Godmother

  She sat up, and it took me a minute to realize she was crying. I stopped moving and watched her, her face in her hands and her hair streaming around them. Her bare arms and the strange burlap shift she was dressed in. I noticed how the soles of her feet were black.

  The sun was starting to rise. The longing in her was so strong that the walls seemed to turn yellow with it. It seemed to be turning me, too, into something else. She wanted something she did not have. The man. Of course. She had more desire in her than any human I had ever come across. “Don't you?” I whispered.

  Her longing had saturated her dream, and me. I could not shake it off. That restlessness, like a gaping wound. I had seen countless human dreams, human desires, but I had never felt infected the way I did then, in her garret room. She was so sad. She wanted something, someone she could not have. She wrapped her arms around her knees and pushed her face down, her shoulders shaking.

  I was astonished to realize how badly I wanted, even then, to go back into her sleep, to the man, despite her anguish. How much I wanted to hear what he had whispered, the words I hadn't quite been able to make out. I wanted to see his face, his eyes. Tunnel my way in.

  There was a faint scratching outside the door.

  She sat up quickly, wiped her face. “Stepmother?” she asked quietly. Her voice seemed to coil through the room and snake around me.

  She jumped off the mattress and scurried to the door. She listened for a second, her eyes wide with fear, and then moved back into the room, her shoulders relaxing. As she passed me, where I was hovering, I noticed a bruise on her leg. How tired she was. I could feel the ache in her limbs.

  She walked to the window then, the small circle punched into the stone wall. I stayed in a corner, hovering, watching her face. She was looking at something far away. Her face grew soft, as if she were sleeping, and her eyes glimmered and shone. I had never seen human eyes like that.

  I flitted from the corner to the window, looked out onto grass and wood. Desperate to see what she saw.

  “What do you see?” I whispered. She flinched.

  Her eyes grew wet. I slipped up to her neck, her ears, facing the window.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”

  I followed her gaze, but all I could see was empty space. The fields and wood stretching out under the early-morning light, the mountains that seemed to float in the sky, and then, just barely, the tip of the castle, the curve of turrets and towers, in the distance.

  I SAT up, startled, and looked around. The take-out bag lay crumpled next to my hand, alongside a battered Styrofoam box with a piece of lettuce stuck to the bottom. The storm clashed and banged against the building, the rain like pounding nails. My wet clothes from the night before lay in a jumble at the foot of the bed, still damp; the whole room smelled of them, as if everything had gone rotten.

  It was just after five in the morning.

  I turned and opened the window, looked out at the water towers, the rooftops, the smudged gray and black sky. The rain pounded down, much more intensely than it had the night before. That raw scent rushed into the room. I reached my hand out the window and let it spatter with rain, watched the raindrops drip down my wrist and across my forearm.

  I looked more closely at my hand and wrist. Something was different. I stretched out my fingers. Moved them up to my face. The light was so dim, a pale silver mixed with amber. I leaned over and flicked on the lamp, placed my hand under it as if it were a microscope, and stared.

  The skin was smoother, paler. I could have sworn it. It was not the same gnarled, twiglike hand I had fallen asleep with. Was it? I shook my head, closed my eyes and opened them. My eyes dropped to my bare legs. I moved away from the window, suddenly nervous with the light on, and stared down at my smooth skin, my small curving toes. My vein-less legs. I could feel my eyes welling over. I stretched back, lifted my arms over my head, and then turned and smiled into the pillow, letting my whole body relax.

  It was just past seven A.M. when I awoke again. My hands were wet, I realized, as were the sheets near the window. The rain was coming in at a slant now, causing a huge puddle to form on the wooden floor. Quickly, I sat up and slammed the window shut. I rushed to the bathroom to grab a towel. Slipped into a fresh shirt and pair of pants. I stopped with my leg through one side. My skin. It was wrinkled now, lined with veins. I held my right hand out in front of me, saw that it was gnarled and spotted.

  I ignored the feeling that dropped over me then, descending on my body like a dress, falling around me in folds. I was used to that sort of disappointment. In the early days, I had awakened every morning to that same feeling, that same sinking sense of being trapped and hemmed in, the ground pressing up into my spine and limbs. When I camped outside the palace and tried desperately to make my way back to him, it was almost unbearable. No one had recognized me. I could not make anyone understand who I was. It was like losing your sight. I had ripped up whole clumps of grass and earth in frustration, and it had splintered through my entire body, that pain. Now it was a dull ache, as familiar as sheets and air and sun.

  I cleaned the floor as well as I could, wrung out the sheets in the bathtub and hung them from the shower-curtain rod. I grabbed the take-out box and brought it to the kitchen, to the full trash bag I needed to drag to the Dumpster downstairs.

  I pulled a set of clean sheets from the hall closet and slowly made the bed. Silver light streamed in. The rain thumped on glass and brick. As I pulled the top corners tight, I caught myself again in the mirror.

