An Echtra

By JD Scott

JD Scott is this month’s winner of $522.50 for a story about knowing your partner.

Bio:  JD Scott is the author of the story collection Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day and the poetry collection Mask for Mask. Scott’s writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere.

They can be found online at jdscott.com and

Without further ado, “An Echtra” by JD Scott.

·         Eddie is different. Eddie is not different from other people. He is different from himself.

That was the first bullet point I’d made for one of my lists, the first list I’d made since the accident. It was a list I had crumpled up, thrown away.

We had met when we were both thirty. I had just opened a small bakery in a building that had been re-zoned for business purposes. The building was two hundred years old and wore its age with dignity. The agent who signed me on referred to it as a shotgun building, but there was a better name for the thin, long wonder: a spite house. Two people, standing side by side, with their arms stretched out in a T-pose could touch wall-to-wall. I couldn’t accomplish that feat when I’d first set up shop though, as I was both the owner and the sole employee.

Eddie was a fledgling professor, an architectural historian. He was working on a book about spite houses, or, as he would tell you, types of buildings that sprung up on odd pieces of land, usually due to stubbornness or disagreements with neighbors. Someone wanted a house built or didn’t want someone else to build one, and that is how my spite house formed. He told me this as he bought a pumpkin cupcake. It was autumn then. The leaves in New England had begun to change. Old houses weren’t exactly rare around here, so I didn’t really get it, but he was polite and charming in a way that had caught me off-guard. I liked the way he said spite as if he was chasing down someone else’s secret. I’d told him to come back any time—that maybe next time I’d let him past the counter. I didn’t think I would see him again, until three days later he came in for pecan crumble.

I wasn’t necessarily interested in the tale of real estate grudges. It seemed like it might be bad for business. Even the name: spite house. Spite doesn’t sell petit fours—and it was no longer a house, was it? I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d wanted the historian to visit again. My investment in the building was solely its low rent. The only interesting part of the building, in my opinion, was the iron staircase in the very back of the miniature kitchen. It led to a second floor (used for storage, although I called it “the office”). I don’t know if the space was necessarily up-to-code for someone to bake in, but the town didn’t seem to mind. A boutique café had gone in before my bakery; it brought the kitchen they’d built closer to my standards.

There was only room for a single table in front of the check-out counter. Eddie sat down with me. I half-listened as he explained the story of the land, who hated whom. He was writing about houses in Massachusetts and Maine. He’d been to the others, said he liked my spite house the best. He said this is what people like him did: wrote books about the past. He said he needed the spite house book to earn tenure. This was the second time we’d met, which is notable since he spoke with such urgency, as if we’d been friends for years.

I showed him the kitchen, and he laughed like a child, moving up and down those iron steps. I thought his book on houses was strictly business, but as I watched him run his hand along the metal banister and tell me the history of its ornamentation, I knew this was a dedication that came from some place deeper. When he learned the stories of old buildings, did he feel like I did when I was decorating cakes? It was only then I began to realize what part of me the extended invitation had come from. I didn’t charge him for coffee that day. I asked if he wanted to answer something about the spite house that I’d wondered.

I stood on one side, lifting my left arm to touch a wall. He’d asked me what I was doing. I told him I had a theory that two people with their arms spread out could cover the width of the shotgun building. He seemed embarrassed, but followed my cue. He made a joke about being crucified. He blushed as we stretched. Our fingertips connected in the middle of the room, proving my theory right. He didn’t laugh, but I could see some satisfaction in his eyes. That is when and what the heart knew.

It must have been mutual: we spent a lot of time together after that. Four months later, we moved in with each other.

This is the Eddie I knew in the first year of our meeting:

·         Eddie grew up in a suburb of Boston. He was very attached to his father, who died when Eddie was young.

·         Eddie is right-handed.

·         Eddie is what I would call co-dependent lite. He doesn’t trust his instincts and relies on me to help him with his decisions. Moving in together so soon was his idea. He is excessively interested in caretaking for each other, although mostly I take care of him.

