The new Tommy Tipp was a better Tommy Tipp. He got up in the mornings and walked the streets of S— with his few good references in hand, one of them from the workshop at the prison, and finally landed an apprentice position with Barnaby, the local locksmith.
The irony wasn’t lost on people. That a former convict should mend their locks and secure their doors from intruders. Sense overruled their concern, though. There was no way a man would illegally enter a home where he’d just installed the locks himself. For this reason alone my husband became quite popular in his new profession. A good luck charm, if you will, a protection against malice.
To me it made perfect sense. Pepper-Man had always been good with his hands; those long, wiry fingers that could braid and twist branches into gifts. He was also fascinated with people’s homes, the way that they lived, and this job let him see quite a few. He was fast and efficient. Barnaby loved the new Tommy.
And all his nights were spent with me.
“Maybe Tommy was tired of playing around,” Dr. Martin said when I finally told him the truth. We were in the hospital, just before the trial. “Maybe you hitting him like that in the woods made him realize that he hurt people? Maybe he wanted another life, and some bloodshed made him realize how far off the track he’d wavered? You could have done him a favor by pushing him onto that rock. Maybe you helped him get his priorities straight?”
“Tommy Tipp didn’t feel anything at that point. He was dead and eaten by the water girls.”
“Don’t you think that the anger you felt in that moment of betrayal might have made you want to see Tommy dead? That it felt safer for you after what you saw in your love spot to stuff your old friend Pepper-Man inside him? It made it easier to relate, didn’t it, to a man that wasn’t a man?”
“He wasn’t a man. He was a faerie.”
Dr. Martin chuckled then, without any malice, mind you. “It’s usually the other way around, you know. Usually, if we see something ‘alien’ in our spouses, we get frightened, and sometimes, if we’re a little confused, we call that stranger in our loved one’s shell ‘the devil’ or ‘a demon’ or something along those lines … I have had other patients in my time who swore their husbands or wives turned into something else, some entity with evil intent. Hell, I think we all feel like that sometimes, when watching our partners change across the breakfast table, that something bad is afoot, destroying what we hold most dear … It is just people changing, though—falling out of love, perhaps. It is different for you, though, you wanted your Tommy replaced with a being. For you, that was the safer option. As a man among men, I can’t entirely blame you.”
“I didn’t have to want anything. Pepper-Man became Tommy because he wanted to—because I needed him to. Although I have been thinking lately that he might have planned that outcome all along. Maybe Pepper-Man wanted to be Tommy Tipp. Maybe that was his plan.”
“To experience humanity?”
“To experience humanity—again.”
“That doesn’t sound much like the Pepper-Man of your childhood. The one who gave you such sleepless nights. Why do you think he changed?”
I didn’t answer the question truthfully, as I knew Dr. Martin would not understand. I don’t think Pepper-Man changed to suit my needs, as he himself would have me believe. I think he changed because I changed. That is the curse of the faeries, you see, they are ever changing, evolving, adapting—struggling to hold on to a core of self. They are like air, in a way, or water: they react to shifts in temperature and environment, and, of course, to what they eat.
The key is in the diet. Always.
He changed because he’d fed from me for so long and adopted traits of humanity through his nourishment. Through me, he learned to be a man again, but let me make one thing clear: Pepper-Man is ever self-serving, just like any other faerie. My well-being is his well-being; my path is his path—he needs me more than I need him. Back then, when he was Tommy, I was still the source of the experience he craved—as well as his source of life.
Was there ever romance between us? Sure. But it was always so much more than that. The love was just a game—the hunger was always what counted. And Pepper-Man liked living through me; grew strong and fat and very lucid—vivid—when he fed from me. I think my blood resonated more deeply with his almost forgotten humanity than, say, the sap of a birch tree or the heart blood of a fox.
I think he was a very dangerous man when he was alive, way back in time. He must have had a honeyed tongue and persuasion must have been his gift. I picture him a merchant prince, counting golden coins. There’s no point in asking, he doesn’t remember a thing. But it’s still there, the template, the basic blueprint of who he once was. Ruthless and cunning, that’s my Pepper-Man, no matter his pleasing exterior.
Maybe I adapted too, and learned to live with the monster instead of struggling against it. If I did, it happened such a long time ago, I cannot recall how that felt, being afraid of Pepper-Man. He was ugly at first, for sure, and I always worried about what he would do, but then—he was always there beside me, a steady companion who knew me more intimately than anyone else, and my only champion for so long. There was much comfort in that. He did what Mother could not and gave me a sense of self-worth. To him I was precious—even if only as his source of existence.
You can’t get more important than that, after all.
