You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,60
victim.”
“I don’t think I was, though Dr. Martin would say so.”
“Even if the doctor’s story isn’t true, you were still taken. Pepper-Man took you when you were a child.”
“… I came to love him.”
“But did you have choice? What were you to do? Taken into Faerie at such a young age.”
“It is the curse of the sight.”
“It is the curse of a predator falling upon its prey—I should know all about that.”
“He needed to feed—”
“Yes, they all say that.”
“What do you want from me, Mara?” I was nearing my wits’ end.
“From you? Nothing. You have bled enough.”
“Why can’t you just let it be, then? Let there be peace now and no more grief.”
“I’ve tried—I can’t. You had your choices stolen, and so did I, by extension.”
“We all do, Mara, that’s what it’s like being born. We can’t pick and choose the life we’ll live, if we’ll grow up in S—, Paris, or New York—”
“But no matter where you live, it’s all life, and yours, not borrowed from someone else’s blood.”
“The Sunday roast would disagree, don’t you think? We all live off something. You are a faerie, Mara, with magic at your fingertips, a life beyond measure. Most people would consider that a gift.”
“I don’t, though. I consider it a consolation prize.”
I sat quiet for a while. It’s always hard for a parent to learn that what you could give has not been enough, that all the hard choices you made mean nothing to the child. That you always gave the wrong thing, thinking it was the right. “What will you do?”
“What I do best.”
“Leave poor Ferdinand alone,” I begged her. “He has nothing to do with any of this.”
She didn’t listen to me, though.
Of course not.
* * *
Daughter of pain. Daughter of anger. Daughter of love, too, I always believed.
Where I was soft, she was hard. Where I adapted, she stood firm. It must be hard to burn as bright as that—exhausting, too, I reckon. Where I chose shield, she chose sword. I never looked back, nothing good came from that. Mara, though, she was always looking back, unraveling the story and following the threads until she came back to the beginning, pinning down guilt where she saw fit. She was never content with just living—or not, depending on the side of the coin.
* * *
I will give you a way out, Penelope and Janus, you can still walk away from this. You can abandon the story before it gets ugly. The password is THORN, yes, THORN, like my maiden name. But then again, you don’t know that for sure. I can still change my mind on the next page. Maybe it isn’t THORN at all, but MARMALADE or SPARROW. But for now it is THORN.
You should probably read on.
XXVI
The last time I saw Ferdinand he was sitting on my porch, sleeping in one of my wicker chairs.
I was just out of bed, had barely had time to make myself a cup of coffee and throw on my satin morning robe. It was a beautiful day in an Indian summer that only seemed to last and last. Even so early, the sun was still blazing, all red and gorgeous. The wind that swept through my garden and caught the dry roses and apple tree leaves was sauna hot and felt like a caress, just the perfect day to take my morning coffee outside. I brought with me the manuscript that I never seemed to be able to finish editing and placed my glasses on top of my head. Armed thus with both pleasure and work, I stepped outside, and found him sleeping there, snoring softly with his mouth open, closed eyes aimed at the sky. His pale blue shirt was rumpled and large circles of perspiration had soaked through the fabric and spread out from his armpits. His red tie with little dogs on it was draped across his shoulder. His glasses were all askew.
I sat down on the other side of the table, put down my coffee carefully so I wouldn’t wake him up. His car was haphazardly parked with one tire nearly grazing my magnolias. I wasn’t in a hurry to know why he had come and promptly fallen asleep on my porch. I knew it couldn’t be good. It probably had to do with Mara, and a part of me just didn’t want to know. So I delayed the moment, took out my pink ink pen and started working on my book, circling words or crossing them