"Tell me the story again," I urged my sister in the nighttime blackness of our attic bedroom.
Odette rolled toward me on her side of the bed. The straw mattress crunched and shifted beneath her weight, and her brown eyes shone in the trace of moonlight straining through the shadows.
"Please," I said with a hopeful squeak in my voice, which made me sound such a baby compared to her, an eight-year-old girl, almost nine.
"Oh, Tru." My sister burrowed her right cheek against her pillow. "You know the story so well."
"Tell me again. My leg hurts, and I really, really want to hear it."
She sighed with a force that rustled the curls peeking out from beneath my nightcap.
"Please, Od," I begged. "Tell me about the day I was born ... and Papa's horse ... and the tower."
Downstairs, our uncle William readjusted his chair and coughed on the pipe smoke that clogged up his throat every evening. I stiffened, fearful that Od would tell me to be quiet and go to sleep. Outside, the wind howled across the roof with a mournful wail that shook the rafters and turned my insides tingly and cold. Mama's hand mirror lay propped on the windowsill, the glass turned toward the trees behind the house to capture anything diabolical that might creep toward us while we slept. Sometimes I wondered if the mirror was enough ...
"All right." Od sighed again. "Since it is your birthday, I suppose I could tell you the story ..."
"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" I smiled and wriggled my shoulders beneath the wool blankets.
"Are you ready?"
"Yes."
"Here it goes, then." My sister leaned close to my left ear and whispered, "Once upon a time, on a cold January morning, five years ago today, a girl named Trudchen Maria Grey was born in a castle built to resemble a stone Scottish fortress called Dunnottar ..."
I swallowed, while rain pelted the thin glass of our windowpane. The wind—that fierce and tempestuous witch borne from high on the snowcapped peaks of the Cascade Range—blew through the cracks in the walls and turned our sheets to ice.
Odette snuggled close enough that the warmth of her body and her long cotton nightgown burned away the chill. Our elbows touched. I closed my eyes, and the splattering of the rain turned into the galloping of hooves tearing across a golden canyon.
"Tell me more," I whispered, even though I knew what was coming next.
"Papa hurried home from selling one of his grandest paintings to a rich ranchero who lived in an old adobe by the Pacific Ocean. He loosened the reins and urged his handsome black stallion forward, and he smiled when he spied the first stone tower of the palace he'd built high on the side of a California hill. I'm sure you don't even remember that tower."
"But I do." I nodded and saw in my mind's eye a rounded tower made of gray blocks of stone, topped by a brilliant scarlet flag that rippled in a breeze. "I think I do remember it."
"We moved away from there when you were just two, Tru. You couldn't possibly—"
"I remember!"
"Well ... then you must remember how magnificent it was. The castle was filled with furniture made of velvet, rugs from the Far East, and other spellbinding treasures from across the world. And it was, oh, so colorful ... greens and reds and gold and bright royal blue. Performers arrived the night after you were born. Persian dancers, an Arabian flutist, a lady opera singer in a horned Viking hat ... They celebrated. Everyone was always celebrating inside our castle, and the place smelled of roasted turkey and gingerbread cakes and ... and ... and little chocolate pastries sprinkled with powdered sugar that looked just like fresh, sweet snow."
"Didn't the noise of the party wake me up, if I was a sleeping little baby?"
"Not at all, silly." Od pulled on one of my blond curls and let it spring back against my cheek. "Mama kept you wrapped in a heavy cloth to muffle the noise."
"Mmm," I said in a dreamy murmur, and I saw it all: our beautiful, brown-haired mother holding a swaddled, infant version of me close to her chest while music, dancing, and feasting surrounded us. I saw vast stone walls that stretched three stories high; windows carved into the stone in the shape of thimbles; women with hair the color of ravens, swiveling their hips, hypnotizing the room with the movements of their arms, which jangled with gleaming bracelets.
In the real version of life, I smelled Uncle William's pipe smoke from downstairs and heard the clicking of Aunt Viktoria's knitting needles, but I told myself they were the scents of the roasting turkey on the crackling fire, the tap-tap-taps of ladies' heels gliding across a marble floor.
"Wasn't there an elephant?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, of course," said Od. "Papa knew all sorts of people—artists, poets, actors, explorers, a magician, fortune-tellers, circus folk. He invited P. T. Barnum, who happened to be in California that very night. In the front garden, I rode Barnum's famous elephant, Jumbo, while Papa painted a portrait of me doing so. The magician even managed to levitate the beast off the ground."
"But the magician was bad, wasn't he?" I tugged the quilt over my right shoulder. "He once took you away and made Mama cry. And he hurt Papa."
