Authors: Melanie Jackson
Divine Fantasy
M
ELANIE
J
ACKSON
D
IVINE
F
ANTASY
LOVE SPELL 
NEW YORK CITY
For my friend, Susan Squires, who also knows about
the world of big, bad wolves and the things that
go bump in the night.
The wolf, the man who claimed to be Ambrose Bierce, had no trouble finding me, and he pulled up a stool next to mine at the bar. Again I noticed his eyes, as black as a witch’s cat and every bit as curious.
“I prefer you without a mustache,” I said when he failed to speak. “I don’t feel like I’m looking into the face of a walrus. And it’s easy to tell when you’re smiling.”
Ambrose caressed his clean-shaven chin. “There is a school of thought which holds that after forty a man’s responsible for the face he has.”
“Hm. Your face is completely unlined.” I pointed out gently. “I think the theory must therefore be flawed. If you’re really Ambrose Bierce, of course.”
“I sleep the sleep of the just these days.” He smiled slightly and gestured to the bartender. A shot glass of whisky came skating down the polished smoothness of the bar.
“There’s a similar saying about women’s faces,” I remarked, taking a sip. “After forty, you’d better give your face to Estée Lauder or you get what you deserve.”
Call a code!
Where’s the crash cart! Damn it—she’s just a kid! Where are the parents?
Light her up!
All around me I heard the panicked voices. I didn’t know what they meant, except that I was in trouble. Again.
I was four. I didn’t call for my mommy. I didn’t call for anyone. Because I knew that no one would come.
Man
,
n
. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
—Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary
I want to tell you a story about a rather repressed girl who ran a long, long way from home. In fact, she ran so long and so hard that she made it all the way to the far side of the planet from where she began. There she stopped to catch her breath because she was tired, and also because she was about as far away from home as she could get. And it was in Fiji, on the little rocky islet called Dolphin Island, that this story of danger and romance really begins.
Now, I’ll admit straight off that running away from home isn’t the mature way to handle most problems; in fact, it is in many cases an idiotic and cowardly thing to do. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time that I had run away, or done something idiotic and cowardly. But I have found that running is generally a fast solution, and in some circumstances
it is effective, such as when there is no chance of winning a battle if you stay and fight. And since every cloud has a silver lining, I can say that past experience always helps when doing stupid things, so I am confident that I will somehow survive my latest misstep…though bookies would probably rate me as a long shot. It’s also doubtful that any insurance company would let me take out a policy.
Why did I run away from a job and a nice apartment with an excellent seasonal view of the chorus of the Bavarian Nutcracker ballet carried out in the streets and open-air markets? Let me respond to this as Socrates might, by answering a question with a question. Have you ever spent a Christmas in Bavaria? Or Switzerland or Denmark? Or any place in the icy north that is desperately picturesque but also desperately cold and dark, especially when you are all alone? Well, I have—and too damn many of them. First in Vermont at a boarding school I detested, and then in Munich. In the beginning with a lover, and then without.
Truth to be told, I’ve never enjoyed Christmas anyway. I know that will make some of you sad, and I would like to tell you that things were different in happier times like childhood, but there were no happier holiday times. Not in
my
childhood. I grew up unwanted, almost an orphan—though without an orphan’s hope that some other family would fall in love with me and take me home. I spent Decembers feeling like a young Ebenezer
Scrooge ditched at boarding school while everyone else got to have presents and turkey and, above all, time with a loving family. It’s always been envy of others’ seasonal happiness, pure and simple, that makes me hate the holidays. An ugly sin, envy, but I think understandable in the circumstances. Maybe.
In recent years, I’d thought that I’d evolved emotionally and reached a sort of peace with the holiday, that a form of détente was at last achieved and I was provisionally safe being happy—or at least unafraid—in December. I foolishly believed that this state of affairs could last even without Max in my life. But last year, three days before Christmas, as I wandered the winter bazaar in Munich referred to by the locals as the Nikolausmarkt, nibbling at some marzipan, an attempted force-feeding of holiday spirit to bolster my frozen smile even though my heart was standing steadfast against the snowy tide and wouldn’t be bribed with sweets, I saw what is actually a very common sight at that time of year: a little girl and her mother shopping at a toy-maker’s stall for some miniature wooden animals to add to the family manger. I had just bitten into a fat marzipan pig with a friendly but stupid face and discovered that, gulp as I would, the gooey pink mess just wouldn’t go down with my gorge on the rise.