·         Eddie gets lost in thought, smiles for no reason at all. He remembers old inside jokes and will laugh at them, seemingly out of nowhere.

·         Eddie is a vegetarian and has a small appetite. He likes pickled okra. The only time I’ve seen him ravenous is when I picked serviceberries from trees around town in June, used them to make a pie. He guiltily ate the entire thing. Now I make three every summer, one for him, and one for us. The one for him I call my “Eddie pie.” The third pie is more of a wildcard; I keep it in the freezer for emergencies (deaths in the family, extraordinarily hard days at work…).

·         Eddie excels at talking to strangers and making small talk. He is that guy who wants to talk to you about weather and coupons in the grocery check-out line.

·         Eddie went to finishing school. His mother is a woman of society. He doesn’t get along with his mother. The two rarely talk. He knows the difference between a salad and dinner fork. He knows what a bullion spoon is.

·         Eddie is the son of a daughter of a daughter who emigrated from Ireland. I am too.

·         Eddie is the one I love.

* * *

Eight years passed. My business grew slowly. This was mostly due to my own stubbornness and workaholism. I hired three employees. Eddie published his book, got his tenure. We bought a normal house together (one spite house was enough). We traveled to Boston, Montréal, San Francisco, Portland. We saw koi fish at a botanical garden, ate mushroom risotto with a blanc de noir champagne. He worked a semester in Philly, and we traveled to Pittsburgh together too, going to an opening at the Warhol Museum.

Then, Eddie was awarded a fellowship in Cork. There was a university there, and he was supposed to teach a class in some food-related department. My own culinary interests had rubbed off on him. His new book was on the history of certain Irish crops and foods. Neither of us had been to Ireland, which seemed slightly more audacious on Eddie’s part, given his research interests.

My grandmother, who we called Mamó, had been dead since my late twenties. She would have loved to know that I was finally going to her homeland. She remained my favorite relative: somehow both the black sheep and the matriarch of the family. She cooked a mean stew, made the best soda bread anyone had ever tasted. I gained my skills in the kitchen from her. When she was still alive, we loved to go thrift shopping together. I would look for kitchen utensils and cookbooks. She would look for ceramic figurines of both angels and fairies alike—as well as books related to her homeland. She had an entire shelf of the Mythological Cycle: poems and legends that I’d love to read (or be read to) as a child.

I had planned to go to Cork with Eddie. I had never taken a vacation longer than the three-day weekends that government holidays provided. At the time, I was hiring my fourth employee. Everything had been under control, until my spite house spited me with an unexpected blessing: some reporter wanted to write about the property after reading Eddie’s book—the bakery was featured in The Boston Globe.

They featured a photo of a pastel cake in the article. We’d received too many orders for weddings after that. The plan changed since business was booming: Eddie would start the fall semester alone, and I would join him in mid-October after the season slowed down.

Across miles and oceans, his snapshots appeared on my phone: blood pudding, quays, docks, whiskey cocktails, medieval manors… I was the tourist who lived through his tourism. We were going to save the Blarney stone for my visit. He texted me that he’d already purchased me a gift, he wanted me to have it as soon as possible; he’d shipped it so it would arrive before I left to see him. At odd hours, we would get on video chat. He would tell me about the students and the old, ghostly castles; I would tell him about buttercream and troublesome brides. We always signed off with our love yous.

When I’d wake up early, it was already noon there. He was always the one to wish me good night first—always the one to say good morning while I was beneath the waves of R.E.M. To be honest, I found the distance unexpectedly romantic. I liked the way it felt like I was reaching out to my sailor mate, out in the world, mapping the seas in a different time zone.

* * *

I knew something was wrong that day because I’d woken up with a swollen knee. I knew something was wrong when our rituals broke apart. I felt the atmospheric pressure of a storm coming in my body, as I lied in bed. Picking up my phone, I’d found no new texts.

