It was Lisa who began it. Things usually began with Lisa, then the others followed her lead—like a chorus, Maeve thought.
"So what makes you think you can act?"
"I know I can." Maeve was defiant, her voice a little tremulous, but she was still determined not to back down, not in front of Lisa Smith and her gang.
The girls were pretending to be amused, but she sensed their resentment of what seemed to them a completely misplaced confidence. They felt a need—almost, one might say, a duty—to set her straight, put her in her place.
"Quit dreaming, Maeve. Ashley will get the part, you know that as well as I do. She's gorgeous, and you—" Lisa hadn't bothered to finish the sentence, but had looked Maeve up and down contemptuously while her friends sniggered.
Maeve flushed. Her looks were one matter on which she could offer no argument. Though not stout, she was sturdily made—like a building designed to stand firm against onslaughts of wind and weather. In her limbs and in the moulding of her face there was an uncompromising solidity. But she had persisted. "What's that got to do with anything? I said I want to be an actress, not Miss Universe. Acting has nothing to do with what you look like. There're always character roles, and—"
"I give up! Catch me trying to help this kid again." Lisa had shouldered her backpack and turned away with an air of disgust. "Ashley's dad has offered to help pay for the stage sets." She threw this over her shoulder as she walked off.
And like a fool I didn't listen, Maeve thought now, wincing. I must have been out of my mind.
The street along which she was walking was lined with large, prosperous-looking houses, half of them designed in a Victorian style, with brick facades and pointed gables, the other half imitation Tudor. Like all the houses in the Balsam Heights development, they were of approximately the same height and breadth, with two-door garages, short driveways and one small strip of lawn at the front. There were few trees in the development, despite its name. Neat, close-clipped hedges were the dominant form of greenery.
It was early spring, damp and chilly, and a cold rain was falling. Maeve huddled into her coat and quickened her pace, her mind running over and over the events of the day. Lisa, of course, had been right. There had always been a sharp, knowing look in Lisa's grey eyes: she understood how the world worked. Maeve should have expected it; she should have guessed. But the possibility of real success for the first time ever had briefly intoxicated her, and she had been caught unawares.
Quit dreaming, said the remembered voice.
She pushed open the front door of her imitation Tudor home, then hesitated as she noticed an acrid smell on the air. Mom was smoking again: a bad sign. She'd quit last year—for good, supposedly. What had made her start again?
Mom was in the living room, reading a magazine—or at least turning its pages, quickly and angrily. Her eyes were fixed on a point in space that seemed to lie beyond the printed words. There were three butts in the ashtray in front of her. Somehow Maeve knew, without asking, that Mom and Brandon had been quarrelling again. The feel of it was in the air, bitter and lingering like the cigarette smoke. Brandon's stereo was blaring up in his bedroom—the kind of music he knew Mom hated.
Maeve stood in the doorway looking thoughtfully at her mother. She had been beautiful once—still was, really. Her hair was gold-blonde and luxuriant; it had been long in the old days, down to her shoulders, though she wore it now in a short, curly perm. Her eyes had lines about them, wrinkles of worry, but they were still the same bright china blue. They turned up to Maeve briefly, before returning to the magazine.
"Oh, Maeve." Her voice was flat, toneless, but the hands clutching the magazine shook perceptibly. "How was your day?"
It wasn't really a question, but some answer was required. To say nothing would seem rude, or be mistaken for sulking. Maeve thought of saying, "Fine," in the same dull voice, but she reflected that Mom would have to know eventually. "I didn't get the part, Mom."
"Part?" her mother murmured.
"The part I wanted, in the play." She could no longer keep a tremor out of her voice. "It went to—"
Her mother flung the magazine down irritably. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Maeve! I don't want to hear about it. I'm having enough problems of my own!"
But you asked, Maeve could have protested. Her mouth remained closed, however, her features schooled to an unresponsive mask as she turned to leave the room. Not a good actress? she thought drily, mounting the stairs with a slow, tired tread. Lisa had no idea....
