“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
Neil Gaiman
She ate with her fingers, talked with her hands, and she laughed with her whole body.
I had been raised in a household with five-piece settings for every meal by a mother who forbade elbows and open mouths and conversation while chewing. My mother had perfect posture, perfect manners, and perfect etiquette, and she made very sure her sons did too.
The woman who sat across the table from me moaned in appreciation for the piece of grilled lamb she had just popped in her mouth with her fingers. She was so wrapped up in the eating and talking that she didn’t notice that I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her lips.
“I’ve never met Markham Gray,” she said, after licking her thumb clean. I shifted uncomfortably, but she didn’t notice. “Colette knows Sterling, of course, because her ex was his architect.”
“So that was all true?” I asked in surprise.
She shot me an eye-roll. “Of course. There’s no way I could’ve scored an invitation to the Gray mansion. I’d never met the guy or his dad. I have to say, from everything I’ve read about the guy, Markham sounds like a jerk.”
“He is. I’d never dealt with him face to face before today, but his reputation isn’t helped by proximity.”
She giggled and bit into an olive. “You speak like an English school boy.” I raised an eyebrow, and she added, “The English are the best at making an insult seem like a compliment, otherwise known as baffling them with b.s. I bet you’re good at it.”
I smirked. “My mother said I should have been a lawyer.”
She sipped her wine and added another lamb kebab to her plate. “A good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge.”
“Exactly why I didn’t go into law,” I said, still struggling not to be distracted every time she licked her fingers.
“Did you ever want to be a journalist like your parents?” Her question caught me off guard. I’d been prepared for a discussion about Gray and his painting, not anything personal about me.
I thought about it for a moment as she watched me. “Investigation has always appealed to me, but I’ve never felt that I connect well enough with people to be good at anything that requires getting someone to open up to me.”
“I think it wouldn’t be hard for you to get people to trust you. You have principles – people like that. It’s pretty rare to meet someone who knows what he stands for, and I think people would respond to it.” She spoke the words as though they were obvious, as though everyone knew that what she said was true. It was a degree of certainty I’d never had about myself.
“Sometimes,” I sighed, “I feel like my principles are all on paper.”
She frowned as she considered me over the piece of pita that she was tearing into bite-sized pieces and dipping into toum, the Lebanese garlic sauce that came with the kebabs. I took a bit of my own food to distract myself from her mouth.
“You mean,” she finally said, still frowning, “that you think they’re a good idea, but you can’t back them up?”
“Something like that,” I said, surprised at the accuracy of her simple translation.
She thought for a moment. “I think belief is like that. You decide which ideas fit your world view, and you believe them.” Then she shrugged. “Who’s to say your principles are any more or less valid than the idea of the Ten Commandments or the Four Noble Truths? The point is that you believe them. If they work for you, and nobody else gets hurt because of them, that’s all the back-up you need.”
Her casual words felt solid and substantial in a way I hadn’t expected from this woman whose exuberance couldn’t be contained by something as corporeal as her skin. Her hair was evidence of that. It moved as though it was as alive as the rest of her – restlessly, relentlessly. I wanted to gather up the curls in my hand and then watch them slip through my fingers, just to see all the different paths they took to get free.
“What do you believe in?” I asked, completely aware of the potential minefield such a question presented.
She took a sip of wine and smiled.
“I actually made a list once, when I was sick and holed up in a hotel in New Delhi, contemplating the fact that my stomach seemed to rest on the bed outside my pelvis when I lay on my side. I think I was trying to decide if getting up for water was worth the effort, which was really just me figuring out whether anything was worth the effort of moving. I needed the list to remind me.”
She held up her fist and ticked her statements off on her fingers. “I believe in throwing your hat over the wall and then figuring out how to get it. In saying yes, in making time, and in learning as you go. I believe that fear and excitement produce the same physical symptoms, so why not decide something is exciting instead of scary, and I believe that travel is the best education money can buy.” She waggled the fingers of her open hand as if to make sure she had remembered everything, sat back in her seat, and only then did she take in the expression on my face. “You look surprised.”
I shook my head, then nodded. “I didn’t … I am.”
Her smile slipped a little, and it made me inexplicably sad to see. “You don’t agree. That’s okay. That’s the cool thing about believing in things; other people don’t have to believe for it to be true for me.”
“It’s not that. I just … wish I believed as you do. I want to trust that I’ll learn as I go, and to say yes even when I don’t know how it could be possible. In my experience … I just don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, as though it actually were her fault.
I shook my head in wonder. “Where did you come from?”
She shrugged, and I could see confusion on her face. “From everywhere. Anywhere that would have me, really. I mean, I grew up in Rockport, but once I left home, I was gone. What about you? Where did you grow up?”
