Arcadia Falls Read Free

of the forest and to the cottage at the end of the woods where the lost girl’s family lives, so she can take the lost girl’s place. The girl stays at the witch’s house, working as hard as she can to please the old witch. Not only does she do the ordinary housework like cooking and cleaning and washing the clothes, she also does extra things to make the witch’s house beautiful. She spins the wool from the wild goats in the mountains into yarn and weaves the yarn into beautiful rugs for the floors and tapestries to cover the walls. She chips the broken glass out of the windowpanes and fits in pieces of colored glass in beautiful patterns so that the light in the cottage glows like scattered jewels. She gathers wood in the forest and carves it into comfortable chairs and sturdy tables. She digs clay by the stream and fashions it into vases to hold the wildflowers she picks in the fields.
    “But no matter how beautiful the girl makes the house, she stilldreams of her own home every night and counts the days until her year of service to the witch is over. When that day comes the witch gives her back the dress she came in, only the torn piece has been patched with cloth of gold. They wait on the porch for the changeling girl to come back. They wait all day. At last when evening comes the witch turns to the girl and asks, ‘You didn’t, by any chance, wash that root in running water? Because you know, that gives the changeling running legs and she’ll never come back again.’”
    It’s not the end of the story, but we’ve come to the end of our trip. At the top of the steep road I see a sign marked FLEUR-DE-LIS. This is the cottage Ivy St. Clare told me Sally and I could stay in—the free housing that made the job impossible to turn down. (Not that I, with an incomplete English doctorate and a mountain of unpaid debts, could afford to turn down any job at all.)
    We pull up in front of the cottage in silence. It’s so well camouflaged in the trees that it takes a moment to really take it in, but slowly I begin to notice that the slate tiles are furred with moss and that many are missing. The rough pine walls are stained and moldy-looking, many of the windows cracked and covered with spiderwebs. A detached garage with a crooked roof slumps against the right side of the house. This could be the witch’s cottage before the lost girl comes and fixes it up—the hut still under the spell of disfigurement. Nothing has been restored. Sally’s father is still dead of a heart attack at forty-two, and I’m still the bad witch who’s sold her childhood home—her castle and her rights to the kingdom—and banished us to this peasant’s hovel. I turn to Sally, looking for any glimmer of the light I saw shining in her eyes just minutes ago, but she’s slouched back down in her seat, stopped her ears up with the iPod buds, opened her cell phone, and put her sunglasses back on. I’ve lost her again right before my eyes.

“I t’s quaint, don’t you think, like something in a fairy tale?”
    But Sally is done with fairy tales for the day. “I’m not getting service,” she says. “This place does get cell phone service, doesn’t it?”
    “I’m not sure,” I lie. The dean had, in fact, told me that the campus lay in a cellular dead zone, but I hadn’t had the heart to tell Sally that yet. I was hoping that if she spent a little less time texting her friends she might occasionally talk to me.
    “What about wi-fi?” she asks. “I mean, you can’t drag me away from all my friends and then not give me IM.”
    From the look of it, the house is more likely to have black mold and a mouse infestation than electricity and a working phone. It certainly doesn’t match the image I’ve held in my head these last few months, through each painful stage of divesting ourselves of our old lives, of a tidy white clapboard house with a front porch and a small garden.
Nothing too big
, I said to myself as I put our Great Neck