Val called on a Friday morning in late October to say she wasn’t feeling well. Could he pick Gretchen up from school and keep her an extra night? So that afternoon Grant picked his way through the wet leaves to join a scrum of parents standing outside the gate waiting for the final bell. He was certain that they were shooting looks at him when his back was turned, wondering who this strange man was and which child he had come to abduct. He felt an urge to climb onto the base of the flagpole and make a declaration:

“My name is Grant Mosely, father of Gretchen Mosely. She is in second grade. Her teacher is Mr. Corliss. Her favorite color is green and her favorite food is salami.”

There were other facts about her he would be less enthusiastic to disclose. The way she picked her scabs off and dabbed dots of blood onto her face, for example. Or the mysterious piles of magazine and newspaper pictures cut into microscopic squares that he found under her bed. Sometimes these little piles contained scraps of her sandy hair.

Grant and Gretchen spent most of their limited time together assembling domiciles and other structures critical to fairy civilization: rings of pebbles, carefully arranged leaf mosaics, shallow paths hollowed out with fingernails and sticks.

Grant’s phone rang again. A picture of Val, Gretchen’s maternal grandmother, appeared on the screen: she had Susan’s prominent cheekbones and heavy brow, the eyebrows shaped into twin frowns, lips decorated with the mocha-brown lipstick she favored.

“Hello?”

“Just checking,” Val said. “To be sure you remembered.”

“I’m here.” Grant checked his reflection in a car window, rubbed a hand over his freshly cropped scalp. He had missed a spot, he noticed, above his left ear, and turned slightly, as though Val could see him through the phone, just as he could smell her odor of citrus and Bali Shag.

Gretchen was born via C-section, a surgical procedure that Susan would not recover from. Grant remembered looked at his daughter, the remnants of uterine fluid and blood clinging to the folds in her neck, and felt his parental inadequacy with a cold certainty. I cannot do this thing. I will pollute her developing brain with my fidgeting and my itching. At this announcement something broke free in Val’s face, like a calving glacier. She reached over and took the sleeping  infant from his arms and began to rock, cooing unnecessarily as she glared at him. Grant felt as though he had been transported back to boyhood, fidgeting and itching under the inquisitorial glare of a kitchen light, nose filled with the smell of roasting squash and boiling chicken, frightened that Val, who practiced a deranged mysticism, a mishmash of pentacles, goat-headed monsters, and voluptuous fertility goddesses, would be able to read his thoughts if she stared long enough. But she needed no divine intervention that day; it was clear to everyone in the hospital room that Gretchen would be raised by her grandmother.

Grant saw Gretchen only rarely, brief moments that rasped the lining of his stomach. When she reached toddlerhood her behavior veered sharply, like a car whose driver has fallen asleep. Grant began to suspect he had, once again, made a terrible misjudgment. Suddenly Val’s gift shop paganism lost its air of harmless whimsy. What lay behind her beaded curtains? A chalk circle on the floor, a bubbling cauldron, Gretchen hacking off the limbs of sacrificial barbies?

The mutilated toys were bad enough. But then Gretchen had begun referring to Val as “Mama.”

“She’s not your mama,” he would say, the word funny in his mouth, for he had only ever called his mother “Mother.” “She’s your grandma.”

“She says she’s my mama now that my other mama went to the astral plane.”

 “You can’t just have a new mama. Your mama is who your mama is.” That word again. And again that confusion, that embarrassment.

“But I need a mama. Who else will take care of me?”

“I will,” Grant said. “Daddy will.”

Gretchen laughed each time he said this.

