He rested his head against the mattress, inhaled mold and leaves and earth. His face felt heavy, as though already sore with tears. “Do you remember Mary? Her husband hits her. I bet he hits my nephew too, but she wouldn’t say.” His eyes burned with unexpected tears. The guilt that twisted his gut was fresh and raw as it had been the day Lyle died. “I never knew why you did it. Why you had to die instead of come away with me. You never said either.”
“Lyle,” he sighed, and his voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure what he’d been about to say. “I just wish you were here, Lyle. I wish you were here to talk to.”
Rafe pressed his mouth to the mattress and closed his eyes for a moment before he rose and brushed the dirt off his slacks.
He would just ask Mary what happened with Marco. If Victor was all right. If they wanted to live with him for a while. He would tell his parents that he slept with men. There would be no more secrets, no more assumptions. There was nothing he could do for Lyle now, but there was still something he could do for his nephew. He could say all the things he’d left unsaid and hope that others would too.
As Rafe stood, lights sprung up from nothing, like matches catching in the dark.
Around him, in the woods, faeries danced in a circle. They were bright and seemed almost weightless, hair flying behind them like smoke behind a sparkler. Among them, Rafe thought he saw a kid, so absorbed in dancing that he did not hear Rafe gasp or shout. He started forward, hand outstretched. At the center of the circle, a woman in a gown of green smiled a cold and terrible smile before the whole company disappeared.
Rafe felt his heart beat hard against his chest. He was frightened as he had not been at fourteen, when magical things seemed like they could be ordinary and ordinary things were almost magical.
On the way home, Rafe thought of all the other fairy tales he knew about tailors. He thought of the faerie woman’s plain green gown and about desire. When he got to the house, he pulled his sewing machine out of the closet and set it up on the kitchen table. Then he began to rummage through all the cloth and trims, beads and fringe. He found crushed panne velvet that looked like liquid gold and sewed it into a frockcoat studded with bright buttons and appliquéd with blue flames that lapped up the sleeves. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made. He fell asleep cradling it and woke to his mother setting a cup of espresso mixed with condensed milk in front of him. He drank the coffee in one slug.
It was easy to make a few phone calls and a few promises, change around meetings and explain to his bewildered parents that he needed to work from their kitchen for a day or two. Of course Clio would feed his cats. Of course his client understood that Rafe was working through a design problem. Of course the presentation could be rescheduled for the following Friday. Of course. Of course.
His mother patted his shoulder. “You work too hard.”
He nodded, because it was easier than telling her he wasn’t really working.
“But you make beautiful things. You sew like your great-grandmother. I told you how people came from miles around to get their wedding dresses made by her.”
He smiled up at her and thought of all the gifts he had brought at the holidays—cashmere gloves and leather coats and bottles of perfume. He had never sewn a single thing for her. Making gifts had seemed cheap, like he was giving her a child’s misshapen vase or a card colored with crayons. But the elegant, meaningless presents he had sent were cold, revealing nothing about him and even less about her. Imagining her in a silk dress the color of papayas—one he might sew himself—filled him with shame.
He slept most of the day in the shadowed dark of his parent’s bed with the shades drawn and the door closed. The buzz of cartoons in the background and the smell of cooking oil made him feel like a small child again. When he woke it was dark outside. His clothes had been cleaned and were folded at the foot of the bed. He put the golden coat on over them and walked to the river.
There, he smoked cigarette after cigarette, dropping the filters into the water, listening for the hiss as the river smothered the flame and drowned the paper. Finally, the faeries came, dancing their endless dance, with the cold faerie woman sitting in the middle.
The woman saw him and walked through the circle. Her eyes were green as moss and, as she got close, he saw that her hair flowed behind her as though she were swimming through water or like ribbons whipped in a fierce wind. Where she stepped, tiny flowers bloomed.
“Your coat is beautiful. It glows like the sun,” the faery said, reaching out to touch the fabric.
“I would give it to you,” said Rafe. “Just let me have Lyle.”
A smile twisted her mouth. “I will let you spend tonight with him. If he remembers you, he is free to go. Will that price suit?”
