The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, Page 5

  One evening while Gwendolyn was stirring a big copper pot (she had more pots than he had thought existed in all the world) full of beef-and-leek stew, she chirped so prettily to him, telling him that he would grow up big and strong and handsome, and play baseball in school, and go to the same university she and his father had done, and take over his father’s practice when he was grown and meet a lovely girl and be so awfully happy.

  Hawthorn stared at her. She was stirring up his future. That was witch’s work! Yet suddenly he could not think why witches and cookpots and futures went together hand in hand in hand. What a funny thing to have knocking around his head! And besides, Gwendolyn hardly ever wore hats at all. Thomas drank in everything she said. You had to pay close attention when a witch gave you a quest. Yes, yes, he would grow up big and strong! He was a troll, after all; he could hardly help it. But he would also be sly and fast. He knew that his ball, which he kept always nearby, was called a baseball, but he didn’t want to play anything with it. He knew it was important, somehow, but he could not remember exactly why, or where he had gotten it. It rolled around by itself sometimes, as though it was not content to just sit still like all the other toys. Hawthorn didn’t know what it was about—perhaps that was part of the quest! To discover the destiny of the pale orb with its ruby stitching and protect it! Little Hawthorn held up his chubby human arms to receive the blessing of Gwendolyn. I shall, my lady, he babbled furiously, reaching for her, willing her to understand him. I shall Go to the Kingdom of University and Meet a Girl Called Lovely and Practice Psychology Like My Father Before Me! I accept humbly the awesome honor of your prophecy! Have you a great weapon for me, so that I may be your True Knight?

  Gwendolyn looked up from her stew-pot and laughed her singsong laugh. She handed him a pencil from the tight knot of her hair, where she was always keeping things like that, pencils and knitting needles and clothespins. Her hair seemed to be a magical purse in which she could hide anything he wanted. The troll received it solemnly and immediately vanquished the cabinet door with one long, dark scrape across its face.

  His new mother was a witch. He knew it in his bones. But the final piece of evidence was this:

  Whenever he looked astonished at a suddenly found wooden train caboose or a burst of trumpets from the horn of plenty when there were no trumpeters about or a stream of caramel pouring golden out of the pot when he knew she’d only put a little sugar and cream in, Gwendolyn would lay her finger alongside her nose, and then tap his, and say:

  “Magic!”

  Then she would laugh and ruffle his hair.

  Gwendolyn said it when she produced a new toy that he hadn’t seen her making even though he watched her with the intensity of a mountain. She said it when she made all the lights come on at once with one touch of her little finger to the wall. She said it when his wooden train carriages went spinning around their wooden track with no one touching them or saying any eldritch words or coaxing them in troll-tongue with tales of other trains that had loved to go fast in circles just like these. She said it when she knit him socks and scarves and hats and she said it when they played the hiding game. No matter how he looked he could never find her—she would pop up out of nowhere, crying: “Magic!”

  Hawthorn tried to snatch up the word in his teeth. He crouched in the shag carpet and pressed his lips together, trying to bite down on an M. But the word squirmed and hissed and danced away.

  Finally, one day, Gwendolyn set down a cup of chocolate in front of him and kissed his head. Hawthorn moved in for the kill, grinning wildly.

  “MAGIC!” he cried.

  Gwendolyn laughed with delight. She clapped her hands.

  It was a good first word for a witch’s son, he supposed.

