she’ll set light to some leaves tonight, or some sticks, or . . . Then she isn’t alone anymore. Scarlet stands very still, peering into the shadows. A girl steps out of the darkness and into the moonlight.
“Hey, sis,” Bea says with a smile.
Scarlet wakes.
Who was that girl? How does she know her? Even as she’s thinking, the girl’s face is dissolving and Scarlet is slipping into sleep again.
Now she sits in a clearing with her legs crossed, picking daisies from the mossy ground. Except that the flowers don’t grow here, they grew in her mother’s garden, and she picked them before the fire. Scarlet sets each daisy in her palm, then incinerates it. Pursing her lips, she blows ash into the air, before beginning again. They shouldn’t be here, these flowers. They don’t belong. And it’s her job to eradicate them.
All at once, Scarlet senses she’s being watched.
Her mother sits at the edge of the clearing, perched on a large white stone. She is here. But she is never here, not in this place.
“Hello.”
Her mother says nothing, as distant in the dream as she was in life. Then, in an unprecedented move, she stands and walks slowly over to Scarlet, her feet bare, like Scarlet’s own, on the moss and stone. She stops, reaches down, and plucks a daisy from the earth. Taking the stalk between finger and thumb, she places it in Scarlet’s open hand.
“Take care of it. I couldn’t, but you can.”
Then, in those strange slipping shifts that so often happen in dreams, Scarlet is running, stepping over the stones, leaping over fallen tree trunks, legs stretched and then lifting into the air. Then she’s standing in the lower branches of a tree, looking up for a foothold, intent on clambering all the way to the top. Scarlet doesn’t know why but the urge is insistent. Then she’s at the top of the tree, looking down.
Someone below is shouting, telling her to jump, telling her to fly.
“Oh-kay,” Scarlet shouts back. How did she get there? She’d wanted only to run; everything afterwards was like being plucked from the ground and set atop the tree by the hand of God. Perhaps she’ll fall and smash on the ground like the Christmas fairy she broke a decade ago. She can still see the fragments of her china face scattered across the floorboards. But no, she won’t die.
Scarlet reaches out her arms like wings and jumps.
Scarlet wakes but doesn’t open her eyes. She presses her head into the pillow, trying to hold on to the tendrils of the dream. But the mists and fog are evaporating, rolling back out of her reach. Sighing, she brushes her hair out of her eyes. Her finger snags on something caught in a curl and she pulls it out.
A white twig.
Twenty minutes later, finally dragging herself out of bed, Scarlet steps onto the carpet and sees that the soles of her feet are smeared with mud.
11:59 p.m.—Bea
“Welcome back. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Bea looks up to see the man with the golden eyes swoop down through the mists like her book-eagles, parting the fog with a single sweep of his outstretched arms. Her father.
Bea steps back, feeling his voice slice thin strips from her skin, pricking the scars on her thighs. She presses her hands to her sides.
“Oh, you’re not still upset?” Wilhelm Grimm reaches out his hand. “I thought I’d explained myself. I thought you understood.”
Bea looks at him, torn between the desire to seize hold of him and the desire to run.
He wiggles his fingertips. “Bygones?”
Bea doesn’t speak, doesn’t move.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t hold a grudge.” He smiles. “You’re my best girl, don’t you know that? I’m so very proud of you.”
Bea hesitates. She wants to resist him, wants to hate him. She refuses to succumb to feeling what she’s been fighting all her life: a longing to be loved by him.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “You can’t tell me you feel at home in that other world.” His hand hangs in the air, waiting. “Tell me you feel seen there. Tell me you have someone who knows you as you truly are, who’s glimpsed inside your heart and accepted you just as you are.” He pauses. “If you have that, go back and enjoy it, for I’ve nothing more than that to offer you here.”
Bea meets her father’s eyes, then reaches for his hand.
They walk together awhile, hand in hand, along the moss-stone paths, the white leaves falling on and all around