The Snow Queen sent the mirror shards into the center of Gerda’s eye and cast her spell: The worst things you ever believed about yourself are all true.
But to her shock, Gerda just blinked and shook her head.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “Your stupid mirror magic doesn’t work on me. I never trust mirrors, anyway. My self-worth comes from within.”
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
THE SNOW QUEEN, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
May 1998
Saskia was fifteen, and Patrick was running his fingers along the notches in her spine as the boat rocked gently beneath them. Her parents were in San Francisco for the weekend, and they’d taken advantage of the opportunity for their first spring sail. Now, with The Ingenue anchored on the quiet lake waters below the full spring moon, the two of them were tucked into the cozy cabin belowdecks. Saskia fought to keep her eyes open, but Patrick’s voice kept calling her back.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there for you,” he was whispering. “You brave girl.”
She didn’t know why he was sorry; they both knew why he couldn’t have been there, as her parents stood anxious guard around her hospital bed. But it was fine. It had been a dramatic episode, her heartbeat exploding irregularly through her veins as she played the Beethoven Hammerklavier onstage at the Marcus Center, lights bursting in fireworks in her vision until finally she’d stood for her bow and collapsed. The day in the hospital afterward had been much more boring, and she had lived on the hope of seeing him striding through the door after visiting hours were over and her parents had left. He lived only a block from St. Mary’s, after all. But it was what it was. Anxiety, the doctors said. A panic attack. Well, okay. It had felt like so much more than that, but it was what they said it was.
And now, remembering, she opened her eyes: she had a bonus for him. She dangled over the side of the bed, rummaging in her purse. Finally, bounty in hand, she held up the translucent orange bottle for his approval.
“Klonopin,” she said, as he squinted at the label without admitting that he was squinting.
He wrapped his hand around hers. Her fingers were long, but his were longer. He had the biggest hands, calloused from the darkroom chemicals and the sailboat’s ropes.
“Ah. But, babe, I already got us a treat.”
He refused to let her get bored with him. You will, you know. She wasn’t bored, but she was bored by the repeated warning, and so she’d followed along obediently as he introduced first alcohol, then pills into their afternoons and evenings. It wasn’t like they were driving anywhere. And it was medicine, what was the problem? Georgia took pills. Saskia had had codeine for some minor dental surgery the year before. It wasn’t like she was shooting anything into her veins; it wasn’t like she was even snorting anything. It was just swallowing a pill, a pill like a thousand other pills.
And then it felt like flying.
That night, it was a simple white pill. She downed it with her rum and Coke, and then his hand was stroking her again, his lips were on her skin, she was running her fingers through his thick, soft hair.
She woke feeling like she’d emerged from a fever, finding the boat moored in McKinley Marina.
“What the— Fuck! Shit!” She stared at her phone. Eight. Eight in the morning.
Patrick, beside her, stirred, his hand knocking the Canon onto the floor.
Saskia wiggled her jeans on, frantic. “Patrick, this can’t happen! Fuck, my parents are already home. I’ve never— How did we even— I don’t remember anything from last night, do you?” She clicked her bra clasp closed and stared at him, naked on his knees, running his fingers over the camera. “Wait, why is your camera out? Did you take pictures—”
Patrick set the camera back on the table, close against the wall. A mischievous grin that made her stomach swirl, drop.
“That pill hit you good, Sassy,” he said, crawling over the bed to her. She hated when he called her that, she fucking hated it, but she was scanning the floor for her shirt, she needed to get out of here. And then his lips on her neck. “You got a little … playful, and you wanted—”
She put her hands on his shoulders, guided him away. “Whatever. Toss them, okay? I’ve got to run, I’m going to— Fuck!”
But her parents weren’t even home when she tiptoed in the side door, breathless and wild-eyed. They didn’t come back until much later that night. By then, she was soaking quietly in her claw-footed tub, Chopin on the stereo and bubbles popping into nothingness around her body.
February 2020
Driving north out of Milwaukee, you can tell precisely when you cross the city limits. It would be possible even if you were blindfolded. The roads literally change beneath you, the patchwork of potholes and cobbled-together repairs replaced by blissfully uniform asphalt. Saskia rolls her eyes as she passes the WELCOME TO SHOREWOOD sign—decades of white flight from the city allow for a reliably high tax base, which, in turn, allows for up-to-date infrastructure. But with every block Saskia drives from Milwaukee, the buildings gain a superficial polish and lose their history. Still, she appreciates the smoothness, if only on behalf of the Saab’s finicky suspension.
