Arcadia Falls (2 page)

I look at Sally and see light there, too, a light of wonder that illuminates her face. For the moment, it erases the dark circles under her eyes, the rashy skin around her mouth, the hacked-off ends of her dark auburn hair, and the torn cuticles on her hands. She could be the lovely child I remember from a year ago.

Cautiously, I start the car, praying the engine will turn over smoothly for a change—and it does! Maybe this place
is
perfect, I think. “Do you remember the rest of the story?”

“Yeah, but you tell it. You always told it so well.”

“Okay,” I say, scarcely believing my luck. I can’t remember the last time I did anything right in Sally’s eyes. “After the lost girl meets the white witch she takes the crystal path into the woods and there at the end of it she finds the witch’s cottage. The witch takes her in and tells her that if she works for her for a year her family will have everything they need—a warm home, enough to eat, rich suitors for her sisters, beautiful clothes for her mother.

“‘But won’t they miss me?’ the girl asks.

“But the witch explains that she will send in her stead a fairy changed to look just like her.”

“The changeling girl,” Sally says.

“Yes. All the girl has to do is go to the old copper beech tree at the edge of the meadow and dig up a root—”

“Is that a copper beech?” Sally asks, pointing up the hill through a gap in the sycamores where a single tree with wine-colored leaves stands on a green lawn before a stone Tudor mansion. I shiver at a detail I always left out when I read the story to Sally—that the beech’s leaves were red with the blood of the changelings that lived in its roots. This whole part of the story always struck me as creepy, but I go on, not willing to waste a minute of Sally’s attention.

“Yes, it is,” I tell her. “The girl digs until she finds a bit of gnarled root shaped like a tiny baby. She takes it out of the ground and wraps it in a piece of calico cloth, which she tears from her own dress—”

“That’s why the sycamore trees are like girls with torn dresses,” Sally crows. I steal a glance at her. She’s sitting up in her seat, the white buds of the iPod tangled in her lap—like naked roots, I think with a little shudder—her eyes shining.

“You know, I never thought of that,” I say, “but I think you may be right. Anyway, the witch had told her that she must wash the root in well water, not the water from the stream, but the well is a long way off and the girl knows that the bucket will be hard to haul up. As she’s walking toward the well she crosses over the stream—”

As if on cue, the Jag’s tires bump over a wooden bridge and Sally thumps the window with her hands in her excitement, the rings on her fingers chattering against the glass like loose teeth. “This is it! This is it!” she cries. “And of course the girl—like all stupid girls in fairy tales—disobeys the witch and washes the root in the stream. And then she goes back to the witch’s house and she has to sleep with the root tucked up in bed next to her. Ugh! Remember how that used to scare me? I’d wake up sure that the root was in my bed and that it had come alive in the night, but it would just be one of my stuffed animals, and Dad would have to come in and search through my whole bed.”

“He’d take off the sheets and shake out the blankets,” I say, stealing another look at Sally to see how she’s taking the introduction of her father into the story. The therapist I’ve taken her to says I ought not to be afraid of sharing anecdotes about Jude, but once again the effect has been to clam her up. She hunches her shoulders, making the bones around her neck stick out. How much weight has she lost since Jude died? When did I last see her eat a real meal? She ordered blueberry pancakes at the diner we stopped at in Rockland County this morning, but she only ate half of one. What kid ever left a pancake unfinished? I wonder if I should say something else about her father here—how he loved her so much that he’d have searched through all the beds in all the world to make sure they were safe for her, that the fact that he up and died on us with debts and second mortgages and borrowed-against life insurance doesn’t mean he didn’t love us.

But I soldier on with the fairy tale, as the road climbs steadily through a dense pine forest that is as dark and mysterious as the forest where the witch lives.

“In the morning, the root has grown into a perfect likeness of the girl—right down to the freckles on her arms and the tear in her calico dress. The witch sends the changeling down the crystal path, out of the forest and to the cottage at the end of the woods where the lost girl’s family lives, so she can take the lost girl’s place. The girl stays at the witch’s house, working as hard as she can to please the old witch. Not only does she do the ordinary housework like cooking and cleaning and washing the clothes, she also does extra things to make the witch’s house beautiful. She spins the wool from the wild goats in the mountains into yarn and weaves the yarn into beautiful rugs for the floors and tapestries to cover the walls. She chips the broken glass out of the windowpanes and fits in pieces of colored glass in beautiful patterns so that the light in the cottage glows like scattered jewels. She gathers wood in the forest and carves it into comfortable chairs and sturdy tables. She digs clay by the stream and fashions it into vases to hold the wildflowers she picks in the fields.

“But no matter how beautiful the girl makes the house, she still
dreams of her own home every night and counts the days until her year of service to the witch is over. When that day comes the witch gives her back the dress she came in, only the torn piece has been patched with cloth of gold. They wait on the porch for the changeling girl to come back. They wait all day. At last when evening comes the witch turns to the girl and asks, ‘You didn’t, by any chance, wash that root in running water? Because you know, that gives the changeling running legs and she’ll never come back again.’”

It’s not the end of the story, but we’ve come to the end of our trip. At the top of the steep road I see a sign marked
FLEUR-DE-LIS.
This is the cottage Ivy St. Clare told me Sally and I could stay in—the free housing that made the job impossible to turn down. (Not that I, with an incomplete English doctorate and a mountain of unpaid debts, could afford to turn down any job at all.)

