“You’re still my daughter and you will listen to your mother.” Sara turned on Mina and put her hands on her hips.
“Yes, Mother, I will listen to you gladly, and do whatever you tell me to, AFTER you explain why we are moving.” Mina was an obedient daughter but she was also old enough now to shoulder some of the burden that plagued her mother. “Tell me why we keep running. I can help. Don’t you think I need to know?”
Sara’s expression didn’t change, but her shoulders dropped toward the floor as if they carried the weight of the world, or at least one teenager. “I told you, it’s for your own good.”
“Is this because of the newspaper article? About what happened on the field trip?”
Sara didn’t say anything. Her silence was the only answer Mina needed.
“It’s because I saved someone’s life isn’t it.” Mina challenged. It was starting to make sense; a click went on in her brain that connected the pieces together. “You always discouraged me from trying out for sports, and clubs. You encourage me to not stand out and try to fit in, to not get noticed, to be a loser. You always feared something terrible would happen to me, but that wasn’t all of it, was it?”
Charlie walked into the kitchen with a small blue leather suitcase and began inserting his most prized possessions; bubblegum, baseball cards, his rock collection. From a distance, there didn’t look to be a single item of actual clothing. Ignoring the discussion between his mother and sister, Charlie wandered around the kitchen and began to pack up his cereals.
“But I finally accomplish something. I do something great like save a life and for one day I’m a hero. Granted I hate being the center of attention, but that’s it, isn’t it? You were afraid for something like this.”
Sara sighed and collapsed down onto a kitchen chair. She rubbed her small hands over her face in anxiety. “Something like that. I was trying to keep you from getting too much attention.”
Mina stood motionless, confused and angry. “That doesn’t make sense. Isn't that the opposite of what mothers are supposed to say? Don't you want me to succeed?”
“Darling, our family was meant for greatness, but the sacrifice that comes with it is too great. I thought, if I could keep you away from the spotlight, if I could keep you hidden, then maybe we could outrun it.”
“Mom, I don’t understand.” Mina began to shiver as a cold breeze wafted through the room.
Sara looked at her a long time before responding. “You’re right. You’re old enough to know the truth, to share the burden.” Sara waited until Charlie had left the kitchen and headed for a second round of favorite objects to pack away. “Mina, I’ve lied to you about your name, about everything.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding shaky.
“Our last name isn’t Grime. It’s Grimm. And for as long as I could remember, we’ve been trying to outrun it.”
“Outrun what exactly?”
“Outrun what killed your father years ago...the Grimm curse.”
Chapter 5
She felt as if her world was spinning uncontrollably. “I think I need to sit down,” Mina said pathetically. Sara jumped from her chair to grab her daughter and led her to the small uncomfortable couch in the living room.
Mina was about to ask more questions, but Sara held up her hand to stop her. “Please sweetie, let me explain.” Taking a deep breath, Sara tried to gather her thoughts before proceeding. “It goes farther back to your great-great-great-grandfather, Wilhelm Grimm, and his brother, Jacob.”
“The Grimms. Do you mean the ones who wrote the fairy tales?”
“Yes, the very same. And no, they didn’t write most of them. They collected them. But more importantly, they actually lived the tales. It’s part of the curse that plagues the Grimm family. Each generation is cursed, chosen, fated to relive the tales. It is why the stories keep changing throughout history, as each Grimm’s action or decision changes the outcome.”
“Do you mean like Cinderella doesn’t always get the prince?” she joked.
“This is serious, but yes. More often than not, the stepsisters do.”
“Oh, come on Mom. You really believe this stuff? This is what is making you pick up and run? Why not try and get the prince and live in the castle?”
“Because that’s not how it works.” Sara looked frustrated; she kept gnawing on her bottom lip as she pondered her words carefully. “You don’t get a choice in the tale. You don’t get a choice in the part you play, and if you remember they don’t all have happy endings. Do you think everyone could survive reliving these tales? Your Uncle Jack didn’t.”
Mina’s jaw dropped in shock. “But I thought that was an accident?”
Sara shook her head. “The curse followed your Uncle and then, when he died, it latched onto your father. Strange things started happening, but he ignored the warning signs. He believed that he was smarter and stronger than his brother and could make it through the stories till the end.”
“Is there a way to stop it, to break the Grimm curse?”
“It’s believed that if a descendent of a Grimm can survive all of the tales, then the Story will be satisfied. Your father survived ten tales before he died.” Sara started crying and buried her face into the couch’s throw pillow.
Mina felt her mouth go dry and she had to lick her lips and clear her throat before she could ask the next question. “How many tales are there total?”
Sara looked up, sniffed and then looked over at her daughter. “Oh sweetie, I won’t let it find you; it’s why I changed our last name and why we keep moving. Every time we move, it seems to takes longer for the tale to find us, even longer if we don’t do anything special to get ourselves noticed.”
“How many?” Mina repeated feeling the strange tingling sensation throughout her body.
“We don’t have to stay. We can keep running and it won’t drag you into the tale. You won’t suffer the same fate as your father.”
Mina stared at her mother hard.
Sara finally broke eye contact and whispered out, “Over two hundred. Jacob and Wilhelm together made it through over one hundred and ninety, but they couldn't complete all of them before they died. So then it started over again with Wilhelm’s children. Honey, they were the only ones to even come close to breaking the Grimm curse and that was almost two hundred years ago. More Grimm’s have tried to overcome it, but didn’t survive, like your father. So I decided to try and run from it instead.”
“Mom, I don’t want to run.”
“Mina, we have to. I didn’t think the curse would pass to you because you were a girl. Your father assured me that the curse only passed to the males. After he died, I thought we were safe. I didn’t know I was pregnant with Charlie until a few weeks after the funeral. Once I knew it was a boy, there was really no choice. We had to run and leave behind our past, even your father’s name, to protect his future.
“I knew one day, it would eventually come for Charlie, but I never expected it to choose you. It wasn’t until I saw you in the backyard talking to a frog that I realized your father was wrong. Too many of the fairy tales had a female heroine, and you were too gifted and kind-hearted for the story to ignore.”