Shorewood fades into Whitefish Bay (White Folk’s Bay, they’d called it in high school—as though they weren’t already the whitest high school for miles around themselves) as the neat-edged American flags on the fronts of the houses get bigger, brighter. Saskia drives inland from the lake a few blocks, parks on a side street. There was a spot open right in front of City Market, but she couldn’t risk taking it.
She picks up her phone, glancing at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She feels like she’s aged a year in the last few days.
But, she thinks, the anger burning down to her bones, I’m still younger than he was the first time he fucked me.
Today’s the day that she’s going to finish it. To clinch the case. Her mother could never have wanted to give Patrick the house, not really; if she had, she would have told him about the huge financial burdens that came along with it. And when Saskia reveals this to Patrick, he’ll have to give up the ghost. He’ll have to admit he was lying about his conversations with her dying mother, lying about his intention to use the house for the university’s pre-college programs, lying about his commitment to Evelyn Kreis’s legacy—lying about it all.
She hesitates over the keypad as an email notification pops up. Gary. She opens it: Sadly, there’s not a lot we can do to date negatives, let alone prints, with any degree of precision. However, there are usually context clues we can use from the images themselves, from your mother’s career—
So she can’t establish her age in the photos from anything scientific. She closes her eyes. One thing at a time; that shit can wait.
She pulls Tara’s number up on her phone.
“Tara Fernwood.”
“Tara. Saskia Kreis.”
“Saskia!” The relief is palpable in the lawyer’s voice. “Are we good to go with the affidavit?”
“Um. Well, look. I’m bringing in some stuff to our meeting that’s going to change the case, I think substantially. I just—”
“Okay, but Saskia?” Tara’s voice rises. “The hearing’s in two weeks. That’s ten business days. The clock started once Josh filed the petition for administration; we had thirty days. Now we have half that. It’s a lot harder to contest a will after it’s been admitted into probate, and I—”
“I know, I got it,” Saskia cuts her off like a teenager reprimanded by her parents. “But it has to be perfect before we file. He gets a written notice once we do, you said?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think—”
“What were the four things we needed for the case? Tell me the four things again.”
A pause.
“Susceptibility, opportunity, disposition, and coveted result.”
“Where are we weakest?”
“Disposition,” Tara says after a moment. “We need to prove that Patrick was actually willing to do something wrong, something unfair. Saskia. What’s going on?”
But she has what she needed. If she proves he lied about the university’s intentions to use the house for an arts center, she’ll prove that he had malicious intentions.
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
She turns on a Voice Memo and climbs out of the car. The quarter for the meter tumbles out of her hands and she watches it fall, stares down at the square of sidewalk beneath her feet. On Milwaukee’s East Side, each concrete block is stamped with the year: City of Milwaukee, 1918. City of Milwaukee, 2004. But there’s no such history imprinted into the sidewalks here.
“Well, look who it is!” For the first time in her life, his cheerful voice disgusts her. He doesn’t have the good grace to come five minutes late to let her pick their table, check her hair, brace for the thought of him. Nope, this is Patrick through and through. Eminently in control.
She forces herself to smile as she looks up at him.
How different it is, seeing him now, knowing what she knows. His beaming face, his sun-kissed coloring, his crisp white shirt beneath the heavy wool coat—all of it so attractive to her just a few days ago. All of it revealed to be nothing more than a trap, a trap with which to catch little girls.
It is so strange, walking into the café with him. Two adults, side by side; to the rest of the world, everything must look completely normal, aboveboard.
She’s never had that with him before. And yet it’s too late to appreciate it, she’s beyond feeling anything but alarm at the thought of him by her side.
“Why here?” she asks as he holds the door open for her.
His grin is bashful. “Oh. I was working from home this morning. My place is just down the road.”
She feels the blood rising into her cheeks with a prickly itch. How stupid she’d been, standing outside his apartment. Of course he’d moved. Moved out, moved up.
But fuck him and his house. She’s here to talk about her house. The Elf House.
The Elf House and the money, she tells herself sternly. That’s what all. No photographs. The photographs are burning through her bloodstream, taken by this creep, this con, this— But no. Money only. Until then, small talk.
She studies the menu posted above the counter. It’s a perfectly nice middle-class street, full of perfectly nice middle-class bungalows. But it’s not the nicest part of Whitefish Bay, not bordering the lake or a park or far enough north to have lots of land.
“Gave up on Downer?” she asks after ordering and paying for her fajita wrap.
“Hamburger, rare, and a Coke,” he says to the girl at the counter, and turns to Saskia with a wink. “Grew up, more like.”
That wink seems to brush against her skin, creeping along her spine. His eyes, the central attraction of his face with their gold sunbursts at the center, the warm brown surrounding them. She glances back at the teenager who took their order, relieved to see that she’s already turned around, is already chatting with a coworker. Not staring after Patrick at all.
