When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae

by Kirsten Mortensen

  “Ty’s been staying with her,” Maisey explained.

  Ah. Well, that made sense. Obviously he’d found someplace in town to sleep.

  “Nice to meet you,” Libby said in a formal voice. “Please excuse me, I have to get some work done.”

  She wasn’t trying to be unfriendly, exactly, but obviously she wasn’t going to sit around and chitchat.

  Libby could hear them from her office. Talking again, but in low voices. She told herself it was a generation gap thing and turned her attention to her work.

  A few minutes later the pitch and tempo of their voices picked up, and she heard the front door. She listened for a car motor, but didn’t hear one, and then she saw the three of them walking on the road past the front of the house.

  Toward Dean’s place?

  That was strange.

  She wasn’t getting any work done. She stared at the list of Dormet Vous customers, her stomach twinging uneasily, then forced herself to pick up her phone and dial the first number on the list.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  One good thing. Something shifted that afternoon for the better, between Libby and Maisey. Maybe having Tyler by for a visit had done it. But Maisey didn’t seem angry at Libby, anymore. Things had hit a new set-point or something. A new normalcy, so they could all be comfortable again now.

  She’d even suggested they watch a movie together that night.

  Libby was grateful for it. Working like she did on her farm, only seeing Paul a few nights a week—she suddenly realized how nice it was, to have someone to hang out with.

  And of course, if they were going to hang out together, maybe she could find out what the kids had been up to earlier.

  Libby considered how to broach the subject while she warmed some milk on the stove for cocoa.

  She may as well be direct.

  Maisey was in the living room, getting the DVD ready. Libby raised her voice so Maisey could hear it over the television. “So. You took Alex to meet Dean, then?”

  Maisey muted the TV and switched on the DVD player. “Oh. She knows him already. She’s his sister, do you believe it?”

  “Ow!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just spilled the cocoa. It didn’t hurt. I don’t know why I said ow.”

  Libby’s face felt hot from being near the stove.

  Maisey had come into the kitchen. She handed Libby a dish rag to wipe up the spilled cocoa. “Actually, she’s his half-sister.”

  “I see.” Libby’s voice, at least, sounded casual. So that explained why they’d all gone to see him. “That’s a . . . coincidence.”

  “Yeah. She’s awfully nice. She told us all about him. You wouldn’t believe. She cuts hair. She’s going to cut mine tomorrow.”

  All about him?

  Libby poured the rest of the cocoa. More carefully this time.

  “How are you going to have it cut?” They headed into the living room, Libby carrying the two mugs of cocoa, Maisey carrying the popcorn.

  “I dunno. Maybe sort of a retro bob. Like Uma in Pulp Fiction.”

  She put the popcorn bowl on the couch between them.

  “So.” Libby blew on her cocoa to give herself some space to choose her words. But she was having trouble forming her question. “She’s his half-sister . . .” was the best she could manage.

  Fortunately, it didn’t take much to get Maisey going.

  “Yeah! Their mother is dead. Terrible story. Cancer. And Alex’s father is dead too, isn’t that awful? He came back east because of it—”

  “Who came back east? The father?”

  “No! No, Alex’s father died when she was a baby. I meant Dean. When their mother got sick, he came back east.”

  “Ah.”

  “But that isn’t even why he’s so sad! His heart was broken by an Iranian princess. So I was right! He’s been living in the woods ever since, Alex says, only before it was out west. He was a logger, so that explains where he got all those muscles.”

  The cocoa was a bit too hot and Libby’s eyes watered as it scalded the roof of her mouth. “An Iranian princess.” Alex was prone to exaggeration, apparently. If not outright lying.

  “That’s what she said! They met in college and fell madly in love, but her parents had this arranged marriage thing all set, and when they found out about it, they took her away. The princess. Kidnapped her, basically. Took her to, like, Pakistan or someplace. And he never saw her again.”