  Now, as always, I couldn't believe that the woman I was seeing was me. I walked up and put my face right next to the glass, looked straight into my sunken eyes, the lines shooting off in every direction. I pulled off my shirt, stared at my grizzled, hanging breasts, my gathering stomach, the feathers that dropped to the floor. My wings twisted out of my back, ugly at the roots, slicing into skin, but with feathers so shining and perfectly white that they made the decay of my body even more stark. Without them I could have been just anyone, any old lady who'd ended up alone.

  I was late for work. I sighed, stumbled into the bathroom to wipe the sweat from my body, pour water down the creases of my arms and legs.

  Hunger pressed in, gnawing at my gut. Why did I always have to be starving? Once I was showered, I folded in my wings and wrapped the bandage around my torso, then pulled my clothes back on and headed to the kitchen. I hated myself for not having gone to the grocery store as I'd planned. I never took care of myself properly, it seemed. All my refrigerator revealed was the same jar of pickles, the same ketchup. One egg with a crack skidding across the top. A tiny hunk of bread, which I stuffed into my mouth, almost choking on the crumbs that sprayed across my throat. It only made me more hungry. I twisted the top of the jar and grabbed several small pickles, biting down on them all at once, letting the tang of them shock my mouth.

  It was then that I saw the book, which I'd left propped open on the couch. The Cottingley Fairies. The girl, Veronica, had not thought they were real. “A scam,” she'd said, two little girls fooling everyone with a camera and hat pins. But I knew my own kind. I knew what was in those photos. Just seeing those flitting bodies made me feel like I wasn't alone, not in the way I'd been before. They had been photographed in this world. My sister. My friends. I picked up the book, checked the dates again: 1917. I must have been in New York then, I thought, but my memory was strange, blurry. I had flashes from my years in the human world, all those moments of yearning, of thinking I had found them. I remembered waking up, seeing the clock, the pier, the water, thinking I had gone home before realizing that nothing would be the same again, that I had lost everything Just one year out of all the years I'd been here. A blur of years, a long haze of sleeping and dreaming and always trying to get back to them. It was only in the past few decades that I could remember my human life with the same vividness I could remember the fairy world. And they had been right there, playing by the side of a creek. With two little gi
rls, rather than me. Had they been watching me? Were they watching me now?

  I stared at the main photo, with the four dancing fairies spread across the lower half, looking so free and perfect and complete. Gladys, Lucibell, Maybeth, another I could vaguely remember from the lake. Had she taken my place? It should have been me in the photo. All of them with their insect wings, me with the feathered ones of a godmother. But Maybeth and I had shared the same heart. I traced the photo with my finger. It was her on the far right. The pose of the body, the curve of the wing were unmistakable. Why was she showing herself to me now, after so long?

  I felt self-conscious suddenly. “Are you here, sister?” I whispered. I stopped moving and listened.

  I heard rain, cars, voices, the faint stomp of feet overhead.

  “Tell me.”

  The light shifted in the corner of the room, and I turned my head, trying to catch her. I remembered all the games we used to play: flying along a shaft of light, in and out of a glint on the surface of water. In the corners, just out of a human's range of vision. Our wings folding out like accordions.

  “Maybeth!” I said. “Where are you?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to keep from laughing. Then I opened them quickly. Looked all around. But there was nothing there at all, no flicker of wings or moving bits of light. The room was the same as always, with its wooden floor, dark furniture, the yellowed blinds hanging over the windows.

  “Why now? Why are you coming back now?”

  “Everything they long for, we already have,” Maybeth had said the day I returned to the lake, Cinderella's need consuming me, a new vigor in my work. And the stained grass, the shards of glass covering it.

  I shook my head, picked up the book. Something dropped out of it. The girl's card, with its pink old-fashioned script, poked out from under the couch. I bent down, groaning from the crackling in my knees.

  I looked around again. “Did you send her to me?” I asked. “To help me find you?” I waited one beat, two beats, but there was nothing except silence.

  Outside, a man shouted in some Asian tongue.

  A sense of hope opened within me. What occurs in the world of faerie will become manifest in the world of men.

  I had read it in a book once, one of the old, priceless books that sometimes passed through the shop, books centuries old, so delicate that George kept them in a safe in the back office. George had been excited enough by that one to call me in and show me, having no idea whom he was telling.

  “This man,” he'd said, “claimed to know fairies. Elders, he called them, the most powerful fairies. This is a book of their lore. Four centuries old, Lil. Only two copies in the world. Can you believe that?”

  We'd looked through it together, in the few hours he had the book before selling it to one of his regular buyers, an elderly gentleman with a traditional library right in his Upper East Side town house. I'd found a small section on fairies who crossed over and became human.

  What occurs in the world of faerie will become manifest in the world of men.

  I had clasped onto that. Believed that there was still a tie between me and them. That what I had done there affected this world and that what I did in this world affected them. And that someday they would come back for me.

  I moved to the window. The rain was stilling now, but the air crackled and hummed with it. The street seemed completely washed out and new, taxicabs moving through the wet streets and spraying the sidewalks. Random people in suits or raincoats or shorts and sneakers dodged puddles and each other as they rushed by. There was something wonderful in all this, I thought, surprising myself. Maybe the world was just opening to me, in a way it hadn't before.