Strange, she thinks; the jealousy is gone. It’s been replaced by this fear, this protective instinct.
He guides her to a table in the corner without making it seem like he’s actually guiding her. Stealthy sheepdog. And then he sits, back to the wall like a soldier or a spy, while she’s stuck with the chair facing inward, the chair facing him.
Student facing, she thinks.
Patrick props his call number next to hers and opens his hands wide.
“So, what can I do for you?”
She can’t look at him, though she feels his eyes on her. His eyes, his camera. She imagines shoving the metal call number apparatus through his eye, so far in it hits the back of his skull.
“This isn’t— Not the house again, is it, Sas?”
As though it could be anything else. She pulls the accountant’s ledger out of her tote bag, spreading the green-lined pages in front of him.
He follows her finger across the sheet. But she can see, she knows him. He understands nothing.
“Mom was holding out on you,” she says finally as the waitress comes and sets their food in front of them, takes their numbers away. She takes a bite out of the fajita wrap, nods in surprise. Spicy. She’s not used to spicy food in Wisconsin. With a greasy finger, she points, smudging the paper transparent wherever she touches. “It’s a shitty deal. The foundation needs significant repairs before long. Back taxes are overdue. Cliff repair is constant, and it’s not going to get better. You’re looking at spending around seven hundred and fifty grand before you even set foot in the place, likely more.”
She sits back as his eyes dart across the page. So what do you think of that? He never did have a head for numbers.
“It seems like something that someone who was making a gift would have told the recipient,” she says.
His brows draw together. “Your mother—her illness—”
Saskia shakes her head. “There’s a medical certificate. She was still lucid.”
He looks up with a boyish grin. “Then I’m sure that she, like me, assumed that the university—”
She makes a face. “Has better ways to spend three-quarters of a million dollars, plus whatever they’d need for renovations. Come on, Patrick. You’re telling me that they’re going to pour time and effort and cash into this white elephant? They’d sell it off in a heartbeat, and you know it. What’s your game, here?”
Backlit by the storefront window behind him, his eyes look pure gold as he narrows them thoughtfully at her. Then he smiles, shakes his head. The silver in his hair is bright, glowing. It would photograph beautifully in black-and-white.
“No game. The possibility that the university would sell it was one of the reasons your mother put it under my care. I can oversee the work, look after the renovations—”
“With what money?” She didn’t mean to be so blunt. And yet the hammering of her heartbeat, the adrenaline in her blood like an itch as he resists, pushes her into it.
He raises a broad shoulder. “There are plenty of options. Reverse mortgage. Sell my place, make a few investments—”
“Sell your place and live where? Make a few investments in what? But fine, let’s just say that gets you the seven fifty. Maybe. How much more to turn it into studio space, to make it actually functional? Just admit it, Patrick. You never wanted it for the arts center. You could do the arts center anywhere, if it’s something that the school actually wanted to support. Do it on some property they already own. You don’t want the Elf House for Mom’s legacy. You just want it for yourself.”
She snaps back in her chair, cursing herself. She wasn’t supposed to say so much. She was supposed to be subtle, cunning. And look, his reaction—he’s grimacing at her brazenness. At her bluntness.
“I appreciate your concern. Can I keep this?” he asks, folding the green paper back in on itself, shutting the ledger. It’s halfway under his arm before she closes her mouth, grabs it back. He laughs, exasperated. “Saskia. I do appreciate it. I do! And I understand where you’re coming from. Really. The loss of your mother was such a shock, and you want to make sure the house is cared for, maintained. But I’m not a bad guy. And I have resources at my disposal, and I’m going to make sure that this all turns out the way your mother and I—the way your mother wanted.”
She opens her mouth at that. But he’s already turning away, gesturing at the waitress, asking for a to-go box for his burger. Once she’d been the object of his affections, his object, the only object, now she is nothing, now she is—
Saskia does not know what it is in him that always wins.
But whatever it is, it ends with her.
She looks at him with fevered eyes. “Or maybe you’re just looking forward to the possibilities of the soundproofed tower. I mean, it’s no Ingenue. But there’s still potential there, I’m sure. Turning it into your own special studio. For example.”
He stands up.
“You know, honey,” he says, and there’s a mischievous catch to his voice as it lowers, as he bends down toward her to whisper, “I just don’t know where you get these crazy ideas. They’re going to ruin you in the end, you know. Better let them go before they destroy you.”
No, Saskia thinks, popping the last of the fajita into her mouth as she watches him turn away. No.
The only one who’s going to get destroyed is him.