phoned the Will O’Wisp, the hospital where my mother worked. It was actually called the William O. Wistop Memorial Long-Term Care Facility, but no one called the hospital that except newcomers, who were easy to recognize because they said the William O. Wistop Memorial Long-Term Care Facility instead of the Will O’Wisp. The Will O’Wisp was a government make-work scheme, and somewhat of a boondoggle, but it employed my mother, so it wasn’t one hundred percent useless.

“Psych,” I said to the automated system that directed calls. “Margery Strange, nurse station.”

The system beeped and whirred as I was redirected. Psych was in the Will O’Wisp’s original wing, a building of such an era that it still had a functioning pneumatic tube messaging system threaded throughout. I imagined my call as a vacuumed pod, a whoosh as it shot through the system, clearing the tight angles around gas pipes and water mains, working its way to the —

“Hello.” The voice wasn’t my mother’s. My mother was supposed to be the one to pick up the phone. Instead, Amber Holden had.

“I’d like to speak with Chief Nurse Strange, please.” I put on my best British accent, the voice of a relative who had consigned a mother or an aunt or a distant cousin with a claim to family fortune to a place as far away as possible so that there was no way that the indisposed relative could possibly arrange to be back in time for the reading, and then contesting, of the will.

Amber heard right through me. “Regulations say nurses are not allowed to take personal calls on shift. You know that, Enid.”

“Her shift hasn’t started yet.” The clock on the oven read 6:59. “She has a minute to come to the phone.”

“Oh, sorry, it’s already seven o’clock here.” The smirk on Amber’s face was loud enough to be heard all the way down the line.

“Can you give her a message, then?”

“No.”

“Even in an emergency?”

“You sound too calm for it to be an emergency. Are you just lonely and want your mummy? All alone in your house by yourself?”

“Well, that’s redundant,” I said. “Alone by myself.”

“How’s this for redundant?” There was a click as Amber hung up on me. As per additional hospital regulations, my mother’s cellphone would be off and stored in her locker, so calling her on that would come to naught. Other than walking to the Will O’Wisp and planting myself in the chairs outside my mother’s secure ward, hoping some-one would notice me, then violate more hospital regulations to let me in to find her, there was nothing to do but wait until my mother came off shift and could show me how to make the notebook work. I flipped through the pages. Still empty, except for a series of doodles I’d made while on the phone with Amber: a stick figure with pigtails doing jumping jacks when I flipped quickly through the pages to animate her. She smudged as I erased each of her; too bad erasing Amber Holden wasn’t that easy.

Amber Holden disliked me. I didn’t really like her either, and maybe in a town larger than our fishbowl-sized one we wouldn’t have had much occasion to run into each other. But in this one, we did. Constantly. Me being in middle school and Amber being in high school, the six-year age gap between us, and the fact that we strove to avoid ever meeting did nothing to prevent our frequent encounters.

Plus, Dr. Holden, Amber’s father, and my mother worked together. More precisely, Dr. Holden, geriatric psychiatrist, was my mother’s supervisor at work. My mother, in turn, supervised Amber Holden, who volunteered on their floor in preparation for her future career in medicine. On all sides, we were surrounded by Holdens. Assailed by them, even.

Worse still, my mother was on friendly terms with Amber. Whenever we saw Amber about town, she and my mother would have some tedious conversation that always ended with Amber proclaiming how great her family was by relating some syrupy family moment of all of them together, even Amber’s brothers, who had long since moved on to more prosperous climes. Gloating completed, Amber always gave me a fake smile before taking her leave, a fake smile my mother chose to believe was real. When Dr. Holden saw us, he also smiled, but his lips barely curled up and his eyes darted away. At least my mother was never fooled by that paltry grinning attempt. Plus, Dr. Holden never came over to chat.

