Chapter Sixteen
I hadn’t so much as turned the keys in the ignition. I kept my hands wrapped around the steering wheel in stunned silence for what felt like an hour but was probably closer to six minutes. Fauna didn’t push me to get moving. I suspected she knew a thing or two about trauma. She allowed me to drive back to my apartment with the radio off, cross the lobby, wait on the bank of elevators, and cross the hall in silence. She subdued her chaos marvelously until we returned to my unit.
I stepped out of one shoe, then the other. My purse dropped to the living room floor as I sank wordlessly to the couch.
“Do you want me to help you pack?” she asked, voice gentle.
“I haven’t talked to my parents in four years,” I said quietly. I wondered if I looked as pale as I felt.
“There’s no reason it has to be a rush,” she said. “The Prince can wait.”
I looked at her miserably. “Is there any chance he’s still in the human realm? Maybe he’s chilling in the Maldives?”
Her expression softened. “Well, what’s stronger? Your feelings for Caliban or your hatred for your parents?”
I said nothing.
“We don’t have to leave the realm if you aren’t ready.”
“Yes, we do,” I said at last. My stomach was filled with stones. This was my fault. I’d ruined his life and mine. He was the best piece of me, and I wanted it back. “I won’t sleep until I undo what I’ve done. The morning after my attack, I woke up knowing I had to get him back. These past few months with him away have been worse than hell. If he can’t come back first, then I have to find him.”
Her usual cockiness was gone. Instead, a true kindness met me as she wrapped both hands around one of my forearms. “You won’t be going alone. I’ll be there with you the whole time. And I’m pretty hard to yell at, as I’m delightful.”
My chest weighed a thousand pounds. I shook my head solemnly. “My mom will see through you.”
Her smile faltered, and I saw the recognition behind her eyes. She knew I was right. Growing up, my parents, along with the church elders, had referred to the gift as the discernment of spirits. It was one of the fruits of the soul, according to biblical lore. While every believer was said to have a spiritual gift that furthered the kingdom of God, most of them were granted things like charity, generosity, the power to uplift, wisdom, understanding, or piety. The three rarest and most hotly contested gifts were scattered everywhere from the old book of Isaiah to the New Testament references in Corinthians. These abilities were said to be prophecy, the interpretation of tongues, and the discernment of spirits, though they were talents that God doled out with a careful hand.
These rare gifts had always sounded dangerously close to witchcraft, in my opinion. Looking at Fauna on the couch beside me, remembering the surprise on Azrames’s face, the anger on Silas’s, or the hunger on the Cheshire cat’s had me reconsidering the gift of spirits. I could almost feel Caliban’s fingers stroking my hair as I thought of all the times I’d told myself I was delusional, all the moments I’d denied what I’d seen, what I’d felt, what I’d known. The church would have told me I was meant to use the gift to see what is for the kingdom of Heaven and what is for the kingdom of Hell. An unscratchable place deep within my mind itched as I wondered how many humans with fae blood were simply trying to make sense of seeing through the veil and found their only validation within the church.
Finally, someone wouldn’t tell them they were crazy.
It was a place where people like Lisbeth Thorson were not only terribly sane but lauded as special, as chosen and celebrated with the knowledge that their ability could be put to work for the Lord.
It had been an easy rabbit hole for my mother to tumble down and an even harder crumbling, claustrophobic dirt pit for me to escape.
But I’d never been alone.
JULY 23, AGE 4
“What are you looking at?” My mother smiled. Her eyes stayed on her hands as she sewed.
My nose had been pressed against the window of our trailer house as I’d watched the neighborhood kids gather around a car. I tapped my pointer finger against the window as I counted them. I didn’t know the big kids well, but I’d seen them around the trailer park. They were maybe ten or eleven years old. Their younger brothers and sisters were there dressed in shades of yellows and pinks and greens. Two girls who lived three trailers down ran behind the car, laughing as someone sprayed them with the hose. One of them was exactly my age.
I’d heard the music from my room and crawled on the brown, scratchy sofa that my parents had rescued from the curb. The cheap fibers bit into my scabbed knees—another in my collection of scars from falling or from being pushed. It depended on the day. The kid my age, a girl named Hannah, had always been nice. She’d given me half of her Popsicle once.
My mother scratched my back kindly from over my shoulder and smiled. “I’m just finishing up your bunny!” she said. She gestured to the kitchen table, where she’d been stuffing a hand-sewn rabbit, repurposed from the fabric of old shirts. She’d made it a blue dress and given it long, floppy ears. “If you want to go play with the kids, I’ll be done by the time you get back.”
I looked up at her uncertainly, then back through the window. “They’re washing a car,” I said. “I don’t have stuff.”