It was an excruciating day. I didn’t go into the bakery. Regret was the emotion I felt as I tried to remember the other professors he worked with. I fumbled through department directories on the university’s website, looking for a name that felt familiar enough. I second-guessed myself and second-guessed myself again. How could I reach out to a stranger abroad, asking why my love hadn’t texted me good morning? I knew how I would appear, yet I had three email drafts ready to go. I told myself I’d sleep on it, but I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to look irrational, but I couldn’t imagine what had happened to Eddie to make him stop texting.

Good morning, my beloved.

Good night, my pulse.

I sent those emails.

I made chamomile tea, but it did nothing to ease the myths that adrenaline created in my mind to explain the silence. It was in the middle of that insomniac night when a professor had emailed me back. There had been a car crash. Everyone had survived—thank God!—although Eddie had dislocated his knee cap, hurt his neck. They suspected he had a concussion. They wrapped his leg, put him in a neck brace. They were keeping him to run some scans on his brain. The professor said he didn’t want to worry me, but they had asked him those questions:

·         What did you eat for breakfast?

·         What day of the week is it?

·         Who is the current President of the United States?

Eddie couldn’t answer.

His gift arrived in the morning post: a medieval cutlery set made out of cast iron. Their handles ended in little curlicues. I only had enough time to pack my bag, drop the knives off at the bakery, tell my employees I was leaving. I said there had been an accident, and to find a way to hang the knives as décor. They must have found me deranged: running out of the door in a panic, still finding time to give interior design advice.

I flew to Ireland, but I didn’t go anywhere beyond the airport or hotel. From the aerial view, Cork was browner than I had imagined. Eddie was out of the hospital by the time I arrived, but something in his eye had unemeralded itself. He was quieter. With the neck brace on, he looked like a stranger. All parties agreed it would be best for him to come back to the States, perhaps reschedule his visit for another time. That is when and where a divergence happened.

I brought an Eddie home with me. I brought an Eddie home with me who had survived a traumatic brain injury. I brought an Eddie home who later had the neck brace removed, but who still walked on crutches. He seemed to want to deal with his agony alone. I turned to the internet for comfort.

I went on medical websites in secret, looking up symptoms: the human brain can be affected in the aftermath of a traumatic injury. Emotions can be affected. People with extroverted, sunny demeanors can become irritable; both socially and generally anxious; angry; depressed; express feeling overwhelmed; and have unprecedented mood swings.

Although it may be hard for you, the person suffering injury, to deal with—as well as your loved ones—you are not a different person. You have not changed. Your personality is the same as it was before the injury.

You are the same as you always were.

Eddie is not the same.

This is the Eddie I knew after the car accident, the Eddie who moves within a house with me:

·         Eddie is colder. He no longer makes small talk. He is introverted, withdrawn. He seems meaner, although he’s never been directly unkind to me.

·         Eddie loves board games, card games, games of all types. He never was this passionate about games before. Oddly though, when I indulge him, I feel more disconnected than ever.

·         Eddie no longer likes our silverware. He bought us wooden bowls and spoons.

·         Eddie is independent. He comes and goes as he pleases. He makes decisions in confidence.

·         Eddie is left-handed. I called attention to this once. He responded that he was always ambidextrous. Now, he only uses his right hand in my presence, even though it makes him clumsier.

·         Eddie is eating me out of house and home. If I hadn’t talked about his vegetarian diet, I swear he would have eaten meat in front of me. It’s like he doesn’t even remember his own convictions from before. I moved the frozen serviceberry pie from our home to the freezer at work, although I couldn’t tell you why. I felt the call to do it in the way that I sometimes feel my swollen knee predicting emergency.

·         Eddie will not go to physical therapy. He says he feels a bruise that will not go away.

·         In the early morning light, I can look at him from odd angles, and the person in my bed is not Eddie.

·         This Eddie is not the one I love.

* * *

Never having been close to my mother, I found myself driving ninety minutes to her house to have tea. She was a social worker, which from a young age repulsed me, because it infected all of us. Small talk became an invitation to try to sort my life. As much as she repelled me, I suddenly needed her.

