I suppose you think me mild for not coming down on your cousin harder, but when you’re dealing with faeries there is one thing you must understand: life goes on forever, and they are all stuck in the mound. They don’t bear grudges for what happened last year, nor a hundred years ago. To me, that has always been one of the most appealing things about them, the way time flows and erases all that was—the only thing that matters is the here and now.
I used to find solace in that, it was my touching stone for years. My past didn’t define me when I lived among the faeries; nothing that happened to me tainted me forever. Mara wasn’t like that, though—was always looking back. I was hoping that the bear hunt would release her from all that; that she would be free now, and stop moving against the tide. It never even entered my mind to let our disagreement continue. What good would that do, arguing with my daughter? It wouldn’t solve a thing, now that it was done. Ferdinand and Father were dead, and our continued disagreement wouldn’t change that. The police would never be looking for clues among the roots and the stones, deep within the mound.
“She blames you,” I told Pepper-Man when Mara had left. “She said it was you who strung up my brother and planted that spear by his feet.”
“Of course she would say that. She is angry because I hit her.”
“Did you, though? Did you kill my brother?”
He didn’t answer me outright. “I will always protect you and Mara, even when you do not want me to.”
“He was going to fill in that hole.”
“And plant tulips—yes, I know. But buried bones always whisper, Cassandra. Before he knew it, he would have had scores of flowers bleeding in his lap, their petals shaped like bears and hearts. It would spread like a toxin through the earth, taint everything it touched with rage and violence. Better he is buried properly. Better it is not a secret.”
“But Ferdinand—”
“Is at peace now, and that was what you wished for, was it not?”
I couldn’t really argue with that. “They still blame me, though, Mother and Olivia.”
“Of course they do. They would not be who they are if they did not.”
“She is my daughter, though, so I guess they have a point. If I hadn’t taken Mara to the mound, none of this would have happened.”
“But Cassandra, what difference does it make? Is the world a poorer place for your father not being in it?”
“But Ferdinand—”
“Was not fit for life.”
“He might have been, though, if—”
“It is done,” Pepper-Man spoke into my ear. “It is over now, my Cassandra. It is done.”
And it was.
Father’s funeral was a beautiful disaster, as disasters go. I didn’t expect it to be any different, still I felt I had to go, to see him buried if nothing else.
The church was filled with flowers—white: roses, carnations, lilies. The casket was closed, as it ought to be, he wasn’t a pretty sight, even when alive. His coffin was shiny and black amid the dull white, rested on a sheet of tulle. Mother’s eyes were hidden behind a veil, it drooped from her pillbox hat like a black wave. Her hair was tied back with a black velvet bow; less curly now, less yellow, more a faded gray. Her suit was very chic, though; she still had a very slim figure. She sat between you, Penelope, and your mother. The latter was sporting a black dress and satin gloves, wore thin, high heels that made her seem tall. I remember you because you didn’t wear black, but navy blue. Maybe your mother hadn’t thought to buy you funeral clothes. The pearls you wore were old, and so was the ivory ring on your finger. I remember both well from my mother’s box of gems. Passed on to you, then, I guess you have them still. She wanted to make sure, I think, that none of her finery ever came to me. Janus, I don’t remember you at all. Maybe you were sick that day—or maybe I just didn’t care to look.
I didn’t sit down beside you in the front row. I squeezed in at the back, among his more distant acquaintances and neighbors from my childhood. My purple clothes and moonstone bangles made me stand out like an exotic orchid in the sea of black and somber charcoal. Those who knew me gave me strange looks. Wondering, I suppose, just why it was that I stood there in the back—yes, stood, because the church was crammed with people, quite possibly due to the dramatic circumstances—the family tragedy, as the newspapers called it. He really didn’t have that many friends, but everyone wanted to come and look, at Mother, at you—the grieving family. Survivors is what you were, every last one of you. Survivors of a family tragedy that ended in blood and violence on Ferdinand’s well-kept lawn.
Just as they came to look when Tommy Tipp died that second time.
It’s just human nature. They really can’t help themselves.
I remember the service as hot and smelling of perspiration caught in synthetic fabrics, generously mixed with the scent of roses and candle wax. About halfway through, my mother must have gotten the whiff of me somehow, because she kept turning back, looking. Her lips were thin and white behind the veil.
I kept my eyes on the casket, though; that was why I was there, to see him lowered in the ground, to see him disappear. See the result of my daughter’s anger and assure myself it was true.
I wondered what his last thoughts were. Wondered if he ever realized who she was, that strange and beautiful girl who went out of her way to provoke him out there on the lawn. If he ever saw my face in her face, the family resemblance. And then, when he fell, and the world turned to pain—what did he think of then? Did he have time to think at all? Did he realize his life had come to an end, and did he understand why? Did he understand that his son had betrayed him?
We will never know the answers to those questions, of course, but I do like to think that he knew; that he understood, in those final few minutes of his life, that his time was up and the past came back for him—came for his heart with a spear full of words.
“Truth,” according to Mara.
“Lies,” according to some.
Outside the church, we all stood in a circle, watching the casket go down in the ground. Words were said, dirt was thrown. This hole would be filled to the brim. Just beside the open grave, there was a naked patch of dirt in the grass. That’s where Ferdinand’s ashes were. They would rest side by side, then, united in death. Neither of them would have been thrilled to know that.
When it was all over and time to go home, Mother lifted her veil. Her eyes looked straight at me, blue as the autumn sky. I made to turn and walk away, but she called after me: “Wait!”
