A sense of calm entered me. The heady scent of the flowers--every kind of flower, lining the streets and filling all the shops--swirled around me.
I stepped forward, into one of the shops. A dark-skinned man nodded at me from behind a cash register. Strange, exotic blooms sat on the shelves in the front of the store. Behind them were bursting small trees and plants. I walked up to one with leaves so dark they were almost black. The curves of the leaves were so pronounced they looked as if they'd been carved with scissors.
This, I thought, right here.
Wet-leaved tropical trees hung and bent into the aisle and over the damp tile floors. I moved to the back of the store, breathing in the moist, pure scent of soil. The leaves tapped my head as I walked through them, and I put up my
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hands to clear a pathway. If I squinted, imagined my feet making soft dents in the tiles, I could be in an ancient forest, in the old world. The forest behind the palace that we had looked out over that night, from the balcony. I breathed in. The smell of rain. I love that smell, he had said.
I let the leaves brush against my face and hands as I walked to the end of the aisle and back up again, emerging into the main space. I felt fantastic.
"We have some new blooms in," the salesman said, approaching me. He pointed to a refrigeration unit with glass doors.
"Those are beautiful," I said.
"Harvested yesterday morning in Holland." He leaned in and opened the door, revealing flowers so red they were like open cuts.
I left the store and started walking. I almost ran into a couple of men hauling boxes from the back of a truck parked at the curb. I passed by piles of baskets held together with strings, stacks of clay pots and crates filled with small flats of pansies and cacti. Ahead, a group of men was lowering pots on ropes and pulleys through cellar doors. The air was heavy with water, the pungent scent of plants, soil.
Billboards rose over the street, from Sixth Avenue. My head was spinning. I walked past silk-flower shops, warehouses overflowing with plants, stores that sold every sort of gardening paraphernalia. Men loitered outside every doorway, it seemed. Down the block a profile flashed into view, a man ducking into a store. I recognized him immediately.
There! His dark hair curled over his collar. I pushed my way past the junipers and spruces, the shop owners and the
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workingmen shouting out to one another, bending down and taping up plants for delivery. I turned in to the store.
Maybe it was the flowers that convinced me he had actually come back to me, that he was there right then, looking for me. I had the sudden, sharp memory of him plucking a flower and holding it to my face, slipping it behind my ear. What kind of flower? I stopped walking. Gardenia, I remembered suddenly. The balcony had been covered in flowers. He had leaned down and snapped one off for me, a glowing white bloom. The smell of it had seemed to penetrate my skin.
A man shoved past me, and my elbow pushed against a bamboo tree, the long stalk jutting up, pressing my skin. I stumbled forward into the store.
I focused in. The flowers shot up all around me, in every color and shape. The place seemed to specialize in orchids. Perfect, deformed-looking blooms covered with spots, flapping out like parachutes, twisting and curving up, dangling in threads toward the soil. I caught my breath. The large trees were in the back, just as in the last shop.
I walked toward the sprawling greens, bending down and pushing my way through. With each step I could feel my wings loosen, my skin pull and tighten, my eyes grow more clear and bright.
"Theodore?" I whispered.
I could feel the silk of the ball gown. Like water.
I reached the back of the store. Saw a man squatting down in front of a tree. His black hair curved over his collar.
I could smell the rain, the gardenias. I heard the music from the ballroom, drifting out onto the balcony. I felt the glass slippers cradling my feet.
For a moment I was so close. It was as if he'd always been
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right there, in front of me, ready to take me back. Then he turned his face to me.
"Can I help you?" a strange man asked.
"No. No, thank you," I said. I felt a feather rub against my arm and slapped it off. I stumbled as I moved to the exit, veering past the two workers, careful not to bump up against the flowers.
I pushed my way down the street as if I were swimming and moved back to Seventh Avenue. I kicked over a pot of soil, not meaning to. I almost stepped into a box full of daisies. I squinted ahead, the strange mixture of forest and city, the lush green and the concrete, the skyscrapers. I focused on moving forward. By the time I reached my own door, I felt as if I'd been walking through the city for days.
I let myself in the front door and dragged myself up the stairs. Once I was in my apartment, I breathed out, let my whole body slow down.
The room closed around me, and a feeling crept in, gnawing at my guts and bones. A howl formed, then swept out and broke through my eyes and mouth and into the air.
I was ridiculous. I spit out the word: "Ridiculous." An old, desperate woman. I hated my swirling hair, loathed my own skin. I deserved all of it, for what I'd done. I could not suck enough air into my lungs.
I pulled the dress over my head, then tore off the bandage that bound me. Desperate, as if I were on fire. Then, leaning forward, I let my wings spread out on either side of me and began to slowly pull them in, until they blanketed me completely.
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Chapter Seven
AFTER MAYBETH AND I RETURNED FROM THE palace, I tried to forget what had happened there. Everything I had done. How I had felt in my human body, the way my heart had pounded as blood rushed through me, the feel of the marble floor pressing into my feet. The air changing weight and shape and tingling against my skin. His eyes right on mine, seeing into me. As if he, and only he, could see who I really was.
