"How can you love us..." Hansel started.
And Gretel finished, "...when you've only just met us?"
The two children looked at each other. Their expressions never changed. In fact, Isabella thought, they really had no expressions: not happy, nor sad, nor angry. Just... there.
She said, "But your father's told me so much about you."
Which wasn't true. All he had said was that their mother had died and that he needed help to raise them. He hadn't even said how their mother had died.
Now the children were looking at each other again, in silence. Simultaneously their gaze went back to Isabella. They know I just Lied, she guessed. It had seemed such a kind and harmless thing to say.
"Children," Siegfried murmured as though begging them to give Isabella a chance.
Still without a word, the children turned to leave.
"Wait," Isabella called. "I have brought you gifts."
The children stopped. Turned. Waited.
Isabella went to the small bag in which she had packed all her worldly possessions. "Hansel," she called, but both children approached. "Hold out your hand."
Hansel did.
Gretel watched with large, pale, unblinking eyes.
Isabella put her father's gold pocket watch into his palm, letting the chain run through her fingers one last time. "This was my father's," she said. "His father was a famous watchmaker, and he made it."
Hansel watched her with large, pale, unblinking eyes.
"Hold it up to your ear," Isabella said, trying to get him to bend his elbow. "Listen to it tick."
Gretel said, "We're too little to know how to tell time."
"But you can learn." Isabella felt her heart sinking.
Hansel said, "There's never anyplace to go in the woods. And no special time to be there." He moved to hand the watch back to Isabella, but she wouldn't take it.
"Keep it," she told him. "You may want it when you're older." To Gretel she said, "I have something for you, too. From my mother." But now her hand shook. Isabella took Gretel's cold hand and placed her mother's wedding ring on one of the child's fingers.
"It's too big," Hansel said as his sister lifted her hand and pointed her tiny fingers down, letting the ring fall back into Isabella's hand.
"You'll grow into it," Isabella said, putting the ring back on Gretel's finger.
"It isn't something to wear in the woods," Gretel said. Again she let the ring drop from her finger.
And Hansel let the watch drop.
Isabella stopped the ring from rolling under the bed, but the glass on the watch had cracked. "I'm sorry," she said, "there was no time to buy or make..." But when she looked up, the children had left and she could see them walking hand in hand out the front door. "I'm sorry," she whispered after them. She looked up at Siegfried, who shrugged as though he didn't know what to say either.
***
The next days were not easy ones. Try as she would, Isabella could not get the two children to like her.
The first day after her arrival, Isabella spent making a dress for Gretel from the pink cloth that the children's mother had woven before she died. All day long, while the children played outside, Isabella cut and pieced and sewed. Supper was a quiet and solemn meal, with Siegfried tired—having been out since dawn chopping wood—and with Isabella's fingers sore and needle-pricked from sewing, and with the children ... with the children sitting there saying nothing, but only watching everything with their large, pale eyes. After supper Isabella worked by candlelight, finishing the dress just in time to present it to Gretel before bedtime.
"I don't like pink," Gretel said, though she'd seen Isabella work on the pink cloth all day.
"She's never liked pink," Hansel said.
"Children," Siegfried pleaded.
But the children turned their cold eyes on him, and he ducked his head and said no more.
"I didn't know," Isabella apologized. "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
***
The second day after her arrival, Isabella spent making a jacket for Hansel.
"Do you like this color?" she asked before she started, holding up the green cloth.
"Yes," Hansel answered as he and his sister went out to play.
But that night, after cutting and piecing and sewing, when Isabella presented him with the jacket, Hansel said, "It's wool. I don't like wool. It itches."
"No, it doesn't," Isabella said, "not if you wear it over a shirt."
"Much too itchy," Gretel said.
Their father said nothing.
The third day after her arrival, Isabella spent baking cakes as a special supper treat. While she worked, there came a tapping at the door.
"Yes?" she said to the old woman who stood there nervously twisting her cane.
"Excuse me," the woman said, squinting nearsightedly at Isabella, "but I'm your neighbor. The baker's widow. I live on the land that borders on your woods."
Isabella was about to thank her for coming over to introduce herself, but the old woman continued speaking.
"You see, it's about them children of yours. Yesterday they come and throwed stones all over my garden. I saw them just as they was walking down the last row, dropping stones as they went. It's an awful mess, and it's going to take me the better part of a week to pick up. I hate to complain, but isn't there anything you can do?"
"I'm so sorry," Isabella gasped, feeling even worse because the woman seemed so apologetic. "I had no idea. I'll send them over to clean up—"
"No," the woman hastily interrupted her. And again, "No. No need for that. I just wanted to let you know." She kept bobbing her head, almost as though bowing, as she hobbled backward with her cane. "So sorry to bother you," she said.
