The Waters & the Wild Page 4

  The girl crouched beside her. Bee stared at the other face. Her own face. Fuller, though, and less strange. But the same. She remembered once seeing a photograph of twin girls, identical, but one looked pretty and the other grasping, hungry, demented, almost ugly. It was all in the details—an expression in the eyes, the way the smaller girl reached out to grip her sister’s sleeve. For a moment Bee wanted to feel the girl’s cheek. Instead, she brushed her fingers across her own. It was cool and soft to her dry fingertips, almost like the underside of a mushroom. Her fingernails were lined blackly with dirt, so thick with it they ached.

  Then the girl spoke.

  “People used to do things to changelings like you. Vile-tempered, ugly, old-looking little things all dressed up in good-girl manners and a pretty-girl glamour spell. Test you. Cook your meals in an acorn or an eggshell to see if you cried out, ‘I never saw a meal cooked in an eggshell before, beer brewed in an acorn!’ They frightened you with steel. You don’t like steel, do you? Put an effigy of wood where you lay to curse you. Or you’d be whipped to make you confess. Then you would turn into your true self—a hideous elf that just lay there, not moving, drooling down your chin. If you didn’t pass the test they’d make you drink water poisoned by witches’ gloves. Or they’d drown you in the river. They’d shove you in the oven. Burn you to death alive. Mother is too nice; she’d never do such a thing, even if she knew the truth. You’re lucky, because there are people who would. If they knew that it would make you disappear and bring their real daughter back.

  “What say you, beastie? Can you pass the test? Does it make your skin crawl? Do you feel gnawed by rabid rodents? Will it kill you? Don’t come crying to me, now, fetch. There’s a simple solution to your worries. Give me back my life.”

  12

  “Tiend to Hell”

  Bee hadn’t been in school for a couple of days. She didn’t answer their calls or emails.

  “I’m worried,” Sarah told Haze at lunch. They were sitting together at their table, staring at the empty space where Bee usually was.

  “I’ve been doing some research,” he said. “I think I understand what might be happening.”

  “What? You better tell.”

  “I think she’s a changeling.”

  “A what? One of those fairy things they exchange at birth?”

  He nodded.

  “That explains why we all get along so well,” Sarah said.

  “And it also means someone wants her to go back where she came from.”

  Sarah tugged at her braids. “We should go see her.”

  So after school she and Haze went over to Bee’s house. Lew answered the door.

  “You must be Sarah. And Haze. I’m Lew.”

  “Is she all right?” Sarah asked. “We’re sorry to just come by. We hadn’t heard from her.”

  He asked them in. The house was small but pretty. Bee’s mom had painted the walls and furniture an unusual mix of colors. Lavender with green trim. Yellow with rose. Lots of beaded Indian cushions and Mexican folk art. Framed astrological charts on the walls. Crystals that caught and refracted the sunlight.

  They sat on the purple couch. There was a framed black-and-white photo of Bee watching them from the top of a bookcase. She wasn’t smiling, and her deeply set eyes looked haunted.

  “She’s in the hospital,” Lew said. “Her mom is there now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Can we see her?” Sarah asked.

  “I can check with Deena.”

  There was a silence so loud it echoed. Then Haze said, “We don’t want to bother you. But we’d really like to go there now.”

  He was looking at the black-and-white picture of Bee so hard that he thought his glasses would shatter.

  Sarah glanced over at him. He looked different to her. Grown-up, suddenly, in spite of his pimples and bitten fingernails. She had a sudden impulse to touch his hand.

  Lew nodded. “I’ll arrange it,” he said.

  “We think we know who you are.”

  She opened her eyes. The boy was sitting at her bedside. His hair looked bluish black. Like a crow’s feathers. He wasn’t smiling. What was he doing here? She had been dreaming that she’d had another visitor before, a girl, with the same bluish black glow to her skin, who sang her lullabies. Had it been a dream?

  “B-b-bee?”

  “Is that my name? What a weird name. I don’t think that’s my name at all.”

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  She wrinkled her forehead at him.

  “A hospital, Bee.”

  “I’m not going. There’s too much steel there.”

  “What’s wrong with steel?”

  “I just don’t like it.”

  “Bee,” he said. “I want you to listen. I’ve been doing some research, and I think I know what’s wrong.”

  “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. How do I know right from wrong? I come from a place where it isn’t the same.”

  “Exactly. I think you’re from someplace else.”

  “Under the ground,” she said. “Where the roots take hold and everything ends but also begins.”

  “I think you’re being poisoned.”

  Bee began to say the words with hardly a breath between them. “Bonnie she was and brewed beer in an acorn. Thus spake the lord of the castle. The Queen of Elphane has lost her daughter. A girl in a long green gown with roses for her eyes. We had something to ask of her and now pray tell where has she gone? To perish nimbly among the foxgloves, pretty maid?”

  He put his hand on her wrist. There was a tube going into the vein in her tiny arm.

  “If I’m right, I think you were exchanged at birth. They stole Deena’s real daughter. And now that girl wants to get back. She’ll do anything to get her life back. She’s the doppelganger.”

