When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (5 page)

He had enough going on right now.

If she needed any other justification, she immediately found out. He sounded a tad inebriated.

“Hi, snookums,” he said happily when she answered the phone.

“Well, hi. Things went well, then?”

“Free dinner, Libby. What’s to argue with a free dinner?”

They’d discussed the meeting some beforehand, of course. If Robbie was taking Paul out for a meal, Paul probably wasn’t on the “to be fired” docket.

Libby decided to stick to safe subjects. “What did you have?”

“Porterhouse. And cheesecake. Coupla pieces of cheesecake.”

She laughed uneasily. “Couple of pieces?”

“It went late, babe. I ordered another slice.”

“Ah. Well. No point in just sitting there.”

“That’s what I thought. Plus it’s not good to drink on an empty stomach.”

“Sensible. So what did they say?”

“You were right, Libby, my darling.”

“I was?”

“What you said the other night. About how much women need to look their best.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“This is big, Libby. It’s important. Women—when you women get old, you just want to die.” He giggled.

“They said that?”

“They didn’t mention whether men do.”

“What, whether men want to die?”

“Uh huh, before they get old. Like in The Who song—” He made some “ner ner ner, ner ner ner” guitar sounds and launched into song, “What a draaag it is getting old.”

“That’s the Stones, actually. And you know, maybe you should get to bed—sounds like you—you need a head start in sleeping this off, don’t you think?”

“Libby, this is important. Libby.”

She waited.

“I was wrong. This isn’t a step backwards. Not at all.”

“Of course not, Paul.”

“Looking good is important for a woman’s self-esteem. And without self-esteem, there would—Libby.”

Libby waited again.

“Libby, without self-esteem, there’d be no steam at all.” He giggled again.

“You’re so right, Paul.” Libby wondered whether he’d offered this bit of marketing insight during the dinner or had saved it up until he’d gotten home. She was hoping the latter. She was also hoping that he’d had enough sense to take a taxi.

“Ribby?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Yeah, that would probably be a good idea.”

“I love you Ribby.” Giggle. “I said ‘Ribby.’ That makes me . . . Rastro . . . I ruv roo, Ribby!”

“’Night, Paul.”

She put the phone down.

Tyler was standing in the living room doorway, looking at her curiously.

“I don’t suppose you brought sheets,” Libby said.

“Nah, that’s okay, Aunt Libby. I don’t need them.”

She sighed. He was missing the point, of course. This wasn’t about Tyler’s comfort. It was about protecting Libby’s almost-new sofa. But to explain the point, she’d have to bring up the issue of how often he bathed.

“I have some twin bedding somewhere. It will have to do. But it’s your job to put the sheets on the couch every night before you go to bed, and take them off when you get up, so that the couch is a couch again.” Libby stood up.

“Sure thing.”

At least having a couple of overgrown kids to look after gave her something to do. Silver lining. Of sorts.

7

Wallace and Libby had started dating in high school. That’s also when he started cheating. And she knew just why she immediately forgave him for it. Because no matter what you might think, fundamentally, they were solid. What they had was solid. And no way was she going to let anything interfere with that.

His dad owned a car dealership. A big one on West Ridge Road, with a huge showroom that smelled like rubbing compound and that was ringed by cubicles where sales staff sit people down in molded plastic chairs and write out deals, and out front the lot with its flags and balloons and an SUV perched crazily on the slanted roof of a huge fake dog house. The doghouse has been there forever, since an ad campaign in the ‘80s, tag line “Drive your way out of the doghouse in a brand new Ford!” With lots of background woofing, you remember probably how big woofing was in the ‘80s, and group photos of people—really the dealership staff and their families—pumping their fists, pretending they were going nuts, they loved their cars so much. During basketball games, kids would woof at Wallace whenever he was out on the court—he didn’t start but was a good enough player to get a fair amount of game time—and he loved it. You could see his face color up and his moves get more intense when he heard the kids start to woof.

And it’s not like he cheated on her constantly. As far as Libby knew, he only did it three or four times. And she always knew in her heart of hearts that the other women weren’t really a threat. And they weren’t. Even the last one, it wasn’t she who broke up the marriage. Wallace was restless for other reasons, career reasons . . . he’d sold off his vending business and was back at the dealership, and he wasn’t happy there. So the affair—it wasn’t the problem. It was a symptom.

♦ ♦ ♦

March was almost over.

She’d stopped walking the land. She told herself she didn’t need to. She’d forgotten about the hallucination thing, pretty much. Anyway, she was busy with the next issue of
Skin Tones
.

Skin Tones
was an amazing newsletter. The concept was totally Paul’s: dedicate a newsletter to people who had been helped by Cal4’s research. Inspiring stories. Imagine a story about, say, a little boy who could finally swim in the family pool without triggering a full-body eczema outbreak. That’s the kind of thing they published. It went to the trade, mostly—skin products wholesalers and distributors, hospitals, dermatologists, companies who licensed Cal4 research. But they also sent copies to consumer publications and health news editors, and sometimes editors used bits of Libby’s articles for their stories.

That’s what made
Skin Tones
such a brilliant idea. It wasn’t promotional, at all. But it made Cal4 look positively angelic. Robbie, of course, grumbled about it. When he was in a bad mood, he called it
Sappy Tones
or
Stink Tones
and complained about how much it cost. But on good days he knew it was fabulous and very, very cheap PR. And he got calls from people about it all the time, which helped. Media bigwigs, some of them. Libby was listed on the masthead as editor, but Robbie got the bigwig calls. Then afterwards, he’d be all gung-ho again and call it
Spin Tones
for a couple of days.

