The first thing you need to know about Puss in Boots is that Puss was a girl. The second was that she had a wild and willful intelligence. She could solve a problem in a heartbeat, did crosswords with a pen, and was reading Schopenhauer before her tenth birthday. I don’t know why people focused on the boots so much. They were all right, as far as boots go. But the way she dressed was far from the most important thing about her.
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
PUSS IN BOOTS, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
November 1999
Saskia was seventeen.
“Holy shit,” Mike said, staring at the SAT score report. “Sas, you sure that you’re the one who took this test?”
She giggled. The perfect 800 in math had been as much a surprise to her as to anyone else. Certainly it would be to Mr. Fletcher, who’d squeaked her by in trig last semester with a B minus.
“It’s wonderful, honey,” Evie said, brushing her lips on the top of Saskia’s head. “But this English score—”
Saskia grimaced. A 550. Yeah.
“Don’t you get two hundred points just for writing your name on the test?”
Saskia groaned and flipped the paper over. “Mom. It’s not like it even matters, okay? Nobody gives a shit about this stuff except you.”
Evie rinsed her coffee mug under a tap hissing water so forcefully, it sounded mad.
“It’ll matter to colleges,” she said.
“It would if I was applying,” Saskia called, louder than she needed to.
“If you were applying. Christ. Mike, you see—”
But Mike was shaking his head, holding up his hands as he left the room. “You two work it out.”
Saskia knew, by now, how to work things out. She went up behind Evie, put her chin on her shoulder.
“And what did you even get on the SATs?” she said. “I bet you can’t remember, because all art schools cared about was your portfolio. And all music schools care about are auditions.”
Evie smirked and twisted around, tucking a loose hair behind Saskia’s ear.
“Should we go get your winter formal dress after your lessons tomorrow?”
Saskia blinked.
“Isn’t Josh going to take you to the winter formal?”
Saskia’s lips were suddenly very itchy. She bit down, gnawing on the bottom one.
“Um, that’s not really Josh’s thing.”
“Oh.” Evie’s bob shimmied around her face. “Well, maybe you could just go with some girlfriends? Just for the experience? I hate to think of you missing out on all of these rites of passage. You’re only young once, you know?”
What girlfriends? she wanted to snap. But she didn’t have to actually go, she could just say that she was going. She could stuff the dress in the trunk of her car, could spend an extra four or five hours over at Patrick’s—
She squeezed her mother’s hand.
“Sure. Let’s go tomorrow.”
February 2020
Saskia lies in bed the next morning, staring at the midwinter sun flickering against the white lace canopy. She woke with guilt like an avocado pit at the root of her stomach. It is all too apparent that this is not a viable long-term solution, keeping Patrick in the attic. She’d just been too quick to fly off the handle, and wasn’t her mother always saying that about her?
She should probably feed him, shouldn’t she. Or at least bring up some water. And they could have another talk. She won’t forget to bring up the Elf House this time. If Patrick could at least admit to the arrangement he made with her mother—there’s disposition, right there. No teenage Saskia would need to be splayed before the court; no adult Saskia would have to see the pity in the jury’s eyes. Just say it, Patrick. Just fucking say it: I lied.
It would be a start, even if it wouldn’t be enough.
It would never be enough.
Descending the back stairs, though, she hears the low rumble of voices rising from the kitchen. She pauses, pulling her multicolored silk kimono closer around her. With the fuzzy slippers, she looks straight out of Grey Gardens. But though she can’t hear the words, Mike’s voice rises in laughter, and there’s a familiarity in the conversation’s cadence. She takes the risk and goes down.
“Sas!” Her father is sitting in front of an enormous breakfast spread at the counter: a pot of coffee, mugs, creamer, and sugar. Plates full of croissants, doughnuts, assorted pastries. His arms spreading wide, he looks like a dragon offering access to his hoard. “Join us for breakfast, won’t you?”
“Oh—”
The two men turn to her. Both around her father’s age, though the years are heavier on their faces; Mike looks about ten years younger than he actually is.
“This is Dennis,” Mike says, and the redhead with a washed-out orange coloring that makes him appear the same color as his beige sweater nods at her. “And Richie.” The other guy with white hair and a retro mustache gives her a strangely old-fashioned salute, two fingers from the forehead.