The only Holden family member who ever seemed genuinely happy to see us was Dr. Sivaloganathan, who was Dr. Holden’s wife and Amber’s mother. She too worked at the Will O’Wisp, but as an orthopedic specialist in a wing as far away as possible from my mother, Dr. Holden, and Amber’s ward. Upon noticing us, wherever we were, Dr. Sivaloganathan would bound over, crossing traffic from one side of the street to the other or banging her shop-ping cart into shelves and promotional displays in a rush to greet us. Then another chat about how great the Holden-Sivaloganathan family was, and finally peace (at least until the next encounter with either her or her daughter.)

But back in the here and now, the air smelled of close-by rain, that rotting vegetable stench. Trash cans clattered down the street and banged into the sound barrier separating the highway from the end of our cul-de-sac. Mrs. Delavecchio (who despised rain like most old people) would be grumbling about the changes in barometric pressure aggravating her arthritis. I considered going over there so she’d have someone to complain to.

Then a thump. A loud one against the side of the house. And another, this one in the back. The wind gave an additional banshee shriek before everything, for a few short seconds, calmed.

“No one knows you are here,” I told myself, willing the patter of my heart to relax. “You are fine.” I sometimes gave myself pep talks like this, and I sometimes answered (since you did what you had to do when you often had only yourself for company). My retorts were in what I always imagined to be an art nouveau font, thin and rounded and the cat’s pajamas.

Maybe.

“You have a hair dangling over your nose. It’s a nui-sance. Do something about it,” I said. “Move an arm. Brush it away.” I didn’t, staying frozen with one foot in the kitchen, one foot in the hall. The hair tickled. I sneezed as best I could without moving.

“Oh, Enid,” I said. “It’s just a trash can. You heard them rolling around the street, the way they always do in a storm.” I went to the staircase to look through the side window. It was high up and shaped in a hexagon with the glass warped at the edges like the eye of an insect. I peeked out into the kaleidoscope world.

Nothing. The trash cans that had smacked into the house must have rolled off down the street.

What about the second bang? It was out back. That trash can couldn’t have rolled down the street.

“I’ll go check, just to show me nothing untoward is going on.” I crept to the upstairs bathroom to look out its window, ready to see one of the black plastic cylinders lying in our flower bed. Instead, toppled against the side of the house was one of the saplings. Poking out from around the corner was the head of another. The two bangs. Two trees taken down by the wind.

I ran back downstairs. Maybe this threat to our house’s faerie protection would be enough for the notebook to reveal something. But each page, every page, was still blank. I redialed the Will O’Wisp number, hoping Amber was on break. My fingers slipped. The handset clattered to the ground. I scooped it back up and tried again.

“Hello.” Amber’s voice sounded pleasant when she wasn’t being nasty. “Women’s Psych Ward.”

I hung up.

The book and I went to my bedroom. I checked that the curtains, blackout ones three layers thick, were in place. (My mother had gotten them for me when I finally told her that no matter how I placed my bed in the room, the street lamp always shone directly into my eyes at night. I had tried to keep that from her, she being already annoyed by our forced move into the town proper, but one look at me after our third night in our rented house and she knew by the way the bags under my eyes dragged all the way down to my jowls that I hadn’t been sleeping and correctly surmised that the street lamp was keeping me awake.) I lay on the bed and told myself it was the wind that had knocked the trees over. A coincidence.

With the empty notebook of spells your mother left for you? Don’t be daft, Enid. This is faerie work.

I jumped up as another bang hit right under my win-dow. I could have looked out, but that would have meant ripping the blackout curtains from the wall (to ensure maximum protection from the street lamp’s attempts to ruin my slumber, I’d glue-gunned off-brand Velcro squares to the edges of my blackout curtains and the window frame to keep drafts from lifting the curtain).

Focus, Enid.

Well, what did I want me to do about it? The trees were falling, and my mother’s notebook was empty.

“I don’t control the weather,” I said aloud. “And I’m not an expert in steganography, either.”

Steganography?

“Steganography means the art of hidden writing. You should know that since I do.”

I was humoring you so you’d feel better, all right?

“Fine.”

Now the faeries?

I took in a gulp of air. “How serious can this actually be? She wanted us to do prep work. And this is our mother we’re talking about. The woman who has bought clothes for me already all the way up to adult size.”

