by Ali Standish
We run deeper into the wood, until the ground rolls like a gentle wave down into a little valley, where there’s a green glade cut cleanly in half by a diamond-bright stream. The water forms a small pool at the center of the valley, like it’s stopping to take a breath before rushing on to meet the river.
This time of year, the valley shimmers with clumps of orange jewelweed and sapphire bellflowers that shoot up from a blanket of moss so soft you could lie down and sleep for a thousand years. Or at least an hour or two.
Wild rose vines climb the trees, their blooms turning the air to honey. An enormous sycamore tree stands higher than all the rest, dappling the valley floor with the shade of its leaves and making the whole glade feel like a secret, round room.
We fly down the hill, and I flop onto the moss, not caring that the damp of it will soak through my new dress. Boomer settles beside me, and I stroke his soft fur as I listen to the stream rippling slowly past.
I think about a day before I’d ever seen this place, when Gram and I had been sitting by the river. She was telling me the story of Rapunzel again. She told that one a lot, but I never minded hearing it.
That day, though, I interrupted her. I was only in second grade, but already the kids in my class didn’t like fairy tales much anymore. They had started to say that magic was for babies.
I didn’t want to be a baby. But not believing in magic? The idea filled me with dread.
And besides, when Gram told her stories, they felt so real to me that it often seemed that she must have been there to see them somehow. That perhaps brave knights had once roamed along our very river, and Lanternwood had been inhabited by secret princesses.
Still. I wanted the truth, and I knew Gram would give it to me. “Gram,” I said, “do you really believe these stories? I mean, princesses trapped in towers and things like that?”
Gram lifted her chin. For a long minute, she just stared at the river, and her eyes had this sad, faraway look she sometimes got. I wondered what she was thinking about.
Then she turned to stare at me with her sharp green eyes and twisted the parasol she always carried to protect her daisy-petal skin. “Did you know, Emma,” she said, “that the Greeks have their own version of Cinderella, much older than the one we tell today? And the Egyptians and the Chinese, too?”
“No,” I said, puzzled.
“It’s true. And the same can be said for many fairy tales. People living in different places and different times all came up with the same stories. Now, how could that happen if there wasn’t some truth to them?”
I looked at her blankly.
“What I mean is, I think there’s some truth in every story—every story worth telling, at least—but especially in fairy tales.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But what about the fairy part? Like magic, I mean? Is that real?”
She looked at me for another long moment, her gaze firm. “Let me tell you something, Emma Talbot. If there is one thing I believe about this world, it’s that there is magic in it for those who care to see. Now, would you like to see some?”
My eyes widened as I nodded.
And the next morning, she brought me here. To the Spinney.
I still remember the first time I saw it. The way the light in the trees flashed mischievously, from green to gold and back to green again. And the wild roses seemed to twist just slightly on their vines to get a better look at me. How every corner of the place seemed touched by some unseen enchantment, shimmering just out of sight.
How it felt like my heart had been charmed into a bird that soared inside my chest.
“You mustn’t ever tell anyone about the Spinney,” Gram had whispered, taking my hand and leading me down the sloping hill to the glade. She was the sternest I’d ever seen her. “It must always be our secret.”
“Why, Gram?” I asked.
She leaned in closer, as if someone might be hiding nearby, listening to our every word.
“Because it’s magic, of course. Full of the charmed folk. But they’re very shy, you know. Imagine if you told someone, and they told someone, and before you knew it, crowds were stampeding through here, holding up their phones and trying to take pictures of the poor fairies and fauns. The creatures would have to leave, wouldn’t they? There’s hardly anywhere left for them to go these days as it is.”
My eyes grew star bright, my heart flew higher. “Fairies?” I asked. “Are there really fairies here, Gram?”
“Of course there are,” she said. “Look—they’ve already left you a welcome gift.” She pointed to the hollow in a huge sycamore tree. I tiptoed closer and peered in.
“It’s a book,” I said.
“So it is,” Gram agreed.
I blink, and Gram is gone. Boomer and I are alone in the glade. I glance over to the towering sycamore tree, the dark hollow. After all this time, the book from that first day is still there, but I can’t bring myself to open it and look inside. Not now.
Instead, I get up from my bed of moss and climb to Throne Rock, two big boulders covered in yellow lichen that grow together in the shape of—you guessed it—a throne. And I clear my throat.
Before, I wasn’t sure why I needed to come here so badly, other than to feel close to Gram. But now I know what I need to do. I need to give Gram the kind of funeral she would want. The kind she deserves.
“Charmed folk,” I call, “citizens of the Spinney, I ask you to gather around me now in honor of this most solemn occasion!”
For a moment, all is still in the glade. Then Boomer’s ears perk as something stirs from a patch of jewelweed.
And as I wait for them to come—the fairies with their soft-beating wings and the fauns walking on hooves silent as time itself, the elves with sparrows burrowing in the nests of their dark hair and the gnomes with their pointed hats pressed to their chests—tears begin to spill down my face.
Here is something you should know about Gram.
She wasn’t just my grandmother. She was my very best friend.
