Godmother (11 page)

There was another link, I realized, at the bottom of the page. “Journal.” When I clicked it, a new page opened. It took a second for it to fill with a number of diary entries about her life. I scrolled down the page, saw that the entries dated to a month back and that there was a link on the bottom of the page to see entries from before. A few years’ worth of archives were listed on the right. How could such a young woman have so much to say, I wondered.

I glanced down at the first one, dated the day before, 10:
16 A.M.

I laughed and scrolled through the next few entries, reading about a German movie she'd loved, her obsessions with Coney Island and rhinestone jewelry and abandoned buildings, a party she'd been to a few nights before, and how, this summer, the air was so thick she felt it was molesting her. I read about a Pomeranian named Diva that she'd fallen madly in love with when it showed up at her door, and how her heart had broken when the owner came to collect it.
Diva,
I repeated out loud. I could see the dog panting up at her with its bulging eyes. She wrote about a T-shirt she'd bought—
“Prufrock is my Homeboy”
—and included a photo of
herself “glamorously draped over a park bench,” modeling it. In one entry she wrote about staying with a friend's Indian family in California and her fervent desire to become Indian as well, due to the luscious food and colorful garments that really “complement my skin tone.” I reached the bottom of the page and realized I was smiling at the screen, utterly charmed.

I shifted in my chair. The light in the back of the store was dim, but the computer screen shone out. I was enjoying this. I took a drink of coffee and clicked on a month from the year before, then looked down at the first entry.

I scrolled down to an entry from a few weeks before that.

I kept clicking to go back and back through the months and years, to the journal's first entry. I sank deeper and
deeper into her life, reading about her travels—to Mexico and San Francisco and Berlin—and nights out at clubs or shows. I read about the art she loved: Joseph Cornell, photos by Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Diane Arbus and Brassaï. Her soaring passions for misfit men and the sudden crashes after they'd revealed themselves to be cracked and flawed. Her continued grief at the death of her first love, in a car accident several years before. I riffled through her heart, her thoughts.

I couldn't believe that it was all right there, for anyone to see. In the old days, no one spoke what they felt, and what we tapped into was buried deep. Now here was a modern girl, with all the secret desires right up there on the screen. It was the modern way. She had been able to walk into the bookstore and flirt with a young man and talk with an old woman, tell me about her breakup and her life, with no self-consciousness at all. For a moment I imagined what it would be like to be as fearless as that, as open.

What I read confirmed everything I'd intuited about her. That she was, like Cinderella, longing for something extraordinary. That she had been sent to me for a reason.

Chapter Six

I
NEVER SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE PRINCE UP CLOSE,
never even come within eyeshot of him, really. My instructions had been specific, startlingly simple:
Help Cinderella get to the ball.
It didn't matter why, or that she was to go to the ball to fall in love with the prince as the fairy elders had decreed. Of course I'd seen the prince—we saw everything back then, in all the world—but I hadn't
seen
him the way another human would have. The way I saw her.

But I had finally convinced Maybeth to come with me. The lure for her of poking around the royal palace was too strong to resist.

“We'll only take a quick look,” I had said. “Just to see up close what all the human girls are so crazy about.”

“I'm sure he's as revolting as the rest of them,” Maybeth said. “I'm going to pull that hair of his and turn it into hay. And then I'll turn him into a cow so he can eat it!”

“May!” I laughed. “You'll do no such thing!”

We flitted about the royal palace and laughed and squealed, thrilled with our daring. Until I realized—
suddenly, shockingly—that the servants were running into place, bugles were blowing, and carpet was being unfurled across the floor. Just underneath us, Prince Theodore was entering the grand hall.

We should never have been in that palace; I never should have let it get that far. It wasn't officially prohibited, I had argued. It would be fun just to pretend. To flirt with taboos, the other world. And now here he was, the prince himself. My previous encounters with the royal family had been official, regulated by the fairy elders, recorded in the fairy book. This, here and now, was all wrong.

I looked down and saw the spark of his hair. I laughed nervously. He glanced up then, right at me, as if he could see me. But he couldn't. No humans could. Could they?

I was aware of Maybeth tittering and laughing at me, but I just stared down into his blue eyes. It was as if vision had taken on a whole new significance. I had never looked at someone like that, never had someone look like that at me. I forgot everything else.