She’d made a dismissive noise and fished below the sink. She filled a fire-hydrant red bucket half full of soapy water and handed me a sponge too big for my hand. She popped a red baseball cap onto my head that matched the red shorts she’d made. So much red. Aside from my shoes and the value pack of white T-shirts, my mom made all my clothes. “Now you have everything. Go have fun!”
And so, I walked excitedly toward the children, red bucket in one hand, fingers digging into the sponge with the other. Though the music continued playing, the spraying water stopped as I approached. The laughter died down, and the playing stilled. My feet slowed, scraping against the sidewalk as I looked at them uncertainly. My eyes lifted to meet Parker—a boy two years older than me who’d shoved me to the ground and stolen my dinosaur toy only a few weeks prior. I hadn’t spotted him from the window.
Life is full of firsts. The first encounter with the room going quiet upon your arrival is something you never forget. The first experience with seconds stretching into a miserable eternity, warping your sense of time and its passage, is hard to shake. When they happen at the same time, they burrow beneath your skin like a tick, sucking at you, draining you. At least, it did for me as I stood there, fingers tightening around the sponge, mouth telling me I needed a big glass of water, tummy feeling like I was going to be sick.
“You weren’t invited,” he said.
The girls stood quietly behind him. The others watched from the side, a happy chorus of songs from cartoon movies still playing, but the silence was so much louder than the music as no one spoke. I swallowed as I looked at them, wondering if anyone wanted me there, and quickly had my answer. They didn’t look at me like they were sorry or like Parker was being mean or like they wished I would be their friend.
They looked at me like they wanted me to go away.
“Go back to your house,” Parker said.
I stood on the sidewalk forever, feet frozen to the ground. Sudsy water trickled down the driveway, nearly touching the scuffed, worn sneakers. I stared at the bubbles and imagined the soapy water washing me away instead.
My eyes welled with tears. I didn’t know what to do, except that I had to leave before they saw me cry. Big girls weren’t supposed to cry, especially not at daycare, or at church, or in front of kids washing cars. I couldn’t let them hear the bellyaching wail that needed to come out. Still, their eyes remained trained on me, freezing me, sticking me to the ground.
No, no, no. Please don’t let me cry in front of them,I begged, remembering from my lessons that I could talk to God in my head when I needed to pray. And so I prayed for my sneakers to run. My tears to stop. Me to be safe in my bed. To be far, far away.
I don’t think my legs would have remembered how to move if I hadn’t caught distant movement. From across the gravel road of our little trailer park, an animal shot back and forth. My gaze pulled from the suds, from the children, from the cars and the torment as surprise momentarily made me forget about my need to cry. A white fox spun in a circle, then jumped, snagging and holding my attention. Even from across the road, I met the silver sparkle of its eyes as if it were looking directly at me. Under any other circumstances, I would have pointed it out to the kids around me.
But I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak.
The best I could do was keep my gaze off the car, off the garden hose, off the boom box and quiet children, and fixed on the fox. It jumped again, hopping to the side until I pointed my body away from the children to follow it. I rotated to look at it just as it turned to trot toward my house. Swallowing against the threat of sobs, I turned to see the fox as it disappeared in the tall grass beneath our trailer.
Our trailer. The fox was at my house. If I turned and ran, I could be, too.
And so I did. I turned and pumped my arms, not caring how the water splashed and soaked my shirt and shorts as I gave it everything I had. I dropped my bucket and sponge on the landing just outside the front door. I’d scarcely made it through the door before I exploded in earth-shattering wails. My world swam; my throat hurt as the suppressed cry clawed through me. My mom was at my side in a second, sweeping me up and cradling me. She took off my baseball hat and stroked my hair, shushing me until she got me to explain what had happened. When I finally told her, she jumped to her feet with a fierceness I rarely saw. My mom had always been so pretty, but her face was twisted in goblin-like rage. Her baby had experienced her first rejection, and she wanted to make it right.
I begged her to stop, not to go, not to make it worse, and something about the desperation of my plea stopped her with her hand still on the doorknob. She struggled to pry her fingers from the handle and redirect her attention to me. After a long while, she picked me up and carried me to the couch and scratched my back, telling me how interesting I was, how funny I was, and how much they missed out. She told me over and over again that I was the most wonderful present God could have given her and that she knew that I, like her, was destined for great things. God had always told her that I’d share her gift, she’d said, and maybe it was too powerful for dumb boys named Parker and little kids who didn’t know how to spot something wonderful.
“Where’s your dinosaur?” she asked, hand pausing on my back.
