Fig

Dedicated to my mother; this book is for you.

Enid Schantz, 1938–2011

I was never really insane except on occasions when my heart was touched.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE

prologos:
(
 Greek root for “prologue”  
); pro (
 before  
), logos (
word  
)
; “before word”

Today is the twenty-first day of October. The year is 1994. Anno Domino. Common era. The Year of the Dog.

Today I turn nineteen. And today I will finish a story that must be told. The last thirteen years of my life. I hold my breath and I cross my fingers.

My story begins when I am six.

1. “Clock” is derived from the word “bell.” Wearing bells can protect a person from fairies—and from falling into a fairyland where time does not operate as it should.

June 11, 1982

Because I'm only six, I'm not allowed to go into the woods alone—nowhere near the farmer's ditch, and most especially nowhere near the Silver River. Daddy worries I will drown, and Mama worries about everything.

I'm getting better at sneaking out. I crawl my way from the house to the orchard, and then I run from tree to tree, hiding behind each one until my arms become the branches. And I can be a rabbit too—I can be the runaway bunny. The Johnsongrass is tall in the space between the orchard and the ditch and hides me the rest of the way. Once I'm by the water, the tall cottonwoods and thick raspberry form walls to separate the worlds, and I can't be seen from the house or the yard.

Mama is helping Daddy pack. I had tried to help but she got mad.

“Fig,” she said. “Leave us alone!”

Then Daddy smiled at me and ruffled my hair with his big fingers. He looked at me with eyes that said,
Sorry
.

“Go and play,” he said, and his voice was soft, and the soft melted Mama. The angry red drained from her face and she was almost normal again. Mama is always pretty, but without the red I could see the soft splatter of pale freckles around her nose. Daddy touched her arm and said her name in a quiet way. He said, “Annie,” like he was reminding her of something she'd forgotten, and then she turned and smiled at me too. And with her voice, she said, “Sorry.”

“I didn't mean to snap,” she said. “I just need to talk to your father.”

“Alone,” she said.

Then she kissed me on my forehead—the special place between my eyes. The place Mama calls my third eye. “Everyone has them,” she always says, “but not everyone knows how to use them. The third eye is a magic eye because it can see all the other worlds.”

Mama is referring to fairyland.

She isn't talking about the world outside Kansas or even just beyond Douglas County, where we live on a farm. The closest town is Eudora, and Eudora, Kansas, is what it says on all our mail, and Eudora is where I go to school and will continue to go until I graduate from high school.

Eudora has a feed and seed, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a post office, a newspaper, a diner, a one-room library, a morgue, and a handful of churches scattered here and there, including the Sacred Heart of Mary, where my grandmother goes even though she lives in Lawrence now. Sacred Heart is more than a church; it's a private school as well. It covers all fourteen grades in one building, while the public school system has Douglas Elementary, Keller Junior, and Carter High. There is talk about closing down the high school and busing all the teenagers to another high school in another town in another county, but it hasn't happened yet.

Mama doesn't care for the Eudora Library. “All they stock is romance novels and car manuals,” she says, and takes me to the public library in Lawrence instead. And sometimes we go to Topeka, but mostly we don't go anywhere. I stay within a triangle of highways and interstate. I stay inside the square acreage of the farm. I stay at home.

I visit the farmer's ditch when Mama takes her bath or does her yoga. This is where I bring all the meat I won't eat. This is my secret. I don't like the idea of eating something dead.

Stepping onto the bridge, I become a tightrope walker.

The farmer's ditch runs away from the Silver River, where my uncle likes to fish. And the Silver River marks the end of our land to the south. Everything on the other side of the river belongs to the McAlisters. While I dare the dangers of the ditch, I would never go to Silver by myself, and I am always careful about getting back to the house before the sun goes down—before anyone knows I am missing.

With arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, I walk across the board, but I only go far enough to toss the meat onto the other side before turning around. Returning to my side, I crouch behind the old log and wait for the dog to come and eat the scraps.

Mama hates dogs. “It's a phobia,” she has said many times. Then she showed me the word in the dictionary, and I learned that
ph
makes the same sound as an
f
.

Mama was bit by her uncle's dog when she was little. The dog was named Sticker, and he bit her on Easter. Everyone was sitting at the table getting ready to eat, but first they had to close their eyes and pray. “I never did like to pray,” Mama said, and this is when she slid out of her seat to sit under the table, where Sticker was curled into a ball of sleeping fur and hidden teeth.

My uncle Billy says, “Always let a sleeping dog lay.” But Mama did not let Sticker lie. She scratched behind his ears, and Sticker whirled around and bit her on the face. “When I opened my eyes,” she said, “I could see his throat.” She was taken to the emergency room and stitched back together. This scar hides behind her eyebrow and is nothing compared with her other scar—the one that came later.

