“What are locusts?”
“Like crickets, but they eat everything.”
Andy nodded, satisfied. I continued the story, about how the woodcutter and his wife became so desperate that they decided to leave the children in the woods, thinking, as I spoke, that my story might have been the wrong choice. Abandoned children in the forest sounded an awful lot like an abandoned boy in the emergency room. But it was too late to go back.
“Okay, so, the children were all alone in the woods, except, luckily, Hansel had some bread crumbs in his pocket.”
“You know what I always wondered?” Andy said. “If they were starving, why didn’t they eat the bread crumbs?”
I’d never thought of that. It occurred to me that Andy might actually know what it was like to be hungry, really hungry, not just-off-the-school-bus, lunch-was-three-hours-ago-and-I’m-ready-for-a-snack hungry.
“The crumbs were so hard that they would have broken his teeth if he’d even tried to eat them. Also, they were moldy. They were green as emeralds with mold!”
The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. “But then if the crumbs were green, they wouldn’t be able to see them if they left them on the forest floor.”
I groaned and said, “You’re kidding me!” the way my dad did on car trips when Jonah asked to stop for a bathroom break ten minutes after we’d gotten on the highway.
“Maybe the forest floor was covered with dead pine needles, which were brown, so the emerald-green bread crumbs showed up.”
“Ah.” When the sliding doors whooshed open, Andy and I both turned to look, but it was only a gray-haired woman who hurried over to the couple with the little girl and started talking rapidly in Spanish. I caught the word Barbie a few times.
“So then what?” Andy asked.
I described Hansel and Gretel’s journey back through the forest. How they slept out alone in the dark woods, with all kinds of scary growls and screeches echoing through the night, with only pine needles for beds and leaves for blankets. I told how they caught a single tiny fish and cooked it over a fire they started by banging a rock against a piece of flint that they found in the river.
“Scott Lindsey?” called a nurse. The teenager got up and sauntered through the swinging doors on giant basketball shoes that made his feet look too big for his legs, with his mom, still holding her magazine, behind him. The moaning man watched him go and said, “Shee-it,” and his wife looked at me and Andy and said, “ ’Scuse his language.”
Andy and I looked at each other and started to giggle. “Shee-it,” Andy whispered, doing a perfect imitation of the man, and then I said, “ ’Scuse his language,” and we both laughed even harder, and he said, “Keep going.”
“Hansel and Gretel wandered deeper into the forest, trying to find their little cottage . . . but instead they found a hideous witch. She had curly black hair like wires, and a big red wart on her chin.” In my retelling, the witch looked like Miss Bonitatibus, my music teacher, who would say, “How honored we are that you could join us,” every time I came back to class after being home sick.
“The witch said, ‘Come! I will show you a sight such as you have never seen!’ And she led them through the forest, to a house made entirely . . . out . . . of . . . candy.” I described the walls made of gingerbread, a fireplace filled with peppermint logs, and a roof tiled with Necco Wafers, pale pink and mint green and melon orange.
“Were there any doughnuts on the house?” Andy asked, lifting up the remainder of the one I’d given him.
“The doorknobs were doughnuts, and the floors were milk chocolate, and—”
At that moment, a woman hurried through the emergency-room doors. She stopped and scanned the crowd, her head turning from side to side until she spotted Andy. Her skin, sunburned a painful-looking pink, was much lighter than her son’s. She had a tangle of taffy-blond hair and wore high black boots, blue jeans, and a low-cut black top. Black rubber bangles covered one arm from wrist to elbow (“They look cheap,” my mother had sniffed when I’d asked her to buy me some), and as she walked over to us, I smelled the nose-wrinkling, sweet-sharp scent of liquor. She looked nothing like my mom or like the other mothers I knew. The moms in my world did not have wild mops of hair, or long fingernails with glittering polish, or four earrings in their ears. I wondered how my mom would look, out of her crisp cotton skirts or linen pants and twinset, and in high heels and a shirt cut low enough to show the tops of her bosoms.
“What happened?” she asked, bending down so that she was looking right into Andy’s eyes.