Letters to Zell

by Camille Griep

  I get pretty drunk. I make a speech about friendship and taking care of one another. Edmund says, “I’ll miss you, Thing One.” And we all think of Thing Two, and so I start crying about Rory. But it’s okay, because this is the last time I’ll mourn her here with my best friends. I can almost imagine her sitting in the corner, Snoozer in her lap, tottering and woozy with her third glass of sweet wine. I try to get ahold of myself; I focus on my family. CeCi and William and Edmund and DJ are looking at me with an unfiltered mixture of pain and pride, faces that I’ve seen pieces of for months. It’s fitting that it was Rory who finally got us to look up from our own belly buttons and into our friends’ hearts.

  I see you, fashionably late, entering through the big wooden door, and I’m so happy that you’ve come, despite everything that’s been going on. I’m leaving this letter under the door to your room, so you’ll know how much your coming meant to me.

  Zell, I hope you find what’s right for you, too. Wherever and whatever it is, know that I love you and I’m proud of you.

  B

  From the Desk of Cecilia Cinder Charming

  Crystal Palace

  North Road, Grimmland

  Dear Zell,

  The cooking school agreed to let me take classes as often as I’m able, at least until my tuition credits run out. I can still learn things, even if I don’t have a certificate. It was so good to see Phil again. I bought him a whole lot of beer and told him everything. He said it made more sense than his alien theory, though we agreed to keep our tinfoil hats as a cover story just in case. He promised to take me to the movies as often as he could to better understand the Human imagination and help me give even better weekly reports to the Godmothers.

  On my way from class back to the portal today, I heard a voice calling to me from a Starbucks sidewalk table. It was Rory’s therapist friend, Patricia.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s CeCi, isn’t it?” She brushed her straight red bangs from her eyes. “It’s just that I haven’t seen your friend Rory around in a while. I was just wondering how she’s doing?”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. We all made connections Outside, but for some reason I never thought about how Rory befriended the people here. Standing in front of me was a woman who’d done Rory a kindness—several kindnesses, actually. I wanted to tell her the truth, but I wasn’t sure how.

  “Something happened, didn’t it?” It wasn’t really a question. She stepped closer.

  I nodded, gulping down the sudden lump in my throat. “It’s hard to explain.” Telling her Rory died is a lie, and it would have made her needlessly sad, and yet, from her perspective, her shortened years, it was the truth.

  “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just I’ve been worried about her, you know, as a friend. I wasn’t seeing her in any sort of professional capacity. But she looked so sad. I wanted to do something.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to reassure her I hadn’t been judging her. “She told us she asked for your help with Henry.”

  “I hope our shopping trip helped her confidence. But it didn’t sound like her relationship was something that was going to get better on its own.”

  “You’re right. Henry would never have been worthy of Rory. Not all the therapy in the world would’ve made it so.”

  She smiled to herself then looked up at me. “You can’t tell me?”

  “I’m so sorry, Patricia. I’m not sure how to explain. Rory, well, she was tired.”

  “Oh no.” She held one hand to her heart and raised the other to her mouth. “I didn’t see. I’m so sorry.”

  “None of us did. I promise. And we’ve all been through the what-ifs, Patricia. I assure you, there’s no consolation there.” I wished I had something to make it better. I dug into my satchel and pulled out a bag of those toy unicorns that you sent for the sign at the restaurant and Bianca’s cake. I handed one to Patricia. “I’m not sure that we’d ever be able to explain where it is we’re from. Some things you just have to skip over, leave to the imagination, you know?”

  She laughed lightly and smiled. There were small tears at the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t wipe them away.

  “These were, inexplicably, some of Rory’s favorite things. I’m sure she’d want you to have one. To think of her.”

  “It’ll go nicely with my lingerie set.”

  “You were responsible for those!” It felt good to laugh in the sun. I hoped Patricia thought so, too.

  She turned the unicorn over in her palm, and it glittered in the light. “We’ll have to have a party someday.”

  I gave her a hug and told her I’d see her the next time I was Outside. It’s like we have a garden of family here. We have a garden of family everywhere. And all we have to do is nurture it.