  Libby grimaced. “Maisey, I don’t believe that for a minute. That sort of thing doesn’t happen, not in real life. Alex is . . .” She stopped herself. But she needn’t have worried. Her skepticism didn’t faze Maisey in the slightest.

  “Alex says he wouldn’t even talk to anyone for like, 18 months. Then their mother got these headaches, and it turned out to be the brain cancer, and Alex had to go out and find him and tell him, because he didn’t have a phone or anything.”

  “You didn’t bring this up to him, I hope.” The adult in Libby took over. Because suppose there was some truth to this tale . . . she felt suddenly protective of Dean. Whatever his reasons for living like he did, he sure didn’t need a bunch of kids pestering him about his private affairs.

  “Oh, no. We just, you know, listen to music. And he carves stuff for us. He carved Tyler a talisman thing. It was going to be a key ring but Tyler wanted a talisman.”

  “Talisman?”

  “It’s a wolf. Kind of.”

  Yeah, that explained it. And what young man could manage without a talisman?

  “It was fun. You should go with us, sometime.” She plumped a throw pillow and settled back onto the couch.

  “Where’s the remote?” No way was Libby going to . . . drop in on Dean. Not that she would mind seeing him. But a social call? Even considering the idea made her feel funny. Awkward.

  Maisey pointed the remote at the TV screen and began navigating through the DVD menu. She’d picked the movie—Two Weeks Notice, Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. Then she hit play, which meant their conversation ended. A disappointment, Libby thought. Because yeah, she was curious about her neighbor. That’s natural, right? But she didn’t want it to be too obvious. Which meant that she couldn’t just pull Maisey aside at any time and question her about him.

  An Iranian princess?

  Libby touched the blister on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. Alex had the story wrong, of course. Although probably there were elements of truth. Maybe even the part about some young woman’s parents intervening in a budding love affair.

  “Isn’t Hugh Grant gorgeous?” Maisey interrupted Libby’s thoughts and she slopped her cocoa again. On her shorts, fortunately, instead of the couch.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The next morning Libby discovered the first of the emails.

  There were four of them.

  Two had “fairies” in the subject line.

  The third subject line just said “hi.”

  The fourth was the most charming. “She-devil bullshit!!!!”

  Libby opened the first one.

  i just had to email u. you’re story is amzing. i would so luv to meet u sometime. its peeps like u who will save gaia from total destruct. luv, sandy.

  Then the next two, groaning aloud as she read. And the last one, no better written, except it was nasty, accusing her of—she wasn’t quite sure. Satanism. Being a charlatan. Both at once, she supposed—might as well cover all your bases when emailing anonymous insults.

  She heard Maisey coming up the stairs and called out to her.

  “Yeah?” Maisey answered warily. Could probably tell from the tone of Libby’s voice that she was in trouble.

  “Look at this.”

  Libby opened the first email again.

  Maisey read it over her shoulder.

  “Maisey. Has Tyler posted about this again?”

  “No, no, Aunt Libby!” Libby turned around to look at her niece’s face. She looked sincere. “You don’t understand. He didn’t post about it ever, not
really. Not on purpose—it was in the comments.”

  She wasn’t a liar. But . . . “Look. There are four of them. Where are they coming from?”

  “I have no idea, I swear.”

  “How did they get my address?” Libby closed the window with the email message in it and pointed at her inbox queue. “Look. Four of them.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Libby deleted the emails, and then something occurred to her. Dormet Vous had started putting Skin Tones up on their website. And Libby was listed as editorial contact.

  Sure enough, when she Googled her name, up popped two issues of Skin Tones in html format. And there was her email address.

  “So that’s where,” Maisey said. She was watching Libby’s screen still.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go back to Google.”

  Libby was, already. She’d seen it, too—her name had come up on another site as well. She clicked the link and groaned again as she read. “Exciting news, gals and guys, a woman by the name of Libby Samson has made contact with the Little Folk in Upstate New York . . .”

  She scrolled down to the bottom of the page. Someone had signed it. The name was “Heavenly Starlight.”

