The Waters & the Wild (4 page)

D
eena was sitting at Bee's bedside when she woke late the next afternoon. She'd gotten home around ten in the morning and thrown herself down on the bed, still dressed, teeth unbrushed.

“Baby?” Deena said, stroking her tangled hair. “Bee?”

The light in the room made Bee's eyes hurt, and her stomach shook as if inhabited by some nasty goblin.

“What's wrong? Are you sick?”

“My stomach hurts,” Bee said. “I feel like I'm going to vomit, but then I don't.”

“We're going to the doctor.”

“No, I'm all right. I think I'm just over-stimulated or something.”

“Do you want to explain that one to me? Do we need to take you to buy some condoms?”

“Mom! No.”

Deena felt Bee's forehead again.

“I'm okay, really. There's just a lot going on.”

“Like what?”

What was she supposed to say?
I've been having visitations from my doppelganger. This boy I like thinks he's an alien. We got invisible together.
Who knew? We flew.
Yeah, right.

“Let me take your temperature.”

But Bee jumped out of bed, ignoring the belly goblin. “I'm fine, okay? I just needed to rest. You worry too much.”

“That's what mothers do,” Deena said. “You'll see. But not any time soon.”

“That's one thing you don't have to worry about.”

Bee thought of Haze, his smile, how he looked at her. There were a lot of girls that were already having sex, but she knew she wasn't nearly ready. Would she ever be? She hadn't even gotten her period yet. She just wanted to be near him, listening to him recite poetry, maybe holding his hand, his eyes transforming her into something magical. It wasn't much different from what she wanted with Sarah.

But her friends wore halos. She had, if only
briefly, belonged. The world she had never loved before had turned to gold.

 

Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and houses with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing.

 

The girl missed her mother in a monstrous way. She missed her with a fanged longing, a
zombie ache. Not having her mother was like not having a soul. She was sure that she had a soul somewhere, but it did not feel that way. Maybe she did not have a soul at all. Maybe it had been taken along with her mother, along with her entire life.

The girl watched her mother as she slept. Her mother's mouth was a rosy bow, like the ones on top of the changeling imposter's birthday gifts.

The man lying next to the girl's mother had gray hair and needed a wheelchair to get around. He sat with the imposter in the garden and spoke gently to her. He valued what she had to say. Smiled proudly at her. Even though she was not related to him by blood, she was his.

The girl was nobody's. Except her mother's and her mother did not know it yet.

Now there were two other people that the girl needed to watch. One was a badly dressed overweight girl with dark skin and a musical voice. The other was a skinny boy with a stammer and broken glasses. The girl doubted she would have befriended these two outcasts. She imagined herself as one of the popular girls.

She turned and watched her mother sleep. She had an impulse to touch her olive-toned, lightly freckled skin, to smell her dark hair. She knew it would smell even more of lavender oil if she just leaned closer….

But in the other room the imposter moaned in her sleep. And the girl slid out the open window, back into the wilder night, where she had never belonged.

I
n her dream, Bee was walking along a road that wound through a canyon. The eucalyptus leaves leaned down, silvery green and medicinal-smelling, trying to shelter her, kiss her or clutch her, she wasn't sure. Every once in a while a car sped by, dangerously close, blinding her in its headlights, and she pressed
herself up against the dirt where wild evening primrose bloomed pinkish lavender by day, but now it was night and they slept gray in shadow. The ruins of an old castle crowned one ridge. The crumbling stone balustrades, balconies and cupolas, the foundation overgrown with weeds. She wandered up there, knowing this was the place, though not sure how she knew, or what place it was.

Among the castle ruins was a low stone bench covered with vines. These she knew to part like hair. She peeked through into an opening, a small tunnel just big enough for her to enter on her belly.

The earth smelled dank, and she heard the murmur of distant water. She slithered through the opening, down, down into the darkness.

“There you are!”

Bee turned her head so fast that her hair whipped her face. The strands felt sharp for a second, as if they weren't hair at all but little thorns. The doppelganger was standing in the shadows of the grotto room.

Bee crouched down on the dark stone floor and wrapped her arms around her legs. She could hear the soft rush of water that ran through the grotto. Her body shook like the eucalyptus leaves in the breeze of her mother's garden. But there was no real breeze down here.

The girl crouched beside her. Bee stared at the other face. Her own face. Fuller, though, and less strange. But the same. She remembered once seeing a photograph of twin girls, identical, but one looked pretty and the other grasping, hungry, demented, almost ugly. It was all in the details—an expression in the
eyes, the way the smaller girl reached out to grip her sister's sleeve. For a moment Bee wanted to feel the girl's cheek. Instead, she brushed her fingers across her own. It was cool and soft to her dry fingertips, almost like the underside of a mushroom. Her fingernails were lined blackly with dirt, so thick with it they ached.

Then the girl spoke.

“People used to do things to changelings like you. Vile-tempered, ugly, old-looking little things all dressed up in good-girl manners and a pretty-girl glamour spell. Test you. Cook your meals in an acorn or an eggshell to see if you cried out, ‘I never saw a meal cooked in an eggshell before, beer brewed in an acorn!' They frightened you with steel. You don't like steel, do you? Put an effigy of wood where you lay to curse you. Or you'd
be whipped to make you confess. Then you would turn into your true self—a hideous elf that just lay there, not moving, drooling down your chin. If you didn't pass the test they'd make you drink water poisoned by witches' gloves. Or they'd drown you in the river. They'd shove you in the oven. Burn you to death alive. Mother is too nice; she'd never do such a thing, even if she knew the truth. You're lucky, because there are people who would. If they knew that it would make you disappear and bring their real daughter back.

