Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

They’re crooning together, guarding one other, clinging.

There’s one thing—it should have been obvious—I didn’t count on. Brilliant child, attuned, she’s calculating that the only thing different in their home is… this virtual stranger.

“Why are you here?” Charlotte asks me, sitting next to her mother and holding her hand. Betty raises her head.

“I came to carry your gifts, and to look at your pictures.” I get to my feet and calculate the distance to the door. “I should be going.”

The green eyes study me; the sequins on her peach-tinted party dress catch dying light. “Did you make Momma cry?”

If the windows could open, I would leap out of one.

“Mrs. Dias wanted to make sure we got safely where we belong, bunny rabbit. Isn’t that nice?” says Betty/Bird. She’s sitting straighter, wiping her eyes, turning a hollow stare at me. “Sometimes grown-ups get a little sad.”

The exit is perhaps a ten-second sprint. I’m not sure what she’s doing, other than a masterful job of reassuring a child.

“What made you sad?” asks Charlotte.

“Oh,” she says, gathering her daughter’s hands back once again in her own. “I was crying because… well.” Betty bites her lip, drawing a spot of blood. Her aura of stellar cheer roils with darkening shades, and she peers at me with downright tenderness. No wonder her writing wins prizes: She reads deep; she kindles; she is aware of others.

I hear the words from her float into the air. “Mrs. Dias once had a little girl too, and some very bad things happened.”

“What?” asks Charlotte, scarcely breathing; she turns her attention full at me.

I’m arrested, immobile, unable to inhale.

“Well, just some bad things,” says her mother. “The little girl went to heaven. It’s too bad we can’t visit there, while we’re here on earth. So this lady wanted to spend more time with someone who reminded her of—” and she stops. No need to finish.

It is my turn for water to stream from my eyes. I can’t blink it away. Easy enough to Google my name and learn my nightmare. Betty did that. Like everyone who knows my story, she had no blooming idea how to bring it up or convey how she wished she could take away my pain: Surely the birthday party was her trying to share with me a fleeting memory of joy. And this is how I repaid her. Charlotte dashes to me, and I kneel, and the size of my baby when I lost her is in my embrace. Betty trembles on the sofa.

How long do I hold on?

Another shock awaits: as I rise to go, Charlotte patting my back as she did her mother’s, a stirring, a rustling, happens above.

A girl about aged thirteen or fifteen appears at the railing cordoning off the loft. Her hair is tousled, as if from sleep. She’s in those jeans ripped to shreds and a loose shirt, with a black bra strip drooping. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“You’re home from school early, Elsie.” Betty’s voice is subdued.

“Flu, I think.” Elsie regards me and says, “Hello. Do you know my mother?”

My mouth opens, fish on the shoreline, last air, nothing coming out.

Elsie says, “Dad’s at the airport, I think, Mom. He’s on his way.”

“I was just leaving,” I manage, barely loud enough to be heard.

Charlotte tells her older sister that she had a great tea party thanks to me, and that I’m sad.

“No,” I say to the birthday girl. “I’m happy I met you.”

I run a hand through my hair. Elsie is the age my Alicia would be. Charlotte isn’t my stand-in for Alicia; Elsie is. And it’s like standing in the surf, when it drags its curling self back to the sea and a person feels she’s sailing backward even though she’s not moving. I’ve barreled through the worm-hole, speeded forward in the time machine, gone through the glass, lost my grip on make-believe: This would be my baby now.

They let me stumble away. I don’t look back, not even at Elsie, rumpled and blossoming, self-possessed, appraising me from on high.

I ask Time to dash forward, and He obliges in spades; the months bunch up in heaps. The slightest crashes still startle me, either at work in Wonderland or in my upstairs rooms, with the compounded fear that the police have come to drag me off. This never happens: This is how thoroughly Betty and Charlotte—and Elsie—want to be shut of me. I should be glad for the immensity of Betty’s forgiveness. No wonder her existence in the world-at-large is more vast and far-reaching than mine.

I’ve turned Alicia’s shrine into a study, to write in. Mr. Bun sits on a shelf, watching over me. My spirit thanks Betty for reminding me that words matter. I touch the pictures Alicia did ages ago, so the colors enrich my blood. I eat and drink normally, or close enough. I speak less and less to Bill, my ex-husband. I’m happy alone. The stars over the city are pinpricks that soothe me. All the heavens do. When the moon shines in a curved rim at its bottom, it’s called the Old Moon holding the Young Moon in its arms.

An editor who read a story of mine in a small magazine asked if I’d write about The Real Thing That Happened To Me. I replied that it’s bad enough those boys will be free in a few years; why do I want to bolster their notoriety? I’d submit page after page of:

Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias

The accent marks can serve as a guide to letting it be sung.

I won’t turn my child or criminals into cash. To atone for my own violence, I’ll do something that stays known only to me. Aid to a victims’ support network, I’m thinking.

The serving girl who replaced Kumiko is exasperating. I fired Alex. It’s a revolving door. We lack enough sign-ups for a tea ceremony, though I hope for a reason to contact Kumiko. One day I’ll marvel at bumping into her by chance and confess I need her as my psychiatrist.

The Dormouse remains missing.

Now and then, I picture Charlotte growing, attending school. Does Elsie get in some harmless teenaged trouble? Vincent, their father, loses hair. At the dinner table, he entertains his wife and daughters with anecdotes that leave them hysterical with laughter.

One day, on Facebook, I note a picture on a friend’s page and gasp. It’s Betty Lezardo. In another fashionable dress, at a literary event. I enlarge the photo, clicking until I can better countenance her face. There’s no mistaking it, and it’s my doing, I’m sure: A slight but definite sidelong glance distorts her eyes, as if fearing what’s behind or not trusting what might be gaining on her. She clutches a glass of white wine with a burning marble of fluorescence in it, from the lights overhead. Her face screams forty-ish more than what I saw on her, like a time-lapse. She appears completely haunted.

Next to her is Elsie, in an LBD, a gateway garment to female adulthood. The skirt flares. Elsie Lezardo, the person who pried me out of fantasy and hurled me into the reality of forward history. Is she sixteen? Has that much time sped past? What are her crushes and career plans, her despairs so enormous she refuses to believe they’ll subside with time? There’s no Charlotte, because this is a grownup party.

Once, thinking of Alicia as she’d be—Elsie-sized now—I fell asleep in Central Park in Sheep Meadow, on a sloping lawn, and leaves like crisp scuttling crabs walked sideways over my face. I sat up with a start. I am alive, I thought.

I’ll never behold Charlotte, Betty/Bird, or Elsie again in the flesh. If we happen upon each other by accident, I’ll cross the street unless they do it first. When I awaken in the morning, I put on a kettle and answer it when it screams. And then I open my front door to Wonderland, and the strangers come in, good and ill, and I serve them the best of what I’ve made from my hours in the night.