to fight and burn, but I will fight this one for you. For your sake and for mine.”
My blood ran cold in my veins. “No, please, Mara, I wish you wouldn’t.” Why poke at a resting bear?
She lifted her chin up high, eyes glowing like crushed embers. “If I don’t, who will?”
“It was all such a long time ago, they are so old now, they will soon die—”
“And never have to pay?”
“Yes, just that. Let there be peace now. That is all I want from life.”
“You are growing old.” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Only old people say such things. People with no hope left. People who have given in.”
“Maybe I have,” I shrugged again. “And maybe it is enough to have survived.”
XXII
We keep coming back to it, don’t we? That book that he wrote. Away with the Fairies: A Study in Trauma-Induced Psychosis. Maybe because it played such a crucial role in everything that happened later. It changed the course of fate, I think. Changed us all.
The book itself is rather dry. It recounts Dr. Martin’s relationship with a young female patient, thinly disguised as “C—,” who later went on to face murder charges. Dr. Martin writes about a troubled young girl who has lost her ability to tell reality from fantasy. His theory is that she had been a victim of sexual and emotional abuse from a very early age, and has constructed a world of her own to escape to. The real problems begin when her fantasy world spills into the real world, confusing the two in her mind. She is living in both worlds at the same time. Her fairy friends are as real to her as her family and schoolmates. Maybe even more real. He used Pepper-Man as an example of how “C—’s” imaginary world evolves: She is attempting to heal herself, by altering her cast: the kindly monster from her childhood (her abuser), who gives her gifts, but also hurts her, is transformed into a prince in her adolescence. He becomes a beautiful savior who has come to take her away from her cruel family. His counterpart in reality then becomes the man who would be her husband. Even though it seems irrational for healthy people, this attempted healing is actually a sign of a highly functioning survival instinct. Her mind is struggling to heal the wounds inflicted on her by rewriting the story and erasing the things that hurt.
As stories go, his is not a bad one. Dr. Martin had taken it all and managed to wrap it all up in one neat little bundle. Applied his magnifying glass to it and knitted a new narrative from the bits and bobs. About Mara, he said: The abortion was another violation of her body, another situation in which she was completely helpless and at the mercy of her abusers. Her mind gets to work and unravels the incident and lets her write a new one, in which she saves the child by taking it to the fairy mound (where the dead still live). The child is lost in the real world, but lives on in her fantasy land. She copes with her loss by not coping at all because she does not have to. The child is still there, only displaced—allowed to grow up in a way that C— had not been able to do.
No wonder Mara was upset, poor child.
He spends quite some time searching for the origins for my “delusions,” examining everything from the fairytale books I had as a child, to the selection of books on folklore and myths available at the S— library at the time. It’s unclear if he was satisfied with his search.
He doesn’t say right out that “C—” had in fact killed her husband, but notes: If she had murdered her spouse as the result of a lovers’ quarrel or a relationship grown stale, her mind would have quickly been at it again, rewriting the story to heal the wounds. Maybe he had not been human at all, but a man made from twigs and river stones? Maybe the real prince had been hiding inside him, and the body in question, with its flaws and appetites, didn’t truly matter? Maybe, as her mind keeps justifying her deeds, the real husband has been dead all along, and it is her fairy consort, her childhood solace, who has been posing as him for years? No crime, then, to dismember his body and wheelbarrow the pieces into the woods …
Your