Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

from their lives many people repeated clichés about her being too beautiful for this world. It was said too often and by too many. She was nearly sixteen when she’d been spirited away. Or rather, as it now seemed, spirited herself away.
    At last there came the sound of a car horn, a double toot, Dell’s little signature of arrival, something he always did when he came visiting. And this time he would have with him not just Mary but also Tara, the now semi-legendary Tara, not, after all, a corpse rotting in some shallow woodland grave but living and breathing, and not, after all, too beautiful for this world but, in the blink of a lizard’s eye, a mere twenty years older without looking it.
    Peter sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
    “Come on,” Genevieve said. “Pull yourself together. Answer the door.”
    With a great heaviness like that of clanking chains, Peter pushed back his chair and hauled his large frame upright. He took a deep breath and made purposeful strides to the door, seizing the door handle at the same moment that a finger pressed the doorbell outside. The door stuck in the frame and he had to wrench it open, and there was Mary with bags stuffed full of Christmas gifts for the grandchildren she spoiled, and she was in, kissing his cheek, pushing past him. And there was Tara, again with that shy half-smile and her burgundy lips slightly puckered, that shy kink, an incomplete curlicue at the corner of her mouth; he’d seen it before many times but never noted it, and now it had him mesmerized. But his momentary trance was broken when they were propelled forward by Dell, bringing up the rear, going
chuff chuff chuff
.
    “Lovely cottage,” Tara said, kissing Peter.
    “It’s falling down. Come in and meet everyone.”
    “Is that door sticking again?” Dell said.
    And then they were all crowded in the tiny hallway, Dell and Mary taking off their coats, the kids all bug-eyed at the mysterious Tara, the dogs trying to leap up at Mary and Dell.
    “Tara,” said Peter, “this is Genevieve.”
    Tara stepped forward. She cupped a hand on either side of Genevieve’s face and gazed into her eyes. “I knew it,” she said. “Beautiful. I knew he would find someone absolutely beautiful.”
    Genevieve blushed. Away from Tara, Zoe looked at Jack and pointed a finger down her own throat. Genevieve was still trapped by Tara’s fingers resting lightly on her face. At last Tara dropped her hands and leaned in to press her lips to Genevieve’s cheek.
    “Let me take your coat,” Genevieve said.
    “So this is Zoe,” Peter said. “And here is Jack, and Amber and Josie.”
    “Hi, Zoe. Hi, Jack. Hi, Amber. Hi, Josie. I’m Tara.”
    “We already know that,” Josie said haughtily.
    Tara turned her smile on Josie, who instantly retreated behind the living room door.
    “Why do you wear dark glasses?” Amber said, reasonably.
    “I have something wrong with my eyes,” Tara said, and Amber seemed satisfied with that.
    Genevieve ushered Tara through to the living room and waved Mary and Dell through after her.
    “She’s tiny!” Gen whispered to Peter. “And so young-looking!”
    The next hour was taken up with the unwrapping of Mary and Dell’s gifts and the merciful small talk that went with it. Tara helped Josie get her package open and congratulated Jack on his ratting, since, she said, she hated rats. She complimented Zoe on her taste in clothes, and when Amber struggled to button up the new dressing gown her grandmother had brought for her she got down on her knees and buttoned it.
    Though the kids all seemed to regard Tara as something akin to a unicorn, she easily charmed them. Peter noted how naturally she did that. It was always thus, he remembered. Though no one else but himself and his parents—plus Richie occasionally—saw the moods that sometimes stood in counterpoint to that effortless ability.
Yes, but there’s a shadow
, he wanted to tell everyone.
    She’d scrubbed up