Fair Peril Read online

  “But as she gave away the apple she could hear what she had not been able to hear before. She could hear what the birds were saying. A hawk flew over and cried, ‘Here comes your mother.’ A meadowlark flew up and sang, ‘Your true mother.’ A wood thrush called, ‘Your true mother who loves you.’ And because the birds had opened her ears, the little girl could hear the loud princess miles away, running toward her and crying, ‘MY DAUGHTER, MY BABY, WHERE IS MY LITTLE GIRL?’ And the little girl jumped up and cried out, ‘Mama! Here I am!’”

  Buffy had meant to go on, to settle the pair of them in a cottage in the woods where the birds would feed them and they could live happily ever after. But the lump in her throat made her end the story there. She sat down.

  “Is that all?” Adamus asked, his voice hushed and froggy.

  “Yes.”

  “It was wonderful. Please, tell another one.”

  Buffy straightened in her chair and peered at him. The pupils of his eyes glistened like black tears.

  “You really liked it?”

  “Yes! It consoled me. It charmed me back to when I was …” His voice trailed away.

  The frog’s emotion stunned Buffy. She was used to lukewarm reactions at best. Her husband had never listened to her stories, any kind of stories, whether stories she made up or stories she memorized and told or stories she saw in tabloids or something that had happened to her at the supermarket or the story of her life—Prentis had not wanted to listen. Her children—Marjorie, married now and living in Wisconsin; Curtis, finishing college; Emily—even before they had reached their teens, they had not wanted to listen. Kids at schools and birthday parties squirmed, wanted to play video games, listened only because the adults made them, as if stories were spinach, good for you. Even the mirror on Buffy’s bathroom wall listened only with a cynical glint.

  But Adamus had listened raptly, with eyes that shone like the night.

  Buffy did not know what to say. “Do you want your supper now?” she blurted.

  “No, thank you. I do not need to eat every day. I could not eat now. Your tale is ringing in me.”

  Buffy sat dumb with gratification.

  Adamus said, “It is not a tale I have heard before. Where did you come by it?”

  “I made it up.”

  “You made that? But—but it echoes like bells no mortal should hear.”

  The frog’s praise and astonishment were genuine, warm, yet Buffy flashed cold. Bells no mortal should hear? Overstatements like that scared her. “It’s just a story,” she mumbled.

  “Just a story? Is ‘Cinderella’ just a story? Is ‘Beauty and the Beast’—”

  Now, wait a minute. “I am a storyteller,” Buffy interrupted, protecting her turf as a pro. “I know the fairy tales, I use them in my work. But I’m not crazy. I don’t believe them.”

  Silence. The frog sat like a green-mottled stone.

  “They’re just stories,” Buffy said.

  Like a chill wind through bluebells, the frog said, “Am I just a story?”

  Buffy got up. It was only seven o’clock, Emily was probably still at the mall with a dozen friends, most people were just starting their evenings, but she didn’t care. It had been a strange day. “I’m going to bed.”

  “But it is not true that you do not believe,” Adamus said. “You do believe. You must. You can hear me. Many princesses passed by that pond, but you are the only one who could hear me.”

  Bullshit. The frog had to be some sort of gimmick, like, the government was experimenting with spy technology and she had found their escaped frog or something. What the teachers used to call a miracle of modern science back in high school, which was about the time Buffy had given up wondering how things worked. In her experience, women usually gave up their curiosity. It was no use. Wondering how the car worked, or the bank’s computer system, or the State Department, would get you nowhere. For women, the world ran on lipstick and luck. Finding the right husband. Finding a talking frog.

  Buffy said, “Good night.”

  “No. Let me out,” the frog begged. “Please. I am an exile in a strange body and now you have put me in this glass prison—”

  “Listen, I’ll give you everything you need,” Buffy told him. “Food, light, warmth, your own little wetland, vetting if you get sick—what’s the problem? You’re safe with me. No snakes or herons, nothing to hunt you—”

  “Will you kiss me? Kiss me or let me go!”

  “Good night.” Buffy turned off the light. In his glass palace the frog squatted, an algae-colored lump, silent, his throat pulsing like a beating heart.

