“Yes,” said Freddy.
“Does it really?” The woman leaned back on the bench and looked off into the trees again. “I know everyone says it does, but isn’t it really just that you scream tears all over yourself until you’re on the point of throwing up, then stop out of pure frustration because nothing has really changed? What good does it do? It’s not going to stop the divorce. You’re off doing it in private, so no one who matters is even going to notice it’s happened. No magical tear fairies are likely to turn up, feel sorry for you, and make everything go poof. As far as I can tell, crying about something you can’t change is a slightly more sophisticated version of throwing a tantrum because the sun has melted your ice cream.”
Freddy felt her eyebrows being drawn down into a glare. Crying did help. It … helped, okay? Well, all right, she did feel sick already. She felt as if she needed to cry more, on and on, until … what?
Maybe it was true. It wasn’t as if she wanted to be crying, was it? “I can’t help it. Could you?”
“Yes,” said the woman. “I have a method.”
“No one can help it,” snarled Freddy. “If you don’t know that, nothing bad’s ever happened to you.”
“Bad things happen to me every day before breakfast,” said the woman. Freddy recognised the tone; it was the one Mel used when she was pretending she wanted everyone to feel sorry for her, even though she knew no one would. “You can see I had several just now. You need to get over the crying thing. You’ve succumbed to a victim mentality.”
Freddy narrowed her eyes. There were a lot of big words floating around, and she thought most of them were probably veiled insults.
“I’m going to do you a favour, small crying girl I have never seen before,” announced the woman, and Freddy saw knowing eyes appear again beneath the hair. “I’m going to teach you not to cry.”
“What good will that do?” Freddy was finding it hard to stop her hands from balling into fists. “It won’t stop them from … from…”
Her eyes filled up. “Oh, stop,” said the woman. “It’s useless and takes us around in circles. Watch this.”
She picked up the little green purse, which seemed less battered than her clothing, and opened it. After a few seconds of fishing, she pulled out a key ring so jammed with keys that it didn’t even jingle.
The woman ran her fingers through the keys. “So you see, when one of the usual terrible things happens to me and I experience an overpowering urge to throw myself down on the floor and blub, I take out this key. No, not this one. It’s in here somewhere. At any rate, there’s a key I take out. I don’t know what lock it fits; I found it in a gutter somewhere. So I have this key. Whenever I’m in danger of tears, I go looking for a lock.”
Freddy’s own tears had receded again, though she could feel them lurking. “Why?”
“To see if the key fits it, of course.” The woman briefly waved the keys about before returning to her search. “It has to fit some lock somewhere. Of course, there are trillions of locks it could fit, and odds are I’m never going to find the right one, but you never know, do you? It gives me something to think about besides my own righteous self-pity. It’s always, ‘Maybe this will be the time, and maybe the lock will belong to a door that lets out into a magical land of sunshine and kitty cats,’ and I stop wanting to cry because I’m interested. It’s never the right lock, but maybe it will be someday. And anticipating that is better than sitting around moaning for some reason I won’t even remember tomorrow.”
Her fingers slid onto a little silvery key and stopped.
“I can spare this one,” she said. “It’s another gutter acquisition. I don’t have the least idea what it’s for.”
Freddy watched as the woman tried to force the key off a ring nearly too full to hold it. She wasn’t really sure she believed anyone could stop herself crying just by sticking a key in a lock, but … I’ve stopped crying now. Is that really all there is to it? It was worth a try. Anything that would stop her from crying herself sick was worth a try.
The key slid off the ring. So did five other keys. The woman regarded them ruefully, then dropped all the keys but one back into her purse. She let the odd one out rest in the palm of her hand. “Take it.”
It was a small key; it gleamed in a beam of sunlight that had escaped the green canopy above. It had a straight blade with a little catch at the end rather than the jagged teeth Freddy was used to from house keys, and the part you were supposed to grasp to turn it—she didn’t know what it was called—was a hollow circle of metal. Freddy hesitated. She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, and she wasn’t supposed to take anything from them, either.
“It’s not poisoned,” said the woman. “I have apples and candy bars for that.”
Freddy reached for the key. She glanced up at the woman’s face as she did.
The slight breeze had, perhaps, been at work; the hair had blown partly back, revealing a pale curve of cheek. “You’re bleeding,” said Freddy, her hand still hovering in the air.
“What? Oh.” The woman touched her cheek gently. “Never put handcuffs on an angry teenager. They weren’t bad handcuffs,” she added in what Freddy thought was meant to be a reassuring way. “There was stuff that happened, and then it went boom. I don’t have the handcuffs any more. Take the key.”
Freddy took the key. It was just a key. It was warm against her fingers. She closed her fist around it.
“Good,” said the woman, rising and picking up the purse. “That’s you sorted. Just try the thing with the crying. It works.”
Freddy shrugged. She doubted it would. But the solidity of the key against her damp skin was oddly reassuring.
The woman turned away, then back. Her hair had fallen over her cheek again, hiding the long bleeding scrape. “One thing. Whatever you do, don’t tell me I’ve given you that.”
Freddy gave her the stare Mel said made people want to apologise for being born.
“I’m serious,” said the woman. “It would be very, very bad. You see?”
“But you already know you’ve given it to me,” said Freddy. “And you said you didn’t know what it was for.”
“Still, don’t tell me. I might do something drastic if you did. People could die. Or you might accidentally kill a puppy.”
There were occasionally crazy people in the park. Freddy hadn’t thought this woman was one of them, but she’d been wrong before. It was kind of too bad. The thing with the key and the crying almost made sense, in a zigzagging sort of way.
“I won’t tell you,” said Freddy, “since I don’t know who you are.”
The woman gave a slight, twitchy little shrug. “No one does, occasionally including me. You have a nice morning, now.”