Stranger Things Happen

by Kelly Link

  “Gerda!” Kay is sitting at a table, fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. When he stands up, he knocks several pieces of the puzzle off the table, and they fall to the floor and shatter into even smaller fragments. You both kneel down, picking them up. The table is blue, the puzzle pieces are blue, Kay is blue, which is why you didn’t see him when you first came into the room. The geese brush up against you, soft and white as cats.

  “What took you so long?” Kay says. “Where in the world did you get those ridiculous boots?” You stare at him in disbelief.

  “I walked barefoot on broken glass across half a continent to get here,” you say. But at least you don’t burst into tears. “A robber girl gave them to me.”

  Kay snorts. His blue nostrils flare. “Sweetie, they’re hideous.”

  “Why are you blue?” you ask.

  “I’m under an enchantment,” he says. “The Snow Queen kissed me. Besides, I thought blue was your favorite color.”

  Your favorite color has always been yellow. You wonder if the Snow Queen kissed him all over, if he is blue all over. All the visible portions of his body are blue. “If you kiss me,” he says, “you break the spell and I can come home with you. If you break the spell, I’ll be in love with you again.”

  You refrain from asking if he was in love with you when he kissed the Snow Queen. Pardon me, you think, when she kissed him. “What is that puzzle you’re working on?” you ask.

  “Oh, that,” he says. “That’s the other way to break the spell. If I can put it together, but the other way is easier. Not to mention more fun. Don’t you want to kiss me?”

  You look at his blue lips, at his blue face. You try to remember if you liked his kisses. “Do you remember the white cat?” you say. “It didn’t exactly run away. I took it to the woods and left it there.”

  “We can get another one,” he says.

  “I took it to the woods because it was telling me things.”

  “We don’t have to get a talking cat,” Kay says. “Besides, why did you walk barefoot across half a continent of broken glass if you aren’t going to kiss me and break the spell?” His blue face is sulky.

  “Maybe I just wanted to see the world,” you tell him. “Meet interesting people.”

  The geese are brushing up against your ankles. You stroke their white feathers and the geese snap, but gently, at your fingers. “You had better hurry up and decide if you want to kiss me or not,” Kay says. “Because she’s home.”

  When you turn around, there she is, smiling at you like you are exactly the person that she was hoping to see.

  The Snow Queen isn’t how or what you’d expected. She’s not as tall as you – you thought she would be taller. Sure, she’s beautiful, you can see why Kay kissed her (although you are beginning to wonder why she kissed him), but her eyes are black and kind, which you didn’t expect at all. She stands next to you, not looking at Kay at all, but looking at you. “I wouldn’t do it if I were you,” she says.

  “Oh come on,” Kay says. “Give me a break, lady. Sure it was nice, but you don’t want me hanging around this icebox forever, any more than I want to be here. Let Gerda kiss me, we’ll go home and live happily ever after. There’s supposed to be a happy ending.”

  “I like your boots,” the Snow Queen says.

  “You’re beautiful,” you tell her.

  “I don’t believe this,” Kay says. He thumps his blue fist on the blue table, sending blue puzzle pieces flying through the air. Pieces lie like nuggets of sky-colored glass on the white backs of the geese. A piece of the table has splintered off, and you wonder if he is going to have to put the table back together as well.

  “Do you love him?”

  You look at the Snow Queen when she says this and then you look at Kay. “Sorry,” you tell him. You hold out your hand in case he’s willing to shake it.

  “Sorry!” he says. “You’re sorry! What good does that do me?”

  “So what happens now?” you ask the Snow Queen.

  “Up to you,” she says. “Maybe you’re sick of traveling. Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” you say. “I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of it.”

  “In that case,” says the Snow Queen, “I may have a business proposal for you.”

  “Hey!” Kay says. “What about me? Isn’t someone going to kiss me?”

  You help him collect a few puzzle pieces. “Will you at least do this much for me?” he asks. “For old time’s sake. Will you spread the word, tell a few single princesses that I’m stuck up here? I’d like to get out of here sometime in the next century. Thanks. I’d really appreciate it. You know, we had a really nice time, I think I remember that.”