  Emily drove to the mall in her new Probe, cruised the parking lot, saw no cars she recognized, and slumped in the driver’s seat, reaching out to pat the stuffed bunny nesting on her dashboard to reassure herself she was not completely alone. She did not want to go into the mall if none of her friends were there. Her friends were her real family. “Mom thinks I’m a materialistic twerp,” she told the bunny. Adults didn’t understand that shopping was an excuse to be with other kids and also a solace for not being at home with two actual parents—stepparents didn’t count—two real parents who still loved each other. Emily knew a couple of kids who had that kind of parents, the kind who got married once and stayed together. Those kids were lucky. She hated them.

  Mom probably cares more about her new pet than she does about me.

  Mom obviously didn’t want to be bothered. Mom hadn’t even gotten upset about custody or tried to keep her. Sure, go ahead, no problem, let the kid live with her father where she had to get out of the house every evening or else see her father getting all puffy-panty-kissy-face with whatsername, the new wife, walking-talking blonde joke, only ten years older than Emily, maybe twelve years, or else had some really good plastic surgery—and Emily was supposed to call her “stepmother”? No way. No way could this woman ever be any kind of mother to her.

  “I’m a blonde,” Emily said to the stuffed bunny, “but at least I’m a real blonde. She did it to herself. The baby goo-goo eyes. The giggle. The whole routine.”

  The woman was so much like her, so much like she might be in ten years if she wasn’t careful, that it scared her.

  “My father’s a twit.”

  The ache in her chest made her feel like feeding her face. But she resisted the urge to go looking for food. She didn’t want to get like that, like her mother.

  “Let’s check one more time,” Emily said to the bunny, which was fading from a realistic brown to a mellow yellow from sunlight. She drove around the lot again. No, none of her friends were there. It was too early.

  “Dammit.” Emily expressed herself via the gas pedal and varoomed out of there.

  Her father was with his bimbo. Her mother was gabbing with a talking frog.

  Emily stopped thinking about her sucky parents, specifically her mother, and started thinking about the talking frog. Awesome, the shivery feeling he had given her—she was feeling it again just thinking about him. What was he? Something exciting, important, forbidden. She knew by the tingle in her spine. She knew by the way her mother had shoved her away from him and the way her mother had—lied to her, let’s face it, telling her, “Nothing,” like when she was little and asking about what double beds were for.

  Emily headed toward the library.

  “Talking frogs,” she said to the guy at the children’s desk, a weird old guy if she’d ever met one, but he knew every book in the library. “Isn’t there some sort of story about talking frogs?”

  “Absolutely.” He found a three-inch-thick volume and placed it in her hands. “They knew what was important. They put it up front. Have a look at the very first tale.”

  The library had an outdoor courtyard with a fountain. Emily took the fat book there, sat on a bench in the sunshine, put her feet up on the stonework rim, and opened The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

  In olden times, when wishing still helped, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful,
but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which had seen so many things, was always filled with amazement each time it cast its rays upon her face.…

  Emily read on.

  “What a babe! Hey, beautiful!” Someone tapped on the glass doors. Intent on what she was reading, Emily scowled at the interruption, looked up, then smiled. It was some of her friends, a few boys, several girls. She had forgotten; they had term papers due tomorrow. Naturally they were at the library.

  “Whatcha doing, Emily?” They came out to the sunny courtyard.

  “Nothing.” She turned back to the story of the frog who was crying, Princess, princess, youngest daughter, open up and let me in.

  Her friends surrounded her. They sat on the bench with her, they sat at her feet, they leaned over her shoulders and teased her as she finished reading. Yet, reading about the prince with kind and beautiful eyes, Emily felt all alone.

  Buffy went snarling to her job in the morning. “Didn’t get much sleep,” she grumbled to a co-worker.

  “Why not?”

  “Stupid frog kept me awake. Croaking.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve got this frog in the aquarium.”

  “You mean croaking as in, dead?”

  “No, dammit.” Though at 3 A.M., Death To The Frog had appealed as an option. “I mean noise pollution.”

