Chapter Nineteen
(Kirby) Are you still with Fauna?
(Nia) You learned her name?! How do you know more than me! I just got one selfie!
(Kirby) I got to video-chat with her. She is a goddess and I am in love with her.
(Nia) Marlow, you’d better be on some awesome bangcation and that’s why you’re ignoring us. If you are: good. we love that for you, happy for you, yay! If you’re not: fuck you, text us back.
(EG) I shouldn’t have to tell you that your chapters are due tomorrow, but my spidey senses are telling me that you don’t have them done. If there’s something going on, you have to tell me.
(EG) Marlow, I’m trying everything I can to let Merit succeed. Let me help you. If we need to spin something, let’s spin it, but you have to clue me in
(EG) Marlow, the deadline is passed. I made an excuse, but it was a lame out. No one bought it. Tell me what’s going on, girl. Are you burned out? Do you need extensions? You just have to communicate
(EG) MERIT FINNEGAN. Your job is not the only one at stake right now. Text me back
I stared at my phone for a while, letting the glow ease me awake while Fauna slept soundly beside me. Part of me wanted to type useless questions into the search engine, like how long do nymphs sleep, but I knew any answer would be something I’d have to get directly from her.
I couldn’t bring myself to face my editor or my deadlines. I had no idea where to begin explaining the chaos to my friends, but I was quite certain they were better off in the dark.
Instead, I tabbed over to my oldest social media app. I hadn’t used it in years. It was the only one I hadn’t bothered to block my parents on, even if they’d deserved it. Without the app, I wouldn’t have known that my childhood home had flooded, forcing my parents to move into a “blessing” of a new property. The site was how I’d found out Grandma Dagny had died, though I hadn’t been invited to her funeral. The smiling pictures of a girl flashing her diamond band were how I had found out my cousin had gotten married. Without the site, it would be like my family had never existed.
I navigated to the account that my mom and dad shared. It was their way of preempting infidelity, or whatever it was they told each other. My parents, despite their despicable flaws, were frustratingly attractive. It was what had drawn my ageless, graceful mother to a failed salesman whose paychecks barely supported his family. They’d been young, and it would have been sacrilegious to consummate their infatuation without a wedding ring. It hadn’t taken long after doing the deed to realize that she was insane and that he was a deadbeat. He couldn’t stand to be around her, and she didn’t respect him.
But, to all the world, they were madly in love. Divorce was off the table, after all.
Given their belief in the sanctity of marriage, I remember asking my mother once if you could leave your husband if he hit you, and she’d said that no, you couldn’t. If you picked an abusive man, then you made your bed and you had to lie in it. You could only leave him if he hit the children, and even then, it was only for their safety. God, she said, hated divorce.
It seemed like a pretty violent stance to take, but then again, the god of the Abrahamic religions had always been a pretty violent guy. Sometimes he wanted his righteous soldiers to pillage and destroy cities, leaving no man, woman, or child spared, like in the genocide of Canaan. Sometimes he murdered all of the firstborns just to prove a point. Sometimes he called fire from the sky to burn cities to ash, leaving nothing but salt, embers, and memories as in Sodom. Sometimes he flooded the earth because he was sick of everyone.
Of course, we were taught the deeply contextual literary and canonical concept of righteous anger. For a while, it seemed like an exercise in mental gymnastics to argue one side and clutch the other. Whether or not it was the lesson the pastors and elders and passages had intended to teach me, I accepted that some people had to die. Sometimes violence was okay. Sometimes there were shades of gray, and morality was more complicated than the world liked to believe. Maybe that was why I thought my parents should have gotten divorced. Maybe that’s why I could understand them and keep them out of my lives but not hate them. Maybe that’s why the thing that kept me up at night was never a guilty conscience.
I scrolled through their social media page to look at the evidence of their years. Something about people over the age of fifty came with a distinct inability to use aesthetics when capturing anything. If I had to guess, I’d say that every photo was taken with a tablet in poor lighting. There were a few blurry pictures of them with church members. My ever-youthful mother held a baby goat and smiled in another. My mouth dropped open when I reached an image of them standing proudly in front of a whitewashed brick home, arm in arm, dangling the keys.
So grateful to the Lord that after all these years, God blessed my husband with an excellent job and this beautiful home! Thank you for this answer to prayers! God is good!
