Trish
While Ed is busy gawping like a landed fish, the kid ducks under her arm and into the apartment like it’s something she does all the time.
“Kid. Kid! Hey kid, hold up I don’t have a daughter!” Ed finally manages to sputter out, kicking the door shut behind them. “Where the fu—frilly heck are your parents?”
The kid gives her a condescending look, like she’s being stupid on purpose, and drops her backpack on Ed’s kitchen counter, “Ten years ago you gave a baby up for adoption.”
And that is both true and terrifying to contemplate.
Ed…she’d never even held her baby, not even once, because she’d known that if she gave herself even a second to care for the life she’d carried for nine months she wouldn’t be able to do what she needed to do. She’d been barely more than a kid herself when she’d got pregnant and she’d known she wouldn’t be able to care for an infant. Better, she’d thought, to give her baby a loving home, parents, and a normal life.
“You got any juice?” asks the kid, tugging open the refrigerator. “Never mind, I found some.”
And now… and now there’s a little girl here with her eyes and her persistent cowlick and her blatant disregard for social niceties, standing in her kitchen and drinking juice out of the carton.
Ed can feel her heart beating in her ears as she struggles to suck in one even breath after another.
“You know,” she says, “We should probably get going.”
“Going where?”
Ed asks arching one fine blonde eyebrow and crossing her arms over her chest. Preparing to pull out all the stubbornness she’s renowned for.
“I want you to come home with me,” says the kid.
“Right, no—I am calling the cops,” Ed says reaching for the phone.
“If you do that I’ll just tell them you kidnapped me,” shrugs the kid.
“And they’ll believe you because I’m your birth mother,” sighs Ed, setting the phone down.
“Yup,” agrees the kid without much sympathy.
“You’re pretty good, kid. But I’ve got one really awesome skill; let’s call it a super power. I always know when someone is lying to me,” Ed says, eyes narrowing critically, “You’re not gonna get me accused of kidnapping. So, how about you tell me why you’re here?”
“I already told you,” huffs the kid, “I want you to come home with me. I need you to come home with me.”
Ed could feel her brows pulling into a furrow, she doesn’t get it. Ten years without a word or a photo and this kid turns up on her doorstep demanding a ride home? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless there’s something else going on.
But the kid is well dressed, well-fed and doesn’t have the kind of…hesitation that comes from being picked apart emotionally for years on end. She doesn’t move like she’s trying to take up as little space as humanly possible, as if her very existence is intrusive to others. And she hasn’t had the years to learn how to tell that feeling to fuck off and die in a fire and become as bristly as Ed herself as a defense mechanism.
So why? Why the hell is the kid here?
“Where’s home?” she asks finally.
“Resembool, in Maine,” answers the kid promptly, flashing her a grin that is pure triumph and tickles something like wonder in Ed’s chest because, the kid looks like her. Shit the kid looks like her father.
And Ed is not emotionally equipped to deal with any of this shit.
“Alright kid, you asked for it, pee and grab some granola bars or something we’re in for a long drive, I gonna change.”
The kid, she does a little twirl as she hops off the bar stool and promptly starts raiding the cabinets like she’s conducting a drugs bust or something.
Ed makes a tactical retreat to her bedroom to put her head between her knees and take some slow deep breaths.
When she lifts her head her bedroom mirror informs her that she looks like she’s been socked in the gut a couple times. Which is about how Ed feels so she figures it’s fine. She hears the toilet flush though and spurs herself into motion, trading out her pajama bottoms for a pair of skintight leggings and her shit-stomping boots and red leather jacket.
The pajama pants go into her bottomless pit/purse along with another shirt and a change of underwear, cause it’s been a long night and she isn’t likely to feel like driving back to Boston from fucking Maine in the middle of the night and she’s even less likely to feel like wearing the same skanky underwear two days in a row.