  The robber girl’s boots cover the scars on your feet. When you look at these scars, you can see the outline of the journey you made. Sometimes mirrors are maps, and sometimes maps are mirrors. Sometimes scars tell a story, and maybe someday you will tell this story to a lover. The soles of your feet are stories – hidden in the black boots, they shine like mirrors. If you were to take your boots off, you would see reflected in one foot-mirror the Princess Briar Rose as she sets off on her honeymoon, in her enormous four-poster bed, which now has wheels and is pulled by twenty white horses.

  It’s nice to see women exploring alternative means of travel.

  In the other foot-mirror, almost close enough to touch, you could see the robber girl whose boots you are wearing. She is setting off to find Bae, to give him a kiss and bring him home again. You wouldn’t presume to give her any advice, but you do hope that she has found another pair of good sturdy boots.

  Someday, someone will probably make their way to the Snow Queen’s palace, and kiss Kay’s cold blue lips. She might even manage a happily ever after for a while.

  You are standing in your black laced boots, and the Snow Queen’s white geese mutter and stream and sidle up against you. You are beginning to understand some of what they are saying. They grumble about the weight of the sleigh, the weather, your hesitant jerks at their reins. But they are good-natured grumbles. You tell the geese that your feet are maps and your feet are mirrors. But you tell them that you have to keep in mind that they are also useful for walking around on. They are perfectly good feet.

  VANISHING ACT

  The three of them were sitting in a boat. When she closed her eyes, she could almost picture it. A man and a woman and a girl, in a green boat on the green water. Her mother had written that the water was an impossible color; she imagined the mint color of the Harmons’ Tupperware. But what did the boat look like? Was it green? How she wished her mother had described the boat!

  The boat refused to settle upon the water. It was too buoyant, sliding along the mint surface like a raindrop on a pane of glass. It had no keel, no sail, no oars. And if they fell in, no lifejackets (at least she knew of none). The man and the woman, unaware, smiled at each other over the head of the girl. And the girl was holding on to both sides of the boat for dear life, holding it intact and upright on the tilting Tupperware-colored water.

  She realized that not only had the boat been left out of the letter; after so long she could hardly trust her parents to resemble her memories of them. That was the great tragedy, the inconvenient unseaworthiness of memories and boats and letters, that events never remained themselves long enough for you to insert yourself into them… The girl fell out of the boat into the green water.

  Was it cold? She didn’t know.

  Hildegard and Myron are spying on Hildy’s cousin, Jenny Rose. It is Thursday afternoon, October the fifth, 1970, and Jenny Rose is lying on her bed in the room she shares with Hildy. She hasn’t moved once in the fifteen minutes that Hildy and Myron have been watching her. Hildy can’t explain why she watches Jenny Rose: Jenny Rose never picks her nose or bursts into tears. She mostly lies on her bed with her eyes closed, but not asleep. She’s the same age as Hildy – ten – and an utter freak.

  Myron says, “I think she’s dead,” and Hildy snorts.<
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  “I can see her breathing,” she says, handing him the binoculars.

  “Is she asleep, then?”

  “I don’t think so,” Hildy says, considering. “I think she just turns herself off, like a TV or something.”

  They are sitting in the gazebo that Hildy’s older brother James made in woodworking the year before. The gazebo is homely and ramshackle. The white paint has peeled away in strips, and bees float in the warm air above their heads. With the aid of a borrowed set of binoculars, Hildy and Myron can spy privately upon Jenny Rose upon her bed. Hildy picks at the paint and keeps an eye out for James as well, who considers the gazebo to be exclusively his.

  The three of them sat in the boat on the water. They weren’t necessarily people, and it wasn’t necessarily a boat either. It could be three knots tied in her shoelace; three tubes of lipstick hidden in Hildy’s dresser; three pieces of fruit, three oranges in the blue bowl beside her bed.

  What was important, what she yearned for, was the trinity, the triangle completed and without lack. She lay on the bed, imagining this: the three of them in the boat upon the water, oh! sweet to taste.

