Dinner that night was pot roast: chunks of beef swimming in gravy with mushy carrots, onions, and potatoes. Pot roast wasn’t Celia’s favorite, not even close, but there were also biscuits with butter, so she filled up on those. Aunt Joanne and Grandmother raved about the food, and between the compliments and the passing of dishes, no one paid much attention to Celia until Aunt Joanne set down her fork and said, very brightly, “Celia!”
Pulled out of her thoughts, Celia looked up, startled.
“Celia,” she repeated, “a little bird told me that you are pleased to have your grandmother come live with you? Is that true?” Aunt Joanne had no children of her own and always spoke to Celia in a weirdly formal way. Whenever she asked something, it sounded like a trick question.
“Yes,” Celia said. “I’m very glad she’s here.” Especially since having Grammy live with them meant Celia could come straight home after school. During vacations Celia went to work with her parents, and that was never a problem. She loved going to Lovejoy World, where the older ladies fussed over her and young J.J. let her help with his cleaning duties, but on school days she had been stuck going to Paul’s. Bossy old Paul, who always had to have things his way. No more of that.
“The two of you should get along well,” Aunt Joanne said patting Grammy’s arm. “Your grandmother loves to bake and go for walks. And you can tell her all about what happens at school. She’s an excellent listener. She’d probably love to hear stories about what you’re learning in class.”
“Grammy is good at telling stories, too,” Celia said. “Before dinner she told me about a time she and her sister thought they saw fairies.”
Grammy smiled, but the other adults looked alarmed. Celia’s hand flew up to her mouth, as if to take back the words, but it was too late. She could tell she’d gotten her grandmother in trouble. Oh, why didn’t she think before she spoke?
“Oh no,” Aunt Joanne said, groaning.
“Mother, please tell me you didn’t share that story with Celia,” Dad said. It was a foolish thing for him to say, because of course she had—isn’t that what Celia just said? “I thought we agreed not to talk about that anymore.” His mouth was half open, making his face look long.
“I like hearing stories about the olden days,” Celia said, defending her grandmother. “I learned all kinds of things, like no one ever told me that Grammy and her sister used to have the same bedroom as me.”
“Talking about the olden days is one thing,” Dad said, with an unconvincing smile, “but I don’t think we need to bring up that fairy business again.” He turned to Grammy. “We’ve always believed children should know the truth about everything, and that is how we’ve raised our daughter. Celia has known from the start that there is no tooth fairy, no Easter bunny, and certainly no such thing as ghosts or elves or fairies.”
Mom joined in. “We have nothing against other people spinning such tales, if that’s what they think is best, but we believe in truthfulness. The world is a beautiful, wonderful place. Every sunrise and butterfly is a miracle to us, so we don’t feel the need to make things up. If you tell Celia the fairy story and don’t explain that it was all in your imagination, she might think it was real and become disappointed when she finds out the truth.”
“You can think what you want. Celia is old enough to hear the facts and decide for herself,” Grammy said. “I’m only telling her what happened to me.”
“Really, Mother,” Aunt Joanne said. “You can’t tell me you believe you saw fairies! I know you thought so at the time, but you were just a child then. Be sensible. You don’t want to go putting nonsense in Celia’s head.”
“Say what you want. I know what I saw.” Grammy calmly speared a chunk of carrot with her fork. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Celia, if I were you. I can tell she has a mind of her own.” She took a bite, winked at Celia, and then addressed Celia’s mother. “I know I said it before, Michelle, but this dinner is just delicious. I would love to have your recipe.”
That night, when Celia’s mother came up to her bedroom to say good night, the subject surfaced again. “Remember how we said your grandmother might tell you stories about magical things?” Mom said, adjusting the covers so they lined up perfectly. “Well,” she continued, “this fairy business is what we were talking about. Obviously fairies aren’t real. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. If your grandmother insists on talking about it, just play along. We love Grammy and don’t want to upset her. Think of it as a very nice story, but remember that it’s just that—a story, okay?”
To be agreeable, Celia said okay, but after her mother shut off the lamp, turned on the nightlight, and closed the door, she got out of bed and peered out the window into the darkness. She stared for the longest time, trying to imagine what her grandmother and her sister had seen in the woods beyond the patio so long ago. And just as she turned to go back to bed, she thought she saw one small wink of light, just a quick flash, and then it was gone.
Later on she couldn’t be sure she saw anything at all.
CHAPTER SIX
On the bus ride home from school the next day, Paul insisted on sitting right next to Celia, even after everyone else got off and they were the last two left. “My mom said she was gonna buy batteries for my walkie-talkies today. And I have that spy kit with all the cool stuff for fingerprinting and seeing in the dark,” he said, his voice ending in a screech. “When we get to my house, we can go out in the woods and play that we’re spies.” He bounced in the seat like his butt was on springs.
Celia looked out the window and sighed. “I told you, Paul,” she said impatiently. “I’m not coming over after school anymore. My grandmother lives with us now, so I don’t need to go to your house.”
