Godmother (6 page)

Chapter Three

I
WENT TO SEE CINDERELLA A SECOND TIME BEFORE
the night of the ball, my sister and friends again trailing behind. It was only by surveying the house that I realized what I needed, all the things she needed to get there. A carriage. A coachman. A dress. Shoes.

This time we waited until late at night, when the whole kingdom was asleep and the moon covered everything with silver and mist. The palace gleamed under us, the river seemed to be made of liquid stars, and even Cinderella's manor, as we came upon it, seemed wonderful and enchanted in the soft light. We passed through the walls into a great marble hallway lined with ancient sculptures. Gods and beasts and warriors loomed on every side of us, casting shadows on the marble tile. A large stone lion reared up on its hind legs, its paws swiping the air in front of it. In one corner, perched on a long stick, was a silver face with a seashell swirling from its forehead. The others flew over to it, to examine the closed silver eyelids, the curves of the shell.

I left them behind. I swept up the great staircase to the main floor, with its rich tapestries covering the walls and
the many chests spilling over with thick, exotic fabrics and colorful jewels. I passed the chambers where the stepmother and stepsisters lay sleeping, on soft mattresses, under silk coverings, their bodies wrapped in velvet and fur, then slipped up the lone, dust-covered staircase that twisted up to the tower where Cinderella slept in a small garret room on a bed of straw.

I came upon her in the dark. Asleep, with her bright hair uncovered, her skin awash with moonlight, she did not seem like the same girl I'd seen scrubbing the kitchen floor. I had never seen a human so beautiful, even with her hair all tangled and dusty, the straw pressing up into her pale skin and leaving long red lines across the backs of her legs and shoulders. She might have been a full-blood fairy. I knew that she was not like a regular human, but I hadn't thought it possible that she was so much like us. Humans were strange and monstrous and ungainly to us. Even the best ones were. We never would have thought to envy them.

Maybe that is what made me get too close. My surprise. The way her starlit hair spread across the straw. The stark black of the room, and how luminous she was against it. The way she moved in her sleep, dreaming, fluttering her eyes. I wanted to know what she was seeing. Suddenly, I was dying to.

I shouldn't have been surprised like that, taken so off guard. Fairies had talked for years about Cinderella's mother, about how beautiful she had been, how beautiful her daughter was, how important it was for the daughter to grow up and marry the prince of the kingdom and to one day become queen, and how necessary we would be in the union. Others had envied me when I was chosen, but
Maybeth and I just laughed and kept playing, flicking water from the lake onto each other's wings. Humans did not matter, we said. Our world is perfect. Theirs is nowhere near. To the two of us, it seemed as simple as that.

I was the one who was beginning to forget.

I landed next to Cinderella's ear. I closed my eyes and leaned in, against her. Her lashes lay on her cheeks like brushes, and her faint almond scent seemed to move around me, wrapping me in. I let her dreams seep into me until I could see them, too. They came in, bit by bit, strange shimmering images. A handsome man walking forward, tall and dark-haired, his face obscured, the hem of a dress, a large open field. Steps winding up and up.
“
What are you seeing?” I whispered, not even thinking. I let myself sink farther down, felt the sleep pulling at me like a tide heading out. “Show me.”

I saw the man walking toward me, grass. Light shooting through so intensely that the man and the grass seemed to be transparent. Human dreams were always so strange and unreal, like the world inverted, hollowed out. But hers seemed to be leading me somewhere. I wanted to see the man's face. And there was something else, a feeling that began at my fingertips and moved through me, burrowing into my chest and gut.
Desire.
I focused on the man and willed myself next to him.

He touched me then, in the dream, his face still out of view, his hand moving against my arm and up to my neck. Suddenly it brushed my lips. I jumped up and opened my eyes, but there was just straw there, poking at me, and her pale cheek and long hair. The same small bare room. I looked at her, astonished, and then a feeling of loss came
over me so strongly that I almost fell over. I needed to be back in the dream. I moved back into it as if I were ripping open a curtain.

I was immersed in it, in her. I breathed through her lungs and felt through her skin and fingers. A man's chest pressed against me. My foot pressed into grass. We were outside. I reached for him and lost all sense of myself. Hair brushed against my cheek, a soft breath warmed my ear, so close it tickled me. And all the while, light poured down over us. The color of butter, of lemons. We stepped through haze. I could feel every particle of light touching me, rolling over my face and neck, my bare legs. Like drops of water. My body was disintegrating into light. Moving into his. The look of his arm as it moved toward me, cutting through the haze, creating shadows and splinters of light. I had to squint even as I moved into him.

“Cinderella,” the voice said, drawing out the syllables, lingering over her name, pulling it out as if it were a mood, a pathway to something. And then something else.

His eyes were full of longing, of love. All I wanted was to disintegrate into him. Become pure light. The feeling in my chest radiated through my body. I was not anything else, did not know anything else, but that feeling.

I blinked open my eyes and he was gone. The field, the voice, the hand. I was back in the little room next to a sleeping girl. I closed my eyes and tried to claw my way back in, but there was nothing. Just empty space and that feeling, which was different now. Unsettled. Wrong. Her hand shot up to her face, brushing at me, and I saw that she was awake. I flung myself into the air and dropped to the floor. What had happened? I looked at my hands and legs in
horror, fluttered my wings to make sure they were still there. I tried to push off the dream, but it was like a web I was caught in.

She sat up, and it took me a minute to realize she was crying. I stopped moving and watched her, her face in her hands and her hair streaming around them. Her bare arms and the strange burlap shift she was dressed in. I noticed how the soles of her feet were black.

The sun was starting to rise. The longing in her was so strong that the walls seemed to turn yellow with it. It seemed to be turning me, too, into something else. She wanted something she did not have. The man. Of course. She had more desire in her than any human I had ever come across. “Don't you?” I whispered.

