Madeline and the Monkey’s Paw

I sat in my car and watched snow fall through the cone of the streetlight in front of his house.

The flakes drifted in slow diagonal lines, catching the light before they lost themselves in the dark. It was the kind of hush that makes you want to hold your breath. Inside, I could see the faint blink of Christmas lights through the curtains. Somewhere in there was a man I thought I loved and a girl I’d never met who might, if I was lucky, love me back.

I checked the text he had sent earlier.

She’s so excited you’re coming. She keeps asking when you’ll get here.

A warmth that had nothing to do with the car heater moved up my throat. I’d never had children. I was in my forties by then and had made a sort of brittle peace with that fact, but all it took was one line about a little girl waiting at the window and that peace cracked like thin ice.

I grabbed the tin of cookies from the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped out into the powder of fresh snow. By the time I reached the porch, my hair and coat shoulders were dusted white.

The door flew open before I could knock.

“Hi!” she said.

She wore ballet slippers and leggings with ponies galloping up the sides. Her brown hair was pulled back in a crooked ponytail. Behind her, the house glowed: tree in the corner, stockings already hung, the smell of something sugary in the air.

“Madeline,” he said from behind her, “let her in, kiddo, you’re letting all the heat out.”

She hopped back to make room. “I helped with the tree,” she told me. “And we have hot chocolate. With marshmallows. Regular and the mini kind.”

“It looks wonderful,” I said. “And that sounds perfect.”

Her father took the cookie tin from me and kissed my cheek. “You made it,” he said. “Road okay?”

“Just a little slushy,” I said, suddenly conscious of the snow melting on the mat. “Hi, Madeline. I’ve heard so much about you.”

She dipped into a sort of half curtsy, ballet slippers squeaking on the hardwood. “Dad said you like Christmas,” she said.

“I do,” I said. “Seems like you do too.”

She grabbed my hand without asking and tugged me toward the living room. There was a pink backpack leaning against the couch, a stuffed horse facedown on a throw pillow, glitter stuck to the rug where she must have been making ornaments. It was the kind of homey chaos I had always imagined and never had.

“She made the star,” her father said, nodding toward the top of the tree.

“It’s terrible,” she said, delighted. “Look, it leans.”

“It’s perfect,” I said, and meant it.

We made more cookies that night. Flour on the counter, music low, the dog pacing around our ankles for dropped crumbs. Madeline narrated everything, from the new girl in her class to how her mom burned grilled cheese sandwiches “every single time” because she got distracted by the news. At one point she touched the ring on my finger, turning it slightly to catch the light.

“Is that from my dad?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he said easily. “That one’s just hers. But maybe one day we’ll get you something fancy, huh?”

Her eyes flicked between us. “Like a family ring?” she said. “With all our names?”

He laughed it off. I did not. The word lodged in my throat. Family. It had a shape now. It smelled like sugar cookies and the dog’s fur and the faint scent of his cologne. It wore ballet shoes and leaned stars and hope.

Later that winter, after I had been around most weekends, he told me the story he thought was adorable.

“She asked the funniest thing the other night,” he said as we were getting ready for bed. “We were on the couch. She was quiet for a long time, then she said, all serious, ‘When is she going back?’ Meaning you.”

He chuckled, waiting for me to join in. “Kids, right?”

I stared at him. “What did you say?”

“I told her you weren’t going back,” he said. “That you were staying. That you’re good for us.”

He said it like a punchline. Like a charming anecdote they could tell one day in a toast at our wedding. For him, it was proof that his daughter was attached enough to me to worry about losing me. For me, it was the moment I realized what role I’d stepped into without quite understanding it.

She had been wishing for a woman around the house, her parents together, the soft outline of a family that matched the pictures in her head. The universe answered with a woman at the sink and a second car in the driveway, which is not the same thing at all.

We got married the following year, in June, with no snow and no ballet slippers, just sticky heat and a rented hall and Madeline in a yellow dress she said made her feel like a flower. At the reception she sat between us, braiding and unbraiding her father’s fingers with her own.

“Now we’re a real family,” she said.

Her mother didn’t come. Her absence hummed under everything, like an off-key note in a song you cannot unhear.

For the first year or so, Madeline and I got along. We baked and we decorated and we built forts out of couch cushions. I helped her with homework, showed up at her chorus concerts, learned the names of her favorite stuffed animals. There were small storms, the usual preteen squalls, but they passed.

Then something in the weather shifted.

It started with eye rolls. Tight shoulders. The way she began to say “your house” instead of “home” when she was with me. She complained that I’d washed her favorite shirt wrong, that I made the spaghetti sauce “weird,” that I didn’t know how her mom did things.

“I’m not your mom,” I said one night, more sharply than I meant to, when she accused me of buying the wrong brand of cereal.

“I know,” she snapped. “You’re my dad’s wife.”

The words landed in the space between us like something dropped and broken. She ran to her room and shut the door. Her father turned the television volume up and did not get involved. Later, when I tried to talk to him about it, he smiled and said, “She’s just adjusting. It’s a phase. You’re doing great.”