  “Aunt Libby, you have to believe me. Tyler didn’t mean to—”

  Libby was on the site’s home page, now, looking for a contact. Someone without a fake name, for her lawyer to hunt down. The lawyer she was going to hire, that is.

  “He posts a lot about supernatural stuff, you know? So his readers—and all he did was—he wrote about finding this new hotspot, you know, your farm, only he didn’t reveal your name or anything, I swear. But then in the comments these people got going, and you know some of them just can’t let it go—”

  “It’s okay.” Libby couldn’t find a webmaster listed on the stupid site. “What’s done, is done.”

  She pushed back from the desk and suddenly realized Maisey was crying. Libby stood up. It hadn’t occurred to her that this whole thing had been hard on the girl . . . of course, Maisey had been mad because her aunt had kicked out her boyfriend. But . . . Libby looked at Maisey awkwardly for a minute. Then she reached out and touched her shoulder, and Maisey kind of collapsed toward her, into her arms. “I’m so sorry. We didn’t mean to make you mad,” she snuffled into Libby’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Libby said again, patting her back like a mother pats a six-year-old with a skinned knee. “It’s not that big a deal. Really. It’ll be okay.”

  Over her shoulder, a notice popped up on her computer screen.

  She had three new emails.

  She didn’t read them. Just deleted them.

  She had other things to do.

  She drove to the hardware store, bought a half pound of roofing nails, went out back, and used her hand trowel to bury them in her growing beds.

  Like ignoring her inbox would make it go away.

  25

  “Whoa, Aunt Libby, you are totally viral.”

  “Thanks,” Libby said.

  Tyler had been maneuvering around the ’net for a good 30 minutes by then. Libby’s neck was getting stiff from standing behind him, so she’d moved to the love seat against the far wall of her office.

  Maisey was still watching, though, draped over Tyler’s shoulder.

  “He means that in a good way, Aunt Libby!” Maisey turned toward Libby, an anxious look on her face. “He means you’ve spread all over.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah, it’s like an infection. Only not a bad infection.” Alex, this time. Sitting on the rug, legs wrapped around each other under her skirt.

  “How many sites so far?”

  “That’s two more,” Maisey said. So it brought them up to about sixty-five, then. Sixty-five websites proclaiming that Libby Samson was the psychic phenomenon of the new millennium.

  Needless to say, Libby had abandoned the idea of legal action. At least for now. What was she going to do? Pay a lawyer two hundred an hour to write “cease and desist” letters to sixty-five fifteen-year-old bloggers?

  Plus Tyler had volunteered to ask them to quit talking about it . . . although Libby had noticed that the more sites he uncovered, the less confident he sounded. “It’s viral,” he said as he added another URL to the file he’d created. “It’s all over the place.”

  “What are their names?” Alex asked.

  “Their names?” Libby thought she meant the names of the bloggers who were writing about her.

  “When they appear to you, what do you call them?”

  Ah. She meant the fairies. “I don’t call them anything. I’m not sure they have names.”

  Alex’s eyes fixed on her, gleaming with interest. “Have you ever asked them?”

  Libby sighed. She couldn’t blame Alex. She supposed she’d be curious, too. After all, this wasn’t about fairies, was it? It was about whether humans are really bound by the mundane, the laws of physics, the plain Jane everydayness that for most people passes for life. By mortality. Which made Libby living proof, to this little slip of an orphan, that there was something more out there than rocks and dirt, and the endless grind of the seasons always taking, taking, taking.

  “No. I’ve never asked them.”

  “You should.” Alex leaned forward. “Can I go with you, sometime? When you meet with them?”

  “I’ve already asked,” Maisey cut in. “She won’t let you.” Pre-emptive strike. She’d seemed a bit funny around Alex today. Libby supposed her niece was going to make darn sure that if anyone went along to see the fairies, it was going to be Maisey.

