Falling In Read online

  Isabelle stared at her. Grete couldn’t mean that, of course. She was just placating Hen. How could this story—Grete’s story, for Isabelle knew the story belonged to Grete—not be told ever again, especially—

  26

  “I heard a child laughing in the woods outside the house the next day,” Grete explained to Isabelle. “And my thoughts brought a heavy branch down on his head.”

  27

  —especially since Isabelle had decided it was her story too.

  28

  I often think about people who get what they think they wanted. Lottery winners. Child movie stars. Everyone has some sort of wish, a dream, that they know won’t come true. Except that one time in a million it does.

  But it seems like every few months the newspaper carries a story about the lottery winner who complains that money has ruined his life. Or about the young actress who has everything except happiness.

  What is it about dreams coming true? Is it because we want the wrong things? Is it because no dream ever really comes true, at least not in the way we envisioned it coming true? The lottery winner finds that money indeed can’t buy everything, particularly love, and the celebrity learns that having people looking at you all the time and trying to touch you and generally wanting to eat you up like a tuna fish sandwich, well, it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.

  And what of the changeling? You’ve known you were one all your life. You’ve felt it. I’m talking to you, lying there on the bed eating Twizzlers and collecting cavities—and you, over there, reading this while you should be doing your math homework. I know you know that I know you know what I mean. And what you think is this: If only you could go back to your real home, to your real family, everything would fall into place and you would be loved and admired all hours of the day and you’d get to eat as much chocolate as you’d like without feeling sick or having the tiniest pimple pop up on your chin.

  But real life is real life, isn’t it? Which is to say, it’s not perfect, even when things go your way. Of course, most days things don’t go our way, we don’t win the big prize, the cute boy or girl doesn’t smile at us, our teachers don’t suddenly discover our true and hidden genius. We’re used to minor defeats. We expect them. But we also expect that when our dreams finally do come true, it will be like the movies—our whole lives perfect and aglow, forever and ever, amen.

  What do I know about it? you wonder. What makes me such a big expert? Am I speaking from experience?

  As a matter of fact, I am.

  29

  Isabelle and Grete were quiet for a long time after Hen went to bed. Finally Isabelle said, “Do you want me to go dig the book out of the trash?”

  “No need,” Grete replied. “It’s rewriting itself as we speak. Go stand next to the shelf by the south window and you’ll hear the scribbling. I’ve tried throwing that story away many a time. I even burned it once. And then I’d go to the shelf to pull out what I thought was a book on birds or rose-bushes, but it turned out to be the story again. If I didn’t read it, it filled all the other books on the shelves. So I read it when it appears, and it lets me be for a while.”

  Isabelle peered across the yard. Her eyes came to rest on a flowering bush, forsythia maybe, yellow, cheerful buds popping out from its branches, so bright she could see them even in the fading light. She tried to think about a story rewriting itself. Were the words the same every time? Or were there small changes with each new version—the baby wrapped in a pale yellow blanket in one story, and in a lavender one the next time the story was read? Was the baby sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl? Was the baby always Isabelle?

  Grete stood up and leaned slightly over the porch railing, as though to smell the pink roses climbing up the latticework. “I lived outside of Greenan when they took the baby—”

  Isabelle sat forward in her seat. “The fairies, you mean?”

  “I always supposed it was.” Grete looked at Isabelle, her expression somewhere between a grimace and a grin. “Funny thing is, I never believed in fairies. Still don’t know if I do. But how else could the baby have crossed over?”

  “Crossed over where?”

  “The other world. Your world.”

  Isabelle took a deep breath. “Oh, I see. I mean, because it would have had to cross over, right? If it was me, that is. The baby.”

  Looking startled, Grete took a step back. “You? Oh, dear—you think that baby was you?”

  “Well, yes, I mean, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” Suddenly Isabelle didn’t feel quite so sure. “Because I’m a changeling? On my way back to my true home? Which is this house?”

