This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Jesus, Penn. You scared the shit out of me.”

  “How?”

  “You called fifteen times. You sent seven texts. Seven texts and no information. I thought something happened to you. I thought something was wrong with Mom or the boys. I thought terrible, horrible things.”

  “I only sent one text.”

  “I got seven.”

  “Sometimes when service is intermittent, it just resends until—”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Take deep breaths.”

  “How can I take deep breaths if I can’t breathe?”

  “Call a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “Call another doctor.”

  “I’m not at the clinic. I had to come into town. It’s six a.m. I’m at a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven. There might be someone inside with gum-selling expertise, but that’s as close as I’m likely to come.”

  “Rosie. I have news.”

  She paused to take the deep breaths instructed and to savor the moment before she knew whatever it was, because whatever it was it was going to be okay. Her mother was okay, and her boys were okay, and Penn was okay, and Claude—Poppy—sleeping back at the guesthouse, was okay, so nothing could be all that wrong. Poppy was going to require some repair, some mending and figuring. Life always required mending and figuring. But mending and figuring—unlike forbidding cancer, banning car accidents, convincing teenage boys they were not immortal, or going back in time to prevent stupid shit from happening—was something she could do. They had to see the invisible paths and forge their way through the jungles. They had to find, to demand, to create the other bathrooms, the other boxes, the middle ways to be. It was not going to be easy. But easy and peaceful turned out to be opposites. And the choice between them was a simple one.

  “I sold the book.” Penn felt it come out of his mouth like a bubble.

  Just as she was catching her breath finally, she lost it again. “Oh. Penn. My love.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean how?”

  “How do you mean how?” She could see him. Penn in jeans and a T-shirt and bare feet, a notebook in one hand, a pencil in the other, floating around in space, over the moon. She was sorrier than Sorry Ralph she was not there to witness, to share in, this joy. “I’m a genius author is how. I’m a prose rock star. I’m a soon-to-be-published novelist.”

  “I should go away more often. You get so much accomplished. I had no idea the DN was even close to done.”

  “Not the DN. The fairy tale. The Adventures of Grumwald and Princess Stephanie. Next fall, Rosie. At a bookstore near you.”

  “The Adventures of Grumwald and Princess Stephanie? Is it a children’s book?”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean sort of. They’ll cross-market it. They think parents will read it to kids. They think parents will read it themselves. They like its nuances and metaphor. They think it appeals and applies to everyone.”

  “But it doesn’t have an ending.”

  “It does now.”

  “It does?” She was surprised to find herself, at once, heartbroken. She had been there at Grumwald’s inception. She had followed him through years of saga and setback, trial and triumph, palace and seashore, home and Away. She had seen him through transformations great and small. She had seen all his selves and loved him more than anyone. “I missed the end?”

  “How could you miss the end?” Penn wondered. “Grum couldn’t end without you. It has an ending, not the end, a stopping point, no more than a pause really. You know how much of Grumwald’s story made the book? One percent. One percent of one percent. Most of Grumwald is only yours. Only a tiny, tiny bit is anyone else’s. Grumwald and Stephanie got an ending for the moment, an ending for everybody else. That’s all.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “How does it for-the-moment end?”

  “You’ll have to buy the book.”

  “I live with the author.”

  “Not at the moment you don’t. Come home. I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, the five-year-old girl who’d presented with diarrhea, weight loss, and terrible stomach cramping was throwing up a foot-long worm into a bucket and looking very pleased with herself. She spoke not a word of English but kept pointing to herself then the worm then herself and grinning. Her mother, who also spoke not a word of English, was doing the same, gesticulating wildly back and forth between daughter and worm, but her face wore the opposite expression. She was not screaming in a language Rosie knew, but she understood clear as lagoons anyway the mother’s horror of this worm that had lately come out of her little girl. If they’d spoken the same language, Rosie would have laid her hand on the woman’s shoulder to commiserate: Oh the things that hide secretly in our children, lying in wait, doing untold damage, yearning to be free. Alarming us beyond all measure.

  Rosie listened to K mediate an argument between the mother, who longed to put this incident behind her, and the girl, who apparently wanted to take the worm home as a pet, and then watched as K mimed, with great dignity, the need to wear shoes while defecating in bushes designated for doing so and to wash hands as well as food that came from the same patch of ground. Rosie’s eyes welled. How could she give all this up?

  The woman who had given birth to twins the night before was meeting with the monk. Apparently, monks in the hills were something like pubs in small towns in the English countryside—there was one main one which served everyone and in all capacities. Because the second baby had taken so long being born, the twins actually had different birthdays, one born late Friday night, the other early Saturday morning. The mother was weepy and weak, and Rosie was standing by to reassure her—and the monk—that both babies were healthy and that their mother, though she had lost a lot of blood, would be back on her feet after a few days of spinach and red meat. From what she could gather, however, via K’s UN-style simultaneous translation, this was not the woman’s concern.

  “I will keep the baby born on Friday,” the mom wept to the monk, “but I am giving the Saturday one to you. Saturday babies are stubborn. They don’t listen. I have three more children at home. I can only take one more. I can only have ones who are well behaved.”