When the dog comes, I think about petting her, but I don't.

I stay behind the log, watching her watch me. We both practice being still. This makes her feel safe enough to come and sniff the pork chops or the drumsticks or whatever meat I've brought to her. Today, I brought a link of sausage. She never stops watching me, one eye dark and the other a cloudy blue. Because she watches me like this, I feel like I'm the one she's actually eating. And this is not the first time I've ever felt like a piece of meat. She never barks or howls or growls. She sniffs the air, and sometimes the sniffing makes her lips curl back into a smile that isn't really a smile. Her gums are a wet blue-black, and there are spots on her tongue.

I think she has a family, because she carries the bones away. At first, she is slow—she moves like she is only stretching—but then she runs. Once she is running, her feet don't even touch the ground. During the day, I try to run like this. I try to run away, but my knees get in the way because they don't bend right. And sometimes I catch Mama watching me. Her worry comes pouring out of her body like something spilling. It drips off her clothes, and her worry is the color of shadows, and it moves like water. From the porch, it seeps into the steps—pouring out into the grass where I am trying to run like a dog. Her worry comes for me.

*  *  *  *

June 21, 1982

After a long day of working in the flower garden, Mama and I decide to have a picnic dinner instead of eating inside the house. The fireflies are coming out. Blinking yellow lights, on and off, here and there, they change everything about the orchard. And Mama and I go to another world—one like Wonderland, or Oz. We go to Never, Never Land.

When I asked if we could go to fairyland, Mama tried to scare me away. “Figaroo,” she said. “You don't really want to go.”

And then she said, “It can be very hard to come back from fairyland,” and that was when she looked away and her face got all sad.

“Sometimes it's even impossible,” she said.

Mama says if I do end up in fairyland, not to eat or drink anything while I'm there. “Those are the rules—otherwise, you can get stuck,” she says. “It's like a spell.”

When Mama talks about fairyland, she uses the word “lure.”

Fairyland
is
a lure. I want to fly and make friends. Most of all, I want to be able to change the size of my body from big to small whenever I want.

I lie back on the picnic blanket, looking at the tangled branches above. In the changing light, I see the little green apples—still too hard and sour to eat. The black branches crisscross the sky. The sun is setting, and that side of the sky looks like melted orange and strawberry sorbet. On the other side, the moon is rising. And in the middle, the sky turns into violet—the color of my new favorite crayon. The darkness brings a chill, and the Kansas humidity turns into a cold damp. Mama wraps herself in a shawl to keep away the chill.

Mama packed a picnic dinner: cubes of cheese bought from the Fergesons' dairy farm across the highway, and Stoned Wheat Thins, green grapes, new cherries, and little cucumber sandwiches cut into hearts using Gran's old cookie cutters. My belly is full like a pregnant woman. We're on an old quilt spread beneath the trees. Mama is wearing a white dress with crocheted edges—the one she calls a garden dress. “It's vintage,” Mama says. “It is almost a hundred years old.”

Mama collects old clothes, and this is what she wears when she isn't wearing paint-splattered blue jeans with peasant blouses or worn-out T-shirts.

She is beautiful in the delicate lacy gown, and I wish I was dressed up too, but Mama says, “You are already perfect, my dearest Fig.”

She helps arrange all my stuffed animals so we are sitting in a circle while she reads out loud. When she's done with the Peter Rabbit books, we imagine the lives of all the rabbits on the farm—what their names are, who is related to who, what they do for a living, and where they live.

Daddy is away with Uncle Billy.

I think it's an emergency, but no one wants to talk to me about it because I'm only six years old. It doesn't matter that I was born from an emergency, or that I've been reading since I was four. It doesn't matter that I can read better than my entire class, and it doesn't matter that I know how to use a dictionary and an encyclopedia.

Looking things up is one of Mama's favorite things to do, and it is one of my favorite things to do with her. Mama keeps the encyclopedia in the living room. It belonged to her father once upon a time, but he gave it to her when she went to college.

“Not only do I want you to have knowledge at your fingertips,” he said to her, “I want you to have a piece of home to forever keep.”

Mama says she's lucky to have this encyclopedia. “Just like I'm lucky to have the few family photos I took with me to college,” she will say, “and some of my mother's dresses, and the teddy bear that's now yours.” But really she isn't lucky at all. She's only lucky to have these few things because everything else was lost in the fire that also took her parents away.

The encyclopedia has a black cloth cover with gold lettering. The cover looks dusty, but whenever I try to wipe it clean, I find there isn't any dust. Mama says it looks this way because it faded from the sun, but it must have faded from another sun, in another living room, because our living room is always dark—even when all the lamps are turned on.

I used to use the encyclopedia as a booster seat, and before that I used the same wooden high chair that Daddy and Uncle Billy used before they grew into boys who grew into men.