“This house,” she said. “This place. It should’ve burned.”
“Yes.”
“And yet here you are.”
He smiled quietly. “Here I am. And here you are. Together again.”
She shook her head. “How can you stand to be here? How can you even think of…” She sighed, her wings drooping. “I thought about destroying it. After … after you all left. I thought about coming here and opening the earth to swallow the house whole.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.” She looked away off into the trees. “And now I wonder why. Why I didn’t do it. Why I waited. Why I even came here today.”
“I can’t answer that for you,” Arthur said. “All I can do is tell you that things will be different this time around. I will give the children what I never had: a place to be whoever they want to be, no matter what they can do or where they come from.”
“You can’t do this alone.”
“I can,” he said. “And I will if I have to.”
“No,” she said. “You won’t.” She marched by him without so much as a glance in his direction, snatching the sandpaper from his hand. Muttering under her breath, she climbed the steps and frowned down at the railing. She nodded, and then began to sand down where Arthur had left off.
“Your dress,” he said. “Do you want to…?”
She paused. “It’s fine. It’s just a dress.”
He watched her for a long while, feet refusing to move. When she eventually looked up at him, he said, “Hello, Zoe.”
Zoe Chapelwhite said, “Hello, Arthur.” Her bottom lip trembled. “I’m…” Then, in a breathy rush, “I’m so sorry for—”
He held up his hand. “I don’t need that from you. I never have.”
“But I did nothing to stop—”
“Zoe,” he said. “You aren’t to blame. You never were. You ran the risk of outing yourself. If they’d discovered you, they’d have come for you too.”
“We’ll never know,” she said, eyes on the railing.
“Perhaps,” Arthur said. “But you’re here, regardless. What does that say about you? Something good, I expect.”
Eyes wet, she said, “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’”
“Emma Lazarus,” Arthur said, pleased. “Yes, Zoe. We will take them all in.”
“You mean that,” she whispered.
“I do,” he said. “I could use all the help I can get, but if this is something you can’t do, I understand. I will continue on as I have been. Might take a little longer, but I’ll get there.”
She did not leave.
It took them the better part of a year to bring the house back up to code. If all went as he’d hoped, there would be inspections of every little detail, and he knew if even one thing was amiss, it’d be held against him.
One day, Zoe told him to stop.
“What?” he asked, looking up from the last bit of paint he was putting on the wall in the kitchen. It wasn’t exactly needed, but he’d noticed the paint had dried with tiny bubbles in one section—small, about two inches wide and four inches tall—and that wouldn’t do. It had to be perfect.
“Come with me,” Zoe said.
He shook his head. “I can’t. We’re busier than ever. We have a mulch delivery tomorrow, and don’t even get me started on the gazebo. I found a loose nail in one of the floorboards, and that means I need to go through and check every single nail in the entire house to make sure—”
“Arthur, the work is finished,” Zoe said. “It’s been finished for close to a month. You know it. I know it.” She stared at him for a long moment. Then, “Go to your office. You know what needs to be done.” She turned to leave, but stopped in the entryway to the kitchen. Without looking back, she said, “The island used to be bigger. Did you know that?”
She left him standing in the kitchen, staring after her.
He did as he was told, and found a typewriter sitting on top of an old desk. A blank piece of white paper had already been fed into the typewriter with more sitting on the desk next to it. The top page had spikey writing on it. Zoe had left him a note.
It’s time to bring them home.
Z
He laughed. He cried. “I’m frightened,” he whispered. “More than I’ve ever been in my life.”
He began to type. He did not stop until he finished.
To whom it may concern at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth,
My name is Arthur Parnassus. I write to you with a proposal. I have assumed ownership of a particular house on Marsyas Island. For the last year, I—along with some associates—have renovated the property to make it not only livable, but suitable to serve, once again, as a home for orphaned magical children. Enclosed, you will find photographs documenting the work.…
He did then what the ten-year-old version of himself could not: he mailed a letter. As he dropped it in the public mailbox in the village, he caught sight of something he’d never noticed before, and his blood ran cold. There, hanging in the window of the post office, a poster of a family. A boy and a girl, both towheads with bright smiles. On either side of them, figures who appeared to be their parents, holding their hands as they walked through a sun-drenched field of wildflowers. Below them, in stark block lettering, words that Arthur read over and over again in disbelief.