  “Who?” Bee shrieked, thrashing in the bed, trying to sit up. “Who stole her away?”

  A nurse peeked around the partition.

  “Everything all right?”

  Bee, quiet now, just stared at her.

  “Visiting hours are almost over.” The nurse looked stern.

  He nodded and leaned in closer.

  “They did. You know who they are. Better than I do. You know somewhere inside you. We have to remember. Maybe they can help us stop her.”

  She reached out with her free arm and touched his cheek. There were small red bumps there, as if his body were hurting itself from the inside out. Then she touched his throat where the Adam’s apple protruded roughly. She watched it move up and down under the light graze of her fingers.

  This comforted her, this touching. It was the only thing. But his touch was not for her. He was not hers. She thought of the girl with the beautiful voice. This boy and this girl were meant to be together and she, the one he called Bee—she was meant to go back somewhere. But where?

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Tell me something, strange lad with the crow’s hair. Something to help me remember.”

  “And pleasant is the fairy land,

  But, an eerie tale to tell,

  Ay at the end of seven years,

  We pay a tiend to hell,

  I am sae fair and fu o flesh,

  I’m feard it be mysel.”

  “What? What’s that?” Bee asked him.

  “‘Tam Lin.’ The fairies have to sacrifice one of their own to hell every seven years. ‘Tiend to hell.’ Tam Lin was a prince who was captured by the Fairy Queen.”

  Bee looked around the room for the first time. The walls glowed yellow green, like a bruise. Everything was made of steel.

  “‘Tiend to hell,’” she said, looking into his eyes. “They sacrificed Tam Lin? Because he was fair? They wanted his eyes?”

  “It’s just an old ballad,” the boy said.

  “But what if I’m the tiend to hell? What if I’m the sacrifice?” Her eyes seemed to flare like candles about to go out. “What if this is hell?” she as
ked him. “Because I want to go back. To the other place, the place I belong.”

  “Maybe you’ve done the work you were supposed to do and the sacrifice is over,” he said. “Maybe if someone loves you enough to let go of you, then you can go back.”

  13

  The Journey

  She woke and looked at the clock. It was three in the morning, the time when, she’d heard, people most often die, the time for spells.

  Uranun caripe baglen ol

  Gemeganza de-noan chiis gosaa

  Zamicmage oleo lag-sapah arphe

  Oresa ethamz taa tabegisoroch

  Resa ethamz taa tabesgisoroch

  Esa ethamz taa tabegisoroch

  Zodinu ar zurah paremu

  Zodimibe papnorge maninua

  Zonac dodsih hoxmarch train

  Amonons pare das niis kures

  She bit down on her lip and ripped the tube from her arm, then pressed some gauze to stanch the blood. Surprisingly, she felt no pain.

  She was still wearing the gown. It was a sickly green color and open in the back, exposing her rear end, so she took it off and went naked. It didn’t matter. No one could see her. The invisibility spell had worked. It was easier not to make the unsightly gown invisible along with the rest of her, anyway.

  She left the hospital.

  She stood on the sidewalk in front of Cedars-Sinai. The sky was hazy with night fog. Not much traffic. Not much breeze, but she lifted her arms and closed her eyes. Now it was time for the second spell.

  The city stretched below her, different than she had ever seen it. Beautiful, really. A grid of lights giving off a phosphorescent glow.

  She flew north toward the shimmering hills, then east above Sunset. From this high up the billboards looked different, even huger. Giant boys and girls in designer sunglasses weren’t just reminding her she could never be like them; now they were threatening to eat her alive. But they were so outrageously pretty, she wasn’t sure she’d mind. She passed the fancy shops, the hotels, the record store, the restaurants, the nightclubs. Deena used to hang out here when she was a kid. A hippie born a little too late, coming of age when the kids were shaving their hair off and wearing swastikas instead of peace signs. Luckily, there were still remnants of an earlier time then; Deena had told Bee about having sprout sandwiches and hibiscus tea at a ramshackle place called the Source, seeing Cat Stevens browsing at Tower Records and Joni Mitchell holding court at the Rainbow. Now the Source was some cantina for hipsters, Cat Stevens was a Muslim named Yusef and Joni never left her house in Bel Air. Bee thought, What a strange place this is. If you made up a city like this, no one would have believed you. It seemed more like myth than reality—a whole metropolis built up around an industry that recorded dreams on giant screens, a city bordered by an ocean and a desert and snowcapped mountains. And right through the middle of the urban sprawl were canyons full of flowers, wild animals and secrets.

  The French chateau on the corner was hidden behind a hedge, but you could see the peaked roof, especially from above. She landed softly and walked down the steep tiled driveway and entered, took the elevator to the lobby. No one stopped her—there were a few employees behind the desk—so the invisibility glamour must still be at work. She tiptoed over the carpet and down the steps into a room with high windows and lushly upholstered sofas. The color scheme was garnet and emerald. There were sconces on the wall, and the candlelight made the room seem haunted. She realized that the ghost haunting it was probably herself. Someone had left out a tray with a wine bottle and a glass, and a plate of fudge and strawberries. She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it. Immediately her head felt as if it was going to detach from her body and float away, so she stopped and ate a bit of chocolate instead. She realized then that she wasn’t sick anymore. The symptoms she’d experienced in the hospital were gone. This was when she wondered if she was dead.