The bell rang. Children surged out of the school, maneuvering through the ranks of parents with the practiced ease of ants through grass. Grant began to panic as he imagined Gretchen wandering around, looking up forlornly into the faces of the other parents. Someone would claim her, take her back into the office. Perhaps there would be an announcement on the public address system, and the other parents would cast their disapproval over him like a wet sleeping bag. But suddenly there she was, looking up at him curiously. She wore a green raincoat with a hood that looked like the head of a frog. She had inherited Susan’s snarled hair and fair skin, along with Val’s dry-eyed, deadpan stare. If Gretchen was surprised to see him there she did not show it, just raised her arms. He lifted her obediently, the stiff plastic coat squealing. She held a paper towel roll decorated with hot-glued buttons and a few streamers. He thought it looked like a rocket, but was afraid to upset her by guessing incorrectly.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“A rocket. A take-you-to-the-moon ship.” She pointed up. It was a clear bright fall day, the blue of the sky a vivid contrast to the mottled oranges, reds, and browns of the turning leaves, the pitched roofs.

Gretchen did not wish to be carried. As they walked home she hummed tunelessly to herself, twisting this way and that. She squatted to examine something in the grass.

“Come on, Gretchen,” he said. She frowned.

“I don’t like that name. I want a new name.”

“What do you think would happen if children could change their names? You’d all have a new name every week. Nobody would be able to keep track of anything or anybody and we would all go crazy.”

She squinted at him suspiciously and began pulling back tufts of grass, examining the dirt below.

“Mama says—”

“Please don’t call her that. OK? It’s just…” he grimaced, searched for the word, gave up. “She’s your grandma. What’s wrong with ‘Grandma’?”

“She’s sick,” Gretchen said.

“No, I mean, why can’t you just call her—”

“She coughs and coughs and her face gets red and her eyes get bloody.”

Grant sighed, scooped Gretchen up and swung her onto his back, where she clung to him silently. A few blocks later: “See there? That’s the one I was telling you about.”

The tree, an enormous bigleaf maple, shared a corner lot with a small white house two blocks from his apartment. It grew out of a ragged rock retaining wall, its branches stretching out over the street as though it wanted to escape. Gretchen skipped up to the tree and stood staring up into its canopy. A few leaves still clung on, dancing in the breeze.

“This is an old tree,” Gretchen said solemnly.

“Yes. How old do you think? Is it going to fall over on us?”

“Someday, Daddy. Old trees have to fall down so the sun can shine on the babies.”

“But not today?”

Gretchen’s face, pale and pinched beneath the frog hood, revealed nothing. Dots of color had come out on her cheeks, and the fog from her shallow breathing issued out in little gusts.

“Do you think any fairies live in this tree?”

“Every tree has fairies.” Gretchen shivered. “The ones that live in this tree are bad. They are wicked.”

“Oh?”

“They like to play tricks on people. Nasty tricks. They’ll do all sorts of mean things and then just laugh about it.”

“I thought fairies were nice.”

“Not all,” Gretchen said blackly. “Some fairies are just mean and that’s that.”

She ran a hand along the tree’s exposed roots, one of which had climbed out and over the rockery. With a sudden shriek Gretchen clamored up into his arms and pointed.

“A black bug.”

“So?” Normally Gretchen loved bugs, would collect them in jars and carry them around. He would often find such jars abandoned around the apartment after her visits and discretely dump the dead prisoners into the trash. “It’s just a beetle, sweetie. Look.” Grant set her down and reached for the beetle, but Gretchen snatched his hand back.

“No, Daddy. It’s a bad bug, full of wicked fairy magic. DO NOT TOUCH IT!”

The beetle had reached the ground and was now making its slow way across the sidewalk. “What would happen if I stepped on him? Would that destroy the evil magic?”

“How should I know?” She squinted at him. “You are the adult. You are supposed to know what to do.”

Grant nodded, scratching at the spot he’d missed while shaving his head.

“We’ll take him to the Ash Fairies,” he said, surprising himself with this decisiveness. “They’ll know what to do.” He scooped the beetle up in a paper coffee cup salvaged from the white house’s trashcan. They walked hand-in-hand the final few blocks to Grant’s apartment, a ground-floor unit in an L-shaped concrete building painted pastel pink. The beetle went into a glass jar, to which they added a few twigs and leaves and set on the windowsill. Grant made Gretchen a sandwich and she sat at the formica table, chewing and looking out at the courtyard with a glassy expression.