I’d even begun making lists more often: a coping mechanism she’d taught me as a child. Despite everything, I respected Mom’s perspective more than anyone’s. I had to keep reminding myself that Eddie’s brain would heal, and then I could talk to my Eddie again. It was hard though, when the old jokes didn’t land. Eddie didn’t laugh like he used to. I told my mother this as I watched her put an extra bag of breakfast tea in—one for the pot.

“Cillian, I don’t know how many different ways to tell you that couples therapy is not the enemy.”

I sighed, slicing soda bread I brought over. I didn’t know how to tell her that we were not a husband and wife. Nuances were lost when you spoke to a counselor who had only imagined a world of married women and men. There were other reasons I was skeptical. The most secret one was that I was afraid a therapist would unlock something in Eddie where he realized he no longer loved me either. That he had changed.

Some part of me held vigil that I could get my old Eddie back, so I couldn’t rock the boat. I didn’t want him to leave me before I could save him. My mother was my only confidante, and even she was someone I couldn’t tell how I truly felt. I couldn’t tell her that I still loved Eddie, but only the Eddie from before the injury. I could not quite form the words to say it yet, but there was something else I was fighting for.

To be truthful, I’d felt warmed by my mother’s worry. Was it because I had desired her love in this instance? Consented to it? I wondered this as I took the butter out. It could also be that Mom was the closest I could get to Mamó, who was the relative I always thought of when I needed advice on matters of the heart.

Once the dead are gone, you begin to summon them less often as you go about your day. The pangs change. I could barely recall Mamó’s voice now, her odd-duck syntax as she delivered a joke. She would often read me fairy stories, bestowing tales of heroes who went to some otherworld to inspire a lesson—like when I was being bullied at school or refusing to eat vegetables. It was her own form of child psychology. I’d wondered if my own mother gravitated toward harder sciences to escape her own mother’s stories, just like I’d gravitated to softer foods to escape my mother’s hardest ways.

Most of Mamó’s lessons were lost on me as a child. I’d nod, pretending. I liked her because she treated me like I was more clever than I was. I thought about her as I sipped my tea. My mother and I sat near the window that overlooked the lake. I asked my mother about her doctor appointments. She asked me about my business. She asked me about the room at the house we were considering wallpapering. I asked if she thought she’d consider retiring at the end of this year. All this time, I was thinking about Eddie. I interrupted her to ask her what she did with Mamó’s old storybooks. She had looked at me with skepticism, as if I’d suddenly revealed that I, too, had suffered a concussion. She carefully told me where she had stored them in the attic.

There are thousands and thousands of fairy books, but none are like the ones you grew up on: those specific illustrations you came to worship. That one stain on the first page from when you’d been eating raspberries, forgotten to wash your hands. As I turned the pages, I remembered an old me I had forgotten too: the one who somehow thought a banshee was going to rise out of the lake and attack me in the suburbs of all places. Monsters and fairies were always closest to my heart.

I’d found myself stopping on a book plate I adored. It was supposed to be a shape-changer, and whoever had drawn this one couldn’t seem to consider what shape they wanted it to be. It was dark-furred, resembling something that was half-rabbit and half-dog. It brought back a memory of running around the backyard with a butterfly net, convinced I could find one to keep as a pet. I’d felt like my Eddie, laughing for seemingly no reason at these old memories.

“There have been worse mid-life crises,” my mom said, watching me come down the stairs.

“There’s a lot of history in these stories. I thought Eddie might like them.”

The thought of me trying to share some part of my past with Eddie seemed to pacify her. She even offered to help me carry them to the car.

“Text me when you get home. Consider therapy, too, please. If not for the both of you, then at least for you. Eddie’s brain injury isn’t just affecting Eddie.”

I’d brought a few of the books for our nightstand, and I was surprised when Eddie was curious.

