Tooth and Nail (7 page)

Any other day, she’d be pushing a glass of wine into my hand, giving me a chunk of fresh bread from the bakery up the street, and chattering about the day’s antics of one of the naughtier children in her class.

But this wasn’t any other normal day. At least, not normal as I’d always defined it. When normal changed this much this fast, what could be the meaning of strange?

“I made a turkey,” my mother finally ventured in a small, weak voice.

“Oh, you made a turkey, all right. About thirty years ago,” I said. “And here I am.”

“Gemma, don’t…”

“Do
not
‘Gemma’ me that way. Don’t imply that I’m the unreasonable one. However,” I amended, “I’m okay with you saying my name as in, ‘Gemma, I can explain why for your entire life, I withheld a crucial and bizarre detail of your existence.’”

Rather than taking the cue I provided, Mom remained silent. I regarded her the way a detached scientist might regard a newly impaled butterfly on a cardboard display. Women walked into the homes they grew up in and expected comfort and familiarity, but what I found in the living room this time was Bethany Fae Cross, a woman with a collection of secrets and complications so enormous, yet so invisible to me up until today.

Perhaps not just because she was fae, but also because she was a mother.

She moved to the sofa and sat beside me. I scooched a few stubborn inches away from her, but she reached her hand across those inches and brushed a few errant strands of hair off my cheek. I was almost surprised to notice it was the same hand I knew. It hadn’t suddenly morphed into Frederica’s dainty long-fingered hand. Mom’s fingers were short and strong. I’d more than once felt her grip on my upper arm to restrain me from crossing the street without looking both ways. The skin of her fingertips was tight and tough, cultivated in a dishwasher-free domicile. Her nails were ragged from scraping between bathroom tiles and digging deep and gloveless into the backyard garden.

“What did Frederica Diamond tell you?” she asked softly.

“Everything you didn’t.”

She gracefully dodged the hurt I hurled, continuing, “How did she get you to believe?”

I searched my mind for another surly-daughter comeback, but I’d depleted my usually bottomless arsenal. I was too tired to reload. So I went for the truth. “She showed me. She showed me the place, or time, or whatever it was…”

“The Olde Way,” Mom said, and in her familiar, sure voice, it wasn’t crazy. It was a bedtime story under a pile of warm blankets.

I wanted to weep.

“Were you there?” I asked her. “Ever?”

“I’ve glimpsed it, like you,” she said, looking past me at something in her mind.

“Where is it?
When
is it?”

“The Olde Way predates you, me, Christopher Columbus, Moses, King Tut. The fae didn’t record our world. They didn’t feel the need to preserve their history because they never anticipated its extinction. They couldn’t predict an existence where it’s necessary to learn from mistakes. All that’s left is the memory, passing down through our lineage, but that memory weakens with each generation.”

She sighed and refocused her gaze on my face. “My few glimpses were as brief as yours,” she said, “but they were a tiny bit more vivid. It’s harder for you to access the memory, but it’s still there.”

“When you called me on my cell earlier,” I said, “did you know who Frederica was?”

“Not right away. There aren’t just a few of us, Gemma. There are so many, everywhere.” She paused. “But when you told me you were meeting unexpectedly with a job recruiter, and when you told me her middle name was Fae, I knew. Some fae families, ours included, continued the tradition of giving children the name, even though we couldn’t any longer give them the valuable inheritance that went with it.”

And here I’d thought it was just tradition on my mother’s side because it was a pretty name.

“You didn’t want me to talk to her,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t want me to talk to any of them, and that’s why you never told me who—what—we are?”

“I couldn’t stop this, Gemma. I did try, but it’s impossible to leave your destiny behind. I knew that. I’d just hoped that by now, you’d stayed under the radar long enough so that you wouldn’t be pressed into service.”

“As a … “ I struggled to remember the words Frederica had used. “A collector? Were you a collector?”

“Yes,” she said. “I collected because it helped me to continue the definition of who I am, who we were and what we had. The morning fae are split into lineages, and each lineage carries on a tradition and a specific role and responsibility in bringing back our world, our way. My lineage—our lineage—are collectors.”

