Well, Janus and Penelope—I’m thinking you imagined more drama, more heated feelings and passionate slashes; a crime of jealousy and rage—Aunt Cassie on a psychotic break.
Especially knowing what you do about those other deaths—or think you do. The things Olivia has told you—the reason why our little family is even smaller, now.
That’s not how it was, though, was not how it happened—I was never crazed—nor ill.
Tommy Tipp’s second death was inelegant and crude, but it was not a murder. It was merely the result of my worlds colliding, human frailty, and the impact this all had on both sides. It was an issue that refused to resolve itself, a wrinkle that wouldn’t be ironed. I can’t even blame anybody involved, they all just see one side of the coin. Pepper-Man cannot, despite his years as Tommy Tipp, quite relate to human rules.
What is the justice system to him, or anyone who lives for a thousand years? How could he properly assess the risks and see the potential consequences for me? My lawyer, Myra Barnes, and Dr. Martin could only see the illusions Pepper-Man and I spun. I know one thing, though: it’s hard having your future hanging in the balance, not knowing what other people will decide about your fate. I had already escaped it once, you know, when I made up that life with Tommy Tipp in the brown house, fooling everyone into believing I had bent my head and abided by society’s rules. Now I was back at square one again, with the good people of S— defining my worth and my measure, deciding where to put me so that I’d make sense.
I will never forget that corpulent, ugly prosecutor, Mr. Carew, pacing the courtroom floor, painting a picture for the jury to see of an unhinged, jealous wife who dismembered her husband’s body and left it out for the birds to find.
“Imagine her,” he said, “pulling the body across the floor and down those concrete steps. His head is lolling; his limbs are flailing, as she drags him down to the cold basement. There”—he paused to take a breath—“she hauls him onto the workbench and gets to it with knives, axe, and cleaver, neatly dismembering him at the joints. Does she cry? No. She is still filled with a raging jealousy. She thinks Tommy’s erectile problems stem from his countless affairs. To her, the dismemberment and desecration of the body is just a part of the punishment…”
Dr. Martin defended me the best that he could: “She is sick,” he said. “She has been suffering from delusions since she was a child. You cannot hold her accountable for this crime. In her mind he was not a man at all, but a creature made from natural debris, collected from the woods where she spent her happiest hours as a child.”
In the end, Myra Barnes was the most convincing. She looked like an expensive stick of cinnamon in there; all dressed in brown; tall, powerful, tough, and pencil thin. Her hair was a shock of brown curls, sprouting in every direction. She spoke with confidence, knowing she had the support of her expert witness: “There is no way a woman Cassie’s size can move a body the size of Tommy Tipp downstairs to the basement, effectively dismember it, and move it back upstairs to spread it across the forest. If she was involved, she would have needed help, and Cassie doesn’t have any friends—we know that from all we have learned in here.
“Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that she was in any way recruiting outside help for the grisly endeavor. Is Cassie sick? Maybe. Is Cassie jealous? Maybe. Did she kill Tommy Tipp? Hardly. It’s much more reasonable to look to Tommy’s own criminal past and the ‘friends’ he made back then. Maybe he owed someone money? Maybe he still had a secret life? We don’t know that for sure…”
Whatever she did, my lawyer convinced them all, wrapped them in doubt and reasoning, and I will forever be grateful for that.
I walked out of there as a free woman, with nothing more than the usual distrust and suspicion tainting my name.
Dr. Martin was happy for me, but sad too:
“I guess there is no way I can convince you to commit yourself to a hospital now?”
“No,” I said, bursting with joy. “No chance at all, my dear doctor.”
The transition from the hospital wasn’t all painless. On that first day, I paid the taxi driver, dropped my bag in the living room, and set about searching the house for my Pepper-Man, but he wasn’t there. Why would he be, anyway? He was done playing Tommy Tipp, and I hadn’t been home for ages. But I had been worrying about him, wondering how he was to feed while I was away? I imagined all kinds of things; saw him perish among the coiling roots; dried up and shriveled like a mummy; or deserting me for a handsome stag, entwining that life with his instead … I was usually able to calm myself down by reminding myself that Pepper-Man had survived long before me and was in every way capable of taking care of himself, and should he choose to leave me for another life, well—there wasn’t really much I could do about that.
