It’s stupid, but Harriet puts Gretel’s ring on before she goes to sleep at night in her room strewn with paper cranes. Stupid because what will all that do? Ward off a return visit from the soot figure? Harriet’s the type who frets all the time, but since she read Perdita’s note, she’s fretting on overdrive. The flat keeps dwindling around her, doors and walls thinning to mere air. She must not be nervous; she must not jump when the heating stutters or when the dripping of the tap changes tempo. The wheat-sheaf ring and the paper cranes bring relief from all dreaming and prognostication. The soot figure is not coming. It has been and gone, and failed.
In the morning Harriet ties on her favorite apron, the one she’s had printed with a sketch of Perdita’s. The sketch is in the style of a pavement sign: a woman who looks a little like Harriet is wearing a tall, pointy hard hat and clutching the handle of a wooden spoon as if it’s a walking stick. Beneath this image are the words WITCH AT WORK. She puts on music that suits her witchy mood: DJ Luck and MC Neat’s “A Little Bit of Luck.”
Ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni ta-na-ni . . .
She washes and strains red beans, boils them down to near-mush, grinds the beans, refers to Hyorin Nam’s danpatjuk recipe for the next step.
With a little bit of luck, we can make it through the night . . .
Harriet pummels rice dough until she has a bowl full of cloud solid enough to rebuild a castle in the air. Instead of crafting ramparts she portions it out into tiny cannonballs. The bean paste bubbles, and Harriet stirs in the dough so that Perdita comes home to a simmering of her favorite things: sugar, starch, and cinnamon. After this and the paper cranes, Harriet almost dares to call herself a friend of Hyorin Nam’s, but she mustn’t be hasty; she’s made this mistake before, and she should wait for a third sign.
At bedtime, Harriet looks in on Perdita and the dolls. They are gathered close, a rustling bouquet of eyes and leaves, and they haven’t gone to sleep yet. They look at her expectantly, so she takes one step into the room, then one more.
There’s a question Perdita’s been asking ever since she woke up at the hospital: How did you get here? The question is for both Harriet and Margot, and Margot misunderstands and thinks Perdita is for some reason fixated on the logistics of their getting to the hospital. Harriet understands Perdita’s question perfectly and—shamelessly unsatisfactory mother that she is—has been pretending to share Margot’s misunderstanding. Harriet and Margot have the kind of past that makes the present dubious. Talking or thinking about “there” lends “here” a hallucinatory quality that she could frankly do without. Pull the thread too hard and both skeins unravel simultaneously. Still. Each time Harriet raises her hand, she sees the two rings on her middle finger. The unaltered fact of Gretel is promising.
So Harriet clears her throat and asks if Perdita is interested in making a deal. Perdita invites her to state her terms, and once stated, they’re rapidly agreed upon. Perdita will tell Harriet how she got to Druhástrana, and Harriet will tell Perdita how she left it. Nggggg, Perdita’s shaking her head, disputing the order of proceedings. First Harriet will tell Perdita how she left Druhástrana. Only then will Perdita tell Harriet how she got there.
Prim, Sago, Bonnie, and Lollipop move outward to sit with their backs against the bedposts. Their arms fold across their bodies, and their faces are in shadow, four geometric sketches indicating a margin.
Harriet settles down next to Perdita; she is cross-legged, and so is her daughter; she’s wearing flannel pajamas, and so is her daughter. “Consider this a bedtime story . . .”
But before Harriet can begin, Sago pipes up. She’d rather go to bed without a story tonight, if that’s all right with the others.
It’s not all right with the others. Perdita warbles something very stern, and the doll named Lollipop lets it be known that she thinks Sago’s a coward. Prim says, “What’s this, Sago? We’ve heard bedtime stories before.”
Bonnie says they’d all listen to Sago if they had any sense. What are they going to do if this particular bedtime story has an “it was all a dream” interlude that truthfully refers not just to the tale and its teller but to all those to whom the tale is being told? “Suppose we’re not even character characters but figments of another character’s imagination . . .”
“I’d be humiliated,” Lollipop bursts out. “Humiliated!”
“Well, it’s not like we’d just sit back and take it,” Prim adds. “We’ve still got our side of the story. It’s like having a return ticket. We can all go there and back together, can’t we.”
Perdita nods. Sago sighs, then asks Harriet to go ahead.
5
A girl grew up in a field. Well, in a house, with her family, but the house was surrounded by stalks of wheat as tall as saplings. The girl’s earliest memories are framed in breeze-blown green and gold. Ice and moonlight, sunshine and monsoon, the wheat was there, tickling her, tipping ladybirds and other pets into her lap.
Druhástrana’s small, but everyone who lives there thinks it’s huge. This is due to a couple of types of subjective distance. There’s bureaucratic distance, by which I mean there are all sorts of formalities to be completed at each stage of travel. It takes hours, and by the time your credentials are checked for the tenth time (tenth out of seventeen), most people feel like turning around and going home again. The other type of subjective distance has to do with the way the land itself impedes rapid motion. For example, the wheat field I’ve mentioned was hazardously lush terrain. Whether you crossed it on foot or by tractor, wheat was all you saw ahead of you and all you saw behind.
But there were landmarks. The first was in the center of the North Sector, where the Cooper family lived. It was a wooden clog the size of a caravel, a relic from the days of giants. The Coopers were convinced the shoe belonged to a giant Cinderella, and they gave the youngest among them the task of keeping it polished in case someone came back for it.
The second key demarcation was between non-farmland and the beginning of the South Sector, where the Cook family lived. Here you met a jack-in-the-box with a pegged-on smile and eyes that popped out on springs and bounced every which way. His wind-up handle was broken, but that didn’t stop him jumping out and squawking HA HA HA just as you were trying to tiptoe past carrying breakable goods. Maybe he was solar-powered. Someone always pushed his eyes back into his head and closed him into his box once he’d had his fun. The Cooks had lost count of the number of times they’d moved him, only to find that he’d returned to his preferred spot overnight. Mr. Jack-in-the-Box would never become an intuitive meeting point like the Giant’s Clog, but the farmstead people would veer off course without him.
The third landmark was a broken loom on an iron stand, austere in its rust. Frills of hemlock (or cow parsley?) grew through and around its rolls and beams, trying in vain to mend the shattered frame, or heightening the display of the damage. That one was in the East Sector, where the Lees lived: it was the landmark closest to the girl’s cottage. It was said that three sisters had quarrelled there. She who couldn’t stop laughing at the Coopers’ Giant Cinderella theory was sad to think that harmony could go so long unrestored. She’d wound measuring tape around one of the legs of the loom stand and placed a pair of scissors on its lowest shelf, so that if by some chance the weaver, the measurer, and the cutter reconvened there, they’d see that somebody else had hoped for this too.