I paused, watched as she battled herself free from well-meaning uncles and your mother, who tried to hold her back from me. She strode right toward me through the green grass, her blue gaze like cut glass.
“What did you do, Cassie?”
I smiled, not to be mean, but because I didn’t know what else to do.
“It is lovely to see you, Mother—”
“Oh, don’t you ‘Mother’ me. I know what you are—I know you’re insane, but not even I expected this…”
“Well, Mother, as you well know, it was Ferdinand and not I who—”
“Bullshit and you know it.” My mother was no longer watching her language. “You made him believe in it, didn’t you? Made him believe in that mad doctor’s lies?”
“I never made anyone do anything.” People were moving all around us, mourners walking to their cars. I am sure they stared as they passed us by, sure they walked close to hear what we were saying, but I didn’t pay attention to any of them. Her eyes like glass before me, it was impossible to look away.
“Of course you have,” said Mother. “I know my children well. You are persuasive and he was weak—but I also know it wasn’t your fault, Cassie. It was him all along, filling your head with those dreadful stories, molding everything to fit his dirty little mind.”
“Who? Father?”
“No! Dr. Martin! Writing it all in that awful book. And now he has killed my son.” Suddenly her face cracked open, splintered and fell apart like a china doll ruthlessly smashed to the floor. Her mascara ran in black rivulets, leaving fat trails on her white-powdered skin. “And now he has killed my husband,” she choked. “And ruined you, Cassie, he ruined you, too. That awful man, he ruined you, too…” Her hand clutched at the air, trying to reach me, and I stepped back; I didn’t want those coral nails on me; the wrinkled old fingers; the scent of gardenias …
I could see the uncles coming up behind her. Olivia stayed put, clutching her purse, looking at us with wide doe eyes. When the first uncle arrived and gently took Mother by the shoulders, I used the opportunity to take another step back, away from her and the confusing affection I suddenly saw in her eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she breathed, as they pulled her with them, away from me.
As reconciliations go, I guess it could have been worse, but it was not what I expected.
Not at all.
Do you remember any of this? That scene at the end of the funeral? What did Mother do after you left the grave? Did she cry, or freshen up in the car to see the day through, head held high?
Did she speak of me again—ever?
I walked by the old house a few years later and saw that there was another family living there. There were swings in the garden, a cat on the porch. Ferdinand’s house too had new inhabitants, someone with a strong stomach, I presume, to live where it all went down.
I don’t know where Mother went after she moved, but I reckon that you do. If she is still alive she must be well over ninety and tucked away in some home, I guess. Somewhere close to Olivia and maybe even you.
“It is not important,” Pepper-Man says when I bring it up, “you will always have me.” And he is right about that, and wrong too.
“Maybe I didn’t go to the clinic,” I say, when I fall into one of my retrospective moods. “Maybe I only made that up. Maybe Dr. Martin helped me make that up…”
“Why do you think of that? Why is it significant?” Pepper-Man asks.
“It is significant to them: to Mother, to Mara, and to Ferdinand too, who died…”
“Nothing is significant to the dead. They are gone.”
“You are not.”
“I am not like most dead.”
He will take my weary old feet in his hands then. His fingers are gnarled again, from age, not from sap. He massages the pads of my toes, the hard skin on my heels. He has changed some since Father died, become softer and kinder, gentler with me. Less of a faerie and more of a man, vulnerable and brittle with age. “What is done is done,” he says, “and it can never be undone.”
If the night is fair and I’m up for it, we take a stroll around the garden, pondering what was and what will be. Pepper-Man picks plums and apples from the branches and offers them to me; jewels of fall, sweet and taut with juice.
“What will happen later?” I ask, as we walk below the canopy of gnarled branches and glossy leaves, the rich taste of apples in my mouth. His hand is on my back, steadying my steps.
“You are growing weary now?”
“I am.”
“I will take you to the mound, then.”
“And…?”
“You go inside.” He pauses and turns toward me, catches a wisp of my white hair between his fingers, rubs it as if to feel the texture, how it has withered since my youth.
“And then I don’t come out again?” The sky above bleeds a twilight violet.
“No, not for a while. And when you do, you will be different.”
“Will I be like you then, taking life from the living?”
“What is life, Cassandra, really? Would you say I do not live?” He lifts the coil of hair to his lips and kisses it.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, you will be like me.”
“I will feed off a horse, then.” I imagine the wind through my hair as I race across a meadow.
“Your face would be horribly long. If you still care about such things, after.”
“A cat, then.” I imagine lustrous fur and whiskers.
“A cat would suit you fine.”
“Will you still be with me?”
Pepper-Man’s gaze meets mine. His face is still smooth but ashen and worn; paler somehow, skin paper thin. His hair is dry and steely gray. “We can both feed from cats, together.”
He might not have loved me at first, when he entered my world when I was a child, but he does now, I’ll tell you that. It was nothing he expected, I’ll tell you that too. I was simply a meal at first, a strawberry tart to chew on—but the heart, even a dead one, doesn’t ask before it swells. He needs me, yes, but he loves me too.
Loves me even more than I do.
“I have known you for so long.” I reach up and let my fingers trail the outline of his face. “It’s like you are a part of me, of every breath I take.”
“Two peas in a pod,” he answers and laces his fingers with mine. “I will always be with you, every step of the way, until your last breath is gone, and beyond.”