You Let Me In

by Camilla Bruce

  “I would like to be real. I would like to not be a tainted secret, something you have to hide in the mound.”

  “I never took you to the mound to hide you.” I picked stray pages from the floor. “You know how that went.”

  “Do I?” Her eyes were gleaming.

  “Sure you do.”

  “Not according to Dr. Martin. According to him, you were driven to a clinic some distance from here and went through surgery to have me removed.”

  “Well, you are here, aren’t you, so obviously that didn’t happen.”

  “But if it did—”

  “Then it went wrong.”

  “That easy?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat for a moment, mulling it over. “I don’t want a nice house or a Sunday roast—”

  “Yes you do. You all want that. You want to live like everyone else. That is the curse of your humanity, that need to join the pack.”

  “I am not human,” she argued.

  “And yet you are—all of Faerie was, once.”

  “Dead, then, and changed, isn’t that what you think?”

  “Yet you live.”

  “On the fringe, far out in the woods; just a shadow passing through your rooms.”

  “What do you want, Mara? Truly?”

  “For someone to pay for my life.”

  “What life?” I was honestly confused.

  “Just that, Mother, what life? The life I did not live at all or the life that I was given? A life soaked in your blood—”

  “But you are happy, Mara, aren’t you?” I tried to touch her hair, soothe her in some way, but she brushed my hand aside.

  “I will be happy when the debt is paid.”

  “Oh, Mara,” I said, “I am not sure if that is the right approach—”

  “What is, then? To be content with what I got, knowing no other life than this, invisible and hungry, living at the edges of people’s minds?”

  “Well, it is life.”

  “But is it?”

  “Sure it is!”

  “I am angry,” she said, “for the injustice of it all. I have paid with my life for someone else’s crime—”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Am I Pepper-Man’s daughter?” Her hard gaze turned on me again, smoldering like embers.

  “I don’t know.” I struggled to meet that gaze. “You are Pepper-Man’s daughter—not Pepper-Man’s daughter. Does it matter what you are? You are.”

  “Oh, Mother.” She leaned back and stretched out her legs. “You were always such a good victim.”

  “I don’t think I was, though Dr. Martin would say so.”

  “Even if the doctor’s story isn’t true, you were still taken. Pepper-Man took you when you were a child.”

  “… I came to love him.”

  “But did you have choice? What were you to do? Taken into Faerie at such a young age.”

  “It is the curse of the sight.”

  “It is the curse of a predator falling upon its prey—I should know all about that.”

  “He needed to feed—”

  “Yes, they all say that.”

  “What do you want from me, Mara?” I was nearing my wits’ end.

  “From you? Nothing. You have bled enough.”

  “Why can’t you just let it be, then? Let there be peace now and no more grief.”

  “I’ve tried—I can’t. You had your choices stolen, and so did I, by extension.”

  “We all do, Mara, that’s what it’s like being born. We can’t pick and choose the life we’ll live, if we’ll grow up in S—, Paris, or New York—”

  “But no matter where you live, it’s all life, and yours, not borrowed from someone else’s blood.”

  “The Sunday roast would disagree, don’t you think? We all live off something. You are a faerie, Mara, with magic at your fingertips, a life beyond measure. Most people would consider that a gift.”

  “I don’t, though. I consider it a consolation prize.”

  I sat quiet for a while. It’s always hard for a parent to learn that what you could give has not been enough, that all the hard choices you made mean nothing to the child. That you always gave the wrong thing, thinking it was the right. “What will you do?”

  “What I do best.”

  “Leave poor Ferdinand alone,” I begged her. “He has nothing to do with any of this.”

  She didn’t listen to me, though.

  Of course not.

  * * *

  Daughter of pain. Daughter of anger. Daughter of love, too, I always believed.

  Where I was soft, she was hard. Where I adapted, she stood firm. It must be hard to burn as bright as that—exhausting, too, I reckon. Where I chose shield, she chose sword. I never looked back, nothing good came from that. Mara, though, she was always looking back, unraveling the story and following the threads until she came back to the beginning, pinning down guilt where she saw fit. She was never content with just living—or not, depending on the side of the coin.

  * * *

  I will give you a way out, Penelope and Janus, you can still walk away from this. You can abandon the story before it gets ugly. The password is THORN, yes, THORN, like my maiden name. But then again, you don’t know that for sure. I can still change my mind on the next page. Maybe it isn’t THORN at all, but MARMALADE or SPARROW. But for now it is THORN.

  You should probably read on.

  XXVI

  The last time I saw Ferdinand he was sitting on my porch, sleeping in one of my wicker chairs.

  I was just out of bed, had barely had time to make myself a cup of coffee and throw on my satin morning robe. It was a beautiful day in an Indian summer that only seemed to last and last. Even so early, the sun was still blazing, all red and gorgeous. The wind that swept through my garden and caught the dry roses and apple tree leaves was sauna hot and felt like a caress, just the perfect day to take my morning coffee outside. I brought with me the manuscript that I never seemed to be able to finish editing and placed my glasses on top of my head. Armed thus with both pleasure and work, I stepped outside, and found him sleeping there, snoring softly with his mouth open, closed eyes aimed at the sky. His pale blue shirt was rumpled and large circles of perspiration had soaked through the fabric and spread out from his armpits. His red tie with little dogs on it was draped across his shoulder. His glasses were all askew.

