David died in the Spring. He died when the trees were covered in pink blossom, on a day when the rain would never stop, and just as the first green shoots poked their heads from the soil. It seemed wrong that anyone should pass away just when the world was coming back to life. Impossible that he should be gone at all. It was summer before I could bring myself to enter his office again. To start packing up his books and tidying the piles of paperwork that, when he was alive, were never, never to be touched.
It was when I was tidying that I found the card. It was tucked away like a secret in the back of a drawer. Written on one side, in a gothic typeface, were the words: “Once Upon a Time… you made all your wishes come true”. My fingers tingled when I touched it. I almost dropped it. I shook out my hand and flipped it over. On the other side was an address in the Old Town and a sketch of a black cat with a wonky ear. It was attached to a plain, glass bauble, like on a Christmas tree, covered in dust. It seemed a fanciful sort of thing. A strange thing for David to have owned, who wasn’t a fanciful man. He wore the same, brown leather brogues every day I knew him and insisted on sharp creases in his shirts. He wore his glasses to the beach. I wouldn’t have believed there was a whimsical bone in his body. Even after so many months, the grief threatened to burst out of the little box where I’d so carefully stowed it. Perhaps I hadn’t really known him at all. Where had the damn thing come from?
The Old Town snakes up the hill, a maze of black, slate roofs and cobbled streets behind the cathedral. Old shops with bowed windows project out from under colourful canopies. Hand painted signs creak in the wind. When the weather is good, chairs spill out onto the pavement outside the cafes. I must have been here hundreds of times since David and I moved back when he opened his own practise. I practically grew up here, spending every summer with Gram, a little way over in her townhouse overlooking the harbour. I’d never heard of the address listed on the card.
Diligently following the directions on my phone, I wound my way through the labyrinth of streets, dodging tourists. Then, with an audible ‘pop’, the signal on my phone went out. I sighed with frustration. I was always getting lost these days, wandering off the beaten path into my memories and my grief. I only looked away from the map for a minute. Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. The nearest shops, a gallery and gift shop, were closed. The sweet shop was open, the scent of burned sugar and candyfloss drifting out of the open door like a half-forgotten song from childhood, but there far too many people queuing to bother asking the way.
In the end, it was the cat who found me. A few more turns where I still hadn’t plucked up the courage to ask anyone for directions and I was beginning to panic. Then there he was. He sat on his bony rump, washing his feet, under a red brick arch beside an antique store. A scruffy, bag of bones black cat, he had the exact same, oddly shaped ear as the cat on the card. He stood up slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and stretched when I approached him.
“Nice kitty,” I held out my hand.
He trotted off a few feet and stopped, looking back at me as if to say, “Well? Aren’t you coming?”
It seemed as good an idea as any. Why not follow a strange cat around, who I could have sworn was the exact same one I’d seen drawn on a mysterious card I found in my dead husband’s office? I was obviously losing my mind, I thought. I’d gone mad with grief.
The cat seemed to have no problem finding his way. He led me down increasingly narrow streets and alleyways, further and further up, left and right. Occasionally, he looked back over his shoulder and I could have sworn he was checking I was still there. Eventually, when I was footsore and beginning to give up, he came to a stop on the doorstep of a dusty curiosity shop. There he curled up and resumed licking his feet quite as if nothing had happened. Above his head, the sign read, “Once Upon a Time…”
A bell jangled when I pushed open the door. Dust motes swirled like glitter in the air. Shelves on either side and in the middle were stuffed, top to toe, with bric-a-brac: a blue and red Jack-in-the-box with a hooked nose, bouncing on his sprung neck; a rocking chair with a broken spindle; a music box; books; a painting of a nameless and long forgotten child in a silk gown under an oak tree. Gas lamps flickered on the walls, making strange shadows dance on the walls. It felt as if the whole place was holding its breath. In the corner, a wooden tree, cobbled together from driftwood branches, stretched almost to the ceiling. It sent spindly, arthritic fingers out to touch the shelves. And from its arms swung dozens of twinkling glass baubles.
They were all different colours: ruby red with a gold swirl inside, which seemed to move as you watched it; pale blue with silver filigree which winked in the light; white with glitter that shifted like a snow globe.
“Can I help you, my dear?”
I jumped. I’d been so entranced, I hadn’t even noticed the man behind the counter. He looked ancient, bent practically double at the waist with wispy, white hair that stood up around his ears and a pair of half-moon glasses. He smiled brightly when I approached, tucking away the trinket he’d been examining.
“Can you tell me anything about this?” I held out David’s plain, glass bauble.
“Ah, yes. This was once one of mine. Of course, it lost its magic long ago. See? The glass is frosted.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, my dear, you see, all my baubles contain one wish. Just one. The magic only lasts for so long, nothing lasts forever, but while it does it grants you one chance to make your dearest wish come true. May I?”
He took my bauble with careful fingers, turned it this way and that and held it up to the light.
“Hmm. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember. An old friend. How nice. Your wish was granted, I think?”
“It belonged to my husband.”
He tapped a fingernail on the glass. Held it up to his ear the same way you might listen to the sea in a shell.
“Ah! David. Yes. I remember now,” he snapped his fingers, laughed with a wheezing gulp and patted himself on the chest, “A lovely wish. Lovely indeed.”
“A wish? What did he wish for?”
His smile grew broader, “Why, my dear, he wished for you.”