I started noticing how many things he explained away that way. The forgotten promise to pick her up after practice. The short, cutting comment to me in front of her. The way he could be the gentlest father, spending hours explaining fractions to Madeline, but the most impatient husband, checking his phone every thirty seconds whenever I tried to talk about my own day.

That was when the full, terrible cost of the wish became clear. I hadn't been chosen for who I was; I had been chosen for what I could do: run the house, manage the daughter, and admire the father. I thought I was a wife; he had wanted a highly effective, adoring nanny.

The truth was, when Madeline wasn't physically present—whether she was at her mother's house or simply upstairs—our marriage became an empty stage, into the quiet space where companionship wasn't required. Madeline's jealousy had been difficult, but it was his fundamental withdrawal that was impossible.

We went to counseling once. He turned on the charm in the waiting room and told the therapist we were “just here for a tune-up.” Afterward he said we were fine and did not schedule another appointment. He told friends I was “a worrier.” They laughed. He laughed. I smiled.

Madeline grew into her teens like someone walking across a lake she was not sure was frozen solid. I watched her testing the ice with each step. Some days she laughed with me in the kitchen, telling me about her friends. Other days she could not meet my eyes. There were weekends when she would barely speak, her resentment crackling in the air like static.

It would’ve been easy to paint her as a brat. Stepmother stories often do. The truth was scarier and more tender. She was trying to make sense of a life in pieces. Two houses. Two sets of rules. Two versions of every holiday. My presence made the split visible in a way it had not been when her parents simply lived apart.

She wanted one whole family again, and I kept the harder truth to myself, that the broken version she had was kinder to her than the perfect one she imagined.

Years later I would think of an old story about a shriveled paw that grants wishes at a cost. The people in that story ask for what they think they cannot live without and get a twisted version instead. Madeline never said her wish out loud, not in so many words, but I could feel it in the way she looked past me to the door at night, listening for her mother’s car, hoping that one day it would stay in our driveway instead of leaving again. A woman in the house. Her parents together. The family she had before the split, restored by force of hope. What she got was me, careful and eager and in the way.

The marriage lasted longer than it should have. Long enough for all three of us to accumulate our own private inventories of small hurts and quiet kindnesses. Long enough for me to see the same patterns I’d heard about from his ex-wife play out in our living room: the disappears-into-work mode, the brittle temper, the sudden generosity that felt more like apology than love.

When we separated, Madeline was old enough to understand anger and not yet old enough to understand nuance. She didn’t scream at me. She didn’t cry in front of me. She folded into herself.

“Is it because of me?” she asked once, very quietly, as we loaded boxes into my car.

“No,” I said. “It is not because of you.”

“Is it because of Mom?”

“No.”

“Then why?” she asked, and there was no version of the truth I could give her that would not feel like a weapon.

“Sometimes grownups break in ways kids cannot fix,” I said. “Sometimes staying together makes the breaking worse.”

It was a thin answer. It was all I could manage without telling her the whole map of his fault lines, without setting fire to whatever co-parenting might still be possible for her sake.

“Do I still get to see you?” she asked.

“If you want to,” I said, throat tight.

She nodded. Then she went inside and shut the door. I sat in the car, both hands on the wheel, and stared at the house we had all tried to bend into our wishes.

After the divorce, the shape of our relationship had to be remade. At first it was sporadic. A text on my birthday. A photo of the dog. A quick visit when her dad was out of town. Her mother, to her credit, did not forbid it. “You were important to her,” she said the one time we met for coffee, an unlikely cease-fire. “I am not going to take that away.”

Years passed. Madeline graduated high school, then college. She moved into a small city apartment with peeling paint and a fire escape she loved. Our contact grew steadier again, not out of obligation but choice. She called me from thrifting trips to send photos of lamps and dresses. She texted me during fights with her boyfriend, asking if a certain tone or silence was normal.

One winter evening not long ago, I stood at the window of my own place and watched snow fall into the orange glow of the parking lot lights. The flakes came down thick and quiet, blurring the outlines of the cars, softening the world.

My phone buzzed.

It was Madeline. The thumbnail of a photo filled the screen: a narrow living room, a small crooked tree decorated with a mishmash of ornaments, half of them clearly from a thrift store, half of them homemade. On top of the tree, a star made of cardboard and tinfoil, leaning.

First Christmas in the new place, her text read. Tiny, but I love it. Wish you were here.

In the old story, the wishes always come at a terrible cost. Ours did too. My marriage ended. Her childhood broke in ways I wish it had not. She did not get the one whole family she thought would make everything right.

But standing there with the glow of her message in my hand and the snow drifting down outside, it felt less like a curse and more like an odd, hard gift. The wish had been twisted and split and granted in pieces. No one would have written it this way. Still, somehow, there we were, two women with a shared past and a complicated love, looking out at December from different windows.

I watched the snow fall a little longer, then typed back.

I wish I were there too.