  I sat down on the other side of the table, put down my coffee carefully so I wouldn’t wake him up. His car was haphazardly parked with one tire nearly grazing my magnolias. I wasn’t in a hurry to know why he had come and promptly fallen asleep on my porch. I knew it couldn’t be good. It probably had to do with Mara, and a part of me just didn’t want to know. So I delayed the moment, took out my pink ink pen and started working on my book, circling words or crossing them out, penning small notes to myself on the pages. The coffee was good. The weather was fine. Ferdinand slept on.

  When he finally woke up, with a backache no doubt, the sun was trailing toward the horizon, ready to set. He woke with a start, sat up in the chair, and fumbled with his glasses to set them straight. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “I’m sorry…”

  “What are you so sorry for?” I had just had a lunch-slash-dinner; the empty plate stood before me on top of the manuscript sporting a piece of lettuce and a lemon slice.

  “I don’t know. For falling asleep? I didn’t mean to, I swear…”

  “No harm in that, but now that you’re awake, some coffee?”

  He brushed invisible lint off his clothes and nodded his head vigorously. I left him alone for a moment then, to go inside and pour him a cup. Pepper-Man was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, waiting for me.

  “What does he want?” He nodded in the direction of the porch.

  “I don’t know yet.” I poured the coffee. “We’ll have to see, won’t we? Wait for him to talk.”

  “Why would he come to you with this, why not your mother? You do not owe him your
aid.” Pepper-Man seemed edgy—restless, worried perhaps.

  “I am his sister and Mara is my daughter. He can see the faeries too, so where else would he turn?”

  “I would not know, but he upsets you, and I do not like to see you upset.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Mara about that. She is the one who causes the upset.”

  “Mara ceased listening years ago, as you well know.”

  “Exactly. The only way to prevent more damage is to hear my brother out, and help him if I can.”

  “But I can feel the clouds gathering, Cassie. He smells like blood and fear, that man.”

  “Not even you can know the future. Maybe this time we can quench the fire before it even begins.”

  He shook his head. “Hardly, it is already burning.”

  “That is just her you feel.”

  “Yes, it is, and that man out there, he will burn with her too.”

  “That man still has nightmares about you, whatever harm could he do?”

  “Tommy Tipp was a harmless man too, but think of all the grief and sorrow that he brought.”

  “That was different.” I fetched Ferdinand’s mug off the counter. “Tommy Tipp was you.”

  Out on the porch, I served my brother coffee and sat down before him.

  “She came back,” he said, as I knew he would.

  I stifled a sigh, suddenly feeling so old and weary. “Go on.”

  “She came back when I was playing, but this time I had locked the doors, so she knocked…”

  “And?”

  “I let her inside, I couldn’t help it—she’s my niece, and I think I am a little ashamed—no, a lot ashamed, that we have treated her so badly, even if none of us knew she was there.”

  “Of course you feel that way, but you couldn’t have known, and even if you invited her to Sunday dinner, she wouldn’t really be there, you know.”

  “But what is she, then? What are the faeries?” His eyes were wide open, pleading with me.

  “They are nothing,” I told him. “Nothing we can define. They live in the cracks and narrow spaces, in between day and night. They are twilight people. Not quite dead, not quite alive.”

  “Thank you,” he said solemnly. “That was very helpful.”

  I chuckled a little. “You asked and I answered. You and I are pale fruit, brother, growing in the twilight. I always thought I was the only one of us who did, but it turns out you live there too. We’re not quite at home in any world, and so we are meat for the faeries.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother you, though.”

  “It did—it does, but there’s no use fighting it. A man born without an arm doesn’t spend the rest of his life wishing for an arm, he learns to use the one arm that he has. That’s what I do. I learn to be good with what I have—and maybe that one arm is enough, you know. Maybe you can do tricks with that arm; fantastic things no one has ever seen before. That’s how you have to think about it, as a disability you can live with and maybe even transform into a strength.”

  “Mara doesn’t think so.”

  “My daughter has never known any differently, and she doesn’t know what she’s wishing for.”

  “She feels bereft.”

  “That she does.”

  “She says that if she could, she would be like me—us—and come live with me in my house.”

  “You don’t want that, Ferdinand, you really don’t.”

  “There must be a way, though, if she wants it so badly. You did it with Tommy Tipp, he was a faerie all along.”

  “Then Mara would have to eat someone’s heart first, like Pepper-Man did with Tommy’s, and as you know, the spell didn’t last, even though Pepper-Man is strong and old.”

  “She seems so mad for being what she is, and mad for even being born. Guilty, I think, for growing inside you when it clearly wasn’t your choice.”

