Married in Green Read online

  Married in Green

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Married in white, you've chosen all right;

  Married in blue, your love is true.

  Married in green, you'll not long be seen...

  --Traditional wedding rhyme.

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1932

  Frances Brown--soon to be Frances Healy, assuming the minister showed up and was still willing to perform the ceremony with her in her current condition--turned to study her profile in the bedroom mirror, smoothing her dress down over her swollen stomach with the heels of her hands. “I feel like just about every cautionary tale in the book right now,” she said, to no one in particular. “Don’t talk to strange men who hunt monsters, little girl, or you’ll wind up pregnant, unmarried, and stranded in Michigan.”

  The mice, who had been sitting on the bed watching her raptly for the past several hours, let out a cheer. Fran sighed.

  “Guess I just committed another proverb,” she said, and turned away from the mirror, leveling a finger at the enthusiastic rodents. “Now see here, you lot. Don’t you go thinking I regret this baby. I was poking fun at myself, not trying to write scripture, and I’m too damn pregnant for you to mess with. You got me?”

  “Yes, Priestess,” chorused the mice dutifully.

  Fran sighed again. Even after four years of living with the Aeslin mice, she could never quite tell when they were going to take her irritation seriously. “Well, you’re going to do what you’re going to do, but what I’m going to do is head on down for supper.”

  “Will you be joining us for evening services, Priestess?” squeaked one of the mice, a sleek female dressed in a cloak made from one of Fran’s worn-out flannel shirts.

  It was a serious question. It deserved a serious answer. “I don’t know yet,” said Fran, honestly. “My feet are hurting me, and I spent so much of the morning asleep that I didn’t get in any target practice, so I was thinkin’ I might go out and throw a few knives around before bedtime, if the light holds. How about I tell you after I eat? I promise I’ll at least try.”

  “That is all we ever ask, Priestess,” said the mouse, and bowed. The rest of the mice did the same.

  Fran smiled. “Y’all are the best thing about this family, and don’t you ever forget it,” she said.

  The cheering of the mice followed her out of the room.

  If either Enid or Alexander had been surprised when Jonathan and Fran came back from Boggsville, Colorado engaged to be married, well, they were smart enough not to have said anything. Fran was reasonably sure they’d been expecting the engagement since Jonathan brought her home. Wasn’t their fault their son didn’t know how to recognize a good thing until he almost lost it. As for the wedding...

  Fran rested a hand atop her stomach and smiled. One thing after another had come up--sometimes several times in the same night. Between the giant monster bats and the people with snakes for hair, things just kept getting pushed back, until the day she had to admit that maybe she was throwing up all the time for a reason. Maybe that should have made them hurry, but it was spring, and the monster hunting business was always in high demand in the summer. So she’d just unfastened her belt and loosened up her shirts, until the day when even she had to admit that wasn’t working anymore.

  Enid had taken her son aside the very next day. “Johnny, I love you,” she’d said, “but my grandchild is getting ready to arrive in this world, and I’d really rather that baby have the family name. Now are you going to marry the girl, or are you dumber than I raised you to be?”

  They’d set a date for the wedding the very next day.

  Wedding. Fran smiled as she made her way laboriously down the stairs. Four people and a minister from the Unitarian church in Ann Arbor did not a proper wedding make. But the Healys didn’t really go in much for socializing with the townsfolk, and most of those same townsfolk thought she was a woman of questionable virtue before she let herself get near to the end of her pregnancy without being legally wed. Fran would have been happy with a trip to the county clerk’s office and a piece of paper. Heck, Fran would have been happy claiming to have been married in Colorado.

  Enid, again, had been having none of it. “Weddings are a form of ritual, and ritual protects you,” that was her position on the whole matter. So it was going to be a wedding, whether her son and soon-to-be daughter-in-law wanted it or not.

  Fran reached the bottom step and paused to catch her breath, pressing her hand down against the small boulder that had replaced her stomach. “Between you and me, kiddo, I’d skip the wedding entire if it would get you out of me a little sooner. Can’t wait to meet you, pretty darn tired of carrying you around like this.”

  “It always feels like that by the time you hit the last few months, I promise,” said Enid. Fran looked up to see her future mother-in-law smiling at her from the kitchen doorway. “Come on and sit down. I have a surprise for you.”

  “I sure do hope that surprise is getting married without standing up again,” said Fran, and followed Enid into the kitchen.

  The woman who was sitting at the scarred oak kitchen table looked up and smiled as Fran entered. It was a less vigorous expression than Enid’s, worn by a face that had done its share of smiling falsely for the crowds. Her hair was too black to be that color naturally, and while she wasn’t wearing any makeup, her features somehow gave the impression that they should be caked with foundation and eyeliner. She was wearing traveling clothes, old jeans and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that hadn’t been in style for a hundred years or more.

  “Juniper?” asked Fran, wide-eyed.

  The woman called Juniper stood, spreading her arms. “Hello, Frannie. It’s been a long time.” Her eyes dipped to Fran’s belly, and her smile turned amused. “How you’ve grown.”