No.
I needed to buckle down and start focusing on the task at hand. Cinderella. I had so many things to do: Go to her. Dress her. Get her to the ball, so that he could fall in love with her and make her his wife. This is what was written in the great tree, what the elders had decreed.
Once she arrived at the ball, my task would be complete. The moment he set eyes on her, he would love her. It was his destiny. What she was made for.
"Lil!"
I glanced up. Gladys swung above me, laughing and
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sticking out her tongue. She threw up her hands and swooped down, pretending she was falling.
"Help!" she screamed. "I'm drowning!" She plunged into the lake so hard that sprays of water leaped up, drenching me.
"Gladys, what are you doing?" I slipped into the lake next to her, tugging at her hand, and gasped. There, past my hand, two of the fairy elders slid by underneath the water, about a half mile below the surface. They seemed giant through all that water. Their bright purple robes made them glisten like sea-fish, their wings spread out like giant fins.
I pulled back and leaped back onto the pier.
"Get out of the water, Gladys," I hissed.
Just then her head burst through the surface and her laughing face was below mine. Gladys was the most beautiful of all of us, and even I had to blink sometimes when I saw her up close, to be sure I wasn't dreaming.
"Why such a grouch?" she asked, shaking her head and sprinkling water droplets across the surface of the water. "I was just playing."
"Well, you're not funny," I said. "I'm trying to work. Do you even know what that is? And of course you have to come bother me at the exact moment that two of the elders are passing by."
Gladys stopped laughing. Her face paled. Suddenly she was right next to me, crouching on the pier. "What? When?"
"Just now." I looked down into the water.
Her body slumped into mine, and I thought I could feel her shaking.
"Here," I said gently, putting my arm around her. "Just let's not do anything to get into trouble,
all right? This is an
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important time in the human kingdom and we all have so much to do." I felt bad for her. And for me.
"Yes," she said. "You're right. I have some vines to tend and humans to visit. I need to find Lucibell. Yes, yes, yes." She sat up. I could see tears glistening on her lashes. "But did you and Maybeth really sneak into the castle?" she asked. She looked up at me slyly, her eyes peeking out from under her thick, tear-speckled lashes. "She said you actually showed yourself to the prince."
My heart almost stopped altogether. I would kill Maybeth, I thought.
"Gladys," I whispered. "Don't ever say that again. Please! And of course it's not true. Why would you even think such a thing?"
Her face shifted and a smile cracked her face wide open. "You love him!" She laughed, and then leaned right over and kissed my cheek before leaping back into the air. "But I won't tell anyone."
"Gladys, please!" I was desperate now. "It's not true!"
She laughed again, fluttering above me. "Whatever you say. I don't have time for you or your love affairs, anyway, Lil. I've got so much work to do. Maybe you should go see Cinderella." Squealing with laughter, Gladys swooped up into the air. "Or better yet, the prince!"
With that, she was gone. I felt the guilt clenching my neck, burrowing its way through my throat, up to my mouth and tongue. I pulled into myself and tried to think of her, Cinderella, everything I had to do to help her meet her fate. Instead, all I saw was him. I longed to be in that body again, to feel that sensation of giving myself over to such a force.
The sun beat down overhead, and in front of me the
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branches of the great tree rose glimmering out of the water, the leaves rippling in the breeze like a school of fish shimmying past. Fairies fluttered all around me, leaving the water and diving back in again. Everyone had their job to do, as I had mine.
But I sat back for one second, two seconds more. Letting the memories sink into me. The shape and weight of his body pressing into air, and then against me. The feel of his skin under my palm, soft and slightly damp at the back of his neck. The way I had grown so large and yet felt so fragile and strange, delicate. I had loved the feel of the marble floor under my feet. The scent of gardenias from outside. The faint scent of the meat being roasted in the castle's kitchen, down the stairs and past the gilded doors.
"Theodore," I whispered at the air, liking the sound of it, and I closed my eyes and imagined the way a flame had seemed to overtake my whole body in an instant when I touched him. The way it had her, when she dreamed of him, but now it was all me. Before then I had not experienced desire in any form--it wasn't part of our world, wasn't anything we even understood--and I took to it.
It suited me.
OVER THE next week, I found myself looking for him everywhere. I had seen him twice, in the diner and outside the flower shop--the signs were there. But he was elusive. I went to the diner each night, dressing carefully, taking time to brush out my hair. I couldn't afford whole meals, so I sat at the counter with books from the store, slowly eating cups of soup and nursing mugs of black coffee, my head snapping 126 up every time someone walked through the front door. I sat there for hours some nights, convinced he would arrive any second. But he didn't come back, and I became more and more convinced that Theodore had come to this world as a sign. A sign that they were ready to forgive me. That I had a task to do. That we would meet again in the other world.
In the store I found it hard to concentrate on the work in front of me. I seemed to spend all my time trying to remember, as if understanding all of it would bring him back to me sooner. What was it about him? I just remembered the way he saw me, the way he made me someone new. He hadn't only seen me. He had recognized me. What had he recognized? What was it?