  Jenny Rose is the most monosyllabic, monochromatic person Hildy has ever laid eyes on. She’s no-colored, like a glass of skim milk, or a piece of chewed string. Lank hair of indeterminate length, skin neither pale nor sunny, and washed-out no-color eyes. She’s neither tall nor short, fat or skinny. She smells weird, sad, electric, like rain on asphalt. Does she resemble her parents? Hildy isn’t sure, but Jenny Rose has nothing of Hildy’s family. Hildy’s mother is tall and glamorous with red hair. Hildy’s mother is a Presbyterian minister. Her father teaches at the university.

  The Reverend Molly Harmon’s brother and sister-in-law have been missionaries in the Pacific since before Hildy and Jenny Rose were born. When Hildy was little, the adventures of her cousin were like an exotic and mysterious bedtime story. She used to wish she was Jenny Rose.

  During the 1965 coup in Indonesia, Hildy’s aunt and uncle and Jenny Rose spent a few months in hiding and then a short time in prison, suspected of being Communist sympathizers. This is the way the rumors went: they were dead; they were hidden in Ubud in the house of a man named Nyoman; they were in prison in Jakarta; they had been released, they were safely in Singapore. Hildy always knew that Jenny Rose would be fine. Stories have happy endings. She still believes this.

  Jenny Rose was in Singapore for the next four and a half years. When her parents went back to Indonesia, it was proposed that Jenny Rose would come to stay with the Harmons, in order to receive a secondary school education. Hildy helped her mother prepare for the arrival of her cousin. She went to the library and found a book on Indonesia. She went shopping with her mother for a second bed and a second desk, extra clothes, hangers, and sheets. The day before her cousin arrived, Hildy used a ruler, divided her own room into two equal halves.

  Hildy hugged Jenny Rose at the airport, breathed her in, that strange hot and cold smell. She hauled Jenny Rose’s luggage to the car single-handedly. “What is Indonesia like?” she asked her cousin. “Hot,” Jenny Rose said. She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the back of the car, and for the next three weeks said nothing that required more than one syllable. So far, the most meaningful words her cousin has spoken to Hildy are these: “I think I wet the bed.”

  “Give her time,” Hildy’s mother advised, putting the sheets into the washer. “She’s homesick.”

  “How can she be homesick?” Hildy said. “She’s never lived in a single place for longer than a year.”

  “You know what I mean,” said the Reverend Molly Harmon. “She misses her parents. She’s never been away from them before. How would you like it if I sent you to live on the other side of the world?”

  “It wouldn’t turn me into a mute, stunted turnip-person,” Hildy said. But she thinks she understands. She read the library book. Who wouldn’t prefer the emerald jungles of Bali to the suburbs of Houston, the intricate glide and shadow jerk of wayang kulit puppets on a horn screen to the dollar matinee, nasi goreng to a McDonald’s hamburger?

  Hildy and Myron come inside to make hot chocolate and play Ping-Pong. They go to Hildy and Jenny Rose’s room first, and Myron stands over Jenny Rose on her bed, trying to make conversation. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, whatcha doing?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  He tries again. “Would you like to play Ping-Pong with us?”

  “No.” Her eyes don’t even open as she speaks.

  There is a bowl of oranges on the night table. Myron picks one up and begins to peel it with his thumbnail.

  Jenny Rose’s eyelids open, and she jackknifes into a sitting position. “Those are my oranges,” she says, louder than Hildy has ever heard her speak.

  “Hey!” Myron says, backing up and cradling the orange in his palm. He is afraid of Jenny Rose, Hildy realizes. “It’s just an orange.

  I’m hungry, I didn’t mean anything.”

  Hildy intervenes. “There are more in the refrigerator,” she says diplomatically. “You can replace that one – if it’s such a big deal.”

  “I wanted that one,” Jenny Rose says, more softly.

  “What’s so special about that orange?” Myron says. Jenny Rose doesn’t say anything. Hildy stares at her, and Jenny Rose stares, without expression, at the orange in Myron’s hand. The front door bangs open, and James, the Reverend Harmon, and Dr. Orzibal are home.