3
Even though I feel really tired, I can’t seem to sleep.
That happens to me sometimes. My brain feels like a carousel, spinning around and around and bobbing up and down, and the longer it spins, the harder it becomes to sleep.
Tonight, memories of Gram twist and whirl in my mind.
There’s picking blackberries in the meadows Gram and baking oatmeal raisin cookies Gram and sitting by the fire reading Gram and throwing balls in the river for Boomer Gram.
All those memories make me feel like I’ve lost a thousand different people instead of only one.
Finally, I sit up and throw my covers off, then head for the rickety stairs that lead to the kitchen.
Whenever I can’t sleep at Gram’s—I still think of it that way, even though she’s gone and I live here now—I go down to the kitchen. Usually I find her there, stirring milk on the stove and heating up a slice of apple pie. Like she’s been expecting me.
I do my best to tiptoe down the creaking steps. I don’t want to wake Mom and start another fight.
My heart jumps to my throat when I see a light on in the kitchen and someone padding around the stove. And even though, deep down, I know it can’t be her—that it can never be her again—it doesn’t stop me from hoping. If anyone could return from the dead, it would be Gram.
It’s not, though. It’s just Dad in his red checkered bathrobe.
“Hey there, Butterfly,” he says, casting a tired smile across the midnight kitchen. “You doing okay?”
I am too old to be called Butterfly, and most times I roll my eyes when he calls me that, but secretly I don’t mind it. And tonight, it feels extra nice.
“No,” I say. “Not really.”
“Yeah. Silly question. Take a seat.”
He nods to the round wooden table that has so many scars running through it you could almost believe it had once been a giant’s battle shield.
“You couldn’t sleep, either?” I ask.
&n
bsp; “No,” he says. “Thought I’d come down and heat up some warm milk and pie. That’s what your gram always did for me when I was a kid.”
“Me, too.”
Dad smiles as he stirs the milk. Then he pours it out in two mugs and serves us each a piece of the blackberry pie Gloria brought after the funeral. It’s not as good as Gram’s apple pie, but it will have to do.
“Sorry about your mom,” Dad says, halfway through his slice. “You know she’s been stressed.”
Mom was really mad at me for running off earlier. She said it was because I didn’t ask her, and I told her I didn’t ask her because if I had, she wouldn’t have let me go. Then she said that was all the more reason for me not to go, which makes absolutely no sense. When she saw that I’d ruined my dress, her mouth folded into a thin line like it always does before she’s about to totally lose it.
Things went downhill from there.
“She won’t even miss Gram,” I grumble into my pie. “She’s just stressed about the move and the house and everything.”
Mom designs houses that have “clean lines” and “open floor plans.” Gram’s cottage, with its comfy, overstuffed couches and tabletops cluttered with knickknacks, is probably her worst nightmare.
“We’ll all miss Gram,” Dad says, nudging me with an elbow. “But you had a special connection with her. There’s no denying that.”
I wince. I had a special connection? Now that Gram’s gone, is that gone, too? An image flashes through my mind of the frayed tire swing rope over the river that snapped in two one summer when I tried to kick too high, sending me plunging into the water.
“To Gram,” Dad says, raising his glass. I clink mine against his.
Dad’s milk leaves him with a frosty mustache that makes me giggle, just a little. He leans over and plants a milky kiss in my knotted hair.
“I’m sorry she’s gone, Emma,” Dad says as he stands to go back to bed. “We’ll miss her a lot, won’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We will.”
I stay at the table for a while after he leaves, thinking about how there are two kinds of missing.
There’s the kind when you’ve lost something important and can’t find it no matter how hard you look. Like when you can’t find your homework and the teacher’s walking around to collect it, and the closer she gets, the more you panic.
And then there’s the kind when you know where something is, but you just can’t get to it. Like after you come back from summer camp and you wish you could go back for just one more day. You wish so hard it makes your insides ache.
It sounds impossible, but I think I miss Gram both ways.
When I go back upstairs, I don’t return to my own bedroom. Instead, I creep into Gram’s. And I’m not the only one. Boomer is there, too, lying at the foot of her bed. When he sees me, he cries and thumps his tail at the same time, like he’s both happy it’s me and sorry it isn’t Gram.
He scooches over as I climb under Gram’s sheets, still unmade from the last night she slept here before she went to the hospital. The smell of her is so strong it makes my eyes water. It smells like wishing.
I burrow deeper as my eyes fall upon the book lying open on the velvet armchair beside the bed. It’s framed in a square of moonlight, so you can see the cracks in the old spine.
I’m sure you’ve heard of The World at the End of the Tunnel by R. M. Wildsmith. It’s one of those books like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan. Everyone kind of knows the story, but most people have never actually read it.
Just in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last fifty years, though, I’ll summarize. It’s about a brother and sister, Jack and Sarah, who go out to play one day and find this old train track in the woods. It leads to a tunnel, and they wind up going through it into another world, the Goldengrove. The Goldengrove is a giant forest where gnomes carve entire villages from the trunk of a single elm tree, fairies host grand balls in moonlit clearings, and wizards disguised as snowy owls keep watch from high branches. The afternoons in the Goldengrove are always perfectly warm and sunny and have been known to last for days at a time.