“What are those?” he had asked with an unprecedented skepticism. Skepticism was good. Old Eddie was inquisitive, curious. He’d only seen me reading nonfiction in our entire time together, so seeing a children’s book in my hands must have been jarring.

I explained they were from my childhood. I asked him if he’d like me to read them out loud. He’d seemed uncomfortable and conflicted, but I wasn’t certain why. I had thought of my grandmother and his own (who had died when he was young)—their connection to that place where he’d been injured. It almost felt like I was twelve years old again, at a party in a dark room, pushing a Ouija board around with friends. Something had changed, and I needed to move a planchette across new alphabets to find the answer.

I read a tale about a little white cat aloud. It was hard to tell if Eddie was amused or bemused. After a time, he either fell asleep or pretended to be asleep to be done with my shenanigans. The stories didn’t calm me as much as I’d wanted them to. I could not go back to that time when Mamó was alive, to those years when she moved in with us, after my father had left my mother for another woman. It was nearly midnight, and I was surprised at how distressed I felt. I closed the book, sitting it on the stack, and then picked up the books to carry them downstairs. I didn’t know what I was doing, besides hunting for a person I loved and sharing a bed with a stranger who no longer loved me.

Something I’d taught myself as a child was that whenever I felt like sneezing or crying, all I needed to do was pinch my nose hard, and the sensation would go away. I was trying not to cry as I went down the stairs. With one hand holding my nose, three books slipped, tumbling. It was then I lost control, letting the tears fall as I scrambled. It was as I restacked them I saw something sticking out of a fairy book: a piece of paper yellowed with age. It seemed to be the final page of a longer letter, but it ended with the following questions:

·         Does the child have unusual features that you do not recognize?

·         Does the child have any birthmarks you do not remember?

·         Have you experienced any bad luck since you suspected the change took place?

·         Does the child cry all the time?

·         Does the child refuse to stop nursing?

·         Is the child remarkably intelligent?

·         Does the child seem withdrawn?

·         Does the child seem sour or bad-tempered?

·         Does the child primarily use his left hand after formerly using the right one?

If the above rings alarmingly true for you, you must telephone me. Please, Siobhan, do not hesitate. Time is not on our side.

Sincerely,

Fionn E. Flanagan, Seanchaí

It didn’t make sense: the context of the letter, or why it reminded me of Eddie, despite having nothing to do with him. Was it the part about using the wrong hand? Why was it addressed to Siobhan, my Mamó’s first name? I read the letter over and over. It was too much. I took melatonin with chamomile. Feeling closer to the unconsciousness I desired, I crawled in bed with that other man, immersed myself in darkness.

* * *

The phone number at the bottom of the letter was a dead end, as had been expected. What was unexpected is that there was a Wikipedia entry on Flanagan. He was one the last of some type of traditional Gaelic storyteller and historian. He would also be pushing ninety. I placed a lot of phone calls from the bakery’s office. My employees must have been nervous, watching me ascend the iron staircase to hide in our storeroom to make call after call. I found a museum curator who knew his nephew who connected me to his daughter who linked me directly to Flanagan.

The phone rang, and he had picked up.

His voice was ancient. His accent was hard to parse too, but at least I had gotten a hold. I’d thought about trying on the guise of a fellow historian to get the information I wanted, but I didn’t know how to pretend to be anything other than a baker. I couldn’t pretend to be contacting Flanagan for any logical reason besides the fact that my relationship was falling apart. All I knew was how to decorate cakes and love Eddie—or else—to hunt down the Eddie I had once loved. I approached this stranger as a fellow human, wondering if anything from that old letter could save me.

Despite his age, he had not lost his spark. Every sentence came out like the beginning of some mythic yarn that had been passed down for thousands of years. Was this what it meant to be a seanchaí? Although he knew his trade, his memory seemed fuzzy. I had said I was from Boston. He wanted to talk about the States, and since I needed him, I was too polite to interrupt his free-associated memories about Fenway Park and some pub where he ate the best French fries of his life. He didn’t initially remember my grandmother when I said her name—when I said I had a letter of his. It wasn’t until I read the list that he became quiet.