I doubt playing dress-up in our future clothes will bam-boozle any faeries.

“I mean that she’s a planner. She’s prepared. She’s some other p-word that fits in with prepared and planned.”

Perfected? Primed? Practised?

“Exactly. I’d bet that the impermanent magic protecting our house is still ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent effective. She just wants to touch it up. So I will be fine. I’ll stay in my room. The blackout curtains work both ways. Any mischievous faerie skulking about outside won’t know I’m here. Even if I turn on a light to read —”

Or for comfort.

“Or for comfort,” I admitted, “they can’t see in. So, I’m all good.

All good?

“All good.”

Then why am I crying?

I was crying because my own bravado couldn’t com-pensate for the fact that I’d failed. My mother had finally entrusted me with a faerie task, and I couldn’t do it. She’d come home at the end of her shift, sigh, and then do it herself. She would never never never never never ever delegate any other faerie tasks my way. I would never learn anything more about the faeries.

“It’s not real,” I told myself. “I’m not crying.”

I hated crying the way Mrs. Delavecchio hated rain. My eyes puffed out and my cheeks got red and my nose clogged up so that I had to breathe loudly through my mouth. I looked like a baboon. I lay back on the bed with a book in my arms pretending to read while I sobbed. I hated being young and the faeries and my mother and Amber and this rented house. I wanted to go home, real home, farmhouse home.

My eyes, I noticed, had closed. Crying was tiring, but I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I was going to stay awake until my mother came home. The lids opened unwillingly. Fine. I could blink a few times, in compromise. Three blinks. That would be all. Just three. Only three.

“Enid?” my mother whispered. I opened my eyes. I’d been dreaming of our farmhouse all fixed up, us moving back in, and my mother taking down the For Sale sign, but here was my mother, her blush-colored scrubs now dirtied with something wet and orange down the front. She smelled of Jell-O. One of her patients must have thrown her dessert at my mother. She knelt beside my bed. “You fell asleep with the light on.”

I pushed myself up. My clothes were rumpled and saltily stuck to me. Tears had dried on my cheeks, and my skin cracked as I opened my mouth to speak. “What, ” I began. My mother had her notebook in her hands. She cracked the spine and began turning the pages.

“I didn’t … there were …” My sentences couldn’t get past the second word. “You don’t …”

“Yes?”

“Your shift is over?” I finally struck on a sentence that made it all the way through to its conclusion. But I couldn’t shake the grogginess from being woken up. It didn’t seem like I’d been asleep for eight hours, the length of my mother’s shift.

“I came during break to check up on you.”

“So, you don’t even trust me?” I said. “Typical.”

“Should I have trusted you? Did you complete the pre-parations I asked of you?”

“No,” I admitted sullenly.

“Then perhaps your pugnacity towards me is misplaced, as my checking up on you was necessary.”

“The trees have fallen over.” I finally managed to sputter out something useful. “I heard them. I saw two.” I remembered the crash outside my window. “Maybe three.”

My mother put a hand on my head like I was a child or a puppy. “That’s for tomorrow.” Then she pressed some fingers to her forehead. “That’s not true. Today. This even-ing. It is after midnight, and so we will handle that today. Now go back to sleep.”

“But —”

“Sleep. Now. School tomorrow.”

My mother moved to the door in an uncharacteristic slide. I rolled over for one glimpse of her before she left. My reading light, plugged in beside my bed and set on a stack of school library books I had no intention of return-ing, spotlit her in the doorway and the wall alongside. And on the wall, by the door, was a shadow, with a penumbra elongated and gossamer-like: a faerie’s shadow.

Enid! Do you know what this means?

Yes, that faeries don’t mind LED light bulbs. That’s pretty inter—

Enid! There is a faerie in the house! There is no way for a faerie to cast a shadow like that unless it is in our room!

What? I have to alert my mother!

I went to raise my head, but as my neck lifted from the pillow, my mother flicked off the light switch and darkness dragged my exhausted self back to sleep.