Od drew her bottom lip inside her mouth and hesitated, the way she always stopped and left me waiting—gaping, holding my breath—before speaking about the magician.
"He wasn't entirely bad," she said. "He practiced his most wondrous spells on us. You probably don't remember, but he used to raise us into the air without any strings attached to us, like he did with the elephant. Long before that awful old polio attacked you, you were flying up to the tallest tapestries inside our castle walls, as free as a sparrow."
"I flew?" I asked, my eyes widening, for I had never heard this part of the tale.
"Yes. The magician wore a cape lined in red silk, and he'd lift his arms—"
I heard the flap of a long black cape and saw the sheen of the crimson lining.
"—and he'd utter a magical phrase: 'Lifto magicus Escondido.'" Od raised her head off the pillow and propped herself up on an elbow. "We rose off the ground, floated into the air like two Russian ballerinas, and ran our fingertips through the top tassels of tapestries with pictures of golden-haired ladies on swings. Mama even gave me a feather duster so I could swipe away all the cobwebs up there."
I laughed and covered my mouth.
Another chair scraped across the floor beneath us.
"Are you two girls still awake up there?" called Aunt Viktoria in her rumbling thunderclap of a voice from the bottom of the ladder that led to our attic—a ladder I could not climb because my right leg didn't work like a proper leg. A rope, a pulley, and a wooden chair hoisted me off the ground and into our bedroom every night.
"Tru wanted a bedtime story," said Od to our aunt.
"It's nine thirty, for goodness' sake. Go to sleep."
My stomach tightened. Nine thirty! So close to ten o'clock, when Wee Willie Winkie knocked at children's windows and cried at the lock to ensure we all lay asleep in our beds.
I turned to check the window for signs of Willie's face, when something rapped on the glass and clanked Mama's mirror against the sill. I jumped and screamed and thought I saw the flash of yellow eyes peering in from the dark.
"What's wrong?" asked Od.
"Odette!" called our aunt, her voice as sharp as the blade of her carving knife. "Are you scaring your sister half to death with your stories again?"
"It's Wee Willie Winkie"—I buried my face in my pillow—"at the window. I hear him! I hear him!"
"It's hail, Tru," said our aunt. "Go to sleep, the both of you, before you turn into terrible cowards with wild, unharnessed imaginations."
"What's wrong with that?" whispered Od to me with a snicker.
I snorted through my tears and hiccups, even though I did not know why she would want to be a coward in a harness. I cast another glance over my left shoulder and saw nothing but storm clouds writhing beyond the glass.
Aunt Viktoria's knitting needles went back to work with little click, click, click, click, clicks. The storm—or Wee Willie Winkie—continued hurling hailstones at our window, and the witchy wind whistled through the cracks in the walls and chilled my skin with gooseflesh.
"Tell me about Papa disappearing," I whispered.
Od flopped her head back down against the pillow. "That is not a story for a birthday."
"I want to hear it, though." I nudged her arm, just above her wrist. "Please ... tell me again why we don't have a mama and papa."
"Well ..." Od swallowed. "As you know, it had something to do with the magician."
"Why did they let him into our house if he was so bad?"
"I just said, he wasn't entirely bad. Weren't you listening?"
"Yes."
My sister fidgeted on the mattress and could not seem to bend her long, storklike legs into just the right position. "There's something I haven't yet told you about the magician, Tru."
"What?"
She sniffed. "He was Mama's younger brother. Our other uncle. Aunt Vik's younger brother, too."
"He was?"
"Yes, I never told you because I didn't want to upset you, but now that you are five, you ought to know that's why Aunt Viktoria is always a little ... well ... grumpy. Long ago, she shared Mama's monster-hunting skills and a touch of our uncle's magic, but now that they're both gone, she's stopped believing in the marvelous. Her life lacks enchantment."
I wrinkled my forehead, not quite understanding the last part of that sentence. Od was always using grown-up phrases she found in the books she borrowed from a neighbor who received novels in the mail from relatives in the east. She would conjure up long and complicated words that perplexed even Aunt Viktoria.
"What does that mean?" I asked. "'Lacksen' ... 'Lacksen-chant' ... ?"
"I said, she lacks enchantment. She ignores her magical powers to give herself an excuse to be boring."
"Go back to the magician and Papa's part of the story."
"All right, all right." Od uncoiled one of my locks of hair again, this time with less of a spring. "The magician did not like that Papa kept Mama trapped inside our castle walls like Rapunzel. Papa was always leaving us to sell his paintings and to write poetry by the ocean. We would stay behind, all alone in that California canyon, with Mama forced to protect us from all sorts of terrible creatures—werewolves and bogeymen and La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. La Llorona was particularly horrible, Tru. I saw her one frightful night after you were born. She banged on my window and threatened to snatch you away while she shrieked and wept in the moonlight, wailing for her own children that she'd drowned."