  “You? A changeling? Child, the notions that fill your head!” Grete sat down heavily on a chair, the laughter rumbling out of her. “You’re no more a changeling than I’m an ostrich.”

  Isabelle stared down at the porch’s broad planks. Her red boots, she noticed, had grown scratched and scuffed after days of wandering through the woods. Her brain felt scratched and scuffed too. Not a changeling? Not the baby in the hammock? Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, but she furiously blinked them away. She’d been so sure! Wasn’t that why the picture had fallen out of the book into her hands? That was what Grete had intended to happen, wasn’t it? So Isabelle would know that Grete was her real mother, that her mother on the other side, in the other world, wherever it was that Isabelle had come from, had just been a substitute mother until Isabelle could find her way to her real home.

  Her mother. Isabelle had hardly thought about her mother—her “mother”—in the days she’d been at Grete’s, and suddenly she could see her pacing up and down the linoleum of their long, narrow kitchen, tugging at the handkerchief she kept anchored beneath her wristwatch, stopping to listen at the window, as though she might hear Isabelle’s voice outside in the yard.

  “Yes, girl, you’re seeing it now.” Grete’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Your mother was the baby. Your mother was the one stolen away.”

  “My mother is the changeling?” Isabelle’s mouth dropped open. Her mother?

  Grete walked across the porch and sat down in the rocker next to Isabelle. “Think about it, child. If my babe was stolen near fifty years ago, do you think it could be you? You’re—what? Eleven? Twelve? Not even close to going on fifty.”

  “Maybe time doesn’t work the same way in every world,” Isabelle offered lamely.

  “Time is time. You can’t change it. Oh, a minute here or there, for sure. You can swallow up a week or two if need be. But years? No.”

  Isabelle started to offer another argument about how time might shift itself around, but stopped herself. Repeated herself: “My mother is the changeling?”

  Grete nodded, and Isabelle rocked back in her chair as far as she could, her head hanging back so that the world appeared upside down to her eyes. “So that makes me a half changeling, right?” she asked in an upside-down-sounding voice.

  “I suppose it does,” Grete answered. “If such a thing can be said to exist.”

  Isabelle sat straight up, and her brains twirled around in her head. Her stomach felt loopy, the way it did on the first downward slope of the roller coaster at Fun World. “Is my mother magic? Am I half-magic?”

  “Not much magic in this family, I’m afraid,” Grete said with a shrug. “Healing powers, for sure, and thought reading. Nothing fancy. But I suppose what little of it there is, your mother has it. Don’t know if it got passed on to you or not.”

  Isabelle ransacked her memory for evidence that her mother could read minds or mend broken bones. But all she came up with were images of a normal, middle-aged woman doing normal, middle-aged things, getting ready for work, chopping an onion while a pat of butter sputtered in the pan on the stove beside her, picking bits of lint off Isabelle’s navy blue sweater.

  “Maybe you have to know that you’re magic to practice magic,” Isabelle said, feeling let down.

  “It’s possible,” Grete replied. She paused for a moment, then said, �
��So, tell me about her. What is she like? Does she look like me?”

  Isabelle peered at her grandmother—her grandmother!—through the dim light. Grete looked eager, like a little kid asking about what she might get for Christmas this year. “She has blue eyes like you do. But her nose is—pudgier, I guess.”

  Grete nodded. “That would be my husband’s nose. Your mother had it even as a baby.”

  “She’s nice,” Isabelle continued. “She doesn’t yell too much. She, uh . . .”

  Grete leaned forward. “Yes?”

  Isabelle shrugged. “She’s a mom. She goes to work, she comes home to make dinner. On Saturday she goes grocery shopping.”

  “Yes, I suppose she would,” Grete said, sounding disappointed. “Oh, I do wish I could see her for myself. I can track her whereabouts and get a general idea of things. But to actually be able to see her!”