Maeve went straight to her room, pausing to glance in her mirror. Her short, straight hair was dark brown, lank and lustreless; beneath their straight black brows her eyes were hazel—not even a true green like Dad's, but an indecisive halfway hue, greenish-brown. Her features were of the sort that are described as "strong" by people who are trying to be kind. She sighed heavily. She was fifteen, an age when most girls began to blossom—like Ashley Robinson, she thought with a pang. Ashley could turn heads just by walking into a room. But Maeve Morgan O'Connor was plain— there was just no denying it. She'd got all her looks from Dad's side of the family.
Maeve quite liked mirrors, in spite of what they showed her. She had always enjoyed the strange reversal of things they presented. Mirrors gave you back the world, fresh and unexpected; presented new angles and perspectives; made you marvel again at shapes and colours. As a child she had often imagined entering a looking-glass like Alice, venturing into that backwards land. It had been her delight to wander about the house holding a small hand mirror before her so that she might see everything anew. If she held it beneath her chin, it reflected the ceiling, and she could pretend that everything had been turned upside down and that she was walking along the stuccoed ceilings among the inverted light fixtures—peering out through inverted windows at blue deeps of bottomless sky.
"What on earth are you doing?" Mom had once demanded in bewilderment on seeing her little girl engaged in this activity.
"I'm walking on the ceiling, Mommy. It's fun." But Mom had just continued to look at her in blank puzzlement.
Poor Mom. She'd probably wanted a daughter who would be golden-haired and beautiful as she was. Instead, life had given her Maeve, who was not only plain but odd as well. "Thank God for Brandon," she had once overheard Mom saying to Dad. It was Maeve's brother who had inherited Mom's colouring, her fair skin and blue eyes and gold- blond hair. He was popular at school—unlike Maeve—and had always had plenty of friends. But now there was the raucous music coming from his room; there were the loud furious arguments in the small hours of the morning that roused Maeve from sleep. There was an atmosphere of stress in the house whenever he was in it, and Mom had not thanked God for Brandon lately.
Maeve hung up her damp coat and tossed her book-bag down in a corner. If only there was a way to escape all of this! There had been a "dress-up" drawer in her bureau long ago; Mom had given her some old dresses and costume jewellery so she could "play at being a grown-up." But Maeve had loved to put on different personalities with the dresses, to become other people, act out parts in stories of her own invention. She yearned for a dress-up drawer now. What a relief to put off your self just as easily as you'd take off your coat—put it off and set it aside, turn into somebody else, for a little while anyway. To not be Maeve O'Connor for an hour or two ... But release would have to come from some other source now.
She looked at her bookcase, crowded still with her childhood favourites: the Chronicles of Narnia; E. Nesbit; L. M. Montgomery; Alice in Wonderland, of course; and Peter Pan. And there was the book of King Arthur and his knights, which Brandon had once been given by Grandma but hadn't wanted. It sat next to her book of Shakespeare's plays. Atop the bookcase lay a small paperback: Adventure in the Otherworld by Jean MacDougall O'Connor. On the cover were knights on horseback, with children riding behind them. She picked up the book and opened it. There on the flyleaf was the author's faded ink scrawl: "For my very favourite granddaughter, Maeve, with love, Jean O'Connor." This was a joke—Maeve was her only granddaughter—but there was real affection in the author's scrawled words. Maeve had read her late grandmother's book a hundred times at least— it was dog-eared now, and pages were falling out of it. But the story itself was eternally fresh and enthralling. It told of a young Newfoundland girl named Emma who one day wandered too far onto the barrens and walked right out of the world into another place. A land of fairies and giants and dragons, of knights and kings. The Otherworld.
As a child, Maeve had longed to pass through such a hidden portal herself; it became her favourite fantasy, replacing her looking-glass dream. She curled up now in her most comfortable chair with the book. The black-and-white photo on the back was of a younger woman than she remembered. For her, Grandma's face would always be as she had last seen it, all those years ago: her crinkled pink-white skin and silvery hair; her eyes, which could smile like sunlit water but were in repose a still and pensive shade of green, the colour of a pool in a quiet wood where no one ever goes. There had been something magical about her. Her home province of Newfoundland had seemed to Maeve a land of romance, with place names straight out of old stories: the Avalon Peninsula, for instance, which always made her think of the Isle of Avalon in the King Arthur stories.
"Grandma," a younger Maeve had ventured once when they were sitting reading a book together, "are ... are there such things as fairies?" She had waited in fear for the answer, knowing that Grandma would certainly tell her the truth, but still half-hoping for a yes.