  Why would a talking frog CROAK? But Prince Adamus the Articulate had made her night hell not talking, just CROAKING, resonant enough to vibrate the bungalow, like an ordinary bullfrog. Rumpled of hair and temper and pajamas, Buffy had expostulated with him repeatedly, but he had merely stared back at her, and frogs don’t blink; it was impossible to outstare him. It was impossible to tell whether he was honking and quacking away as a form of psychological warfare aimed at depriving her of her sleep, or whether the so-called ensorcelled prince was truly in ranine mode, croaking for the imperative frogginess of it—swelling rhythmically, his bubble of throat puffing huge, vibrating as he emitted a sound like the combined belch of a thousand beer-swilling husbands—because it was mating season.

  “What are you keeping a frog in the house for?”

  “Don’t ask,” Buffy muttered, going about her job with even less than her usual lack of luster. When she had suddenly needed employment, she had spent a hellish week at a Trojan factory first, stroking warm latex off ranks of militarily erect, sleek steel penises marching out of the machine. Just what she had needed at that low point in her life, pricks on parade. Then she had landed this job in the artificial-food plant, where all day she counted and packaged and boxed fake fried eggs to decorate the cooktops at Sears, fake sandwiches and dewy-fresh plastic pseudo-lettuce to go in the refrigerators on the sales floor, fake hyperrealistic wedges of pie and cake for the dessert trays at Denny’s and other fine restaurants. Chocolate-marshmallow-peanut ice-cream sundaes that would never melt. Brownies à la mode. Buffy remembered being at a restaurant once where the waiter had actually touched the plastic lemon meringue pie with his fingertip as he pointed it out, totally destroying the illusion. Ick. Buffy went through her days disgusted and dreaming of real nutrition. Given her druthers, if she had to work at some kind of scut job she would have held down a sales counter at a mall, where stories would walk past all the time. She had long since decided the food factory was not good for her—she tended to go home and eat Twinkies by the box—but she had not tried to find other work.

  She fell asleep at her work station twice that afternoon. Keep that up and she’d have to find another job.

  Driving home, she promised herself Tastykake powdered donuts instead of Twinkies.

  The frog was lolling in his personal pond when she entered the house. “Listen, virago, either kiss me or let me out of here,” he began immediately. “I am a prince of—”

  “Shush a minute.” The light on the answering machine was flashing. Buffy pressed the play button, and the results startled Adamus so much that he dropped his monologue.

  “It’s talking!”

  The opportunity for sarcasm slipped right past Buffy; she had gone rigid. “It’s her!” She swatted the machine to silence it. “Jesus! She’s got the incredible nerve calling me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s the Trophy Wife! My ex’s little-bitty-assed gold-plated prize. I can’t believe—”

  “What was that she named you? Madeleine?”

  Buffy stood hyperventilating, too livid to explain that all hippie-generation women with ugly and unmanageable monickers nicknamed themselves Buffy, though perhaps not all of them had proceeded to marry bastards. “She would,” she muttered. Of course the Trophy had called her Madeleine. “I’m not going to listen to—I don’t have to—oh, shit, I can’t stand it.” She rewound the tape and swatted the machine back on.

  “Hi, Madeleine?” Dahling. “This is Tempestt.” Her socool voice somehow conveyed the preciousness of the redundant t. “Madeleine?” Rub it in. “Emily has asked me to hire you, and she specifically mentioned, uh, your talking frog, to tell stories at her sleepover party this Saturday night. If—”

  Buffy turned the machine off again. “I won’t do it.”

  But—had Emily really asked for her? Emily wanted her own mother at her party?

  “I’ve got to do it. But they’re not gonna pay me.”

  “I won’t do it,” Adamus said.

  “Yes, you will.”

  “Be a captive curio? Gawked at like a slave on an auction block, laughed at? I won’t.”

  “Hate to tell you, Addie, but yes, you will.”

  “I won’t talk.”

  “Ve haf vays to make you talk.”

  “I’ll curse. I’ll blaspheme. I’ll shock the children and make them faint. Boogers of God!” Adamus swelled up, then jumped up, energized by his own daring. “Spittle of God! Toe lint of God! CROTCH of God!”

