by Lily Markova
It was early morning, and the other children were still in their beds, so Saskia didn’t get to catch a glimpse of Charlie as she and the Skeleton were led down one quiet corridor after another. Saskia was burning to yell out, to let Charlie know that she was still in the Prison, too, and that Madam Horridan was lying about her getting herself into trouble. It was only for fear that the Fiends would change their minds and lock her in the single bedroom again that Saskia kept her mouth closed. She longed for some news about the Princess so tried not to do anything that the pair of Fiends escorting her might deem improper.
Before entering Madam Horridan’s lair, Saskia let go of the Skeleton’s hand. She heard his bird warble in a hurt voice and his teeth chatter, but she didn’t turn to meet his gaze. Saskia wished she could reassure him, explain to him that she just didn’t want to give the wicked hag a reason to be annoyed, but didn’t dare say anything or even wink at him in front of the Fiends.
As she stepped into Madam Horridan’s office, green eyes were the first thing Saskia saw, and they were the only thing she thought she was going to look at since.
“Mommy!”
In a second, Saskia’s face was buried in the Princess’s trench coat, her arms clamped tightly around the Princess’s waist. The Princess wiped a tear out of her eye and kissed the top of Saskia’s head, as she had so often done before.
“Just a little longer,” said the Princess softly. “This will be over soon.”
Madam Horridan, who was sitting at her desk and watching the reunion with a patronizing smile, cleared her throat and interrupted.
“Well, the papers are in order,” she said in a festive tone, “the results of the latest home inspection satisfactory. . . . Saskia, you’re going home—today.”
Saskia looked up at the Princess, afraid to believe that. “Really?”
The Princess smiled and nodded. Saskia hid her face in the Princess’s coat again, hugging her even more tightly.
“There is just one tiny thing left,” said Madam Horridan, and Saskia peered at her warily from under the Princess’s arm. “Saskia, this is a very important moment. You need to show me now that when we release you into the outside world, you will be able to deal with it in a mature, sensible way. Let’s do away with fairy tales once and for all. Say good-bye to your skeleton, and you and your mother will be free to go.”
Saskia looked up at the Princess again, searching for some solution, some other way in her green eyes, but the Princess’s eyes were unreadable, her smile gone and replaced by a foreign tightness around her mouth.
“No,” said Saskia, shaking her head. “No.”
A strange feeling, both sore and hollow, settled in her chest as she heard her own voice. There was no resoluteness to her “no.” She sounded as though something bad, irreversible had happened already and all she could do was say something, anything to buy herself time before she would have to face it.
“Please, Saskia,” the Princess said barely audibly. “Then we can finally go home, you and me. . . . Franz is waiting, he misses you. We can eat the biggest cake in the world today. . . .”
Saskia fought back tears and turned to the Skeleton. He was standing alone in the middle of the room, pressing his hands over his chest and looking at Saskia with large, blue, blue flowers. Saskia couldn’t bear to see him so lost and scared, and she turned to the Princess again, her eye pleading for help.
“Please, Saskia, do as they ask,” said the Princess, still quietly, and her eyes were begging Saskia, too.
At that moment, the battle inside Saskia’s mind was over, and she was the one defeated. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with her Princess.
Saskia let go of the Princess’s coat and walked up to the Skeleton. Her face was crumpled, and she felt as though she might burst out crying at any second now, but the hollowness in her chest wouldn’t let her.
“I asked you not to leave me,” she said, taking the Skeleton’s hand and staring at it to avoid his gaze. “And you didn’t. They told me you weren’t real, that an imaginary friend wouldn’t help me if I were in danger, but you were always here for me, and now—now, I’m the one who’s leaving you.”
The Skeleton hung his skull, and his arms fell to his sides as Saskia’s hand released his.
“You were my first and greatest friend, Skeleton, and you will always have been real to me.”
Saskia stepped back, afraid that if she didn’t, she would hold the Skeleton and never, ever, let him go.
“Good-bye, Skeleton.”
The Skeleton dropped to his knees. The red bird broke out of his chest, leaving a dark hole in his ribs and his tailcoat, and fluttered out of the window. The Skeleton crumbled to the floor and lay without movement, his eye flowers staring and dewy. Saskia’s mother hurried over and hugged the girl to her chest.
Madam Horridan clapped her hands together and laughed. “Wonderful, Saskia, I am so proud of you!”
When Saskia had the courage to look at the motionless Skeleton again, he wasn’t there.
“I’m so sorry, baby.” Saskia’s mother took her by the hand, and they left Madam Horridan’s office, and they left the Children’s Home, and neither of them paused to look back, not one time. Saskia’s mother kept saying she was sorry, and Saskia didn’t understand what she was apologizing for, but replied every time that she was very sorry, too.
Chapter Ten. Ever After
“Was it too bad at the Children’s Home?” asked Saskia’s mom over dinner that evening.
Saskia shook her head. “Was it too bad in the hospital?”
Her mom shook her head, too. She looked older, a lot like the day two uniformed people had taken Saskia away, only her clothes were clean and her hair was drawn back into a tight, neat knot at the nape of her neck. She was beautiful anyway, because Saskia loved her.