I stared at the picture of the trimmed hedges, the new, glossy car in the driveway. It was a three-story home with black shutters on what looked to be at least two acres of property. They looked…rich. A tiny fire burned through me at the glib sentences. The religious community’s fucked-up stances on how privilege equivalated the blessings of the faithful were steeped in problematic issues of supremacy. I wondered if God wasn’t good when we lived in a trailer, when we had to sleep in snowsuits because we couldn’t afford power, or when we crashed on my Grandma Dagny’s couch and floor for six months between homes. Perhaps material possessions defined his goodness. Then again, I had a chip on my shoulder.
Fauna made a small noise upon waking, and I closed the phone. I wasn’t sure why I did it. I wasn’t hiding anything from her. Maybe I didn’t want her first conscious thought to be a glaring phone screen or for me to be distracted. I guess perhaps I felt like she deserved…more.
I slid out of bed in my oversize T-shirt and my underwear and started the tiny hotel coffeepot, wondering as to the wisdom of using something that may or may not have been cleaned in the last six months. I kept it running just for the smell of coffee, which had her yawning, stretching, and smiling in moments. I watched her blink open her enormous eyes and felt equal parts happy and sad. I’d never let my friends sleep over. I occasionally allowed the people I dated to spend the night at my apartment, but more often than not, I would insist we hook up at theirs so I could bow out under the believable, and somewhat true, guise of insomnia. I’d missed out on an entire experience of human existence. Waking up next to someone you loved, making them coffee, watching the sleepiness tumble from their eyes as they rubbed away their dreams with loose fists, it was an intimacy I didn’t even realize I was lacking.
Fauna sat up and realized I was staring at her.
She yawned. “Are you shocked at how ravishing I am first thing in the morning?”
“Kinda,” I answered honestly. “It’s offensive for anyone to look that good when they wake up. Fuck you.”
“You should!” she said, merry despite her grogginess. “I’m fantastic in bed.” She laughed at my slack-jawed surprise before asking, “Is that coffee for me? And what do they have for sweetener?”
“Oh, this will be undrinkable. I just like the smell. Let’s get ready and swing by the bakery before we commit crimes.”
She pumped a sleepy first into the air. “Doughnuts and theft!”
I abandoned her to shower, brush my teeth, and go through the motions of my morning routine. The fear of being in my hometown coerced me into applying an extra layer of makeup, lest I run into anyone from my youth. I wanted to look my best, should I bump into any of the girls who were mean to me in high school. Fauna was practically dancing with impatience while I picked out my clothes. I’d packed as if I were staying for a week rather than a single day, and I struggled to decide what would strike the perfect balance between successful, attractive, and conservative.
“Come on,” Fauna urged. “We’ll be in and out. Quick adventure.”
I shot a look at her reflection in the mirror just over my shoulder. “You either underestimate how small this town is or how insecure I am. But I’ll blame you if we go anywhere without making a killer impression.”
I forced Fauna to take the bags to the car just to give her something to do with her energy, promising her that there were some hard candies in the glove compartment. I settled on a long-sleeve cream dress that gathered at my waist and fell just a few inches above my knee. The neckline offered just enough cleavage to pique the interest, without showing so much that it gave away secrets. It was conservative while it still hinted that I had money. The best part was that it had pockets. I paired it with heels, a watch, and a delicate designer necklace to inform anyone who recognized me from my youth that they’d been shortsighted for mocking our income disparity. I swept my hair into a ponytail with trembling hands and stared at myself.
My gray-green eyes were neither my mother’s sky blue nor my father’s hazel. I’d hoped it meant I was adopted and had a much cooler family somewhere else, but no such luck. I’d used a shaky hand to sweep a cat eye onto either side, then dusted my lids with a mauve and sparkly neutrals. Worry had turned me a sickly shade of bloodless, but a generous amount of blush put the life back in my cheeks. My mousy hair had never relinquished the final traces of gold that lit its occasional strands, even if I was no longer the pale daughter of Norway that had represented my maternal line for generations. I smashed my lips together, rubbing in what remained of the lip gloss before sighing, full mouth tugging down in a disappointed pout.
I looked great.
I looked successful.
I looked put-together, elegant, and mysterious.
I looked like I was one minute away from a breakdown.
A whistle cut through the air as I exited the motel. It was the first time I considered how Fauna and I were dressed as if we were headed to entirely different events. I was ready for an upscale board meeting, while she looked like she was about to sell me crystals and tell me that astral projection had changed her life. Her crocheted bralette top looked great with the giant butterflies printed on her flowing pants, but I struggled to picture her shopping for such an item. Then again, she had just scared a gas station attendant along the interstate over a gummy bear craving. Who knew what she was capable of achieving.