  That was the day that Hawthorn forgot his name. It slipped away from him in the night, as silently as he had snuck up on magic. When he awoke in the morning, he was Thomas Rood, and the only Hawthorn he knew was the twisty old tree outside his nursery window.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE WOMBAT PRINCE OF CHICAGO

  In Which a Boy Named Thomas Talks to the Furniture, Inquires into the Nature of Marriage, Acquires a Wombat, and Breaks a Large Number of Household Items

  The childhood of Thomas Rood was full of broken things. Lamps, necklaces, chairs, candlesticks. Cups, saucers, gravy boats, vases. Books with their pages torn out, wallpaper peeled off, paintings cut up with scissors, spectacles with lenses shattered, poked out, cracked, used to burn holes in many exciting objects. No toy lasted long in Thomas’s room—he would tear any bear or bunny or dinosaur apart in a frenzy, as if he was looking for some secret thing inside it that only he knew was there. If curtains were drawn he clawed them down. If they were not he wrapped himself in them, turning and turning till the cloth twisted so tight it burst free from the rod and he was left standing in the living room, cocooned in paisley, weeping in fits of frustration. He had even once taken a hammer to the flagstones in the courtyard outside his parents’ apartment building, whacking craters into them like naughty moons.

  One ought not to judge him: Changelings are all Heart. Their Hearts are so big that there is no room for anything else. They wear their hearts on the outside, like you and I wear our skin. And so all the bravery and headstrong feeling and sweetness and fierceness and wildness and terror and love has nothing to stand between it and the world. Which is why they can hardly bear the touch of the world. Imagine you have fallen and cut yourself, rather deeply, and some awful fellow puts his fingers right into the wound every morning with your toast and tea. That is what it is like to be a Changeling. Everything touches you in your deepest part, whether you asked it to or not. Where human children have years and years in which to grow their hearts and learn to live with them while staying safe from all the troubles a heart hauls with it, a Changeling starts out raw and red and full of longing. Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs. Some walk around naked, though no one can see it but you and I.

  Thomas Rood had a naked heart, even when the rest of him was bundled up in hats and mittens in the depths of winter. And it was this naked heart that hurled itself at everything, at lamps and toys and flagstones and draperies. Thomas could not help it. All his life he had known that something was wrong. It was only that he did not know what it was. He felt all the time as though there were another boy inside him, a bigger boy, a stronger boy, a boy who knew impossible things, a boy so wonderful he could talk to jewels and make friends with fire. But whenever he tried to let that boy out, he was only Thomas, red-faced, sputtering, gangly, clench-fist Thomas.

  This is what Thomas did know, down deep where you and I know about gravity and how good sugar tastes:

  The world was supposed to talk to him, and it didn’t.

  Not just his mother and father and the radio, but everything. When he looked at the flagstones in the courtyard, he knew, he knew that they should be able to open up their stony faces, showing a mouth that went all the way down into the earth and the rooty loam, and tell him their secrets and jealousies and private jokes. It was the same for the lamps and the teacups and the paintings in the hall. They were supposed to be like him! Alive and real and grumpy! Thomas did feel poorly about breaking those. One of the paintings was his mother’s favorite: a dancing girl with wild blue and red silks on and orchid boughs in each hand in the midst of a black and starry wood. He had screamed at it. She should not be frozen in paint! She should hear him wanting her to be real and dance right out of the picture! If the world weren’t wrong, if it weren’t broken, she would do it. He could make it happen with his wanting.

  But he couldn’t.

  The toys were the worst. When he was just a baby, some well-meaning uncle had given Thomas a stuffed frog with fuzzy, brightly colored skin. As soon as he had enough teeth he chewed its head off. Not because he did not love it—he adored the frog and held it so close to his chest that if the poor thin
g had been alive it would have gotten quite suffocated. He told it everything that grieved him, everything he longed for but could not quite remember, everything he did remember—that some winds could be red, and some cats were as big as horses and could talk, and some wells were really chimneys. And the frog said nothing. It stared back with glass eyes and a pink felt tongue lolling out stupidly and said nothing. Frogs talked. Toads talked. That was right, it was! They talked and danced in a funny hoppy thumpy way and liked bouillabaisse for supper. That was a fact as much as I have five fingers on each hand or the stove hates little children and longs to scorch them. But the frog kept mum and it hurt him like an arrow in his gut. He couldn’t bear it. It was wrong, wrong, all wrong.