The courtyard, the setting for their elaborate fairy epics, consisted of several weed-choked vegetable beds, a ragged band of roses with greyish blooms, and the twisted trunk of an Ash. The Ash Fairies, Gretchen said, loved to dance and frolic, though to Grant they seemed rather dozy. One or another was always getting lost, necessitating dramatic rescue operations that dragged on interminably, during which Grant would descend into a half-conscious daze, following Gretchen’s barked instructions to “send for the butterflies” or “search the prairie,” a reference to an adjacent patch of crabgrass. Grant performed these operations obediently, thoughts straying back to his own lonely childhood: a mother who lost the feeling in her legs, her hearing, and, gradually, her touch with reality; a father who could not find it in himself to speak to anyone else, not even his only son. Seeking escape from his parents’ collapsing silence, he had spent long hours perched atop an earthen levy that divided their yard from the river, building shelters that did not keep the rain out and rafts that did not float. But he was young and undaunted in his childish singularity, not yet freighted with the paralyzing doubt that would seize him a few short years later.

The doubt, when it arrived, did not discriminate. He doubted the quality of his drawings and the sincerity of his father’s smile. He doubted his ability to remember the bus schedule or speak to the other boys without equivocating, stumbling over qualifiers and caveats. He doubted his choice in socks. By high school Grant creaked beneath the weight of this self-examination, agonizing over the simplest decisions. Susan was one of the girls drawn to his moody helplessness. She wanted to protect him from whatever unspeakable terror menaced him, but he couldn’t handle her maternal coddling for long. It aroused in him a stark panic, the sense that by accepting her affection he was giving something else up. Now, in fatherhood, the doubt had lurched from the shadows and bound him once more. He could still find respite in play, the slide into an inconsequential world of make-believe; but periodically he would snap out of it, imagining that Val had arrived for a surprise inspection. “There he is,” she would say. “Down on his knees in the mud.”

Gretchen clambered onto the Ash, leaned into the curve of its trunk, and whispered up into its branches. A soft patter of rain sent the leaves dancing, but it was dry inside the tree’s canopy. She looked down at Grant, nodded and extended her hand. He emptied the jar onto the ground and used a leaf to transfer the beetle to a branch. It was not entirely black; in the center of its head was an irregular yellow blotch which reminded him of a birthmark Gretchen bore on the inside of her left elbow. When he had held her as a newborn Grant had been unable to look away from that angry red mark. He imagined the mark spreading to cover her entire body, a corrupting stain. She would grow up, the scales would fall from her eyes, and she would see, as everyone did, that the world’s happiness was all spoken for.

The beetle took stock of the situation, then began to march.

“What’s going to happen?” Grant asked.

“The fairies see if the bug has an evil heart, or if it has been cursed by an evil fairy. If it is only evil on the outside, they can save it.”

“What if it’s evil on the inside?”

Gretchen looked grimly up at Grant and shook her head. Grant, suddenly antsy, rubbed at the jar’s textured surface with the pad of his thumb. The beetle made its way to the ground and struggled through the crabgrass. Grant followed its progress carefully. From across the courtyard came a hoarse shout and the slam of a door.

“Daddy…” Gretchen’s voice was soft, worried. “Daddy those boys are coming. Come on, let’s go inside.”

“Just a sec. I can’t seem to catch the little guy. Look at him go! Man, he’s scared to death.” The beetle scuttled this way and that, eluding the jar’s pursuing lip.

The boys, four of them, were part of a loose gaggle ranging in age from four to fourteen who lived in the complex and, as far as Grant could tell, had no adults in their lives. They swung from the Ash’s branches, screamed at one another, running in and out of the buildings. Gretchen watched them carefully and kept her distance. She had no interest in their wild, violent games, but loved the tree and played on it whenever the boys’ absence allowed.

  “I want to go inside now,” Gretchen said.

