by M Sawyer
Nolin’s heart pounded, but not from the running. “I suppose I like the relationship between emotions and chemicals. Abnormalities. How much our personalities depend on a delicate balance of chemical reactions and electrical impulses in the brain. It’s really beautiful, actually.”
“And complicated.”
Exhilarated, she started to speak faster. “Very complicated. So many tiny events add up to a human being, a unique individual with hopes and fears and dreams and talents. Nature is incredible.”
“You’re right, it’s fascinating. Humans are so complicated. Any little tick in their machinery can completely alter the way they work, for better or for worse. See? This isn’t so hard.” He paused. “Are you thinking about anything else?”
Nolin chewed her bottom lip, waiting for the words to come. Finally, she spoke. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Drew looked over at her, his brow furrowed. “Er… what you’re doing right now?”
Nolin shook her head. “What I’m doing here. Back in this place. And in general. Two days ago, everything was fine, and now I’m back here and my mother is falling apart. I don’t know what to do.”
Drew pressed his lips together and crinkled the corners of his eyes. He stared straight ahead. “Well, I guess you should just do what you can do.”
“What I can do,” Nolin echoed. “I feel like I can’t do anything.”
Drew shrugged. They turned a corner. Nolin’s shoulders grew tense; they were nearing her house.
“Well,” Drew started, choosing his words carefully, “if you can do something, do it. Even if it’s not very much. That’s what I tell myself when I’m working with kids. I can’t make them understand. I can’t make them want something. Beyond that, I do what I can.”
“That’s a good thought.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” he smirked. “It’s something my mom always said. ‘No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.’”
“Your mom sounds like a smart woman.”
“Ah, don’t give her too much credit either. She usually said that when us kids were being lazy and not doing our chores. She does believe it, though. It’s just something I keep in the back of my mind.”
He glanced at his watch and slowed his pace. “That should be seven miles for me. How long have you been out?”
“I’m not sure.” Nolin’s heart sank when they turned down her road. The house squatted like a toad at the end of the street, duller than the others without the usual spray of daffodils or grass just starting to green. Her legs twitched from exhaustion, or from resistance. Drew slowed in front of the house and turned to Nolin. His cheeks were red and blotchy from the cold air. Nolin tightly folded her arms over her chest, willing herself to go back inside though her legs refused to move.
“I’ll run by here around seven tomorrow morning if you want to do this again,” Drew said. “I’ll see if there are any trails around if you’d rather not run on the road. I could afford to branch out a bit.”
Nolin nodded. “Okay. I’ll be out here.”
“Sounds good,” he reached up to adjust his knit hat and stuff a few stray chunks of hair underneath. Then he paused. “Just do what you can do. That’s all.”
With one last smile, he turned to jog back down the street. Nolin watched him disappear. Something inside her glowed warm, a tiny point deep in her stomach, like a sip of hot tea. For the first time since she’d brought her father’s corpse back to the mortuary, since her mother had dug her way back into her mind like a relapse, she felt hope that, one way or the other, everything would be all right.
Chapter 27
THE DOOR CLICKED quietly when Nolin stepped inside the house, blinking while her eyes adjusted to the dim light. The house was quiet. Somehow, she knew her mother was still asleep. Maybe she should go upstairs and check anyway.
She tiptoed into the living room, slipped off her running shoes, and padded up the stairs in her socks. Her soft steps sounded unnaturally loud in the silence.
Maybe today she’d find some tools and get her bedroom door open. The dust in there must be piled up six inches thick.
Melissa’s door was shut. A slice of light shined out of Nolin’s old room.
The door was cracked open.
She was sure that door had been locked the night before. Had Melissa opened it? Nolin had barely slept. She would have heard Melissa get up during the night, unless Melissa opened the door while Nolin was out on her run.