  You might think, given the rather grand scope of the destruction Thomas performed on his house, that he was an unhappy child. But it just wasn’t so. For some things did talk to him, and these he loved more fiercely than water and red velvet cake. His mother and father, the lovely phonograph in the hall with its great brass bell, certain books in which the author seemed at times to be speaking right to him, other children, the wonderful radio in their little parlor with its staticky growls, the sky when it was full of thunder, the squeaky floorboard in his bedroom that sounded like a whip-poor-will when he bounced on it. And there was one book in particular that Thomas held so dear that he slept with it clutched to his little beating heart. His mother had bought it for him because it had fantastical, wildly colored illustrations. He could not even read it when she first put it into his hands and guided his fingers to the first page. The pictures were enough. Thomas stared at them for hours, at the breakfast table, in his nursery, at the park when other children were playing on the swings, under his blanket at night when he ought to have been sleeping. Even in the dark, he could look at the blackened pages and see the vibrant colors dancing there in shadow.

  It was a book about trolls.

  Thomas Rood was entranced by them. Their gorgeous bigness, their hands like great strong shovels, the way their noses rode majestically on their faces, almost covering their mouths. The way their mouths looked like they could eat anything in the world, and would very much like to. He marveled over the garlands of jewels the artist had drawn hanging over their mountainous shoulders, golden earrings in their long, long ears, their mossy, tangled, rose-twisted hair, their huge, fierce eyes, their skin like birchbark, with bits of gems showing through at their joints, as though a troll was really nothing but a brilliant labyrinth of rubies and amethysts and emeralds and sapphires on the inside.

  Thomas wished that he were a labyrinth of emeralds on the inside. Some of the trolls lived inside hollow bridges, peeping out of little golden windows at trespassers. Some were magicians, holding up their heavy, muscled arms to the sky to make the lightning sing. Some could turn into other creatures, mice and dogs and elephants. Thomas could not help it. He was fascinated, enraptured. Whenever he was alone in the house, he went into his mother’s closet and pulled out her jewelry, her furs, and his father’s fine brown leather coat with the patches at the elbows like flagstones. He put them all on at once. Thomas slipped into the suit jacket so that the sleeves hung down past his wrists like big, strong hands. Over that he put on all the furs at once so that his body looked huge and lumpy and wild and powerful. Then he draped Gwendolyn’s jewelry over his shoulders, slung them round his neck, clipped them to the lapels so her pendants and earrings and gold chains and bracelets hung glitteringly down the sleeves, and he looked just the tiniest bit more like the trolls in his book. Thomas laid the book on the floor between himself and the mirror and stared back and forth from troll to boy, boy to troll. His heart wriggled and writhed. He looked into those pictures and some tiny voice in his heart whispered, But that’s me, that’s me!

  I shall not be ashamed to tell you that the tiny voice in Thomas’s heart belonged to me. And perhaps to you as well—and while we should like to thump him gently and say: You silly thing, you are a troll and have always been. How could you forget a thing like that? I should sooner forget how to sneeze! It is not so easy to always know who you are. As we have said, no one remembers being born, even though being born was certainly the most exciting thing that ever happened to us! But it fades into a dim recollection of light and sound and newness, and then melts away altogether. And that is how Thomas Rood remembered being a troll, remembered that he was a Changeling. In the shape of his thoughts, which seemed to be nothing like the shape of anyone else’s—a trapezoid tumbling amongst lovely regular rectangles. In his hatred of silence and terrible, urgent longing for jewels and gold and talking frogs. And in the soft flashes of his senses, just before he fell asleep: the scent of a toad’s warm skin, the taste of opal porridge with buttercups melting on top, the deep, rumbly, safe thunder of a trollmother’s voice, the heat of a jungle where everything, somehow, rhymed.

  If Thomas could not, any longer, quite remember that he was a troll, he learned very quickly what he had become.

  It was a thing his father called him.