“I remember that case,” he interrupted.

Case? Was he some type of hard-boiled detective now?

“Can you tell me what you remember?”

“It was her grandchild. Tell me, Cillian, wasn’t it? Are you a believer?”

Believer in what?

“Her grandchild? I’m her only grandchild.”

We both paused, trying to process what the other was thinking, feeling.

“Ah, so you’re the one who was stolen away.”

Exhausted and desperate, I was ready to follow even the most illogical train of thought. I took notes as he began talking about fairies, and about how some of them steal human babies away. I scribbled about his fairy world as plainly as one writes down a phone number. Changelings was the word he kept using.

These babies are replaced with adult fairies who use magic to look like human children.

“There are ways to tell though.”

“That’s what the list was.”

“Correct. Once we are certain what we’re dealing with, there are ways to force the fairy’s hand, to get it return the human child.”

“What did Mamó do?”

“That, I could not tell you, after so many years. However, if she had not found a way to get you back, we would not be speaking right now.”

I didn’t have time to process, time to think about a young me who had been swapped out with a changeling. All I could say was, “I think it happened again.” I had no memories from when I was a baby. Although I am probably more of a disbeliever by nature, how would refusing to believe I’d been whisked away to some fairy world help me? How would disbelief bring back Eddie?

“Is the baby within earshot of you? The young mother?”

“There’s no baby, and I have no wife.”

I tried to explain the circumstances to the best of my ability. I told him my on-the-spot theory: that something conspiratorial had happened with the car accident, and my partner was replaced. I asked questions about time, distance, weeks, miles between here and Cork.

Although there was something sing-song about his voice, he seemed to lose a little of his music as he dutifully answered. Was he losing faith that Eddie could be recovered? Or did he simply not believe me? The car accident, the injuries. Was I careening toward madness as I convinced myself my normal, concussed partner was being held hostage in another world?

“It is not often that changelings target adults. It’s quite rare, actually.”

I had offered money for a solution, as one does in moments of desperation.

“I don’t need money, and I’m too old to be much of service to you now beyond my words. The advice I have for you requires no charge.”

I heard him flipping through his books over the phone. I imagined him at a mahogany desk in a wooden library, surrounded by dusty tomes.

“You should know that the good folk rarely steal away men. They don’t get much out of us grown-ups. Adults are harder to imitate. Babies do little more than lie there, so they’re perfect targets. Adult lives are too complicated for the good folk, who don’t quite understand what it means to be human. They have spell-work to siphon off memories, but they never quite get the personalities right. They cannot hold a human’s deepest and most cherished memories. That is why you feel the changeling does not love you. There is no way for it to access Eddie’s truest heart.”

“What can I do to get Eddie back?”

“There are always tells. You must get the changeling to confess, and then it will feel obliged to lead you to the real Eddie.”

I felt like both of us were doing something dangerous and borderline illegal by indulging each other with fairy stories, but it was the closest anything felt to right since the accident.

“With babies, you can often make the changeling laugh to catch them. You need to be careful though. The fairy who replaced your Eddie may be a potent one. He may be too clever to resist the easier tricks. I have a list of ways, though, that I can give you. Please know this though: the good folk are incredibly dangerous.”

I was a tenacious baker with tattoos of pastries going up and down my arms. I rolled out phyllo in a spite house on a daily basis. I had once been compared to a honey badger by an ex-boyfriend. I was too deep into this now to be scared of fairies. More than anything, I thought about what would happen if I were in Eddie’s place instead. Eddie was astute, dedicated to learning. He would use all his cleverness to outwit a changeling. He would save me without question. What option did I have, except to use my dumb perseverance to save him?

I offered Flanagan the bakery’s address. I couldn’t risk having his list sent to the house.

“A letter?” he said, slightly offended. “My good sir, I know how to use email.”

