoring myself in reality had been a cornerstone of my psychiatry. Hundreds of hours in therapy began to unravel. I parroted what I’d trained myself to say. “Fauna, none of this is real. I—”
“Babe, all of this is real. For the love of the gods and goddesses, how did he remain patient with a nonbeliever for so long? I’ve been around you for all of three hours and I’m already tired of your repetition. Be less boring.”
“I’m batshit,” I said quietly. “Mental illness runs in my family, on my mom’s side. We’re all nuts. We—”
Fauna finished off the last of a glazed croissant, using her fingertip to clean the plate. My stomach grumbled. I hadn’t wanted to eat, but it hadn’t made it any easier to watch an entire box of chocolate, maple, and vanilla baked goods disappear between her perfect, pearly teeth. She sucked her finger clean as she nodded. “Yes, Lisbeth was one of us—is one of us. Well, technically, it’s your great-grandmother, Aloisa. She’s the best. So much cooler than you. Way more open-minded. She would have believed anything. Speaking of anything…”
Fauna got to her feet and wandered into my kitchen. She began loudly opening and closing drawers. My eyes stung against the lateness of the hour as I watched her invade my privacy as she continued riffling through my things.
“What are you doing?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. I allowed her the chaos while I grimaced at the mention of my mother.
John and Lisbeth Thorson, the model Christian couple, pillars of the church. A woman as rigid as the ruler of judgement by which she measured the world around her, and a man as absent and forgettable as the John Does who shared his name. My mother wasn’t quite Margaret White, but she had several qualities that would have made Carrie fans proud. I spoke up to be heard over the sound of Fauna’s snooping. “My mom was—is—obsessed with angels and demons. She’s schizophrenic, Fauna. She saw and heard things that weren’t there. Eventually, she stopped talking about it. She had to. Do you know how many jobs are taken off the table when you’re diagnosed? Do you know how stigmatized it is? I couldn’t risk getting slapped with that label. I didn’t want the world to close down for me like it did for her, or for my grandma.”
She planted both palms on the kitchen island and leveled her stare before saying, “Did these voices in your mom’s head ever tell her to hurt herself?”
I frowned. I was ready to answer when the sound of papers and loose cords from my junk drawer stirred my attention. I stood at long last and crossed to the kitchen. “Can I help you find something?”
She continued her hunt as she said, “A marker. A Sharpie, preferably. Now, about these voices, did they ever tell her to do things? To hurt others? To wreak havoc? What did they say to her?”
I waved her aside and closed the kitchen drawers and cabinets as I crossed to the stand beside the couch. It housed remotes, a surround-sound manual, and a variety of writing utensils. I procured a black marker and she snatched it from my hand.
“Why do you need it?”
She bit the cap and kept it in her mouth as she crossed to my floor-to-ceiling window. Through the plastic cap, she said, “Because angels and demons aren’t the only things out there, and your warding sucks. Now, answer my question.”
I shook my head, still-damp tendrils pooling against my shirt. “No, they didn’t really talk to her. I knew she kept seeing them long after she stopped bringing them up. She saw them and heard them…but they were just there. Around. And…hey!”
The high-pitched squeak of felt on glass cut my reverie short.
“You’ll thank me later,” she said through her mouthful as she continued to draw lines, circles, curves, and curls.
“I doubt it!” I recoiled at her final product, which might as well have been slapped from a grimoire onto my living room window.
“I shouldn’t have been able to get in here. Any god or the creatures from their pantheons could stroll on in.”
I trailed after her, lips parted in horror as she headed toward my front door to continue her vandalism. I was too stunned to speak, but she continued talking as if she weren’t breaking every rule of socially acceptable behavior. Back to me, intent on her art, she said, “Schizophrenia is real, just as clairvoyance is real. Seeing through the veil can be wonderful, or it can ruin your life. The best way to tell whether you’re clairsentient is the message coming from the other side. Unless she had a parasite…well, a parasite would tell her to do terrible things. You would know. You met one of those creepy little fuckers. But it sounds like you’re all suffering from a terrible case of great-grandma Aloisa getting knocked up by the fae.”
She nodded at her handiwork and set off down the hall.
“That’s permanent marker. You can’t just—”
“I’m pretty sure you have the funds to take the hit on the deposit.” She rolled her eyes as she stepped into my guest bedroom and headed for yet another window.
I trailed her graffiti helplessly. Unsure how to intervene with her property destruction, I pressed my fingertips into my temple and asked a question instead. “My mom… You’re saying she was just seeing through the veil?” My question was underscored by the orange prescription bottles as we left the guest room and stepped into my bedroom.
“Poor clairsentient humans,” Fauna murmured, voice quick to correct my train of thought. She popped the cap onto the back of the marker, clearing her mouth as she multitasked drawing and responding. I watched, a passenger in my own apartment as she defaced my bedroom window. She looked at the medications, then answered the unspoken question. “No, the pills did not dull her, or your, ability to see through the veil. They simply make life more bearable. Psychic abilities can be…a lot. Even if you can’t turn them off, you don’t deserve to suffer. Give yourself a tiny pinch of relief. Survive it.”
“Psychic?”
“There,” she said, satisfied. “Are there any other doors? Windows?”
I winced at the symbols she may as well have ripped from the occult. “You’ve destroyed everything in my apartment. It looks like we’re trying to summon the devil. My place now looks as crazy as I feel, so thanks for that.”
Fauna made a face that I had made countless times to my students in Colombia. She was a teacher doing her best not to throw shoes at her student. She rallied for self-restraint, leaning into the comfort of my couch against the lateness of the hour. “People have paid unspeakable prices for the kind of warding I just gave you. No one from beyond the veil can pop in without an invitation. Between these walls, you’re safe from everyone from the boogeyman to Zeus himself. Be grateful.”
