Love is Hell Read online

He walked directly to me. Stood less than a foot away.

  Nobody shouted, or tried to stop him, or stone him. No one else was gasping. No one looked his way. He was a ghost.

  Silence like a fog descended on the village. Everyone’s movements slowed, then stilled altogether. Bonnie stopped reaching for my hair. Spittle hung from her lip, but did not fall.

  “You’re . . .” I began, not knowing how to frame my questions. I wanted to put the baby down, hurl myself into his arms.

  Robbie stared back at me. There was a faint greenness to his skin as if he had been unwell.

  I placed the jug on the ground and put my brother’s unmoving baby beside it.

  “Your body is false,” he said, “but your face is fair. It didn’t take you long, did it, to find yourself someone else? And a baby, too.”

  “A baby?” I asked, confused. “She’s not my baby, Robbie.

  She’s my brother’s. Why are you talking so strange?”

  What are you?”

  “Where I have been, Jeannie, I could have taken a noble lady, a queen, for my wife. But I couldn’t forget my Jeannie and the vows we made.”

  “Where you’ve been, Robbie? You are—you were— dead. I saw your body. I buried you.” My eyes stung. I could still see him lying in his grave. His broken face and fingers. And here he was without even a bump on his nose. I wanted to touch him, move closer, smell him, see if this was my Robbie.

  “I despised her riches, her pearls, her furs, her light.

  I despised her sweet self because there was nothing in my heart but getting back to you. But you’re not a maid now, eh?”

  “I am.”

  “You are?” he said, his tone hard and unbelieving.

  “You’re married again. They told me.”

  “To Charlie McPherson. You remember Charlie?”

  “You’re saying you waited for me? Kept yourself intact?” He was angry.

  “I never wronged you,” I told him. “You were dead. I buried you. Six feet under and no flowers on top.”

  “What’s the soil but a path to the kingdom below?”

  I sat down or, rather, my legs gave way beneath me.

  “The kingdom below?”

  “Where the fair folk are. Where their king and queen rule. It was their queen that wanted me.”

  The fair folk. The green ones. Fairies. Faerie. All the things my parents believed and I wanted to be educated away from. “They’re under the ground? The fairy folk?”

  I put my hand in the dirt, got it under my fingernails, waited for something to reach up for me.

  Robbie crouched down, leaned closer. He smelled of it, the dirt. His eyes were bigger than they had been. And much much greener. I reached out to touch his hand. It was warm, as if the blood still circulated beneath the layers of his skin. I had been expecting cold. His skin against mine—epidermis to epidermis—it made me feel the way I had when he was alive: want.

  He leaned even closer. His lips were almost touching mine. His breath smelled like the earth. I wanted to kiss him.

  “I could kill you,” he said. He put his hands on either side of my head. “I’m much stronger now. I could crush your skull.”

  “I love you,” I said, glad that my voice did not shake.

  “That was the last thing you said to me before they dragged me away.”

  It wasn’t. My last word to him was his name screamed as loud as my cracking voice would allow.

  “Was it any truer then than it is now?” he asked, his hands increased their pressure on the sides of my head.

  “It was always true, Robbie. It will always be true.

  More than two years you were under there.” A tear slid down my cheek.

  “Four weeks to me. A month ago you were with me.”

  “Four weeks?” I said. He was eighteen when they killed him; he was eighteen now. While I was almost that age myself.

  “You got yourself another husband.”

  I shook my head. “Charlie McPherson! He’s not a real husband.”

  “You forgot all about me.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Not what, my love? Not true? The child on the grass is not yours? The ring on your finger belongs to some other girl?”

  “Bonnie is not mine. Why don’t you listen? And my husband . . . Charlie! Remember Charlie? He has no interest in girls. I’m as much a maid as the day . . . ” I paused. “As the day they killed you.”

  “Our vows are tattered and all forgot?” Robbie said softly. He was reciting a speech, not listening to me. He smiled, but it was just lips and teeth. “You took another. You have a child.”

