Ольга Грушина - The Charmed Wife

“But… but it’s all gone!” My heart is pounding now. “I gave some to Melissa, and I’ve been paying rent, and there are Jasmine and Alice—I hired them to help out last month, I told you—and then I bought some presents for the kids, and… and it was so little, anyway, nothing compared to his millions upon millions… They can’t do that!” I cry, and in a smaller voice: “Can they?”

“Oh, they can,” she says. “In fact, they have.”

A second siren has joined the first, and another, and yet another, until half the city seems to be screaming with doom and disaster.

“But what do they want? What does he want?”

“He wants full custody of the kids. And to keep all his money. And come trial next month, he may well get both. Of course, I will do my best. But.”

“But he can’t do this to me! I’m better at taking care of Ro and Angie than he’ll ever be. He won’t even bother himself, they’ll just have a staff of nannies round the clock… Wait—what about Nanny Nanny? She’ll tell the court I’m a good mother, she knows, she was there, all the nights I spent by their beds, all the stories I told them—”

“Sadly, Nanny Nanny no longer works for your husband. She hasn’t been seen since before Christmas. And I’ve heard rumors…” Gwen lowers her voice. “The family cook served roast leg of lamb at the holiday feast, and—”

“And what? Please tell me.”

“And my sources inform me, it tasted more like goat. Like tough, old goat.”

For a minute we are silent.

“So, then, what can we do?” I ask, defeated.

She faces me squarely.

“Nothing. There is nothing to do. Unless you are finally willing to tell me what happened between you and your husband at the end.”

I look through the window at the city of glass and steel before me, and I think of the last months of my marriage, not so remote in time, and yet belonging to the fabric of some entirely different life, ruled by other laws, held together by other truths, an out-of-time fairy tale with a rosy beginning that promised happiness never-ending, stretching all the way from that snapshot of the blue spring skies protectively enclosing a white-veiled bride as she ran down the grand staircase hand in hand with her beloved, both smiling radiant smiles, to the two of them, thirteen years hence, standing side by side in the dimmed ballroom of their silenced home, clothed in the somber black of grief, jointly experienced and yet unshared, their faces blank, their stiff hands not touching.

After the last courtiers had departed muttering condolences, the fairy-tale princess, about to become the fairy-tale queen, slunk away to her own bedchamber without another look at the man who was not her true husband, who was left all alone, hunched over, in the dark. She was feeling faint and not sure of anything, her reality a mere step away from a dream. Her head ached as though she had not slept the night before, and perhaps she had not. Her feet were sore as though she had recently walked a long distance, and perhaps she had. Her lips bore a faintly tingling impression of other lips pressing against them, and this she could not bear to think about at all, for the kiss, whether real or imagined, had been warm, exhilarating, overwhelming, alive , nothing like any of the stilted, close-mouthed, obligatory kisses dimly remembered from the first year of her marriage (there were no later kisses to remember), and the lingering thrill of it, while making her heart beat faster, only served to add to her confusion and misery.

In her room, she sank onto her bed, raised her eyes—and saw two mice, one fat, the other skinny, with whiskers wrapped in golden foil, sitting side by side on her mantelpiece, bracketed by the dusty porcelain poodles.

She gasped.

“Nibbles? Brie? Are you really back? Is that really you?”

The mice nodded, their beady eyes brimming with sympathy.

“We know you are sad,” they offered in unison, “and we are here to help you.”

(This time, astonishingly, unnaturally, the mice were telling the truth: they were indeed the original Brie and Nibbles of her youth. Their long-dead spirits, snatched from a tranquil afterlife by their dear princess’s acute distress, had taken to haunting the dwellings of mice, squealing and moaning, spooking the old out of their slumbers, making the young choke on their cheese, until the venerable Sister Charity, currently known as She with the Immortal Fairy Blood Flowing Through Her Veins, grew annoyed at the hubbub of constant complaints and appeals, and consented to grant the two temporary visibility on the plane of physical manifestations, to “sort out the princess mess,” as she told them sternly, turning her piercing blind eyes in the direction of their flickering shapes, “so you can at last rest in eternal peace and I can be left in peace for at least two minutes to complete my important work. Go now.”

As it happened, the fairy mouse had recently discovered that there was another world only a breath away from theirs—a much richer, thrilling world full of glorious sewer systems to populate, millions of mice and rats to rule over, and whole alleyways of trash cans positively overflowing with magnificent food—and was currently devising some way to merge the two worlds once and for all. For reasons not altogether clear even to herself, she felt the unhappy woman to be a loose end that needed to be tied up in order for her plan to succeed, but she did not explain her secret purpose to the spirits of Brie and Nibbles, and even if she had done so, her grand future vision would have gone right over their furry little heads.

Dismissed, they found themselves materializing on the familiar mantelpiece and there awaited their friend. They felt rather anxious about their status as ghosts—it seemed best not to disclose the fact of their long-ago demise to the princess for fear of upsetting her, yet wouldn’t she be bound to notice that they were ever so slightly transparent? But when she saw them, she did not look beyond what she expected to find, for she was still only a human princess of limited understanding, and grateful as she was for their return, kindhearted and mindful of others as she strove to be in general, she naturally attributed much more significance to her own life than to the lives of simple mice, and would have been genuinely astonished had anyone told her that her one-note, romance-obsessed, cliché-ridden story might not be immensely more important or endlessly more fascinating than the multigenerational, multidimensional, magical, militant, philosophical, and culturally diverse saga of the dynasty of Nibbles and Brie.)

And so, overcome by relief at having someone to talk to at last, the princess broke down and told her friends everything—told them about the cruel curse imprisoning the prince since the early years of their marriage, and how she had been trying and trying to get her true beloved back, and how the world had conspired against her, and how… how… And just as she choked on her sobs, Brie and Nibbles exchanged a dark look, and Brie cleared her throat.

“Pardon us,” she said in a tiny voice. “We are terribly sorry to tell you, dear princess, but you are mistaken. There isn’t any curse. There never was. We’ve been watching your prince from the very beginning, and sadly, he is the same prince. The very same prince you married.”

She shook her head with such vigor that a headache drummed at her temples.

“No, no, that’s not true!” she cried. “It can’t be true. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what terrible things he’s done since the curse—”

She blushed, fell silent.

“Believe us, we know.” Brie spoke with care. “We mice are small, we can go wherever we please and no one pays heed to us. We’ve seen… things. Many things. Many… eek… different things. Starting just days after your wedding. A young kitchen maid got lost in the hallways delivering breakfast to the Marquise de Fatouffle’s bed, and, well… Then, the following week, the marquise herself… And others after that… Oh, we grew so concerned about you—”