  “Juney!” Fran crossed the kitchen with a speed she hadn’t known she was still capable of, throwing her arms around as much of Juniper as she could. Juniper laughed and hugged her back, and for a moment, they just stood there, holding each other.

  Juniper smelled like grass, honest dirt...and sawdust. Fran lifted her head, eyes going wide again.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, not letting go. “Last I heard you were still out west.”

  “Yes, with the show.” Juniper stepped back. Fran disentangled herself from the other woman reluctantly. “Things have changed since Paul died.”

  “I suppose that would be true,” said Fran cautiously.

  Paul Campbell had been the owner of the Campbell Family Circus, where Fran was a trick rider and Juniper told fortunes under the name “Madame Geneva.” Times were hard for an independent circus. He’d been desperate to save his flagging show, and so he’d bought a baby Questing Beast, intending to raise it as the best sideshow exhibit the world had ever seen. Instead, it killed a bunch of people, and tried to kill Jonathan. Fran had killed it before it had the chance--and when Paul tried to finish the job, she’d killed him, too.

  Jonathan had taken her away from the circus the very next day.

  Juniper smiled sadly at the look on Fran’s face. “We all know you killed him, sweetheart, and yes, some folks were mad at you for a little while. But the cards told me you had reason, and when Elmer went looking for what that reason was, he found everything. Paul was a good man, but by the time you killed him, he wasn’t a man anymore. He was a monster.”

  Fran paused, blinking. “You mean you think he was a werewolf?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Not quite,” said Juniper. “I mean we know he bought some sort of beast-thing that ate a bunch of folks, and since you and your new boyfriend were the last ones to see him alive, it wasn’t hard to figure out what the cards were telling me. Elmer found the ma
n who sold him the monster. The cards told me that what you did was self-defense.”

  “Oh!” said Fran. It felt like a weight she hadn’t even realized she was carrying had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders. The circus didn’t hate her! She could go and visit the only family she’d ever really been a part of! She started to throw her arms around Juniper again and stopped as the weight of the burden she was still carrying pressed hard against her bladder. “...ow,” she finished.

  “That baby’s about ready to join the show,” said Juniper. “Boy or girl, do you think?”

  “From the way it kicks, I’m bettin’ it’s a boy,” said Fran. “But Juney, what are you doing here? What do you mean, things have changed?”

  “Well, for a start, we’re not a circus anymore.”

  Fran clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Juney, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be, sugar-pumpkin! Come over here. I’ve got something to show you.” She took Fran’s arm and tugged her toward the back door. Feeling obscurely like a very large balloon on a string, Fran allowed herself to be led.

  Enid slipped in front of them at the last moment, opening the door and freeing Juniper to pull Fran out onto the back porch. It was a narrow square of wood, barely large enough for both women to stand side-by-side.

  Fran gaped. Juniper put an arm around her shoulder, squeezing as she waved her free hand in an all-encompassing gesture.

  “Frannie, I’d like to introduce you to the Campbell Family Carnival,” she said.

  For once in her life, Frances Brown couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “Careful now,” cautioned Enid, standing at the top of the porch steps and watching as Juniper led Fran down into the back field. “Remember your delicate condition.”

  “Ma’am, I assure you, between me and your son, there ain’t nothin’ about this baby that’s delicate,” Fran replied, but her heart wasn’t in the talking back. She was too busy staring at the spectacle in front of her.

  The Healy family home was built on the very edge of Buckley Township, barely close enough to their nearest neighbors to qualify as living in town. There was a stretch of open land the size of a football field between the house and the edge of the forest. Most of the time, they kept it clear, beating down the weeds to keep any of the less friendly native wildlife from becoming overly interested in dropping by for a visit. Now, however...

  Somehow, while she’d been sleeping, an entire carnival had sprung up where that open space would normally be. Fran recognized some of the attractions--half the midway was familiar, and she’d helped to assemble that Ferris wheel more times than she could reasonably count. Others were new.

  “When did we get a merry-go-round?” she asked incredulously.

  “Sold the elephants,” said Juniper, leading her forward.

  The smell of popcorn and frying sugar assaulted her nose, and she was instantly hungry, even though she would have sworn five minutes ago that she was done eating until after the baby came. “But you loved the elephants!”

  “We bought them back for half what we got for them a season later, when the zoo we’d sold them to figured out that they weren’t going to play nicely with the other animals,” said Juniper, with a wicked grin. “Just a few tricks like that and it became surprisingly easy to spruce ourselves up. It’s still an act in progress, of course. And we’ve never managed to replace our star attraction.”

  “Oh, hush you,” said Fran. Inwardly, she was glowing--and that glow just got brighter when they reached the midway, and for the first time in four years, there was her family, waiting for her.

  Oh, not all of them--a few faces were missing, and a few faces were new, and a few faces bore scowls instead of welcoming smiles--but enough that, for the first time since people in town had started to point out the expanding balloon of her belly, she actually felt like she was standing in a place that she could call her home.

  “We’ve missed you,” whispered Juniper.

  Fran beamed, clasping her hands together beneath her chin, and cried for joy.

