You Let Me In

by Camilla Bruce

  Mother gives me a shivering smile, goes back to mock eating, pushing pieces of meat onto her fork with the knife, but never lifting it to her lips. “I think you have looked so pale recently. Are you eating well? Not developing some affliction, are you?”

  “No.” It’s starting to get uncomfortable now, and I know where this is headed. She has figured it out, what is going on, or at least developed a strong suspicion.

  “Well.” Mother’s fork is still hovering in the air. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you? If something was wrong?” She says that last part with a hard edge, gaze darting across the table, toward Father.

  “Of course.” I can feel my cheeks flush. I had never planned on telling, I think. I had somehow believed that the baby was mine and mine alone, that it was just another secret to keep. Now I saw that I had been wrong. This particular secret spilled out, was just as real to others as it was to me. The realization rattled me. Now it was I who swallowed hard and fought to chew through the meat.

  “Cassie is getting fat,” said Olivia.

  “No,” said my mother, voice stern, gaze mended. “She’s not.”

  * * *

  In the next part of this story, I am sitting in the back seat of the family car. It is a large brown one with a spacious trunk, but I couldn’t tell you the brand. Father’s hands are on the wheel, his eyes are peering back at me from the rearview mirror. In the passenger seat beside him is Mother, wearing a navy-blue coat of wool. She has a pocket mirror in her hand, is freshening up her lipstick. I can see her reflection from where I’m sitting. Her eyes look tired, and small cakes of pale powder are haphazardly strewn around her face. I think she’s looking old. Older than before. Only her curls are as they have always been; very yellow, very hard.

  “Don’t drive so fast,” she tells Father. “We’ll get there soon enough.” She doesn’t sound very enthusiastic about the prospect. “Although I guess you are eager to have it dealt with.” Her voice is pure venom, laced with loathing.

  Father says nothing, he just drives on through the barren landscape in the early hours of dawn. The first hint of winter has come, coating the fields in a thin crust of ice. It’ll melt again in a matter of hours, but the skeletal fingers of frost have definitely been there, warning of the season to come.

  I’m in pain.

  “How are you doing back there?” Mother half turns in her seat to look at me. “I’m sure you are eager to get there as well?” Her voice is not as toxic as before, but it holds no warmth either. Again, she has that wary expression when she looks at me, as if I am a potential danger, as if I might bite. As if I’m something she can’t handle and she knows it. There is no blame in there, but no compassion either.

  I don’t say anything. I feel sick.

  “You should have told us earlier.” Mother’s lips are pursed when she looks into the mirror. “It gets harder the longer you wait.”

  “How do you know?” I’m not trying to hide my resentment.

  Mother doesn’t answer my question. “You don’t have to tell Dr. Martin about this,” she says instead.

  “Why?”

  “He would only make a fuss.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what doctors do.”

  “You were the one who wanted me to see him.”

  “I know,” she sighs, closes the mirror and puts it back in her purse; her gaze drifts out the window. “We don’t have to tell everyone everything,” she says. “Some things ought to stay in the family.” Father grunts his approval by her side. She turns to him, snaps: “You don’t get to have a say in this.” Back to me: “You just say it was a boy if they ask you when we get there.”

  “What boy?” I feel utterly miserable. Angry, too.

  Mother shrugs. “A boy from school. They won’t ask for names.”

  We drive on.

  Halfway there, we have to stop so I can throw up. I’m standing by the roadside, retching, holding my hair away from my face. I am wearing an oversized shirt to hide my “condition,” one of Father’s old work shirts, I think. It smells like copper and peppery cologne.

  Mother is leaning against the car, looking in the opposite direction. Her sunglasses have huge frames—making her look like she has insect eyes. Father is standing on the other side of the car; in the middle of the road, staring into the horizon. He doesn’t look at me.

  * * *

  The clinic was as one expects such places to be: sterile, cold, white and silver, softened by a touch of turquoise. No one asked me about the boy. The nurses were kind but impersonal and everyone spoke in hushed voices, as if they—like Mother—just wanted to get it over with.

  I remember the cold surface of the operating table, remember the hard mattress in my lonely recovery, the smell of fabric softener from the bedsheets. A woman cried and spoke in Spanish on the other side of the pink curtain separating our beds. A faint scent of roses lingered in the air.

  No roses for me, though, but on our way back I was given a box of caramel cupcakes. Father bought them for me in a store nearby the hospital. I didn’t eat them, I was too sick and still in pain. I dozed the whole way home. When we got there, I stuffed the cupcakes under the bed, then I lay back on the bedspread and cried.

  Pepper-Man wasn’t there.

  I was alone.

  * * *

  As I said before, I don’t know where this second story comes from, but Dr. Martin wrote about it in Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. It’s one of the things that made your mother so angry with me, I suppose.

  They said it never happened, Mother and Olivia, but Dr. Martin certainly thought it had. He had them examine me before the trial, and felt the results proved him right. Something had indeed happened to me; the doctor who examined me was very clear on that. Dr. Martin could never track down the clinic, though. Neither he nor my lawyer could find anyone who would have remembered me. None of this existed in any file.

