The Marsh King's Daughter
Karen Dionne
To be fruitful provokes one’s downfall; at the rise of the next generation, the previous one has exceeded its peak. Our descendants become our most dangerous enemies for whom we are unprepared. They will survive and take power from our enfeebled hands.
—CARL GUSTAV JUNG
From its nest high on the roof of the Viking’s castle, the stork could see a small lake, and by the reeds and the green banks lay the trunk of an alder tree. Upon this three swans stood flapping their wings and looking about them.
One of them threw off her plumage, and the stork recognized her as a princess of Egypt. There she sat without any covering but her long, black hair. The stork heard her tell the two others to take great care of the swan’s plumage while she dipped down into the water to pluck the flowers she imagined she saw there.
The others nodded and picked up the feather dress and flew away with her swan’s plumage. “Dive down now!” they cried; “thou shalt never more fly in the swan’s plumage, thou shalt never again see Egypt; here, on the moor, thou wilt remain.” So saying, they tore the swan’s plumage into a thousand pieces. The feathers drifted about like a snow shower, and then the two deceitful princesses flew away.
The princess wept and lamented aloud; her tears moistened the alder stump, which was really not an alder stump but the Marsh King himself, he who in marshy ground lives and rules. The stump of the tree turned round, and was a tree no more, while long, clammy branches like arms extended from it.
The poor child was terribly frightened, and started up to run away. She hastened to cross the green, slimy ground, but quickly sank, and the alder stump after her. Great black bubbles rose up out of the slime, and with these, every trace of the princess vanished.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter,
1872 translation by Mrs. H. B. Paull
HELENA
If I told you my mother’s name, you’d recognize it right away. My mother was famous, though she never wanted to be. Hers wasn’t the kind of fame anyone would wish for. Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Elizabeth Smart—that kind of thing, though my mother was none of them.
You’d recognize my mother’s name if I told it to you, and then you’d wonder—briefly, because the years when people cared about my mother are long gone, as she is—where is she now? And didn’t she have a daughter while she was missing? And whatever happened to the little girl?
I could tell you that I was twelve and my mother twenty-eight when we were recovered from her captor, that I spent those years living in what the papers describe as a run-down farmhouse surrounded by swamp in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That while I did learn to read thanks to a stack of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and a yellowed edition of the collected poems of Robert Frost, I never went to school, never rode a bicycle, never knew electricity or running water. That the only people I spoke to during those twelve years were my mother and father. That I didn’t know we were captives until we were not.
I could tell you that my mother passed away two years ago, and while the news media covered her death, you probably missed it because she died during a news cycle heavy with more important stories. I can tell you what the papers did not: she never got over the years of captivity; she wasn’t a pretty, articulate, outspoken champion of the cause; there were no book deals for my timid, self-effacing wreck of a mother, no cover of Time. My mother shrank from attention the way arrowroot leaves wither after a frost.
But I won’t tell you my mother’s name. Because this isn’t her story. It’s mine.
1
Wait here,” I tell my three-year-old. I lean through the truck’s open window to fish between her booster seat and the passenger door for the plastic sippy cup of lukewarm orange juice she threw in a fit of frustration. “Mommy will be right back.”
Mari reaches for the cup like Pavlov’s puppy. Her bottom lip pokes out and tears overflow. I get it. She’s tired. So am I.
“Uh-uh-uh,” Mari grunts as I start to walk away. She arches her back and pushes against the seat belt as if it’s a straitjacket.
“Stay put, I’ll be right back.” I narrow my eyes and shake my finger so she knows I mean business and go around to the back of the truck. I wave at the kid stacking boxes on the loading dock by the delivery entrance to Markham’s—Jason, I think is his name—then lower the tailgate to grab the first two boxes of my own.
“Hi, Mrs. Pelletier!” Jason returns my wave with twice the enthusiasm I gave him. I lift my hand again so we’re even. I’ve given up telling him to call me Helena.
Bang-bang-bang from inside the truck. Mari is whacking her juice cup against the window ledge. I’m guessing it’s empty. I bang the flat of my hand against the truck bed in response—bang-bang-bang—and Mari startles and twists around, her baby-fine hair whipping across her face like corn silk. I give her my best “cut it out if you know what’s good for you” scowl, then heft the cartons to my shoulder. Stephen and I both have brown hair and eyes, as does our five-year-old, Iris, so he marveled over this rare golden child we created until I told him my mother was a blonde. That’s all he knows.