I owned so few things. My dad was a woefully unsuccessful salesman, and my mother, though educated, had forgone any career to be a good wife and mother, which meant she had entirely too much time to focus on her only child. My favorite toys had all come from the Christmas charity drives, though my parents had been too proud to go in. They’d sent me in alone. Given the state of my thrift-store jacket, which was thirty years out of fashion, no one had ever questioned the legitimacy of my financial status. The dinosaur I’d gotten—a Parasaurolophus, which had been a word I’d loved saying, both for its extra syllables and its uniqueness—was the best thing I’d ever owned.
“Promise not to get mad if I tell you?”
She studied my swollen, tear-stained face, then said, “I promise.”
When I told her, she said she’d make me a dinosaur once she finished the rabbit. I shook my head and asked if she could make me a fox.
“Sure, I can get some red cloth—”
“Make it white,” I said. “With silver buttons for eyes.”
She made a curious face but agreed. The fabric and thread she’d used for the rabbit were white, and we had plenty of white T-shirts that were on their last leg, should she need more material. We had plenty of buttons.
“Sure, Marlow,” she said, snuggling me. “Now, I thought I’d have more time to finish your rabbit, but why don’t you go look at your book in your room and I’ll come give it to you when you’re done?”
I liked being alone in my room.
My National Geographic book of every animal and its habitat. It, Goodnight Moon, and The Children’s Picture Bible were my three books. I sniffed away the last of my tears and disappeared, closing the door behind me. I flipped right to the arctic fox. Some of them were grayish in the summertime, but I smiled at the pictures that were as white and perfect as a magician’s rabbit. It looked exactly like the one I’d seen across the street. I hadn’t learned how to spell more than my name, but I knew from the pictures that they lived in cold, wild places. There were no images of foxes near homes or in trailer parks. Nothing looked like my city. The globe highlighted the parts of the world where the snow fox lived, and my mom had shown me our town on the map enough for me to know that the fox under our trailer was very far from home.
I jolted in surprise as it crawled out from under my bed. It stole my breath, but I wasn’t afraid. The day and its pain melted at the sight of something so perfect, so stunning, so beautiful in my bedroom.
“How did you get in here?” I whispered, instantly aglow.
The fox approached me and rolled over playfully.
“Can I pet you?” I asked. I knew enough of animals to have been warned that some bite. This one seemed very friendly, but I still didn’t want my fingers to get eaten.
It arched toward me, and I stroked its perfect, soft fur like it was an exotic housecat. It wrapped itself around me, taking my tears. I told it how beautiful it was, and it made a quiet squeaking noise as if it appreciated the compliment.
“Are you someone’s pet?” I asked.
It sat upright, curling its tail at its feet, and tilted an ear. I remembered that foxes could not speak and giggled.
“You don’t have to be my pet,” I said, “but will you be my friend?”
It flopped to its side, head nearly upside down as it batted a paw at me.
I told it how excited I was to see it across the street. I told it that being with a fox was so much cooler than spraying a garden hose or listening to music or playing with dumb kids. I kept my voice low, hoping my mom wouldn’t discover us and take away my new friend. She loved having a clean house, and animals were dirty. She’d let me have a betta fish once, but it had died in its bowl, turning into a block of ice when we’d lost power and the house had frozen. We’d worn our snowsuits to bed, with me sleeping between my parents until they were able to pay the power bill.
“I bet you would have kept me warm,” I whispered to the fox as I thought of our nights in the snowsuit and my long-lost fish.
It tilted its head toward me as if asking for scratches.
My head whipped around the moment a sound broke our happy reverie.
“Marlow, who are you—” My mom opened the door, finished toy in hand. Her mouth dropped open as she stared at me. I looked over to address the fox, but it was gone.
She’d scooped me up and driven directly to the church, face red, black smudges staining her cheeks as tears ran. No matter how many times I asked her what was wrong, she wouldn’t tell me. She didn’t carry me into the church but dragged me by the wrist while I demanded to know what I’d done wrong, fear coursing through me. I didn’t understand why the pastor had been called, or the elders, or the water, or the men who pressed their hands on my head, my back, my shoulders while I cried.
I insisted she was wrong—the fox was good, the fox was a friend—but she couldn’t hear my arguments over the strength of her conviction.
My mom changed after that day.
Her discernment of spirits had allowed her to see that her child had been visited by the devil, I’d learned. But through daily hours of prayer, dedication, piety, study, church visits, and purification, God would still lay claim on me. She tore the arctic fox page from my National Geographic book, leaving only the torn remnants of what had once been a pretty snow landscape and a perfect, furry creature in its memory.
I no longer had space for tears, as every night I’d hear my mother falling asleep sobbing as she begged the Lord to spare my soul.