CHAPTER 2
The summer when Ben was a baby and Hazel was still in their mother’s belly, their mother went out to a clearing in the woods to paint en plein air. She spread out her blanket over the grass and sat Ben, slathered in SPF-50 and gumming a chunk of zwieback, on it while she daubed her canvas with cadmium orange and alizarin crimson. She painted for the better part of an hour before she noticed a woman watching from the cool shadows of the nearby trees.
The woman, Mom said when she told the story, had her brown hair pulled back in a kerchief and carried a basket of young green apples.
“You’re a true artist,” the woman told her, crouching down and smiling delightedly. That was when Mom noticed her loose dress was hand-loomed and very fine. For a moment Mom thought she was one of those ladies who got into homesteading and canned stuff from her garden, kept chickens, and sewed her own clothes. But then she saw that the woman’s ears rose to slim, delicate points and realized she was one of the Folk of the Air, tricksy and dangerous.
As is the tragedy of so many artists, Mom was more fascinated than afraid.
Mom had grown up in Fairfold, had heard endless stories about the Folk. Had known about the nest of redcaps who dipped their hats in fresh human blood and who were rumored to live near an old cave on the far side of town. She’d heard about a snake-woman sometimes spotted in the cool of the evening near the edges of the woods. She knew of the monster made of dry branches, tree bark, dirt, and moss, who turned the blood of those she touched to sap.
She remembered the song they sang while they skipped rope as girls:
There’s a monster in our wood
She’ll get you if you’re not good
Drag you under leaves and sticks
Punish you for all your tricks
A nest of hair and gnawed bone
You are never, ever coming—
They’d shouted it with great glee, never saying the last word. If they had, the monster might have been summoned—that was what it was supposed to do, after all. But as long as they never finished the song, the magic wouldn’t work.
But not all the stories were terrible. The generosity of the Folk was as great as their cruelty. There was a little girl in Ben’s playgroup whose doll was stolen by a nixie. A week later that same girl woke in her crib with ropes of gorgeous freshwater pearls wound around her neck. That was why Fairfold was special, because it was so close to magic. Dangerous magic, yes, but magic all the same.
Food tasted better in Fairfold, people said, infused as it was with enchantment. Dreams were more vivid. Artists were more inspired and their work more beautiful. People fell more deeply in love, music was more pleasing to the ear, and ideas came more frequently than in other places.
“Let me draw you,” Mom said, pulling her sketchbook from her bag, along with some charcoals. She thought she drew better in Fairfold, too.
The woman demurred. “Draw my beautiful apples instead. They are already given over to rot, while I will remain as I am for all the long years of my life.”
The words sent a shiver down Mom’s spine.
The woman saw her face and laughed. “Oh yes, I have seen the acorn before the tree. I have seen the egg before the hen. And I will see them all again.”
Mom took a deep breath and tried again to persuade her. “If you allow me to draw you, I’ll give you the picture once it’s done.”
The elf woman considered this for a long moment. “I may have it?”
Mom nodded, the woman assented, and Mom got to work. All the while that Mom sketched, they spoke of their lives. The woman said she had once belonged to an easterly court but had followed one of the gentry into exile. She told Mom of her newfound love of the deepness of the forest, but also of her longing for her old life. In turn, Mom told her of her fears about her first child, who’d grown fussy and bored, whimpering on his blanket and in need of a new diaper. Would Ben grow up to be someone completely unlike her, someone who would be uninterested in the arts, someone dull and conventional? Mom’s parents had been disappointed in her again and again because she wasn’t like them. What if she felt that same way about Ben?
When Mom was done with the drawing, the elf woman drew in her breath at the loveliness of it. She knelt down on the blanket beside the baby and brought her thumb to his temple. Immediately, he began to howl.
Mom grabbed for the woman. “What have you done?” she cried. On her son’s brow, a red stain was spreading in the shape of a fingertip.
“For the gift of your drawing, I owe you a boon.” The woman rose, towering above Mom, taller than seemed possible, while Mom wrapped her arms around a squalling Ben. “I can’t change his nature, but I can give him the gift of our music. He will play music so sweet that no one will be able to think of anything else when they hear it, music that contains the magic of faerie. It will weigh on him and it will change him and it will make him an artist, no matter what else he desires. Every child needs a tragedy to become truly interesting. That is my gift to you—he will be compelled to art, love it or no.”
With that, the elf woman took her drawing and left my mother huddled on her blanket, weeping, arms around Ben. She wasn’t sure if her son had been cursed or blessed.
The answer turned out to be both.
But Hazel, floating in the tideless sea of amniotic fluid, was neither. Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.
CHAPTER 3
Hazel got home from the party late that night to find Ben eating cereal at the kitchen table, dragging his spoon through the milk to scoop up the last pieces of granola. It was a little after midnight, but their parents were still awake and still working. Light blazed from the windows of their shared art studio out back. Sometimes, when they were inspired or on deadline, one of them even wound up sleeping out there.
Hazel didn’t mind. She was proud of the ways they were different from other people’s parents; they’d raised her to be. “Normal people,” they’d say with a shudder. “Normal people think they’re happy, but that’s because they’re too dumb to know any different. Better to be miserable and interesting, right, kiddo?” Then they’d laugh. Sometimes, though, when Hazel walked around their studio, breathing in the familiar smells of turpentine and varnish and fresh paint, she wondered what it would be like to have happy, normal, dumb parents, and then she felt guilty for wondering.
Ben looked up at her with cornflower-blue eyes and black brows, like her own. His red hair was messier than usual, the loose curls disheveled. There was a leaf stuck in it.
Hazel moved to pluck it out, grinning. She was drunk enough to feel blurry around the edges, and her mouth was a bit abraded from the way Franklin had mashed his lips against hers, all details she wanted to be distracted from. She didn’t want to remember any of the night, not Jack nor how much of an idiot she’d been, not any of it. She pictured a huge trunk slamming down on those memories, a padlock coiling around the trunk, and then the trunk falling to the bottom of the sea. “So how was your date?” she asked him.
He gave a long sigh, then pushed his bowl away, across the worn tablecloth. “Basically awful.”
Hazel put her head down on the table, looking over at him. He seemed insubstantial from that angle, as though if she squinted, she might be able to see right through him. “Was he into something weird? Rubber suits? Clown costumes? Rubber clown costumes?”