These latter years he has changed again, paling to a dusty gray.
I think that means I might be changing too, slowly shedding my colors with age. I wonder what I will look like at the end. When I walk out the door to this house for the very last time.
Will I even recognize myself in the mirror?
After he became Pepper-Man, drinking and gambling was no longer Tommy’s habit. That first winter of his new life, before we got married, he left his human vices behind, and instead we would go for long walks through the streets of S— and have ice cream by the sea. He took me to the movies and bought me pastries and roses.
The women Tommy Tipp used to have relations with observed this new development with suspicion and jealousy. Soon there was a rumor that I had fallen pregnant, and that Tommy stood by me because it was “the right thing to do,” and he was a good man, really. When time went on and no baby was in sight, they said I’d either tricked him or miscarried.
The rumors made Mother uncomfortable.
“He should make a decent woman out of you,” she said. “No need to feed the gossip mill. God knows it would be better for all of us if you left this house for good.”
She didn’t care at all that Tommy Tipp had so recently been considered “bad news.” I think any man would have done for her, as long as someone pulled me out of her hair. I think that if she could, she would have rather just forgotten I existed.
After seven months as Tommy the locksmith, Pepper-Man did as Mother wished, and married me the first day of May. The wedding took place at the S— town hall. Tommy Tipp’s mother and aunts donned dresses in powder blue and salmon pink, pulled straw hats down their ears, and came to throw rice as we exited the stairs. His parents hosted a barbecue after the short ceremony; there was beer and food and we popped champagne. My dress was blue silk; bought at a second-hand store. The diamond on my finger was new, bought with locksmith money. My parents were absent, though they sent flowers and a card. Olivia and Ferdinand, the latter freshly dropped out of college, made an appearance late at the barbecue. My sister wore a champagne-colored dress that made her look old and matronly. Ferdinand wore a wrinkled shirt and a tie with tiny elephants on it. He had a beer. Olivia nibbled on a chicken leg.
“You didn’t want them to come, right?” Ferdinand asked, when the clock had struck midnight. Olivia had long since gone home and one beer for my brother had—with surprising ease—become many more.
“Mother and Father? No—of course not.”
“Good. I would hate for them to not show, if you really had wanted them to.”
“Did they say anything, at home? About why they didn’t?”
“She said it wasn’t ‘their kind of celebration,’ the barbecue … You know Mother can be a bit of a snob. I am happy for you, though. Olivia too—we both are.”
“Tell Mother I said thanks for the flowers. Tell them I thought it was thoughtful and sweet.”
See? I was already learning to pretend. Say the right things to appease the beasts.
With a few years, I would master it fully, and so would Pepper-Man-in-Tommy. We were strangers in disguise, living there among them.
No one ever suspected a thing.
After all the dirty plates were gathered and carried inside, every empty beer can located among the trees and shrubbery in the Tipp family’s garden, Pepper-Man-in-Tommy and I went into the woods, where we married again at the mound.
Pepper-Man and I had no need of rites of blood, to cut and mingle our life-streams, we had already done so long ago. Neither would we jump the broom, knowing there would be no more fruits. We just celebrated ourselves, and looked forward to our life together—and my freedom from the white room. We lifted our cups to Tommy Tipp, to his heart, that hard and stringy organ that had brought us to this bliss.
Pepper-Man left his Tommy-shell, dressed up in red, and danced with me, fast and wild. The piper and the drummer whipped up a shrilling reel, a feisty waltz, and a tango so dangerous it cut our legs with its razor-sharp edges. Mara danced too, skirts a haze, changing partners faster than the music could follow. The honey cakes were plentiful; stacked with red apples far out of season and sugared nuts and violets. Sweet wine ran from barrels down into bottomless cups. My blue silk dress ripped, my left heel broke. The diamond on my finger sparkled. Mara pressed a kiss to my lips, her skin warm and flushed from dancing. She placed a wedding crown on my brow, made from wild roses, hawthorn, moths, and silver bells.
“A faerie bride,” she whispered. “That is what my mother is.”
“A faerie child,” I whispered back. “That is what my daughter is.”
I guess that through all this you have started to wonder about Mara. Who is this person so dear to me, yet absent from your mother’s memories, this woman who draws me to the mound and calls me Mother? The young girl I have been fighting with—and warning you about, though perhaps not strongly enough?
I’ll tell you about Mara, and how she came to be.
My little girl came about when I was fourteen. She was an accident—the result of my brief stint as a fertile woman.