We pull up in front of the cottage in silence. It’s so well camouflaged in the trees that it takes a moment to really take it in, but slowly I begin to notice that the slate tiles are furred with moss and that many are missing. The rough pine walls are stained and moldy-looking, many of the windows cracked and covered with spiderwebs. A detached garage with a crooked roof slumps against the right side of the house. This could be the witch’s cottage before the lost girl comes and fixes it up—the hut still under the spell of disfigurement. Nothing has been restored. Sally’s father is still dead of a heart attack at forty-two, and I’m still the bad witch who’s sold her childhood home—her castle and her rights to the kingdom—and banished us to this peasant’s hovel. I turn to Sally, looking for any glimmer of the light I saw shining in her eyes just minutes ago, but she’s slouched back down in her seat, stopped her ears up with the iPod buds, opened her cell phone, and put her sunglasses back on. I’ve lost her again right before my eyes.

“I
t’s quaint, don’t you think, like something in a fairy tale?”

But Sally is done with fairy tales for the day. “I’m not getting service,” she says. “This place does get cell phone service, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” I lie. The dean had, in fact, told me that the campus lay in a cellular dead zone, but I hadn’t had the heart to tell Sally that yet. I was hoping that if she spent a little less time texting her friends she might occasionally talk to me.

“What about wi-fi?” she asks. “I mean, you can’t drag me away from all my friends and then not give me IM.”

From the look of it, the house is more likely to have black mold and a mouse infestation than electricity and a working phone. It certainly doesn’t match the image I’ve held in my head these last few months, through each painful stage of divesting ourselves of our old lives, of a tidy white clapboard house with a front porch and a small garden.
Nothing too big
, I said to myself as I put our Great Neck McMansion on the market.
Nothing too new
, I thought as I tag-saled the Danish modern furniture Jude and I had bought at Roche-Bobois. Nothing more than I can take care of by myself, I lectured myself as I let go the housekeeper and the gardeners.

I got the
nothing
right. The house is built of the same rough pine as the surrounding forest and the same granite as the hillside it backs up against. The only color is the faded green and russet of the trim on the pointed eaves. The whole house is tinted the colors of a pheasant seeking to camouflage itself in the undergrowth of the forest. I have the feeling that if I blink it will disappear.

“The library will have wi-fi,” I finally think to tell Sally. “All private schools do these days.”

“Not private schools for losers.” Sally slumps farther down in her seat. She makes no move to get out of the car, and neither do I. We seem trapped in the driveway of our new home, as if thorny hedges blocked our way. Perhaps Sally thinks if she doesn’t get out I’ll put the car in reverse, drive back through the pine woods, down the sycamore-lined road, out to the county route, and to the highway. We’ll retrace our steps until we get back to Great Neck and like clever children who’ve unraveled their sweaters to mark the way home, we’ll unspool time until we’re back in our lives of a year ago. I’ll be the wife of a prosperous hedge fund manager. Not the kind of suburban housewife I despise—the ones like Lexy’s mom who spend their days gliding in their BMWs between the hair salon and Burberry’s—but one with literary interests and just enough time to nurture our talented daughter. Last September I was taking the last course requirement for my Ph.D. in English literature at City University Graduate Center. Sally was starting tenth grade. She belonged to the art club and the literary magazine and had been inducted into the National Honor Society.
The hedge fund was in its third year. Jude had quit his trading job at Morgan Stanley three years before. I knew that we had borrowed heavily to start the fund—and to support the lifestyle that, Jude assured me, was necessary to look successful—but I thought it was worth it to have Jude home more and looking less stressed. He hadn’t looked so young and carefree since his sophomore year at Pratt, where we had met. He didn’t look like a man who had less than three months to live.

If I could unravel time and change that, I’d drive in reverse all the way down the New York State Thruway to Long Island.

“Why do you think it’s a school for losers?” I ask. “It has a very good reputation—especially in the arts. Its graduates go on to Ivy League colleges and the best art schools. Remember Grandma always said she wished she could have gone here?” I don’t mention that my mother was always bitter that her own mother hadn’t let her attend the Arcadia School, even after she got a full scholarship. When I heard about the job—as a last-minute replacement for a new teacher who’d gotten another job somewhere else—I felt that coming here might somehow heal that old wound. Right now we can use all the healing we can get.

Sally lets out an exasperated sigh and holds up a finger—a habit of Jude’s, this counting on fingers. “One, it starts in August.”

“That’s so the students have time to get to know one another.”

“Please, there are only six hundred students here. I’m sure they get to know each other all too well. Two, it’s full of rich, spoiled kids.”

I have to suppress a laugh that after living in materialistic, prosperous Great Neck she would worry about such a thing, but I reply soberly, “They have a scholarship program for gifted art students and only let in qualified students, whether they can pay or not. Remember, we had to send your portfolio for you to get in?” I hadn’t let Sally know how relieved I’d been when she was accepted because it meant I wouldn’t have to pay for private school or send her to the public school in the town of Arcadia Falls. “I think you’ll really like the art classes here.”

“I liked the art classes at my old school. And three, it was founded by hippie lesbian witches.”

“Witches?” I repeat only the last part because I’ve heard the accusation of
hippie
and
lesbian
already.

“I looked it up online. Do you know that there’s a legend that the town of Arcadia Falls was founded by a group of witches who were thrown out of the Dutch settlement in Kingston?”

I should be glad, I suppose, that Sally’s taking an interest in American history and that she’s bothered to try to find out anything about our new home, but I would prefer she’d chosen some other feature of the local landscape, like the history of bluestone quarrying or the short stories of Washington Irving. “That sounds like a pretty outlandish story, but even if there was some truth to it, that’s the town, not the school. The school was founded by artists—”

“Who were drawn here by the whole witchcraft thing. I’ve been looking at the Facebook profiles of the students here. They’re all into Wicca and voodoo. They even teach it here.”