  “She thinks I took her to the mound to hide her, but I took her there so she could live. She wasn’t fit for this world, Ferdinand—I lost her.”

  “In Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis, Dr. Martin says that it was they who did it, Mother and Father…”

  “How did Mother feel about that, you reading the book?”

  “She didn’t feel a thing, she doesn’t know.”

  “Why did you read it?”

  “To understand, I think. Not only the things that happened to you, but the things I remembered from childhood too. That thing…”

  “Pepper-Man.”

  “Yes, that thing…”

  “That thing is probably listening in, I think you should know that. He wants me to not get involved this time, wants you and Mara to figure things out.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “He cares for me.”

  “As well he ought to if you are the thing that lets him live.”

  “It’s not that easy, Ferdinand. He could easily have found himself another source of life, but these bonds run deep, my brother. You could almost confuse them with love.”

  “You can’t love him. He abused you as a child, took advantage of you always…”

  “Well”—I squinted my eyes against the sun—“they all do, don’t they? Given a chance?”

  “They who?”

  “People, faeries—we all have to live. It’s a predatory world out there. We all eat something, don’t we? We hardly ask the piglet before we roast it and serve it with gravy.” This had become my favorite metaphor.

  “I can’t believe you’ll compare yourself to a pig roast.”

  “Well, there you have it. I’m very pragmatic.”

  “But those stories about Mother and Father—especially him—are they true? Mara seems to think they are.”

  “What do you think?” I shaded my eyes with my hand.

  “I don’t know what to think. In the book there are two stories, and now that I know for sure that Pepper-Man is real, I mostly want to believe that he did it—got you pregnant…”

  “That would put Mara firmly in the mound.”

  “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” He seemed to think it over. “There would be no point in thrashing against her confines, then, if Pepper-Man was her father for real.”

  “She chose to believe Dr. Martin, though, even if she didn’t like him.”

  “A faerie believing in a man, huh? Somehow that strikes me as odd.”

  “Nevertheless, that’s what she did.”

  “And you, Cassie? Are you still confused?”

  I took a moment. “Maybe I have decided that it doesn’t matter. Maybe one thing being true doesn’t mean that the other thing is untrue.”

  “How very faerie of you,” he replied. “How very in-between.”

  “That’s how we do it, us twilight fruits. We decide not to decide, because as soon as you do, something happens that changes things again. It’s better to stand firmly in the middle.”

  “So you don’t share Mara’s thirst for revenge?”

  “Whatever good would that do? It won’t make her human. It won’t take her out of the mound.” It cut my heart to say it out loud.

  “What do you think my niece will do?”

  “You tell me, it’s you she seeks out. You are the one she envisions an accomplice.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do.”

  “Should I offer her to feed of me? Wouldn’t that make her more human, make her more like me?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Well, it’s not like I do much good in life, at least I’d be useful to someone that way.”

  “And vulnerable, too. Look what happened to me.”

  “But would it help her?” His eyes were imploring.

  “Honestly? I think she’s too angry for quick solutions. Even if she discarded her hawk for you, she would still have that seething fury, and it would only backfire on you, Ferdinand. It could cause you so much pain.”

  “If I gave her my heart, though, so she could live in a body rese
mbling mine for a little while?”

  “You would give her your heart to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you want that, Ferdinand? It’s not your fault that she is like she is.”

  “She came to me, didn’t she? Reached out to ask for help.”

  “Do you value your life so little?”

  “… I might think that hers is worth more.”

  I saw it all so clearly then, why Mara went to see him. She must have watched him, followed him around, and seen that he was ripe for just that kind of thing. He was a man without a purpose, a knight without a cause, a gentle soul with a big heart and a conscience heavy with guilt. She could use that, Mara. Could use a man willing to put his heart—literally—in her hands. He was like clay to her, moldable and soft. She could forge a warrior out of him, a servant loyal to the bone.

  “Don’t let her use you,” I said; my lips felt stiff and my mouth was dry. “Don’t let her talk you into anything.”

  “I truly want to help—”

  “It’s not your fault what happened when we were children. Our father’s brutality is not your sin, not our mother’s viciousness either. You couldn’t have saved me. You couldn’t have spoken up. Even if you had insisted about Pepper-Man they wouldn’t have believed you—or they’d just blame me for feeding you lies. There was nothing you could have done, brother, so please don’t break your neck trying to make it right.”

  He was quiet for a while. “She is so horribly alone, though, even among her own kind.”

  “Aren’t we all?” My voice was dry.

  “But Mara needs me,” he tried.

  “As the spider needs the fly.”

  “She is your daughter, Cassie. How can you speak of her like that?”

  “I have known her all her life and loved her with all my heart, so I should know what she’s like.”

  “But if I want to help her—”

  “Don’t.”

  “But if I want to—”

  “Don’t.”

  He gave me a sad and accusing stare. “Is that all you are going to say?”

  “Yes. I know these beings better than you do and I know what a life is worth. Don’t throw yours away on some useless agenda. My daughter is misguided, that is all. She should never have come to you.”