I was wholly unprepared for puberty in that way. Didn’t expect to wake up on sticky sheets, see Pepper-Man trail the new blood with his fingers and stare at it, as if mesmerized. I had some idea of how these things worked, of course, I was no fool and I had read books, of course, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so grisly.
“The blood means you are ripe for plucking.” Pepper-Man stretched out behind me, placing a hand on my aching belly, on the faint swell that had appeared overnight. “You can have children of your own now, make life in that tiny cauldron of yours.”
“What if I bleed out.” I pressed my face hard into the pillow; my voice was muffled by the down.
Pepper-Man chuckled behind me. “You will not, women have bled always. It is the curse of your kind to sometimes bleed. Occasionally it will stop, and then it will begin again. There is no escaping the blood now, not before you are all worn out.”
“But it hurts.” I curled around my aching belly like a fetus.
“Who said it would be painless to carry such a gift? The blood is the price for life, it has always been so.” He swept one of his long fingers across the bloody sheets, and lifted the index to his lips to taste.
“Make it stop,” I demanded. “I know you can do that.”
“Why, not even I can turn back the course of time. You are ripe when you are ripe, and your blood will be even fatter for it. Taste better.”
I remember something shattering in me at that moment; breaking into pieces like a kaleidoscope.
For a brief moment, I saw it all, felt it all: how he stole from me. How he reveled in my blood—my pain—and lived on it, and for the very first time, it bothered me.
“I give you life.” I meant it to be an accusation.
He chuckled beside me, fingers back on my belly, resting. “That you do, and what a fine source of life you are.”
“You never asked me if it was all right.”
“It is a natural thing to feed. You never asked your Sunday roast if it cared to be your meal.”
“I thought you loved me,” said I.
“I do! I do! How can one not love blood as rich as yours? You have made me who I am, sustained my very being, and for that I will be forever at your service.”
“For a price.”
“There is always a price. Anything worth having has a price.”
“What is my price tag, then?” I asked. “What do I get in return for what I give you?”
“I am your servant, bound by blood and shadow. Isn’t that enough?”
And it was, because it had to be. Without Pepper-Man I was nothing, just a sad and angry girl. Without him, all I had was the shrinking white room and a family that loathed me. No magic, then, no crowns of twigs—no midnight flights in the otherworld and dancing until dawn. No mound and no woods, just me, all alone. No one would love and take care of me then.
So I had bled, every month or so, for a year. Those intervals were days of aching, of hunger and fatigue, raging and tears. Mother bought me pads, but said little on the subject. Her furious attitude had turned into a quiet sort of resentment. She would rather not see the woman I became, just as she never wanted to see the child I was before. Her greatest failing, I think, was to always see me for what I was not, never for what I was.
Motherhood done right is not a thing of beauty. The bonds that bind run deep, are shackles of love forged deep under your skin. Root and thorn; blood and bone; pain and suffering … It’s an instinctual love that has nothing to do with reason, and you can never ask your children for something in return.
Maybe there was something wrong with Mother, who didn’t feel that way about me. Maybe she, too, was broken from the start?
Dr. Martin thought so, back then, and later on. Maybe she was afraid, he reasoned, her rules were nothing but desperate ways of keeping her own demons at bay. She let other demons into my bed, though, and pretended not to see.
I will never forgive her for that.
She made me love my Pepper-Man, because there was no one else to love. Made me rely on him always, because there was no one else to trust.
What kind of mother does that?
My fourteenth birthday came and went, and suddenly I bled no more. The well was dry, I thought at first. There would be no more bleeding, I had withered before my time.
Then I got stomachaches and threw up before breakfast.
“You carry a child.” Pepper-Man stood beside the porcelain bowl, looking at me as I heaved above the toilet.
“I don’t think so,” I croaked and fished a towel from the rack to dry residue from my lips and beads of moisture from my brow.
“I know these things.” Pepper-Man’s voice was calm as snow. “You carry a child within you.”
I would like to say that my world shattered at that point, that I was struck by lightning and lamented my cruel fate for days on end, but I didn’t. I was still a girl, you see, still stuck in that place in between worlds, that crystalline haze of not-quite-there. Reality didn’t have sharp enough edges, daylight wasn’t harsh enough to penetrate to where I was. So at first, I did nothing but throw up and wipe my lips, let Pepper-Man soothe me with gifts of leaves and thorny branches. Then my body started to change: a dark trail appeared across my abdomen, from my navel and down to my sex. My small breasts ached and the nipples swelled. I put my hand on my belly and thought I could feel life pulsating through my skin, just below my fingertips. It felt mysterious and alien, yet magical and sweet. The connection to the embryo was instantaneous and strong. It was mine. I felt that.
The child was mine.