They didn’t speak much after that. Saskia wanted to talk to her mom, about anything, but the words got lost on their way through the hollowness that still dwelled in her chest. Saskia’s mom opened her mouth a few times as if to ask something else, but seemed not to know what to say so pretended she’d only meant to take a sip of her tea.
Franz was curled up on Saskia’s lap, purring and kneading her leg with his paws, his vertical pupils fixed on the window. He had fully transformed into a cat while Saskia and her mom had been away, and although Saskia couldn’t be sure what really was on his mind, he appeared quite contented.
The mice must be less happy about Franz’s recovery from the human condition, because there wasn’t one around. The candelabra were gone, too; Saskia and her mom ate their macaroni and cheese by bright electric light, so the walls bore no shivering shadows and Saskia’s glass of juice didn’t have that fascinating flickering gleam to its rim that candles had once given it.
Saskia was glad to be back, but the new quietness of the house made her feel as if she still weren’t at home, as if this were someone else’s dining room, even though it looked almost the same as theirs.
“Could you play something, Mommy?” she asked when they had finished their food.
Her mother walked over to the hatch dresser and sat before it, but no matter how hard she tried, the music just didn’t sound right. She closed the doors of the Polyfun.
“I think I forgot how to play it. Maybe some other time,” she said sadly.
That night Saskia found that she had grown a lot since she had last slept in her bed in her tidy small room in the attic. Her size hadn’t changed all that much, but somehow, Saskia just felt too old for a child’s bed now.
On the next day, Saskia had to wake up earlier than usual, because her mom needed to get to work on time after she walked Saskia to school. Saskia wasn’t as nervous as she had thought she would be before her first day back at Still Bays Elementary, but she did pause before the door to her class. She shut her eye for a moment, and instead of imagining she was a little wolf, simply reminded herself, “I am Saskia.” Strangely, she felt much braver and calmer after that.
/> When she entered, the teacher smiled at her and nodded wordlessly at her seat in the back of the classroom. Saskia thought it was nice of him not to make a big deal out of her return. As she walked down the row of tables, no one was whispering or staring, or maybe she just didn’t take notice anymore.
During lunch break, Saskia took her old place at an empty table in the far corner of the cafeteria, and peered into her backpack, searching for the apple her mom had given her this morning. She heard a chair scrape against the floor and looked up.
“Is it all right if I sit here?”
Saskia nodded slowly, afraid that if she spoke, her voice might quiver. This was the first time one of her classmates had expressed a desire to sit with her at the cafeteria.
The girl in a blue scarf sat down opposite Saskia, twiddling a brown lunch bag in her hands.
“It’s so good to see you back,” she said, looking from her bag to Saskia and then to her bag again, so Saskia wondered for a moment which of them the girl was talking to. “We were all very worried. We even wrote you a letter together, but I don’t know if Mr. Goodwill managed to deliver it to you. . . . Oh, I’m Elizabeth.”
Saskia swallowed down a lump in her throat together with the words “I know” that had almost burst out of her. She didn’t want Elizabeth to think she was some weird stalker who knew all her classmates’ names. “Hi, I’m Saskia,” she said instead.
“I know.” Elizabeth exhaled, as though she was relieved, and an uncertain smile lit her porcelain face. “Your costume that day, it was so terrific. I was a little bit jealous. You know, I wanted to tell you that right away, but you looked kind of cross—I was scared you’d be mean to me. Now I see I was wrong.”
“I. . .like your scarf,” said Saskia. A mixture of awkwardness and euphoria swirled in her chest, edging the hollow feeling away. “If you want, I can ask Mom to make a costume for you, too. She’s very busy these days, but I think she’d be glad to.”
Elizabeth’s smile grew wider. “Yeah, I’d like that! Do you want an orange? Dad always packs me two of those, every day, I just can’t stand the sight of them anymore. . . .”
“Okay, and you can have my apple, then.”
Saskia didn’t think it was too early to say that this was the best day she had ever had at school.
After classes, Saskia had to loiter in the grounds for half an hour until her mom had a lunch break, too, and could walk her back home through the town park. As they passed the fallen tree, Saskia kept her eye on it furtively, but the trunk was empty, and it was empty on the following day, and the day after that, but Saskia kept hoping.
“I have a surprise for you,” her mom said one day, when she came to pick Saskia up. She was wearing her gray uniform, but there was an old cunning twinkle to her green eyes, which made Saskia even keener to know what this was about.
“Is that a costume for Elizabeth?”
“No, but you can invite her over sometime, and then we can decide together what kind of costumes you would like, and you two can help me make them.”
“That sounds good,” said Saskia. “Maybe it’s a trampoline, so that I can walk the tightrope above the garden?”
Her mom shook her head, and the intriguing glint in her eyes faded a little.
“Good,” said Saskia firmly. “You know, I think I don’t want to be an acrobat anymore.”
“What do you want to be, then?”
Saskia hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be like you, work at the Children’s Home to make sure nobody chases or beats anyone.”
“Well, you don’t have to figure that out right now,” said her mom softly.