  “I understand.” The monk nodded kindly then added, to Rosie’s shock, “This baby is mine now.”

  “Thank you,” the mom wept, clasping his hand to her forehead. “Thank you, thank you.”

  The monk dipped a bundle of twigs in a pan of water and sprayed it over both babies and their mother. He said a great many things Rosie did not understand, which caused the mother to cry even harder and to which K merely nodded along. Then the monk told the mother, “I have blessed this baby and spoken with him. He will be a good baby and well behaved always. I wonder if you would take care of him for me? I promise he will be a good boy.”

  “Yes, oh yes,” the mother sobbed. “Thank you, thank you. I would be honored to take care of him for you. We will take him into our family as our own.”

  Dispelling fear, Rosie thought. Choosing peace and calm instead of battle.

  “I have to go home,” she told K after the monk left.

  “Bad news this morning?” K worried.

  “No, good.”

  “Ahh, better reason.”

  “I have to go home, but I’ll be back soon.”

  “You move to jungle?” K grinned, the question so absurd as to present as a joke.

  But Rosie had been considering it more than idly. She knew the reasons she could not sleep could not always be solved by uprooting and fleeing, that Madison to Seattle felt a mammoth move but was nothing compared to Seattle to remote northern Thailand, that the jungle may have been a fine place to doctor and was probably even a fine place to write books but it was a hard place to raise children or send them to college or keep them safe from and embraced by the world. She knew that what came out of kids was often
terrifying, but its coming out, rather than staying inside, was the happy ending. There was much unfinished business at home, and hiding out, burrowing deeper away, was not the answer.

  But she also knew this: they needed her here. And this: she needed them too.

  Here, they needed more doctors, more teachers, more skilled hands, more creative ideas, more instincts that stood in for CT scanners and echocardiograms. They needed more of other kinds of teachers too, and Claude—Poppy—was proving a natural in the classroom. Rosie could not say who was learning more, the students or her child, but she gave thanks for the apparent answer, which was both, together. She imagined what the boys could do here, the technology and ideas Ben could impart, the patients Roo could keep company and comfort with his modest Rooness, the tunnels and trenches, roofs and rain barrels, potties and porticos Rigel and Orion could help dig, build, move, and repair, not to mention the sick kids who would adore the Rigel and Orion Show.

  And she needed them too, first of all because knowing they were here meant she could never completely leave, and second of all because they reminded her, with the stark clarity that seemed to pervade everything they did here, that she belonged in an emergency room. She couldn’t move here, she knew, and she couldn’t stay, but she could come back. She couldn’t work here year-round, but there were clinics and patients closer to home who needed her too.

  And Poppy could not be Claude, and she could not hide, and if they could not entirely plan for who she might be two and ten and twenty years from now, they didn’t need to. They could make hard decisions, together, when it was time to decide, and in the meantime, they could embrace what was now and what was good. They could be mindful of what was hard for everyone, not just what was hard for Poppy, the trouble all humans in the whole world had knowing who they were and what they needed and what would help the mysterious, unknowable, miraculous beings in their care. Their lives would be a different kind of fairy tale, less magic and more ambiguity, less once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after and more in between. A middle way. In the meantime, they had to live with not knowing, got to live with not knowing, got to help other people with what they had to live with too. Tell their stories, dispel fear, let be. Amend as necessary.

  Rosie went to check on the worm girl so she could finish her shift so she could go home and start packing and go home.

  PART

  IV

  Ever

  Grumwald stood in front of the mirror in Princess Stephanie’s clothes and wondered what it would be like when someone knew and then, shortly thereafter, everyone knew the secret he’d been keeping for so many years. He remembered the time the witch gave him magic beans. He remembered the time she came to the restaurant when he was having dinner with Lloyd. He remembered all the way back to before he met the witch the first time, back when he was still Grumwald only, Grumwald alone. He could picture it, cloudily, in that way that you do when you know it was true but you just can’t believe it anymore.

  He remembered that night with the fairies, the night his life had begun in a way, Princess Stephanie’s birth day. The witch, impatient for the makings of one spell, had cast another: he would be Grumwald by day, Princess Stephanie by night. At first it had been an odious curse. The way between his forked selves was through the trees, root-tangled and muddy and overgrown, and the hike back and forth each day was crushing.

  So he forged a path. He realized he knew how to be a princess because he knew how to be a prince. The particulars diverged, but they were more alike than different. Helping his charges feel loved and respected, their talents honored, their loads lightened was his job in either guise, and he was good at it, from long practice, which of course didn’t change based on what he was wearing or what name he was called.

  Except then, slowly, day by night by day, it got harder and harder to find the path. Grumwald thought he’d have to start repaving, rehacking the roots and branches, refilling the potholes to reclaim his way, but no, it turned out his two worlds had moved closer together, had very nearly merged. Like magic. He still didn’t think there was anyone he could tell, but he and Princess Stephanie felt home.

  When he thought back to the dinner with Lloyd though, he decided it was time to talk to the witch. Making peace was better than living in fear. So he snipped off a piece of Princess Stephanie’s green hair one night—Why had this been such a big deal? He couldn’t remember—and took it to the witch’s cottage the next morning.