She can tell by her father’s voice that she’s supposed to know who Dennis and Richie are, so she smiles, nods, and takes the stool next to his. Wolfie shoves over, wiggling his tail as he tries to direct her attention, and her scraps, down to the floor. She runs an absentminded hand over his head.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
“Guys, this is my daughter, Saskia.”
“I think we got that much, Mikey. Doesn’t give us much credit as detectives, does he, Rich?” But the redhead’s eyes are smiling, his voice the broadest Wisconsin she’s ever heard, straight through the nose. She notices even as her heartbeat starts to tremble in her limbs, as her fingers freeze in Wolfie’s fur.
“Detectives?” she says brightly.
One night! she wants to scream. He’s only been here for one night!
The imaginary courtroom and the imaginary jury that have been haunting her all morning—yeah, they’d been preceded by an imaginary police search, of course. But that officer had been faceless, nameless, had been a stand-in for someone she’d never really thought she’d meet. These two are overwhelming in their specificity. She can’t stop looking at the large pores on Dennis’s nose, tiny black dots like on her mother’s tomato pincushion. Can’t stop looking at Richie’s torn cuticles, the places where the blood has rushed to the surface of his chewed-up fingers.
She’s always been good at decoding permutations and combinations, and she sees them converging on this moment, now. This is a nexus in the web; this is a moment that will produce all future moments, this, here, now, sun shining bright through the archways, this moment will be the one she looks back on later, the one she realizes ruined or saved her, the one—
Saskia represses a shiver as her father hands her a mug of coffee.
“Sure, kid. You remember—we were all at Washington High together. These guys joined the force together when they came back from the service. And with everything that’s going on with the house and all, I thought it’d be good to get some details on the guy. There’s something not right with him, something not right about any of this. I’ve been saying it—”
The cops are shaking their heads.
“Motherfucker,” Dennis says under his breath.
“Real piece of work,” from Richie.
There are police. In her house. Discussing the man trapped in her attic.
Shouldn’t they be retired by now, if they’re her father’s age? He’s over seventy, sure, but his job isn’t anything like being a police officer.
“Patrick?” The gravity in the room shifts as her voice cuts through them, chirpy. Three pairs of eyes are on her now, and she licks her lips, trying to moisten her dry mouth. “Gosh, what are you trying to find out about him?”
The cops look at Mike, but her father’s looking at her. “Anything,” he says, and his calm, low words are like a battle cry. “Everything.”
Richie, though, is happy to elaborate.
“Guy’s just a real creep. Nothing official, but we talked to the provost down at UWM on Friday. Three girls in his classes brought harassment complaints about him to the dean, three years in a row, 2012, 2013, 2014, and they all got shunted on up to the provost’s office, and they all ended up withdrawing the complaints once he got moved on over to Development. There’s something not right with a guy like that.”
Saskia seizes it: an opportunity.
“I knew that he manipulated Mom. I just knew it. No way that arts center stuff was for real.”
The squiggly vein on her father’s forehead appears as he tenses his jaw. She’s blown apart his carefully modulated information drip. The detectives, to their credit, don’t say a word. They just watch. Wait.
“Evie,” Mike says finally. “She left this guy … well, she left him a fairly generous bequest.”
Dennis blows his cheeks out like an enormous red squirrel. “Shit.”
“But better than…” Richie says, gesturing vaguely in Saskia’s direction with a fat hand.
Two identical navy gazes latch on to him.
“Better than what?” Mike says in a sepulchral tone.
Dennis nudges the other cop. “Well, our first thought was that maybe your daughter was currently involved with the guy.” The cops chortle, but neither Mike nor Saskia is amused. “Hey. You’d be surprised to find out how many fathers want us to peek into the new boyfriend’s past.”
Richie bites into a chocolate croissant. “Fathers of daughters,” he says. “They’re a special breed.”
A few dismissed charges. Would a judge allow them in as evidence? She’ll have to ask Tara. Or, better, Christine. Fuck, she needs to send that email. Eleven days left.
In the meantime, Saskia can’t bear up under scrutiny, either.
“Thanks so much for looking into this,” she says, grabbing an almond croissant and refilling her coffee as she stands to go. “But, unfortunately, I can’t imagine you’re going to find anything that would be useful for us. What, like he had a pattern of scamming ladies out of their property? I think we’d have heard by now.”