“But what about the beetle? The fairies must have decided he had a good heart, because they let him go. Now we need to take care of him. See? He’s all on his own out here. He came from a different tree, a different place. This isn’t his home. He is afraid. He won’t be able to find food. The other animals will come for him. The birds. There are a lot of robins around here.” Grant looked into the Ash’s upper branches suspiciously.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” Gretchen said. She was staring at the boys, who had finally noticed them and were lurking at a nearby picnic table.

“Fine.” A sluicegate opened inside him and released a torrent of adrenal rage, a moment of thoughtlessness, delirious and delicious. He raised a foot, brought it down on the retreating beetle with a sharp crunch. Just as quickly the fury ebbed. He looked up quickly to see if Gretchen had noticed. She had, and was appraising him with a look of tender, crushing sorrow. She said something that he couldn’t hear. Her voice was small, a pinprick of sound coming from far away. She shuffled close to him, tugged on the leg of his jeans. He took her hand absently, and in a daze they walked towards the door, past the boys muttering to one another and eyeing Grant warily. At the doorway Grant stopped and looked back, marveling at the boys’ mindless capering. He wondered what he would be willing to do for Gretchen to experience such freedom from worry, and decided he was not above killing one of them.

“That was a brave thing,” she said, and leaned in close to whisper: “You released the bug from the evil magic. It’s free now.”

“But I…” he paused. Maybe she hadn’t seen, had somehow missed his fit of petulance. “So the beetle. It had a good heart, then? The fairies told you?”

“Oh no, Daddy, it had lived with the evil magic for too long. Its heart was black and cold. To be free it had to die and be born over again.” Gretchen ran her fingers, still plump with baby fat, along the grooves of his cheeks. Grant closed his eyes. Her touch was light, as was the sound of her breath whistling in and out, delicate on the verge of fracture, a frozen cobweb strung across a garden path. But he could only give himself over to the glorious sensation briefly; the rain picked up, fat drops striking his upturned face. The boys sheltered beneath the tree’s protective branches. Grant scooped Gretchen up and brought her inside, where they cut out paper dolls and drank tea until it was time for her to return to Val’s.

Val did not look well when she opened the door.

“Are you alright?” Grant asked.

“Just recovered from a little bug,” she said.

She didn’t sound as though she had recovered. She sounded as though she had been run over by a coal train. Grant opened his mouth to protest, but a coughing fit seized her and Val, waving him away, pushed the door shut.

That week Grant, for the first time, felt Gretchen’s absence acutely and found himself counting the days until Saturday, his next appointed time with her. He noticed when the courtyard was unoccupied, those moments of stillness when Gretchen would take his hand and lead him outside to check on the fairies. He noticed the extra bread in the cabinet and the strawberries he’d saved for her, withering in their green paper carton.

On Saturday morning Grant called Val again and again as the day slid by, but never got an answer. He sat down at the table, left knee jackhammering, unsure of what to do. Finally he grabbed his coat and drove to Val’s house. Dusk had settled by the time he arrived and the porch was dark, though not so dark as to obscure the sun-bleached Tibetan prayer flags. His knock produced a muffled shuffling from inside. He waited, knocked again. To his left, the curtain over a window was pulled back and there was Gretchen, peering out at him. He waved. She dropped the curtain back into place.

“Gretchen?”

He knocked again. Waited. Went to the window, but the curtain blocked his view. He circled the house until he found an uncovered window and cupped his eyes to the glass. Inside, Gretchen darted across the room and into the kitchen. Grant circled the house several times, calling her name. He couldn’t tell if she was playing a game or was frightened, but his own heart began pounding wildly. She seemed to be alone in the house. When at last she opened the door he swept her up into his arms and stepped inside, his damp shoes squeaking on the vinyl floor. The counters were littered with open bags of chips and boxes of cookies. He turned to Gretchen: “Where’s Grandma?”

Gretchen smiled conspiratorially. Her eyes were red and overwide as though she’d been awake for days, or on amphetamines. The house was quiet, so quiet he could hear the refrigerator hum.

