Blood Red, Snow White Read Free Page A

that shows there is no such thing in life as chance, or luck. There is only fate. Which is why, years later, when the young man walked into Russia, he could have gone nowhere else. It was his fate to go there.
    *   *   *
    But I was telling you another story, about Ivy, and how the young man ended up in Russia at all.
    He grew up. He left school and the Lakes, and, now a man, he moved to the big city in the south. And there he fell in love.
    Not once, but hundreds of times. He developed a habit of falling in love at least once a week, and of asking whomever the girl was to marry him.
    This went well for a year or so, because all the girls he asked to marry him said no. There were narrow scrapes from time to time; once he thought better of the marriage proposal he’d written in a letter, and traveled a hundred miles to intercept it before the girl could read it. The girls had a fair idea of his nature, that he was young and impetuous, and so they said no, though they did it kindly, and with a quick peck on his cheek.
    But then, one day, one of them said yes.
    Her name was Ivy, and the young man had fallen in love with her straightaway. It would have been rude not to, because all the other young men in the city also wanted her. She was beautiful and witty, and she was much more fun than other girls. He wrote poems for her and about her, and they got married.
    They enjoyed the whole thing so much they got married again two weeks later, on All Fool’s Day.
    After their honeymoon was over, they moved out of the city and into a cottage in the countryside, and there they did what comes easily to newlyweds, and the result was a baby. A baby girl. They called her Tabitha.
    Then life changed. There never was a story that was happy through and through, and this one is no different. The young man began to realize that he had not married the woman he thought he had.
    She began to change, or maybe it’s closer to say that she became herself.
    As if he had married an enchantress, a crone who had transformed into a beauty, her true colors began to emerge.
    The young man saw that Ivy was like a fairy tale herself. She lived in a world of fantasy. Maybe she had become bored, maybe she missed her life in the city, maybe he and Tabitha weren’t enough for her. So she made up stories of her own. She told him that other men wanted her still. She admitted to having affairs, though all these stories were just fantasies.
    The young man worried about her but decided that it was probably best to ignore the tales. Ivy’s stories got worse. She told him that she had discovered a plot against her honor. Three coarse men, she had learned, were planning to kidnap her and hold her against her will (sort of) in a lighthouse. She told him to buy a gun to defend her.
    He thought for a while, trying to remember a lighthouse within a hundred miles of where they lived. He didn’t buy a gun.
    And the young man, meanwhile, had fallen in love again. This time, however, he’d fallen in love with someone quite unexpected; he had fallen in love with his daughter. This was something he had not been prepared for, as he was swept up by a bond and a yearning and a protectiveness for which he found words were quite inadequate.
    Now, after all the marriage proposals he had made, and years with Ivy, he at last understood what love truly is. Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it’s about how much you care for someone else, and he cared for Tabitha very much indeed. He smiled, as if for the first time, with his child’s first smile, and laughed with her first laugh.
    Things with Ivy grew bitter, and as each week went by, and the weeks became months, they argued more and more, battles of vicious words that poisoned them both.
    Years passed, and the fights continued. As Tabitha grew, and began to walk and talk, the young man feared for her, and the effect that her parents might have on her.
    Finally, one day, he knew it had to end, and