There is nothing intrinsically horrible about this custom of adding wooden animals to a manger, nothing to cause the average person to gag and flee. It is, in fact, rather touching and delightful—so
familial
and
loving
, so
marshmallow fluffy
and
sweet
that it gave me a dizzying case of contact diabetes, followed immediately by the thrust of my old envy honed to lethal sharpness as it cut my heart in two. I stood there outside the stall, my feet slowly freezing in the slush that had leaked into my boots, and heard myself making a noise that sounded almost like a woman in labor. Only it wasn’t life that was leaving my body. It was long-delayed grief. Thank goodness the nearby carolers were so loud or someone would have called for an ambulance.
Gagging, I spat out the almond mess and threw the rest of the suddenly loathsome sweet into the snow. It stuck fast, pink rump thrust helplessly in the air. I took it as a sign to get my own ass unstuck pronto. Sometimes retreat really is the better part of valor.
I had put off mourning my loss for months, denied it, refused to acknowledge it, but something inside of me looked at that mother and daughter and broke like a ruptured piñata, albeit one overstuffed with baked apples and roasted almonds. Maybe in my quest to find some Christmas spirit for filling the void in my heart I’d had too many grilled sausages, or too much spicy gingerbread washed down with too many mugs of the mulled glühwein. Maybe I just saw one too many crèches at the Krippenmuseum, the Nativity Museum packed with cheery British and French tourist families, or perhaps I had been pressured to buy one too many Nutcrackers or other wooden toys by one too many jolly vendors who assumed that I had children who would want
them. Whatever it was, my brain cracked open its defensive barrier and dumped all my fake cheer, and into the breach rushed all those icons: painful glowing candles and twinkle lights and cheery carols and hand-carved crèches and worse, thousands of hand-holding lovers and families with cuddly kids and cuddlier dogs, none of which I have. Not anymore.
No, I didn’t have any of it. My parents were dead, Max Ober and I had called it quits a day after the miscarriage severed the last thing we had in common, and since I had no one to answer to, not even a dog, I took my aching spirits in hand and ran away from home in the early hours of Christmas Eve, renouncing not only the bad relationship but also the hopeless sad-sack identity I had been wearing like a hair shirt since the split with Max. I was going somewhere no one knew me and I could reinvent myself as anyone I wanted to be.
I’d have left sooner, but I had to pack and there were no tickets available that snowy Saturday, not at any price. I would have had to murder someone at the airport to get a seat to anywhere. The idea had merit, but I wasn’t quite—
quite
—that desperate. Instead I waited until the tears had unclogged from my throat; then I picked up the phone and called my—well, really Max’s—travel agent. Normally, I don’t call Max’s floozies when I want something, but Gretchen, the part-time astrologer and full-time man-stealer, was the only agent I could find still in the office. And, to give the devil her due,
she was efficient, even if she was a big-breasted Bavarian hussy.
We talked politely about anything except Max while she typed with her polished acrylic talons and I rummaged through my dresser drawers in a vain search for a bathing suit and periodically glared out the window at the twin onion domes of the Frauenkirche that were topped off with postcard-perfect dollops of new-fallen snow. As Gretchen blithered on about the approaching holiday and seeing her family, I tried not to recall the last argument I’d had with Max. Which had been about Gretchen, actually. It started with English words like
self-absorbed egotist and faithless hound
and ended with German words like
hessliche Schwanz
and
schmutzige Arschloch
. (Don’t ask. They’re really bad and colloquialisms. If you look them up online, the dictionary will just say:
keine übersetzung gefunden
. Meaning:
There’s no translation.)
My command of that language isn’t good enough for phrases like
penis-driven he-slut
, and I ended up calling him creative things like a
toilet-dweller
and a
hole-in-the-ground
and anything that came close to what I wanted to say. Poor Max must have thought I was speaking in tongues—and I was. I had sailed right past rage and entered a zone of complete berserk insanity. Max was shocked. Absolutely nothing in our previous relationship had suggested that I was anything other than reserved, well-mannered and sane. I didn’t even talk dirty in bed. He called me Miss Modesty and
probably felt justified in seeking out someone for more adventuresome sex. Like Gretchen.
I must say that even limited German is an excellent language for ending relationships. It has the proper gutturals for expressing deep rage. Max, the hound dog and
hessliche Schwanz
, packed his bags and left that night and hasn’t spoken another syllable to me since. His final words to me were that I should see an exorcist.
In the normal course of events, there should have been an angry phone call or two, since he left some things behind, and who really vents all their stored-up spleen in one argument? But maybe he found his forgotten CD collection in the shrubs under my small balcony, off which I had thrown them, along with a few odds and ends of clothing and all our couple photographs. And maybe he just couldn’t take any more of my daily accusations because they cut a little too close to the bone. I did hold him responsible for the miscarriage and had made no secret of it. He hadn’t really wanted the baby, you see.
