by Signe Pike
“So after all the stories you’ve listened to, all the people you’ve met—what do you believe?” I asked.
I saw a flicker of something in his face, and then he chose his words carefully. “People can believe what they want, but I’d have great respect for these faery places myself. I wouldn’t interfere with them. I’d bring nothing out of a faery fort, I don’t care who laughs at me for that.You go in, have a good look around, measure them, photograph them, sure. But I’d bring nothing out—not even a leaf out of one of the bushes. Because that’s not my property. That’s theirs. I’ve heard too many stories of people who have interfered in one way or another and ended up the worse for it.
“Right now,” Eddie continued, one finger aloft, “there’s a murder a day in this country—probably two or three. It’s not that long ago that a murder in Ireland would have been very unusual. Something’s gone wrong. And I would much prefer to be listening to these old people—call them superstitious, call them what you like. They were interesting, and they had respect. They had respect for certain places and there was a reason behind it. The reason was that they had inherited a system of values, and I think that is something worth keeping.”
These days, the demand for Eddie’s storytelling was cutting into the time he’d like to have for his writing and his collecting of folklore. But he can’t refuse to go places to tell his stories, because that’s what keeps them alive. He was worried that if a new generation can’t hear them, where they came from, and the context out of which they came, something could be lost.
“I have always said, and I am not a bit ashamed of it, that Ireland was always a third-world country with a little dab of white-wash on it,” he said. “People thought that they had nothing. But that’s not true, they had something. They had their beliefs. They had their stories. And they threw it all away for money.”
He was referring, I knew, to the economic boom Ireland experienced beginning in the 1990s.
“People wanted a bigger house, a bigger car, three holidays . . . they tried to substitute things for things that you can’t substitute anything for. Helpfulness, kindness, charity, human decency. It costs you nothing to help people,” he said vehemently. “Nothing at all. These”—Eddie held up a tape—“these are invaluable. They cannot be replaced. Money can buy a lot of things. But not these.” We gazed around the room, taking in the hundreds of stories surrounding us from a generation whose memories were turning into dust. Then Eddie looked down at Charlie, his dog, who was flopped at my feet with his legs open, angling for a belly rub.
“Sometimes I think that’s why I admire dogs so much. They’re better human beings than we are.” He reached over to stroke the dog’s head.
“Charlie,” he murmured, “you might be talking to the faeries every night and regard it as a very natural thing. While we have to go looking for them.”
We said our goodbyes and I turned back to give Eddie and Charlie the mutt a final wave as we pulled out of the drive. I looked at KP, feeling like a kid who’d brought my parents to show-and-tell at school.
“So what’d you think?” I asked anxiously.
“It was pretty awesome,” she said. “So that’s how your interviews typically go?”
“Yes. And no. There’s always something different that intrigues me. It’s as though all the people I’m meeting . . .” I paused. “Well, I know this sounds completely ridiculous.”
“No, Sig, go on . . .”
“Well, it’s as though all the people I’m meeting I was somehow meant to meet. Believe me, I know how crazy it sounds. I’m following my instincts about where I need to go, who I need to talk to, who I need to meet, and every single time I have an interview, it’s as though I’m given a clue. Or a piece to a puzzle would be a better way to describe it. They’ll say something—something almost out of the blue—and in the course of the conversation it means something to me, helps me to figure out something mysterious that I’ve experienced. I noticed it first in Glastonbury, and from there it’s just happened over and over again. It’s just like Eddie said: after a while there are too many coincidences for things to be coincidental.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I think I can see what you mean.”
I looked out the window, watching the countryside go by, just thinking about the black dog. I could almost see him, lying dutifully in the field with his paws crossed, reminding all who passed: this was once a faery fort.
September 27, 1989
Dear Dieary,
These pages in the middle of you are for things I needed to write so this is what I have to say. Sorry I haven’t written in so long I promis I will write in you every day!
How are you?
I am fine.
I wish you were a real person because than, I would have a real best friend that would talk back to me and never talk about how chubby I am. And if you were a person you would be my very best friend because you would be so nice and never tell secrets that I told you. Dieary, I love you.
I was sucking on a watermelon Blow Pop when my dad opened the door. Clicking the lock on my diary I took out the sucker and sat on it. I could feel it sticking to my comforter . . . and my leg.
“You’re eating candy at this time of the night? Jesus, Signe,” he said, shaking his head. “Throw it in the trash.”
Busted, I reluctantly extracted it from my leg, wrapping it in a tissue so I could pick it out later, and dropped it into my wastebasket.
“Now you’ve got to go and brush your teeth again.”
“I don’t mind,” I answered defiantly, moving past him into the bathroom. He followed me and leaned against the doorframe.
“Sig, have you noticed that your clothes aren’t fitting so well lately?”
“Nope.”
Yes. But I didn’t care.
“Why don’t you come running with me tomorrow?”
“I don’t want to go running.”
“Signe, don’t be perverse. It’s the best exercise you can get. It works the whole body—every muscle group.”
I paused, midbrush, to look at him.
“I don’t like running.”