When she emerges from the bedroom it’s to find the kid carefully zipping the Ziploc on a pair of peanut butter sandwiches and slipping them into her backpack. It’s one of those canvas ones, and someone has customized it with ‘Patricia’ spelled out in looping pink calligraphy along one of the pockets.
“Are you ready?” asks the kid, bright eyed and eager.
“As I’ll ever be kid,” sighs Ed, scooping up the tiramisu cause she needs both the caffeine and the comfort, “Get your coat.”
And then they’re on their way.
The kid tucks up, nice and small in the passenger seat of Ed’s ancient yellow bug, and watches Ed drive and eat dessert out of the carton at the same time for a while, not saying anything, just looking. Absorbing.
Some first impression Ed’s making, the kid should be cataloging the ragged laces on Ed’s boots and the tangle of her hair and the way she’s ignoring road safety and thinking ‘thank fuck this chick is not my mom’. Should be, but isn’t. Not if the smug, smug look on her face is anything to go by.
About a half hour out of Massachusetts she pulls a big leather-bound story book with surprisingly small type out of her backpack and flips to very specific page.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ed can see a faceless blonde woman in a fancy gown brandishing a sword, while behind her stands a dark-haired man.
Now that’s Ed’s kind of fairy tale.
“What that?” she asks the kid, as much because they need a way to pass the time as because she’s halfway curious about the book and half again as curious about the kid.
The kid gives her a piercing look and then turns back to her story.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for it,” she says.
And Ed is a little offended by that, “Ready for a bunch of fairy tales?”
The kid shoots her a pissy look, also familiar, and Ed clenches her fingers tighter on the wheel.
“These aren’t just fairy tales, they’re written like fairy tales but every story in this book actually happened.”
And Ed can feel her eyebrows crawling up into her hairline, and before she can censor herself she says, “Damn kid, you’ve got problems.”
The kid isn’t offended though, she just says, “Yup, and you’re gonna fix them.”
Like it’s a foregone conclusion. Like Ed isn’t the biggest problem this kid has and her abandonment isn’t more than likely responsible for like seventy percent of the rest of them. She knows full well what it feels like to be in the kid’s shoes she’d just hoped that maybe her adoptive parents wouldn’t have told her. That they could have lied until she was old enough to appreciate what Ed did and why it was for her. Because keeping her, it would have been selfish, it would have been the height of selfishness and letting go was the hardest thing that Ed has ever had to do, both up ‘til then and since.
“And I have a name you know, it’s Trish.”
“It’s Patricia,” Ed says just to be contrary, watching the kid pull a face, another familiar face, another parallel between them.
“Trish,” she insists firmly.
“Whatever you say, kid. Hand over one of those sandwiches would you?”
“Do you ever stop eating?”
“Watch it kid, I’m giving you a ride out of the goodness of my heart. I coulda put your butt back on a bus, I still could.”
“But you won’t,” says the kid, confidently, nibbling at her own sandwich.
“Keep up the smart remarks and we’ll find out, won’t we?”
They pass the sign welcoming them to Resembool and Ed slows the car to roll through the kitschy cookie-cutter small town main street. Overhead thunder rumbles threateningly and the air starts to smell like ozone and expectation.
“Alright kid, we’re in Resembool, how about a home address?”
“555 not-telling-you-street,” sasses the kid.
Ed slams her automail foot down on the break hard enough to give them both whiplash, and climbs out slamming the door shut behind her with enough force to rattle the frame and parking her butt on the damp hood.
Short of an oncoming vehicle she’s not moving an inch further and the kid seems to get that because she climbs out to join Ed in the middle of the road.
“You said you wanted to take me home kid, well we’re here, and it’s,” she glances up at the clocktower, “8:15?”
“That clock hasn’t moved in my whole life,” the kid explains.
“Whatever, the point is it’s late and I’m getting pissed. So, time for you to fess up. Why’d you bring me here?”
The kid blinked up at her with surprisingly solemn eyes.
“This town is cursed.”
And that…wasn’t what Ed had been expecting.
“I…what?”