“Can you see me?” I whispered, just as he turned away.

“Lil, that's not funny!” Maybeth said.

I looked over at her. “He saw me,” I said.

We were still hovering against the ceiling of the grand dining room. The room underneath us shone with marble and gold. I could feel him moving through the palace, down the great hallway, through to the suites where he slept.

“That's impossible,” Maybeth said. “You know that's impossible.”

“Sometimes they can see us,” I said, turning to her, challenging her.

She looked down, then back up at me, no longer laughing. “Lil, you shouldn't be talking like that. And we're late. Come on.”

But I had to be sure. “I'm taking another look,” I said. “One more, just to see.”

“Lil, he's promised. He's the prince!
Her
prince!” May-beth swooped over to me then and grabbed my dress with her tiny hand. Her fingers pinched into me.

“Let go!” I said. I could feel him in his chambers, sitting on his velvet chair with a manuscript open in his lap. All my senses homed in on him, and I could feel his dreams of the hunt the next day, the flush that swept through him. “He saw me. I can feel it!”

“So what if he did?” she asked, exasperated. “We have to get back. We shouldn't have come here at all.” Maybeth, my sister, the prettiest, wildest fairy girl, was practically wringing her hands with worry. I almost laughed out loud at the sight.

“Go ahead, then. I'll meet you there!” I said. I was tired of listening to her and her annoying, high-pitched squeal, and with that I tucked in my head and just went. As fast as I could. So that even Maybeth saw only a blur of light, felt a whoosh against her pale skin before I was gone.

I laughed and whooped, my heart racing with the thrill of it. This was my one chance, I thought. I was doing everything wrong, and, for once in my life, I didn't care. I didn't slow down or even think about where I was going, I just darted through the great hall and the gigantic gilded doors and the various ornate chambers until all at once there he was. He looked up from the pages and right into me.

I stopped dead. He was so beautiful.

I was shocked. We fairies were interested in humans; we helped and loved and tormented them. But I had never felt anything like this before. I felt stupid suddenly, and scared. I was used to being invisible and having free rein over the human world. Being able to flit along the curve of a child's ear, playing my harp and tickling the skin with my notes. Sliding myself into a rain gutter. Perching on the tine of a fork. Whispering and singing until the humans dreamed of our world, and longed for it. But I had never been pinned down the way he was pinning me now.

“Hello,” he said. His voice rumbled through me.

I looked back and forth, and slipped my cloak over my face to make myself invisible. Was he one of us posing as the prince? I had heard of banished fairies roaming the earth as humans. But this was the prince. It was impossible. I had been one of those fairies who'd seen to it that he was born, to the queen and king—a woman and man with only a touch of fairy blood running through their veins. I had dangled mint under the queen's nose eighteen years before in human time. In our time only months.

Now I felt time grinding to a halt as his eyes bore through me. Bright eyes, like the water of the fairy lake, the sugar water that moved against you like silk.

“What is your name?” he asked.

No human had spoken to me before. Not in this form, with flitting, flapping wings, hovering in the air.

No sooner did I have the thought than I transformed, right there. Without even thinking about it. My tiny fingers stretched out, my body filled and dropped to the floor. My hair grew in masses down my back. And then, before I knew
what was happening, I was standing in front of him, an almost-human, nearly his own height. It was in this form that we had been known to make humans go mad.

I was horrified at my daring, even as the prince stood and walked over to me.

“Who are you?” he gasped.

“Lil,” I whispered, and my voice sounded loud and strange in my ear.

My heart pounded.
Run!
a voice inside me said, and yet I stood there and lifted my eyes straight into his.

For a second I was sure I heard the voice of the chief fairy elder beating in my ear.

“I have never seen anyone like you,” he said, and then he came so close to me that I could practically taste him. Small beads of sweat formed on his brow, like drops of dew on a grass blade.

I knew at that point I should leave. Pull my body in and swoop away as quickly as possible through that gilded door.

But I could not look away from him. I was sure he would taste of peach juice and dew. Figs plucked straight off the tree.

“I have never seen anyone like you, either,” I whispered, and stepped toward him. I heard the strange sound move through the room. My voice in human form, light as air.

I walked to him. I lifted my hand and pressed my palm against his cheek, in one quick gesture that seemed to have a life all its own. As if the rest of me were still as small as a hummingbird, hovering in the corner of the room.