Godmother (14 page)

I felt as if he, Theodore, the prince, could be around any corner, waiting for me. Surely that had been him in the diner. Surely none of these things had been a coincidence.

I peered into the restaurants I passed, glanced into the boutiques and coffeehouses and the huge self-service laundry on Seventh Street. I was struck by a pile of wonderful junk bursting out of one of the storefronts, just off the sidewalk: a faded white hatbox, a bright red Formica-topped table, racks of colorful clothing. In the window I saw boxes spilling over with fake pearls and rhinestones and gold chains. I ran my palms down the sleeves of the dresses hanging from the rack.

I was suddenly conscious of my dull shirt, the tattered skirt dropping down my legs. I picked out a purple-striped dress and went inside, barely able to stop myself from laughing. The fabric shimmered in my hands.

In the shop it appeared that every vase and knickknack and piece of clothing in the world had been crammed onto the shelves and racks and boxes. I wandered through the aisles and touched everything: a lamp in the shape of a stretching ballerina, a painting of a smiling pit bull, beads that looked like miniature Easter eggs. As I approached the glass case in front of the cash register, I nodded to the woman behind it as she sat folding scarves into a box. And then my eyes fell upon the most wonderful thing, something that could have been crafted by fairies: a scarf with every color in the world in it, that seemed to change color under my gaze. I reached over, ran my fingers across it. The scarf seemed to glitter and spark under my touch, and for a moment I couldn't look away.

“Don't you love that?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“Yes,” I said, picking it up. It was large and diaphanous, as big as a shawl. “It reminds me of something, a place I used to love.”

The woman was tall and thin, like a column, and her hair was held back with chopsticks.

Ten dollars and it s yours. Would you like to try on that dress?”

“Yes. Yes, please.”

She led me back to a space that was barely big enough to stand in and then drew the drapes closed around me. I checked that not a sliver of the space was showing to the room outside it, then carefully removed my old clothes and slipped the dress over my head and let it fall.

I turned to the mirror. I was transfixed by the image in front of me: It was me but not myself, the dress snug against
my body but not too snug, just right, and the purple stripes gleaming against my skin.

“Do you have a pair of shoes that might go with this?” I asked, peeking my head out. “In a six?”

“Let me look,” the woman said. A minute later she brought me a pair of shiny pumps. I slipped my foot into one. It fit perfectly. Just like the glass slipper, I thought, laughing to myself.

When I left the store with my old clothes and tennis shoes squashed into a shopping bag, the heels felt strange on my feet. I loved the clacking sound they made as I walked down the street. I twisted my shoulders to feel the dress shift and trickle along my skin.

I knew that George and Veronica would fall madly in love, live happily ever after, the way she had been supposed to so long ago.
What occurs in the world of faerie will become manfest in the world of men.
This was it, I thought. The mistakes of the old world corrected in the new one. A new beginning.

I started heading uptown. Almost as if my body had a mind of its own. I craved something. The water. Trees. Flowers. Something from the other world.
All my old loves will be returned to me.
The sky felt so close I could have reached up and touched it.

You should just go home now,
I told myself.
Go home and rest. Take a bath. Watch television.
On a Saturday afternoon there was always some old movie on, something with a Carole Lombard or a Marlene Dietrich.

But I didn't feel ready to go back. My feet made a steady rhythm on the sidewalk. I could walk for hours sometimes, despite my creaking bones and soft body, as if I were in a
trance. A remnant of my fairy existence, I supposed. That day every street felt like a revelation. I had to warn myself not to stare too hard at the people I passed; I wanted to touch them all, talk to them, stare at their faces, ask about their violin cases or leather portfolios or the books peeking from their bags. I wanted to pet every single dog I saw strutting or slinking past.

I thought about going to the pier, but I found myself heading north instead. Eventually I turned on Twenty-eighth Street, and I realized then what I had come for. Pots of flowers and tall, gangly trees lined the streets on either side. It was like entering a forest, the only street in Manhattan where you had to brush past leaves and branches to get down the sidewalk. I breathed it in. The buildings were dilapidated, hardly changed from the century before. I paused in front of a bamboo tree and ran my fingers up the side.

A sense of calm entered me. The heady scent of the flowers—every kind of flower, lining the streets and filling all the shops—swirled around me.

I stepped forward, into one of the shops. A dark-skinned man nodded at me from behind a cash register. Strange, exotic blooms sat on the shelves in the front of the store. Behind them were bursting small trees and plants. I walked up to one with leaves so dark they were almost black. The curves of the leaves were so pronounced they looked as if they'd been carved with scissors.

This,
I thought,
right here.

Wet-leaved tropical trees hung and bent into the aisle and over the damp tile floors. I moved to the back of the store, breathing in the moist, pure scent of soil. The leaves tapped my head as I walked through them, and I put up my
hands to clear a pathway. If I squinted, imagined my feet making soft dents in the tiles, I could be in an ancient forest, in the old world. The forest behind the palace that we had looked out over that night, from the balcony. I breathed in. The smell of rain.
I love that smell,
he had said.

I let the leaves brush against my face and hands as I walked to the end of the aisle and back up again, emerging into the main space. I felt fantastic.

“We have some new blooms in,” the salesman said, approaching me. He pointed to a refrigeration unit with glass doors.

“Those are beautiful,” I said.

“Harvested yesterday morning in Holland.” He leaned in and opened the door, revealing flowers so red they were like open cuts.

I left the store and started walking. I almost ran into a couple of men hauling boxes from the back of a truck parked at the curb. I passed by piles of baskets held together with strings, stacks of clay pots and crates filled with small flats of pansies and cacti. Ahead, a group of men was lowering pots on ropes and pulleys through cellar doors. The air was heavy with water, the pungent scent of plants, soil.

