The Fairy Lure

He would not have seen the package until Thursday had it not been for the screeching of tires in front of the house. For anyone else, an ominous sound, but one that he feels attracted to like some masochistic moth to a constant, dull flickering torch. Shuffling down the entryway, he cracks the door and peers out onto the silent street. He knows what he heard, even though there isn’t a car in sight. The sounds of his most recent trauma: screeching tires, crunching metal, sirens, voices over police radio, have become the shibboleths in the language of loss that only he knows. For even if it is true that people die every day, even that people die in car accidents and that they all too often involve the shuddering loss of a child’s life and that that is horrific every time, it is still the case that nobody has lost her, his Abigail. He is the only, the first and the last native speaker of his loss.

Turning to go back inside, there it is, the box on his doorstep, a small wooden case. He looks at it for a long moment, then stoops and gathers it up, even though it is Tuesday and he only gathers things up that are on the stoop on Thursday when he has his groceries and other necessities delivered. It is part of the discipline, to limit the mental energy he spends on anything but his grief. Anguish must be his mind’s sole occupation or he knows he will not survive, though he still cannot discern a reason for surviving. 

 Door locked, box tossed on the kitchen counter, he returns to his midday observance, consisting in the articulation of heartache through a steady perusal of artifacts from his life with her. Her stories are the latest artifice to draw out the pain, enlarge it, cause it to swell in the sinews of his chest. Printed in the tremulous hand of an eight-year-old girl, he knows them so well, having collated them through a thousand readings. One undeniable theme remains, coursing through every story he helped her write: the real presence of magic in the world. Whimsical illustrations illumine the text and mark out the sacred text; every story she wrote, of fairies, elves, unicorns, mermaids, a true story for her. 

Only there was one true story. He was there with her when it happened. He had seen and heard it. And she had written it into a story about a girl and her daddy, about the night they had set out to catch fireflies in the backyard and the fairies had spoken to them. There were few fireflies in the fading light of day, but she told him to ask the fairies to send more. He asked how he should ask them, and she had said to ask in the fairy language and they would hear him. He had fostered this love of magic in her, carefully nurtured it over a thousand stories, earnest-faced answers to questions about fairy lore, until she had believed that he had a special connection to fairies. So, after a pause, he had whistled in lilting waves and staccato bursts for a few moments to create the illusion for her of a fairy tongue. Into the moment of silence that followed, in which he wondered what to do next, there came whistling replies from all around the backyard, from deep in the trees and bushes that surrounded them. A dozen fireflies blinked into view moments later. “Daddy, daddy! They answered!” she had screamed with delight. That was the night that he had seemed either to pretend his way into discovering a bit of true magic in the world or actually calling into being a tribe of magical forest creatures. 

But that couldn’t have been right, he had reasoned. Even in the moment, his discomfort with the possibility of some inexplicable phenomenon had driven him to explain it away. Abigail’s reaction had, of course, been antithetical to his. Spurred by the excitement of the moment, Abigail had insisted that the fairies needed a house in the garden. He had obliged, spending weeks crafting an intricate home, complete with furnishings and working lights. She had watched every night from the back window for activity. But then school had started and Abigail’s attention had been diverted. His interest in the magical had been conditioned almost solely by hers, and the neglect of the house accelerated his distrust of his own experience. He had spent the next few years, especially after Mara got sick, quietly sequestering the moment in a conceptual space where it could be rationalized away. The house in the garden remained vacant. 

His chest heavy with freshly drawn up pain, he leaves the stories strewn about and pours a drink, another quotidian ritual. A prepared meal from the refrigerator, the third day in a row he has eaten the same thing. He sits down at the kitchen table and remembers the box. There is no marking on the outside, no hinge on the lid, no stain or finish on the wood itself. Opening the box, seeing the small item inside, becomes a new lexicon of shock overcome with a thick, hot anger. An outrage. Someone, he could not imagine who, has sent a vulgar expletive, a symbol of what had been licit only to he and his daughter. 

A fuming message to his sister. How dare you. How did you know? She is driven to tears denying it. She didn’t send it or leave it at the door. She doesn’t know who would. More messages, to his mother and father, to Mara’s brother, even to Josephine’s schoolteacher. No one knows who sent it. Most absorb the angry words, some respond from a cognate hurt of their own. 

He slams the lid shut on the box, stomps to the back door, throws it into the snow, stands seething at the doorway, the heat of his anger objurgating the sub-zero air until a detente between external cold and internal heat reveals his underlying disbelief. There is no marking on it. No brand, nothing inscribed in the silver, no evidence of mass production. Inside, at the computer, he pours another drink and searches for its origin, some shop that sells hundreds of curios like it every year. Nothing. It is a singular item, like the moment on a midsummer night when he had spoken magic into the world for Abigail. And like that moment, he despises it because it cannot have any power to change anything. The moment, he had discovered, was purely aleatory, the symbolic representation of a real but impuissant essence. 

Because right when magic ought to have been substantial, for Abigail, for Mara, for himself, it had been absent. Liver cancer is pernicious, especially at a late stage. Mara wasted away within weeks. Chemotherapy took its toll. Watching her mother die, Abigail appealed to him: ask the fairies to use their magic. Heal mommy. Pilgrimage to the house in the garden now happened daily. Bread, honey, chocolates, and coins had been set out to entice them. Mara had spent the last days groaning and then nothing. And he had clung to his daughter’s belief that if there was something transcendent in the world, even something as insignificant as fairy folk, that it should count for something when it mattered most. 

He stumbles away from the computer and into the kitchen. The box is on the counter, closed and dry. He stares for a long moment. He opens the box and finds it inside. It is the fairy lure. He knows this because she made it, for the house, not to bring mommy back, but to keep the tenets of magic alive. One of the last moments with Abigail, before the accident, she had exegeted the loss of his wife and her mother for him. “Even if fairies didn't help us, it doesn’t mean they aren't real.” And she had given him a small silver token. When he heard the screeching tires and crunching metal and his world fell apart again, he had thrown it out, thrown it in the garbage. And here it was again and again. 

And in this moment, he believes, that his daughter need not exist altogether in the past tense, that she could dwell in the space between the numinous and the mundane, and that magic, even if it could not save two lives, might have the power to save his at last. So he strides out into the winter cold to place the lure in the house.