My mind circled back and back to that moment, trying to burrow in.
We could see humans back then. We could pass by them and feel their thoughts, their suffering, the parts of them that were closed off to the world, the parts of them that ached for it. But none of it ever touched us. We used to laugh at the mess of human life. But standing in the prince's chambers in human form, staring up at him, I had seen everything with the eyes of a fairy and a woman. Everything, from the tiny beads of sweat above his lip to the fear and desire that gnawed at his gut. I remembered how I had tasted it when I leaned in and touched his mouth, how I had wanted to take him into me. It was a dangerous way to see a person. I knew every moment of his life, every feeling passing over him, every fear and memory, and I saw it all right as he was seeing me, as a woman, alive to the world.
My mind beat up against it.
Everything had seemed different inside that body: His
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hand running across my waist. The flame in the center of me. And the smells. Of course. Had there been smells before? I couldn't remember. That night on the balcony, the palace. The smell of rain and flowers and lush grass. The smell of champagne as I brought the glass to my lips and felt the bubbles pop against the tip of my nose. The perfume the women wore, gliding past me. The smell of silver and waxed marble and his jacket, as we spun across the floor. It had felt as if the entire world had just split open. As if I'd lived, until then, on the surface of things, never knowing that you could hack through to something else. How could the fairy world have compared afterward?
The ball was a few short weeks away, and I had heard nothing from Veronica. I'd told George not to ask questions, that it was all taken care of. I knew I needed to call her to make arrangements, but there was a part of me that just wanted to forget everything and wallow in the past, the way I'd been doing.
Then one afternoon she appeared, as if I'd conjured her.
I was counting the register for the day when the front door banged open, and she stomped over to the counter. "Hey, Lil," she said. "Are you busy?"
She was a mess. Black lines ran down her cheeks, and it took me a second to realize she'd been crying. I hurried out from behind the counter.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "I was just closing up. Let me get you some tea."
"Thank you." And then, "Do you have any gin?"
"No."
"Whiskey?" She laughed, and her face crumpled into tears.
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"What is it?" I moved toward her and put my hand on hers. I tried to see into her, the way I might have once. "Are you hurt?"
"No," she said, her voice ragged, black tears streaming down her face. "It's just ... I'm sorry, I just can't get myself together."
"Let's go sit down, okay?"
She nodded. I locked the front door, then led her to the office in back, gesturing to the chair at George's desk. I pulled out a stool from the corner of the room and sat across from her, taking her hand in mine.
"What happened?"
The sobs were moving up and down her body. "I'm so embarrassed," she said, "to be crying like this over some guy."
"Ah," I said. Relieved it was only that.
She looked around the office, self-conscious. "You're working, you have things to do. You must think I'm completely psycho, barging in on you like this."
"No, no," I said. "It's okay."
She looked at me then. "I guess I feel like you know things. I don't know why. I felt it right away when I sold the books to you and then even more when you came to the salon."
I waved my hand, trying to mask how anxious and glad her words made me. "It's because I'm so old," I said. "It gives one a certain wizened air."
But she just looked at me, her eyes bright blue from her tears. Water eyes. "No," she said. "It's something else."
I smiled nervously, then looked away. "I'm sorry you were disappointed by this boy," I said. "I know how much it hurts."
"Thanks," she said. "I wish I wasn't like this. But I feel
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like someone ripped my heart out. I don't know why, but I can't ever just be normal about anything."
"I know."
"I don't know w
hy I'm this torn up about it, though," she said. "I mean, it seems totally out of proportion to what happened. So something didn't work out. I just wanted so badly for it to work out. And I know in a few days I'll be fine, but it doesn't change how broken I feel now."
I could almost feel the longing in her. I wondered if she dreamed of him, the way Cinderella had dreamed, so long ago. I thought of the man in the diner, his eyes burning into my skin. My heart clenched in my chest, despite myself.
"You're one of the most vibrant girls I've ever seen," I said. "I had a sister once, like you. You remind me so much of her. She's been gone a long time, and you bring her back to me."
"Really?"
"Yes." It was true: Maybeth was more real to me in that moment than she had been in years. She might have been right there.
"What was she like?"
I smiled. "Wild," I said. "Always screaming with laughter and getting her nose into things. But she was also very kind, gentle. She could heal animals, in fact. She had a special connection with them."
"What happened to her? Or is that something I shouldn't ask?"
"Oh, she ..." I paused, unsure what to say. "There was an accident. When we were young. A long time ago."
"I'm sorry," she said. She leaned back into George's chair. "I like that I remind you of her. That's funny, I forgot
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you told me that. And you remind me of my grandmother. I mean, not that you're ... Well, she was just amazing, Lil. She was an actress when she was young, in Berlin. Just the most glamorous lady you could ever meet. She'd stand over the stove cooking in heels and red lipstick, whip up a strudel or some schnitzel like it was nothing."