  It took well over an hour for Fran to say hello to everyone, meet the people she didn’t know, and hug the ones she did. At some point, a paper plate holding a fresh funnel cake was pressed into her hand, dripping with grease and powdered sugar. She ate every bite, and sucked her fingers until not a drop of sweetness remained behind. The baby kicked, and she laughed and asked for cotton candy.

  “It’s for the baby,” she said.

  Everyone else laughed, and the introductions and remembrances went on.

  Finally, after there were no more hands to shake or necks to hug, Juniper put a hand on Fran’s arm and tugged her gently away. “You’re swaying like a reed,” she said. “Come on, Frannie. We’ll all still be here in the morning, and I’m afraid that mother-in-law of yours will kill me if I don’t make you sit down for a spell.”

  “I just...how did you do this? How did you all...?” Fran let herself be led, once again giving in to the urge to stare in wide-eyed wonder at everything around her.

  “Put all the blame on that fiancé of yours. He’s the one who figured out what our route was, sent the invitations, arranged for permits for us to operate here in town for the next week, and paid our travel costs.” Juniper’s smile couldn’t have looked smugger if she’d tried. “If you weren’t marrying him, Fran, I’d be tempted to make a try for him. He’s a little stuffy, but he surely thinks the moon of you.”

  “Johnny did all this? My Johnny?” Fran’s expression didn’t lose any of its wonder, but it did gain a certain edge of understanding. “That’s why he kept putting off marrying me, the snake. And why his mama let him.”

  “He just wanted you to have your family here. You can’t blame him for that.”

  “Blame him? I want to kiss him until he remembers how he got me pregnant! This is the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.” They had walked past the end of the midway and were moving toward the other side of the house. Fran brightened when she saw the ramshackle assortment of trailers and trucks parked just past the barn. “The boneyard!”

  “Like I said. We’re here for a bit.” Juniper smiled again. “Wait until you see what I’ve done with your old trailer.”

  Fran blinked. “You have my trailer?”

  “Sure do. Couldn’t let a stranger take it, could I?” The pair walked past the first of the trailers, passing the invisible boundary that separated the carnival--public space, meant for tourists and townies--from the private, family-only space of the boneyard. It was a morbid name for something that wasn’t morbid at all. It was the comfortable hidden face of home, the flannel sheets and hot stew, rather than the pretty flash and dazzle of the midway and the sideshow tents. There was nothing morbid about that.

  With every step, Fran felt like she was getting stronger. She barely even noticed how the baby was pressing on her bladder, or how much her ankles ached. Still, she had to admit a touch of relief when Juniper stopped her in front of a familiar trailer. The paint was different, and the dream catchers and stained glass stars in the window were new, but she knew the shape of it. She had lived inside those metal walls for years.

  “It seems so small,” she said softly.

  Juniper laughed. “Funny thing. When they told me Michigan was enough to keep you contained, I said the same thing about the state. You want to come inside and sit down for a little bit? Maybe let me read your cards?”

  Fran paused. “That’s what this was all about, isn’t it? You wanted to read me.”

  “That’s not what it’s all about. We really are here for the wedding. But yes, I’d like to do a reading. You left us rather abruptly. We worried. I want to be sure that you’re okay.”

  Fran looked at Juniper--a woman who’d been her friend for as long as she could remember, even if they hadn’t seen each other in years--and sighed. Then she placed her hand in the other woman’s, and allowed herself to be helped up the stairs into the trailer.

  “As much as you’re ho
lding my hand today, you’d think I was marrying you,” she complained genially as she crossed the threshold. Looking frankly around, she added, “I love what you’ve done with the place. Real homey. If you kill people for fun.”

  “A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do to keep the unquiet dead from hassling her while she’s trying to sleep,” said Juniper matter-of-factly. “Sit down. I’m going to go get the cards.” Stepping lithely around the table which took up much of the front half of the trailer, she vanished into the back, leaving Fran alone.

  Fran took another look at the walls, and snorted. “Not sure I could sleep in here if you paid me,” she muttered, and began the difficult task of maneuvering herself into a chair.

  The trailer walls were plastered with words. Pages cut from newspapers, magazines, and even books were pasted up everywhere, layered with slices cut from carnival posters. No image was intact; no page was complete. There were at least four layers on the walls and ceiling, and that was just what Fran could see at an easy glance. Judging by the thickness of the seams where the layer of makeshift wallpaper met the doors or window, there might be as many as ten layers, all of them caked one over the other. Only the floor had been spared, although it was painted solid black.

  “I have to freshen the paint every month,” said Juniper. Fran looked up, almost guiltily. Juniper smiled. “If I don’t, it scuffs, the wards open, and more dead people show up asking me to tell their futures.” She was holding an old wooden cigar box in her hands. “Do you come freely and without fear to hear your fortune?”

  “Right now, my ankles say I couldn’t stand up if I wanted to, so sure,” said Fran. “You really sure this is necessary?”

  “Yes,” said Juniper. She took the seat across from Fran, setting the box down to one side. She opened it and withdrew a deck of hand-painted cards, which she proceeded to shuffle. Finally, she extended the deck toward Fran. “Cut.”