Godmother (26 page)

I thought of the palace and its silver stairs. How they had felt under my human form, the glass slippers clacking against metal.

An hour later I turned on Seventieth, and the street was darker now, lined with town houses fronted by swooping banisters, greenery bursting out of the windows and doorways. There were whole worlds in each one, I thought, imagining what I might have been able to see once on a street like this. Of course, the world was so crowded now. The thoughts and dreams swirling here would likely move into a fairy and eat her alive. Wouldn't they? I laughed. I thought of Cinderella's stepmother and her dream: the banquet tables laid with food, the chests overflowing with jewels.

Men and women walked by holding hands, stepping out of cars, walking up into the palaces lining the streets. I thought of Veronica and George, how perfect and alive they were, the way her eyes would glitter when she looked at him, her lashes batting up and down like wings, and how flushed he would become under her gaze. I thought of her ice blue dress with the crystals shining off it, wrapping around her body and clashing with her hair.

I could see all of it.

The Frick came up on my right, surrounded by a regal
dark fence. I took a breath and stepped through the main door, past the security guards and around the side, to the front desk.

Inside, it was a riot of color, all around. I was surprised that it was an old house, a mansion someone had lived in once. I could
feel
the presence of lives in the walls and air, even before I read about them.

I bought a ticket, then walked slowly through, one grand room after another, past the ornate furniture that was on the verge of crumbling, the fireplaces, the paintings that took up whole walls. Everything rubbed up against everything else. As I walked from room to room, I heard whispers, laughter. At one point I saw men and women standing around the couches with drinks in their hands, and stopped in my tracks. They were gone a moment later, the whole place turning so quiet I could hear my breath, my beating heart. The faint movements of the pacing guards.

I entered a great hallway, a long rectangle of a room lined in paintings. Every kind of painting, it seemed. Whole worlds clashed and collided with each other there. Stormy scenes, dark trees bent against blackening, melancholy skies. Portraits, faces staring out, spoke of other, ghostlier worlds. I thought of everyone, all the places and people I had known, the dreams I had taken up into myself and could still feel rustling there, deep down.

I stopped and stared into one of the paintings: a lit-up, butter-colored harbor with long boats teeming against the shoreline, where men and women wandered and worked and waited. The sky glowed and turned to dark, then to a bright dewy blue, almost translucent. Sugary. The water was green and brown and blue, constantly changing, almost
alive. I could see the sun and the buildings reflected in it, growing and spreading across the surface, feel the cool sprays of it flicking onto my hands and face.
The sky,
I thought,
is going to break open.
I stepped closer, stared into one of the boats, the people working there and the sails dangling and folding down, like sheets hung out to dry, and then the faces, the people bent over, moving. I could hear them talking, shouting orders. I could hear the sounds of their feet stomping across the hull, the planks of wood, the water slapping against it, and the tug and groan as the boat stopped and swayed in the harbor.

“Ma'am?”

I recognized something. A familiar line of the jaw, arch of the forehead. A clock, I saw then, rising up across the water. Chiming one, two, three …

“Excuse me, ma'am?” A hand touched my arm. “Ma'am, are you okay? I need you to step back behind this line.”

I looked down, disoriented. Green carpet, a yellow line.

I moved then, but I could feel the tears bubbling up in me, pressing against my eyelids. I looked back at the painting but it was all still now, quiet. A lovely scene lit from within, as if a heart were glowing from inside of it. The figures on the boat were motionless, drawn in black paint. The clock tower had disappeared.

A stairwell led to a cluster of rooms downstairs. A painting caught my eye immediately as I walked in. I stepped closer. The colors seemed to shimmer off the canvas, greens and blues and golds. I focused in. A fairy scene. Three fairies next to a lake, dancing on the grass beside it. Behind them, a scattering of lights.

I could reach into the painting and feel water, grass
light. I could feel the wind breaking against my face as I flew through it. The water skimmed against feathers as I dove in, exchanging the air for the fairy lake, pressing into the water, my wings spread out like sails as I went deeper and deeper into the other world. The elders sat at their thrones; the gnarled trees swayed back and forth in the water.

I checked the date of the painting: 1831. I leaned in but could not make out the fairies’ faces. They could have been my own kind but also could have been any other fairy tribe. Had they shown themselves, too?

I didn't want to step away. The colors were rich, like juice or candy. My body, with its aches and fatigue, felt different, as if I were one gesture from flight. Back in the other world, flying had been as natural as breathing. I barely had to tilt my wings, think of air, before I was gliding through it. In the water I could dip my head and propel forward like a great fish, the water skimming through each feather, massaging them.

A guard stood at the edge of the room, watching me. I nodded to him, then saw the painting to the left of the one I'd been looking at.

It was a forest scene. A beautiful girl with pale blond hair lay in the grass, her body spread out and angled strangely. The grass was covered in blood. Over her hovered the small body of a fairy, the unmistakable sheen of wings. It was evening, and the moon was above, shining through the trees.

In the background you could see the coach, a horse barely visible against the black night. The trees dropped over the scene, their leaves pale green in the moonlight.

I couldn't breathe. I looked up at the guard, but he
didn't seem to know what was happening. He was just standing there as if everything were normal.

The fairy was tiny, her wings a blur of movement, but still bright white. You could just make out the red of her hair, like a tiny flickering flame.

I looked at the plaque next to the painting.

1834,
ANONYMOUS
.