Rafe nodded and removed the coat.
The faery woman caught Lyle’s hand as he spun past, pulling him out of the dance. He was laughing, still, as his bare feet touched the moss outside the circle and he aged. His chest grew broader, he became taller, his hair lengthened, and fine lines appeared around his mouth and eyes. He was no longer a teenager.
“Leaving us, even for a time, has a price,” the faery woman said. Standing on her toes, she bent Lyle’s head to her lips. His eyelids drooped and she steered him to the moldering mattress. He never even looked in Rafe’s direction; he just sank down into sleep.
“Lyle,” Rafe said, dropping down beside him, smoothing the tangle of hair back from his face. There were braids in it that knotted up with twigs and leaves and cords of thorny vines. A smudge of dirt highlighted one cheekbone. Leaves blew over him, but he did not stir.
“Lyle,” Rafe said again. Rafe was reminded of how Lyle’s body had lain in the casket at the funeral, of how Lyle’s skin had been pale and bluish as skim milk and smelled faintly of chemicals, of how his fingers were threaded together across his chest so tightly that when Rafe tried to take his hand, it was stiff as a mannequin’s. Even now, the memory of that other, dead Lyle seemed more real than the one that slept beside him like a cursed prince in a fairy tale.
“Please wake up,” Rafe said. “Please. Wake up and tell me this is real.”
Lyle did not stir. Beneath the lids, his eyes moved as if he saw another landscape.
Rafe shook him and then struck him, hard, across the face. “Get up,” he shouted. He tugged on Lyle’s arm and Lyle’s body rolled toward him.
Standing, he tried to lift Lyle, but he was used to only the weight of bolts of cloth. He settled for dragging him toward the street where Rafe could flag down a car or call for help. He pulled with both his hands, staining Lyle’s shirt and face with grass, and scratching his side on a fallen branch. Rafe dropped his hand and bent over him in the quiet dark.
“It’s too far,” Rafe said. “Far too far.”
He stretched out beside Lyle, pillowing his friend’s head against his chest and resting on his own arm.
When Rafe woke, Lyle no longer lay beside him, but the faery woman stood over the mattress. She wore the coat of fire and, in the light of the newly risen sun, she shone so brightly that Rafe had to shade his eyes with his hand. She laughed and her laugh sounded like ice cracking on a frozen lake.
“You cheated me,” Rafe said. “You made him sleep.”
“He heard you in his dreams,” said the faery woman. “He preferred to remain dreaming.”
Rafe stood and brushed off his pants, but his jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth hurt.
“Come with me,” the faery said. “Join the dance. You are only jealous that you were left behind. Let that go. You can be forever young and you can make beautiful costumes forevermore. We will appreciate them as no mortal does and we will adore you.”
Rafe inhaled the leaf-mold and earth smells. Where Lyle had rested, a golden hair remained. He thought of his father laughing at his jokes, his mother admiring his sewing, his sister caring enough to ask him about boyfriends even in the middle of a crisis. Rafe wound the hair around his finger so tightly that it striped his skin white and red. “No,” he told her.
His mother was sitting in her robe in the kitchen. She got up when Rafe came in.
“Where are you going? You are like a possessed man.” She touched his hand and her skin felt so hot that he pulled back in surprise.
“You’re freezing! You have been at his grave.”
It was easier for Rafe to nod than explain.
“There is a story about a woman who mourned too long and the spectre of her lover rose up and dragged her down into death with him.”
He nodded again, thinking of the faery woman, of being dragged into the dance, of Lyle sleeping like death.
She sighed exaggeratedly and made him a coffee. Rafe had already set up the sewing machine by the time she put the mug beside him.
That day he made a coat of silver silk, pleated at the hips and embroidered with a tangle of thorny branches and lapels of downy white fur. He knew it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made.
“Who are you sewing that for?” Mary asked when she came in. “It’s gorgeous.”
He rubbed his eyes and gave her a tired smile. “It’s supposed to be the payment a mortal tailor used to win back a lover from Faeryland.”