Mother Nature is a bitch, Laurel had whispered conspiratorially to me. Why didn’t she give new mothers something useful, like larger bladders or husbands who might actually change a diaper?
I hadn’t wanted to admit to her that Peter did change Chloe’s diapers or that I found Esta’s explanation reassuring. Maybe it meant I wasn’t going crazy after all. Maybe—
I hear the creak again. There’s definitely someone on the stairs. I get up, careful not to disturb Chloe, and pad barefoot into the sitting room. Light spills down the spiral stairs like water cascading over flat stones. The stairs are empty but now I hear another sound coming from the floor above—a ruffling sound, like wings. Maybe there’s a bird trapped in the room above.
Once when Chloe was only a few weeks old a sparrow got into the house. I’d taken the screen off a window to get a wasp out—several wasps, actually. They’d made a nest under the roof and were getting into Chloe’s nursery somehow. I was terrified one would sting Chloe and she’d turn out to be allergic and go into anaphylactic shock.
Call the exterminator, Peter told me. But I was afraid they would use chemicals that would hurt Chloe, so I’d devised a system of waiting till the wasps, drawn by the light, landed on the windowpane, at which point I’d whisk them out with a dust mop.
Then one day I forgot to close the window and a sparrow flew in. Once in the enclosed space it panicked and flew wildly back and forth, slamming into closed windows and walls. I tried to use the mop to guide it out but that just increased its panic—and mine. Every time it hit a wall or window I felt my own heart slam up against my rib cage, as frightened as that stupid bird. It didn’t help that Chloe was shrieking. The sound of her crying, that damned bird flying around, it had all made me feel . . . trapped.
But I wasn’t trapped, I remind myself as I start up the stairs, gripping the narrow iron banister, placing each foot carefully on the smooth, slippery wood; I’d gotten out. As I come up onto the second floor I see that the room is a windowless octagon, lined floor to ceiling with books. The only furniture is a circular table with two heavy carved chairs pulled up to it. There’s a lamp on the table but it’s not lit. The light and the sound are coming from the next floor.
The stairs leading up to the top of the tower are narrower and made of iron instead of wood. The spiral is so tight I feel like a snail squeezing my body into a new shell. By the time I ooze through this corkscrew I’ll be contorted into its shape, molded into something new.
What I am, when I get to the top, is dizzy from going round and round. The room spins like a top—an eight-sided glass top. This is where the light was coming from. A full moon shines through the open skylight and wide plate-glass windows. When the room stops spinning I see that the view stretches for miles over hundreds of wooded acres. That sea of green on my phone has been transformed into a silver forest. I might be Rapunzel up in her high tower with only my own hair as an escape plan. It takes my breath away seeing how far I’ve come.
This is what you wanted, a voice says. Laurel? Myself? I can no longer tell the difference. But somehow I can finally breathe. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten away. I’ve escaped. And that sound—
I cross to a rough wood table under one of the windows. It’s just a ledge really, but someone has used it for a writing desk. There’s a notebook lying open, pages white in the moonlight, turning in the breeze from the open window. That’s what was making the ruffling sound. Not a bird, just these pages.
Still, as I approach the book, I half expect it to dart out from under my fingertips like that damned sparrow that had finally bashed itself to death against the bars of Chloe’s crib. Peter had come home to find me sitting on the floor with the dead bird in my lap, Chloe screaming in her car seat.
The image is so disturbing I look away from the book—out the window—and notice that the woods below are not unbroken. I can make out some buildings below, a stately brick Victorian structure with two wings and a clock tower at its center, the clock face glowing like a second moon. It sits in a network of meandering paths and smaller buildings. It looks like a college campus or a country club, but it must be the hospital. I stare at it for several minutes, looking for the escaped lunatic of my imagination, but the grounds are so quiet I would think it was deserted if not for the smattering of lit windows and pathway lamps. Celebrity rehabs, anorexic teenagers, overworked CEOs, I repeat to myself. All as harmless-sounding as “postpartum depression.” Nothing to worry about.
I look down at the book and read the spidery script.
. . . and when she came out of the woods she found that what she carried was a senseless lump of wood . . .
It’s a handwritten draft of the changeling story. Schuyler Bennett must have written it here, looking out over all these acres of woods, like the woods the girl in the story has to walk through. Like the woods I’ve driven through with Chloe—
Chloe. The name intrudes as insistent as a baby’s cry. Suddenly I have that terrible feeling I had in the car that I have left her behind. Did I put a cushion on the other side of her before