At supper the children ate the cakes but said they were dry and flat and that even their mother's cakes had been better.
Isabella ignored the stinging in her eyes and said, "Our neighbor has been having a problem with stones in her garden."
Hansel said, "The soil around here is very rocky."
"Perhaps so," Isabella said, not wanting to accuse them, "but she says she saw you playing there and she thinks you might have accidentally brought some of the stones in with you."
"Our neighbor is very old," Gretel said. "She doesn't know what she sees."
"And she's never liked us," Hansel added.
Isabella looked to her husband to say something. But all he said was, "Perhaps," which said nothing.
The fourth day after her arrival, Isabella stopped the children as they went out to play. "Why don't you take this cake to our neighbor?" she asked.
The children looked at each other in that way that made Isabella almost think they were talking to each other without words.
Gretel asked, "To apologize for putting stones in her garden?"
"We already told you we didn't do that," Hansel said.
Isabella said, "And I believed you," although she didn't. "But this is simply to cheer her up about the stones, however they got there."
Hansel and Gretel looked at her with their unblinking eyes and expressionless faces. But they took the cake.
Later that morning as Isabella stood on the front stoop to shake out the dust from the rugs, she saw birds gathered on the path the children had taken. She stepped closer and saw what attracted them. It was pieces of the cake.
That evening, after the children had come home from playing and while Siegfried was still outside washing up at the water barrel by the front door, Isabella asked the children, "Did you take the cake to our neighbor as I asked you to?"
"Yes," Gretel said.
Hansel added, "She said it was dry and flat."
Isabella looked into their faces and couldn't bring herself to accuse them of lying. "Did part of the cake break off before you got there?" she asked.
"No," Hansel said.
"No," Gretel said.
Isabella had never raised children before and wasn't sure how they were supposed to act. She tried to remem
ber when she had been a child herself and was fairly certain she had never acted like this.
The fifth day after her arrival, Isabella woke up later than usual because she'd spent a good deal of the night crying softly. Siegfried, who'd put his arms around her but said nothing, had already left to chop wood in the forest.
When Isabella opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Gretel standing right by the side of the bed, looking at her. Isabella shivered although it wasn't cold. "Good morning," she said, but Gretel didn't say anything.
To get away from Gretel's staring eyes, Isabella turned to get her comb from the nightstand on the other side of the bed.
And there was Hansel standing right by that side of the bed, looking at her.
"What are you doing?" Isabella asked.
It was Gretel, behind her, who answered. "We made you breakfast."
Isabella turned to look at her, and Hansel—behind her—said, "We hope you like it."
Again Isabella shivered. "Why don't the two of you go out and play?" she suggested.
Without a word, without a change of expression, the two children left the house.
The breakfast that the children had made for her was porridge. They had gathered berries for it, which spread purple stains across the pale lumps of cereal in the bowl. This was the first time the children had made any effort to do anything for her, Isabella told herself. The porridge was probably meant as an apology for the night before. And yet ... And yet it looked too ghastly to eat.
She dumped the contents of the bowl out the door and, as the day progressed, watched the grass beneath shrivel and die.
The children had lived in the woods all their lives, Isabella told herself. Surely they should know which berries were good to eat and which were not.
But she couldn't bring herself to believe they'd intentionally try to do her harm.
That evening Siegfried came home from chopping wood before the children returned from playing. Isabella set the table and kept stirring and stirring the stew so that it wouldn't overheat and stick to the pot, but still the children did not come. "Call them," she asked of Siegfried, not daring to admit to him that they never came when she called.
Siegfried stood in the doorway and called, "Hansel! Gretel! Dinner!"
Still the children did not come.
Isabella's annoyance began to turn to worry. What if something had happened to the children? What if they didn't come home because they couldn't? One moment she thought something dreadful must have happened, the next that something dreadful better have happened or she was going to punish those children as they had never been punished before.
Isabella walked to the end of the front walk. "Gretel!" she called. "Hansel! Come home NOW!"
The edge of the sky faded from orange to pink to gray to black, and still the children did not come.
Siegfried took a lantern out into the woods. Isabella could see the light bobbing between the trees as he walked down to the stream; she could hear him calling and calling. He didn't come back until his voice was practically gone. "No sign of them at the stream," he whispered hoarsely; no sign of them anywhere.
They left the shutters open, with candles in the windows to guide the children home, and they left the fire in the hearth to warm the children when they came home.
But the children didn't come home.
Isabella wept loudly, telling Siegfried how she had slighted Hansel and Gretel at breakfast. Now she thought of them out alone in the woods, cold and frightened and hungry, not knowing—very obviously not knowing—which berries were good to eat and which were not.
"There, there," Siegfried said, patting her back awkwardly. "There, there."