“Morning fae?”

She paused.

“Are there afternoon fae?” I asked.

“Midnight fae,” Mom said, then, “The dark fae. They’re not us.”

She stopped, chewing her lip. “I should get dinner on the table,” she said faintly.

“Let’s hear it,” I said. “I just found out today I’m a tooth faerie, so if you’re wondering about my capability to handle what you’re about to say, we’re way past that. I want answers. I don’t even know the right questions to ask, but I want the answers.”

I realized my fists were clenched tightly, and I stretched all of my fingers out, in the space between Mom and me, and maybe the fact that she couldn’t fully see my expression let her continue.

“My parents are dead,” she said quietly.

“I know,” I said, softening my tone.

“But not for as long as you thought,” she said at the same low volume. “Your grandfather died when you were ten. Your grandmother died seven years after that.”

I blinked, startled, but considering the fact that I’d never known my grandparents to miss them—and considering everything else I had learned today—I waited to hear my mother out.

“I cut myself off from my fae family. I kept up infrequent contact with my parents because I couldn’t bear to—oh, but you were too important to me, and I knew you’d be too important to all of them.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed and her shoulders melted down deeper into her pink cotton cardigan. “Fae marry fae. We’re barely hanging on to our existence as it is. But rare mixed marriages do happen.”

Dad. George Cross’s presence was in every room of this house even still, like old rugs you couldn’t unload at a garage sale because the strangers who stopped into your yard knew—despite the fact that you’d scrubbed the rugs clean—that they were covered with ghosts. Since he left, Mom hadn’t talked about him ever, not to me, even when I asked her over and over, “Why?” Then somewhere along the line I had become an adult, and I had realized his leaving had hurt her more than it had hurt me, and that maybe she didn’t tell me why because she didn’t know why. And I stopped asking.

But I had more questions now. “Your family didn’t want you to marry Dad?”

I saw her flinch, and I felt awful.

“The fae do tolerate a mixed marriage,” she said, “and it’s only because of what—who—they produce.”

Produce? Would that be me?

“What did you see, Gemma?” Mom asked before I could take my conversational turn. “When Frederica showed you a glimpse?”

I didn’t have to struggle to remember that. Brief as it was, it had embedded itself into my permanent heart’s memory. But putting it into words was difficult. “I didn’t see,” I said, “as much as I
felt
.” I slid from the sofa cushions onto the carpet, and lay on my back staring at the ceiling. I tried to will it back to me, that sense of falling into soft nothing, that certain joy. “I felt light, and air, and music, and water, and peace.”

“You felt peace,” Mom repeated. “So you understand the true essence of the Olde Way is peace and innocence. War doesn’t exist there, or chaos, or violence in any form. It can’t. So when the Olde Way crumbled, the fae had no means of resistance. The fae have no physical fighting instinct, so there was nothing to draw upon—and humans simply took over without conflict, most likely without even knowing our ancestors were there.”

From my spot on the floor, I just looked at her feet, one curled over the other, in thick blue socks. None of that made sense, at least as far as the individual me was concerned. “How could I not have the fighting instinct?” I asked. I nudged my duffel on the floor where I’d tossed it when I came in. It was zipped, but only partway, and a few inches of the stretchy wrap I used under my gloves snaked out. “I’m a fighter.”

“The half-human side of you is the fighter,” Mom said. “And that’s why you’re a precious gem to the fae, and that’s why, before I was even pregnant, I knew I had to get you away.”

I waited. I didn’t get it. I needed her to explain it to me. She’d taught me how to read, how to tie my shoes, and how to safely cross a busy intersection. I had to trust she could reach and illuminate the confused part of me, because if she couldn’t, I wasn’t sure anyone could.

But she sat there, looking not at me but at the spot I’d occupied on the sofa a few moments earlier.

“You didn’t want me to be part of this?” I finally asked. “You didn’t want me to be a collector? You didn’t want me to be”—
oh
, I thought,
God help me
—“a tooth faerie?”

She winced. “’Faerie’ is not the right word. It’s a human word for the ideas they have of us. And no,” she said quickly, her voice rising on the last syllable. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to embrace this. My reason for leaving had nothing to do with escaping the fae dream. Not at all.”