The newsletter’s main story this month featured a woman who’d been misdiagnosed. She’d been told she had skin cancer, but it turned out it was a garden variety seborrhoeic dermatitis that responded to topical ketoconazole. The only weird thing was, Libby got the feeling the woman didn’t really understand that it had never been a malignancy. She seemed to think the ointment had cured her of cancer. Libby didn’t put that part in the article, though. Just focused on how ecstatic the woman was about her skin clearing up. Nor was there any reason to get into how she felt about the doc who’d pronounced the C-word and scared her almost out of her mind.

But Libby thought about it a lot afterward, about how others’ skewed interpretations of the so-called facts can become other peoples’ nightmares. If people don’t have enough savvy to take a deep breath once in awhile and say, maybe he’s wrong, maybe she’s wrong, maybe it’s not so bad, maybe it’s really nothing at all, maybe it’s not really a malignancy after all.

That doctor who’d diagnosed the woman, something had happened. But what? What had made him decide he was looking at a malignancy instead of a benign and fairly common dermatitis?

There were two kinds of people in the world. People who were faithful to the facts, and people who weren’t. But now a disturbing new thought occurred to Libby.

What if something might come between a fact and someone’s own two eyes? Something out of a person’s control?

Vaguely, she recognized, that during her marriage, she had resisted the temptation to become jealous for this very reason. Had she allowed herself to become jealous of Wallace’s girlfriends, her ability to perceive the facts of their marriage would have been impaired.

She was proud of that. She’d been in control.

Was the doctor who’d seen a fictional cancer also in control?

Of course he was. He’d been careless. Undisciplined. That had to be the explanation.

♦ ♦ ♦

It had started raining again while she was working. Maisey and Tyler were out, somewhere, in Maisey’s car—when you live in the country, you pretty much have to be out in a car if you’re going to be out at all—and Libby was editing her feature for about the fifth time when the door slammed and Maisey came in, shouting for her.

“Aunt Libby! You should see it out there!”

Libby looked out the window.

Everything was gleaming faintly. And then it hit her: she was looking at a glaze of ice.

Maisey had made it to the office door by then. “It’s totally freezing rain out there! We almost went off the road, like, fifteen times!”

“Well, I’m glad you’re back safe. You made it to the grocery store, I assume?” Their drain on her food stores had become a bit of a sore point.

“Oh yeah. All stocked up. Tyler’s bringing it in.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Libby worked awhile more, massaging the article into shape, then took a break and got up and looked out the window again. A bit of late afternoon sun had broken through the clouds in the west and the ice coating on the trees along the road caught the sunlight and shimmered, a coat of lacquered gold.

She stood for a minute, looking. Rain and sun at the same time, there had to be a rainbow out there to the east.

She wanted to be outside.

Wanted to see the rainbow and have that shimmery gold all around her.

She went downstairs and put on her coat. Maisey and Tyler were standing in front of the stove, pressed up against each other and looking down into a frying pan.

Maisey glanced over. “Going for a walk?”

“Yeah,” Libby answered , and then added, pointedly, “I won’t be gone long.” She didn’t want them to think they’d have time for a quickie while she was out.

She stepped outdoors and turned uphill.

It was ridiculous, after all, to think that this . . . episode . . . would recur. Whatever had triggered it, it was a fluke. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.

She rounded the house to her front lawn, but the slice of sun had already swept off to the north. No rainbow. The rain fell light and steady, and beneath her feet the ice coating on the blades of grass crackled as she walked. She looked back and her footprints had made dark splotches in the pale iced lawn.

She walked through the first hedgerow and came to the shallow ditch. Where she’d seen that . . . thing.

There was nothing there.

She breathed deeply, deliberately.

It was going to be okay.

But it wasn’t okay.

He was waiting for her.

She turned to follow a deer path along the edge of her property, near where the posted signs had been hung.

And suddenly, there he was. Sitting on one of the rocks from the stone wall. Not five feet away.

She whirled and began walking quickly back the way she’d come.

“If I were you, I’d move my car, Libby,” she heard him call out.

Crazy. Craziness. Feet crunching the ice, hard and fast, her stomach hurt like she’d been punched, her eyes suddenly tearing. And then she was approaching the little ditch where she’d seen him before and she felt her dread intensify—after all, hallucinations aren’t bound by the laws of space, right? But he wasn’t there—he wasn’t there—she broke into a trot and a moment later burst into the warmth of her house, and stood, trying to catch her breath, to calm her shaking hands.

He’d said her name. He’d said it the other time, too. Which proved it was a hallucination. Living inside her head.

She pulled off her jacket and draped it on the back of a kitchen chair.

Maisey and Tyler descended the stairs with elaborate casualness. Perversely, she was glad they’d tried to pull a bit of mischief, it gave her a few seconds to compose herself. Or try to.

They hustled past her to the kitchen and she mustered an elaborate I’m-keeping-an-eye-on-you look, not easy considering how she was shaking.

A moment later she closed her office door behind her, sat on her work chair, and clamped her arms around herself. And sat there, shaking without making a sound.

8

It was pitch black.

Libby sat up in bed.

What was that sound?

CR-RACK.

There it was again.

Her heart pounded.

CR-RACK.