I stay stubbornly silent.
“This isn’t easy,” she says, relenting a little. “Why don’t you take a day or two to think it over, and in the meantime set up an appointment with Faye. Talking about things will clear your mind. Do call my office once you make your decision. We should aim to file by Monday. And look, I understand the desire to cut loose when a man hurts you, believe me, we’ve all been there, but you mustn’t forget that your entire future is at stake here. Last night was unwise. Let’s just hope there will be no repercussions.”
I am, in truth, not entirely certain what happened last night, but a stumble into the powder room revealed frightfully bloodshot eyes, lids painted in black and gray stripes, a glittering pink mouth slanted sideways, red blotches on my cheeks, and an unevenly chopped, bristly mop. After a single glance, I squeezed my eyes shut and would not look again, scrubbing blindly at my eyelids, at my lips, tugging a brush through the remains of my beautiful hair, too frightened to confirm that the dissipated reflection might have any connection to me, to my neat, respectable, hardworking self. And I now feel so distracted by wanting and, simultaneously, not wanting to recall what precisely led to my riding the trolley at six in the morning, carrying a badly burnt potted hydrangea in my cleaning bucket and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a not-altogether-sober lachrymose clown, that I let Gwendolyn gather her papers and depart the house before I think to ask her who Faye is.
Once the front door closes behind her, I sit by the window, massaging my aching temples, round and round and round, until I realize that the movements of my fingers have fallen in rhythm with the thin girlish voices I hear chanting some nonsensical rhyme outside, Melissa’s three daughters, Meg, Mary, and Myrtle, playing in the yard, choosing “it” for their game of tag. As I prod my temples, I listen absently to the winding words that reach me through the cracked window.
I straighten, listen more intently, my heart taking a sudden flight—and before the next girl is out, I leap to my feet and rush from the room, from the house, down the sidewalk that skirts the neighborhood park, shouting, “Wait, Gwendolyn, wait!” after the pinstriped figure in men’s brogues that is even now striding briskly toward a gray Packard automobile I see parked across the road.
She looks back at last, allows me to catch up, to recover from a stitch in my side, before asking whether I have made up my mind already.
“It’s not about that,” I pant—and stop.
It seems preposterous to bring up the stormy crossroads, the threats, the curse, when faced with this smartly dressed, businesslike person holding a briefcase of dyed alligator skin and considering me with poorly concealed impatience in the prosaic white light of a clear December day, and I feel a fleeting yet vertiginous doubt, almost as though I imagined that black-and-red night—dreamed it up wholesale to disguise the uncertainty, the terror, of my first divorce consultation with Miss Gwendolyn McKee, Esquire. I inhale and press on. “That time, at the crossroads, when… when you wanted to take what you called my life’s spark from me, you… well, you didn’t. And later, in your house, you said you wouldn’t have taken it, ‘not even if’—but you didn’t finish your sentence. What were you going to say?”
“Nothing of any practical use to you. And it might upset you.”
“Please. I’m not a little girl. Tell me. Please.”
I feel like a little girl standing empty-handed on the sidewalk, begging her for a crumb of some revelation. She sighs, probes me with an even gray gaze.
“I suppose you have the right to know,” she says at last. “I wouldn’t have taken your spark even if you had it. The thing is, you didn’t. You had no spark. No passion. No joy. There was nothing to take.”
I stare at her, stunned.
“A garden with no flowers,” I whisper.
“Yes, but you used to have it. I could feel the hollow in your chest where it had been once. Someone had taken it from you already. Scooped it clean out.”
“Some… someone?” My lips feel numb.
“Someone.” She shrugs. “Or something. Sometimes it is an act of malicious magic. Other times, it’s just—just life, you know. Joy leaks out when there are enough cracks.”
“But… can I never get it back now?”
Her face, bereft of the steel-rimmed eyeglasses, appears gentler.
“Few things are impossible. Still, let us focus on the pressing matter at hand.” She shakes her wrist out of her sleeve in an oddly familiar gesture, glances at her watch. “I have another client, I must run, but if you aren’t doing anything at present, why don’t you go see Faye. She is quite maudlin at times, but she should be able to help you process your emotions. Here, I’ll jot down the address for you if you don’t have it handy. Talk to her, organize your thoughts, then call me, yes? We should get the bastard before he gets us.”
And it is only after the rather long-nosed chauffeur in a green uniform with flames on the cuffs drives Miss McKee away in her gray Packard that I remember I have forgotten, again, to ask who Faye is. I look at the address on a slip of paper and, dully, walk to the other side of the park, through a neighborhood of neat little cottages rising bright and square and menacing like rows of well-cared-for teeth, until the street ends abruptly and I find myself beyond the town’s edge, in a thicket of evergreen trees, on a twisting path carpeted in dry fir needles and leading into a chilly emerald dusk. Some minutes later, I make out a small house through the pines. In another dozen steps, a smell envelops me—the light, sweet, delicious smell of a happy childhood. I have no time to think about it, though, because just then I come to an opening in the trees and, at last, see the house clearly—and it is like no other house.
Its walls are made entirely out of crumbling, sugar-sprinkled gingerbread, and its white roof glistens with frosting. Striped red-and-green candy canes frame the cheerful windows, chocolate hearts dot the door, and the weather vane is shaped like a pink lollipop. I stand gaping with wonder for a full minute, then, cautiously, approach the aromatic door and raise its licorice knocker. When I release it, the sound is the crunch of a cookie devoured by a greedy child, and a voice sweet as molasses calls out: “Just pull the bobbin, and the latch will go up.”
The door opens softly, soundlessly, as though on buttered hinges.
Inside, the air is stifling, and it is like Christmas, a confectionery shop, and a doll tea party, all rolled into one and suffused with a warm, rosy glow. Amazed, I stare at the profusion of potbellied teapots, cuckoo clocks, embroidered pillows, needlepoint rugs, porcelain statuettes, plump little lamps with tasseled shades, processions of jeweled eggs along flimsy shelves covered with lacy doilies, everything pink-hued, toy-sized, cozy, crammed—and absolutely suffocating. And I nearly give in to an impulse to dash back out into the woods, when the same saccharine voice exclaims: “Oh, my sweet child, what a surprise, how delighted I am to see you!”—and only then do I notice the round-shaped woman bundled in a multitude of strawberry-colored shawls, seated in a pink armchair under a pink pile of knitting, beaming at me over her rainbow-tinted butterfly-framed eyeglasses.
“Fairy… Fairy Godmother?”
“The same, the very same!” she confirms brightly. “But I prefer to go by ‘Faye’ now, it has a more modern ring, don’t you think? Sit down, sit down, have some chocolate with me.” Not rising, she stretches her hand to break off a chunk of the wall and, laughing, offers it to me; mechanically, I take it. The puffy pink ottoman I sink into is soft, too soft, and warm, as if someone was sitting there just moments before. “What brings you to my humble abode, my sweet child?”