  Nicholas Rood said it with a furrowed brow and while he said it he pushed his glasses up onto his nose and scratched the back of his neck. He said it when Thomas ruined the curtains again, or bashed his head against the nursery wall exactly forty-nine times (for any good spell must involve seven times seven and a certain amount of discomfort for the magician) or tore a stuffed dinosaur apart as though he could find its secret cretaceous heart and eat it. He said it often enough that it seemed a kind of title, like Gertrude the Great or Ethelred the Unready.

  Thomas was Not Normal.

  One evening when Thomas was five, they sat down to supper, all three of them, at the cherrywood table, which Thomas could not help licking when no one was looking. It ought to taste like cherries with a name like that. It mostly tasted of varnish and the ghosts of spilled mustards past. But he licked on, in hope. Supper was meatloaf and peas and red potatoes and roasted onions. This was Thomas’s favorite, as the potatoes and onions looked like lumps of gold and ruby and the peas like little jades and, somewhere in the back, dusty corners of his troll-brain, the meatloaf reminded him of the rich, spicy taste of manticore. He shut his eyes and slurped up strings of hot onion out of the crispy skins and pretended he was slurping gold out of a mountain. With his eyes still shut, Thomas asked suddenly:

  “Why do you and Nicholas live together?”

  Gwendolyn quirked her eyebrow. She was long past being startled by her son’s strange questions or his odd insistence on calling them by their given names. But Nicholas Rood gave his son a sharp look.

  “Now, Tom, that’s Not a Normal question for a boy to ask at table, is it?”

  “I only mean that you might live anywhere. In a Bedouin camp, under the icecaps, on the moon. You might lasso polar bears and ride them across the Wild Yukon and write letters to Gwendolyn, who might be adopted by a mob of kangaroos and carrying around joeys in her apron. But you don’t.”

  “Heavens to Betsy, Gwen! What’s he been reading?”

  Gwendolyn shrugged, which might have meant nothing or everything I can’t lock up. Nicholas could never tell.

  “Who’s Betsy?” Thomas chirped.

  “It’s because we’re married, dear,” said Gwen, pulling her hair over to one side of her neck, as she often did when Thomas got on to a curiosity and shook it in his teeth like a dog with a good bone.

  “What’s married?”

  “Don’t be daft, Tom,” his father sighed. “You know what married is. We fell in love—”

  “Is that like falling into a chasm or a canyon or a hole?”

  “No. We fell in love and we wanted to make you—”

  “What did you make me out of? I think it must have been out of onions and potatoes and Gwendolyn’s necklaces and rum because I like those things so much.” Thomas beamed and forked another bite of manticore-loaf into his mouth.

  “What do you mean you like rum? Who gave you rum?”

  “It’s the brown stuff in the cabinet that tastes
like cake on fire. I gave some to the phonograph and she drank it all up, so I know it’s good.”

  Nicholas Rood colored from his neck up.

  “It’s fine, Nick,” Gwendolyn hushed him. “It only warped the Bill Broonzy record; you don’t even listen to that one anymore.”

  Dr. Rood took a deep breath, swallowed the loss of the Broonzy, and plowed on. “We fell in love and we wanted to make you, and the Normal thing to do is to get married, so we went down to a church—”

  “Oh! Was it the Wizard’s Palace?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The Wizard’s Palace!” Thomas cried, squirming with excitement in his chair. “On Wabash Avenue!”

  “He means Holy Name,” Gwendolyn chuckled into her peas. “You have to admit it looks rather spectacular. If I were a wizard, I’d ring up my real estate agent.”

  “Well, yes, then. That was the place. Your mother wore a white dress—”

  “Her witch’s cloak,” Thomas breathed, enchanted.

  “No! For God’s sake, what’s gotten into you? Your mother is not a witch, Holy Name Cathedral is not a wizard’s palace, and you are not made of necklaces and rum! We went to a church and Father Lawrence married us and we danced all night under the stars and ate cake and it was beautiful. Now be quiet and EAT YOUR PEAS!”