  “Your parents are well connected,” Dr. Martin said. We were talking in “our” room at the hospital, during my trial. “I am sure they found a way to cover their tracks.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It could mean a lot to the jury.”

  “Why?” I asked, though even I realized the importance.

  “A broken and traumatized woman is no murderer, not in any common sense. You shouldn’t go to prison, Cassie, you should stay here at the hospital.”

  “I don’t know if I remember it right,” I argued. “And my daughter isn’t even dead. She is living in the woods, in the mound, still.”

  “Exactly.” Dr. Martin smiled a tired smile. “Which only proves my point. Have you ever thought about why there are two stories about what happened in there?” He touched my forehead gently across the table.

  I shrugged. I knew what was true, of course. I knew that my Mara was safe and sound, but the other story was still there, made up or not, and Dr. Martin so dearly wanted to believe it. “Can’t both stories be true?” I asked. “Why is it that only because one thing is true, the other thing is not? Why do we always have to decide?”

  He chuckled then. “You really are something, Cassie … Don’t you think we need a foundation of truth to measure what’s false?”

  “Like science?”

  “Just that.”

  I didn’t know what to say at first. How could I describe what I felt inside, that “truth” to me was like mercury, always changing, moving—didn’t matter? I could easily hold two strings of truth in my mind and feel them both to be real without getting all confused about it. Now I realize that’s not how most people feel, but then I was far more oblivious.

  Truth is such a fickle thing, isn’t it? Subjective and shifting like a living being.

  Pepper-Man or no Pepper-Man—that’s just two sides of the same coin. Two sides of the same Cassie-coin. It all depends on which side you look at.

  I could see them both.

  * * *

  I could stop here. I would like t
o stop here. I am old now and tired. I’m thinking I should stop typing now and let the past be. But then you would still have questions. Questions about the body in the woods, questions about what happened later—those other deaths that occurred … I guess I owe you some answers about that. The “family tragedy.” The violent end. Somebody ought to know what really happened.

  And so I keep writing—and you two keep reading.

  XVI

  We had lived together for twelve years, Mr. and Mrs. Tommy Tipp, in that small brown house on the outskirts of S—. We had even bought a lawnmower from Father’s firm, which Pepper-Man-in-Tommy pushed around in the garden every Sunday, toweling off perspiration with crumpled-up T-shirts and drinking cold beers on his breaks. I would watch him through the windows sometimes, making roast and salads in the kitchen, using freshly picked vegetables from our own patch. I was quite the housewife, back then. When I felt particularly inspired, I even made raspberry and blackcurrant spreads, canned fruits and mixed herbal teas.

  I grew sated in those years. My hips rounded and my braid fell long and thick down my back, looking all lustrous and healthy—Pepper-Man loved it, played with it for hours. Those were my years of milk and gravy.

  Pepper-Man-in-Tommy was the perfect husband; I never had to worry that he would stray or leave me. The two of us were so strongly entwined, so mingled and as one, separation seemed impossible. Still does.

  I remember that first day at our new home, when we carried the things from the white room inside; the cardboard boxes of books I had long since outgrown, the wicker chair, the fairytale pictures—how out of place it all seemed on the vast, wooden floor of our new living room. I placed it all in the attic, and the attic is where it still is. You can have a look for yourself; I had it all moved when I came here. The white room is neatly boxed up above your heads—all those bitter nights.

  I had decided I wanted to be like the rest. Be like those other—good—women. It was easier that way, you see. Being different is hard and takes a toll. The rest of society is always pushing, herding us strays toward what it deems natural and decent and safe. Easier then to give in, I figured, pretend to be like everybody else. Even with a dreary reputation like mine, it was still doable, I believed, if I built those walls strong enough and painted the backdrop of my life in loud and cheery colors. Maybe if I kept my head down and dazzled all of S— with my pretty illusions, they would all think me happy and well adjusted, and I could at last get an ounce of peace.

  Time to create. Time to explore. Time to walk between the worlds.

  I didn’t write professionally yet, that came later, after the trial. I dabbled in it, though, and painted and worked on some other arts as well.

  My masterpiece from that time was doubtlessly my life. In that respect, I was no different from other young women. Every choice I made—from picking out a sofa, to choosing a profession for my man—was a measured move, a careful staging. Those four walls, that husband and that car, everything was calculated and carefully thought through. It had to appear solid and true to the world, you see. Every young wife can relate to that. If you can make your life a piece that fits neatly in the puzzle, you are all set and bound for that bland brand of happiness that people think they crave. Just look at your mother, Olivia did it too—she always excelled at it. Unlike many other girls, however, I didn’t build my doll’s house or raise those pretty screens to hide some petty mundane blemishes—alcohol problems, a lack of love, or a crushing, bottomless debt.

  I was protecting rather than hiding.

  Protecting my other life; the one that brought me endless joy; steeping my faerie tea, running through the woods, spending days on end with Mara in the mound.

  So, you see, no matter what your mother thought at the time, or what she has told you, that I was “well for a while,” that things were peachy back then, she was wrong.

  She didn’t know me at all.

  * * *

  Dr. Martin came to visit sometimes, drank iced tea in the garden. I remember him complimenting me on my “radiant health” and admiring my “harmonious lifestyle.”