The still air in the house felt strange, settled, yet alive at the same time, the way a house felt early in the morning as its occupants were just beginning to stir. Nolin climbed the rest of the stairs and pushed the door open, bracing herself for the creak of a stiff door that hadn’t been opened in years. To her surprise, it opened easily, like it had been used often.
She peered into the room. Breath caught in her chest. It looked more or less the same as the day she’d left it. A black-and-white picture of her past, the colors muted with a fuzzy film of dust. The bed was unmade, blankets crumpled at the foot of the mattress just how she left them. The plants on her dresser were dried-out stalks. Dead leaves littered the floor.
Despite the dust, the room smelled oddly fresh, though there was a definite musty undertone. A slight edge of something familiar tugged at her memory; perhaps her childhood smell still lingering on the bedclothes. Nolin sneezed as dust filled her nose. Tiny clouds puffed from her footfalls on the stiff carpet. This room was even quieter than the rest of the house somehow. Nolin felt as if she’d dropped into the past, the ghost of her present, a world devoid of sound and color. She could pass through the walls and the furniture like a specter if she’d wanted.
Nolin lowered herself carefully onto the edge of the bed, splitting the silence with a brief creak. She twisted to look out the window at her old view of the woods, unchanged. The jagged outline of the treetops against the sky was so familiar she could have drawn it in her sleep. The top of the tree line jerked up and down like a heartbeat monitor, the pulse of her memory.
Something felt hard underneath her. She reached into the stiff, dusty covers, and pulled out a small book.
It was faded, like an ancient manuscript in a tomb. Feathery dust bunnies peeled off the cover and the golden title showed through.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ten years overdue.
She calculated the overdue fee in her head; over two hundred dollars. She was so tired, and the idea of a two-hundred-dollar library fee was so absurd, she chuckled. Icing on the cake, two hundred dollars of her mother’s debt was one hundred percent her fault.
She found the dog-eared page, permanently creased and brittle, then read a few lines out loud to settle back into the rhythm. She’d always loved the way Shakespeare felt in her mouth, like small, sweet fruits that rolled around on her tongue. She flipped through the parts she’d already read and restarted the scene she hadn’t finished. The fairies in the forest, the fairy king Oberon asking his wife, the queen Titania, for possession of the changeling boy.
Changeling.
The word hit her like a bucket of cold water, stirring a memory of reading this scene the first time, how that word had fascinated her. Her eyes returned to the same footnote. “A child exchanged for another by fairies or goblins.” She remembered the illustration that used to be taped above her bed until she tore it down, the gnarled tree surrounded by thin, wild-looking children with pointed ears and devilish grins. A cold prickle of anxiety formed in her stomach.
Why did that idea interest her so much? She’d always loved fantasy, but she’d never believed in monsters in the closet, or Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy. She’d never gotten presents from Santa Claus, and she unceremoniously dropped her baby teeth in the trash after pulling them out. So why was this word changeling so special?
She’d never heard of changelings anywhere else. They weren’t like vampires or witches or other common creatures in movies and books. Maybe that’s why the word fascinated her; it
was something new and strange. The idea of creatures stealing a human and leaving behind their own spawn was frightening...yet fascinating. A goblin child growing up among humans...what would that be like?
The anxiety in her gut flexed. She understood perfectly. Being treated like a freak, always an outsider, not belonging anywhere. She related more than she wished to admit. This disturbed her even more.
The bright morning sun punched through the window. She’d forgotten how hot her room got sometimes. Nolin twisted around to open the window and noticed clean tracks through the dust on the windowsill. It looked like something large had slid over it, wiping the dust away.
“What the hell?”
The clean mark was about a foot and a half wide, dust piled to the sides like snow flanking a freshly plowed road. Her eyes traveled up to the silver window latch, down instead of up. Unlocked. Gently, she pushed on the window, which swung open easily on well-used hinges.
A fresh spring breeze blew in from the open window, carrying the smell of the woods and playing with her hair. She poked her head out and looked down. Only smooth wall below her. Nothing to climb, no scuffs or marks on the wall or indentations in the grass where someone could have put a ladder.