“But you’re going to come sometimes, right?” He rested his feet on the seat in front of them. “Because we’re still working on the LEGO castle, remember? We still have to do the drawbridge and all the other stuff. Right? We can’t stop now. We’re almost done.”
Celia’s house came into sight as the bus turned the corner onto her road. “You can go ahead and finish the castle without me,” she said, picking up her backpack. “I won’t be able to come over for a long time. My grandmother needs me at home.”
“How long is your grandma going to live with you?” he asked. “Not too long, I hope. Maybe she’ll die or go off to Florida like my grandma did.”
“My Grammy is not going to die, and she’s not going to Florida. She’s going to live with us for years and years and years, and she needs me to be with her when I get off school. I told you that already, Paul.”
As the bus came to a stop, Paul stood up to let Celia get past. “Maybe next week you could come over and play?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, getting up to make her way to the front. As the bus driver pulled on the lever and the doors whooshed open, she turned to wave to Paul. His sad face made her feel a little guilty, and it occurred to her that maybe she could invite him to her house. The only problem with that was that she didn’t really want him there because she liked having her grandmother all to herself. Finally she said, “See you tomorrow, Paul.”
Celia stepped down from the bus and headed up the walkway toward home. “Hello, Celia,” Grammy said, smiling as she held the door open. “How was your day?” A good smell welcomed her from inside. Something chocolatey. This was so different from Paul’s house, where the only greeting was his mother saying wearily, “Are you kids here already?” Sometimes Paul’s mother was napping when they arrived, and they had to use the key under the mat to get into the house. On those days they had to be very quiet because she had a headache.
“My day was good,” Celia said, shaking off her backpack and dropping it on the mat by the door.
Ten minutes later, Grammy and Celia sat at the kitchen table, each with a glass of milk and a large brownie topped with vanilla ice cream. At Paul’s house, Celia usually had carrot sticks or pretzels with water.
Grammy was a good l
istener. In between bites Celia told her about her day at school. There’d been a drama in her classroom when one of the boys reported money missing from his desk. At lunchtime, the cafeteria served crusty fish sticks with tartar sauce as thick as paste. Celia hadn’t eaten much of it. “And in the afternoon, we went to the computer lab and played basketball in gym class. That was fun.”
“You’re lucky.” Grammy swirled the ice cream with her spoon. “We didn’t have computers or basketball in school when I was your age.”
“But you saw a fairy when you were the same age as me.” Celia met her grandmother’s eyes questioningly. Would she deny it? Say that it had been just a made-up story?
“Yes,” her grandmother said. “I did see a fairy. In fact, I saw a whole world of fairies. They lived in the woods behind this house. Would you like to hear the rest of the story?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Grammy set her spoon down and smiled at Celia. “I think I mentioned that the first time I saw the fairy girl was on Easter Sunday. She flew right up to us, and then was gone lickety-split. After that, Josie and I started looking for fairies. Every night after our parents tucked us in, we sneaked out of bed and sat on the balcony watching the woods for signs. Night after night we watched and waited, but we didn’t see anything. After two weeks or so, we started doubting ourselves. Had we really seen a fairy?”
“What else would it have been?” Celia asked.
Her grandmother shrugged. “We didn’t know. A bird, a dragonfly, a firefly? None of those seemed likely. We wondered if we’d dreamt the whole thing or maybe just imagined it. Josie really lost hope we’d ever see one again, but I was sure we would. In fact, I knew it.”
“How did you know?”
Grammy leaned in toward Celia. “I dreamt about her. I saw her over and over again in my sleep. She had pale skin and bright eyes and wings as sheer as my mother’s stockings. Sometimes in my dreams she sang so beautifully I still remembered the sound of it when I woke up. I thought she was trying to send me a message. Josie thought I was being silly and wouldn’t listen to my talk about dreams. Big sisters are like that sometimes. She felt superior because she was older.”
Celia remembered that she’d felt that way about Paul and decided she’d be extra nice to him the next time she saw him. It wasn’t his fault she’d outgrown his games. “So then what happened?”
“One night we were out on the balcony watching, and Josie got tired and went back inside. I’m not sure what made me stay out there all by myself. I just had a feeling I should wait a bit longer. And that’s when it happened.
“There was a rustling in the woods, like a large animal tearing through the brush. A dog, I thought. I stood up then and leaned over the railing to see if I could get a better look. A spring breeze whipped at my nightgown, and I kept hearing noises like twigs breaking and something moving low to the ground. Then the night air was pierced by a scream that went right through me. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“The scream wasn’t anything I could hear with my ears—it was only in my head. It came straight into my mind, just like the fairy girl’s singing in my dream. I could tell it came from the direction of the woods.”
“So what did you do?”
“I didn’t know what to do at first. I was frozen in place. It was probably only a minute, but it felt like hours.” Grammy shook her head. “Like being trapped in a nightmare.”
Celia nodded. She knew what that was like. When she was little, she’d had bad dreams of being cornered by wart-covered monsters with long claws and sharp fangs. Other times she’d dreamt about being held underwater and not being able to breathe, or getting lost and trying frantically to get home. Even now, if she had a nightmare she sometimes woke up her mother for reassurance. Night terrors always seemed so real in the dark.