“Time is frozen here, it’s not just the clock, it’s everybody. Nothing has changed here at all for ten years except me,” the kid holds up her book, “I told you before about how every story in here actually happened, the stories in this book are about the people here, in Resembool, but they’re trapped. When the evil queen cast her curse and brought them here from Amestris she stopped time so that everyone would suffer like this, forever.”
“So let me get this straight, an evil queen sent a bunch of storybook characters here.”
“And now they’re trapped!”
“Frozen in time,” Ed scrubs a hand over her face, “And stuck in Resembool, Maine. That’s seriously what you’re going with?”
“It’s true,” the kid insists.
“If it’s so bad here why doesn’t everyone just leave?” Ed says trying to inject some logic into this conversation.
The kid gives her a scathing look, “If they could leave they would but they can’t. When they try bad things happen.”
“Kid…” she starts, but the kid is quick to interrupt.
“Use your super power, see if I’m lying!”
And Ed doesn’t have to look to see the kid being earnest and truthful and heartbreaking.
“Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true,” Ed points out.
“That’s exactly what makes it true,” she insists, “And you should know that better than anyone.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re in this book.”
The kid drops the heavy wide-paneled thing into her arms and Ed finds herself staring at the sword wielding princess from before. This time standing against a dragon with her yellow ponytail and long red coat caught high in an invisible breeze. The caption reads ‘The Dawn Princess tames the Flame of the East’.
“Kid, Trish, this isn’t me, this is just a story,” she says as gently as she can manage.
“You just don’t remember because you’re as cursed as all of the rest of them, but you’re also the key to breaking the curse. You’re going to bring back their happy endings.”
And the kid believes that too, although why is anyone’s guess. Ed isn’t quite sure what to say, to any of it. Clearly the kid is wrong but she’s also ten and something in her life made her get on a bus to Boston to find a woman she’d never met and had no reason to trust and blackmail her into helping.
“Trish?” interrupts a man.
He’s tall and gangly dressed in a long coat and carrying an umbrella, and being followed by an adolescent husky.
“Hey, Dr. Falman,” says the kid unperturbed, holding out her hand so that the dog can sniff at it.
“Is everything okay here?” asks the man.
“Just tryin’ to give her a ride home,” says Ed summoning a smile that feels like it’s been stapled to her face.
“She’s my mom, Dr.Falman,” Trish says, not looking up from scratching the dog behind the ears, as though it isn’t a bomb to drop.
“Oh,” is all the man says, “I see.”
Figuring that she’s got an ally in the only other adult on the street she ventures to ask, “You know where she lives?”
“Yeah, sure, uh, right up on the end of Flamel Street, the Mayor’s house is the biggest one on the block,” he offers, gesturing down the road.
“You’re the Mayor’s kid?” Ed prods, and the kid flushes gratifyingly with embarrassment.
“Uh, maybe,” she hedges, examining her shoes.
“Hey where were you today, Trish, you missed our session,” prods Falman.
“Uh, I forgot to tell you there was a field trip planned, at the last minute.”
“Uh huh, and was Mr. Mustang aware of this field trip,” asks Falman wryly, glancing over at Ed.
Trish has enough grace to look sheepish.
“Okay,” says Ed, tucking her hands into her back pockets and rocking back onto her heels, “Listen, I really should be getting her home.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Well, um, you have a good night, and Trish I’ll see you for our session on Friday.”
Falman wanders off down the street, whistling as he goes and the dog trots after him obediently. Ed watches them for a long minute, making sure they’re out of earshot before she turns back to the kid.
“So, that’s your shrink, huh,” she says.
“I’m not crazy,” snaps the kid.
And boy does Ed recognize that particular brand of defensiveness.
“Never said you were,” Ed points out, “It’s just that he doesn’t seem very cursed to me, he doesn’t seem like he’s suffering at all. In fact, he really just seems like a guy who’s trying to help you.”
“He’s the one that needs help though, not me,” says the kid, “Cause he doesn’t know.”