Except it’s not the Goldengrove anymore, because the hobgoblin king and queen have captured the fairy princess whose laughter makes the sun rise. Now that she’s their captive, the hobgoblin king has taken over the Goldengrove and turned it into the Dimwood. In the blackness of the eternal night, all the wickedest creatures—the trolls and banshees and ogres—have driven the good creatures into hiding.
Anyway, Jack and Sarah journey across the forest, defeat a troll army, rescue the fairy princess, battle the evil hobgoblin king and queen, and return the world to the sunshine.
Sorry for ruining the ending, but if you didn’t see it coming, you really should read more stories.
The World at the End of the Tunnel happens to be my favorite book in the entire world.
The first time Gram read it to me, I was eight, and it was snowing. Like, hard. The roads were so bad that school was canceled for a week, and Dad couldn’t come get me from Lanternwood.
There was too much snow to go to the Spinney, and anyway, it was too cold for walking around outside, which meant Gram and I spent most of our time bundled up in Morning Glory Cottage.
I didn’t mind it, but Gram, who hated being cooped up inside, went a little stir-crazy. She finished about twenty paintings in her studio, cleaned the whole house, and cooked enough soup to last all winter.
One morning, I opened the door to her room and found her lying in her bed, looking out the window, crying. There was an old green shoebox on her lap.
“Gram?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
She turned to me and frowned, leaning down to shove the shoebox under the bed.
“Emma,” she said. But it was like someone else was saying my name. There was a coldness in her voice I wasn’t used to, like the icy weather had climbed inside her. “You should have knocked.”
My eyes started to well. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Boomer had lunged over and bitten me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
But her scowl had already evaporated. “No, I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean it. Come here, darlin’.”
I scrambled up onto the bed with her, staring out through the old foggy panes at the snow-covered garden.
“You know you don’t have to come here, don’t you?” she said. “I love having you, but I don’t want you to ever feel like you have to come, do you understand? I want this house to be a happy place for you. A place you want to visit.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t understand. And still don’t. Morning Glory Cottage was and is my favorite place in the world, besides the Spinney. “I love it here,” I said. “It’s pretty in the snow.”
Her face twitched into a smile. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
It was then that I noticed the old book lying on her lap. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Ah,” she said. “That is a very old, very interesting story. Would you like me to read it to you?”
And she did. The sound of R. M. Wildsmith’s words filled up the world that had gone silent in the snow, so that for the next few days, it felt like the only world that existed was the one in the book.
As soon as we finished, I asked if we could read it again.
The last few weeks before Gram died, when she’d gotten really sick and couldn’t leave her room, I would come in to find her staring out her window with the same pained look on her face as I’d seen that snowy day. And I knew she was thinking about how she wanted to be outside, living, instead of in her room, dying.
This time, I read The World at the End of the Tunnel aloud to her. But we were only halfway through before she went to the hospital and never came back.
Now, I reach over and pick the book up. Then I turn to the beginning, careful not to damage the old pages. On the title page, there’s an inscription from my grandpa, who must have bought the book for Gram.
For my muse and best friend.
Below these words is Grandpa’s illegible signature. I trace the writing with my fingers, thinking that I could have written the very same thing about Gram.
Then I flip the page and start to read.
The adventure all began with a glass of milk being overturned by an elbow and Jack and Sarah being turned out from the house for the morning in punishment. An inglorious way to begin an adventure, perhaps, but then we can’t control when or how adventure may find us.
I hear the story in Gram’s voice, and after a while, she lulls me to sleep.
4
The next few days pass by in a fog.
No, I mean an actual fog sails in off the river and settles over Lanternwood, like a giant ghostly ship dropping anchor.
The fog doesn’t stop me from spending most of my time outside, though. Morning Glory Cottage is just too full of emptiness, even with us all living there now.
So I take Boomer for long walks, from the cornfields on one end of the village to Briar Hollow Lane on the other. Briar Hollow Lane is a little gravel road just before the bridge that marks the town limits. There’s a No Trespassing sign at the top of the road because it leads to a water-filtration shed or something like that. Gram told me once when I asked why we couldn’t walk down there, and the answer was boring enough that I quickly lost interest.
Somehow, life in Lanternwood has carried on pretty much the same as it did before Gram died. Boomer chases Old Joe’s tractor and tries to attack it as it chugs down High Street. Ruth stands by her gate, groaning about her old bones, or else hovers over Gloria as Gloria prunes the garden for her, complaining loudly about everything she’s doing wrong.
Boomer and I walk along the river, too. I throw his ball in and laugh when he belly flops into the murky water. He runs through the last summer picnickers, who come despite the fog, and I pretend to be angry with him when he steals a block of cheese or a bag of Goldfish.
I can almost see Gram beside me, twisting her parasol overhead, wearing one of her old-fashioned long dresses and a frown on her lips that doesn’t quite match the mischief in her eyes. “Now, Boomer. Manners, please.”
