After
Her mother smiles, wickedly perfect, as she strokes her daughter's hair. Ella smiles back and reaches out, wanting to touch the dark hair, the pale skin, the pretty red mouth. Her mother laughs softly – it sounds odd, like breaking crystal – and carries her tiny daughter to a bathtub filled to the brim with water, setting the squirming child down as gently as she can without spilling any over the edge.
"Mama," Ella says, her small arms stretching out as she does so, and her mother laughs again before pushing her daughter's head under the surface.
Ella Prince thrashes about in her bed before realizing that she is awake (not stuck in her nightmare) and alive (not a little girl anymore) Her husband, Charlie, groans as he rolls over to face her; his body awake but his brain not quite there yet.
"Is the baby up?" he asks sleepily, leaning over his wife's rigid form to grasp blindly for his glasses. He sits up in bed and rubs at his eyes, yawning as he reaches for the t-shirt he'd tossed to the floor only a few hours ago, and Ella lies statue-still in their bed as she wills her heart to stop racing.
This isn't a memory, she tells herself as Charlie gets up to check on their son. How could it be?
Her mother was sick, sick in her head and sick in her heart right until the day she died, but she never would have stooped so low as to murder her only child. Her father, who might be able to tell her the truth (that it's nothing but pure imagination, but the cry for help, but the anger, but the fear, but the hate, but the love) is too far removed from this place (this palace) she's learned to call her home for his only daughter to reach out for him, at least at this early hour of the morning. Michael White does not need to know this part of her world exists and Ella wouldn't want him to. Let him think that everything is wine and roses, gold and pearls, that everything is just…the way it is. It's okay. She'll deal. Like she always does.
But it's all so easy to imagine, so easy it freaks her out, if only slightly. She can't imagine her mother being like this (and yet knows she was).
It's a bright day as Ella walks down the street, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her coat. Her bicycle is at home, safely pushed back into the garage behind the Lexus and the Saab and the baby carriage. Ella walks, her heels clacking on the ground with each step that she takes. She raises her head up to look into the light that shines down on her. The sun's warmth travels through her body and it's like looking into her son's eyes: too bright, too hot, too knowing, and even though he is only eight months old, his eyes burn into hers in a way that makes her want to ask which side of your family will you take after?
The shops seem to vanish behind Ella; the sidewalk seems grow longer and bigger and, and vaster, somehow. Her hands feel all right, not clammy at all, because the sweat is running down her spine and she doesn't know why. Her father is still at work, still breaking his body in the homes of people too affluent to know what real work is, and she thinks about visiting him. It's just a quick walk from here, really, to the little sandwich cart down the street where he usually grabs his lunch before heading right back to work, but she doesn't go. Her father is working and she doesn't particularly want to see him. It is just an idea, a quick thought, a diversion on the path that she should continue walking down.
Her feet ache. Her shoes are too high, too small, too different for everyday walking, and even if she hacks off her toes, she knows that she can't wear them any longer. She leans against a building and rubs at her foot; missing the old ache, the burn that started in her knees and crawled through her back when she scrubbed floors and washed windows, missing that tender, accomplished feeling she used to get after a hard day of work. She passes the buildings that she and her father used to fix together, big townhouses and elegant hotels with gates and spires and rooftop gardens. She wonders if the girls she used to work with still lounge by the back door on their breaks; if Greta and Ruby and Blanca still gossip about the management and the guests as they smoke their cigarettes and pick at their uniforms and wish for princes to rescue them, not just waiters and temps and wolves in sheep's clothing.
She brushes past the dumpster and when she finds the familiar alley empty, Ella touches her hand to the cold steel of the door. It feels the same, it looks the same, but she feels different. She imagines how her old friends would react if she told them how those childhood tales really end – how sometimes, the wolf eats Red Riding Hood. The witch steals the prince from the beautiful mermaid. Hansel and Gretel never find their way out of the forest. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty never wake up.
Cinderella feels like a bird trapped in a cage once she has her fairy-tale wedding, bogged down by charity work and pleasing the prince's family and raising children that won't know what it's like to have to sing for their supper and befriending arrogant, snobbish twits who will never feel the sting that washing and working till your hands bleed brings.
The sun burns her face when she finally emerges from the alleyway, except it isn't the sun hanging in the sky any more, but the moon. Ella shivers, and that's the strange part: first she shivers and then, then she sees why. A quick walk down to the corner grocery, she told Charlie, to a place where she never arrived.
She was walking away.
When she comes home, the city dark under the light of the waning moon, Charlie has lines on his face that speak of worry. If she had disappeared for longer he would have (called out his men) called the police, or worse, her dad. He still might. So Ella smiles because her dad might recognize this (the walking away) and says, she was lost in her thoughts, sorry dear, she lost track of time.
It's not really a lie, and he doesn't press the issue.
