I spoke to my daughter about it at length when she came around to see me next. It was a windy day and her skirts were spinning around her ankles when she came in through the door, picking debris from her hair with her fingers.
“You can’t go around scaring people like that.” I was sitting on the champagne-colored sofa, pink ink pen in hand, editing my new book. “Whatever were you trying to accomplish?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t do anything, I just visited, that’s all. I didn’t want him to see and made no effort that he would. He just did.”
“And now he’s terrified.” I pushed my purple-rimmed glasses on top of my head.
“Well, I can’t do anything about that. I would think you’d be pleased, truth be told. At least now someone knows you were telling the truth all along.”
“It doesn’t matter what they think. I don’t care if they think I lie. I’ve been called a liar my whole life, why would it matter to me now?”
“Don’t you think he deserves to know, though? Deserves to know that his sister isn’t mad?”
I shrugged. “I can’t see how that would make any difference to Ferdinand. I hardly think he’s been lying awake at night pondering the state of my mind.”
“But still, doesn’t it make you happy to know that he knows?”
I straightened up on the sofa and put my pen down. “If Ferdinand had been a bolder man, he would have known all along. He saw Pepper-Man when he was a boy.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Then why didn’t he say something?”
“He did—to our father. That was a great mistake.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it wasn’t good. He never spoke of it again, decided it wasn’t real, I suppose. Decided not to believe.”
“Oh, that man,” she scoffed, plunged down beside me on the sofa, manuscript pages flying. “Then why was he so surprised to see me, if he knew all along we were real?”
“He doesn’t want to believe, and I can’t blame him. Look at what happened to me.”
“But still, isn’t it good, Mother, to know there is someone else out there who sees?”
I sighed. “What do you want, Mara, a revolution? For the faeries to rise up and claim their existence? For the veil to come down so you too can all have nice houses and Sunday roasts?”
“I would like to be real. I would like to not be a tainted secret, something you have to hide in the mound.”
“I never took you to the mound to hide you.” I picked stray pages from the floor. “You know how that went.”
“Do I?” Her eyes were gleaming.
“Sure you do.”
“Not according to Dr. Martin. According to him, you were driven to a clinic some distance from here and went through surgery to have me removed.”
“Well, you are here, aren’t you, so obviously that didn’t happen.”
“But if it did—”
“Then it went wrong.”
“That easy?”
“Yes.”
She sat for a moment, mulling it over. “I don’t want a nice house or a Sunday roast—”
“Yes you do. You all want that. You want to live like everyone else. That is the curse of your humanity, that need to join the pack.”
“I am not human,” she argued.
“And yet you are—all of Faerie was, once.”
“Dead, then, and changed, isn’t that what you think?”
“Yet you live.”
“On the fringe, far out in the woods; just a shadow passing through your rooms.”
“What do you want, Mara? Truly?”
“For someone to pay for my life.”
“What life?” I was honestly confused.
“Just that, Mother, what life? The life I did not live at all or the life that I was given? A life soaked in your blood—”
“But you are happy, Mara, aren’t you?” I tried to touch her hair, soothe her in some way, but she brushed my hand aside.
“I will be happy when the debt is paid.”
“Oh, Mara,” I said, “I am not sure if that is the right approach—”
“What is, then? To be content with what I got, knowing no other life than this, invisible and hungry, living at the edges of people’s minds?”
“Well, it is life.”
“But is it?”
“Sure it is!”
“I am angry,” she said, “for the injustice of it all. I have paid with my life for someone else’s crime—”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Am I Pepper-Man’s daughter?” Her hard gaze turned on me again, smoldering like embers.
“I don’t know.” I struggled to meet that gaze. “You are Pepper-Man’s daughter—not Pepper-Man’s daughter. Does it matter what you are? You are.”
“Oh, Mother.” She leaned back and stretched out her legs. “You were always such a good victim.”
“I don’t think I was, though Dr. Martin would say so.”
“Even if the doctor’s story isn’t true, you were still taken. Pepper-Man took you when you were a child.”
“… I came to love him.”
“But did you have choice? What were you to do? Taken into Faerie at such a young age.”
“It is the curse of the sight.”
“It is the curse of a predator falling upon its prey—I should know all about that.”
“He needed to feed—”
“Yes, they all say that.”
“What do you want from me, Mara?” I was nearing my wits’ end.
“From you? Nothing. You have bled enough.”
“Why can’t you just let it be, then? Let there be peace now and no more grief.”
“I’ve tried—I can’t. You had your choices stolen, and so did I, by extension.”
“We all do, Mara, that’s what it’s like being born. We can’t pick and choose the life we’ll live, if we’ll grow up in S—, Paris, or New York—”
“But no matter where you live, it’s all life, and yours, not borrowed from someone else’s blood.”
“The Sunday roast would disagree, don’t you think? We all live off something. You are a faerie, Mara, with magic at your fingertips, a life beyond measure. Most people would consider that a gift.”
“I don’t, though. I consider it a consolation prize.”
I sat quiet for a while. It’s always hard for a parent to learn that what you could give has not been enough, that all the hard choices you made mean nothing to the child. That you always gave the wrong thing, thinking it was the right. “What will you do?”
“What I do best.”
“Leave poor Ferdinand alone,” I begged her. “He has nothing to do with any of this.”
She didn’t listen to me, though.
Of course not.
Daughter of pain. Daughter of anger. Daughter of love, too, I always believed.
Where I was soft, she was hard. Where I adapted, she stood firm. It must be hard to burn as bright as that—exhausting, too, I reckon. Where I chose shield, she chose sword. I never looked back, nothing good came from that. Mara, though, she was always looking back, unraveling the story and following the threads until she came back to the beginning, pinning down guilt where she saw fit. She was never content with just living—or not, depending on the side of the coin.
I will give you a way out, Penelope and Janus, you can still walk away from this. You can abandon the story before it gets ugly. The password is THORN, yes, THORN, like my maiden name. But then again, you don’t know that for sure. I can still change my mind on the next page. Maybe it isn’t THORN at all, but MARMALADE or SPARROW. But for now it is THORN.
You should probably read on.