  “She got As in math in school,” Isabelle said, relieved to have one more bit of information to report. “And she looks pretty when she smiles.”

  Grete smiled, and Isabelle could see her mother in the old woman’s face. Her mother, the changeling. That night, as Isabelle lay in bed, she twisted her imagination this way and that, trying to see her mother as a magical being, a person who had been taken by fairies as a baby. Her mother had been stolen by fairies! It was almost impossible to believe, but Isabelle tried as hard as she could. After all, didn’t this news change everything? Once Isabelle told her mother she was magic, who knew what sort of things the two of them—the magic mother and the half-magic daughter—might make happen.

  Which raised a question for Isabelle. No, make that two questions.

  How on earth would she ever get home?

  And just what was she doing here in the first place?

  30

  When Isabelle walked into the kitchen the next morning, her eyes still cloudy with sleep, she found a knapsack leaning against the wall beside the back door. Grete stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot.

  “So you’ll be off today, then,” Grete said, not turning around. She sounded as though she were continuing a conversation instead of starting one. “To the camps north of Greenan.”

  “I will?” Isabelle asked. She rubbed her eyes. Had she missed something? “Are you kicking me out?”

  Grete glanced at Isabelle over her shoulder. “Putting you to work, is more like it. Now that I’ve brought you down here, there’s something I need you to do.”

  Isabelle stumbled against a chair, then lowered herself into it. “What do you mean, you brought me down here?”

  “Exactly that. I got you to open the door, which wasn’t difficult at all. You were ready.” Grete put a lid on the pan and set the spoon on a cloth by the stove. “I tried for years to get your mother to come, but I never could, even when she was young.”

  Isabelle puzzled over this. “Why not? She was in an orphanage. Why wouldn’t she want to come home?”

  “Because she didn’t know she had a home. And there was the problem of the imagination.” Grete turned toward Isabelle and tapped her head. “The ability to see things that aren’t there and to hope that what you see could be real. You have to be able to put your hand on a doorknob and believe that something completely unexpected lies beyond the door. Your mother never had that kind of imagination.”

  Grete began brushing little sprigs of leaves and twigs from the counter into her hand. “It took years to find her in the first place. Had to let my mind wander to the places in the other world I thought she might be. I could feel her, you see; and after a while, I could track her thoughts. They’d come to me in little bursts of words. Baby words at first— ‘Fire hot!’ ‘Dog bite!’—but then more complicated thinking. One day, when she was about nine, the matron at the orphanage had her memorize her address. So then I knew exactly where she was. But it turned out to be useless information. Your mother was scared of the dark. She was scared of other children. I could know her thoughts, but I couldn’t intrude on them to explain things to her.”

  She tossed the bits and pieces she’d gathered into the sink and wiped her hands on her apron. “In short, your mother was not the kind of girl who would open a door and hope she would fall into another world. So I could never get her to one of the doors.”

  Isabelle blinked. Blinked again. “There’s more than one door?”

  “What do you think, girl? There’s doors all over creation. And the children who want to find them find them, and the children who don’t want to, don’t. Your mother didn’t want to find one—”

  “But I did,” Isabelle finished for her.

  “I knew it from the minute you were born.”

  Isabelle walked over to the counter and tore a hunk of bread from the loaf on the cutting board. “So you got me instead of my mother, and now you’re sending me away.”

  Grete stepped closer to Isabelle, as though she meant to share a secret. “I want you to go to the camps and tell the children my story. Make them see I’m not a witch—that there’s no witch at all.”

  “Who’s not a witch?” Hen stood at the door, a bundle of dried roots in her arms, her eyes wide. “What do you mean you’re not a witch? Who said you were a witch?”

  “Hen,” Grete said in an even voice. “I thought you were outside.”

  “What do you mean you’re not a witch?” Hen repeated in a trembling voice.

  Isabelle felt confused. “Wait a second. I thought you were a witch. Not a bad witch or anything, but a witch.”