“What say you, beastie? Can you pass the test? Does it make your skin crawl? Do you feel gnawed by rabid rodents? Will it kill you? Don't come crying to me, now, fetch. There's a simple solution to your worries. Give me back my life.”

B
ee hadn't been in school for a couple of days. She didn't answer their calls or emails.

“I'm worried,” Sarah told Haze at lunch. They were sitting together at their table, staring at the empty space where Bee usually was.

“I've been doing some research,” he said.
“I think I understand what might be happening.”

“What? You better tell.”

“I think she's a changeling.”

“A what? One of those fairy things they exchange at birth?”

He nodded.

“That explains why we all get along so well,” Sarah said.

“And it also means someone wants her to go back where she came from.”

Sarah tugged at her braids. “We should go see her.”

So after school she and Haze went over to Bee's house. Lew answered the door.

“You must be Sarah. And Haze. I'm Lew.”

“Is she all right?” Sarah asked. “We're sorry to just come by. We hadn't heard from her.”

He asked them in. The house was small but
pretty. Bee's mom had painted the walls and furniture an unusual mix of colors. Lavender with green trim. Yellow with rose. Lots of beaded Indian cushions and Mexican folk art. Framed astrological charts on the walls. Crystals that caught and refracted the sunlight.

They sat on the purple couch. There was a framed black-and-white photo of Bee watching them from the top of a bookcase. She wasn't smiling, and her deeply set eyes looked haunted.

“She's in the hospital,” Lew said. “Her mom is there now.”

“What's wrong?”

“They don't know.”

“Can we see her?” Sarah asked.

“I can check with Deena.”

There was a silence so loud it echoed. Then Haze said, “We don't want to bother you. But
we'd really like to go there now.”

He was looking at the black-and-white picture of Bee so hard that he thought his glasses would shatter.

Sarah glanced over at him. He looked different to her. Grown-up, suddenly, in spite of his pimples and bitten fingernails. She had a sudden impulse to touch his hand.

Lew nodded. “I'll arrange it,” he said.

 

“We think we know who you are.”

She opened her eyes. The boy was sitting at her bedside. His hair looked bluish black. Like a crow's feathers. He wasn't smiling. What was he doing here? She had been dreaming that she'd had another visitor before, a girl, with the same bluish black glow to her skin, who sang her lullabies. Had it been a dream?

“B-b-bee?”

“Is that my name? What a weird name. I don't think that's my name at all.”

“Do you know where you are?” he asked.

She wrinkled her forehead at him.

“A hospital, Bee.”

“I'm not going. There's too much steel there.”

“What's wrong with steel?”

“I just don't like it.”

“Bee,” he said. “I want you to listen. I've been doing some research, and I think I know what's wrong.”

“Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. How do I know right from wrong? I come from a place where it isn't the same.”

“Exactly. I think you're from someplace else.”

“Under the ground,” she said. “Where the roots take hold and everything ends but also begins.”

“I think you're being poisoned.”

Bee began to say the words with hardly a breath between them. “Bonnie she was and brewed beer in an acorn. Thus spake the lord of the castle. The Queen of Elphane has lost her daughter. A girl in a long green gown with roses for her eyes. We had something to ask of her and now pray tell where has she gone? To perish nimbly among the foxgloves, pretty maid?”

He put his hand on her wrist. There was a tube going into the vein in her tiny arm.

“If I'm right, I think you were exchanged at birth. They stole Deena's real daughter. And now that girl wants to get back. She'll do anything to get her life back. She's the doppelganger.”

“Who?” Bee shrieked, thrashing in the bed, trying to sit up. “Who stole her away?”

A nurse peeked around the partition.

“Everything all right?”

Bee, quiet now, just stared at her.

“Visiting hours are almost over.” The nurse looked stern.

He nodded and leaned in closer.

“They did. You know who they are. Better than I do. You know somewhere inside you. We have to remember. Maybe they can help us stop her.”

She reached out with her free arm and touched his cheek. There were small red bumps there, as if his body were hurting itself from the inside out. Then she touched his throat where the Adam's apple protruded roughly. She watched it move up and down under the light graze of her fingers.

This comforted her, this touching. It was the only thing. But his touch was not for her. He was not hers. She thought of the girl
with the beautiful voice. This boy and this girl were meant to be together and she, the one he called Bee—she was meant to go back somewhere. But where?

“Tell me something,” she said. “Tell me something, strange lad with the crow's hair. Something to help me remember.”

“What? What's that?” Bee asked him.

“‘Tam Lin.' The fairies have to sacrifice one of their own to hell every seven years. ‘Tiend to hell.' Tam Lin was a prince who was
captured by the Fairy Queen.”

Bee looked around the room for the first time. The walls glowed yellow green, like a bruise. Everything was made of steel.

“‘Tiend to hell,'” she said, looking into his eyes. “They sacrificed Tam Lin? Because he was fair? They wanted his eyes?”

“It's just an old ballad,” the boy said.

“But what if I'm the tiend to hell? What if I'm the sacrifice?” Her eyes seemed to flare like candles about to go out. “What if this is hell?” she asked him. “Because I want to go back. To the other place, the place I belong.”

“Maybe you've done the work you were supposed to do and the sacrifice is over,” he said. “Maybe if someone loves you enough to let go of you, then you can go back.”