I approached the car and asked, “Where do you get your clothes? I never asked.”
“My place!” She smiled.
“Your…excuse me?”
“I have a house in the mortal realm. You know, for funsies.”
At this point, I wasn’t sure why anything she said shocked me. If she informed me that she also had a husband, three children, and wore pantsuits from Monday through Friday, I probably would have found it just as ridiculous as everything else I’d learned. None of it had to make sense, I supposed.
“Where is it?” I asked, bringing the engine to life so I could get the air-conditioning going. The car was already stuffy, despite the early hour.
She waved the question away. “On the beach.”
I waited for her to expand. When she didn’t, I promoted, “We’re nowhere near the beach. How are you getting clothes from there? Didn’t you say to that Azrames guy that you were…mortal-bound at the moment?”
She shot me a side-eye, presumably at how I’d referenced the monochromatic demon. She said, “I’m limited in what I can do with you. If I want to stay present with you, I have to stay in mortal form. Personally, I can come and go from wherever I want. And once you have the s?jle, we can stroll everywhere from the Celts to the Shintos to the Greeks without you having to bond. If you can spare me for two minutes while you think I’m in the bathroom, sometimes that’s all it takes for me to blink in and out.”
“I’ll jot that down on my ever-growing list of worries,” I mumbled.
“You’d love my place. Unless you hate the ocean, but no one hates the ocean. Being in it, maybe. But looking at it? Always enjoyable. Plus, the owner is fae, so he rents it out to a bunch of us to come and go as we please. We trade in favors, mostly.”
I arched a brow.
“He’s a eunuch, so they’re not those kinds of favors, but I applaud your entrepreneurial spirit. Usually he just needs errands run around the world or between realms, but only once in a while. It’s a pretty sweet gig. And since I’m an absolutely lovable gem, I’m welcome between most kingdoms…except Egypt,” she shuddered. “I may have pissed off Osiris. But in my defense: I should never have been the one sent to deliver things to a god of death. We have incompatible personalities. Anyway.” She tucked a curl behind her ears as if speaking of a boring Tuesday night before saying, “My landlord knows I’m indisposed for a while. I’m on a super-secret, very important mission to be stuck in a mortal body with a pretty blockhead so she doesn’t make deals with angels.”
I smiled as I relied on my memory to guide me to the bakery. “Oh, so we’re adding pleasant adjectives before the insults now? I’m flattered.”
She nodded. “I call it like it is. You make bad choices. But, this is the first time I’ve seen you dress up, and you’re stunning. I can sprinkle all sorts of incentives before truths if it makes them easier to swallow.”
“Like putting a dog’s medicine in cheese?”
She made a contemplative face. “Whenever I don’t understand a reference, it just informs me that I need to watch more television. When our very special mission is over, I’ll dedicate three weeks to nothing but education in the form of reality shows.”
“That’s wise,” I agreed.
The town was small enough that it took only two stoplights and three turns before I pulled into a spot directly in front of the bakery. She stepped out the moment I put the car in park. “Wait, your hat!”
“Nah.” She shook her head, peering through the crack in the door as she bent over to wink at me. “They weren’t nice to you here, and you look great today. I think we should give your small town something to talk about.”
My fingers and toes tingled as if I’d been injected with Novocain. I struggled to get my breathing under control as I fumbled with my belt. My gut told me no, but it was hard to argue with her logic. I’d dressed up because I wanted to make a statement.
The glass bakery door squeaked open on ungreased hinges. I led the way and walked directly to the counter, not realizing our mistake until forks clattered to their plates and conversation halted around us. Fauna looped her arm around mine and smiled at the person working the cash register before saying, “How many cream-filled doughnuts can I order before it’s inappropriate?”
The cashier’s eyes were too wide, mouth too open, lips too slicked with drool as he stared at her with his blank, catfish-like gaze.
I decided that we’d already committed to the bit, so I might as well double down. I tightened my grip around her arm and flashed a smile of my own.
“I’ll have a black coffee with six pumps of honey. She’ll have a latte, whole milk, with six pumps of sweetener, two pumps of vanilla, two pumps caramel, and squirt in some liquid cocaine if you have it lying around. Oh, and she’ll have eclairs, please. All of them.”
He continued staring.
“The last one was a joke.”
“Ma’am?”
“The cocaine, not the eclairs. Though, if you have any coke…”
“We don’t, ma’am.”
Fauna and I shared a giggle. She was right. This particular brand of chaos was fun.
He swallowed. “Name?”
