“The usual sources being?”
“Christy. The professor. An old copy of the Newford Examiner with a special section on the fairy folk of Newford.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am,” Jilly admitted. “But I did go to the library and had a wonderful time looking through all sorts of interesting books, from K. M. Briggs to When the Desert Dreams by Anne Bourke, neither of whom write about Newford, but I’ve always loved those fairy lore books Briggs compiled, and Anne Bourke lived here, as I’m sure you knew, and I really liked the picture on the cover of her book. I know,” she added, before Mona could break in. “Get to the point already.”
“I’m serenely patient and would never have said such a thing,” Mona told her.
“Humble, too. Anyway, apparently there are all sorts of tricksy fairy folk, from hobs to brownies. Some relatively nice, some decidedly nasty, but none of them quite fit the Nacky Wilde profile.”
“You mean sarcastic, grubby, and bad mannered, but potentially helpful?”
“In a nutshell.”
Mona sighed. “So I’m stuck with him.”
She realized that she’d been absently doodling on her art and set her pen aside before she completely ruined the page.
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” she added. “I finally get the apartment to myself, but then some elfin squatter moves in.”
“How are you doing?” Jilly asked. “I mean, aside from your invisible squatter?”
“I don’t feel closure,” Mona said. “I know how weird that sounds, considering what I told you yesterday. After all, Pete stomped out and then snuck back while I was with you last night to get his stuff — so I know it’s over. And the more I think of it, I realize this had to work out the way it did. But I’m still stuck with all this emotional baggage, like trying to figure out why things ended up the way they did, and how come I never noticed.”
“Would you take him back?”
“No.”
“But you miss him?”
“I do,” Mona said. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“Perfectly normal, I’d say. Do you want a shoulder to commiserate on?”
“No, I need to get some work done. But thanks.”
After she hung up, Mona stared down at the mess she’d made of the page she’d been working on. She supposed she could try to incorporate all the squiggles into the background, but it didn’t seem worth the bother. Instead she picked up a bottle of white acrylic ink, gave it a shake and opened it. With a clean brush she began to paint over the doodles and the blob of ink she’d dropped by Cecil’s head. It was obvious now that it wouldn’t work as shadow, seeing how the light source was on the same side.
Waiting for the ink to dry, she wandered into the living room and looked around.
“Trouble with your love life?” a familiar, but still disembodied voice asked.
“If you’re going to talk to me,” she said, “at least show your face.”
“Is this a new rule?”
Mona shook her head. “It’s just disorienting to be talking into thin air — especially when the air answers back.”
“Well, since you asked so politely …”
Nacky Wilde reappeared, slouching in the stuffed chair this time, a copy of one of Mona’s comic books open on his lap.
“You’re not actually reading that?” Mona said.
He looked down at the comic. “No, of course not. Dwarves can’t read — their brains are much too small to learn such an obviously complex task.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know you didn’t, but I can’t help myself. I have a reputation to maintain.”
“As a dwarf?” Mona asked. “Is that what you are?”
He shrugged and changed the subject. “I’m not surprised you and your boyfriend broke up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He stabbed the comic book with a short stubby finger. “The tension’s so apparent — if this bird story holds any truth. One never gets the sense that any of the characters really like Pete.”
Mona sat down on the sofa and swung her feet up onto the cushions. This was just what she needed — an uninvited, usually invisible squatter of a houseguest who was also a self-appointed analyst. Except, when she thought about it, he was right. “My Life as a Bird” was emotionally true, if not always a faithful account of actual events, and the Pete character in it had never been one of her favorites. Like the real Pete, there was an underlying tightness in his character; it was more noticeable in the strip because the rest of the cast was so Bohemian.
“He wasn’t a bad person,” she found herself saying.
“Of course not. Why would you let yourself be attracted to a bad person?”
Mona couldn’t decide if he was being nice or sarcastic.
“They just wore him down,” she said. “In the office. Won him over to their way of thinking, and there was no room for me in his life anymore.”
“Or for him in yours,” Nacky said.
Mona nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it? Generosity of spirit seems to be so old-fashioned nowadays. We’d rather watch somebody trip on the sidewalk than help them climb the stairs to whatever it is they’re reaching for.”
“What is it you’re reaching for?” Nacky asked.
“Oh, god.” Mona laughed. “Who knows? Happiness, contentment. Some days all I want is for the lines to come together on the page and look like whatever it is that I’m trying to draw.” She leaned back on the arm of the sofa and regarded the ceiling. “You know, that trick you do with invisibility is pretty cool.” She turned her head to look at him. “Is it something that can be taught or do you have to be born magic?”
“Born to it, I’m afraid.”
“I figured as much. But it’s always been a fantasy of mine. That, or being able to change into something else.”
“So I’ve gathered from reading this,” Nacky said, giving the comic another tap with his finger. “Maybe you should try to be happy just being yourself. Look inside yourself for what you need — the way your character recommends in one of the earlier issues.”
“You really have been reading it.”
“That is why you write it, isn’t it — to be read?”
She gave him a suspicious look. “Why are you being so nice all of a sudden?”
“Just setting you up for the big fall.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thought of what I can do for you yet?” he asked.
She shook her head. “But I’m working on it.”
Notes for chapter seven:
(So after Mona meets Gregory, they go walking in Fitzhenry Park and sit on a bench from which they can see Wendy’s Tree of Tales growing. Do I need to explain this, or can it just be something people who know will understand?)
GREGORY: Did you ever notice how we don’t tell family stories anymore?
MONA: What do you mean?
GREGORY: Families used to be made up of stories — their history — and those stories were told down through the generations. It’s where a family got its identity, the same way a neighborhood or even a country did. Now the stories we share we get from television and the only thing we talk about is ourselves.
(Mona realizes this is true — maybe not for everybody, but it’s true for her. Agh. How do I draw this???)
MONA: Maybe the family stories don’t work anymore. Maybe they’ve lost their relevance.
GREGORY: They’ve lost nothing.
(He looks away from her, out across the park.)
GREGORY: But we have.
In the days that followed, Nacky Wilde alternated between the sarcastic grump Mona had first met and the surprisingly good company he could prove to be when he didn’t, as she told him one night, “have a bee up his butt.” Unfortunately, the good of the one didn’t outweigh the frustration of having to put up with the other, and there was no getting rid of him. When he was in one of his moods, she didn’t know which was worse: having to look at his scowl and listen to his bad-tempered remarks, or telling him to vanish but know that he was still sulking around the apartment, invisible and watching her.