‘A girl stands up in the cookie aisle, a place she knows well, a place where bad things couldn’t have happened, or at least, so she thought. She was looking for something that she did not quite manage to find and now, it seems she’s lost something of more significance than the box of cookies. She looks for her mother. Walks slow, then faster, until she’s passed all the aisles, seen the woman in none. Then, she screams – mommy! Mommy! - but her mother doesn’t say anything, for there’s nothing left to say. And the girl doesn’t understand, but finds herself trapped in strange people’s arms. Lost, she goes with the strangers, because all this while, she felt sure she’d know her way home, but it turns out she does not.
Except none of this happens, not in the real world, at least.’
The Bedtime Man registers the shock in the little girl’s face. Smaller than he’d expected, like deep down, she already knew this, and he knows she does. Some things just can’t be painted over, no matter how hard you scrub.
But the girl says nothing, and so the story goes on.
‘You see, none of this can happen anymore, but it could have. Once. It was a very real possibility once, a future, picked out of a list of many other futures you could’ve had. Carefully chosen, not the best, but surely the most convenient.
‘None of this can happen because the girl, in this moment, is no longer living. This girl who, in a different life, might have gotten separated from her mother while shopping, she’s been long gone, I’m afraid. In this life, the real life, as it were, she perished when she was very small, of a fast and inexplicable illness. An unfair outcome, I’m sure you would agree.’
‘You lied to me,’ Lettie feels her lower lip tremble and forces herself to stop it, just as she’s done all those motherless nights, spent inside an orphanage bed, wondering why she’s all alone, why her mommy never came back for her.
And while in those terrible nights, she always managed to calm herself, regain composure before the ultimate loss, this time she can not. She presses the back of her hands over her tightened eyelids and thanks God for the pitch-dark, even though she knows the Bedtime Man can smell her tears.
She is wrong, for in this darkness, there is no heaven that can hear.
‘I know it’s little consolation, but your mother did come for you. She thought it was unfair, too.’
But the girl, who would’ve done anything once to hear these exact words, can not make sense of this final bedtime story. It seems too cruel to be true.
‘You lied,’ she says again, not in the least interested in listening to the Bedtime Man.
‘No, I merely agreed with you, with your mother. I thought it was unjust that you should get this ending and not another. When your time came, I saw this particular future waft into the room and hang right over your crib and I merely told myself, why not? Why shouldn’t she get to experience a childhood? Why shouldn’t she get to play like other children have played, or feel joy and sorrow?’
When she opens her eyes, the Bedtime Man looks sad, his face now grown dark and weary, his back just slightly more bent.
‘But why this future? If you were going to lie, why not lie about a normal family?’
And still, even now, even though she knows all that didn’t happen, that all that sadness wasn’t in fact real, she can’t help the breaking sound in her throat when she speaks the words. Some things just won’t go away.
The Bedtime Man shifts in his seat. It occurs to Lettie only now that he may very well be the one controlling the shadows, hiding himself when he wishes not to be seen, shielding her when she wants the same.
‘Because then, there would have been questions. Your parents are still living, I could not bring them here. And it wouldn’t have worked with anyone else, you would have known.’
‘But I remember…’ she loses the words into the night, into the images that drift before her eyes, only to be let go. ‘I remember them, I remember so much, I remember that day in the supermarket and…’
‘Yes, I made sure you would. See, the basic structure for that future existed somewhere in the ether, all I did was make sure you remember it.’
‘But why?’
‘Because even this life is better than no life at all, don’t you think? Forgive me, it was an unfair question. I brought you here because I thought your story ended unjustly and that it deserved to go on. Perhaps I should’ve let you go, but I couldn’t. I was weak, I failed my job and not just once.’
‘The other children.’ It’s not a question, and so, he does not bother answering. Lettie sees clearly now, for the first time, she understands things, pieces together the map and finds she was wrong all this while, that she’s not, in fact, special at all. Right now, she hates the Bedtime Man with a searing, liquid fire. Hates him for invading her privacy, hates him for stealing her story, for making the unfairness of it all seem matterless.
‘You could have stayed inside the orphanage,’ his tone is even, his voice cold as ice. ‘Nothing would have happened to you or your story, if you’d only known to do as I asked. I told you, Miss Tremont, that coming here was not a good idea. I’m sorry I had to destroy your vision of things, but I never thought you’d come out. I hoped you could be a happy little girl for at least a while longer.’
‘Why shouldn’t I have come out?’
And she knows, while she speaks, that she should stutter more, sound more like a child, perhaps whimper, but she can’t. It’s never been in her nature to be a little girl, she’s always been tough, always impatient, and now she’s out here, in the cold and the dark. And she speaks clearly, not so much sad for what she may have lost, as she is curious as to what comes next.
‘Because I can’t take you back in there, not now that you know the truth. You would compromise all the other children and that wouldn’t be fair. They still have their chance at a better story.’
‘You could erase my memory of this, like you did when I was small.’
She’s fast and the Bedtime Man remembers once more why it was she captured his attention in the first place, even as a baby.
‘No, I never erased your memory, I merely built on top of that. No one remembers the exact moment of their death, and for an infant so small, it would be easy to just chuck it all up to some minor illness, it was forgotten before it was even noted. I can not interfere with your memories, I never interfered with any of your memories. It’s against the rules.’
‘There are rules?’
‘There are always rules. Any good story has rules.’
‘So what happens now? Since I can’t go back, are you going to kill me? Will I stay out here with you forever?’
‘You’re already dead, Miss Tremont, and even if I wanted to kill you, I couldn’t. I’m just the aftermath, the one who picks up the loose ends and tries to tie them into something believable. No, now, you go with the others, the ones who remember things as they were. You go where you should have gone in the first place.’
‘And what about you?’ She feels peace, for the very first time in her life, there is not one question swimming through her mind.
‘Still here, tying up loose ends, telling stories to children, same as I’ve always been, same as I always will be.’
And the Bedtime Man holds out one bony hand and leads the child to another door, one previously hidden in the many shadows that surround the dark; and that night, he walks out to the end of the corridor and calls out to the remaining children and tells them the story and the girl in the cookie aisle.
The End