“Tehran. London. New York. Chicago.” My voice sounded flat to my own ears. Each city had had its own culture and rules and structure, and I’d had to learn each one like a language in order to navigate life there.
“That sounds so much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Rockport, Boulder, Nevada City, and Zion,” she said.
“And yet the view seems so much better from those places.”
She smiled a little dreamily. “They do have pretty great views. Have you ever been to Zion? The colors in those canyons are surreal – like the earth was formed in a giant taffy pull from all the colors of the sunset. The sandstone isn’t really great for climbing, but if you look for them, you can find just enough footholds to feel like you’ve fallen into a Willy Wonka candy world. Almost like you could lick the wall and taste lemon and orange and strawberry, except it would taste like fire and wind and the ripple of heat over the desert floor.”
I felt as though I should only ever travel with this woman from now on – that her view of the world was so fascinating and unique that listening to a tourist guide would be a pale fragment of the experience I’d have seeing the world with Anna Collins.
But then the sound of her full name in my head pulled me away from visions of multi-colored taffy walls and back to the land of the larcenous Collins sisters.
“You said you grew up in Rockport?” I said with what I hoped was casualness.
The fanciful look in her eyes faded. “I promised you a story, didn’t I?” Her tone was more statement than question, and I regretted that I’d caused the playfulness of her tone to disappear.
The waiter came to remove the plates, and I signaled him for the check. Anna noticed and pulled her wallet – a slim metal card case – from the back pocket of her jeans.
“You did,” I said, noticing the way her eyes had gone stormy gray in the dim light of the restaurant.
“Once upon a time there was a family with two daughters,” she began. She watched me as she spoke, but warily, as though she would run at any sudden movement. “One daughter grew up knowing she would become a princess, and her whole life was spent preparing for the job.”
“Princess is a job?” I asked with a smile, because I hadn’t been expecting a fairy tale.
“You’ve seen how hard Kate and Meghan work? And yeah, I know they’re both duchesses, not princesses, and I know Meghan isn’t doing the official gig anymore, but there are rules, and it’s a job,” she snapped back.
I held up both hands in surrender. “Sorry, please continue.”
She sighed. “One sister was princess-in-training, so the other one became a thief.”
My eyebrows shot up, and her eyes narrowed, but she otherwise ignored me.
“The thief was named Honor, and she wasn’t really an actual thief, she just had mad thief skills. Everyone wanted to be friends with the princess, but a couple of the lesser-known villagers realized that the thief played the best games, and her hide-and-seek plans were always legendary. She was the best at capture-the-flag because she was ruthless and could anticipate every move the opposition would make. They called her a thief because she stole every game she played with the villagers, until finally even they wouldn’t play with her anymore.”
Anna paused to take a sip of water as I picked through her words looking for recognizable landmarks. Colette was the princess, obviously, which made Anna the thief, Honor. I might have smirked at the irony, but she wasn’t laughing.
“Eventually, Honor learned to play games that didn’t need playmates, and to use her thief’s brain to catch real thieves rather than become like them. She traveled the world playing solo games and catching thieves and pretending it was enough.”
She had her hands wrapped tightly around her wine glass and was swirling it gently to watch the red wine dance against the sides. Another man might have taken her hand to comfort the lonely girl she’d been. I wouldn’t have taken her hand, even if one had been free, because that would have meant letting go of something I couldn’t stop holding on to.
She exhaled and didn’t meet my eyes as she continued speaking. “One day, in a hiding spot only she could find, she found a letter addressed to her containing a request that only she could fulfill. It was a quest, noble and honorable, and a way for a thief to distinguish herself. A treasure was hidden in a dragon’s lair to keep its rightful owner captive. If Honor could take the treasure from the dragon, the captive could go free. Honor knew the history of the treasure, and she knew that it didn’t belong to the dragon, so she decided that stealing from a thief wasn’t stealing at all, especially if it freed someone she loved.”
She looked at me then, and her eyes were sad. “But when she took the treasure from the dragon, she found another treasure hidden inside, and suddenly it felt very much like stealing, and maybe the dragon had been the thief, or maybe someone else had been, but she didn’t know who the hidden treasure belonged to, and putting it back would be much, much harder than taking it had been. And so she was afraid.”
“Of getting caught?” I asked carefully.
She smiled, not very convincingly. “Oh, she’s Honor among thieves, and everyone knows that thieves are just one bit of bad luck away from getting caught.”
She pushed herself back from the table and stood. “I should go find the waiter to pay my bill.” Her voice caught, and it sounded almost like a swallowed sob.
“Anna, let me help you,” I said quietly.
“You can’t,” she whispered. “You have principles that won’t let you, and that’s good.” She smiled, and her lips trembled. “I’ll let you pay for dinner though, thank you.”
She tucked her little metal wallet back in her pocket as she strode through the restaurant to the door, wiping her eyes as she went.