It was magical.
The driveway meandered through a meadow alive with slender trees, their bright green leaves trembling. And so was Mimi-trembling with anticipation.
There were wildflowers, all kinds of them. She would get a book. Was there a bookstore in Ladybank? A library? But even without a book, she knew a black-eyed Susan when she met one, and there were hundreds of them, hundreds of Susans waving at her.
And there were buttercups, and pink things.
At a weeping willow, the driveway veered right and passed into a copse of slender who knows what and some other kind of tree, still in showy bloom, though it was already July. Dogwood? The name came to her, but her knowledge of flora and fauna came mostly from fiction. So all she could say with any authority was that it was beautiful. Something from a fairy tale.
“There’s this tulloch-that’s what they call it,” Marc had told her. “In the meadow out back of the house. Back in Scotland, a tulloch is usually a fairy mound. Keep your eyes peeled!”
But it wasn’t fairies Mimi was thinking of as she glided along the overgrown driveway. This was Wind in the Willows territory. And around the next turn, she would surely meet the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Or Dusk, more likely, since it was getting on in the day.
She came at last to what she knew there would have to be, a tiny bridge to cross the snye. She pulled the car to a stop in a dappled grove and turned off the ignition.
“Snye,” Marc had said, as if it were something sexy, a sly new four-letter word. “A side channel that bypasses a falls or rapids and rejoins the river downstream, creating an island. A narrow, meandering thing that sometimes comes to a dead end.”
The quiet flooded into her, but it was a busy kind of quiet full of insect sounds and birdsong and the wind in the… well, the willows! She climbed out of the car, stretched and yawned, and looked around. It was half fairy tale, half impressionist painting, and half golden-age Disney. “Yeah, so I suck at math,” she muttered to Ms. Cooper. Ms. Cooper wasn’t listening anymore. “Good baby,” said Mimi, patting the hot and dusty side of her car. She shook her head in wonder and went to examine the bridge.
She was lucky she had stopped.
The bridge only covered a span of about twelve feet but was built over two stone arches, the second of which had crumbled into the stream. Mimi rested her hands on her hips and considered the problem. The narrow drive curved again up ahead, but she could see glimpses of the house between the foliage. It looked as if she would have to complete her journey on foot.
She headed back to the car and was just about to lock the doors when a squirrel chattered at her from a branch not far above her head. Mimi laughed.
“Thanks for reminding me,” she said. And she deliberately did not lock her doors. This was why she was here, wasn’t it? To stop locking things up…
The grass beside the driveway was damp. She slipped out of her black-and-red flip-flops and, oh, how cool the earth was under her tired feet. She made her way down the bank to the stream-the snye-a totally magical name. And because of it-this tiny gurgling stream-the other side was an island. Not a very adventurous island, hanging so close to home like this, but an island all the same.
There were water lilies. Of course.
“Snye,” she said, “you are too picturesque for your own good. Do you realize that?”
The stream was clear and not very deep, no more than a foot or so, she guessed. The bed was sandy. Minnows glinted. Jesus bugs flitted across the surface, an everyday miracle. All of it was a miracle. She didn’t see anything down there that might nibble on her: no crawfish, suckers, crocodiles. She breathed in deeply and closed her eyes and let the sound of the stream enter her and calm her city brain. The sound of the stream also reminded her of how badly she needed to pee.
She could do it here, surely, she thought, looking around at a grove that was about as treacherous as a postcard. But, for all the traveling she had done in her nineteen years, she was a girl from the Upper East Side, and outside was outside wherever you were.
She needed to ford the snye, but her capris were too snug to roll up. So she headed back to the car and opened the back door. She looked around at the pretty vale-360 degrees-and then, satisfied that she was alone, she shimmied out of her pants and stuffed them in the suitcase that was open on the backseat. She was wearing a thong, and the air felt silky on her naked backside. She found a pair of cutoffs and slipped her shirt back on, though she didn’t bother to button it up.
The water came to just above her knees, deeper than she’d thought. Looks were deceptive, even in pretty vales. She climbed the other bank and slipped her wet feet into her flip-flops before taking to the road again.