  “So close to nature,” he would say, glancing at the surrounding woods with a hint of suspicion.

  The closeness to the woods was important, of course, when we chose where we would live. Easy access to the mound and Mara was number one on my list. Otherwise, we decided to keep a faerie-free environment, nothing unusual for our neighbors to see; no overgrown lawn or crowns of twigs, no faerie tea jars on display.

  On the surface, everything was clean and untangled, fitting right in with the world around us. In our bedroom, however, or where no one cared to look, in closets and drawers, the nooks and crannies, nature burst forth: green leaves sprouted and moss lined the walls. Spider sisters spun sheets of silk around our bed, toadstools grew in our basement, and in the garden lived a tribe of frogs. That’s what it’s like being married to a faerie; the woods are never far off. Sometimes you have to pluck rowan leaves and hawthorn berries out of your laundry; throw out gallons of curdled milk; nap the fresh sprouts of buttercups or daisies from the sink. There is always debris; leaves and pieces of bark and twigs. Seeds and pollen. Dead things on the windowsills.

  Visitors never saw that, though. They only saw our clean and spacious rooms; the cozy blue couch, the white tiles in the bathroom, the dining room set of oak with eight chairs. Barnaby’s locksmith and hardware business was a good trade for a young husband like mine; the money allowed me to stay at home with my typewriter and my tea. I didn’t write to sell yet, mind you, it was only for me and my Pepper-Man to see. My stories back then were just drafts of what was to come; rough coal sketches to the oil paintings I would make later, filling in the blanks with color and emotions. I never wrote about faeries, though. Never wrote about strange creatures living all around us, in the rustle you hear behind you on the street or the draft of icy wind that passes through your living room. No, instead I wrote about sinful seductions, indulgent romance and piña coladas, office intrigues and family dramas. That’s what I found in the faerie tea: stories about normal people, about lives I’d never live.

  That was exotic to me, you see, human lives without faerie implications. Was exotic to them as well, human lives untainted by death and rebirth—so that’s what’s captured in those jars: stories rife with flavors, scents, feelings, and trivial worries.

  Dr. Martin tried a cup once, after we’d discussed them at length. He’d suggested that the faerie tea was nothing but alcohol, and that the leaves and the flowers, the stones and the pieces of bark in the jars, were nothing but various forms of pills. Clearly he thought I was drinking my days away, dissolving pills in vodka and gin. I was horribly offended, of course, and sought to prove him wrong.

  It was a lush autumn afternoon, just after my trial.

  He was sitting on the porch at the brown house where I had returned to live after my acquittal.

  “Tastes like grass and water.” He smacked his lips. “What did you say it was? An acorn and a leaf?”

  I nodded.

  “Now what then? I go home and dream?”

  “No. You just go about your day. The story will come to you; unfold like a flower, subtly—deep inside.”

  He claimed it didn’t work, but of course it did. It became Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. I guess it worked a little different on him, being unused to the faerie side of things.

  * * *

  If I have one regret from our time at the brown house, it’s that we didn’t allow Mara to come inside. Thinking back, it seems harsh, though she never seemed to mind; she was as happy as before whenever I came to visit. This house is different, though, even closer to the mound so she can come and go as she pleases—that is why I bought it in the first place. It was run down and neglected when I got it for nothing, the strip of road was overgrown. But I saw potential here. Saw the lilac beauty it could be.

  I had to move, you see. When that wave of curious horror following the trial an
d the uproar around Dr. Martin’s book had subsided, people didn’t fear me as much anymore. The village youth started to drive by in their cars, throwing eggs and other nastiness at the walls of our little brown house. I found letters reciting Bible verses on my porch and a dead rat in my mailbox.

  Out here, there’s no way to come and go unseen.

  Dr. Martin was horrified at the prospect of me moving so far into the woods all alone. He said it wasn’t safe, but I knew it would be. I would move further into faerie land, so that their power would be stronger—would keep me safe, as it always had. And time has proven me right, hasn’t it? There’s been no more verses on my porch or dripping foodstuffs. I am merely an eccentric old lady now, “that writer out in the woods,” solitary in her secluded home, doing whatever eccentrics do.

  People have almost forgotten about the trial, and about those other deaths too. That’s what people do: they forget and they move on.

  Not your mother, though.

  Olivia will never forget.

  If you are still with me, we should move on too.

  XVII

  The night Tommy Tipp died in the eyes of the world, we had known for some time that something wasn’t right. I guess it was akin to cancer for other people, that slow onset of a disease you know can only end in misery. Of course, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy’s disease played out a little differently.

  At first, it was just small things: a twig peeking out of the skin on his thigh, a root coming loose by his earlobe, then the honeyed oak stick stopped working and his hips became all skewered. His colleagues at Barnaby’s thought it might be gout, and wanted him to go see a doctor. He never did, of course, what was the use in that? We knew very well that the body was falling apart, that the last few drops of Tommy Tipp’s heart blood were slowly burning to an end. It didn’t matter much to us, really, Pepper-Man had another body he could use, but we still despaired—it was our life together as man and wife that was coming to an end.