My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

FRANCINE PROSE. Hansel and Gretel

TACKED TO THE WALL OF THE BARN THAT SERVED AS LUCIA DE Medici’s studio were 144 photographs of the artist having sex with her cat. Some of the pictures showed the couple sweetly nuzzling and snuggling; in some Lucia and her black cat, Hecuba, appeared to be kissing passionately, while still others tracked Hecuba’s leathery rosebud of a mouth down Lucia’s neck to her breasts until the cat disappeared off the edge of the frame and Lucia’s handsome head tilted back…

This was twenty years ago, but I can still recall the weariness that came over me as I looked at Lucia’s photos. I didn’t want to have to look at them, particularly not with Lucia watching. I was twenty-one years old. I had been married for exactly ten days to a man named Nelson. It had seemed like a good idea to drop out of college and marry Nelson, and a good idea (it was Nelson’s idea) to spend the weekend in Vermont at his friend Lucia’s farm. At that time, I often did things because they seemed like a good idea, and I often did very important things for lack of a reason not to.

Lucia de Medici was an Italian countess, a direct descendant of the Florentine ruling family, and a famous conceptual artist. She was also, I’d just discovered, the mother of a woman named Marianna, the love of Nelson’s life, an old girlfriend who, until that afternoon, I’d somehow assumed was dead.

Striped by the sunlight filtering in through the gaps between the barn boards, Lucia and I regarded each other: two zebras from different planets. She was a small woman of about fifty, witchy and despotic, her whole being ingeniously wired to telegraph beauty and discontent. And what was Lucia seeing, if she saw me at all? A girl with the power that came unearned from simply being young and with every reason not to act like such a quivering blob of Jell-O.

She said, “Up here in the wilderness I am working so in isolation, some days I want to ask the cows what do they think of my art.”

“It’s. really something,” I said.

“Meaning what?” Lucia said. I was pleased she cared what I thought, but hadn’t she just explained: when it came to Lucia’s art, the cows’ opinion counted? She frowned. “Prego. Watch out, please, not to back up into the fish tank.”

I turned, glad for fish to focus on after Lucia and her cat. An enormous goldfish patrolled the tank with efficient shark-like menace, while several guppies hovered in place, rocking oddly from side to side. “I am scared of that big fish,” Lucia confided. “He push his sister out of that water, I find her gasping dead on the floor.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the cat?” I asked.

“Of that I am sure,” she said.

I sensed that Lucia had tired of me, and I thought that now we would leave her studio. Instead, she switched on the stereo and voices filled the barn. Suddenly my eyes watered; it was my favorite piece of music, the trio from Così fan tutte that the women sing when their lovers are leaving and they beg the wind and water to be good to them on their way. Their sadness is a painful joke because their lovers aren’t leaving but disguising themselves as Albanians and seducing the women as a test, a test the women eventually fail, a painful joke on them all.

I listened to the delicate, mournful tones, the liquid rippling of the strings, cradling and oceanic. There was grief in the women’s voices, pitiful because it was wasted, pitiful and humiliating because we know it and they don’t.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“So you say now,” Lucia said. “This, too, is one of my projects. I think everything gets boring sooner or later, no? The most fantastic Mozart becomes unbearable after a while. So I have put this trio on a loop that plays over and over until the audience cannot stand it and runs screaming out of the room.”

Lucia’s project depressed me. I felt personally implicated, though I knew: there was no way that she could have had me and Nelson in mind. In the ten days since we’d been married, Nelson had changed so profoundly that he might as well have gone off and come back disguised as an Albanian. You hear women say: Before the marriage my husband never drank or hit me or looked at another woman. But with Nelson there was nothing so violent or dramatic. Before the wedding he’d liked me; afterwards he didn’t.

He had been my lab instructor in a college biology course. He was a graduate student in anthropological botany, writing his thesis on the medicinal plants commonly used by the rain-forest tribes he’d lived among for two years. It was rumored that most of his research was on Amazonian hallucinogens, so it made sense that he was often strange, mumbly and withdrawn — but a perfectly capable and popular lab instructor. He was blond and handsome and tall; he looked lovely in a lab coat. He came from an old Boston family and played jazz clarinet.