I didn’t dwell on these thoughts for long, though; since building a bond like ours, borne first of need and then sewn up with trust, takes time. I didn’t really think my absence for a few months was enough to break us apart. I was still worried I’d find him changed, though—I knew that I had changed a bit while I was gone. I had gained weight for once, despite the measly hospital food. I had hips for real, and sizable breasts. My skin color was better too, and I was far less prone to headaches and fatigues. The nurse who did my blood work at the hospital even mentioned it to me, how my vitamin B deficiency seemed to be suddenly gone, and the iron levels were rising. It was the upside of being without him, I suppose.
Physical Cassie had flourished, while the emotional Cassie ached.
When Pepper-Man was nowhere to be found in the brown house, I set out into the woods to look for him and hoping to see Mara. I walked and I walked, but the path never forked, and the in-between place never came. The veil itself appeared to be gone. I will never forget the horror of that moment, when I thought that my child—my only true home—was lost to me. At first, I convinced myself I had done something wrong, taken a wrong turn, and so went back to the edge of the woods to start fresh. I walked the path, waiting for the bend that signaled that the fork was straight ahead, but it never came. Then I screamed and thrashed, and walked around in circles, calling for my loved ones all night. Finally I went home, teary-eyed and weary, voice hoarse. My palms were grimy from hitting tree trunks and pulling moss from the ground, my knees were scabbed from kneeling on the rocky embankment by the brook. My heart felt so empty, as if all feelings had fled.
I felt so fragile in that moment; made of rice paper, so very crisp and thin, just a spark would be enough to set me ablaze and erase everything within. Paper lungs and paper kidneys, paper heart and paper brain. Wind could sweep me off my feet, water could dissolve me. I think I wanted to be gone in that moment, sitting there in my empty house, on the cozy blue couch, staring out in the air. No Pepper-Man was there, no Mara …
Just me.
I brushed my teeth automatically and pulled on a clean nightgown. I looked into my bag of toiletries, stuffed to the brim with prescription drugs. I was long overdue with the big and blue ones, soon to be overdue with the white and bitter. I took them all out and threw them in the bin.
The last thing I did before I went to bed was to pause by the basement door, where I tore the hateful yellow police tape away.
The brown house was mine again, but the bed was empty. Empty and cold, like me.
When I finally slept, exhausted from my wild search, it was a light and dreamless slumber. No woods, no roots, no Pepper-Man in it. Not even a glimpse of my daughter’s chestnut tresses.
The next day started out in the same way: I was all alone. I had barely pulled clothes on and put up my hair when I set out again, searching the woods. When the path still refused to reveal itself, I tried all the tricks I could think of: I walked widdershins around an ancient oak, built circles of stones with incantations; I burned bundles of oak and thorn, and drank teas from wild herbs and flowers. Nothing helped. Faerie was still closed to me. I cried and I wished. I cut myself and let the water in the brook lick the blood from my skin. I pleaded with Pepper-Man to please let me in. I called for Mara, screamed for her.
Still I got no answer.
When I came home again, dawn was nearly there, coloring the sky in a bleak, white light. I went to the bathroom and into the shower, stood there for a while to let the warm water soften my aching limbs. I cried again, for all that I had lost. Tears and snot ran off my face and into the drain while I slowly began to wash myself. It was then that I saw it, through the transparent plastic curtain, a swirl in the mist from the water and the heat. It was not exactly a man, but a shape; a hand, maybe, moving in the fog. Something that could be the outline of a face, eyes in there too, a pair of dark hollows.
I took heart then and swallowed all my doubts, chose to believe that what I’d seen was a sign; that the Otherworld wasn’t all lost to me after all, and that maybe one day I would see them again, my Pepper-Man and my Mara. Suddenly, I was laughing instead of crying, standing there in the shower, while the water from the showerhead slowly went from warm to cold and the mist in the bathroom was no more.
When I woke up the next day, long past noon, Pepper-Man was there.
He was sitting on top of the chest of drawers watching me. He looked just like before—when we were married—with his slanted green eyes and chiseled cheekbones, broad shoulders and narrow hips. His hair, which had gradually turned a soft shade of brown, was pooling down in his lap, though it looked more knotted than usual. Relief flooded me and nearly had me in tears again, but then Pepper-Man saw that I was awake and jumped down on the floor.
