Read Grimm's Last Fairy Tale Online
Authors: Becky Lyn Rickman
Grimm's Last Fairy Tale (2 page)
She cataloged for an hour, but then decided to perform an experiment. She checked for new online orders and, sure enough, there were a few. She left her desk and went back to the stacks hoping that her visitor would leave another message. She took her time, perusing a few other volumes before returning to her station. Nothing.
When her day was finished, she headed home, stopping for a few groceries. Though not evident to anyone else, there was a smile in her heart that was beginning to wipe out all apprehension. She told herself that she would just enjoy it. What danger could there be?
When she walked in the door, the boys were there to greet her as always.
“Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley, Colonel? How was your day? What shall we do this evening?”
She waited for the response, but only got the usual request for dinner.
“Oh, I should write some more, you say? What a splendid suggestion.”
She fed the felines, made her dinner, and sat at the laptop and waited for the crisis that, for this evening at least, never came. To her delight, she had a perfect evening with no intrusive phone calls and optimum time to write, but found that she could not. She could not get her mind off of the messages that she was beginning to realize were for her alone.
Thoughts of romance were creeping into her psyche and they were at the same time excruciatingly painful and eagerly welcome. When she went to bed, she was more tickled than she had been productive during the evening. She could hardly wait to see if there would be another message tomorrow. She slipped into a peaceful sleep filled with dreams of what had not been, but what there might still be a chance of.
in which Maggie welcomes
more cryptic messages which
have been cleverly altered
Maggie's dreams of the night before left her hesitant not only to wake up, but also to get out of bed and face the world. Often her dreams were filled with re-enactments of the abuse she had suffered. Ex-husbands and lovers who were still chasing her to do her more harm. She would awake in a chilling sweat, alone, comfortless and these nights would frustratingly cause her insomnia. She wished, as many do, that she could control the phantasms of the night. But this night was different. This night she had not wanted to see come to an end. She was in the arms of someone; someone nameless and faceless, but strong and gentle and soft-spoken, and she would rather not leave him or the safe harbor in which he kept her harbored.
The relentless snooze button would not be quieted and eventually stirred the Mr.'s into a frenzied plea for breakfast. She sat up, saddened by the greyness of the day, put on her slippers, and traipsed into the kitchen slowly. She knew what was there: the same empty cat dishes; the same oatmeal with the same tea; the same blaring absence of anything out of the ordinary.
She determined that this morning would be different. She threw all caution to the wind and made herself a couple of eggs and some toast and even drank a glass of orange juice. Then, feeling quite full, she left the dirty dishes in the sink, which, for her, was an unprecedented move.
She turned on her computer, read the clever updates on her friends' social network pages wishing she had something extraordinary to post. She lost herself in the steam of a shower a little too hot for comfort, scrubbing a little too hard with the loofah, hoping to feel something. Even pain would be a validation that she was still capable of feeling something. But there was nothing. She let her tears mingle with the warm spray and watched them run for the drain and out of her system.
As she dressed, her thoughts turned to the bookstore and at last she felt something. She was sensing a sort of hopeful tingle all over. No sooner had she formulated that thought than there was the dull aching of an apprehension that maybe this was a fluke and there would be no more messages. She tried to rationalize this with the reality that she would be no worse off than she was now. She knew she would be though. A glimpse of a better life and a true love had stirred a kind of hunger in her that left her with a longing that could not be satisfied fulfilling the book wishes of others.
After trudging through her morning routine, Maggie made her way through the slushy streets and entered the bookstore.
"Hemingway? Where are you?"
The calico made her way to the front of the store and took her place on the counter awaiting her morning love fest. She knew Maggie loved cats and she knew that her night of solitude would be rewarded with some tactile show of affection.
"How was your night, Hemingway?"
Hemingway responded with a wet-nose nuzzle and then ran off to lie among the biographies.
Maggie turned on the computer, anxious to go back to the shelves and retrieve the night's orders. Once more she found herself afraid that there might not be a message today and equally afraid that there would be. These occurrences were creating a dangerous anticipation inside of her heart.
Once she compiled the list of orders, she went back and took her time, allowing whomever time to find the perfect passage for her. As she sought the books, she began to panic. What if nothing was there when she got back to the desk? She shrugged it off and finally returned to her desk. Tears that she could not explain poured from her eyes. There was a book. She looked. She read:
"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that this love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to London. For you alone I think and plan. -- Have you not seen this? can you fail to have understood my wishes? -- I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated
mine.
I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. -- Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be
most fervent, most undeviating in, J.G.
Maggie knew this passage all too well. After all, she was an Austen, and this was from her favorite Jane Austen offering,
Persuasion
. Only it was Captain Wentworth—F.W. and not J.G.—and it was Bath, not London. This passage, though one of the most intensely passionate in literature, did not lend any clue to the "whom" that was haunting her. Haunting. Odd that she should think that word rather than stalking or sneaking or harassing. Everyone knew of her love of Jane Austen and that
Persuasion
was her favorite. So the list of suspects was not narrowed down.