Right from the start, our love had been tainted with cruelty. My lab partner was a squeamish boy, a Mormon from Idaho, who refused to cut into, or even touch, anything slimy. I enjoyed humiliating him. I feel I have to confess this, so as not to make myself sound nicer or more innocent than I was. From the other side of the lab table Nelson watched me grab the etherized frog from my partner’s shaky hands and our eyes locked in the candle-like glow of the Bunsen burners. Later, Nelson told me that what had caught his attention was that my lab partner was in love with me and I had no idea. I believe that Nelson imagined this, but even so I was flattered — flattered and guilty and proud, all at once, for having made the Mormon boy suffer.

Nelson was moody, given to brooding silences in which I knew he was grieving over Marianna. He didn’t like to talk about her or about his time in the jungle. I’d never met a man with a past he didn’t like to discuss, or for that matter a man with any past at all. Nothing had ever happened to the boys I knew in college, but they were so touchingly eager to tell you all about it. I was young enough to be enthralled by what a man wouldn’t say, and I believed the glitter dust of romance and adventure would sprinkle on me like confetti if I stood close enough to Nelson.

Marianna had gone with Nelson to the Amazon, but she was demonically restless, she’d left and flown back every few months. Nelson said he always knew the night before she arrived. She used to hitchhike in with the bush pilots who invited her along because she was so beautiful — beautiful and doomed.

“If those pilots knew her,” Nelson said, “they wouldn’t have taken her up in an elevator. Every time a plane took off, she was praying it would crash. She had a death wish instead of a conscience, she was born suicidal, it was a miracle she lasted long enough to meet me. Her suicide attempts got more and more serious until I couldn’t do anything to…” His voice trailed off and he took a deep breath that ended the conversation.

I don’t know why I assumed from this that Marianna was dead. It helped, I suppose, that I was never able to ask the obvious questions: when and where Marianna died, and how exactly she did it. Instead, I went through Nelson’s possessions. I found his journal from the Amazon, and nowhere — nowhere — in it was one word about Marianna. Stupidly, this cheered me; it made her seem less important. I thought I’d learned something new about her, not something new about Nelson.

He told me I made him happy. He said we should get married. He said we shouldn’t tell anyone, not even our parents or friends. I agreed, though it bothered me, not being able to boast that I’d been chosen by a handsome older man, the most popular lab instructor. In City Hall, we ducked behind a door when Nelson saw a judge who knew his father; and that was the last time he touched me, yanking me out of the judge’s way.

For a week after the wedding he paced our hot cramped Cambridge apartment, staying up all night, listening to music: Bill Evans, Otis Redding, Bach — only the slow second movements. I couldn’t ask him what was wrong, if he thought we’d made a mistake. It didn’t take a genius to draw the logical conclusion when someone seemed so much happier before getting married — to you. I was not supposed to notice that I was sleeping alone in the bed that had changed unrecognizably, grown colder and less welcoming since when we used to spend all day there.

One morning Nelson brought me coffee. He said he knew he’d been rotten and he was mightily sorry. He said he’d eaten some things in the jungle that he shouldn’t have eaten, and now he had these episodes, he was gone for days at a time.

“Episodes?” I said. “Gone?” Why hadn’t he ever had one in all the months we’d lived together?

Nelson said we needed to get away: an impromptu honeymoon in Vermont. That morning we threw our knapsacks into his VW Bug. We drove with the windows open, my long hair streaming back, and for a time I felt like we’d left our problems in Cambridge, along with my toothbrush and contact-lens fluid and everything else I needed. I kept wondering about Nelson’s episodes. Did he have them when he was driving?

Early in the afternoon we turned into Lucia’s long, tree-lined driveway, which, Nelson said, always reminded him of the stately avenues of lime trees leading to Tolstoy’s estate.

“How do you know Lucia?” I asked.

“Mutual friends,” he said.

Lucia ran out of the rambling spotless white farmhouse and kissed Nelson three times, alternating cheeks, then grabbed his shoulders and gave him a smacky kiss on the mouth. She eyed me coolly, then smiled flirtatiously at Nelson, as if he’d come to amuse her by showing off his very large new pet.

“What’s this?” she said.

“Polly. My new wife,” he said. “Polly, this is Lucia.”

“Your new what?” Lucia asked, only slightly dimming my pleasure in his finally having told someone. “Welcome.” She embraced me swiftly, kissing my sweaty forehead.

“Guess what?” she asked Nelson. “Just yesterday I got a postcard from Marianna. She is in India at an ashram, fucking hundreds of people a day. She writes she is finding enlightenment through nonstop tantric fucking.”