“What is this?” I said, turning to the guard.

He looked up at me, confused. “Ma'am?”

“Do you know anything about this painting?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

I turned back to the canvas. Her pale skin, her peaceful face. The blood, sickly and dark in the moonlight. I could have been right there. As if not one minute had gone by.

I studied the painting, tried to memorize every detail. There was something strange about the trees, I saw after a minute, and I looked more closely. Up in the right-hand corner, in the array of heart-shaped leaves dappled with moonlight, leaves that shifted from pale to dark green, there was a smattering of lights.
Fairies.

“You were there,” I whispered. “You were there, watching.”

The room was silent.

“Are you here now?”

In the corner of my eye: the curve of a wing, the blurred light above me. I turned, and there was nothing.

I did not know how to feel. What to think.

My head spun. Someone had recorded that ancient scene. And if it
had
happened, if it had become a part of history, hadn't it been destined to happen? What if everything had turned out the way it had been destined to all along?
What if it had happened exactly as it was supposed to? Maybe they were never destined to be together, Cinderella and the prince. Maybe it was him and me, all along.

I felt dizzy. After a few more minutes, I went upstairs, moving back through the rooms, passing angels and mirrors and overstuffed couches and chairs and the guards staring out at me, until I heard the sound of water and entered a columned marble room with a long fountain in the center. The water tumbled down from it into a shallow pool below.

Above, the glass ceiling arced and glowed, filtering a strange light into the room and onto the water. Around the fountain, green plants jutted, and the leaves spread like long fans in the air. White flowers drooped from the stems. It was a courtyard, right in the middle of the building, with lights hanging from the ceiling around it.

On the other side from where I was standing, there was a statue, a tall bronze statue of a creature with flaring, jagged wings.

I dropped then, next to the water.

My face stared back at me, and I bent down into it. Relief poured through me.

I thought of Cinderella, what the modern world had made of her. The flat cartoons, the children's books, the films that surrounded her with birds and mice and all the creatures of the forest. That showed her with a pouf of hair and a dress like a cape. Her hand raised to her mouth, her eyes as big as saucers.

I hadn't realized until then how many times I had doubted myself.

Chapter Fourteen

S
HE WAS PULLING ME IN. I'D HEARD OF FAIRIES
who couldn't find their way once a human heart grabbed hold of them like this. The pain was moving from her to me so fast—the memories, her sickness—that soon there would be nothing left of me. My powers were already almost gone.
Concentrate,
I thought. I pulled myself up, lifted myself off the ground, stood over her.

“Cinderella,” I said, making the words that I would speak as fierce as I could, willing all my strength into them. “You have to go to the ball. You cannot turn your back on your own destiny. I was sent here by the fairies, to get you there. Whatever you feel now, he will erase it.”

She just stared back at me with those hollow eyes.

“Cinderella,” I repeated. “Are you listening to me?”

Her memories were so sharp in my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to will them away, but they flared up at me like suns. I saw all that her stepmother and stepsisters had done to her. What the servants had done to her. The beatings she had received, the ways her body had been abused. I was angry, suddenly, at my world. Swooping down to save her
and give her a new life when we should have seen what the old one was doing to her. She was obviously damaged, those eyes, the bruises on her skin, her dark heart. And her thoughts. I could hear them. Little twitterings between the locks of her moonlight hair: “I am not fit for a prince.” “I am nothing.”“A little cinder girl.”

“Please,” she said. “I do not want to go.”

I stared at her. She had everything. We had given her the greatest gift a human girl could have, and she was willing to toss it away.

The anger came up on me in a flash. “This is your fate,” I said. I wanted to spit the words at her, turn them into knives and arrows. “What we have fated for you. Do you think you can ignore that? We all have to do what we are fated to do. Every one of us.”

Again I could feel the ball and what was happening there. It pulled me so strongly. I could feel Cinderella's memories roiling around inside me, but they were no longer wiping out everything else.

And I could feel him. Waiting for me. Taste his lips as he stalked across the marble floor, his eyes sweeping in every direction.

“No, Godmother,” she said, shrinking back from me. “I can't go. Please do not be angry with me.”

I bent down, leaned into her. The tone of my voice changed, shifted. “You would defy fate?” Even on the ground, with tears running down her cheeks, she looked like a princess. I could
feel
him. I knew what would happen the moment he saw her. “A little cinder girl like you?”

She did not move. She didn't even seem to have heard me at first, but then she looked up, straight into me, and for a
moment I thought I saw something ferocious in her staring back. Could she hate me? Me, who had been sent to help her?

I tried to dip into it, what she was feeling, but something was stopping me, something in her. Why couldn't I change her? Why couldn't I enter her thoughts, fill her with excitement and desire?

The horses and carriage glimmered faintly, barely visible in the darkness, and the thoughts seemed to rush up on me:
Because I am the one who desires him.
And then,
Because I could go in her place.

Even as my mind reeled against it, told me that this was something
I could not have,
I felt a soaring from deep within my body. I wanted this. This night.

She was right: She did not deserve it.

And someone needed to go to the ball, make the prince fall in love. It was supposed to be her, but I could go in her place. They might never know it was not her. Later I could fix everything.

I took a deep breath. “Fine, Cinderella,” I said. “You will not go, then.”

I would need to dress as she had. I would need everything back again, the way it was.

“Please, Godmother,” she said. “If you came here to help me, take me back to them. My mother and father.”