  She vibrated with a chill and dropped a strawberry from her hand, then hurried out of the chateau and back out onto the boulevard. The night lifted her again, swirling her into the air like a leaf, and carried her farther east, and then north again into Laurel Canyon.

  This was where she knew she was supposed to be. The road was narrow, and the hills sloped up at a sharp angle on either side. Here were the eucalyptus of her dreams, the sleeping primroses. She flew farther into the canyon world until she came to a strange structure on the side of a hill.

  It was a brick wall and stone balustrades—the remains of a grand stairway. Squat palms and jacarandas grew all around. She remembered her mother showing her this place before, and the queer chill she felt then, as a little girl, staring out of the car window.

  “That’s Houdini’s mansion. The magician. It burned down in the fifties,” Deena had said.

  “Nineteen fifty-eight. His wife, Bess, said he came back to her during a séance,” Lew had added. “And people see an apparition of a coach driven by white horses at Lookout Mountain Avenue.”

  “I knew he’d bring up ghosts,” Deena said, in that eye-rolling way.

  Lew just shrugged.

  What would he think of his girlfriend’s daughter now? At least he’d probably believe it, as opposed to Deena, who never would. Bee knew she should be missing them, but somehow she didn’t. Was this what it felt like to be dead? She missed Sarah, though, and Haze. She remembered Haze sitting at her bedside in the hospital. Was that Haze? He’d only stammered once, and where were his glasses? He hadn’t smiled—he was too worried—but she wished she had seen his smile one more time. Why couldn’t her friends have come with her? The missing was an aching feeling in her chest, but dull, like when a part of your body goes to sleep. She realized the ache was in the exact space where her heart might have been beating. Maybe ghosts had to have longing or they wouldn’t be ghosts; they’d just go away for good.

  But there was another feeling inside her now as well. A sense that she had begun to love the world, finally, this alien world into which she had been thrown. Yes, she loved the world, with its Haze and its Sarah. It was no longer lonely. It was beautiful in its way, with its oceans and roses and light. But there was also the feeling that now, having met her friends, she had accomplished something, the thing, perhaps, she had come for: to touch their lives, to bring them together. Now she could go back to the place where she belonged. The balance had to be restored.

  The bench. The one in her dream. She knelt and ran her hands over the cool stone, the thick leonine legs wrapped with ivy.

  Then she saw the opening in the side of the hill and she knew she was home.

  progeny

  the fairy queen knows these things

  she has had long days and nights

  indistinguishable

  under the earth brooding about the

  state of the world above

  once she stood in a meadow and wept

  because her revels had been interrupted

  because of fire and flood

  disease and death

  still she had no idea how prophetic

  were her words

  the strange illness that poured

  itself between bodies

  through the elixir of the blood

  wasting men before their time

  their faces sunken and lumpy from the drugs

  no immune systems to speak of and all

  because they loved

  the queen’s own husband had had his

  share of male paramours

  it angered her enough to want

  to change the seasons

  but she had sense not to destroy the world

  the towers crumbling as the cards

  foretold they would

  bodies flying from the windows like

  burning birds

  that tsunami wiping out so many in its wake

  the queen saved a young sylph put her in a tree

  impressed with her lithe beauty

  but the girl’s beloved with his camera

  perished along w
ith all the rest

  what of the climate change? it

  terrified even the queen

  a powerful sorceress witch and lesser deity

  the ice melting the dying animals

  everything backwards

  skin cancer more common now

  no ozone to protect

  the queen once fair as milk cowered

  in her underground lair

  avoiding mirrors and the realization

  of how she had changed

  become a wizened monster

  maybe it was better here

  she no longer really missed the world

  it was only her daughter

  she needed

  14

  Progeny

  Haze and Sarah were eating lunch together when they saw her. They knew immediately when she walked right past them. She did not even smile or say hello, but she did glance their way for a moment. Her eyes were completely different. The pupils that had made you want to jump inside them were now tiny pricks.

  She was wearing new clothes—a pink tank top and pink camouflage pants. Her hair was freshly washed and pulled up in a high pony-tail. She wore makeup—mascara, lip gloss, blush on her cheeks.

  A few nights before, Deena held her new daughter and wept with relief that she had recovered. Deena knew nothing of the change, but still she sensed it. This girl who snuggled in her arms had warmer, less translucent skin. She was less frail and less aggressively beautiful. Her breasts were starting to show. She sucked her lower lip like a baby so that her teeth protruded slightly. When did Bee start needing braces? Deena wondered. Even if Deena suspected something, she did not pursue it. She was relieved, deep down, that this new child had come to her. A real child. One who needed her. A child of the world.

  The girl walked right past Haze and Sarah and went to sit at Lindsey Carlisle’s table.

  “I miss her,” Sarah said.

  “Me, too.”

  “What happened?”