Fauna looked at me expectantly.
“Your Majesties.”
“Holy shit.” Fauna eyed the house impressively as we pulled up the driveway. “I didn’t think you came from money.”
“I don’t,” I said, turning off the car. The Mercedes was a very quiet car, but in the absence of air-conditioning, radio, and engine, the silence was deafening. “I’ve never gotten a dime from them, even when I desperately needed it.”
She unbuckled her belt. “All the more reason to leave everything in your will to me.”
“The moment the ink dried, they’d find my body mysteriously washed up on the shores of the river,” I grumbled.
She wrinkled her nose. “They used to leave treasures at my temple. Now I get an eye roll. Now, what do we do about this house?”
A dull ache joined the shades of blue washing over me. The truth was, I didn’t know anything about their new home. “If I hadn’t checked their social media this morning, I wouldn’t even know that my dad had gotten some fancy new job and they’d moved into the most pretentious place in town. Let’s hope the cedar chest is easy to find.”
She chewed on her lip as she leaned forward, peering out the windshield. “Well, looks like we have our work cut out for us. You take the boring rooms, I’ll take wherever your mom hides her jewelry.”
Her joke almost got a laugh out of me, but not quite. Walking up the driveway mirrored how I imagined it might feel to arrive at your own funeral. I realized I had no idea how to get into the house. I blinked in horror at the flaw in my plan. I didn’t have to communicate my mistake before Fauna realized the problem.
“Hold on,” she said. “Stay here.”
I tried not to look suspicious as I waited between the immaculately trimmed hedges. I inspected the door, the window-box planters filled with geraniums, the frosted glass, the welcome mat that said “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Fauna disappeared around the corner of the house, presumably heading for the backyard. I assumed she had more experience as a cat burglar, and remained obediently on the doorstep.
A moment later, the front door opened.
“Welcome to my home!” She grinned, throwing the door open on its hinges and making a sweeping gesture inward.
I started to ask her how she’d done it but acutely remembered her stepping into my house from oblivion on more than one occasion. I suspected she’d only needed to round the house in case curious neighbors and their prying eyes peered through cracks in the blinds as the attention-grabbing ginger vanished into thin air.
I struggled to take a forward step.
“Are you coming in? Or should we head back to the city?”
“Is that an option?” I asked. I knew the answer. I wasn’t just curious to find Caliban. I was desperate. He’d been my anchor in a life that had been nothing but storms. He’d kept me from losing my mind, even when I’d blamed him for my loose grip on sanity. He’d saved my life in more ways than one, and I needed him to do it again. I couldn’t face the future—especially not one knowing that angels and fae and gods and demons lurked in every shadow—without him.
They’re not even home,I inwardly cursed. Don’t be a coward.
I entered and looked around at the utterly unfamiliar space. While a few small touches remained, it was hard to find any evidence that I knew the humans who lived here. I never thought I’d live to see the day where John and Lisbeth were upper middle class.
The gallery wall of photos and mid-century-modern furniture were the browns, beiges, and grays of an HGTV makeover. I knew exactly how much the cognac-leather couch and chair set cost, as I had looked at it myself before ultimately selecting to move into a furnished apartment. My gaze wandered over the books, the globe, the bobbles, the speakeasy-style light fixture, and the cowskin rug. An enormous, illustrated topographical map that looked like it might have been salvaged from a one-room schoolhouse hung as a focal piece on one wall. Brown wooden beams stretched over the ceiling, breaking up the white walls.
It smelled faintly of window cleaner and bleach, which were the main odors permeating my childhood. The sterile scent, however, was the only element of nostalgia. There were no family photos. It felt so staged, so fake, there was no evidence that anyone real had ever lived here.
“Do any of your gifts help you find things?” I asked Fauna.
“Um, if you’d like, I can grow a tree? Or call a few animals, if you think summoning a bunch of rabbits might help. Or bless the fertility of their garden so those peony bushes get some tender loving care. Or—”
“Fine, fine. Let’s get looking.”
Despite her threats to raid the kitchen, Fauna stayed by my side for most of our hunt. We began on the ground floor, peeking into the guest room and the office, the kitchen, and stately formal dining room with glass double doors. Fortunately, a chest was a challenging object to conceal, which limited its hiding places. For most of my childhood, it had been at the foot of my parents’ bed. Now that they had space, it might not be something Lisbeth would want sitting out in the open any longer.