“You grew up in Connecticut.”

Her brows drew together. “Yes?”

“So is that like faer-” I checked myself—“fae headquarters or something?”

She smiled a bittersweet smile. “They’re everywhere,” she said. “We’re everywhere, although many cluster in communities. Frederica recruits for the D.C. fae.”

“So not only is tooth collection real,” I said, “but there’s a whole network?”

“It’s a global operation,” she said, reflecting my wryness back at me through her grin.

“Yet still retaining that homey family business feel.”

I paused, remembering the crumpled card in my pocket. “Frederica said there are local meetings. What are they, like AA?”

Mom laughed. “Maybe, in terms of the confidentiality and locations. They’re gatherings where fae—can be herself. Or himself. Shed the human guise and just be fae for a while.” Her smile remained, but changed. “I told you the memory is fading with each generation.”

I nodded.

“Well, when you go past the beginning of human time, that’s a lot of generations. When you touch the tooth, come in contact with the essence, a tiny sliver of that memory is sliced off so you can taste it. It’s intoxicating, but fleeting. When the fae gather, there’s power in the group, and they use that power to channel the Olde Way. It’s a little stronger, and they can hold it a little longer. They renew the connection to the dream, and to one another.”

“To remember why they’re—we’re—doing all this.”

“Yes,” she said. “The different lineages all have a role. There are morning fae who gather innocence from animals, in zoos and shelters and the wild. There are fae who manipulate the environment—the best that they’re able. Humans would have destroyed the Earth we share far back if not for the fae efforts, and we need the Earth intact to bring about our, well, our heaven.” She sighed. “When you’re a tooth collector, every tiny bit of innocence you obtain becomes a piece of that whole dream that we’re striving to get back. It’s our purpose. I loved doing it. I would have done it for as long as I was allowed to, if not for … “

“Dad?”

She fell silent, the word hitting her again. I hated with all my heart to be the one delivering the painful blows, but I needed to know what was at the center of this powerful secret. “Did you not say anything all those years and leave your family because of Dad? You didn’t want him to find out what you were?”

Her eyes watered a bit, and I squeezed my own eyes shut so I wouldn’t have to see it, but in my personal darkness I saw Dad again, saw him holding up the pads for my tiny fists to punch. One-two. One-two.

“It hurts.”

“No, Gemma, that isn’t pain. You’re feeling what it is to be human. You’re human.”

You’re human…

“Dad knew,” I said, and snapped my eyes open. I jumped to my feet. “Dad knew what you are. What we are.”

She nodded. “I told him right before we got married. He had a right to know me. He had a right to know why he could never truly be a part of my family. And he had a right to know what your destiny could be if I didn’t break away.”

“He had a right to know,” I echoed. “But I didn’t?” I began to pace around the room. Emotions swirled and gathered heat in the center of my chest, and I felt my fists ball up, tightening and stretching the muscles on the insides of my wrists.

“Your father agreed,” she said, and despite my anger, I hated to hear her plead with me.

“Maybe I … “ I pressed the heels of my fists against my eyes hard enough to see red and yellow streaks before I dropped my hands again. “Maybe I would have
wanted
to be a part of it. Maybe I want to be a part of it now. What Frederica showed me…” I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have kept me from that. I would have wanted to do my part.”
I still can
, I thought. I still could. I didn’t lose my chance. Frederica was offering it back to me. She was only waiting for me to believe in what I was.

And looking at my mother curled up in the corner of the sofa I had spent so many hours on, in the living room I had lived in, I believed.

“It was never my intention to take you off the fae path to peace.” Mom got up. Standing, she was tall enough to look me straight in the eye. “I left so you would have peace in
this
world. I couldn’t give you over to fight their battles.”

A thousand more questions crowded my head and I opened my mouth to let the next one spill out, but the doorbell rang before I could make a sound.

Mom and I both looked at the door, then at each other. “Avery,” she said, her tone dissolving from that of Scheherazade storyteller and re-solidifying as mother. “He called earlier and said he’d meet you here for dinner.”