If she could have, Tilly would have willed her heart to stop beating—if only for a moment, and if only so she could better listen for her mother's reply in the aching quiet. It came soft, hushed like an unwanted sob, from somewhere close yet as she felt around in the dark, Mama was fathoms away, unreachable, untouchable.
"Where are you?" Tilly hollered. She bumped against a side table near the stairs and heard the clatter of glass. It was the oil lamp. Patting for a pack of matches, she struck a light and fed the wick. The room was filled with amber warmth and jumping shadows that hid in the family hearth.
"Here," Mama croaked from the stairwell. "I fell. My crutch slipped and I fell—"
Tilly took the lamp. "How long you been there?"
"Don't know—it was still light out—" She was interrupted by a retching cough that reduced her voice to little more than a whisper. "Oh, honey, I don't know if I want you to see me like this."
There was a part of her that didn't want to see Mama either, an imaginative piece of Tilly that pictured her mother shattered and scattered across the stairsteps. The lamp shook in her grasp. Tilly swallowed hard and forced a smile that grew more genuine as she cast the light into the stairwell. "Well, tough. Here I come."
Something glittered from the steps. To an outsider, the small flecks might have been mistaken for diamond dust or the impossibly small shards of a smashed mirror. Tilly knew it was all that was left of Mama's right leg.
Once she fell, Mama had tried to climb back up the stairs. It was clear in the way her body was twisted, crutch hooked around one of the worn spindles in the stair railing as a makeshift tether, leaving a trail of crushed fey-skin behind her. Her body had given out with only two more steps to go. Mama laid still, chest falling in shallow crests. Her hair was thin and curled with sweat.
"I'm sorry," Mama said, blinking away tears. "I'm so sorry you have to see me like this, sweet thing."
Tilly put the lamp down on the bottom step and climbed up after her. "Aw, ain't the first time I seen you in your housecoat."
It took her mother a moment too long to get the joke. When she did, she broke into a broad smile, but her laugh sounded an awful lot like a cry. "Oh, sweet thing—"
"I love you. You're my brightest star." With a kiss to her sweaty forehead, Tilly laced an arm around Mama's waist and another under her still in-tact knee. Three hours prior, the act of lifting her mother would've been little more than carrying a toy, but the last shred of magic was utterly gone from Tilly's dress. Her muscles were shot. She puffed, face going red. "Gimme a second—"
The struggle was not lost on Mama, whose dark eyes flitted to the tattered hem of her daughter's dress, then the dried blood on her forehead. "Oh, no. What happened to you?"
"It's a long story," Tilly panted. She looked up at the sound of the front door opening. "Sprout, Boogs—can y'all help me? Mama fell while we were out."
Between the three of them, they got Mama back upstairs and onto the bed. Tilly did the best she could to clean and dress the stump of her leg, while Sprout brought up a cup of water and a bowl of rampion and strawberries from the backyard. All the while, the younger of the Lafayette siblings retold the events of the day—with her own particular brand of embellishment, of course.
"I think we must have cleared about 40 plates each." It was hard to tell if Sprout was putting on a brave face or if her excitement from the fair genuinely overrode any concern she had about the current situation. "Booger was probably the best of the bunch but they wouldn't let her place on account that she's not people—"
Whatever the case happened to be, Mama seemed happy for the diversion, scratching the dog behind the ears. "She's people to us, now ain't she?"
Booger pressed her head into the woman's hand. "Better than people, if you ask me. That's why they didn't let me enter none. Knew they'd be plum outclassed."
If it hadn't been for the empty space where Mama's leg should've been, Tilly could have told herself it was a normal evening at the farmhouse. "Well, if there's one creature whose gluttony knows no bounds, it'd be you, Boogs."
The dog's black lips rolled back to show large, sharp teeth. "I get the feeling you meant that as one of them backhanded compliments, but I'm just gonna take it as a regular type."
Sprout's grin wrinkled her nose. "Besides, you'd have been right there with us if it wasn't for that B-O-Y."
"A boy?" Mama repeated with interest. "You met a boy?"
"It's getting mighty late, ain't it?" Tilly said with a sigh and a fixed smile. "Why don't y'all get dressed for bed?"
"Us?" Mama laughed. "What about you?"
Sprout hung her goggles on the bedpost. Her eyes twinkled with mischief. "Probably gonna run back to town to see him. It's been four whole hours since they smooched last."
