The film shoot was infamous, plagued by high-profile affairs, professional squabbles, and the disappearance of two crew members in unrelated incidents. But the film itself was an art-house hit. It was rewritten as a psychological drama about a woman who wakes up in the woods with no memory of her former life; my grandmother’s stories play out as dream sequences, or flashbacks. According to the reviews I could find, it bore zero resemblance to its source material.
The movie’s success, partly fueled by infamy, led to several short-lived stage productions, a miniseries that never came to be, and Althea’s failed stint as a TV development consultant in Los Angeles. When she got back to New York she bought the Hazel Wood, going for a song after its last owner had died under seamy circumstances in a fire that damaged part of the estate.
She’d picked up a couple of husbands along the way, the first an actor she met on the set of the movie. He left his wife for Althea, and was killed by a junkie in their apartment in the Village when Althea was pregnant with Ella. She met her second husband, a displaced descendant of Greek royalty, in LA, and took him with her to the Hazel Wood.
So yes, you could say my mother was raised, in part, on fairy tales. But death played a part. And money. Dead-husband money, fairy-tale money, too. Enough of it must’ve ended up in my mother’s pockets to get us by despite her sketchy employment history and all the leases we’ve run from partway through. Staying in motion was as much a part of who we were as my mom’s sharp laugh, my angry streak. Our bad luck days that abated with every move, then slipped back in like red dirt on our shoes.
But no matter how bad it got, the Hazel Wood was always at our backs. It was always the place Ella would never return to. She took care of me, and I took care of her, in a symbiotic sisterly relationship that looked cute on TV but felt fucking exhausting when you’re moving for the third time in a year and don’t even have a bedroom door to slam.
As I pored over the article about Althea for the nth time, it didn’t read to me the way it used to. I once pictured Althea as a distant but benevolent star, a fairy godmother who watched me from far away. My fevered kid brain cooked together fairy tales and my missing grandmother and the mystery of the man who took me into a superstition I never voiced aloud. When I looked into mirrors, I secretly believed Althea could see me. When a man watched me too long through a car window or at the grocery store, I didn’t see a perv, or the first harbinger of the bad luck coming: he was one of Althea’s messengers. She watched me, and she loved me, and one day she would show herself to me.
But now I was reading her story with fresh eyes. She wasn’t a fascinating fairy queen, she was an arrogant fantasist. Who hadn’t once, from my babyhood to her death, tried to contact Ella. Ella, who had me at nineteen and hasn’t had anyone but me to hold on to since.
Because that’s what the article doesn’t get to. Just months after it ran, Althea’s second husband killed himself in the Hazel Wood. After his death, Althea closed its borders. She and Ella were shut up in there alone, living on fairy tales and god knew what else, with only each other for company. This is the part Ella really won’t talk about, the fourteen years she spent rattling around in a place cut off from the world. She didn’t even go to school. Who my dad is, and how she met him, is a secret so buried I’ve stopped asking.
My head was buzzing when I reached the apartment.
Wait. Apartment doesn’t put the right image into your head. The … estate? Not quite, but closer.
Harold’s place smelled like discreet cleaning products, my stepsister’s perfume, and whatever takeout Ella ordered that night. I think Harold had some idea she would be cooking dinner for him, maybe from the dented tin box of recipes that lived in the kitchen, inherited from his mother. But he was disappointed there: Ella and I could live for weeks on cereal and popcorn and boiled edamame.
I heard the high murmur of raised voices down the hall and followed it to their closed bedroom door.
“You didn’t embarrass me tonight, you embarrassed yourself.”
Harold’s voice ended in a hiss. I used the sounds behind the door to place them: Harold to my left, a soft shift that was Ella on the bed.
I pressed my back against the wall outside their bedroom door. If he moves any closer.
“You can look like trash on your own time, but tonight was about being my wife.” Wife burned even worse than trash, but I stayed still, biting back the cold metal taste of rage. Ella asked me again and again to trust her. That she could handle Harold. That she loved him. That this grab at stability wasn’t just for me.
Her silence was louder than Harold’s voice. It’s her greatest power, though she never used it on me. She’ll stare at you as you try to pull your thoughts together, to say something that’ll reach her, but she’ll never reach back. I’ve watched her pull things out of people—secrets, confessions, promises to let us stay an extra month—with her silence alone. She wields it like a weapon.
“Ella.” Harold’s voice was suddenly desperate. I was lanced by a pity I didn’t want to feel. “Ella, say something, goddammit!” I heard the rush of his clothing as he moved across the room, toward my mother on the bed.
I waited a beat and a breath, and tried to wrench open the door.
Locked.
“Mom! What’s going on?”
“Jesus Christ, is that your daughter again?”
“Mom.” I pounded the heel of my hand against the door. “Let me in.”
Quiet, a creak, then Ella’s voice was close. “I’m okay, baby. Go to bed.”
“Open the door.”
“Alice. I’m fine. We’re just talking. You can help me by going to bed.”
Rage was running through my blood. “He called you trash. Open the door!”
Harold threw it open, and I startled back. He was rumpled, partly undressed. His shaved head looked shadowy and his eyes were bloodshot. Harold had Captain Hook eyes—mournful and cornflower blue, with a phantom glaze of red when he was angry.
Next to him, in a dark strapless sheath and shock of wild hair, Ella looked like a black poppy. Her dress seemed designed to call attention to the tattoo climbing up her arm and almost to her throat: a psychedelic flower on a spiny stem that could’ve been a botanical illustration of a blossom found on Mars. I had its twin tattooed on me in mirror image—a misguided Mother’s Day gift Ella had blindsided me by hating.
In the half-light of the hallway, she looked like a predator, and Harold looked like prey. The anger ebbed away.
“I didn’t call her trash. I just said…” He ran a hand over his drooping head. “These dinners are important. They’re full of potential clients, they determine the course of— Oh, for Christ’s sake, why am I trying to talk to you?”
Ella leaned against the doorframe, watching him coolly. “I was wearing this the night you met me. Remember?”
“Yeah, when you were a cocktail waitress. Forget it, I’m not going to stand here defending myself to both of you.” Harold glared at me. “I’m not a monster, Alice. Why are you always looking at me like I’m some goddamned monster?” He turned heel and retreated to the master bathroom.
“Mom.”
Ella cocked her head at my tone, looked for a moment like she’d ask. Instead she sighed, long and heavy. “Go to bed, Alice. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
She touched her forehead to mine, gently, then closed the door between us.
A dense quiet settled around my ears. It was the sound of living in a place sealed off from the rest of the city, in a vacuum of wealth.