  Myron’s mother, Mercy Orzibal, is a professor of English and a close friend of the Harmons. She is divorced, and teaches night classes. Myron spends a lot of time at the Harmons under the harried attention of Hildy’s mother, known as the Reverend Mother.

  This afternoon was a wedding, and the Reverend Mother is still in the white robes of a divine: the R.M. and Mercy Orzibal, in her sleeveless white dress, look like geese, or angels.

  James is wearing black. James is almost seventeen years old and he hates his family. Which is all right. Hildy doesn’t care much for him. His face is sullen, but this is his usual expression. His hair is getting long. His hair is red like his mother’s hair. How Hildy wishes that she had red hair.

  A cigarette dangles from the lips of the Reverend Mother. She’s reached an agreement with Hildy: two cigarettes on weekdays, four on Saturday, and none on Sunday. Hildy hates the smell, but loves the way that the afternoon light falters and falls thickly through the smoke around her mother’s beautiful face.

  “Do we have any more oranges?” Hildy asks her mother. “Myron ate Jenny Rose’s.” There are several in the refrigerator, when Hildy looks. She picks out the one that is the most shriveled and puny. She tells herself that she feels sorry for this orange. Jenny Rose will take good care of it. The good oranges are for eating. Jenny Rose has followed Myron and Hildy, she stands just inside the doorway.

  “Oh, Jenny!” says the Reverend Mother, as if surprised to find her niece here, in her kitchen. “How was your day, sweetheart?”

  Jenny Rose says something inaudible as she takes the orange from Hildy. The R.M. has turned away already and is tapping her ash into the kitchen sink.

  Hildy retrieves three more oranges out of the refrigerator. She juggles them, smacking them in her palms, tossing them up again. “Hey, look at me!” James rolls his eyes, the mothers and Myron applaud dutifully – Hildy looks, but Jenny Rose has left the room.

  Hildy plays Ping-Pong in the basement every night with her father, uncrowned Ping-Pong champion of the world. He tells silly jokes as he serves, to make Hildy miss her return. “What’s brown and sticky?” he says. “A stick.”

  When Hildy groans, he winks at her. “You can’t disguise it,” he says. “I know you think I’m the handsomest man in the world, the funniest man in the world, the smartest man in the whole world.”

  “Yeah, right,” Hildy tells him. The sight of his white teeth across the table, floating in the mild, round pink expanse of his face, makes her sad for a moment, as if she is traveling a great distance away, leavi
ng her father pinned down under the great weight of that distance. “You’re silly.” She spins the ball fast across the net.

  “That’s what all the ladies tell me,” he says. “The silliest man in the world, that’s me.”

  The basement is Hildy’s favorite room in the whole house, now that Jenny Rose has taken over her bedroom. The walls are a cheerful yellow, and fat stripey plants in macrame hangers dangle from the ceiling like green and white snakes. Hildy lobs a Ping-Pong ball into the macramЋ holders – it takes more effort to retrieve these balls than it does to place them, and at night when Hildy watches television in the basement, the Ping-Pong balls glow with reflected TV light like tiny moons and satellites.

  She lets her father beat her in the next game, and when he goes back upstairs, she ducks under the table. This is where Hildy sits whenever she needs to think. This is where she and Myron do their homework, crosslegged on the linoleum floor of their own personal cave. Myron is better at social studies, but Hildy is better at math. Hildy is better at spying on Jenny Rose. She shifts on the cold linoleum floor. She is better at hiding than her cousin. No one can spy on her under the table, although she can see anyone who comes into the basement.

  She has learned to identify people from the waist down: brown corduroy would be her father; James and Myron wear blue jeans. Her mother’s feet are very small. The R.M. never wears shoes in the house, and her toenails are always red, like ten cherries in a row. Hildy doesn’t need to remember Jenny Rose’s legs or toes – she would know her cousin by the absolute stillness. Jenny Rose’s legs would suddenly appear above two noiseless feet, pale and otherworldly as two ghost trees. Hildy imagines jumping out from under the table, yelling “Boo!” Jenny Rose would have to see her then, but would she see Jenny Rose?