This might have been the beginning except that it isn't. It is the realization. Or it could have been. Ella doesn't know, she doesn't think about it, because her mother was smart (it's not really insulting to say her father is "not quite") and she went away. Ella is smart too, so she doesn't think. She loves the life she has. Every little bit of it.
She tells herself that she does, but it sounds so small.
The next time, or possibly the 700th time, is at the high table of Charlie's family's latest charity function. Charlie cradles their son in his lap, feeds him fruit off his plate and tickles him until Henry's face is beet red and he is practically growling with delight. Ella's father is laughing loudly, drowning all other conversations of the wealthy dinner guests into empty slumber. Ella forces herself not to wince. The woman sitting next to her, however, has no such qualms.
"He is just so common!" she says with a tittering laugh. She sounds callous and just as lower class as the man she insults when she gestures towards Ella's father with her salad fork (or is it the olive fork?), but being born in the right family at the right time seems to be enough for her to get away with it. In another life, she might have been someone's evil stepsister.
"You think that Charles Prince's continuing favor might be based on nothing?" Ella asks and snorts lightly, raising her wineglass to her lips. The woman in her ridiculous yellow dress turns and opens her mouth. She stares for a moment, and then looks down at her plate.
"I didn't mean to insult you, or your husband," she says softly, and suddenly Ella feels the thrill: starting at the back of her skull and racing down her spine to her quivering legs. The woman doesn't speak to her again, but eats her dinner as quietly as she can. Ella smiles at the fish on her plate, and it takes her a full minute before she understands that the woman fears her, just a bit, just for what she might say, what she might tell either her husband or his family or someone else. Ella could cause this woman's downfall.
"It was poor judgment, yes," Ella says. "But I'll forgive you, just this once."
She feels strong (so strong) and it is enough to let her smile grow wider and watch the woman cower before her. It's...nice. It's not like her, and she realizes that this smile on her lips, the cruel one, which she gives as she asks the woman to pass her the butter - the smile, it's her mother's.
Afterwards her father doesn't look shocked, so he probably didn't hear. Charlie's shirt was ruined by Henry's messy fingerprints and that's where his attention was. Ella smirks at the woman as her husband loops her arm in his. The woman doesn't quite run away when leaving.
But it's close enough.
The water in the bathtub smells like the rose she left on her mother's coffin.
Only, it doesn't. It's not an organic smell – it's plastic, it's an aroma, it's fake – and it is nothing compared to the gentleness of the real flowers that her father plants in the springtime or to the green hills rising over a magical land of fairy tales that she wants to escape to. It's the sick-rose-smell of an apartment in Manhattan, of a bathtub filled with water and soap that doesn't sting children's eyes.
Ella's hands feel cold as they wash Henry, even though the water is boiling hot. She washes him, pours shampoo on his head, and knows that Charlie is watching her from the doorway. A lean, dark shape with his eyebrows raised, he's not quite looming, but a comfort; a reminder. She doesn't need his keen sense of smell, his awareness of the world around him. Maybe because she has her mother's magic, maybe because she knows Charlie just this well - or maybe because she can see his reflection in the tiles. She washes Henry's hair carefully with even strokes, when her fingers itch to press his soft, downy head under the surface. And she wants to run away and to understand why her mother gave up all this, all of this.
Ella washes the shampoo out of her - their - son's hair and Charlie is suddenly beside her, holding the fluffy green towel as she rises up from the floor. The water is dirty and the roses stink. She goes to the sink and turns on the faucet with clingy hands, and in the mirror she can see Charlie toweling off Henry, who squeaks with delight. If Ella were able to travel through this bathroom mirror, she would never come back. But she doesn't try, doesn't lift her hand to touch the surface to see if (because) it might bend. Charlie is watching her. Now is not the time.
(And she is grateful for his presence, because she knows that he suspects. Not all of it, but some. Enough.)
Charlie grins and kisses her cheek. Ella is proud of herself for her restraint. She smiles back and Charlie picks up their son to carry him to his bedroom, fit for a prince. Ella looks down at her hands and sees them in purple satin gloves. She continues to wash them, and then raises her head. The woman in the mirror looks back, just like her mother, just like her mother, just like her mother, just like the Evil Queen in all the fairy tales and Ella has to close her eyes. She has to.
She then hears Charlie's light footsteps in the hall, passing by on his way to their bedroom, and quickly opens her eyes again. He cannot know. Her father cannot know.
Nobody can know.
They would try to take this away from her. And Ella is smart, she knows that all of this is dangerous, and Ella is strong, she could cope. She already copes. She would live. But she looks at the mirror and she can see that the last remains of her mother are in her, are a part of her, and how can she betray all of this? How can she let herself lose this? This is who she is.
She can keep quiet.
Because her mother still lives in her (but Ella is not her mother – she is such a small part in Ella, and it's such a small lie to tell) and it is all that she has left for her daughter.