  I shook my head. Foolish old woman. I would go crazy if I stayed inside another minute, talking to ghosts. But I was laughing now, and something new was moving through me. Hope and nostalgia mixed together. The image of the lake, all of us buzzing around it.

  I grabbed my keys and purse, locked up, and headed downstairs.

  My upstairs neighbor Joanne was standing in the foyer by the mailboxes. She looked small and meek, with her blue-gray curls and her cat's-eye glasses.

  “Lillian,” she said, turning to me. I had no choice but to stop. “Can you believe this? Morris not dead a few months and his grandson's gone and sold the building. Not one ounce of respect for what his grandfather stood for.” Her face was like a pot of tea about to whistle.

  “I'm sure it will be fine,” I said.

  “It's not fine,” she said. “We're moving to Flushing. The buyout will barely cover the move. After twenty years that we've been in this building. And you, it must be twice that. What are they offering you?”

  I thought of the papers gathering on my kitchen table, which I hadn't been able to bring myself to look through. I remembered the day Joanne had moved in, with her late husband, how radiant she had seemed then, starting something new.

  “I can't talk now,” I said, gesturing to my wrist. “I'm late for work.” I didn't know what else to say, only that I needed to get out of the building, into the street.

  “We found a decent broker, if you need any help.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Once I was outside, I couldn't walk fast enough. How could he sell the building? Could he do that? I headed across Thirty-sixth Street toward Eighth Avenue. Past the zipper store, past the shop selling buttons of every shape and size and color, past a group of caramel-colored boys slouching in front of a deli, an old woman with a small dog yapping at her heels, a young man with a baby slung across his chest. I turned onto Eighth, heading downtown. The city closed in around me. Four lanes of traffic raced toward me like a river. A homeless man dragged himself down the sidewalk, and a line of bedraggled men stood on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street. Bleating cabs and buildings shooting up, flickering neon signs and a sea of people standing on curbs with shopping bags, looking lost. Up ahead, the blinking lights of Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. Food stands everywhere selling pretzels and kebabs and sausages and fruit and soda. Subway grates looking down over trash and rats. What a place, I thought. What a place for fairies to return to.

  I walked downtown along trash-strewn sidewalks, block after block, the city passing on either side of me, with all its life, its filth, but me barely noticing now. If they were here to take me home after all this time, I knew there was only one place they would be.

  It was eight A.M. I had two hours before the shop opened.

  I hadn't gone down to the pier in months, maybe years. I had stopped letting myself hope that I might ever find them again. Now my heart felt like it would burst open and I could almost see them already, telling me it was time to come home.

  Eighth turned to Hudson, Jane Street appeared to my right, but with new energy I made my way farther downtown, veering west to the water. The farther I walked, the more my body stretched out, loosened, and came to life.

  I crossed over the West Side Highway. The water glimmered under the sun. I moved forward without even thinking, past the piers and the shining glass buildings and the joggers and bikers and people walking their dogs along the thin, curving path that lined the river.

  I could forget everything, moving like this. My body blurring into the next moment and the next, until I dissolved into air. It was as close to flying as I could remember. I passed people on their way to work, men and women dressed in suits and looking at me in open disbelief. I laughed out loud as I passed them. “I'm not an old lady at all!” I wanted to shout, and I became more and more convinced that I would find them waiting for me, all of them, telling me it was finally time to return.

  A half hour later I walked past benches and lamp posts and trees, and turned down West Street. I knew the way by heart, no matter how much time had gone by. This is the place I always came back to. The earliest memories I had of this world. I headed down the same path I always had, the water straining against my senses, and turned down to the pier with the small clock tower at the end of it. The wate
r glimmered from behind. Pier A. I came right up on the river. Every cell in my body felt alive, tingling. My breath coming heavy and fast.

  Breathing in, I leaned down against the railing and stared into the water. It was almost reptilian looking, thick, scaly, and green-black, like dinosaur skin; I imagined I could reach out and drum my fingers against the hard surface. Everything was quiet.

  “Where are you?” I picked up a pebble and dropped it in, watched it pierce the surface and disappear. I imagined it slipping past Maybeth's face as she slept in a water lily.

  I looked around. A few bored commuters stood by the water. A couple was heading up a ramp onto the barge where a crowd of people stood waiting for the ferry, reading newspapers and talking on phones. I walked to the end of the pier and looked out. A clock glowed from the other side of the river, mirroring and magnifying the one I was standing under. I could almost see the silver steps and him on the other side of them, waiting. The way the hands of the clock moved slowly and slowly around, reflecting in the water. Reminding me that in this world, I had all the time I could ever need.

  I closed my eyes. Remembered that feeling of descending from the air into the water and down to the bottom of the lake, where the roots of the great tree flared out in every direction, where I could press myself against any vine or leaf and feel the fate of a human pressing back at me. How on certain nights we would all descend into the heart of the tree and gather to hear the elder's decrees. This here; this was our real home, where we all came from.

  Something rubbed against my leg and I jumped. It was just a kitten.