Her father’s gaze is as hot as a dragon’s as she climbs back up the stairs. The second she’s around the corner, too far away to be seen, she picks up into a run. Runs all the way to her bedside table, then to the tower with the key in hand.
She has to let him out. She can’t wait any longer.
She’ll play it off as a joke. Then she’ll take him out the side door—and she’ll …
But no, she realizes as the tower door swings open with a creak. No, she can’t let him out. Not yet. Because in what world will Patrick go quietly?
Who would stay quietly, for that matter?
She relocks the door, trots back to her room, and drops two Xanax into the coffee. Waits a minute, swirling it in her hand like a beaker, and adds two more. He just needs to stay quiet until the cops leave. That’s all.
The dusty attic smells like a close room in the summer, when the windows have been closed for rain and you’ve slept slightly too long, waking in the muggy fug of it. Not even a day, and already he’s permeating every cubic inch of the space.
He’s only half-awake as she hands him the croissant and coffee. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her as he sits up, back against the wall.
“Saskia,” Patrick says carefully, “what are you doing?”
She doesn’t drop his gaze, either, as she points at the pile of photos at his feet.
“How old am I?” she asks. She wonders at how measured her voice is, how cool. She never knew about this part of herself.
His eyes follow her finger, raise unwillingly toward her face again.
“Eighteen,” he says hoarsely.
She stares at him, waiting for him to break; but neither of them moves.
“Was there ever a plan for the arts center?”
He closes his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
And then she’s skittering down the stairs, slamming the door behind her and jamming the key in as fast as she can.
Why can’t she do it? Why can’t she fucking let him go?
Because it’s too late, she realizes as she drops the key back into the drawer of her bedside table. Because she’s already climbed up the playground slide, and there’s a line of kids waiting impatiently on the ladder behind her.
There’s only one way down.
Saskia does run out the side door later that morning. But the cops are long gone by then; she just doesn’t want to pass her father in the study. She’s headed for her mother’s studio.
It’s only once she’s sitting at the desk, sunlight dappling the cottage around her, that she realizes: she’s living her mother’s life.
In the Elf House. Writing her book. Playing her Scrabble side. She hasn’t boxed in a month, hasn’t so much as jumped rope. She’s said goodbye to her best friend and her boyfriend (such as he was); she’s hanging out with Georgia, she’s—
She puts her head in her palms.
Well, she’s not exactly like her mother.
She has, after all, trapped Patrick in the attic.
It’s enough to make her sit up straight and start writing.
Her Persephone, though, doesn’t want to do what the original did. She doesn’t want to wait, a damsel to be rescued, for the shitty deal her mother is capable of negotiating. While the Demeter scenes are easy enough to craft—she’s written two of them so far, Demeter trapped in a haunted castle, Demeter searching through caves—Persephone’s just sitting there. Playing nice with Hades.
But what if she didn’t?
What if she took what was his, instead?
She grabs her phone and sees she missed a message:
Christine had a cancellation tomorrow. I say we take it. 2:30 work for you?
She’s not entirely sure what day it is anymore. She has to check the phone’s calendar to verify: still eleven days to the hearing. Still time.
Can’t do tomorrow; let’s touch base next week? How’s the affidavit coming?
A long time for the three dots to resolve. And then: It’s in your in-box. Let me know if I have the go-ahead to file. What was the potential message Tara never sent? A failed girl-power call to arms, she’s sure. She’s grateful Tara changed course. There’s something extremely decent about Tara, despite the pity.
Lexi picks up on the first ring, just like she always used to do on the house phone.
“Sorry to call—”
“Nah, it’s like old times. What’s up?”
“Okay, so. Mom’s book. Here’s what I’m thinking: Persephone kills Hades, and then she takes over as Queen of the Underworld.”
“No.” Lexi’s response is quick, final.
“No, it’s perfect. It’s like all of Mom’s other stories. The princess—that’s Persephone, here—she takes action. She reaches her goal. She vanquishes the villain, she—”
“Yeah, I mean, it totally works narratively,” Lexi says. “But it doesn’t make any sense in the world of the Greek myths. I mean, Hades is a god. He’s immortal.”
“Yeah, okay,” Saskia says, flopping back in her chair. A frustrated noise rises from the back of her throat. “Ugh. I just…”
“What?”
“I just really wanted to kill him, though,” she says, staring out at the trees.