  Love,

  CeCi

  Important Fucking Correspondence from Bianca White

  Ocean View Apartments

  Santa Monica, CA

  Rory,

  So, last night Rachel and I go to this place that specializes in molecular gastronomy. I ordered asparagus foam with steak sorbet. CeCi will find it fascinating, but it’s probably the last iced meat dish I’ll be eating for a while.

  Speaking of our favorite chef, we’re meeting her tomorrow along with Phil’s partner, Eric, at the new restaurant Phil’s apprenticing for. We’re going to drink our way through as much of the wine list as we can afford. Then we’re going to the House of Blues to hear a band Rachel thinks we’ll love.

  All these new things, all these experiences, are why I adore being here. I love the noise and the energy and the possibility and the unknown and the weird. For example, I now have a cell phone. I can talk to Rachel no matter where she is. Well, except at the corner down the street and in the vegetable aisle at Ralphs where there are no bars—cell phone bars, not taverns.

  I should also tell you I’ve had my first driving lesson in a large, empty parking lot. (Well, not my very first. Mr. Toad did let me try driving once, but that was before he got put in jail.) Rachel is unimpressed with my existing skills and says I need to practice a lot or go to driving school (which is like cooking school, but shorter) before I take a driving test.

  When I get a car, I think I’ll get a red one. With one of those little ledges on the back. A fast one. What do you think?

  Did you know that here in the markets, there are entire aisles of ketchup? There are like ten different brands. Some made of berries and balsamic vinegar. Some are outrageous colors. There are big bottles and small bottles and teeny-tiny bottles like we had at the Beverly Wilshire. Rachel is slowly adapting to the fact that I don’t know very much about ketchup or anything else. Sometimes it seems like I’ll never adapt, but Rachel says all the choices are just as overwhelming for Humans.

  She wasn’t kidding when she told us my father’s name was a common one here. We’ve found twenty Steve Whites who worked for the theme park in some capacity over the last ten years. Maybe he isn’t one of them, but it’s worth a try to track them down. Even if takes my whole life. I’ve been back to the park several times. And I keep thinking I see his handprints on the fantasy world there. I could be making things up, but I wonder if he isn’t visiting the parks like this around the whole world, tweaking a detail or two, making sure the Humans are always dreaming us, inadvertently making sure that when you wake up there’ll be a Realm to wake up in.

  Speaking of sleuthing, I asked Rachel to see if she could find anything out about Fred. Before you get angry, please know that I did it for myself because I was curious. I’m sending a book of poetry along with this letter. If you read the poem “The Sleeping Beauty” and find that nothing rings true, then we’ve chased the wrong lead. Otherwise, it seems you were never terribly far from his mind.

  I keep waiting for the portal magic to wear off in some visceral way, and I wonder if this felt the same for Fred, or my father.
I feel the same as I always have. Except maybe a little more purposeful. I’m thinking about training for something that will help me help people. You know, like a missing-people finder or a counselor like Patricia.

  Snoozer is doing well. He loves Rachel and has met a lady Great Dane two doors down that he enjoys visiting every day. He gets to go to PetSmart every week for a bath. Zell sent him a unicorn chew toy last week that he’s completely destroyed.

  He misses you. We all do.

  This is only the first of a great many letters Zell, CeCi, and I will be sending you. When you wake up, you’ll know we thought of you every single day. We’re choosing to keep you as part of our lives—somewhere we can’t be, but still with us.

  I hope it’s a good surprise.

  I’ve also started collecting a bunch of crappy romance novels for you. You’ll love this first one. It’s all about this guy whose wife doesn’t remember him because she was bopped on the head with a falling satellite but then he tells her this story of their courtship and then she remembers and it’s all better until he turns out to be an evil zombie but then she’s saved by someone named Fabio. It’ll be your favorite book, I guarantee it. Or maybe the one about vampires. Or the were-narwhals. I can just imagine the look on your face.