Saskia hazarded more guesses, a cake, a trip to the circus, a new Polyfun song, and a lot of other exciting things, but the surprise turned out to be much better than anything she had imagined.
Just as they reached the end of the park and saw their house across the road ahead, a black car pulled over nearby. Two people in the Children’s Home uniform stepped out, waving at Saskia’s mom. One of them opened a rear passenger door and let out a grinning boy.
“Charlie!” screamed Saskia, dropping her backpack and dashing toward him.
“Saskia! They told me something horrible had happened to you!”
They hugged and told each other all about their days apart, while Saskia’s mom signed some papers and talked to the adults.
“Now, the five of us had better be able to fit in this poor tiny house,” Saskia’s mother said, shaking her head with mock concern, when the car had driven away.
“Charlie can stay? For good?” Saskia laughed and gave her mother a hug, too. “Wait!” She drew back. “Why five? You, me, Charlie, Franz, who else?”
“And that’s another surprise!” said her mom, who had clearly waited for this question.
She motioned for them to follow her to the front door, and then unlocked it. For a second, Saskia hoped that behind the door would be the Skeleton, but it was someone else. That someone was nice, too.
“Archie!” yelled Charlie, dropping his notebook and the stuffed dog and running forward, faster than Saskia had ever seen him run before.
Scrabbling and howling in its eagerness to get outside, a large, fluffy, propeller-tailed dog shot out of the house and bounded at Charlie, knocking him off his feet. Charlie didn’t complain. He lay on his back, laughing and wriggling, while Archie licked Charlie’s face with his great slobbery tongue, his giant overexcited head shaking and barking.
“I found him waiting for you at your old house, Charlie,” said Saskia’s mom. “He could do with some feeding up. So could you two! There’s a big cake getting cold in the dining room, let’s go eat it—only, of course, first the soup.”
And they went into the old wooden house, whose walls had been stripped of hop tendrils and were gleaming with fresh golden paint. The rosebush under Saskia’s window had been supported with stakes and was on its way to getting well.
Many things were on their way to getting well. Saskia’s nosebleeds had stopped, as had Charlie’s abundant sighs. Elizabeth became a frequent guest at their house. Charlie’s comics had more and more characters in them, and he found some friends at Still Bays Elementary, too. Archie and Franz, however, never came to see eye to eye, but their dislike of each other was only a source of entertainment for the children. Sometimes Saskia fancied that Franz had cursed, but it always turned out that she had misheard him, and when she asked Franz to repeat what he’d said, he remained unperturbed and proper.
Saskia’s mother always meant to learn how to play the Polyfun again, but she never had time anymore, and eventually they took the instrument out into the backyard.
And the five of them lived, not ever after, and not always happily, but they were together and took the greatest care of one another.
P.S.
Somewhere in most average and ungifted woods, on a fallen tree, sat a tall human skeleton. His broken ribs had knitted well—you could see that through the hole in his tailcoat. People often walked past the fallen tree, but no one ever stopped to say hi, and the skeleton sat and waited, snapping his teeth at the occasional butterfly or feeding a small, newborn bird in his chest with earthworms.
Sometimes, he got to see a girl with short black hair. She was dressed in a blue, well-ironed uniform (only her eyepatch was violet) and was invariably escorted by a woman in gray clothes, who had large green eyes, and a boy, who was also wearing blue and carried a mangy stuffed dog.
The skeleton knew the girl had a name, but it kept slipping his skull. He remembered only that it was the Girl, who had once noticed him and helped others notice him, too—a boy who could run very fast, and a princess who could play the Polyfun. The Girl always looked his way when she walked by, and he waved at her, but she never waved back. Maybe she pretended not to see him, maybe it was temporary, or maybe she would never notice him again. The boy who was with her looked at the fallen tree, too, but he never showed a sign that he could see the skeleton, either.
Th
e skeleton also remembered that he came from a foreign land called Côte d'Au Revoir, the entrance to which was at the back of the circus tent. Sometimes people stumbled in, and it was such a pleasant place that they never wanted to leave it. There were a lot of creatures other than humans in Côte d'Au Revoir, and they could walk freely between their pleasant place and this strange proper world. Sometimes the creatures performed on the circus arena, where everyone could see them, because those who came to the circus wanted to see something magical, while believing there had to be a safe explanation. But outside the tent, nobody really noticed the creatures, so they felt lonely in this proper world and didn’t stay long.
In his pleasant land, the skeleton had met many people, and among them a man who used to be a circus acrobat, and who gave the skeleton his tailcoat, asking him to find the Girl and her princess and invite them to Côte d'Au Revoir. There was a fairyland waiting for the Girl, but she had been convinced there wasn’t.
The skeleton didn’t blame her for that. He knew how easily proper people could convince you that you were wrong and a little bit crazy. They offered sensible arguments and quoted philosophers, and led you to believe you were confused about things. They would be persuasive and sympathetic, and they would make you see the world out of their eyes until you forgot what it had looked like out of yours.
But the Skeleton wasn’t going to return to Côte d'Au Revoir alone. He would wait for the Girl to grow up, and maybe then she would be brave enough again to remember him.
* This story has a proper happy ending.
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