Fauna and I went into the basement next—a finished, carpeted basement free from parasitic entities—and it took less than two minutes of poking around to ascertain that aside from a large sofa, a flat-screen TV, fire-safe egress windows, and the boiler room, there was nothing for us down there. We mounted the stairs, and the second floor seemed a little more promising.
Every door stood open, which drew me first to yet another guest bedroom. I looked behind the bed, opened the closet door, and frowned at the very large verse painted in driftwood that hung on the far wall. I found a few of my things tucked into a storage container beneath the bed, which may or may not have been comforting, as I wasn’t sure if hiding them was better than my mom burning them altogether. Fauna had quickly grown bored at my walk down memory lane and wandered away, leaving me alone with the only proof of my existence.
There was a musty scent to my things. It was the mildew of nostalgia, of a tin-can trailer home in the woods, of rainy days and walks in the forest.
I lifted a crinkled picture of my mother, father, and me smiling in front of a tent. Our thrifted clothes were so collectively outdated that the photo could have passed as a relic from the ’80s. I remembered the trip. It had stormed so hard that our sleeping bags had soaked all the way through. We’d packed the tent in the pouring rain and used what little money we had to get a motel for the night. The three of us had stayed up late, eating junk from the vending machine, and watching an old western on the static of a box TV.
It was a happy memory.
I looked down at my chest to see if a physical thread was sticking out where my heart should be. I knew that while under their roof, I was a single tug from unraveling.
Fauna had been away from me for less than two minutes when I heard her triumphant noise from the next room.
“Did you find it?” I called, still kneeling over old grade-school pictures, report cards, and several childhood drawings of me playing with a friend with eyes as silver as diamonds.
“Get over here!” she yelled.
I folded up a drawing of my guardian and slipped it into my pocket. I joined her in the master bedroom. Despite Lisbeth’s commitment to beige, it didn’t look like the stuffy, over-priced room one might expect. She’d used vintage movie posters and spread statement wallpaper from the 1920s on one wall to break up the room. She’d always loved antiques.
If only I could have convinced my mother that homes should smell like something other than bleach.
“Fauna?”
“In here!” Her voice drifted from the walk-in closet. Sure enough, the little pirate had tracked down our treasure chest. She knelt between the rows of hung pants and pressed shirts over a large cedar chest. She’d already opened it and pulled out the wool bunad. “It’s in great shape,” she marveled, running her fingers along the red-and-blue woolen dress. It was strange to see it in color after years of having only the black-and-white picture on my fridge. “This has to be two hundred and fifty years old. Gods, it makes me emotional.”
“Great,” I said. It made me emotional, too, but not in a way that permitted us to linger. “Let’s focus on finding the broach and get out of here.”
I picked up a handmade quilt and set it to the side to reveal a row of wooden boxes. I knelt beside her and felt through the various containers, frowning at the concealed, orderly collection. One box contained a collection of old photographs. I passed it off to Fauna, who began to flit through them while I continued to dig. I opened the next box to find a leather journal wrapped in twine. I passed it off to Fauna as well, who immediately dove into Aloisa’s diary, no doubt searching for salacious details about her friend Geir and the human-Norde sordid love affair. Another box was filled with handwritten recipes for various desserts and traditional dishes. Finally, I found the box I was looking for. I knew it before I even opened it. The moment I lifted it, the sound of shifting metal snapped both of our gazes into alert. Fauna huddled around me as we opened the box and looked at the delicate fabric of a handkerchief concealing something small.
She held the box so that I could move the fabric to the side, releasing a low, appreciative murmur as I gripped the edges of the dangly, silver heirloom as delicately as possible.
“That’s it,” Fauna breathed. “That belonged to Geir.”
“And what is it supposed to do?” I looked over the antique and into Fauna’s eyes.
“These are exceptionally rare. Every pantheon has their legends about gifts like this. He gave it to Aloisa so that she could move to and from the mortal realm to visit him on her terms. If she—”
A car door slammed, and just like that, our spell was broken.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Our eyes met in mutual panic across the scattered evidence of our breaking and entering.
I wrapped the s?lje back in the handkerchief and shoved it in my pocket. Fauna was busy lining the wooden boxes along the bottom of the cedar chest with family heirlooms just in time for me to put the quilt, then the bunad where we’d found it. I rushed to the window just in time to see a woman in her early fifties walking up with a tall, broad man. Fear mingled with puzzlement as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. The pair disappeared beneath the lip of the window as the handle to the front door rattled.
I tore my eyes from the pair to look at Fauna. “It can’t be.”
She met my wide-eyed disbelief. “Is your mother with…?”
“Silas.”