Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Free Page A

peasant hutches. Peter knew them well because he’d been raised in an identical house five doors away. Richie, having inherited the property from his mother, still lived there.
    There was a light on in Richie’s house, but deep, low, and at the back. There was a single living room that ran the depth of the house. The dim light only made the house look cold and uninviting. Just go up to the door, Peter told himself, and when he answers the door just say
Tara’s back
, that’s all you have to do.
Tara’s back
.
    But he couldn’t. He and Richie hadn’t spoken in a long, long time, and two words might as well have been two hundred thousand words. He couldn’t do it. He cursed under his breath and drove away.

    “C OME IN, LAD .” D ELL spoke in a strange kind of whisper.
    “Where is she?”
    “Are you going to take your coat off? And your shoes? We’ve got the new carpet.”
    Peter took off his coat and handed it to his father before untying his shoelaces. He felt a wave of frustration with his father, that at a time like this he was concerned with clean carpets, but said nothing. He made to move down the hall but he felt the flat of his father’s hand on his breastbone.
    “Don’t go upsetting anyone. Your mum’s had a fall.”
    “I’m not here to upset anyone!” Peter tried to keep the keening note out of his voice. “Is she through here?”
    “Come on.”
    Peter took a step into the living room and stopped just inside the doorway. His mother lay on the couch. She was sipping tea and had an ice pack on the knee she’d cracked when she’d slumped to the floor. But Peter was more interested in the woman nursing Mary from the armchair next to the sofa. Even though she wore dark glasses, it was his sister, Tara: of that there was no doubt.
    Tara stood up. She seemed an inch or two taller than he remembered. Her soft nut-brown hair was maybe a darker shade, and still fell around her face in a tangle of curls. Behind the shades and around her eyes there might have been one or two lines but she hardly seemed to have aged. She just looked pretty grubby, like she’d been living rough.
    “When did you cut your hair?” she said.
    “Oh. That would be about fifteen years ago.”
    “You had such lovely long hair!”
    “Everybody did then. Do I get a hug?”
    “Of course you do.”
    Peter 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 upon 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.”
    W ITH 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