And next thing she knew, she was standing in a beautiful wild garden, before a house that was truly something from a fantasy. Not that it was made from gingerbread. Not that it was grand. It wasn’t the slightest bit grand. In fact, it was small in scale, like a toy house that had grown up but never really made it into full-blown adulthood. A Munchkin house. There was one gable above a tiny porch with a shed roof held up by pillars to either side of a door that had once been blue. The green roof was dappled with moss and patched here and there, the porch tilted drunkenly forward, and one of the three steps had rotted away. The clapboard was in serious need of paint. It was a dingy white, but it glowed in the west-leaning sun and the windows to either side of the front door gleamed like mirrors reflecting trees and sky. Despite its grungy hide, the house looked far from deserted. It looked loved and welcoming.
For maybe the first time in her life, she blessed her father. He’d finally come through. He had abandoned her when she was scarcely two, and she had hated him for years before bothering to get to know him. And, yes, she was hungry and road weary and she needed desperately to find a bathroom, but for one moment she forgave her father everything.
The plinth under the left-hand column contained a secret drawer in which she found a little tin key box. Yes! Her father had not been here in over twenty years, and the key was just where he said it would be.
She carefully climbed the steps-what was left of them-to the front porch, which was slippery with rot. The flooring bent under her weight.
“All those potato chips,” she muttered. She’d work it all off. She imagined herself in a sky-blue do-rag and yellow Oshkosh overalls, with little Disney bluebirds circling her head as if she was some kind of Snow White, returning the cottage to its pristine comic-book self. She would whistle while she worked. Or not. She had never really gotten the hang of whistling.
She tried the key. It didn’t fit.
She tried again. She pushed and pulled and jimmied without success. And then, when she looked closer, she realized that the key was a lot older than the lock. In fact, the lock looked new.
She stepped back from the door. She looked at the nearest window. She could not see inside, but she could see what she hadn’t thought to notice at first. Marc had said the windows would be boarded up. None of these windows was boarded up. She felt cold all over. The wrong house?
She backed down the steps, slipping and falling to one knee.
Ridiculous! There couldn’t be two enchanting little white gabled houses with keys hidden in secret drawers. Not unless she had entered a parallel universe. And Mimi hated parallel universes.
Then she remembered her contingency plan. The back door.
“Who knows what the weather will have done to the place,” her father had said in his e-mail. “The back door exits into a little shed. There are shelves along the back wall of that shed, and on the top shelf there are old cans of paint. Behind the green can, you’ll find the back-door key on a nail.”
Mimi scurried around the house to the shed. The shelf along the back wall was still there and so were the cans of paint. She lowered the one whose label was stained green and behind it there was, in fact, a key.
She was just reaching for it, when she heard a noise behind her and glanced back to see a man standing at the entrance to the shed.
“Can I help you?” he said in a voice that did not sound as if he had help in mind.
She turned to face him, pulling her shirt closed. There was no escape. But his voice was young, and Mimi was not easily intimidated.
“I asked you a question!” He had lowered his voice, not in volume, but in pitch, and it made Mimi think of someone who was trying to sound more menacing than he really was. A skinny someone. There were, after all, some skills a girl learned living in the big bad city.
“Well, since you asked so nicely,” she said, “I was looking for this can of paint.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You were looking for the key.”
“Got me,” she said. “And, by the way, who the hell are you? No wait, hold that thought. I have been driving all day, and if I don’t get to a bathroom pretty quick, we’re both going to regret it. Me more than you, obviously, but you get my point.”
He approached her, angrily, and she stepped out of his way, throwing up her hands, wondering if she had been mistaken about how harmless he was.
“I don’t have a cent on me,” she said.
He stopped directly in front of her, a head taller than she was but with eyes that while serious could hardly be called menacing. And what she saw hanging around his neck gave her hope.
“Well, actually I did dab on some Trouble by Boucheron, but I have no money. Honest!” He didn’t seem amused. “Bad joke,” she said, lowering her arms. “Sorry.”
Meanwhile, he slipped a key into the lock and opened the door.
Indignation rapidly replaced fear, but it would have to wait, for a more pressing problem needed to be addressed first. He faced her from just inside the kitchen door. He pointed to the right.
“It’s all yours,” he said.
“You bet it is!” she said.
His frown hardened. “Be my guest.”
She pushed by him. “We’ll see about that,” she said curtly. She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and locked it. Then, as she pulled down her shorts, she looked around for a weapon. A toilet plunger? It would have to do.