I sucked air through my teeth and dared another peek at our present-day window in Oregon.
"So, one night," continued Od, "when he was visiting us, the magician put on his cape and raised his hands over the chair where Papa dozed ..." Od raised both of her hands in the air in the dark, and the shadowy shapes of her fingers lengthened into claws that made my neck shrink down into my shoulders. "And Papa vanished." She dropped her hands to the bed. "Forever."
I threw the quilt over the top of my head and drew my good knee to my chest. "Where did he go, Od? Where is he?"
"He's just ... gone. Never to be seen again." She tugged the blanket off my shoulder and pulled on my right earlobe. "Come now, Tru. You were the one who asked for the story."
My right leg throbbed from the attic's frigidness. I whimpered and grabbed my calf while my eyes watered.
"What's wrong?" asked my sister.
"Where's our mama?" I asked through gritted teeth.
The shine of my sister's eyes disappeared, and the room slipped deep into a darkness that reminded me of the sludge that oozed from the bottoms of molasses jars. "I don't want to talk about Mama and Papa anymore tonight," she said.
I grumbled and rubbed at my leg. One week earlier, our physician, Dr. Dunn, had declared that we might need to remove the leg, because it didn't do anything but dangle and ache, and it looked like a withered old tree branch. He did not say how he would get rid of it, so I imagined him snipping it off with a pair of giant pruning shears, which petrified me, of course. I had lived with that leg's strangeness ever since a bout of fevers overtook me and paralyzed me two years earlier. I would miss it, despite its uselessness.
Outside, the hail changed back into a steady rain.
I snuggled closer to my sister. "I'm scared Dr. Dunn is going to take away my leg."
"No, don't worry about that." Od stroked my head with a touch that relaxed my shoulders. "I won't let him. You're going to get better. One day soon, Mama will return and find a way to help you."
"Is she truly a monster-hunter?"
"Yes."
"In Oregon?"
"No, all over the United States, for the land is filled with wild and mystical beasts that terrify even the bravest huntsmen. If she lived in Oregon, we'd see her all the time, silly. Aunt Vik certainly wouldn't keep her from coming here and hugging her babies."
"And you're certain she'll make my leg better?"
Od nodded hard enough to cause the muslin fabric of her pillowcase to crinkle. "Yes."
"When?"
"After she's earned enough money for her bravery. People pay her in gold for her heroism, and one day we'll join her on her expeditions."
"We will?"
"Yes. It's our destiny to embark upon a daring quest to save the world. I've viewed the future in a mystical set of cards called the tarot, and I swear to you, Tru, we'll be heroes, just like Mama."
The pain shrank down to a mere twitch beneath my knee, as if Od had uttered one of the magician's spells to tame my discomfort.
With my eyes still shut, I imagined our mother dressed like the huntsman who rescued Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother by chopping open the wolf's belly with an ax. She wore a long forest-green coat, a scarlet vest, black boots that stretched up to her knees, and a hat shaped like an upside-down flower pot. She carried a rifle nearly as long as she stood tall, and she smiled with the softness and adoration of a true mother, despite her bloody brutality with beasts.
I reached out and took hold of my sister's hand. "I liked the story. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Good night."
"Good night, Tru. Happy birthday."
My sister kissed my cheek, and I fell asleep amid dreams of castles and magicians and a mother who slayed the bogeyman.
Throughout the years, we would repeat that very same scene, over and over and over again, with Od and me tucked together in the bone-chilling attic until I grew too heavy for Uncle William to lift with the pulley. Eventually, he built an extra bedroom for us at the back of the house, but no matter where we slept or how big I got, my leg would ache, rain would drum against the glass, and my sister would spin her tales.
"Once upon a time ..." she would always say in the beginning, "on a cold January morning in the year 1894, a girl named Trudchen Maria Grey came into the world in a castle built to resemble a stone Scottish fortress called Dunnottar ..."
Up until the day Aunt Viktoria sent Od away when she was just seventeen, my sister spoon-fed me fairy tales to anesthetize my heart from the pain of truth, just as mothers slipped tonics laced with morphine into the mouths of teething babes. Instead of teaching me who we were and why we'd been banished to a small wooden house in the middle of an Oregon filbert farm, Od had stuffed my brain full of legends, tall tales, fables, ghost stories, myths, magic, monsters, and promises of an epic adventure.
In other words, lies.