Nelson touched the top of his car. His hand came away black with grime, and for a moment the three of us stood there staring at his hand. “I’m sorry,” Lucia said. “But if I can’t tell you, who can I tell? All alone I am going crazy.”

“Marianna?” I said.

“My daughter,” said Lucia. “Nelson’s friend.”

I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “But I thought she was dead!”

“My daughter is very much alive, thank you. Nelson, what have you been telling this child? Anyway, it is perfect you come. Marianna sends me a phone number where I can call her in India this weekend, we can go into town where is the nearest phone.”

“There’s no phone here?” I said.

“Of course not,” Lucia said. “Now come to my studio and see my new piece. I call it Così fan tutte, starring me and my cat.”

Nelson said he’d see it later, he needed to walk, he’d been in the car all morning; Lucia tried not to look disappointed at being left with me. Nelson headed off toward a horse barn and Lucia led me across a field on a path tunneled between high grasses. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I should praise everything I could — nice house, nice land, nice view, nice sky — without sounding truly psychotic. Finally I said, “What beautiful blue flowers!” The field was completely blue.

“Bachelor’s buttons.” Lucia sighed. “In Europe they are weeds. For years I never grow them. Then I learn they keep their color forever, Etruscan tombs are full of them, Etruscans bury them with their dead to stay blue in the afterlife.”

For an instant the waves of heat shimmering over the field resolved into a miniature phantom funeral procession, Etruscans in white, bearing scythes and armloads of blue flowers; and in that instant I wondered if Nelson’s episodes might be catching.

Then we went to Lucia’s studio and looked at the photos of her and her cat, and she played the Mozart that we listened to over and over. I could have listened forever and never gotten tired and been grateful for every minute by which it shortened the weekend. But after four or five times I said, “Okay! Enough!” It seemed required, like my admiring the field of blue flowers.

Lucia switched off the stereo and said, “I am right, am I not? Now go find Nelson, and I will do another five minutes of work.”

But it was five hours before Lucia emerged from her studio and found us on the lawn, bouncing grumpily in our metal armchairs. We had been arguing about Lucia, furiously but without speaking, so perhaps only I was arguing and Nelson was thinking about something else.

Finally — after a walk through the scratchy fields matted with treacherous berry canes, and a long nap that Nelson took and I wasn’t invited to join — I’d mentioned the photos of Lucia and her cat. I suppose I expected some conspiratorial expression of normal distaste.

Instead, Nelson said, “I love her. She’s absolutely bananas.” I recalled the lab partner I’d nearly dissected for Nelson’s benefit, and now I needed Nelson, and he was taking Lucia’s side. But there was no comparison. Lucia wasn’t some squeamish kid who made you do all his experiments for him. Lucia was Nelson’s very good friend and former mother-in-law.

I had spent Nelson’s nap time in the airless library with its motley collection of books, tattered and reeking of mildew. These were mostly in Italian, but there were also some volumes in English on folklore, magic, and witchcraft. It was no accident that I was drawn to a volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor was it accidental that I turned to “Hansel and Gretel” and read it for survival tips as much as for entertainment. This was the version in which the witch is fattening up the children and feeling the chicken bones Gretel holds out to deceive the witch into thinking the children are still thin.

After I mentioned the cat photos and Nelson defended Lucia, I thought how different the story would be if Hansel were in collusion with the witch. So when at last Lucia appeared from her studio and said, “You children must be starving! I will make chicken with mushrooms,” I must have paled. Lucia said, “Nelson, look, your friend is half dead already from hunger.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m fine, I’m not hungry at all.”

Inside the house we found Hecuba licking a stick of butter on the dining-room table. Lucia buried her face in the cat’s black fur and, with many tiny kisses, set it on the floor. She opened a bottle of wine and put two glasses on the kitchen table.

“From the state liquor store,” she said. “Imagine such a thing! I think it is so that they can keep track of how much and what we are drinking. Now you two sit down. In the kitchen, I am a wild woman. A maniac. Watch out.”

With that, she began to fly about, chopping, stirring, frying. “After dinner, we will phone Marianna,” she said. “When it is seven here, I think, is nine in India.”

Lucia reached up and took down one of several large apothecary jars full of what appeared to be dried lizards. “My mushrooms,” she said. “My beauties. I could kiss each one. This has been a fabulous year. Tonight with the chicken I will put in maybe eight kinds of mushrooms I find in the woods this spring.”

“Do you. know a lot about mushrooms?” I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.

