Christopher Golden - The Monster’s Corner - Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

I must be the most unlikely Godmother this man has ever seen.

I am the most unlikely mother, I know, that’s a certainty.

And so we slide, quiet and calm, into the city by the sea.

The afternoon of our arrival I buy a house on a path lost through thickets of dune-weeds, a high-gabled antique with wind-battered gray boards. The Realtor tells me hesitantly that the house is so cheap because it has been on the market for years and years, and has been on the market because it is haunted. I laugh, and the baby makes a little birdlike coo in response.

Ghosts, I say, do not bother us.

It is isolated, she says. Five miles from any store.

We require no company, I say.

Where the house is, the ocean is too rough against the rocks to sunbathe, she says. And even if you were to go swimming, the riptide will take you out to sea in a blink.

Do I look like the beachgoing type? I snap bitterly, and her eyes slant away. Then I say more calmly, We will take it.

If the Realtor is surprised to see me count out the money bill by bill, she doesn’t show it. She hands me the key. I will have a boy bicycle groceries up to you today, she offers. It is a courtesy we show to all our buyers. I smile at her, and take a few minutes to write out a list of things I need. Her eyes widen when she scans it, but she swallows and nods, and I can feel her relief cracking when I finally leave the room.

The boys arrive after I have opened all the doors and windows and the strong sea wind is carrying the dust out the door. I have scrubbed the kitchen tiles to their original white, and have swept and washed the bedroom where the baby and I will sleep.

The seven boys stop their bicycles, exhausted, at the porch. They carry up the wooden crates and put them in the hall, their sweat dripping on the floorboards. The baby gurgles, and one handsome blond boy with eyes the pale of sage stops to smile into her face. I tip them all generously, and they ride off into the dusk, down the hill again into the city.

I close the door. I intend for those boys to be the last males ever to step foot into this house. I say it aloud to say it at all. My words hang in the air, then chime back to me, silvery and quick. The ghosts approve.

After a quick supper and bottle, I take the baby out to the back of the house, where the garden ends at a cliff’s edge. Stars pulse over the last red line of sunset. I hold the child up to show her all this vast beauty, to let her feel the night wind, full of spray.

This is happiness, my girl, I say aloud, and find myself laughing for the first time in years. The baby sticks out her tiny pink tongue and licks the salt from the air.

It takes until the baby’s head stops wobbling on her neck for her name to come to me. When it does, I cannot believe it took so long. The herbs her mother was plucking that night when I stopped her in my garden; what I feel growing furiously in the world we left behind, a building storm of the birth-mother’s wrath and sorrow.

Rue, I say, smiling. A cousin of rouge; my well-chosen road. I say to the baby who blinks and focuses, My daughter, your name is Rue.

I scan the State News every day until I find the notice about a runaway returned home to our old village; I think of Rue’s mother’s body slowly healing in my cottage, the girl eating my food until there was no more to eat, then waiting it out another week until hunger drove her home.

It goes on to say that she was in the public stocks for a week; and I think of the neck-polished wood on the little dais in front of the Library. How it would smell of accumulated sweat and shame and rain in the pores of the wood.

She will be sent to a work camp for a few months, it says, in light of the complications of her case; and I think of the girl cracking rocks, picturing each rock my ravished face.

I shiver. But then I put my hand on the baby’s back. Her breathing, in and out, calms me. It plays between the sound of the waves, echo or source: and who would be so foolish as to try to tell the difference?

The wind turns icy. My bicycle slips over the road under my body when I try to ride it, and I fear for Rue in the little seat behind me. I stay in the house and order groceries by telephone. When the man puts them on the porch, he picks up an envelope of cash. It is such a smooth transaction, and I have come to fear the glances of strangers so, the feeling that everywhere I turn in the world I have Rue’s mother’s eyes upon me, that I continue the practice into the spring when the winds quiet and bring the sweet perfumes of washed-up seaweed and cherries in bloom. I stop taking the State News. If the world hums and clanks and grinds its machinery elsewhere, I don’t know or care. The baby grows, sits up, grins. Her hair on her skin is a smooth, soft pelt that I love to rub my cheek against. Her hair on her head is the color of the world seen through a glass of wine. I speak to her in French and this is the language she first learns. She speaks falteringly, then lispingly, then clearly. Maman, she calls me. The white kitten that showed up on our porch hungry one morning, its pink mouth open in a jagged bawl, she names Milou after a comic-book dog. Soon, she is chattering away in the pretty dresses I make for her, my little French canary. Like this, the old language becomes another wall I build between the world and my daughter, keeping us apart.

Some days my daughter is mermaid, some days she is water. We walk slowly beyond our rocks to a calmer stretch of the beach and she crouches beside the tide pools, watching the creatures within. Regarde, maman, she cries, and points her finger down. I see the dazzle of the miniature world, the urchins the color of pumpkin flesh. The translucent crabs threaten their claws at my girl like tiny skeptics damning the gods. Her own head is framed against the wintry sky, reframed within its thick crowns of red braid. My old blood warms, watching her, my little girl in tights, her jacket clenched over frozen hands. So beautiful, with her mother’s face and hair, and my quickness in her eyes.

Our days are sweet and short. She falls asleep in my lap, as I read to her. And underlining it all is the other mother’s fury, which I feel ever nearing, ever darkening, defining our life the way shadows give definition to the day. That she will come is the one thing I know about the future, and the only thing I fear.

Seasons pass, however, with the calm of heaven. We are fond company, the cat on our laps, the good meals in our bellies culled, mostly, from our own beautiful garden, the books delivered and devoured. As we listen to the surf each night, I comb out her hair. Sometimes we play with it: It becomes tent, and I crouch beneath its scalpy smell; I heap it over my face and it becomes my own hair and we laugh at how ridiculous it is against my wizened face; I bind my wrists with it, and it takes her some work to free me. She is gentle and sleeps deeply. Raised on sweets and sea air and literature, Rue walks through dreams the way she walks through rooms.

But today she crouches in last year’s swimsuit, peering again at her old friends in the tide pool, and I see how tight the suit has become on her body. She is bigger, her hips and chest, her lips suddenly abloom. I stand, agitated, shaking, saying, Oh-oh-oh. She runs over as fast as she can: Her hair is so very heavy she can’t run fast or far, normally, but she does her best to help me. She asks if I am cold, and I nod, yes I am, mute. There is something wrong with my body. I cannot stop shaking; my lips can’t form words.

Rue murmurs as she helps me over the suddenly steep and long path to home, and brushes my own sparse hair from my face until I am soothed asleep.

Something has shifted. My leg clumps harder on the ground, and words come with more difficulty into my mouth. Rue takes the harder cleaning, though it must hurt her neck with all its heavy hair to support when she scrubs the floors the way she scrubs, with low grunts that remind me of something I’d rather not remember. Once in a while, I see her hair resting on the windowsills, as if to quietly steal some relief. I tell her what we need and she writes the lists: My hands shake so, my writing is illegible. I still call the orders in, and she listens with a strange look on her face: I have never taught her English, and before was careful to keep her from hearing this other language. But when it is too difficult, and the man on the other end loses his patience, Rue takes the telephone from my hand and in her lisping accent tries hard to replicate my sounds. She does well, and I am proud, but there are some comical mistakes. Instead of cherries one day, we get cheese; instead of batteries, we get tweezers. But one thing I never, never let her do is to take the envelope of money out to the porch. No matter how long it takes me and how many breaks I must take on the way to the door, I am the one to risk the delivery boy. I keep my own treasure tucked away inside, as she was tucked inside me those many years before I had ever met her, or her mother, my tiny seed waiting for the right moment to bloom.