Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [62]
Once Hazel started to pretend that Jack had been taken by a dragon and she was going to rescue him. Jack wouldn’t play. He insisted that this would never happen, he would never get taken by a dragon, and he most certainly did not need rescuing, for he was Jack, Prince of Eternity.
Hazel jolted awake in her little bed, blanket heavy on top of her, the small room just as heavy with night. Moonlight streamed through the window and she could see the odd shapes of the half-finished clockwork animals scattered around the room.
What if Jack didn’t want her to come?
She came in thinking she would rescue him, like some sort of story, like a little kid pretending to be a brave knight. He needed saving; therefore, she would save him. This was the way it used to work. It used to always be so simple, it was just the two of them and they could make shacks into palaces. But things change.
Jack went off on the sleigh with the white witch, without warning or word. She could come all this way, she could break him out of his snow globe, and he would scoff and roll his eyes and say, “Hazel, stop being such a baby.”
Ben had said it. And Lucas, too. The white witch would not have taken him if he didn’t want to go. He wanted to leave his mom and her unseeing eyes. He was the invisible boy looking for the place where no one could find him, where he did not have to feel invisible anymore.
Why would they want to stay?
Hazel always saw him, always. But it wasn’t enough for him. She wasn’t enough. She could be such a baby sometimes.
Maybe rescuing him was not the point at all. Maybe Hazel was supposed to come here and find this couple in their cottage who only had a sad mechanical bird to keep them company. They had a missing piece, a hole at the center, an ache with no name. Maybe Hazel was just the misshapen piece for them.
Maybe she was Rose, after all—maybe that had been her real name. Maybe she had come into the woods and slipped into the life she was supposed to have had, if no one had wanted to give her up. Maybe the woods are where people found each other. This is what happens on journeys—the things you find are not necessarily the things you had gone looking for.
Maybe she didn’t belong anywhere else because she belonged here.
Hazel got up and looked out the window. The moon shone on the garden like it had been hung in the sky for that purpose alone. The garden beckoned to her. She’d slept in her clothes, and they were damp and uncomfortable. She opened her backpack and then remembered that she didn’t have a change of clothes anymore. Hazel pulled the comforter up on the bed so it was nice and neat, and then grabbed her backpack, stuffed the jacket in it, and tiptoed through the dark cottage. The mechanical bird chirped at her as she passed.
She could still taste her dreams distantly in her mind. And the memory of Nina’s tea lingered in her body. There was something about it. Everything around her looked sharp, almost unnaturally so, like she could see the truth of things. Like if she looked at a box she would know what was inside.
She stepped outside, and then stopped and stared. The small garden was just a slip of earth on the side of the house, but it seemed like its own universe. The sweet, sharp scent of hundreds of flowers greeted her. Even in the night their colors sang. It was a thick, lush blanket of color—luxurious purple and electric blue and sunshine yellow and cheery red. It was like a movie version of an enchanted garden, gorgeous, vivid, and too beautiful to be real. She could dive into the purple of the violets and live there.
She felt suddenly that she wanted for nothing in the world. The flowers called to her, like they had secrets to tell—Rose, come on. Hazel