After hearing the true story of Gustav, it is no wonder that I remembered so little from those days. I had been locked inside my own mind with music as my only means of self-expression. Had I not been stolen, I would never have lived among the changelings, never had the chance to become Henry Day. And had I not changed places with the boy, I would never have known Tess, never had a child of my own, and never found my way back to this world. In a way, the changelings gave me a second chance, and their reappearance—the break-in at our home, the encounter in California with Edward, the pair dashing across the lawn—was both a threat and a reminder of all that was at stake.
When I had first started seeing the changelings again, I attributed it to the stress of discovering my past. They seemed hallucinations, nightmares, or no more than a figment of my imagination, but then the real creatures showed up and left their signs behind. They were taunting me: an orange peel on the middle of the dining room table; an open bottle of beer on top of the television; cigarette butts burning in the garden. Or things went missing. My chrome-plated piano trophy from the statewide competition. Photographs, letters, books. I once heard the fridge door slam shut at two in the morning when we were all asleep, went downstairs and found a baked ham half-eaten on the countertop. Furniture that hadn’t been moved in ages suddenly appeared next to open windows. On Christmas Eve, at my mother’s house, the younger children thought they heard reindeer tramping on the roof, and they went outside to investigate. Twenty minutes later, the breathless kids came back in, swearing they had seen two elves hopping away into the woods. Another time, one of them crawled through a gap no bigger than a rabbit hole under a gate in our backyard. When I went outside to catch it, the creature was gone. They were becoming brazen and relentless, and I wanted only for them to go away and leave me at peace.
Something had to be done about my old friends.
? CHAPTER 34 ?
I set out to learn everything that could be known about the other Henry Day. My life’s story and its telling are bound to his, and only by understanding what had happened to him would I know all that I had missed. My friends agreed to help me, for by our nature we are spooks and secret agents. Because their skills had lain dormant since the botched change with Oscar Love, the faeries took special delight in spying on Henry Day. Once upon a time, he was one of them.
Luchóg, Smaolach, and Chavisory tracked him to an older neighborhood on the far side of town where he circled round the streets as if lost. He stopped and talked to two adorable young girls playing with their dollies in their front yard. After watching him drive off, Chavisory approached the girls, thinking they might be Kivi and Blomma in human form. The sisters guessed Chavisory was a faery right away, and she ran, laughing and shrieking, to our hiding place in a crown of blackberry stalks. A short time later, our spies spotted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her old house, Henry looked haunted, and he sat in his car for the longest time, head bent to the steering wheel, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.
“He looked knackered, as if the woman sapped his spirit,” Smaolach told us afterward.
“I noticed as well,” said Luchóg, “that he has changed of late, as if he is guilty of the past and worried of the future.”
I asked them if they thought the older woman had been my mother, but they assured me she was somebody else’s.
Luchóg rolled himself a smoke. “He walked in one man, came out another.”
Chavisory poked at the campfire. “Maybe there are two of him.”
Onions agreed, “Or he’s only half a man.”
Luchóg lit the cigarette, let it dangle from his lower lip. “He’s a puzzle with one piece missing. He’s a tockless clock.”
“We’ll pick the lock of his brain,” Smaolach said.
“Have you been able to find out more about his past?” I asked them.
“Not much,” said Luchóg. “He lived in your house with your mother and father, and your two little sisters.”
“Our Chopin won lots of prizes for playing music,” said Chavisory. “There’s a tiny shiny piano on the mantel, or at least there was.” She reached behind her back and held out the trophy for us to admire, its facade reflecting the firelight.
“I followed him to school one day,” said Smaolach. “He teaches children how to play music, but if their performance is any indication, he’s not very good. The winds blow harsh and the fiddlers cannot fiddle.”
We all laughed. In time, they told me many more stories of the man, but large gaps existed in the tale, and singular questions arose. Was my mother living still, or had she joined my father under the earth? I knew nothing about my sisters and wondered how they had grown. They could be mothers themselves by now, but are forever babies in my imagination.
“Did I tell you he saw us?” Luchóg asked. “We were at our old stomping grounds by his house, and I am sure that he looked right at Chavisory and me. He’s not the handsomest thing in the world.”
“Tell the truth,” Chavisory added, “he’s rather fearsome. Like when he lived with us.”
“And old.”
“And wearing out,” said Smaolach. “You’re better off with us. Young always.”