  “Thank you, Grumwald.” She looked relieved enough to cry. “Night-fairy hair so helps my arthritis. I can’t catch the night fairies because my hands are too stiff, and my hands are too stiff because I can’t catch the night fairies. Some contradictions are too stupid even for magic.”

  “Anytime.” Grumwald hadn’t realized she was in pain. “Really. I have unlimited supply.”

  “Night fairies are impossible. They don’t listen. At first I thought they were hard of hearing, but no, they’re just, well, flighty. Have you ever tried to reason with a night fairy?”

  Grumwald grinned. She was preaching to the choir.

  “Ahh, that’s right.” She looked chastened. “I’m sorry about that. It hurts so much sometimes I lose my good sense.”

  “It’s okay,” Grumwald assured her.

  “Let me get my wand.” It took her a minute and a half to get up from her chair. Her bones creaked like bare branches in the wind. “I should have lifted your curse years ago. There’s no excuse for leaving it. Sloppy witchery, that’s what that is. I’m losing it in my old age.”

  She shuffled slow, slow, slowly across her worn floors, away from the heat and flickering light of the fire, over to the kitchen where from a pot rack hung dozens of wands in shapes and sizes Grumwald had never seen before, some topped, traditionally, with white caps or stars, others curled up into snail shells or coiled like snakes or fraying out at the ends like tangled hair. “Now, which one did I use in the first place? I can’t remember. Well, this one will do.” She gave a few tentative waves to a bright-yellow wand no bigger than his longest finger. “Now, remind me again which way we go.”

  “Which way?” said Grumwald.

  “Do we lose Grumwald or Princess Stephanie? I forget who you were to begin with.”

  Grumwald had never thought of it like that. Losing one. Revealing which he’d been to begin with would mean conceding that once upon a time he was someone other than both, and that was what he could no longer imagine. He knew the answer—probably the witch did too—but he found he didn’t believe it anymore. And mostly, he was loath to give it up, to give them up. The idea of life without Grumwald was devastating. The idea of life without Princess Stephanie was devastating. But the idea of life being just one or the other had become, simply, unimaginable.

  “I want both,” he was surprised to hear himself stammer. “Both. Grumwald and Princess Stephanie.”

  “Ah.” The witch was less surprised. “That happens sometimes. Can’t give up the perks of either one. Each incarnation has its rewards. Easy then. I’ll just leave the spell, and you can keep going back and forth.”

  “Not each.” Grumwald shook his head. “Both. I want to be both.”

  “Both at once?” Even the witch was shocked.

  “Each is good, but the back-and-forth is so tiring.”

  “I can imagine. But I don’t … I don’t know how to make you both at once. I’m not even sure I know what that means.” They spent the afternoon together in her cottage discussing, looking through books of spells and potions, trying one oddly shaped wand after another. At last, her soft, gray face lit with revelation. “What if we looked betwixt?”

  “Betwixt?” Grumwald was skeptical. “Isn’t betwixt just a witchy way of saying in between?”

  “Betwixt is more complex, more twisted threads, more layers than in between.” She smiled at him through rheumy eyes. “Betwixt a prince and a night fairy is neither-nor as much as both-and. You see? Something new. Something more. Something better.”

  “S
omething betwixt.”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “Betwixt I can do. Well, I can do my part.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Your part.” Of course.

  “Is it hard?”

  “It is very hard.”

  He closed his eyes and steeled himself. “Tell me.”

  “Exactly,” she said again. “You have to tell. It can’t be a secret. Secrets make everyone alone. Secrets lead to panic like that night at the restaurant. When you keep it a secret, you get hysterical. You get to thinking you’re the only one there is who’s like you, who’s both and neither and betwixt, who forges a path every day between selves, but that’s not so. When you’re alone keeping secrets, you get fear. When you tell, you get magic. Twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “You find out you’re not alone. And so does everyone else. That’s how everything gets better. You share your secret, and I’ll do the rest. You share your secret, and you change the world.”

  “It’s not that easy.” Grumwald felt his lungs scritching to become one in his chest. “I can’t just share my secret. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to understand. It’s complicated.”

  “Of course it is. It’s life.”

  “So how do I do it then? How do I share my secret? What do I tell?”

  “Your story.” The witch didn’t even hesitate. “You tell your story. That is what we all must do.”

  “That’s not magic,” said Grumwald.

  “Of course it is,” said the witch. “Story is the best magic there is.”

  After

  Poppy could not believe that the gym could look so completely different and smell so exactly the same. It’s not that the garlands and lace hearts and glitter and confetti didn’t make the place look nice. It was more like why bother if it still smelled like socks.

  At first she had rejected utterly the suggestion that she do her big coming back at the Valentine’s dance. It was stupid to have a dance in fifth grade. They weren’t even middle-schoolers yet. Plus, no one had seen her for months. They might not even let her in. Her hair was growing back, but it was still short and strange-looking. If she showed up in a dress with a bow in her too-cropped hair, it was going to look like she was trying, and failing, too hard.