“So you can see me now? I thought we would have to do this for weeks, running about in the woods, screaming and shouting—”
I couldn’t help but laugh, even if I was crying. “I thought I had lost you for good. You and Mara both.”
“They poisoned you against me,” he raged. “They rose walls between us, lacing your veins with toxins—can you feel it? Feel it slithering through you like a snake?”
“Are you talking about the pills they gave me?” It had never even occurred to me that they would have any effect on my ability to see faeries, even though Dr. Martin had told me that was the very point.
“Of course,” said Pepper-Man, “they are weapons meant to blind you.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“Well, now you do.”
“I threw them all away yesterday.”
“Good riddance, then,” he huffed.
“I thought they only worked on crazy people—”
“Well, women like you, running with faeries, are crazy—whatever that means.”
“Then I’d rather be the crazy one.” I stifled a fresh bout of tears.
He kissed my head then, lay down with me on the bed—the very same bed we had shared while living together as husband and wife. “Do you remember how I told you that everything in nature can be eaten by something? Your pills are nature too; those concoctions that you swallow can eat everything faerie. Do not let them feed you those things again.”
“I won’t.” I laced my fingers in his hair, was so grateful in that moment just to have him back beside me, I didn’t even mind if he scolded me a bit.
“We ran with you last night, Mara and I, and Harriet too, answering your calls and your summons. The gates to the mounds stood open wide, and the water girls licked the blood from your skin, and yet you could not see us. Mara was quite distressed, Gwen had to brew her a calming drought and send her to sleep in the yew tree. It is a dangerous power, the one your Dr. Martin wields, that can make a mother blind to her child.”
“I don’t think he believes himself to be particularly powerful.”
“Even more reason to be scared, then. A sorcerer with no understanding of his craft can do great damage.”
“But I’m here now,” I said, “and the drugs are wearing off. Come and feast.” I pushed the laces of the nightgown away from my neck, lay back, and closed my eyes.
Home at last.
Later that same day I saw Mara. My girl was waiting for me by the edge of the woods, curly hair wild down her back. I cannot describe the joy I felt, holding her in my arms. My beautiful shadow child, for a brief moment lost to me. She kissed me and hugged me and took me by the hand, led me with her into the woods, into the mound where I told her all that had happened; every accusation and every insult, every nasty headline. All my anger came pouring out of me, even the anger I nourished for my family and long kept suppressed.
In hindsight, I should maybe not have done that—but you must understand that I had no idea what she could do.
What damage she would wreak later on.
Your mother did an interview with the S— Gazette shortly after I came back from my undeserved stint in the hospital. She felt she had to, I suppose, to save face, or to rescue whatever was left of her dignity after I had so rudely spoiled it. This was before Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis, mind you. There was no coming back after that.
Mara read it aloud to me, all those pretty things Olivia said. “We always believed in her innocence,” she read with a sneer on her face. “My sister is incapable of violence like that…” Mara took a cinnamon bun from the tray on the table and munched on it while scanning the page, frowning as she did. Marveling, perhaps, at the praise from an aunt who had never showed her mother much warmth before.
I, for one, was happy. “Maybe she wants us to reconcile,” I suggested. “Maybe our differences are all in the past.” And in that moment, I truly believed it. So I guess you can imagine my surprise, then, when days went by after I’d returned from the hospital without as much as a word from my sister. I even tried to call her—twice, leaving messages with your help. Olivia never called me back, though, nor did I hear anything from Mother, but that was of course to be expected. Ferdinand came by the brown house one time, standing pale and uncomfortable at the door, refusing to come inside.
“I am glad you are free, Cassie,” he said.
“Well, thank you, Ferdinand,” said I. “To tell you the truth, so am I.”
I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if I had insisted on him coming inside that day. If I had served him coffee or a cup of tea and taken the time to speak with him—would it have changed what happened later? If I had somehow made him feel less alone, less burdened with guilt, could the later disaster have been avoided?
Mara says no, and Pepper-Man too, but I just can’t help but wonder.
He was always such a gentle soul, my brother, so easy to lead astray. Maybe I could have saved him.
Maybe it was already too late.