  Buffy laughed so hard she had to sit down. Adamus deflated.

  “But—you laugh at blasphemy?”

  “Why not?”

  “But—” The frog’s wide, blotchy, mud-green face looked even more pop-eyed than normal with dismay. “But—don’t you believe?”

  “Not in any toe-lint sense, no.” Buffy’s religious beliefs were hazy, and she preferred to leave them that way. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus, either. Or the Easter Bunny. Or the Tooth Fairy.” The frog’s ogle-eyed presence, walking-talking proof that maybe she should believe in something, discomfited her. “Of course, I do believe in fairy princes,” she added sarcastically, her voice rising. “Cinderella kissed a fella, all that fairy-tale stuff. Why not? I could use a fairy godmother.”

  With a thud the refrigerator went dead. Simultaneously the answering machine beeped off and the Gro-Lite flickered out. A dozen anonymous household machines quit, and in dim silence the frog sat tensely, head cocked, listening. Buffy could hear it too: an unidentifiable, almost mythical sound, like distant geese flying or winged wolves or banshees wailing, far and high in the sky.

  “Oh ho,” Adamus said softly. “You’ve got to watch what you say. Now you’ve done it.”

  “Done what? It’s just a power outage.” Because the electricity had gone out, a person could hear things, that was all. Probably traffic. Echoing against the clouds or something.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Now what?” Buffy heaved herself up to get it.

  There on her doorstep stood a sixtyish woman with hair dyed so stiffly blond it looked like it had been spray-painted gold. She wore massive gold circle earrings, a gold unicorn pendant, a cheap white sweater with tacky pseudo-gold dangles and beads all over it. Because of her golden spike-heeled boots, her droopy rear in its white polyester stretch pants protruded from under the sweater and her gold-draped boobs thrust forward, albeit from a rather southerly sector of her chest. She carried a gold purse the size of a Welsh corgi, somewhat battered and rubbed; brown leather showed through the golden surface. Her eyelashes were gilded with glitter mascara. Some of it had fallen off and caught i
n the creases flanking her mouth. The woman’s middle name ought to be “Ormolu.” Buffy felt dourly surprised, as always, that her former mother-in-law did not wear gold lipstick.

  She felt more surprised to find her at her door.

  “Fay,” she said, trying not to sound either too falsely welcoming or too nonplussed. “What can I do for you?” The relationship between her and her mother-in-law had been cautiously cordial but never warm. This was the woman, after all, who had raised Prentis to be the way he was. Mama’s little crown prince.

  “Power outage, my sweet patootie,” said Fay severely. “Power outrage, is more like it. Power scandal.”

  “Huh?” Buffy absorbed little of this, being hung up on the sweet patootie. I wrinkle, therefore I yam? “Sweet what?”

  “Fairy tale is NOTHING TO BE SCOFFED AT.” Fay advanced upon the door, and Buffy was sufficiently flabbergasted to back up. A white-and-golden frigate, Fay sailed into the kitchen.

  In the aquarium, Adamus leaped about like oversized green popcorn, yelping, “Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother! Fairy Godmother!”

  “It’s just my mother-in-law,” Buffy protested.

  “Fairy Godmother!” the frog appealed like a tattling kid. “Make her kiss me. Get me out of here!”

  Fay was looking around as if she saw no frog, heard no frog. “You’ve got mud on your floor,” she said, apparently to Buffy, though she was looking at the mud. “And what’s that, dead beetles?”

  The unspoken message came through loud and clear: No Wonder Prentis Left You. Buffy allowed herself to be rude. “Fay, what are you doing here?”

  Looking around, perhaps mentally cataloging the cobwebs in the corners and the grease on the stove, Fay did not answer, but Adamus leaped at the glass and shouted, “She has come to rescue me!” Leap. “I am Prince Adamus d’Aurca!” Leap. “You warthead, don’t believe in anything, how do you think I talk?” LEAP leap. “A frog can’t talk. A frog has no ribs. But I have ribs.” The frog ricocheted wildly, splashing water out of the aquarium onto the muddy floor. “A frog has barely any brain. But I have access to the biggest brain there is. I—”