"It's not like that!" Tilly's face flushed with heat. "If you gotta know, I'm gonna head back to town to get Dr. Crabbe. He needs to look at Mama's leg."
"Oh no, sweet thing," Mama was quick to interject. "You had a rough day and half a night as well. Why don't you wait 'til the morning, get a good night's rest?"
"If I wait 'til the morning, he might have other patients," she answered.
Her mother's expression sharpened. "Tillomena, I will not have you running yourself ragged over this. It can wait until the morning. I'm not dying."
"Yes, ma'am," she said, but felt her insides knot.
By the time Tilly had untied her hair and stripped off the ruined remnants of her dress, Sprout was already curled up along her mother's side, fast asleep. Mama soon followed suit, her fingers still moving rhythmically through her youngest's hair. Closing the trunk at the foot of the bed, Tilly climbed into her spot beside Mama with her copy of Natural and Unnatural Fauna of Southeastern Grimland. She didn't feel like reading, if she was being honest with herself, but she thought that walls of text would smother the guilt growing in the pit of her stomach. A pressed flower, courtesy of Sprout, marked her place smackdab in the middle of the Ks.
Tilly started at the top of the page and began to read, squinting to make out the words in the dim light. "'...The kalidah are not native to Southeast Grimland, introduced in the year 1900 as a potential predator to combat the growing jabberwocky population.'"
Booger curled up on top of Tilly's legs. "Sounds more like gibberish than jabber, to me."
"Pay attention," she hissed, attention returning to the book. "'Without a natural predator, the kalidah adapted too successfully to the region. Their numbers are estimated between 10,000 and 20,000, with local governments offering as much as twenty dollars a head to hunters.'"
A black nose edged its way onto the pages. Booger snorted down at an illustration of a strange beast that had the shaggy body of a massive bear with an oddly feline head. "This it?"
"Mmhm." Tilly continued to the next page. "'Some ecologists speculate that it was the introduction of the kalidah that wiped out the indigenous unicorn population rather than deforestation, but there is no definitive proof. What is clear, however, is that the kalidah remain unopposed in the wilds of Southeast Grimland.'"
"So they're basically saying the only thing that troubles a kalidah is another kalidah," Booger surmised with a snort. She rolled over on top of the book, tail thumping against Tilly's legs. "I could take 'em. Eet 'em whole."
"I'm sure you could." Tilly scratched the dog beneath her scruffy chin. "You know, it's a little hard to read when you're laying 'cross the book like that."
Booger's tongue lolled from her mouth. "I know."
With a sigh, Tilly tried to yank the book from beneath the shapeshifter but froze as Mama next to her started awake with a wracking cough. Booger rolled to her feet with a shake before settling back at the end of the bed, pretending that they hadn't been up reading well past their bedtime.
Tilly, on the other hand, was caught red handed. She slammed the book shut. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up—"
Mama waved the thought away, voice raspy from her coughing fit. "You didn't, sweet thing. Just sometimes my lungs don't hold in the air like they ought to anymore. Makes it hard to breathe. You go back to what you were doing. I'll be back to sleep in no time."
But Tilly didn't feel like reading anymore. "I'm sorry."
"For what? I told you, you didn't wake me up none," Mama said. "It's this cough."
"No, I mean—" Tilly bit her lip. "I'm sorry I went to the fair today. If I had stayed home, this wouldn't have happened."
"Don't you say that." Mama threw an arm around her daughter's shoulders and squeezed her close. "You're a girl. Soon to be a young woman. You can't just stop living your life because of me."
"You don't understand." Her voice wobbled, propping her chin on her mother's shoulder. "You are my life. If anything happened to you or Sprout or Booger I—I dunno what I'd do."
"And that's all the more reason to not make us your entire life." Mama's fingers combed through Tilly's hair in a well-practiced glide. "We all love you, sweet thing, and we'll all try to do right by you, but we can't last forever. You need a world outside of us. And I think, in its own way, the world needs you."
Tilly sniffled, blinking hard and fast. She didn't answer.
"I'm proud of what you did today," Mama continued.
"More trouble than it's worth," Tilly grumbled.
"Most things are, but we do them anyway." Mama's gaze slid slyly to her daughter. "This boy. He cute?"
"Yeah. He is." In spite of everything, Tilly laughed, wiping some snot away with a knuckle. "But I don't know how to feel about him."
"When you meet the right one, you'll know exactly how to feel." Mama kissed her forehead. "Get some sleep, my princess."
Smiling, Tilly doused the light.