“That he’s a storybook character?”
“None of them do,” the kid says, earnestly, like it’s the saddest thing she’s ever heard, “They don’t remember who they are so they don’t remember what they’re missing.”
“Convenient,” sighs Ed, swinging open the driver’s side door and dropping back into her car. “I’ll bite though, what is that guy missing?”
“His friends,” says the kid, climbing in the other side and swinging the door shut, “They pass each other in the street every day but they’re like strangers.”
What Ed takes from that is that the kid is a bleeding heart who thinks her shrink has no friends. Which could be true and is a little sad but there’s not much that Ed specifically can do about it.
She waits until she hears the click of the seatbelt before putting the bug in gear and heading the rest of the way down Flamel Street. In about three blocks the shopfronts morph into a few stately colonial style houses with neatly trimmed hedges and manicured lawns.
Ed and her car couldn’t have been more out of place if they’d tried. But she still pulls up to the curb and frog-marches the kid through the front gate.
“Please don’t take me back there,” she pleads.
The bottom drops out of Ed’s stomach, but she doesn’t look down at the kid that could’ve been hers if she’d made different choices.
“Kid, I have to, I’m sure your parents are worried sick,” she says instead.
“I don’t have parents, just a mom, and she’s evil,” the kid sighs.
“Evil, that’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”
“She is, she’s the one who did this to everybody—she doesn’t really love me. She only pretends to.”
And there it is, Ed thinks, there is the root of all of this. And she’s almost relieved to have finally found it. If the kid thinks her mom doesn’t love her then it makes a weird sort of sense for her to seek out the one biologically designed to love her unconditionally, no matter what.
“Kid,” Ed sighs, pausing in the walkway, and crouching down so that she’s eye to golden eye with her, “I’m sure that’s not true. Maybe she doesn’t always show it, maybe sometimes she does things that you don’t understand but your mom loves you.”
“You can say that because you don’t know what she’s done,” the kid insists.
And luckily Ed doesn’t have to find an answer for that because, just as she’s trying to force out some sort of comfort that doesn’t sound like it came out of a fortune cookie or off the back of a cereal box the door swings open and a tall blonde woman and a taller man wearing a sheriff’s uniform emerge.
“Trisha!” cries the woman, throwing her arms around the kid in a hug that probably strains the kids bones, before leaning back to give her a once over, “Where have you been? Are you alright?”
“I found my real mom,” spits the kid with surprising venom, ducking under the woman’s hold and running into the house.
“I’ll check on her,” offers the sheriff, “Make sure she’s all right.”
The other woman gets to her feet, and in those heels she’s not just tall, she’s downright towering. She’s young too, or young-looking anyway since with the kid being ten there’s no way she can be as young as she seems. She’s dressed in a simple sheathe of a dress and her makeup is smudged from crying, her short hair not quite as perfectly coifed as it could be.
“You’re Trisha’s birth mother?” says the woman, blinking back shock and dismay.
“Hi,” says Ed, waving like a dumbass because she doesn’t know what else to do, and then tucking her hands into her back pockets where they can’t make any more lame gestures.
The woman stares at her for a long moment, weighing her or whatever, taking her measure. Probably coming to a thousand and one wrong conclusions. Or if Ed’s unlucky, a thousand and one right ones.
Whatever she sees in Ed’s face though it’s not enough to have her escorted off the property though because she smiles weakly and asks: “How would you like a glass of the best apple cider you’ve ever tasted?”
Ed breathes a sigh that is not relief no matter how much it sounds like it because she doesn’t care what this woman thinks of her. She really, really doesn’t. Really.
“Got anything stronger?” Ed asks following the woman, this town’s Mayor, inside.
“Don’t underestimate the cider,” she says, “It’s got quite the kick to it.”
Ed lingers like a shadow in the doorway of the dining room while the Mayor clicks and clacks through her house authoritatively, asserting order with an exactitude that Ed could admire if it didn’t leave her lurking at loose ends. Unsure of where they stand.