“It’s freezing in here.” He felt Gretchen’s arm; it was cold. Grant wrapped her in his jacket and set her on a chair. She looked tiny and helpless sitting there, her pale face and slender legs poking out. On the floor were several plastic dolls, naked, their hair shorn and piled up. The dolls were arranged side-by-side, on their backs, facing the ceiling, and each had a hole burned through its chest, the plastic black and bubbled.

“They weren’t happy,” Gretchen said, and began to slowly swing her legs. “Mama said she bought them at the store, but they weren’t in a package. They were afraid, and they missed the little girl that they lived with before, who loved them and took care of them and made them safe. It was making them think evil thoughts and plan nasty tricks. I wanted to take them back, but Mama said no. She said if I didn’t want them, she’d just throw them in the trash.” She looked up from her knees and smiled at Grant, a big, open smile, just like the one she’d shown him after he crushed the beetle. “So I set them free. Just like you did.” The smile evaporated. “But Mama didn’t like that. She got mad and had to lie down. Now she won’t get up.”

“How long has she been lying down?” And how long had Gretchen been left to fend for herself? He counted out the days—nearly a week had passed—and felt his surprise start to give way to anger.

Finally a sound: wet coughing from the hallway. Grant shivered, reluctant to pass through the beaded curtain. It was the threshold to Val’s private world, a world he had never seen and did not wish to. But he looked again at the bags of junk food on the counter and saw no way around it. He clattered through the beads and opened the door to Val’s bedroom, releasing a cloud of dry heat. The air was stale and reeked of cigarettes. He turned down the thermostat. A sliver of light from the hallway fell across the bedspread and one pale arm, thin and frail. As his eyes adjusted he saw the rumpled piles of soiled clothing, balled tissues, towels, pill bottles, tea cups, saucers filled with chicken bones. At the center of this wreckage Val lay, frail and diminished. Grant stepped to the side of the bed and snapped on the light. She was breathing, just: a phlegmy sucking sound, punctuated by reflexive coughs. Val’s eyes were closed. She started to mutter and Grant leaned in to listen: a confusing garble about water, life, currents, time. It reminded him of sitting on the levee as a boy and watching the river, exhausted after its tortuous climb down from the mountains, flattened into a sluggish torpor as it transected the floodplain. He recalled the winter morning when, after a week of unrelenting rain, he woke to find the levee breached by a milky green torrent, the spillage running across the road, thick tendrils in the gravel. The waters rose quickly and washed away the road, the cars, the houses in a three-day scouring of the earth. When the waters receded he and his father returned to the property but sand, river, and sky were all that remained.

He used a mustard-colored pillow. There was no resistance. Afterwards he composed her in the bed, smoothed the spread and folded her hands. He expected to feel something—elation, terror. Instead there was only the emptiness of freshly cleared space, like a tree coming down and revealing something you hadn’t seen before. He took the pillow, switched off the light, collected a bag of clothes from Gretchen’s room, and returned to the kitchen. Gretchen remained seated, face expressionless. He handed her the pillow and she hugged it to her chest. She seemed too calm. Shock, he decided. Grant picked her up, and as he did so a strange groaning sound emerged from beneath the coat. He nearly dropped her before realizing it was her stomach. He pulled her close, felt her heart fluttering. She was scared after all. 

“Are you hungry?” he asked. She nodded. “Come on then,” he said, opening the door. “Let’s find you something to eat.”

They emerged into the night. What seemed to most worry Gretchen was the fact that Grant did not have her booster seat. “Mama says I can’t ride in a car without it.” He spent a few fruitless minutes searching before settling for a thick cookbook. Gretchen looked from his face to the cookbook and back several times, her uncertainty growing. She asked after “Mama” several times, looking back at the dark house. A single light glowed from within, a meager splash of orange on the inside of a curtain.

“Mama will be fine,” he said. “Now come on, we have to go.” When she remained standing uncertainly, Grant lifted her onto the cookbook and buckled her down. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. But this will have to do.”