She dialed the phone to her sister, Lizzie, the one who actually got to be named after a notable Austen character, and asked if she were pranking her. By the tone in her voice, Maggie knew that Lizzie had no clue what she was referring to. There was also a hint of delight in Lizzie's voice at the prospect that Maggie might have a secret admirer. Everyone wanted to see Maggie happily paired off to a nice man of her equal; everyone, that is, except Maggie.
With a mixture of school-girl crush and aggravation, she went about her dusty business at the bookstore until her tasks were complete and her workday was at an end. As she went to lock up, she noticed Hemingway was not around and knew instinctively that she was locked back in storage. Hemingway often escaped the world to the solitude of the storage unit and would sneak in when Maggie had the door opened and was otherwise occupied.
"Hemingway, you little tramp! Get out here. I've got to go home now."
The frisky feline walked a little too slowly out of the storage room and rubbed Maggie's legs a few too many times.
"Fine! I forgive you. Just don't go in there again. You know how it vexes me!"
Maggie made her way to the front of the store, gave one last glance around to make sure all was in order and opened the door to leave, then suddenly did a double take. There was a book on her desk! A second message in the same day! Was her admirer getting a little bolder or just getting a jump-start on the next day? Maggie turned on the light again and looked to see what literary nugget was left for her this time.
Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of my hearing! Fifty-three! Break my heart! Oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "Hello, Maggie!" just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a "Hello, Jacob!" that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.
Mark Twain! A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court! But he had used her name and age and now disclosed his own! Jacob. She knew no one named Jacob. Who was this gentle creature wooing her? Maggie decided maybe it was time to retrieve, shake the dust off of, and try on something she had not worn in a very, very long time. It was a smile so genuine that no calamity could wipe it off her face. She twirled in the parking lot and then drove home to the boys.
Maggie couldn't wait to get home and turn on the computer and investigate everyone Jacob. But her plans were delayed when she received a call that one of her elderly friends needed a ride to the emergency room. She knew this would mean hours of sitting and waiting and though her heart went out to this woman, it meant she would have to waylay her sleuthing.
In the waiting room, she read through two full Highlights for Children and three People magazines and now knew so much more about the inhabitants of the Babylon that was the entertainment world than she ever needed to know.
At last she was able to return her friend to her home, make her a small meal and visit for a bit, and now was on her way back home and to the computer.
"Boys, tonight is not the night to stretch across the keyboard. Mommy's on a mission!" There was a joy in her voice and a spring in her step and somewhere in the back of her mind she was subconsciously scolding herself for having to receive obscure and random love notes from a stranger in order to come to life, but there it was. She did not even know who Jacob was. She went to the local white pages online and found that there were about a thousand Jacob's in the county. So, feeling full of serendipity, she typed J-A-C-O-B in the Google search bar and came up with way too much information. This could take the rest of the week to go through.
First up, Jacob's meaning: as a boy's name the meaning of Jacob is "he who supplants".
Next up, supplant: 1. to take the place of (another), as through force, scheming, strategy, or the like. 2. to replace (one thing) by something else.
Maggie thought of the empty slots on the bookshelves and her subsequent thoughts of the empty places in her heart and her desire to have them filled. Was Jacob, whoever he was, trying to do just that?
Jacob--Jacob Black, a character in the popular Twilight series.
Jacob--also known as Israel, father of the 12 tribes in the Old Testament.
This was getting nowhere. Then, as she turned to leave her computer, a book caught her eye. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Maybe it was the ghost of Jacob Grimm, she mused. She giggled, fed the cats and then hit the road to what she hoped would be sweet sleep.
in which a literary battle of wits ensues, some things are
revealed and others are not
When Maggie awoke, she was not feeling as blissful as she had the last couple of days. She occasionally suffered from sleep apnea and this had been a particularly bad night. She labored her way through about half of her oats and even her shower didn’t bring her to life.
She arrived at the bookstore more tired than she had left it the day before, doubting that any messages could turn her outlook around. Days like this—days when she would have rather stayed in bed—brought up old resentments of having to work in the first place. It was not that she was at all lazy or wanted to lie around watching TV. Maggie had aspirations. She wanted to spend her days pursuing dreams that had long been on the back burner due to raising children, the one dream of hers which had been fulfilled. As much as she loved being a mother to many, she had forgone many things and made many sacrifices to do it and now was the time to accomplish these ambitions. The men who had not known how to love her the way she needed to be loved—exclusively—had left her with no income, no retirement, no social security and had saddled her with the need to work to meet her most rudimentary needs. She had worked so hard raising her children and had thoughtlessly counted on having a man to care for her as she got older. Her thought was that she could do these things when the kids were grown.
Instead, she mourned over the lives her husbands had chosen to live that had left her struggling to care for herself. She attributed the stress-damage ravages that her body was enduring to these immature men and that left her feeling even worse about herself and her inability to forgive, forget, and move on.
So it was an altogether rotten day she was facing and it was seasoned with bitterness. She gave no thought to romantic messages or secret admirers and quite frankly was in no mood for them today. Why should she give the time of day to anyone who might be interested in her? History had proven all her romantic dreams utterly futile. The truth was, Maggie had often said, much to the chagrin of those who loved her, that she could never respect anyone that could love her.