  “I don’t! I didn’t. Look at her! Look at her hair! At her squinty little eyes. She’s the image of her mother, Maggie.

  No child of mine would look like that.”

  “Why couldn’t you have waited?” His hands pressed firmly on the sides of my skull. I wondered which part would break first if he began to squeeze. How fast would I die?

  “Waited! You were dead, Robbie. I held you broken in my arms. Your nose was smeared across your face. Your eyes went dull. My father, my brothers, Sholto McPherson, his father, even the priest—all those hideous, righteous men. They killed you.”

  “They did,” he agreed, listening at last. “They cursed and spat on my dying body that they’d already battered with their feet and hands and stones.”

  “Then why are you warm now? Did you swear your soul away to get another life?”

  “No,” Robbie said. “After I was dead, I sank into the earth until I slid out into her kingdom; all my bones knitted, my skin unbroken.”

  “Your old scars are gone. The bumps on your nose.” I touched my fingers to his nowstraight one. I could feel the strength in his hands. It would not take much effort for him to crush me.

  “Down there they all have green eyes.”

  “Are they your kin?”

  He nodded. “It was true what they said: I am fey. I am a witch, an elf, kin to Faerie.”

  “Maybe they’re your kin because they’re dead like you. When you kill me,” I said, daring him, but terrified he’d take my dare. “I’ll be kin, too.”

  For a moment the pressure of his hands on my skull increased. I swallowed my screams. Then he laughed and slid his left hand to my cheek. “I’m as warm as you are.”

  I let out a sigh. He would not kill me yet. “You don’t smell the way you used to,” I told him.

  “It will wash off.”

  Robbie sank all the way to his knees.

  “I served the queen for four weeks, and each day she asked me to be hers and each day I said no. Then she let me go. They told me that you would not stay faithful.”

  “They were wrong.”

  “They told me I’d return to you and you’d be with another man and there’d be a child. They told me you’d forget my name. I laughed at them but not as hard as they laughed at me.” His voice dropped. “They don’t lie, you see. They can’t lie.”

  Like the ballads said, and yet they’d told him nothing but lies. “They were wrong. I never forgot your name, Robbie. Not a day’s gone by I haven’t thought of you. I have no child, and I’m handfasted to a man who will never touch me. I’ve never been with anyone but you.”

  “You did not wait.”

  “I will never be with anyone else. I ran away from this place as often as I could. All I want is to get away from them and everything they did to you. I’ve tried to run. This place won’t let me go.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They put a geas on you. You can’t leave, no matter how fast you run. Your path is blocked.”

  “What? A geas?” I knew that word. Why couldn’t I remember what it meant?

  “Your parents. They used my blood to keep you here.

  As long as I was below the ground, you couldn’t leave.”

  Robbie stood up, pulled me up beside him, and smiled his hard smile again. My hand was in his. “Walk with me.”

  I walked beside him. Numb. My parents had use
d magic—Robbie’s blood—to keep me from leaving. I had thought my hatred for them could not grow. Fiona’s parents’ broken car, the bicycle, the pain in my side. All of it, my parents’ doing. We walked out of the village, past the paddock and the tourist buses. A gaggle of them were frozen, some with their cameras pointed back at the village, the others out to sea. He led me to the edge of the cliff. The ocean roared below. There was no wind. The seagulls above were frozen in air.

  “They killed you to keep me here,” I said.

  Robbie laughed. “Oh no. They wanted me dead for my own sake. The geas was them being canny. Why waste all that fey blood?”

  “I will kill them.”

  He laughed. “I’ll help you.”

  I put my hand on his chest and couldn’t feel his heart beating. I touched his throat where there was no pulse.

  “You’re warm,” I said.

  “And green. And dead to this world.”

  I leaned forward so my lips were close to his. The air between us went taut. I could feel the warmth of his mouth, but no movement of his breath. I smelt only the earth. Yet I wanted him.