A curious expression had come over her grandmother's face, and at first Maeve thought she was not going to answer. Then Grandma had leaned close and said in a soft, low voice, "Do you know, I really think there might be." And for an instant, it had seemed to Maeve that she was going to say something else. But then she had just smiled and returned to her reading.
Maeve smiled herself at the memory, and plunged into the pages of her grandmother's book.
She had just arrived with Emma at the great castle of Temair when voices from the room below jerked her back to the real world. Dad was home, his deep voice resonating throughout the house.
"... I don't like that crowd he's in with. Coming home at two a.m., blind drunk! It'll be drugs next, you watch."
Her mother's voice rose plaintively. "What did I do? Where did I go wrong? Why couldn't I have had normal kids, like everyone else? I ran into June Robinson at the supermarket today, and she just talked and talked about her daughter. Her Ashley is attractive, a good student, always happy—"
Dad snapped, "Of course the kid's happy! Her father's a millionaire, so she'll never lack for friends. She gets whatever she wants: clothes, trips, racing bikes. Why wouldn't she be happy?"
At this point Brandon turned on his stereo again to drown them out, and Maeve tried to return to her book. But the bitter sarcasm in Dad's voice hurt her. She knew that at least some of that bitterness was directed at himself, and she longed to run down and console him, but there was nothing to say. The lines on the page before her seemed to blur, and she found that she was reading the same sentence over and over. After a few minutes Brandon switched to his earphones, and there were the voices again. Arguing still. Dad's voice now had an edge of desperation to it: "At least spare me the sight of the smug rich flaunting their expensive cars and clothes! If I must be poor, let it be in a poor province!"
"But Newfoundland!" Mom sounded appalled. "It's an absolute backwater! There aren't any jobs there at all!"
"Roy might find me something. And there we could buy a house outright—a real house, not one of these tacky jobs with their fancy fronts and plywood walls! No mortgage, no ruinous property taxes..."
Poor Dad. He was still upset about being laid off—''Just cast aside, after fifteen years!" he had said incredulously when it happened. "Not so much as a handshake. Just, 'Clean out your desk, please, you're not wanted any more.'" His work search was not going well, either. He had to be getting desperate if he was talking about going back to impoverished Newfoundland, where they didn't even have fish to catch any more. He must know Mom would never move there.
Maeve turned off the light and lay down on her bed. The streetlights were coming on, their sodium glow staining the overcast sky a dull, luminous copper. She closed her eyes, and in the darkness that lay behind their lids she sought the green and secret place in which she always found refuge. There were trees in that place; she formed them in her mind—not the bare budding trees of March but trees of late spring, enfolded in clouds of delicate, unfurling leaves....
"I'm telling you there isn't any work! Not in this field. And a man my age can't just start over. Perhaps you should be looking for work—"
"And what kind of job do you think I'd be able to get now? I've been out of the workforce for seventeen years! I gave up a good, promising career to raise your kids, look after your house—that was the deal, remember? 'I don't want a working wife,' you said—"
They were both getting angrier by the minute. They'd be yelling soon. "That was then, this is now," Dad countered weakly. "The kids are grown. Can't you find something, even part-time?"
"As what? A waitress?"
... And lilacs, and magnolias, and apple trees all covered in white or wine-coloured blossoms...
Dad's angry misery rumbled through the room below. "For once I'd like to live in a place where I'm valued for who I am, not for how much money I make. I'm sick and tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses. And our kids, what are they learning here? Either to be greedy and acquisitive, or to envy kids who have more money and gadgets than they have. They could use some real values, Brandon especially, and they're not going to learn them here, that's obvious."
... There were trees and there was sunlight. It fell between the branches in long streams and lay in patches on the forest floor. Tall maples, birches with their silver bark and conifers too: resinous-smelling pines. Their needles crunched underfoot. But here where she lay there was moss, softer than the softest carpet. In the distance the tree trunks faded into a green dusk. Birds were singing all around her, large, dove- coloured birds that perched on boughs overhead or flew from tree to tree in a blur of white wings. Birds of the Otherworld...
"We can live within our means there. Don't you see? It's either go there and get by, or stay here and be poor."
"Then go there yourself. Who's stopping you?"
The voices faded, drowned by birdsong.