“It’s a pirate ship,” she’d said when Holly scolded her. “Not a statue at all. Someone’s trapped it in bronze so it can’t sail, someone’s lulled it to sleep. But it wants to be freed. Can’t you hear it crying?”
From the distance of all these years, Holly sees the parallel and shudders.
She tears her gaze from the statue, searches the crowd of people milling about—tourists come to gawp, businesspeople looking for a quick lunch, couples out for afternoon drinks. She doesn’t spot her daughter.
She walks around the statue. A few feet from her starting point, she catches the faintest trace of the scent she associated first with Peter and, later, Eden—cut grass, spring, an effervescence she can’t quite articulate. But the scent is off. It’s heavy, decomposing. Rotten.
She turns in a slow circle, trying to locate its origins. A small woman is balancing on the concrete edge around the statue, ignoring the signs asking visitors to keep off. Sticking her tongue out toward the topmost fountain as if she’s a child, reaching for the water that’s spraying down. The tourists give her a wide berth, and as Holly gets closer, she can see why. The woman is wearing a stained white tank top and jeans that are too big, tied around her waist with what looks like rope. Her feet are bare and dirty.
And the scent is coming from her.
This close, although her frame is gamine, her face and body look bloated, stretched beyond their normal limit, like a tick that’s fed and is now engorged. The water from the fountain slows to a trickle, then shuts off, and the woman jumps down. She lands directly in front of Holly and smiles, displaying a mouthful of blackened teeth.
Holly flinches. “Excuse me,” she says, backing away. But then she catches sight of the tattoos along the woman’s shoulders. Small feathers, golden and lovely, so realistic they seem to move in the river’s breeze. Holly can’t help staring. The woman stumbles forward, and as she moves, the feathers take on a shimmering radiance.
The woman looks up, sees Holly’s gaze, and smiles again. She says something in a surprisingly musical voice, but it’s too quick, too high-pitched, for Holly to catch.
“Pardon?”
Before the woman can repeat what she said, a stranger intervenes. “That’s enough. Why don’t you take a nap?” she says, pointing to a bench on the other side of the atrium.
The small woman mutters again, looks at Holly dourly, but shuffles off, her too-large pants flapping around her legs.
“You could understand her? What did she say?” Holly asks, distracted.
“She said, ‘Hello, Darling. You like these? They don’t hardly work and I wouldn’t waste them on you if they did,’？” the stranger says quietly.
Holly looks up. The woman speaking has a pixie face with rosebud lips and eyebrows arched like butterfly wings. Her blue eyes are arresting under her short crop of white-gold hair. She looks as if she’s twenty at least, but . . .
“Eden?” Holly breathes. It’s her daughter. She’s found her, she’s finally found her, and she’s alive and whole and healthy. Joy and relief flood her as she reaches out to hold her darling girl.
But her daughter moves away.
Anguished, Holly follows. “Wait!”
Eden stops in front of the statue and roots through her pockets. She takes out a coin, tosses it into the pool of water, and closes her eyes, perfect dusky lashes dark against her pale face. Everything in Holly screams to hold this changeling child, to wrap her in her arms and never let her go. The need to touch Eden is so deep and visceral her arms ache.
But her daughter’s frame is rigid, her jaw set, her arms held close to her body. And when she finally opens her eyes, her expression is wary. So Holly keeps her distance. She takes a deep breath, grips her hands together so she won’t be tempted. Bites back the questions that tumble through her mind—Are you okay? What happened? Where have you been? Instead she tries to make a connection.
“You loved this place,” she says. “We came here often, the three of us. Do you remember?”
“A little.” Eden shrugs. “The water used to be murky. You could never tell what was really down there.” They gaze at the water, now the bright blue of a swimming pool. The statue too has been refurbished since those days, scrubbed clean, the green-gray patina replaced by shining bronze. “I liked it better before. That’s what it really was. Gritty and sad.” Her voice wavers. “But my wishes never came true then, either.”
Holly’s about to ask what she means when there’s a commotion at the other end of the atrium. The strange little woman is lying on the cement bench in the corner, blowing bubbles into the sky with a wand. Both it and the container of soap are a bright fluorescent pink, a child’s toy. Nearby a mother has her arms around a small girl, hustling her toward the exit and throwing furious glances over her shoulder at the woman.