  Better yet, maybe I’ll write a book. I’ll call it For Want of a Unicorn. All of my characters will live Happily Ever After.

  Love,

  B

  Acknowledgments

  Naming every person who supported me in the creation of this book is impossible, but I’m grateful to everyone who believed and inspired and loved and wished and cheered me onward. Extra thanks go to those of you who’ve exchanged letters with me over the years. Archiving said correspondence was the first kindling for this project.

  Thank you to Jason Kirk, my acquiring editor, and the rest of the folks at 47North for their confidence and contagious, unflagging enthusiasm. I am so grateful to my editor, Caitlin Alexander, for ensuring my first novel realized its best self with her expert guidance and patient encouragement. Thanks, also, to Hannah Buehler for copyediting this tangle of whimsy.

  My agent, Cameron McClure, believed in these princesses before their stories were finished—even as their narrator drove, lost, in circles around the Portland airport. I’m beyond fortunate to be making this publishing journey with her, particularly since I can’t read a map.

  Mama and MamaSue, thank you for loving me fiercely, believing in this dream, and showing me the meaning of strength. I’m sure Pops is lifting a glass with us in some great beyond. And love and thanks to the rest of the family: Bruce, Cassie, Rodger, Valeska, Stefan, Serena, Amelie, Julien, Dale, Kari, Lucy, Jorge, Sara, Jon, Megan, Nathan, Alexis, Jude, Mindy, Bailey, Olivia, Lucy, Jorge, and Little Miss Not Yet Appearing In This Book.

  My critique partner, Casey Blair, read every draft of this novel, called me on my shit, and talked me through the aha! moment I so dearly needed during the homestretch. Isabella David McCaffrey, Caroline Edwards, Jill Seidenstein, and Rashida Eddie Scholz provided me with not only fresh eyes and new insight, but also continuing encouragement and love. Thanks to my local girls, Rayna Weth and Wanda Ng, for keeping me sane and well watered. Ashlee Peters (aka Besty Friend), thank you for being there for the celebrations and the breakdowns. Thanks, also, to my writing group, my talented fellow VP XVIers, and the Rainforest Writers.

  Lisa Nakamura, chef/owner of Allium on Orcas Island, has my gratitude for taking the time to share her culinary school experience as a young woman. Thanks, too, to the valiant Dr. James Babington for his help when an insolent radial nerve threatened to halt the whole shebang.

  I’m also grateful to Stephen Parrish and Wendy Russ, senior management of The Lascaux Review, for giving me the opportunity to work and laugh alongside them at the magazine. May their futures be ever free from rubber frogs.

  And last, but certainly not least, to my beloved Adam: There simply aren’t words for all the ways in which I continue to fall in love with you. Thank you for believing in my fairy tale. Let’s go see what this Ever After business is all about.

  AN EXCERPT FROM CAMILLE GRIEP’S NEW CHARITY BLUES

  Editor’s Note: This is an uncorrected excerpt and may not reflect the final book.

  On an evening such as this, I should be gazing out over a wall of footlights, a tide of applause buoyed up from the crowd, exhausted, elated, distantly annoyed that I mistimed an arabesque or fell out of a fourth pirouette. That’s how things would have been for twenty-one-year-old Cressyda Turner, soloist-on-her-way-to-principal at the most prestigious ballet company on the left coast. That Cressyda would be the City’s favorite Kitri or Juliet—pick any leading role at all except those foul Swan Lake idiots.

  But that is not what I’m doing. Here and now, I’m simply Syd, galumphing my way down a pitch-black alleyway on my way home from clinic rounds. I’m not pretending to be a qualified professional or even a competent adult, but Doc needs a hand and I made Danny a promise I shouldn’t have: to make the sick and dying of the City feel cared for. So like a moron, I quit working at the candle works and signed on with Doc Remington. These days I get to see death and illness and sadness up close and personal, instead of from an uncomfortable, yet arms-length, wax-covered distance.

  The next best friend who kicks the bucket better have simpler demands.