Nolin pulled the window shut and locked it, pausing to think. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and that familiar feeling of being watched, the feeling she’d experienced so often, settled upon her. She remembered thinking that the woods had eyes and gazed into her window while she slept, whispered to her at night to invite her into its depths. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be in her room anymore.
Stepping into her previous footsteps from the bedroom door, she tiptoed back into the hall, shutting the door behind her.
Dread and fear roiled within her. Something familiar lurked under that anxiety, flitting out of sight before she could identify it. Descending the stairs, she saw the house anew, not as an unwelcome reminder of a past she wished to forget, but as a future she might never have. Her childhood home transformed into something foreign and unfriendly, though she knew every inch. Now, she saw it through the eyes of an intruder.
***
Soggy grass squished under her feet. Worms wriggled on the sidewalk, washed out from the rain. The willow tree looked just like she remembered it, vines hanging motionless in the still air. The library hadn’t changed at all. The bushes were a little bigger, the metal letters above the door were a little orange with rust, but it was as good as a warm blanket.
Nolin stepped inside, filling her lungs with the delicious scent of paper and leather. The rush of the climate control blew her hair off her shoulders. The shelves stood in the same places, the same round tables and saggy couches and the same ugly, multicolored carpet. It was like stepping into a dream.
The woman behind the desk with glasses, thick makeup, and tight, brown ponytail looked up from typing. Her dark-blue eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open, her berry-colored lips forming a perfect O.
“Oh my… Nolin! Is that you?”
Nolin grinned. Ms. Savage stood up, ran around the desk, and threw her arms around her, surrounding them in a cloud of lavender perfume.
“Oh my goodness, hon, you’re gorgeous! Look at you, all grown up!”
Ms. Savage hadn’t changed any more than her library—same ponytail and glasses, similar sweater and slacks. A few wispy lines fanned from her eyes, but it was still Nolin’s old friend.
“I can’t believe you still work here,” Nolin laughed. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“Well, you too! Where the heck have you been? How many years has it been? I worried they’d locked you up for good!”
Great, has everybody heard what happened? Nolin brushed it off. Her mother and her condition had never exactly been a secret. More of an urban legend, really. Of course a daughter moving in the same direction would excite the gossipers.
“I’ve been working in Maxfield.”
“Well, good for you. What brings you back here?”
“Just visiting my mom.”
“Well, a decade is a long time to be gone.” Ms. Savage stood back and smiled without showing her teeth. “Welcome back. Your account’s expired, of course. We can sign you back up in just a minute...”
“Actually,” Nolin started, holding up A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I just found this. I checked it out a while ago—okay, ten years ago, sorry about that—and I thought I should return it.”
Ms. Savage cocked her head to the side.
“I wondered where that went.”
Nolin’s face grew hot. “Yeah, I’m really sorry. I found it in my old room; I don’t think anyone’s been in there since I left. I can pay you back for it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it at all,” Ms. Savage said, waving her hand dismissively. “Just keep it.”
“Oh,” Nolin said. She looked down at the book that was now hers, getting reacquainted with it, then hugged it to her chest. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem. Listen, I’m going out for an early lunch. Would you like to join me?”
“I… um, yeah. Is there anyone else here to watch the library?” Nolin asked, looking over her shoulder.
“There’s an assistant around here somewhere. She can handle it.” Ms. Savage bent down to type something into the computer and then stood up to sling her purse over her shoulder.
“I usually just get a salad at the deli up the street.”
Nolin shrugged and followed her out of the library.
Ms. Savage walked quickly, neatly clipping along the sidewalk with short little steps while Nolin bumbled along in her flip-flops.
“So...why are you still here?” Nolin blurted. She felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn’t meant to sound so rude.