Her longing had saturated her dream, and me. I could not shake it off. That restlessness, like a gaping wound. I had seen countless human dreams, human desires, but I had never felt infected the way I did then, in her garret room. She was so sad. She wanted something, someone she could not have. She wrapped her arms around her knees and pushed her face down, her shoulders shaking.

I was astonished to realize how badly I wanted, even then, to go back into her sleep, to the man, despite her anguish. How much I wanted to hear what he had whispered, the words I hadn't quite been able to make out. I wanted to see his face, his eyes. Tunnel my way in.

There was a faint scratching outside the door.

She sat up quickly, wiped her face. “Stepmother?” she asked quietly. Her voice seemed to coil through the room and snake around me.

She jumped off the mattress and scurried to the door.
She listened for a second, her eyes wide with fear, and then moved back into the room, her shoulders relaxing. As she passed me, where I was hovering, I noticed a bruise on her leg. How tired she was. I could feel the ache in her limbs.

She walked to the window then, the small circle punched into the stone wall. I stayed in a corner, hovering, watching her face. She was looking at something far away. Her face grew soft, as if she were sleeping, and her eyes glimmered and shone. I had never seen human eyes like that.

I flitted from the corner to the window, looked out onto grass and wood. Desperate to see what she saw.

“What do you see?” I whispered. She flinched.

Her eyes grew wet. I slipped up to her neck, her ears, facing the window.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”

I followed her gaze, but all I could see was empty space. The fields and wood stretching out under the early-morning light, the mountains that seemed to float in the sky, and then, just barely, the tip of the castle, the curve of turrets and towers, in the distance.

I SAT
up, startled, and looked around. The take-out bag lay crumpled next to my hand, alongside a battered Styrofoam box with a piece of lettuce stuck to the bottom. The storm clashed and banged against the building, the rain like pounding nails. My wet clothes from the night before lay in a jumble at the foot of the bed, still damp; the whole room smelled of them, as if everything had gone rotten.

It was just after five in the morning.

I turned and opened the window, looked out at the
water towers, the rooftops, the smudged gray and black sky. The rain pounded down, much more intensely than it had the night before. That raw scent rushed into the room. I reached my hand out the window and let it spatter with rain, watched the raindrops drip down my wrist and across my forearm.

I looked more closely at my hand and wrist. Something was different. I stretched out my fingers. Moved them up to my face. The light was so dim, a pale silver mixed with amber. I leaned over and flicked on the lamp, placed my hand under it as if it were a microscope, and stared.

The skin was smoother, paler. I could have
sworn
it. It was not the same gnarled, twiglike hand I had fallen asleep with. Was it? I shook my head, closed my eyes and opened them. My eyes dropped to my bare legs. I moved away from the window, suddenly nervous with the light on, and stared down at my smooth skin, my small curving toes. My vein-less legs. I could feel my eyes welling over. I stretched back, lifted my arms over my head, and then turned and smiled into the pillow, letting my whole body relax.

It was just past seven
A.M.
when I awoke again. My hands were wet, I realized, as were the sheets near the window. The rain was coming in at a slant now, causing a huge puddle to form on the wooden floor. Quickly, I sat up and slammed the window shut. I rushed to the bathroom to grab a towel. Slipped into a fresh shirt and pair of pants. I stopped with my leg through one side. My skin. It was wrinkled now, lined with veins. I held my right hand out in front of me, saw that it was gnarled and spotted.

I ignored the feeling that dropped over me then, descending on my body like a dress, falling around me in
folds. I was used to that sort of disappointment. In the early days, I had awakened every morning to that same feeling, that same sinking sense of being trapped and hemmed in, the ground pressing up into my spine and limbs. When I camped outside the palace and tried desperately to make my way back to him, it was almost unbearable. No one had recognized me. I could not make anyone understand who I was. It was like losing your sight. I had ripped up whole clumps of grass and earth in frustration, and it had splintered through my entire body, that pain. Now it was a dull ache, as familiar as sheets and air and sun.

I cleaned the floor as well as I could, wrung out the sheets in the bathtub and hung them from the shower-curtain rod. I grabbed the take-out box and brought it to the kitchen, to the full trash bag I needed to drag to the Dumpster downstairs.

I pulled a set of clean sheets from the hall closet and slowly made the bed. Silver light streamed in. The rain thumped on glass and brick. As I pulled the top corners tight, I caught myself again in the mirror.

Now, as always, I couldn't believe that the woman I was seeing was me. I walked up and put my face right next to the glass, looked straight into my sunken eyes, the lines shooting off in every direction. I pulled off my shirt, stared at my grizzled, hanging breasts, my gathering stomach, the feathers that dropped to the floor. My wings twisted out of my back, ugly at the roots, slicing into skin, but with feathers so shining and perfectly white that they made the decay of my body even more stark. Without them I could have been just anyone, any old lady who'd ended up alone.

I was late for work. I sighed, stumbled into the bathroom
to wipe the sweat from my body, pour water down the creases of my arms and legs.

Hunger pressed in, gnawing at my gut. Why did I always have to be starving? Once I was showered, I folded in my wings and wrapped the bandage around my torso, then pulled my clothes back on and headed to the kitchen. I hated myself for not having gone to the grocery store as I'd planned. I never took care of myself properly, it seemed. All my refrigerator revealed was the same jar of pickles, the same ketchup. One egg with a crack skidding across the top. A tiny hunk of bread, which I stuffed into my mouth, almost choking on the crumbs that sprayed across my throat. It only made me more hungry. I twisted the top of the jar and grabbed several small pickles, biting down on them all at once, letting the tang of them shock my mouth.