Nobody came and nobody went. During the daytime, the barn was calm and hushed. Mice scurried along the walls, and in the rafters a mourning dove, reluctant to make the fall migration, cooed and waited for a reply that would never come. From sunrise to sundown, the old boards ticked and moaned as the cold and warmth alternately played off the wood. The people had departed or perhaps stayed inside the farmhouse, nobody could tell, but the familiar sounds of car engines or wheels along the gravel had all but ceased. Nights were quieter still; the bark of a fox, the cough of a deer would startle a soul. And after midnight, when ordinarily they would have had the run of the place, the puppets were too scared to move.
The disappearance of the Devil made them question their faith. Not in the Quatre Mains—they had long ago learned to mistrust him and his seemingly random capacity to dispatch one of their number into the void. But now they feared the others, the unknown lurking just beyond the cramped chamber into which they had been stuffed. Some accepted the close quarters with stoic forbearance. “Make the best of your situation is my motto,” Mr. Firkin said more than once. Others could not tolerate the claustrophobia. No? had pulled out nearly every straw on her head. The sisters looked terrible, too, draping themselves like pashas in the trough. Masha covered her eyes with one mitt and complained of a migraine. Olya wore a path in the sawdust, desperate for a cup of tea. Irina spoke only in sighs.
Kay did not like her new body. She felt like Alice grown ten feet tall, too big to fit into such a small room after tasting from the bottle labeled DRINK ME. “Which would you have liked best,” she remembered from her nursery Wonderland. “To be a tiny Alice, no larger than a kitten, or a great tall Alice, with your head knocking against the ceiling?” Kay had been small as a kitten, and under the circumstances, given a choice, she preferred that size. She was taller than she had been when she lived in the real world. She was bigger than her husband.
What would he think if he suddenly saw her in the barn? So changed as to be unrecognizable. He would walk right past her as though she were a stranger. Or a stranger still. There was so much she had not told him, sides to her personality kept secret during the months of dating and even after they had moved in together, after the wedding, too. She had always thought there would be time for the whole story. And he, too, hidden by the past, a stranger in many ways, the life he had away from her, the teaching he would be good at, he was a generous and patient man, and she imagined a gaggle of coeds would fall in love with him every semester. The French seduction. A man of words. Muybridge, she recalled suddenly. White beard, animals in motion. She could picture her husband hunched over the pages, moving Muybridge between languages. At the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and a serious frown of concentration that sometimes frightened her. Theo.
“What did you say?” the Good Fairy asked.
She would have blushed had blood run beneath her skin. “Theo,” she said at last. “Theo was his name. It just came back to me again. Sometimes my mind comes and goes about the way things used to be.”
With a creak of wooden bones, the Good Fairy sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulder, a weariness in the motion. A twig snagged on Kay’s collar.
“Better you forget all about him,” the Good Fairy said, as they untangled.
“I don’t think about him much, except to wonder if he misses me. If he is curious about what happened, or if he has forgotten about me yet.”
The Good Fairy rubbed her back in wide circles, the rough fingers scratching an itch that had not existed before. “I used to be just like you. When I first came into this world, it was passing strange. Imagine my surprise to find I’d been changed into this scarecrow, this bundle of kindling, where before I was a person just like you and the rest. For the longest time, I ached to be who I once was, to see my people—Lord, how I missed them. But I made my peace with it, took the advice of Mr. Firkin and the Queen and just put the past where it belonged. There is no past, only the right now. Much more appealing to think about what is to come.”
“Well, what is to come?” Kay asked. “Are we to be here for long? I heard the Deux Mains say to the people in the village that the next shows will be in the spring. Does that mean we’ll be shut inside through the whole winter?”
“You’ll learn,” the Good Fairy said. “Don’t measure the days as you once did, not as something to be endured but as an opportunity to rest. And savor the moments for what they allow.”
Behind them came a drumming on the floor, starting out slowly and softly and increasing in speed and volume. No? stomped her feet and growled, the tantrum intensifying till she threw her hands in the air and howled and caterwauled. “All winter, all winter. I can’t stand another minute.” Shrieking, she ran across the room and sped around the corner, heading for the barn door. The puppets were too shocked to react immediately, and they stood there, stunned, as her screams bounced off the walls, a spray of curses as she fought the lock.