“When you say Zeus…”
“The guy has trouble keeping it in his pants. You don’t need him in your bedroom. As for your abilities, it doesn’t matter what you call them,” Fauna said. She recapped the pen and handed it to me. “None of the words matter. Everything you say has been made up by humans and filtered through time and culture. Use language however you want. Whatever helps you understand that you can see and feel and experience more than is limited to your realm.”
“Then what is it really called?”
Her nose twitched, patience evaporating. I experienced a moment of true fear in the ten seconds it took from her face to go from agitated to contemplative. Fauna leaned away from me as she rolled a question around on her tongue. Her eyes danced with curiosity for a long, long time. “Why did you choose to call the Prince Caliban?”
I blinked. “What does this—”
“Just tell me.”
My lips parted. I probably looked like a salmon in the jaws of a bear as my mouth opened and closed uselessly against a series of nonanswers. Finally, I said, “It’s from The Tempest. The character was the son of a witch, and Caliban always seemed so magical…”
Her mouth quirked into a half-smile. “Shakespeare tracks for someone with a degree in literature. You did well.”
My bunched brows asked the question I couldn’t articulate.
“It’s not his name, of course. Fauna isn’t mine. Silas isn’t the angel’s real name. We don’t give out our real names, though if people are astute, they can sometimes guess the outer edges of our names. Like you, choosing Caliban. Important, magical…the character was half-monster, in human shape, right? It’s a good name. It shows your insight. In fact, I suspect it’s why you’ve lived by your many aliases. Because at the end of the day, it isn’t just for safety or anonymity. It’s because some part of you knows that names have power.”
“What does that…”
“Oh my gods, I’m trying to remember you have redeeming qualities.” She leaned forward as if to tell a secret. “What does that have to do with language? With fae and elf and demon and psychic and realm? Come on, Marlow-Merit-Maribelle. Put the pieces together.”
And so, I did.
She offered a satisfied nod as she saw it click behind my eyes. The realm words weren’t just old or lost or strange. They were too powerful, too important to be shared. Instead, we were left with the outer edges, as she’d called them. Whatever we did to communicate those thoughts would suffice.
Fauna led the way back to the living room as if it were her home and I were the guest. Still in the hall, she asked over her shoulder, “Can I ask what your grandmother was named?”
“Dagny.”
She released a heavy sigh. “That tracks.”
“Why?”
“New day.” She settled onto the couch. “It’s a pretty name for a someone who wants their end to look like a beginning. Aloisa wanted a fresh start. And? Did she get it? I mean, her name would have taken her to a new place, a fresh start, regardless. But, did Aloisa and her daughter live happily here?”
“No,” I said quietly.
My thoughts flitted briefly to the small, square home that smelled of sourdough bread and brown-orange shag carpet. Her green, plastic-covered couch and amicable smile had served as a constant in my youth. She was always available to babysit, as my grandmother had suffered from terrible agoraphobia, and had nowhere better to be. If Grandma Dagny could see through the veil and had no guidance for who or what she saw, perhaps leaving her house was a fear worse than death. Flavors of her insanity had trickled down my maternal line, passing from her, to my mother, to me. At least my grandma had been the friendly brand of nuts. My mother, on the other hand…
“Are any of us actually crazy?” I asked.
Her rich, musical laugh caught me off guard. “All of you, probably! I can’t imagine what it does to the human brain to have fae blood pumping through your veins! And to be…oh, what’s the word…come on, it’s a really good one that you humans recently started using. What is it when you know something is true but you’re told over and over that you’ve lost your mind?”
“Gaslit?”
“Gaslit!” Fauna echoed enthusiastically, clapping her hands together. “Such a good word. It’s overused, though. At this pace, it’ll be devoid of meaning within the year. But yes, Dagny’s wires are crossed, her chemicals are wrong, and I hope she received all the treatment to make her life easier. I even hope you…” She frowned, then said, “I’m sorry we don’t intervene more often. It’s better this way. The days of roaming freely in your realm did…not end well, for man or fae.” Rather abruptly, she turned to the large, black rectangle against the wall. “Wanna turn the TV back on?”
I looked at the ethereal being made of starlight and speckled like a baby deer and practically snorted. “The cartoons…I don’t get it. You really want to watch TV? Why?”
“Life is long! Come on, Miss Mythology. You know what fucked-up shit the gods used to do for entertainment? Now we get to watch producer godlings torture actors. If we’re lucky, they’re very, very sexy actors.”
“How could you care,” I asked, “when you look the way you do?”
Fauna made an arrogant face, biting her lip and leaning in across the table as she said, “Why, do you find me very, very sexy?”
I blinked. Wordlessly, I handed her the remote.
She giggled and clicked it on, flipping through the channels as she said, “We do, sometimes. A few of us get bored and appreciate the adulation of eight billion humans through film or TV. Maybe I could audition for Fire andSwords. I look like a princess, don’t you think? My acting is quite good. Wait until you see me play the role of helpless forest maiden looking for a big, strong man.”
I dared to ask, “What do you do with the big, strong man when you find him?”
Her eyes darkened and her voice lowered as she said, “Well, that depends what kind of mood I’m in.”
I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to speak if I stayed. I abandoned her to watch TV as I walked numbly to my bedroom. I could hear her giggling at the cheesy dialogue and gasps over the dragons even as I closed the door behind me. I lay down, hair still wet from the shower, and let the pillow absorb what remained of the water and, with it, everything I thought I knew of the world.