Billboards rose over the street, from Sixth Avenue. My head was spinning. I walked past silk-flower shops, warehouses overflowing with plants, stores that sold every sort of gardening paraphernalia. Men loitered outside every doorway, it seemed. Down the block a profile flashed into view, a man ducking into a store. I recognized him immediately.

There! His dark hair curled over his collar. I pushed my way past the junipers and spruces, the shop owners and the
workingmen shouting out to one another, bending down and taping up plants for delivery. I turned in to the store.

Maybe it was the flowers that convinced me he had actually come back to me, that he was there right then, looking for me. I had the sudden, sharp memory of him plucking a flower and holding it to my face, slipping it behind my ear. What kind of flower? I stopped walking.
Gardenia,
I remembered suddenly. The balcony had been covered in flowers. He had leaned down and snapped one off for me, a glowing white bloom. The smell of it had seemed to penetrate my skin.

A man shoved past me, and my elbow pushed against a bamboo tree, the long stalk jutting up, pressing my skin. I stumbled forward into the store.

I focused in. The flowers shot up all around me, in every color and shape. The place seemed to specialize in orchids. Perfect, deformed-looking blooms covered with spots, flapping out like parachutes, twisting and curving up, dangling in threads toward the soil. I caught my breath. The large trees were in the back, just as in the last shop.

I walked toward the sprawling greens, bending down and pushing my way through. With each step I could feel my wings loosen, my skin pull and tighten, my eyes grow more clear and bright.

“Theodore?” I whispered.

I could feel the silk of the ball gown. Like water.

I reached the back of the store. Saw a man squatting down in front of a tree. His black hair curved over his collar.

I could smell the rain, the gardenias. I heard the music from the ballroom, drifting out onto the balcony. I felt the glass slippers cradling my feet.

For a moment I was so close. It was as if he'd always been
right there, in front of me, ready to take me back. Then he turned his face to me.

“Can I help you?” a strange man asked.

“No. No, thank you,” I said. I felt a feather rub against my arm and slapped it off. I stumbled as I moved to the exit, veering past the two workers, careful not to bump up against the flowers.

I pushed my way down the street as if I were swimming and moved back to Seventh Avenue. I kicked over a pot of soil, not meaning to. I almost stepped into a box full of daisies. I squinted ahead, the strange mixture of forest and city, the lush green and the concrete, the skyscrapers. I focused on moving forward. By the time I reached my own door, I felt as if I'd been walking through the city for days.

I let myself in the front door and dragged myself up the stairs. Once I was in my apartment, I breathed out, let my whole body slow down.

The room closed around me, and a feeling crept in, gnawing at my guts and bones. A howl formed, then swept out and broke through my eyes and mouth and into the air.

I was ridiculous. I spit out the word:
“Ridiculous.”
An old, desperate woman. I hated my swirling hair, loathed my own skin. I deserved all of it, for what I'd done. I could not suck enough air into my lungs.

I pulled the dress over my head, then tore off the bandage that bound me. Desperate, as if I were on fire. Then, leaning forward, I let my wings spread out on either side of me and began to slowly pull them in, until they blanketed me completely.

Chapter Seven

A
FTER MAYBETH AND I RETURNED FROM THE
palace, I tried to forget what had happened there. Everything I had done. How I had felt in my human body, the way my heart had pounded as blood rushed through me, the feel of the marble floor pressing into my feet. The air changing weight and shape and tingling against my skin. His eyes right on mine, seeing into me. As if he, and only he, could see who I really was.

No.

I needed to buckle down and start focusing on the task at hand.
Cinderella.
I had so many things to do: Go to her. Dress her. Get her to the ball, so that he could fall in love with her and make her his wife. This is what was written in the great tree, what the elders had decreed.

Once she arrived at the ball, my task would be complete. The moment he set eyes on her, he would love her. It was his destiny. What she was made for.

“Lil!”

I glanced up. Gladys swung above me, laughing and
sticking out her tongue. She threw up her hands and swooped down, pretending she was falling.

“Help!” she screamed. “I'm drowning!” She plunged into the lake so hard that sprays of water leaped up, drenching me.

“Gladys, what are you doing?” I slipped into the lake next to her, tugging at her hand, and gasped. There, past my hand, two of the fairy elders slid by underneath the water, about a half mile below the surface. They seemed giant through all that water. Their bright purple robes made them glisten like sea-fish, their wings spread out like giant fins.

I pulled back and leaped back onto the pier.

“Get out of the water, Gladys,” I hissed.

Just then her head burst through the surface and her laughing face was below mine. Gladys was the most beautiful of all of us, and even I had to blink sometimes when I saw her up close, to be sure I wasn't dreaming.

“Why such a grouch?” she asked, shaking her head and sprinkling water droplets across the surface of the water. “I was just playing.”

“Well, you're not funny,” I said. “I'm trying to work. Do you even know what that is? And of course you have to come bother me at the exact moment that two of the elders are passing by.”

Gladys stopped laughing. Her face paled. Suddenly she was right next to me, crouching on the pier. “What? When?”

“Just now.” I looked down into the water.

Her body slumped into mine, and I thought I could feel her shaking.

“Here,” I said gently, putting my arm around her. “Just let's not do anything to get into trouble, all right? This is an
important time in the human kingdom and we all have so much to do.” I felt bad for her. And for me.

“Yes,” she said. “You're right. I have some vines to tend and humans to visit. I need to find Lucibell. Yes, yes, yes.” She sat up. I could see tears glistening on her lashes. “But did you and Maybeth really sneak into the castle?” she asked. She looked up at me slyly, her eyes peeking out from under her thick, tear-speckled lashes. “She said you actually showed yourself to the prince.”