Ms. Savage smiled and examined her unpainted fingernails, flicking a speck of dirt off her cuticle. “I haven’t had a reason to leave,” she said. “I’m a creature of habit, and I like comfort. The library is comfortable. I have my books, peace and quiet. I like this town. If the day ever comes that I want something different, I’ll do something different. Until then, I’ll love my cozy little library.”
Nolin chewed her bottom lip and kicked a pebble that skittered across the sidewalk before ricocheting into the grass. Nolin couldn’t imagine staying in one place forever, especially Calder. Maybe Ms. Savage’s experience was different. Perhaps the old houses and the single stoplight in town charmed her. Nolin found it strange that a woman who loved Chaucer and wore tweed would be happy in a tiny town with a one-room library and no art galleries, theaters, or museums within fifty miles in any direction. She seemed cut and pasted from one world into this one, snipped out of a college professor’s life or from a Parisian sidewalk cafe with a thick book and expensive cappuccino. Maybe that’s why Nolin was always drawn to her; Ms. Savage didn’t belong here anymore than Nolin did, though they seemed cut out for very different lives.
“I know you don’t care for it here,” Ms. Savage said.
“To put it mildly.”
Ms. Savage chuckled. “This town has just the right amount of loneliness for me. It keeps my mind working because it has to. If there’s too much going on around me, my mind stops and has to keep up with the flow, go in a certain direction whether it wants to or not.”
“So you find the monotony…stimulating?”
“It’s like an open meadow for my mind to romp around. Compare that to, say, a crowded freeway, full of noise and action and speed, direction. Though it seems exciting, it’s very restricting. Go one way at a certain speed or crash, get a citation, impede other drivers. I prefer my open field where I can run around in circles.”
Nolin shook her head incredulously. “I think it’s suffocating. You can’t buy a pack of gum around here without the whole town knowing about it. Then they’ll judge you for buying cinnamon instead of spearmint.”
Ms. Savage chuckled. “Screw ’em. Screw ’em all,” she said.
Nolin fiddled with her book, running her thumb along the aged spine
. A thought hit her: Maybe Ms. Savage knew more about changelings. She could probably even recommend some more books about them.
“I have a question about this play,” Nolin said, drumming her fingers on the cover. “I left off at the first scene with the fairies. I even remember the exact line, when they ask about the changeling child.” Nolin’s eyes darted to Ms. Savage’s face, which was calm and staring straight ahead. “I remember wondering what a changeling was because I’ve never heard of them before, and the footnotes said that it’s a goblin or fairy child exchanged for a human one. I feel like there’s more to it than that. I know people back then believed in fairies, but why did they think they stole children?” Somehow, she felt Ms. Savage would understand. If anyone would understand an odd obsession with something from a book, it was her.
“Well,” Ms. Savage said, “it’s just a legend people thought up to explain sickly children and oddballs. Western European mythology, that’s all.”
“Oddballs?”
“Well, the changelings,” Ms. Savage indicated quotations with her fingers, “were usually children who just didn’t fit in. Sometimes they had a physical or mental condition, and sometimes I think they were just…different. Society’s full of them. This was the way to rationalize them. Or mistreat them. They didn’t feel so bad neglecting or abusing a child they didn’t even consider human.”
The wad of anxiety in Nolin’s stomach writhed. If she had been born then, would she have been one of those odd children, shunned or feared because she was different? Believed to be the spawn of a goblin, traded for an innocent human baby?
Her mind flipped through her memories of elementary school: the teasing, the fighting, lunches alone at the end of the long cafeteria table. She might as well have been a changeling for the way she was treated. “That’s awful,” she said.
“Listen, Nolin,” Ms. Savage continued. “I think I get it, why you’d find that concept so interesting. I know you’ve always felt out of place and like you don’t belong.” Ms. Savage looked over at Nolin, her dark-blue eyes focused and piercing. For the first time with Ms. Savage, Nolin suddenly felt very uncomfortable. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and watched the sidewalk in front of her.