  No, instead of taking my third curtain call, while ducking an onslaught of roses, I am peering into darkness punctuated by even deeper darkness, listening to what sounds like a child crying for help. I should be done for the day. I should just go home. But I don’t because I am not a monster. I should just get help. But I don’t because I am not a coward.

  Still, I curse Danny’s ghost as I hitch my backpack of supplies onto both shoulders and head back to the street. If Danny has a ghost, it’s laughing at me right now because I have enough headlamp batteries for about fifteen minutes, so it’s off and I’m stumbling around like a drunk on a three-day bender instead of a one-time professional ballerina.

  Danny was a true Survivor. He beat the plague three or four years ago, only to be leveled by a case of once-treatable appendicitis. We kept him as comfortable as we could. But losing him is still tragic and painful and stupid. Even more stupid than thinking I could possibly be suited for any sort of caretaking job.

  Doc says it’s good to have a brusque bedside manner, but that’s not really it. I’m just mad. I don’t want to help people die nicely. I don’t want to help them die at all.

  “Hello?” I call. I hear the sound again, a ways down Bleeker and on the right. I keep going, thankful for the boots that lace around my ankles and save them from ever-growing potholes.

  Until Danny, I didn’t think anything would ever feel as bad as losing my mom, but it does, even though they’re two separate griefs. Mom was one of the first to die, back when they were still learning what the plague was. We thought it was the flu at breakfast. I went in for my first week of Company rehearsal and came back to a paramedics team. I said good-bye to my mother almost forty-eight hours later, still dressed in my knit body warmer and rehearsal leotard.

  My dad didn’t answer his phone back in New Charity. He called a few days later, telling me all about his new prized colt. I gave him the news, and hung up. Uncle Pious, my dad’s brother, called back and tried to mediate, even gave me the hard sell about coming to live with them in New Charity. I told him where he could shove his shit kickers, and not terribly long after that the phones stopped working. Months later, groups started coming back from New Charity saying they’d closed their gates. Current residents could pass back and forth, but only with a special card, proving they’d been inoculated and a resident at the time of the outbreak. It wasn’t that uncommon—everyone had sheltered in place to avoid gridlock.

  Uncle Pi sent a note saying not to worry—that I was protected. But it didn’t make sense until later, when word got round that the few of us who’d been born in New Ch
arity hadn’t beat the virus—none of us had ever contracted it in the first place.

  I stop in front of the building where the sound is coming from. It’s indeed a kid. There’s no door, just an empty frame, so I poke my head inside, where the wailing has grown constant and loud. “Hey, buddy, can you hear me?”

  “I fell,” the child says.

  It is dark outside and no better in here, though I can see a candle flicker above. The kid must’ve brought it in. “What’s your name?”

  “Mina,” she says.

  “Mina, I’m going to try to come up the stairs now.” I test them with my weight. They are rutted concrete and for this I am thankful, though I’m still careful as I climb them. On the second floor, Mina has fallen through a rotted plank. Though she has managed to remove her leg from the hole—undoubtedly the cause of the screaming—it is obvious she will not be able to stand on it. The candle she brought is starting to gutter, but I let it burn awhile longer, hoping to use the headlamp to get us back to the clinic.

  “What were you doing up here?” I ask.

  She points to the corner. “Come on, Buster. It’s okay.”

  A black and white dog steps out of the shadows, some sort of bulldog mix. He wags his tail. “And what were you doing up here?” I ask the dog. Mina laughs, a tinny, small thing. Even in the candlelight she is too pale.

  “Let’s get you out of here.” I belly over to her, trying to distribute my own weight over the boards. When I reach her, the dog gives me a once over.

  She’s a tough kid. I splint her calf, while the dog watches my every move. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t whine, doesn’t babble. We inch our way over to the stairs on our stomachs. I pick her up and flip on the headlamp. The dog, who does not need a headlamp, leads us down the stairs. “I’m going to borrow him someday, Mina,” I say. “So he can lead me through the dark.” But she’s already asleep, no doubt exhausted. Buster is at my side, tethered to Mina by some invisible leash. I’m a little bit in love-at-first-sight with them both, despite myself.