When the sixth morning after Isabella's arrival dawned, Hansel and Gretel still had not returned.
"One of us needs to be here," Isabella told Siegfried, still hoping the children might find their own way back. "But I would like to go out to search."
The first place Isabella went was to the stream behind the house. But even in the daylight there was no sign that the children had gone swimming there: no discarded shoes, no footprints in the muddy bank. Isabella went farther and farther into the woods, calling and calling, praying that no hungry animal nor desperate highwayman had come upon the helpless children.
She found nothing that even hinted the children might have passed by that way.
Once again at night they left the lights burning in hearth and windows, and once again the children did not come home.
At dawn of the seventh day after Isabella's arrival, Isabella started out once again. This time she headed in the opposite direction, toward the village. Surely in this direction there was not enough of the woods for the children to get lost in before they came upon the outlying houses, and from there they certainly would have been able to find their way back home. Still, Isabella thought she could enlist the help of the villagers in searching for the poor lost dears.
But before she got to the village, she got to the house of their neighbor, the baker's widow who had come to call about the stones in her garden. Smoke was pouring merrily from the chimney in the kitchen and also from the large, stone baker's oven in the front yard, and Isabella knocked at the door to inquire if the old woman had seen the children.
The door opened, and it was Gretel who stood there, with Hansel behind her, neither saying a word, both looking at her with large staring eyes.
"Gretel!" Isabella cried, throwing herself to her knees and flinging her arms around the young girl. "Hansel!" She tried to bring him into the hug, but he evaded her embrace, and Gretel squirmed away, too.
Isabella sat back on her heels. "We were so worried," she said. "You must have been so frightened, being lost."
They didn't look frightened. And they didn't say anything.
"You must have just found your way back here this morning," Isabella said.
"No," Hansel said.
"We've been here all the while," Gretel said.
Isabella couldn't see why the baker's widow would have let the children stay in her house for two long nights without letting anybody know. She tried to see over the heads of the children into the house. There were half-eaten ginger cakes and pastry treats all over the table, crumbs tracked on the floor, tiny jelly handprints on the walls.
The old woman couldn't be home, Isabella thought. She must have gone to the village three days ago, and the children just let themselves in. But surely the old woman wouldn't have left the oven going like that. "Where is our neighbor?" Isabella asked, feeling suddenly very small and frightened.
"Right behind you," Gretel said.
"In the front yard," Hansel said.
Isabella turned around, but there was no one there, nothing there, only the oven smoking away.
And the old woman's cane, lying on the ground before it.
Isabella scrambled to her feet, telling herself that surely there was a different explanation, surely she misunderstood everything.
The children looked at her with calm, unblinking eyes.
"What have you done?" Isabella whispered.
"She didn't like us," Hansel said.
"We didn't like her," Gretel said.
"What have you done?" Isabella cried.
"Don't yell at us," Gretel said. "She was a witch."
"She was definitely a witch," Hansel agreed. "We don't like being yelled at."
"She was just a poor old woman," Isabella shouted, "half blind and half lame."
Gretel turned in the doorway to look at Hansel. Hansel nodded. They both looked at Isabella.
Isabella took a step back.
"We don't like being yelled at," Gretel said.
Isabella took another step back. Her voice shaking, she asked, "How did your mother die?"
Once again Gretel looked over her shoulder at Hansel.
Hansel said, "We don't like you."
Isabella kept on backing up until she reached the end of the walkway, then she turned and ran. Her heart pounding wildly, sh
e ran and ran till she spotted their own cottage in the woods. She considered stopping for Siegfried but then she ran on.
After all, he was the one who had gotten her into this.
TWELVE
Evidence
If the coach turned back into a pumpkin
and the coachman into a rat
and the footmen into mice,
one can only wonder
why the glass slippers alone remained
untouched by magic's ebbing tide.
Obviously a set-up.
But by whom?
The fairy godmother's ability
didn't extend beyond midnight.
And where would a cinder girl
have ever gotten shoes like that?
Could they possibly have been a secret gift
from the stepmother,
eager to get her out of the house,
tired of her unrelenting goodness,
and beauty,
and cheerfulness
(not to mention all that singing)?
THIRTEEN
Beast and Beauty
Once upon a time, in a land where even parents had magic, a mother got so upset with her son's bad temper, sloppy clothes, messy room, and disgusting table manners that she said: "II you're going to act like a beast, you might as well look like one, too."
The next thing the poor boy knew, he had hair all over his body, his knuckles reached the floor, his teeth curved into tusks, and his nostrils were so big that anyone he stood near could see halfway up his nose.
Despite his promises never to yell again and to wash his socks at least once a week and to take out the garbage and to keep his elbows off the table, his mother would not relent. And his father never contradicted his mother.
"You may live alone," she said, "so that you may live however you choose."