Lucia laughed. “Nelson has eaten my mushrooms for years, and he is alive to tell the tale. Don’t worry, every mushroom I pick, I send a spore print to Washington for analysis. No one knows you can do this, but it is the only safe way. I have a good friend, he finds mushrooms all his life, last spring, he eats something he has been picking for years, he barely has time to call Poison Control before he loses all sensation in his—”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Nelson. “We feed Polly first and then watch her for twenty-four hours to see if she makes it.”

It was the sort of intimate teasing that married couples indulge in, and I might have been encouraged that Nelson was choosing to do it if I hadn’t suspected that they were capable of sitting at the table, discussing Nelson’s research, Lucia’s art, and occasionally checking to see if I had survived the dinner. It crossed my mind that if I did die from mushroom poisoning, I would be at least spared going into town and phoning Marianna.

It was reassuring that we all started to eat at once, food that was so delicious, who cared if it was lethal? Behind Nelson was a window and all through dinner I’d been distracted by dark shapes swooping near the glass.

“What kind of birds are those?” I finally asked.

“Bats, darling,” said Lucia. “But my bats are very strange bats. Most bats squeak, you know, like mice. But my bats cry like kitties. Isn’t that right, Hecuba, my love? Tell our friends what the little bats say.”

Lucia couldn’t remember if she had gas in her car, so we took Nelson’s VW, with our sleeping bags still in back. I offered Lucia the front seat. I was shocked when she accepted. Since then I have met others who take you up on what’s only politeness; it’s like some spiteful playground trick you fall for again and again. I scrunched up in the backseat: a relief, in a way.

Lucia slid in front and said, “I don’t believe in seat belts. To me, is a fascist plot.”

Then the whole grim scenario played out before my eyes. Nelson having an episode, Lucia not wearing her seat belt. Was it more or less scary that this was wishful thinking on my part? I felt like a child in the backseat, sullen and resentful. I thought mean thoughts about Lucia and Nelson, that they had more in common than just Marianna. By temperament, they were spoilers, they enjoyed ruining your pleasure, making you hate what you might otherwise love: Mozart, bachelor’s buttons, mushrooms, food. in Nelson’s case, my whole life.

For just the briefest moment, I was sorry for Marianna. And suddenly I felt frightened, alone, at Lucia and Nelson’s mercy, like a heroine in a thriller. Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, held prisoner in South America by Claude Rains and his evil mother. But Lucia and Nelson weren’t conspiring to kill me. It was fine with them, enough for them, to make me acutely unhappy. Though it wasn’t — ever — clear to me if they even knew, or cared.

It was a soft July evening. We drove along a river, past a waterfall. Light and water splashed on us, beading up on the car. A valley opened before us, rolling fields studded with barns, silos, farmhouses, kitchen gardens: quiet facades behind which families and household pets must have been eating dinner, inside, out of the golden light.

“Look!” I said unnecessarily. Nelson and Lucia were already staring at a blazing wedge of sun streaming down from one high cloud.

“People say I am imagining,” said Lucia. “But I know for a fact I am psychic. Yesterday morning I woke up and I knew I would hear from Marianna though it was, oh Jesus Christ, early spring since I hear from her last. That time she turned on the gas in your apartment, Nelson, I was at a party in Manhattan, and at the very moment my daughter was trying to kill herself, I suddenly faint and throw up all over the dinner table.”

There was a silence. Nelson said, “Two hundred years ago, my ancestors would have burned women like you and Marianna at the stake.”

Now I was glad that I was in the back, I could burrow down in the lumpy seat and try not to be hurt that Nelson’s forebears wouldn’t have wasted their time burning a woman like me.

“So would the people in this town,” Lucia said. “They would boil me in oil on Main Street if they knew anything about me.”

Only then did I realize that we were in town. On the way to Lucia’s, Nelson and I had passed many pretty country villages crowded with tourist couples shopping for maple products. But Lucia’s town wasn’t one of those. Two grim rows of water-stained Greek Revival houses led up to the business section, a dusty crossroads — gas station, post office, grocery, hardware — uninterested in a stranger’s patronage or in any hospitable cosseting frills, like, for example, a sidewalk. I tried to imagine a life for myself and Nelson in such a town, in one of the nicer houses, near somewhere he could teach. but it didn’t seem like a good idea, thinking too far into the future.