“You’ve never tried it.”
“I only like running in soccer.”
“Damn it, Signe!” he exploded, banging his fist on the doorframe. “Why are you so goddamn argumentative?”
I looked back at him, and he had that really scary look in his eyes like he always got when he yelled.
Because you always make me do things I don’t want to do.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly.
Mom tucked me in. I tried to fall asleep, and I even had my polar bear, but I was worried. What if I fell asleep and accidentally rolled over on him and then he wouldn’t be able to breathe and he’d die? I sadly relinquished him to the floor. Everybody thought that stuffed animals weren’t alive, but I knew that when we weren’t really looking, they were. So you had to be careful. There were probably lots of girls who killed their bears by accident in their sleep.
The next morning Dad took me to the bike path behind the house. Normally I loved the bike path. My favorite days I would steal carrots or apples from the fridge and follow the path to where it cut through the fields—that was where the Cornell polo ponies were kept. There were always a few horses waiting by the fences in the pasture, and I fed them treats while I stroked their velvety noses.
Today Dad was teaching me how to jog, but he was running too fast, singing a Navy song to try to make it fun. It actually felt like I was trapped in a box with no air.
“Your left, your left, your left, right, left,” he sang, his voice intoned with some weird accent, like a drill sergeant.“Your lef, your lef, your lef, raght, lef!” he droned.
It reminded me of an evil marching song that the Orcs would chant when they were hunting hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. They were going to catch me. My lungs were burning and his legs were so much longer than mine and he kept running, running. He tried to teach me how to breathe.
&nb
sp; “Come on, Sig! We’re going to run for forty-five minutes. Look, I’m timing us on my watch.” He jogged in place next to me, showing me his Casio watch. I glanced at the timer. It’d been six minutes and I couldn’t breathe.
I stopped and he continued to jog in place.
“Come on, Signe. Don’t be a wimp. Don’t be a quitter . . .”
I could feel how hot my face was, and I hated him for making me do this.
“Signe,” he sang, “don’t be a quitter.”
I hated him for making me feel like a quitter.
“Signe . . .”
“Dad!” I shouted. “I’m not doing this. I hate it . . . you go too fast!”
His face got tight, and I could tell I’d made him angry.
“Fine,” he said, after a moment. “Go home then. I’m going to finish my run.” I watched him run down the path in his stupid short little shorts until he got smaller and smaller and smaller.
Tears stung my eyes as I turned to walk back home. This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to get out of running, but why did it have to feel so bad? I found my mom weeding in the front garden.
“You’re back early,” she said, straightening, brushing the dirt from her gloves.
I told her about Dad running too fast and feeling like a quitter. She thought for a while and said, “Do you think you might like running if you could do it on your own?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Well, maybe you could save up some allowance and get your own stopwatch. Then you could time yourself, and do your own runs?”
I considered this. “Okay. But how much do they cost?”
“Hmmm . . . I bet we could find one for five dollars or so.”
Oh, brother. That was going to seriously cut into my candy money. Big time.
“Jeez!” I exclaimed.
She laughed. “Well, if you want to do this, maybe we can think of a couple of extra chores to earn you the extra money. I’ll give you two dollars for mopping the kitchen floor.”
I thought for a moment. If I did this, maybe my dad wouldn’t think I was such a loser. Maybe I could learn to run in my own way, a way that didn’t hurt.
Maybe I would even like running!
“Deal.”
October 15, 1989
Dear Dairy,
I can’t wait for Holoween because I am going to be a fairy that looks like every kind of beautiful fairy there is. It’s going to be so NEAT! NO ONE will guess what I am!
I hide candy everywhere in my room, so my parents don’t know! I save all my allowance from my chores and buy candy after school from Short-Stop Deli. Lemonheads are what I usually buy. Any kind of chocolate is good too—Snickers or M&M’s, or Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Or Reeces Pieces. Also the ones in the shape of half limes and lemons that look real, with the rind and everything, and they’re coated in sugar.Those and the Rock Candy might be my favorites. My favorite place to hide them is in my shoe rack—don’t tell! But I like it because then nobody can tell me what to do! And I can have candy after dinner too!
Your friend,
Signe Singer (I just like to write that sometimes because I think it looks neat.)
I was drawing flowers over the i’s when suddenly my bedroom door burst open, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Goddamn it, Signe!” My father stood in the doorway, his arm raised, and I could see he was clenching something in his fist. He was waiting for me to look at him.
I thought as fast as I could. What did I do this time? I didn’t do anything!
His body looked like a spring that was being stretched too far.
“I told you to get this out of the goddamn living room!” So loud that my neck automatically tucked into my shoulders in a cringe.
“Alan, give her a break, will you?” I could hear Mom rushing down the hallway.
“Linda,” he said as he rounded on her, “stay the hell out of it!”
She melted away. He looked at me, his jaw clenched. The next moment I saw his arm fly back, and I watched in slow motion as my brand-new stopwatch came sailing from his fingers. It arched across the room, sailed over my head, and hit the wall, nearly colliding with my pink African violet. There was a sharp crack and its guts spewed onto the floor. I clenched my fingers. Open and closed, open and closed. His eyes were piercing mine.
