Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Free Page A

stepped forward and he held his sister in his arms. She held him tight. He inhaled the smell of her. She didn’t smell like he remembered. Now she smelled of something belonging to the outdoors he couldn’t identify. Rain, maybe. Leaf. Mushroom. May blossom. The wind.
    It was a long time before she broke the clench. Peter looked over at his mother stretched out with her ice pack and her leg up on the couch. She gave him a pained smile and dabbed at her eye with a tissue.
    “So where you been, Tara? Where you been?”
    “She’s been traveling,” Dell said.
    “Traveling? Twenty years is a lot of travel.”
    “Yes, it is,” Mary said from the couch. “And now she’s come back home. Our little girl has come back home.”
    WITH TEA BEING THE drug of choice in the Martin household, Dell concocted more of it, thick and brown and sweet. After all, they’d had a bit of a shock; and whenever they had a shock or experienced a disturbance of any kind they had poured tea on it for as long as any of them could remember. The fact is they poured tea on it even when they hadn’t had a shock, usually six or seven times a day. But these were extra-special circumstances and Peter knew he had to wait until the tea had arrived before he could begin any line of questioning. Even when the tea did arrive, the questioning didn’t go well.
    Peter had hardly taken his eyes off his sister since his arrival. The same half-smile hadn’t escaped the bow of Tara’s lips since he’d walked into the room. He recognized it as a disguise of some kind, a mask; he just didn’t know quite which emotions it was intended to camouflage.
    “So where exactly has all this traveling taken you, Tara?”
    “Goodness! All over.”
    “Really? All over?”
    She nodded solemnly. “Pretty much, yes.”
    “Tara already told us some of it, Peter,” said Dell. “Rome. Athens. Jerusalem. Tokyo. What was that place in South America?”
    “Lima. In Peru.”
    “Really? Traveling all this time? Constant traveling?”
    “Pretty much, yes.”
    “Always moving?”
    “Well,” Tara said. “I might have settled here or there for a few months, but always with a view to moving on.”
    Peter nodded, but he was only pretending to understand. He scrutinized his sister’s clothes. She wore threadbare jeans with huge bell-bottoms, of a kind that had strayed way out of fashion when he was a young man and had probably come back in again. She wore a grubby dress over the top of them and long strings of beads. A woolen cardigan was a couple of sizes too big for her, the arms of which reached to the tips of her fingers but failed to hide her dirty fingernails.
    Peter couldn’t help himself. “You look like you could do with a bath.”
    “Steady on,” said Dell.
    “But Tara,” Peter said. “No word? Not even a postcard? No good-bye, no announcement, no—”
    “I know,” said Tara. “It’s unforgivable.”
    “Do you know what you put these two through? What you put us all through?”
    “Before you came, I said to Mum and Dad that I will understand it if you hate me.”
    “We don’t hate you,” Dell said. “No one hates you.”
    “But—” Peter tried.
    Dell cut him short. “Peter. I know there’s a lot to get into. But I won’t have you say anything to scare her away again. Okay? I won’t have it.”
    “I’m not going away again,” Tara said.
    Peter ran his hands through his close-cropped hair.
    “What about you?” Tara said. “Tell me about your life.”
    “My life?” Peter said. “My life?”
    “Mum says you have children.”
    “Get the photos, Dell. Get them,” said Mary, too quickly.
    “Tell me yourself,” said Tara. “I want to hear everything.”
    Peter sighed. “I married a lovely girl I met at university. Genevieve. We’ve got three girls and a boy.”
    “Tell me their names!”
    “Well, my eldest is fifteen going on twenty and her name is Zoe and—”
    “That’s a lovely name.”
    “And then came Jack, he’s thirteen.