“If they knew…” Lucia said darkly. “About me and Hecuba. and my work. It is very anarchist, very un-Puritan and subversive. But to them I am just a crazy Italian, her house always needs fixing, her checks clear at the bank. Meanwhile, they tell me the gossip, the carpenters and electricians and plumbers. This town is a pit of snakes.”

What people was she talking about? There was no one in this town, no children wheeling on their bikes as their parents watered the shaggy lawns. It was as if a bomb had dropped while we were out at Lucia’s, and we hadn’t known about it, and we were the only ones left.

“Turn here,” Lucia instructed Nelson. Nelson pulled up to the grocery, a one-story brick-red-cinder-block structure streaked with patches of oily black. Against the wall was a phone booth and a rickety picnic bench with an uninterrupted view of the gas pump.

“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” cried Lucia.

“What is it?” Nelson said, and from the backseat I echoed lamely, “What’s wrong?”

“I forgot my money. We must go home. I will miss Marianna!”

“I have money,” said Nelson. “Can you get change in the store?”

“I can try.” Lucia rolled her head and flared her nostrils, breathing harshly. I felt as if I were in the car with a small pony starting to panic. “Two women work here, sisters, one nice, one bitch, you never know who you are getting…”

Nelson handed her a bill. “It’s a ten,” he said.

“I know that,” snapped Lucia, groping for the door handle.

Nelson leaned across her. Presumably he meant to open the door, but he was restraining her, too. He had to twist around slightly. I was shocked by the look on his face. I was afraid he was having an episode. Then something in his expression reminded me of my lab partner in the split second he had to decide whether to relinquish the frog or fetal pig I was grabbing out of his hands. Briefly I wondered if Nelson had been right about the Mormon boy’s secret passion for me. Because suddenly I recognized the expression of a man who has just realized that he will — that he is helpless not to — humiliate himself for love. And that was my psychic moment: I knew what was going to happen. I knew what Nelson was going to say long before he was able to make himself sound even slightly casual.

Nelson said, “Say hello to Marianna. Tell her I’m up here visiting with my new wife.”

“Yes, of course,” Lucia said and jumped out of the car.

The summer evening was warm and pretty, but Nelson and I stayed in the car. I didn’t move up front. We stared at the storefront, on which there was nothing to see, not even a beer or cigarette ad or a sign announcing a special. Eventually Lucia appeared, holding a small paper bag. She gave us the V-sign and dipped her hand into the bag. The last rays of dusky evening light shone on the silver quarters raining back into the sack. I thought of how “Hansel and Gretel” ends with a shower of pearls and jewels that the children steal from the witch and play with when they get home.

As if we were at a drive-in movie, we watched Lucia kneel and gather some coins she’d dropped, then stuff them in the phone, and dial and listen and slam the coin return and begin all over again.

“You know, it’s the strangest thing,” I said. “I thought Marianna was dead.”

“Dead?” said Nelson. “Right on the edge, and the worst part is, she could live on that edge till she’s ninety. What else do you think she’s doing, fucking an entire ashram in Bombay? Just being in Bombay. She got sick as a dog every time she came down to see me in the jungle. Once she found this empty patch of jungle and was squatting there puking and shitting and she looked up and saw a viper coiled around a branch just over her head.”

In theory Nelson was talking to me, but he was looking at Lucia. And now it seemed, unbelievably, Lucia had placed her call. She was talking rapidly, gesticulating. She turned her back to us and leaned into the wall and bent her head as she listened and shouted.

At last Lucia got back in the car. “Okay, we go home now,” she said.

This silence lasted the longest. “What did she say?” Nelson asked.

“Nothing,” replied Lucia. “I couldn’t reach her. That was someone at the ashram, a man who speaks Italian. Yes, they know her very well there. She has just left for the Himalayas. She will stay in the mountains until fall…”

We drove back to Lucia’s, and when we got out of the car, Lucia said, “I am tired now. You can sleep in my studio. There is a little mattress with sheets and also towels. The first light switch inside the door.”

Nelson bent to kiss Lucia good night. Lucia turned away.

A full moon was shining on the fields. We didn’t stop to admire it. I tried a timid werewolf howl, but Nelson didn’t laugh. He was walking ahead of me; he knew the way to the barn, which had cooled off considerably since the afternoon.

The switch lit an old-fashioned bedside lamp on a table near a mattress that Lucia had made up with pillows, clean white sheets, and a thin red quilt. She must have done it sometime before she left the studio to cook dinner, just when I was assuming she’d forgotten us completely.