“You live like a goddamn pig. Learn to clean up after yourself.”
He turned and left. The house was still again. I turned my face into the carpet and pulled my polar bear over my head. His soft fur protecting me, I could imagine we were just hibernating until spring. I heard a shuffling on the carpet and hoped it was my mom. She gathered me in her arms, her sweater smelling sweet and clean like Navy perfume.
“Siggie, we can get you another one,” she murmured into my hair. “We’ll get you another one, okay, sweetie? Don’t cry . . .”
I pulled my head up from her shirt. “I don’t want another one. I don’t want another one ever again!” I drooled through my tears.
I hated him. I hated him and his stupid running. I hated him so much that sometimes I wanted to kill him.
20
Climbing the Lost Druid Mountain
Is it madness to believe, as I now believe, in the existence of the subterranean realm?
—JOHN MATTHEWS, THE SECRET LIVES OF ELVES AND FAERIES
I LOOKED over at Kirsten and her pretty golden hair, gleaming in the sun. I always wanted to have blond hair like hers. She seemed almost unaware of me as I sat there, admiring her profile as she concentrated on the road.
“Sig.”
“Yeah.”
“Put something else on. We’ve heard this CD like seven times.”
“Mmm, okay. You want Mix One, Two, or Three?”
“Don’t you have any CDs we haven’t listened to already?”
“No. These were all from Eric. And I’m traveling light.”
“How about the radio?”
“Mmm, okay.” I fiddled with the tuner.
“Can I ask you something?” I turned to her.
“Sure.”
“You remember the time Dad broke my stopwatch?”
“No. He broke your stopwatch?”
“Yeah. When I was nine. He threw it against the wall and it shattered into pieces. He never apologized or anything.”
“Wow.”
“Sometimes I wonder—why didn’t Mom do anything? Why didn’t she stop him from acting like that, yelling at us the way he did?”
She thought a moment. “I guess she was like me. She stayed out of the way.” It was true, Kirsten was always somehow better at avoiding Dad’s fits than I was.
“I wish she hadn’t.”
“You know, Signe, interfering only made it worse. I think she could have pushed him to physical violence if she had gotten in the way. I mean, don’t you remember? Can’t you hear her? She’d say, Alan, just leave her alone! Linda, stay the fuck out of this.This is not your business. I can hear those voices in my head. I mean, can’t you?”
“Yes.” I turned to gaze out the window. “Yes, I can.”
“I think she did try,” she said, after a moment. “But the reason you can’t really remember is because it was so ineffective.”
“She couldn’t stop him?”
“No. No one could.”
“I remember he never wanted anybody in the family to comfort anyone else,” I said.
“Nope. Because that would make it seem like he’d done something wrong. If we had to . . . console each other against his wrath.”
“But where did it all come from? All that anger? I think about it sometimes, and I just can’t understand why leaving a pair of shoes in the hallway could justify that kind of reaction.”
“It might’ve had something to do with the fact that he was smoking all that pot.”
“Self-medicating for some kind of depression . . .”
“Yes. He was also a control freak. That didn’t help, I’m sure.”
“But after the
divorce, it was like everything changed. I guess it must have happened more slowly than that—probably in retrospect things got better once they told us they were getting a separation. He realized that now we could choose. If he lost his temper, we just wouldn’t want to be around him.”
“The old Dad and the new Dad—they were like different people,” KP said. “I guess after the divorce I just wanted to leave the yelling one behind. So I did.”
My sister has always had a way of deciding something, and then making it so, when it comes to her emotions. It’s a behavior I’m not able to summon. I couldn’t decide to forget how it made me feel, even though so many years had gone by. I still hated running. With a passion. And after all those years of practice, I still couldn’t stand to be yelled at. Where some people could handle it, I still had to fight not to burst into tears in a conference room filled with people. I blamed him for that. In fact, I realized I still blamed him for a lot of my fears. Maybe that was a part of why I was having so much trouble getting over his passing, letting him go.
There was too much anger, too much regret.
I could never reconcile my two fathers. After the divorce, he became more of a dad, and more of a friend. He told us he loved us, that he was proud of us. He hardly missed a home soccer game, he fixed us breakfast before school. He pulled all-nighters to help me finish papers, he took us skiing at midnight. He let me have parties while he hung out at the neighbors’. He let us have wine with dinner. But what about the old Alan—the one we so feared? He’d melted away and in his place was this gentle man who literally caught bumblebees on his fingertips. Perhaps we’d been so amazed by the transformation we didn’t want to jinx it. Nothing was ever said.
I was twenty years old when I sat down to remind him of “old Dad.” I’d composed the conversation with the help of a therapist so that he might acknowledge that his mistakes had made my childhood at times really, really shitty. So he’d finally understand what it was like to grow up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Was it the weed? My mother said he smoked several times a day. Was it the depression? Depression was never something he’d acknowledge having. I was still so broken, so angry about the past, and I desperately wanted some closure.