That was the moment the two of us laughed. He went on an aside about how when stolen children are recovered they emerge with unusual talents. He said my baking skills may come from the good folk. After that, his voice became dark again.

“Siobhan was able to convince the changeling to bring you back to her. With your Eddie, you may have to do the opposite—you may have to go into their world.”

He said he would include other information in his email: how to bind a fairy, how to make a request. He gave me warnings about fairy hospitality—how I must never eat or drink anything in their world—but I shouldn’t refuse their offerings either. It was a moment when I should have probably paid the closest attention, but it was hard to focus when all I could think about was the inscrutable logic of a world where Eddie could be stolen away from me. Flanagan and I had said our goodbyes, and his list arrived to my email a few hours later.

What was time? What were minutes when Eddie had been gone for months? How did weeks pass in the otherworld? I knew my next thought was unhinged, but I had to call my mother. I had to use discretion, yes, but if everything Flanagan had said to be true was true, there were risks I needed to account for.

“I might be taking a trip,” was the first thing I could think of after she picked up. I realized, once our voices were connected, that I hadn’t thought this through properly.

“A trip?”

I tried to shrewdly explain that I’d suspected Eddie had been kidnapped from our home. She had yelled at me, asking why I didn’t call the police. I tried to remain calm.

“It wasn’t from our house. The person in our house is not Eddie. The real Eddie was taken away in Ireland, during the car accident.”

As expected, that sentence took my mother awhile to process.

“Cill, I am incredibly sympathetic to what you are going through, but you have to listen to yourself. Think about how heartless you would appear to Eddie if overheard you. Your partner was in a car accident—he could have died!—but thankfully he lived. He is there with you. Right? Eddie was not taken away, right?”

I winced. She continued.

“Eddie has suffered brain trauma due to a concussion. Who put those kidnapping ideas in your head? Were you on some internet forum? Conspiracy theories about laboratory clones is not going to help either of you process what happened.”

In the gaps of silence between her sentences, I could tell her mind was racing alongside mine. I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t some conspiracy theory, but she actually might involuntarily commit me if I told her about the fairies. If Mamó had rescued me from a changeling as an infant, my mother had nothing to do with it.

“I’m coming over. Are you home or at the bakery?”

I had only called her as a warning. If I went to some otherworld and didn’t come back, I wanted her to know peace. Talking about kidnappings was probably not the best route to tranquility.

“Mom—Mom!” I shouted over her. “I’m working, and if you come here, I will have you escorted off the premises.” I rarely sounded this angry. I grew embarrassed that everyone downstairs could hear me shouting. “We have a lot of orders to fill. Don’t worry about me.”

“Cillian—”

“I love you,” I huffed, hanging up the phone.

I wasn’t convinced I had pacified her, but hopefully she indulged the possibility that I might actually call the cops on my own mother if she came here without my permission.

It was the time to get Eddie back. I knew what I had to do. I picked up the phone again, and made one more call.

By the time I’d come downstairs, it was already fifteen minutes after closing. My bakery’s manager was waiting. She said she’d heard me shouting, felt worried. I consoled her more than she consoled me, and soon we’d said our goodbyes, and I was alone. I didn’t have much time. I thought about the third Eddie pie hidden in the bakery’s freezer: the one reserved for emergencies. I began the one ritual I knew best from the land of humans, pulling out a Sharpie alongside a piece of receipt paper. I started making a list—a private one—for me, alone.

* * *

I heard the tap on the front door, and as I opened it, I thought about how his knock had a different rhythm than it used to. I was the one who kissed him first. After the accident, he always giggled slightly when my lips moved in. An anxious giggle was not a full-blown laugh, though. It was not the tell that Flanagan had described. I had to do more.

Eddie had asked why I’d have him come to the bakery when I rarely invited him over anymore. I felt guilty, like maybe I was the one who had changed. I had to push onward with my convictions though, because I knew the Eddie I was talking to was not my Eddie.

When I had called him, I told him there was a surprise. The reveal: a story about how I had new recipes I was trying out; I wanted him to taste-test.