The lamp threw out a circle of light, thankfully too modest to include the photos of the artist and her cat, or the killer fish in his tank. I didn’t want to see those pictures now, I didn’t want to feel jealous because Lucia’s passion for her cat was deeper and more tender than what Nelson felt for me.

I shucked off my clothes and slid under the quilt. Nelson waited a moment. Then he took off his jeans and got into bed in his T-shirt and shorts. He rolled over so his back was to me.

“Good night, Polly,” he said.

“Good night,” I said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” I said.

I think he may have fallen asleep. I remember that he slept. I turned off the night-light; bars of moonlight took its place. I lay in the dark and listened to the cat, mewing like a newborn, a cry that seemed to get louder when I realized it might be a bat.

I wished I could have found the switch on Lucia’s stereo that activated the endless loop of the Mozart trio. It didn’t matter how often I’d heard it, I couldn’t remember it now when I most needed its soothing distractions. I wished I could recall exactly how it sounded, the voices of the women with their misdirected grief, each mourning because she imagines her lover is facing the dangers of travel, when her misfortune is beyond what she can imagine: the cruelty of a lover who would want to test her like that.

Twenty years later I went with my second husband and our children to visit friends in Vermont. Over dinner our friend reminisced about the past, the years when the woods in every direction were teeming with crazy artists. He mentioned people we all knew, who had lived there for a while.

My attention had drifted, lulled by the pleasures of friends, food, and wine, the distant shouts of children on the lawn, the sweet light of that summer evening. Then once more I had a moment when I knew what was going to happen, that my friend was going to mention an Italian woman artist who had lived just through the forest, essentially next door…

I had forgotten, I never exactly knew, where precisely Lucia lived. And I wasn’t thinking about that long-ago night at her house until the moment — that is, the instant before — my friend mentioned Lucia de Medici’s name.

I said, “I used to know her. I spent a weekend at her farm.” And everybody stared at me, because my voice shook so.

There was a second coincidence, a shadow of the first. For dinner that night we were having chicken with wild mushrooms. For all I knew, our hostess had picked the mushrooms in the woods, but when I asked her where the mushrooms came from and she heard my concern, she made a point of saying how much they cost, dried, in the store, because she knew that the fact of a store would reassure someone like me. To my friends, my having spent a weekend with their former neighbor was no more remarkable than having chicken with mushrooms twice in twenty years.

And really, it wasn’t surprising for adults to know someone in common; by then the threads of our lives had stretched long enough to have converged at various places. But what shocked me was that my friends had known someone who seemed to belong to a whole other existence. I felt as if I’d been reincarnated and just now recognized the entire cast from my previous life: shuffled, playing brand-new parts, living in different houses.

I said, “Whatever happened to her? To Lucia?”

My friend said, “She went back to Italy. I think I heard something like that.”

“Did you ever meet her daughter?” I said.

“Her daughter?” My friend considered. “Oh, yes, she had a crazy daughter. Lucia was always worrying. She was always in some nutty place, Machu Picchu or Kathmandu…”

“Was the daughter beautiful?” I said.

“Beautiful?” my friend repeated. “Sort of pretty, I guess. Very nervous, overbred. like a big trembly Afghan hound.”

Then my friend mentioned another friend, a mutual friend, a friend so close our families often spent holidays together. And it seemed that this friend had also been a neighbor of Lucia’s. He had also lived on a farm, but on the other side, and had lived there that same summer, perhaps that very same weekend. Did I know that? our host asked.

But how could I have known that? How could I have understood that two messengers from my future were, even as I lay awake in that barn, just beyond the hedge? I wondered how often the future waits on the other side of the wall, knocking very quietly, too politely for us to hear, and I was filled with longing to reach back into my life and inform that unhappy girl: all around her was physical evidence proving her sorrows would end. I wanted to tell her that she would be saved, but not by an act of will: clever Gretel pretending she couldn’t tell if the oven was hot and tricking the witch into showing her and shoving the witch in the oven. What would rescue her was time itself and, above all, its inexorability, the utter impossibility of anything ever staying the same.

But I — that is, the girl I was — couldn’t have possibly heard. She was too busy listening for the mewing of cats, or bats. To have even tried to tell her would be like rising up out of the audience just when those angelic voices are praying for gentle winds, a calm ocean, like interrupting the opera to comfort or warn the singers: Don’t worry, there is no journey, no one is going away, there is nothing to fear but your own true love, disguised as an Albanian.