“And then I saw a glimmer of light off in the distance, and I heard the fairy’s voice in my head, begging me to come, that they needed my help.”
“She knew your name?”
Grammy nodded. “‘Celia, please help!’ is what I heard. She was begging me, calling my name over and over again. I couldn’t ignore it.”
“So you went into the woods?” Celia whispered.
“I did.” The telephone rang just then, and they each turned toward the noise. “I better get that,” Grammy said, reluctantly getting up from the table. “It might be your parents.”
It was Celia’s parents—she could tell from listening to her grandmother’s half of the conversation. When Grammy returned to the table, she said, “Your parents are going to be a little late tonight. They have an important meeting with Vicky McClutchy.”
Oh, that again. Celia had heard her parents talk about this many times. Vicky McClutchy was the owner of McClutchy Toys. She wanted to buy her parents’ toy company and had approached them several times, but Celia’s father wasn’t interested. He didn’t like Vicky McClutchy, and he didn’t like the idea of someone else owning his creations, especially Trixie-Dixie: The Good Deed Game, his pride and joy. He never tired of telling people that he got the idea in a dream. “If that Vicky McClutchy gets a hold of it, she’ll use cheaper materials and junk it up,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “And change it all around. Eventually she’ll turn it into some kind of horrible video game. It just wouldn’t be right.”
Celia’s mother was a little more open-minded. “We can at least listen to what she has to say,” she said. “For that kind of money, we could retire early and still have plenty for Celia’s college fund.”
“I will never sell my soul for cash,” was how her father responded. Her mother thought he was being a little dramatic.
For all her parents’ talk, they’d never actually had a business meeting with Vicky McClutchy until now. It looked like Celia’s mother had finally gotten her way. “Anyhow,” Grammy said, “I guess it will be just you and me for a bit. Now where were we in the story?”
“The fairy girl called for help,” Celia prompted. “And you went.”
“Oh yes.” Her grandmother smiled. “Would you mind if we moved into the living room first? The chairs in there are kinder to my back.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grammy smoothed her skirt as she settled back onto the green sofa. Celia sat next to her and hugged a throw pillow.
“I think,” Grammy said, “that I was just getting to the part where the fairy girl was calling for my help, wasn’t I?”
Celia nodded. “You couldn’t ignore her, you said. You just had to go.”
“That’s right,” her grandmother said. “I went into the bedroom to wake up Josie, but she was sound asleep and wouldn’t budge. I thought I might be able to sneak past my parents and slip out the back door, but when I went to the stairs I heard them in the living room and knew that wouldn’t work. They would have seen me. But I knew I had to get to the woods. It was a matter of life or death. So I climbed over the balcony railing and shimmied down the vines to the ground—”
“You did what?!”
Grammy smiled. “I was like you then, young and limber. And those vines are quite strong. Josie and I used to climb down them all the time. We used the brick for footholds and held onto the vines like rope.”
This was a new idea to Celia, who would never have thought to try such a thing. How shocking to think that olden-days girls would be so daring. When she’d thought of her grandmother and great-aunt as children, she’d imagined them knitting, not rappelling down the back of her house. And to leave the house by yourself, in the dark? Unthinkable. Once at Paul’s they’d been playing in his basement when he suddenly ran up the stairs and turned off the lights, leaving her in the pitch black. He’d thought it was funny, but she panicked and screamed until he turned the light back on. “Don’t be such a baby,” Paul had said, in a mean voice. After that he was extra nice to her so she wouldn’t tell his mother, but she never forgot. Now, even thinking about being alone in the dark made her heart race and gave her breathing problems.
“I promise.”
“So I climbed down as fast as I could. There was a full moon that night, so everything was well lit, until I entered the woods. I was still in my nightgown and the ground was wet against my feet, but I went quickly, following the noise and the glimmer of light.”
Celia moved closer to her grandmother, anxious to take in every word.
“I heard the fairy girl calling my name over and over again. I shouted, ‘I’m coming,’ and I kept going. I’d never been out by myself at night before. My heart was beating so loudly I felt it in my throat. When I finally reached the light ahead of me in a clearing, it took a second for my eyes to adjust.
“What I saw sent chills through me. A fairy girl was snagged on a thorn bush, cornered by a fierce-looking coyote. The animal had his teeth bared and was growling deep in his throat. He was crouched like he was about to attack, and she was twisting and turning, trying to free herself.
“I could tell it was the same girl I’d come face-to-face with on the balcony. She had a soft glow around her, like she was lit up from somewhere inside of her. When I stepped into the clearing, the coyote turned his attention away from her and snarled in my direction.”
“Were you afraid?” Celia asked.
Her grandmother nodded. “I felt like throwing up, if you must know. Either that or running away, but I thought if I ran, the coyote would come after me and attack.”
Celia said, “My father says coyotes don’t usually bother humans. That they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
“That’s normally true,” Grandmother said. “But this wasn’t a regular coyote. This one was actually a shadow thing in disguise.”
Celia and the Fairies Page 2