And neither had I—until I lost her. That day, in the cold sterility of a hospital emergency room, I got a look at myself and was repulsed by what I saw. I was as selfish as my parents, and probably as unfit to have the care of another as they ever were. And, worse still, the child had spontaneously aborted because she had a severely malformed heart. A genetic mutation. Like mine, only she was more damaged. I guess it’s the sins of the fathers and all that. But that wasn’t something I could accept about myself at
that point—that my genes had killed a child I hadn’t realized I wanted until it was too late. It was far easier to blame Max and his philandering for breaking us up. And outwardly, that’s what I did. But on the inside my self-loathing grew until I knew that I had to forgive myself or die.
Once I decided to bolt from Bavaria, I wasn’t fussy about where I was going. The only instruction I left with Gretchen, before I hung up the phone on her muttering about Mercury being in retrograde and messing up her computer, was that I wanted somewhere warm. As soon as possible, and damn the cost. I didn’t add that I was tired of Max’s memory. He loved Christmas, and I knew that he was probably off reveling somewhere without me while his presence was hanging about my apartment like Banquo’s ghost, pitying me all the while, though that specter was at least half of what had me in full retreat from the festive season. That bastard Indian-giver! Making me sort of feel safe about being happy at Christmas and then taking it all away again! I hated him for so many things, even the ones that weren’t really his fault. It was reflexive.
Realizing that I was spiraling into rage again, I forced myself to stop. Max lived by a lot of rules and sayings I didn’t agree with, but he had one axiom I liked. Translated, it went something like:
Never rent out your brain to assholes because they’re hard to evict
. That Max was just such an anatomical object didn’t negate this advice. It was time I ejected the jerk from my thoughts.
Gretchen finally found what I wanted, in spite of her gremlin-ridden computer. She had a last-minute cancellation of a friend of a friend who’d broken a leg in a skiing accident and who would be spending the holiday in traction instead of basking on a beach. I was very fortunate, she informed me. It was after the full moon, and therefore a cabin was available. The island never allowed guests the week of the full moon, which had ended on the twenty-third, Gretchen said.
Sind Sie jetzt frei?
I answered rather impatiently,
Natürlich
. I wanted it yesterday even, and gave her my Visa number.
And that’s how, nine thousand dollars and thirty-two grueling hours later, I ended up on Dolphin Island in Fiji on the day after Christmas. The dreaded holiday had come and gone unnoticed while I passed through a great many time zones and three longish layovers in London, Sydney and Nadi, and then a last leg in a seaplane, a single-engine floatplane that was too small for comfort. And maybe for safety, though that wasn’t foremost in my brain at that point. If I had been in my right mind I would have worried about going to an island accessible only by seaplane, where there was no law, no government, no health care or building codes, a place so obscure that even cruise ships that plied their trade in the islands didn’t stop by. But I was punch-drunk with exhaustion and grief and just wanted to be done traveling even if it meant death by drowning.
Things were looking up, though. The resort was
beautiful, the weather fine, and there wasn’t a Nutcracker or child in sight. I’d had the hotel pack me a picnic lunch—lobster in lemongrass with some slices of mango—and hiked out to Sylph’s Hole where I was assured of seeing some giant green turtles (and by the way, I discovered it’s the turtles that are green, not their shells). This wasn’t a lifelong ambition or anything, but it seemed as good a way to spend the first day of vacation as any other. And it was there, by the gurgling waters, which had as yet to deliver up any living creature to my newly purchased digital camera, that my unhappy life took a turn for the…bizarre.
I lolled in the sun, feeling about as capable of sustaining heavy thought as a helium balloon, but it did briefly cross my mind that I was very, very alone in the world and that, except for Gretchen, not a soul knew where I was. This, I decided, was a good thing. Alone didn’t have to mean being lonely. Alone could mean safe and peaceful and unpressured. And I’d had a lot of practice at it. Believe it or not, there is an upside to being orphaned at eighteen, if you are born to parents with bigger bank accounts than hearts and to whom you were at best nothing more than an accidental tax write-off. Their deaths in a plane crash on—you guessed it—Christmas a decade ago had left me alone, but no more lonely than I had been while they were off living their terribly glamorous lives and I was stuck at a school I disliked. And I was considerably better off financially. Perhaps not living on Easy Street with the beautiful people like Bill Gates and
Oprah, but situated on Easy Cul-de-sac, which wasn’t terrible even if it wasn’t very good for a stifled spirit that wanted to travel beyond the borders of its self-made cage.