A hand grasped her arm, and there was Melissa helping her to a bench, saying, “Here, sit down for a moment. Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” she replied, or tried to reply; her words had grown larger than her mouth and would not quite fit there. The world was swimming, and everything felt hot, and her stepsister was peering at her with eyes that had gone wide and solicitous.
“You don’t seem well,” she kept repeating. “And why are you barefoot?”
She straightened, tried to focus. They had not seen each other in almost a decade, not since the royal wedding, in fact, though she presently recalled that Melissa, who had ended up marrying the king’s woodsman, had persisted in sending her holiday cards, dutifully answered by Prince Roland’s scribes, as well as stork-bordered birth announcements for her numerous children, five or six by now, she was not certain exactly how many, but however many they were, she decided in a burst of resentment, Melissa had grown far too dumpy and her life was far too pathetic for her to have the right to offer any kind of sympathy, to visit any kind of judgment, to be looking at her betters with such condescending concern while living, it wouldn’t surprise her, in a shoe in some backwoods with her badly washed brood, eating porridge morning, noon, and night, telling time by the crowing of a rooster, and now Melissa’s eyes were once again brimming over, almost as if she were voicing all these awful yet indisputable thoughts aloud, which of course she was not, which she was almost sure she was not, until Gloria took her under both elbows with unwomanly strength and, lifting her bodily from the bench, passed her to a slack-jawed footman and ordered, rather grimly: “Her Highness needs to go back at once. She is upset. And speaking of shoes, do find hers.”
The last things she remembered were her younger stepsister’s glistening cheeks as she sobbed, over and over, “I forgive you, you aren’t yourself, you aren’t yourself right now!”—and her own dignified reply, while she was being manhandled into the carriage: “Well, of course I’m not myself, the evil sorceress sent me away a long time ago!”—and the hush falling among the mourners. Then everything turned black and still until, without any transition, there she was, sitting on a sofa in her reception room, possibly on a different morning, her hands cradled in the gentle warmth of Melissa’s grasp.
“I came as soon as I could, we’re all so worried about you, you must tell me what’s wrong,” Melissa was saying to her, must have been saying for some time. And suddenly she was crying on her stepsister’s shoulder, talking about the treacherous butler, and the prince’s cold eyes, and the overweight, overwrought woman in the mirror who would not go away—oh, and the potions, the endless potions that brought no cure—her words coming out all at once, in a soggy, incoherent jumble.
When she collapsed into exhausted silence, Melissa sat stroking her hand, carefully, lightly, as though it were some trembling, skittish animal.
“Show me what you’ve been taking,” she said at last, her tone guarded.
They went into the washroom. The potions were stored in a secret cabinet behind a painting of a lotus. Together they looked at the formidable army of green, blue, pink, yellow vials. Then, without warning, Melissa reached in and swept all the bottles off the shelf, and they shattered in a many-hued explosion of glass, noise, and magic on the stone tiles of the washroom floor.
“Oh no, what have you done, why have you done this!” she cried—but already the spilled vapors of spells and enchantments were billowing toward an open window, and in their swirling turbulence she glimpsed green imps, blue dragons, pink flies, yellow cockroaches with jaws loosened in toothy grins, a nebulous phantasmagoria of grotesques, all vile, all filled with some dark, dangerous essence. Growing quiet, she watched them seep and seethe past the windowpane, then dissipate in the cold wintry light. And when the last polluted whiff was gone, she felt a weight lift from her shoulders, and the world grew sharper and brighter, as if drained of some subtle yet pervasive poison.
Melissa was holding both her hands, squeezing them tightly.
“No more dark magic, promise me, promise me! You’ve been ill, and no wonder. I just don’t understand why your prince didn’t smash them all ages ago.”
“But he couldn’t have,” she mumbled. “He didn’t know.”
“How in the world could he not?”
She shook her head, not looking up.
“I prefer not to trouble him with my problems. He has so much on his mind. And it’s hard to find a private moment to talk, really. Whenever I see him, at official functions, there are always so many important people he must talk to first…”
“But I don’t understand. You see each other every night after the day is done.”
“Oh, well, no, to be honest, I mean, he travels so much, and he works so late, and I’m such a light sleeper, you see… Of course, it’s a big palace, and the west wing is more convenient for him, so after the first year or two, he just…”
She broke off. Her stepsister was staring at her.
She felt a need to defend her husband.
“He is busy, you know. He has a kingdom to run.”
Melissa pursed her lips. “Well, pardon me, I just live in a shoe, but at least Tom and I see each other daily. We talk. We sleep in the same bed. If I ever got into a state like this, he’d be the first to notice. Your prince is rich and handsome, no argument there, but he doesn’t strike me as a very nice person. Cold, he always seemed to me. Shallow. Uncaring. But to each her own, I suppose. You chose him, so clearly, compassion and compatibility matter less to you than his other, more visible, qualities.”
This was much like the Melissa of their teenage days, when they had gotten into spats over homework or chores, and she felt briefly reassured by the familiarity of her sister’s sour expression. Yet after Melissa left (full of sympathy once again, having exerted from her the promise to stay clean), she knelt to sweep away the empty orange bottles, the debris of all her crushed, drowned pills, and, as the last of the drug-induced haze lifted from her mind, thought about her life, thought about her marriage, and saw some truth behind her sister’s words.
She and the prince were overdue for a heart-to-heart talk.
She just needed to go on a strenuous diet first.
It is the fairy godmother’s turn to keep her eyes averted.
“Really?” the witch spits out. “You stupefied her with potions for years? What, do the Powers That Be pay you a commission for each happy ending that doesn’t end up at my crossroads?”
“I will have you know, it is perfectly within magical regulations.” The fairy godmother’s voice is pitched too high. “Of course, I could see there was no curse upon her, some women are just taken that way after a baby, but I thought it would be more beneficial to her cure if I allowed her to stay within her preferred frame of reference. And it isn’t dark magic, not strictly speaking, not unless misused to excess, and had she but followed my directions… Self-medicating can lead to all sorts of trouble. I feel terrible, truly terrible, but you understand, I had no idea—”
An anemic half-moon has just risen over the fields, and in its pasty light, the fairy godmother’s pale, plump hands keep fluttering like weak moths. I want to reach out and arrest their nervous trembling.
“Fairy Godmother.”
She will not look at me.
“Fairy Godmother, it was not all your fault. Not your fault at all. It was just… I was just…” I want to reassure her, but it is hard for me to stare back into my personal darkness, so I fall silent and watch the sickly moon. It is moving in and out of low, billowing clouds, and sometimes it seems as though the predatory clouds are chasing after it while it struggles to escape them, and other times as though it means instead to seek shelter behind their woolly softness, hide from the emptiness of the stark autumnal skies. “It just felt easier to run away. And I guess I kept running for a while. For a long while. And not just with the potions…”