  Grete gave Isabelle a sharp look. “Now don’t go talking like that. I’m not a witch. I’ve got powers. I don’t use them for bad; half the time they come unbidden. One of the few times I’ve done anything on purpose—”

  “What? When?” Isabelle asked eagerly.

  “Was to get you here. I’ve been waiting many a year for you to be old enough to help.”

  Hen’s eyes sparked. “If there’s not a witch that kills little ones, then who’s killing them?”

  “Nobody!” Grete shook her head in disgust. “Not one child has been killed!” She paused. Revised. “Only one child has been killed.”

  (And here’s when she told Isabelle and Hen the story: the boy in the woods the day after the baby disappeared, Grete’s powers unleashed as if by their own volition, the branch falling, falling, Grete yelling for the boy to move, the boy standing there frozen and then toppling with the weight of the branch as it hit him, and then still as a stone.)

  Grete faced both girls. “If I’d come forward, if I’d walked out of the woods with that boy’s body in my arms, I would have been put to death on the spot. So I ran. Ran for years until I finally settled here, where nobody knew me, where nobody had ever seen my face before.”

  “So the people around here, they don’t have any idea?” Isabelle asked. “I mean, who you are?”

  “They know that I’m Grete the Healer,” Grete replied. She sighed. “But I suppose that’s not what you mean. Do they know I’m the witch? The so-called witch? Of course not. I’d be dead in the ground if they did.”

  Isabelle grabbed Grete’s wrist. “You have to tell them! Otherwise it will go on forever!”

  “What do you think I’m talking about, girl?” Grete looked as though she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I know it must be told. And now you’re here to do the telling. You’re the only one I can trust to get the job done, child of my child that you are. If you don’t, you’re right—it will go on forever. I’ll be dead and gone, and they’ll go on believing that there’s a witch in the woods eating their babies. The stories get worse with every generation.”

  Isabelle took a deep breath. If she could put an end to the fear and the running just by standing up and telling the truth, she supposed she ought—

  “I think you ought to be strung from the highest tree.”

  Hen stood in the middle of the kitchen, still clutching her bundle of roots. “You’ve had a good life all these years, making your potions and brews, while the rest of us have b
een running off into the woods, thinking death was riding on our tails. It’s a horrible thing you’ve done, not coming forward.”

  Grete stared stonily into the air for a few moments before she replied. “I hoped that by being a healer, I could make up for some of it. Hoped I could even things out. Because”—and here she turned toward Hen, looked her in the eye—“I wasn’t willing to die. Not for a minute, not for something that happened by accident. Do you blame me, Hen?”

  Hen threw the dried plants to the floor, where they disintegrated into pieces and crumbs. “I don’t blame you,” she snarled, barreling past Isabelle toward the back door. “But I won’t ever forgive you either.”

  The door slammed behind her. Grete sat down at the table, looked up at Isabelle. “You’ll do it, won’t you, Isabelle? Tell the other children?”

  Isabelle swallowed hard. She nodded. “I should go talk to Hen first, though.”

  “Go,” Grete told her, rubbing her face with her hands. “Go see about Hen.” She looked up at Isabelle, her eyes rimmed in red. She opened her mouth as if she had more to say, but the only thing she said was, “Go. Now.”

  31

  How many hours had Hen trailed Isabelle on the path north? How many hours had Hen been muttering and mumbling about the kind of trouble she was going to be in, the way she’d let the children run off on their own, what could she have been thinking about, wasn’t Mam going to boil over when she found out, and for what? For what? Hen kept asking the trees and the birds and the air. So that Hen could help a killer make her potions?

  “She’s not a killer,” Isabelle chirped in a singsong voice from time to time. “She’s a healer.”

  “’She’s a healer,’“ Hen mocked back. “Oh, is she? Seems to me she admitted to at least one killing. I’d wager there are more she’s not confessed. Old liar, that one is.”