“How did she find me?” she asks finally, while the Mayor busies herself with ice and a decanter.
“I have no idea,” she admits, still not looking at Ed, “I adopted her when she was three weeks old, the records were sealed and I was told that the birth mother didn’t want any contact.”
“You were told right,” Ed says quietly.
“And the father?”
“There was one,” snorts Ed.
“Do I need to be worried about having him turn up on my doorstep?”
“Nope. He doesn’t even know.”
She wants to say that he probably wouldn’t care even if he did. But that’s bitterness talking, not truth.
The Mayor hands her a tumbler of amber liquid that smells as amazing as it looks. Ed takes a delicate sip and finds that it tastes even better than it smells.
“And do I need to be worried about you Miss…?”
“Elric,” Ed offers, along with her flesh hand, “Edwina Elric.”
“Allison Curtis,” says the Mayor, taking it.
Her hand is soft, butter soft and precisely manicured, but she’s got a grip like a vice.
“You don’t need to worry about me Madame Mayor; I was just giving her a ride.”
And something relaxes around the woman’s eyes, worry lines smooth away and she looks impossibly young and impossibly pretty. And unreachable, untouchable all of a sudden like a marble statue veined in gold.
Her hips roll easily as she leads them into a richly decorated study, lush with leather and books that have cracked spines but have started to gather dust. Like they were well-loved once and have since been forgotten.
Ed wonders if the kid feels the same way.
“I’m sorry she dragged you all the way out here, I really don’t know what’s gotten into her lately,” says Mayor Curtis, jolting Ed from her musings.
“Kid’s having a rough time of it, I get it.”
“Ever since I became Mayor balancing things has been—tricky. I assume you have a job?”
“Uh, yeah, I keep busy. Freelance mostly,” Ed says taking a nervous sip of cider.
“Well imagine having another full-time job on top of it, and that’s being a single mom. So I push for order, and I know I can be strict but I just want to spend time with her and I want her to have the tools she needs to excel in life. I don’t think that makes me evil, do you?”
Wide-eyed and earnest and—god, she looks like the kid, if Trish grew up to be a golden amazon with a slightly olive tinge to her eyes she’d look like Allison Curtis. It’s another emotional sucker punch and Ed’s staring to worry about the damage to her metaphorical kidneys.
“I don’t think she really believes you’re evil,” Ed says, hoping it’s a comfort even if it is kind of a lie, “She’s just young and well into a fairy-tale obsession.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, her storybook? How she thinks everyone in town is a character from it?”
The worry lines are back and the reason for them is clear when the Mayor says: “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
And Ed is torn between helping the struggling power-mom and staying loyal to the kid who isn’t even fifty-percent hers, no matter what a blood test would tell them. So she does the last of the cider like a shot, and coughs a bit at the burn.
“Look it’s none of my business, and I should really get going,” Ed says, standing, “She’s your kid, and you’ve done a good job with her. I’m…grateful. I’m glad she got to grow up with someone like you.”
Ed sticks out a hand and the Mayor seems a bit taken aback but shakes it again, firmly, nonetheless.
“Of course,” she says, smoothing down the front of her skirt, “I’ll see you out.”
She’s got a boot on the stone walk and hasn’t heard the door shut behind her when the Mayor calls out: “Miss. Elric—”
Ed looks back over her shoulder and catches sight of the kid in the upstairs window, unconsciously mirroring the Mayor who is leaning a hand against the door frame like she needs it to steady herself.
“Madame Mayor?”
For a long moment it seems like Allison Curtis is about to say something, but eventually she decides against it. The wrinkles smooth away and she looks ageless and artful as she smiles with exact politeness.
“Drive safely,” she offers.
Ed quirks her a half-smile and a sloppy little salute and tries not to think of the light flicking off in that bedroom window upstairs or the finality of the gate creaking shut behind her.
She made her decision a long time ago and it isn’t the wrong one even if it is one that she has to try and live with.