“We don’t know! Anything, really. People make leaps; he’s autistic, not stupid. What I do know is that no matter how long it seems to take, one day, he’s gonna be an adult—which means he’ll end up living in the real world soon enough no matter what we do, or don’t do.”
“Yeah, I know. I know that. But . . .” I paused. “We’re not gonna be around forever. One day, we’ll be gone—her too, sooner that that. And he’ll be alone.”
“What’re you afraid of, Lois? That no one’s going to love him but us? Look at him, man: he’s lovable. Very much so.”
“He’s innocent.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“’Cause it can be.” He blew out a breath, annoyed. “Tell me I’m wrong, Simon.”
“I can’t, obviously—but you’re not right, either. Not totally.”
We stared at each other for a long minute then, neither willing to give an inch on the subject, till the kettle’s spout finally began to sing. Till I sighed, letting my eyes drop, and thinking, as I did:
We’ll see.
So we had tea, mainly in silence, and then we picked up a bit—shuffled all those various bits and pieces Clark tended to leave behind everywhere back to where they were supposed to go, the DVD cases and the random toys, the plastic cups that’d once held water and the coverless Tupperware containers containing nothing but cereal crumbs or pretzel salt. Eventually, as I loaded the dishwasher, I felt Simon draw near, clearing his throat; I looked up to see him hiding something behind his back, and smiled in spite of myself. He smiled back.
“Well,” he began, “I was going to give this to you at the end of the evening, but since I think you could use the pick-me-up now. . . .”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling absurdly touched, and a little surprised—Simon rarely gave me gifts out of the blue, mostly because by the time I’d talked enough about something I wanted for him to clue in about it, it usually turned out I’d bought it myself already. I recognized the Amazon packaging right away as he handed it over. “No guessing,” he said.
“Aw.”
“Seriously. I think you’ll find it’s worth the wait.”
I shook my head, smiled, and obliged, popping open the cardboard flap at the end and sliding out a flat, bubble-wrapped package; tore open the bubble-wrap, slipping it off to reveal a startlingly old-looking hardback volume no more than six inches high, bound in dark green fabric, spine worn and pages yellowing, like something from the older and dustier shelves of a university library. No title on the cover. Genuinely puzzled now, I opened it and found the title page.
In the centre, drawn in black ink, a massive snake curled about a little girl in a frilly Victorian-style pinafore; both the snake and the girl wore crowns, and behind them, a dark forest rose on either side. A
bove this picture were the words The Snake-Queen’s Daughter; below, Wendish Folkore & Legends; and below that, in smaller letters, Translated and Compiled by Mrs. A. M. Whitcomb, and smaller yet below that, Edited by Charles Pelletier, M.A., O.B.E. And opposite, on the printer’s page, my eyes drawn magnet-sharp to it even though I knew exactly what I was going to see: © 1925, printed in Toronto, Faber & Faber.
“I’m sorry about the condition,” said Simon. “I had to buy it used because the seller only ships to Canada by priority mail, but I figured, well, like you said—it’s an investment, right? In a project that could really be something important . . .” He trailed off, maybe noticing at last that I wasn’t squeeing with delight as he’d obviously expected. “Hon? Is—this not it?”
“No—no, this is definitely the one, and that’s great; I’d have gotten around to it, I guess, but the fact you already did . . . that’s amazing, thank you so much. That’s excellent.”
“Um, all right.”
“No, it’s just . . .” With a sigh, I flipped the cover open again. “When I was talking to Jan Mattheuis, I showed him my book, the one I found the original Lady Midday story in—and he pointed this out.” I tapped the copyright notice on the printer’s page.
“The date?” I nodded; he rubbed his face, clearly thinking hard. “Look, this doesn’t disprove anything. It’s still perfectly plausible she could have made the films, then wrote her source material down—I mean, she wasn’t involved with this book either way, right? She was already gone. This is this other guy’s baby, this Pelletier. . . .”
“Maybe, sure, but it doesn’t matter.” I leaned against the counter, hard, welcoming the distracting pain as its granite edge creased my skin. “What I want out of the NFA is a contract, money for research up front rather than afterwards, and Mattheuis isn’t gonna shell out that kind of dough for ‘plausible.’ Which means I have to find another way to make the connection, if such a thing exists.”
“It does. It will.”
“We don’t know that,” I replied, throwing his own words back at him, 99.9 percent unconsciously—then realized what I’d done, and went a little white. But he simply shook his head, took me into his arms, hugged me hard. Laid one hand on the back of my neck, warm and soothing, and let me dig my face into his collarbone.
“It will,” he repeated. “You will. I have faith.”
I woke up at four-thirty in the morning.
Simon was snoring, duvet wound around him, sheets underneath sweat-hot; like Clark, he runs at a fever pitch, particularly when unconscious. By contrast, I was naked to the waist, clammy, frigid—I’d somehow managed to bend my arm up behind my head and lodge it there, cutting off the circulation so my hand felt gloved in needles, all their pricks turned inwards. The room was dark, my eyes unfocused, perceptual lag-trails hovering everywhere like worms sketched in light, a thousand blinking spirals. A drawn breath rattled in my throat, pulse hammer-fast.
Abruptly, I found myself upright, hand on the bedroom closet’s light-switch. One flick and a wash of light showed our apartment exactly the way I’d left it: no crouched figures, white-eyed and grinning; nothing extruding from the walls; no ceiling spiders. I pulled on a robe then scrabbled around in bed for my glasses, where they must’ve fallen off in my sleep. A huge smear bisected one lens. I rubbed it clear if not clean on my collar, thinning the grease so I could look through without squinting. This lent a weird, pale light to everything, including The Snake-Queen’s Daughter, which still lay on the glass-topped dining table.
Shivering, I sat down and picked it up, resisting the urge to re-read “Lady Midday.” I studied the table of contents, which was laid out in a small, crabbed font with occasional smearing. Thirty titles, each slightly weirder than the next: “Why People Today Die Their Own Death,” “In Spring We Drown The Winter,” “The Green Boy,” “She Washes Your Feet With Her Hair,” “Prince Worm Sheds Twenty Skins,” “The Pots With Candles In Them,” “Nightingale the Robber,” “There Were Eyes In The Knots of Trees,” “The Iron Trencher,” “The Drowned Dog,” “The Princess Who Was One Hundred Animals,” “Lamentation of God.” “Never Trust An Old Man With A Frog’s Mouth,” was the last. “No shit,” I heard myself mutter as I turned the page, revealing Charles Pelletier’s Afterword.