  “Do you believe me now about Bonnie? Charlie?” I asked, staring into his too-green eyes.

  He smiled. The first smile that was like my Robbie of old. “She did not have much of the look of you. And I do remember Charlie. I liked him for being almost as outcast as me.”

  “Good,” I said. “The fairy folk are liars.”

  “They can’t lie.”

  “But they can misdirect, can’t they? They can confuse.

  Isn’t that how they trick the heroes in the ballads?

  They told you something that isn’t a lie, but isn’t true, either, not all-the-way true. They didn’t say I had a child, now did they? Only that you’d find me with one.”

  Robbie nodded.

  “I’ve never lied to you, never told you anything that wasn’t true down to its core.”

  “No,” he said, touching my cheek. “I had forgotten that. They can make you forget.”

  “We never did much together,” I said at last, stepping closer to him.

  “We kissed. We held each other,” Robbie said, his lips moving close to mine. “Touched each other all over.”

  I nodded. “I thought that I would explode.”

  He laughed. “I did. You did. Over and over again. You drove me mad.”

  “I had to. I couldn’t be a wife and mother, not without giving up my dreams. I never wanted any of it. Except with you.”

  “But later, you said. After you were a doctor.”

  “Yes, but they took our later away, didn’t they?”

  “Not entirely, Jeannie, my love. Where I’ve been, there’s pearls, there’s silk, velvet, and gold. More books than I’ve ever seen before. All yours, if you walk with me. If you remember our vows. All you have to do is follow me.” He looked out to sea, took a step closer to the edge, pulled me with him.

  “You want me as dead and gone from this world as you?”

  “Yes.” He smiled broader, wilder. “We’d be together.

  It’s so much lovelier than this world.”

  His lips touched mine. It felt electric. Bigger than our kisses of old. He was without a heart, without a pulse, but I wanted him as much as I had when I first saw him bathing in the river.

  “Why would you stay here, Jeannie? Leave your family.

  You never loved them, they never loved you. Come with me. Learn from the green folk. They have more learning than anyone in this world. They’ll teach you whatever you want to know. You can be a doctor down there more easily than you could up here.

  “Their world is as vast as this one. We’ll explore it together.”

  “But, I’m not fey, Robbie. How do you know they’ll take me the way they took you?”

  “You’re all fey,” he said. “Some more than others, and some much less, but there isn’t a person in this village— in any of these villages—without at least a drop of their blood.”

  I wanted to dispute him, but my parents had cast a geas. And I could feel the rightness of what he said.

  Fiona and her family had never gone directly against my parents. Never breathed a word about going to authorities outside the village. They knew. I knew. The rules in the village aren’t the same as the world outside. Because they’re fey. We’re fey. I am fey.

  “In some lights,” Robbie said, “your eyes are green.

  They’re already a little way toward where they’ll be.

  “Come with me, Jeannie.” He pulled me closer to him.

  I felt his love, I felt his need. I wanted him just as much. He took another step closer to the cliff. “You and me, Jeannie.”

  Small rocks shifted under my feet. They skittered over the side, down to the water far below.

  “Not yet,” I said. My heart was beating hard. “I’ve been saving all the money I can. Me and Charlie were going to run to the city. We can now, can’t we? You’re aboveground so—”

  “The geas is broken.” He nodded.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Robbie? Come to the city. We could be married for real. You could play. They’d pay you. You’re the best fiddler I ever heard. You’d be rich!”

  He kicked the ground, sending more dirt and rocks over the edge. “Under there, I am rich.”

  “Come with me, Robbie!” I tried to imagine him in a city, with tall buildings and cars and hardly any trees or flowers. I’d only ever seen him here. This small village, with its tiny green, its hill, its ash trees, the river. It was hard enough to imagine myself anywhere else.

  He shook his head. “The city is steel and iron and chrome. It’s cars and trucks and petrol, fumes and pollution.