  Libby watched as Tyler selected a new URL to copy. “I don’t actually ‘meet’ with them. I go up there and work, and if there’s something they want to—if there’s something I need to do, that they can help me with, they show up. That’s all.”

  “Well, could we go with you? We could help you work,” Alex pressed hopefully.

  Libby shifted in her seat. “It wouldn’t matter. I don’t think you can see them.”

  Maisey and Alex both gasped appreciatively, waiting for more. So she told them about the time Maisey had given her the phone message.

  “He was right there?” Maisey said.

  “Wow,” Alex said.

  Tyler had swiveled around in his chair. “You could, like, give workshops in how to see them,” he said.

  “Oh, Ty, that is a great idea!” Alex beamed first at Tyler, then at Libby. “It would be awesome, and think how great for mass consciousness and everything—”

  “Forget it. There’s no way. And I don’t know how to see them. I just do.”

  “You should ask them!” Alex said. “They could help you. And you should ask them their names,” she added quickly.

  Libby stood up. Enough was enough. “It’s not like that. It’s not—” What she wanted to say was “It’s not the relationship I want to have with them.” But there was really no point in going into it with the kids. So she didn’t. “Look, I have to get some work done. You’ll have to finish this later, Ty.”

  And she shooed them out of the room.

  26

  She really needed to get that doorbell fixed.

  That’s what she was thinking to herself as she went down to see who was banging on her door at 8:30 on a Saturday night.

  The stoop light was on because Maisey was out with Tyler and, probably, Alex. The three of them were always together lately, it seemed.

  Libby opened the door.

  A boomer-era couple stood on the stoop. Him, closely-trimmed graying beard, Imagine World Peace baseball cap. Her, tall. Really, really tall.

  Libby opened the door. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re so sorry to bother you,” the woman said. “Are you Libby Samson? We’re looking for Libby Samson, the woman who talks to the little people.”

  Argh. Not again. “I’m—I do apologize, but I’m busy right now.”

  “Oh, Libby!” The woman stepped toward Libby and Libby reacted, as any normal person wo
uld, by taking a step backward. Big mistake. They followed, and the man followed the woman, and then they were both inside Libby’s house. Both of them looking around as if they expected she would have fairies in cages, or slumped over empty mead goblets around little rough-hewn tables in her kitchen.

  “I’m so pleased we found you,” the woman said as she peered into the living room. “We’ve come all the way from Vermont—I told Danny we could find you!”

  “She’s an intuitive,” Danny said. “Gifted.”

  “You have a charming home. Charming.”

  Yeah, right. Pigsty, more like. “Look,” Libby said. “I don’t mean to be rude—”

  “May we sit down? We won’t stay long, we have a hotel in town. We came so far—”

  “It would have been a seven hour drive,” Danny said, nodding. “Then we hit awful traffic outside Albany. Huge accident.”

  “Huge. I had to purify the scene.” The woman looked at Danny. “Danny wouldn’t let me get out, though, I had to do it through the window. Sometimes the emergency service personnel don’t understand.”

  “Jade doesn’t like being told what to do,” Danny said.

  They had made their way to Libby’s living room. Danny sat down on the couch while Jade began looking through the rental DVDs stacked on an end table. “Oh my!” she said, holding up a copy of The Matrix Revolutions. “You watch these things?”

  Maisey and Libby had watched it the night before. Repeat for Maisey, but Libby had missed them when they came out—Paul wasn’t big on movie theaters.

  “You’ll lower your vibrations, you know,” Jade said, giving a sharp little shake of her head. “This stuff—it’s one of my big things—”

  “It’s part of The Work,” Danny helped explain.

  “Would you mind—I could use a glass of water—do you have good water here? The water in town is atrocious. You’re on a well, right?”

  Libby returned from the kitchen with two glasses of water. Jade sniffed hers with a thoughtful look, took a cautious sip, then nodded. “It’s fine, hon.” But Danny didn’t seem thirsty—he set his glass down on the end table.