  All of it burns. No, Jeannie, you have to come with me.”

  We were so close to the edge that even a slight tug and he’d send me over.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “It’s not death, Jeannie,” he said, kissing my mouth.

  “It’s a bigger life. A bigger world.”

  “I want a life with you, Robbie. I do. Far from my family and this village. But I want you to have a heart that beats. I want the Robbie that was before they came for you. Before you went underground. Please, Robbie, please come away with me.”

  He wrapped his arms around me tighter. I felt his kisses on the top of my head. My throat felt tight and my eyes burned with crying.

  “I can’t,” he said. “When the sun sets, my clothes turn to feathers, my body to ash. In this world, I’m dead, Jeannie.”

  I squeezed him. Kissed his mouth again. His cheeks.

  His eyes. His neck. “But didn’t you stop time?”

  He laughed. “No. The sun’s still moving and the ocean below. I might be fey, but I am not god.”

  “How long do we have?” I whispered. “An hour? Two?”

  “An hour. At most.”

  We sank to the ground.

  “Or you could come with me, Jeannie. It’s beautiful there. . . .”

  “What will your queen make of me? Won’t they trick us apart? We can’t trust them. Look how they turned you against me.”

  “But we won, Jeannie. They respect victors. You can learn to be a doctor there. It’s a huge world. Vaster than this one.”

  “I don’t believe in that world, Robbie. It’s hard enough believing in the city.”

  “We’d be happy.”

  “And if I changed my mind? Would they let me return to this world?”

  “You’d be fairy, Jeannie.”

  “Iron would burn me.” I shook my head, unbuttoning his shirt. He pulled the jacket off, flung it away.

  “I never forgot you.”

  He pulled my shirt over my head, kissed my belly. I felt the heat in my cheeks.

  “You’re still you, Robbie. Even without a heart.”

  “Yes.”

  We twined. We twisted. We covered every pore of our skin with kisses. Around us the world grew darker by the second.

  “I have to go,”
he said, holding me tight. “Will you come?”

  Part of me wanted to. I wanted to be with him forever.

  Past death, into his other world. But . . .

  “I love you,” I said. “I always will. No one but you.”

  “That’s a promise?”

  “Yes,” I said and the word “promise” echoed inside me.

  He kissed me again. Hard, pulling me closer to the edge. I felt him get heavier, felt his body slide toward the edge—toward the ocean and his green kingdom underneath. He was pulling me with him.

  “Robbie, no,” I said, fast as I could. “You promised me once. Remember? You said you’d never make me do anything I didn’t want. I don’t want this, Robbie.”

  He looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes. I had not known that fairy could cry.

  “You promised.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  And then he let go. I fell back. He fell below.

  “Goodbye, Robbie.”

  Beside me his clothes turned into feathers. The wind picked up, dragging them into the air and my hair all about me. I pushed back from the cliff, grabbing at my clothes before they were blown away, getting them back on me, and walking back into the village past the nosy tourists and their incessant cameras, past the narrow villagers who couldn’t step away from the past.

  Maggie ran up to chide me for leaving her daughter untended. I ignored her and picked up the jug and made my way back to Charlie’s house.

  A week later, we were in the city, living in a cheap boarding house. I found a bakery to work in, Charlie a newsagent’s.

  They let us both back into school. In the city it was free. The baby was born in May: Fay Greene. Both names for my Robbie.

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  Fan Fictions

  gabrielle zevin

  .

  You know this girl.

  Her hair is neither long nor short nor light nor dark. She parts it precisely in the middle. She sits precisely in the middle of the classroom, and when she used to ride the school bus, she sat precisely in the middle of that, too.

  She joins clubs, but is never the president of them.

  Sometimes she is the secretary; usually, just a member.

  When asked, she has been known to paint sets for the school play. She always has a date to the dance, but is never anyone’s first choice. In point of fact, she’s nobody’s first choice for anything. Her best friend became her best friend when another girl moved away.