Chapter Three
Fazire & Lily
Eight years later, Lily was now twenty-two…
It was, quite simply, the worst time in his entire genie life.
And as Fazire had lived millennia that was saying quite a lot.
He thought the worst was when Sarah slipped away two years ago.
Fazire had never known anyone who’d died and he’d known Sarah for decades. She was his roommate, his protector, his friend.
He’d had a good, long time with Sarah and he was lucky to have it. He knew that.
It didn’t make him miss her any less.
She was kind to him, took care of him even on her teacher’s salary. She kept him fed, clothed, happy and showered him with baseball tickets and suntan lotion. Sarah never, even though it was her right, asked a thing from Fazire in all her years. She just gave and gave and gave.
The first and only human any genie in the entire History of the Genie Race who had been entitled to but hadn’t asked for one single wish.
Sarah, in Genie Land, was a legend as Fazire thought she very well should be.
She’d at least, before she died, seen the outrageous beauty Lily had become, the now well-rounded perfectness that was just simply Lily. Off gallivanting across the world, or at least England where she went to university and then decided to stay. Becoming sophisticated and cosmopolitan but never losing her down-home, Indiana-girl charm and spirit.
Lily’s gold-white hair had changed. It was still golden with strands of white but also, unusually, had strands of strawberry blond as well as copper. And just to make it that bit more interesting, not that it could get much more interesting, here and there were strands of auburn.
She’d been awarded a scholarship to go study at some place called “Oxford” in England after she won some writing competitions, creating magnificent stories that it seemed everyone wanted to read.
Once in England she became more interested in what she called “footpaths” and tramping around in cathedrals and castles and every museum in London (and a fair few shops) and writing more of her wonderful, entertaining stories, than eating. She was busy, busy, busy and the weight just melted off.
Tall, like her mother, father and grandfather before her even though Fazire had only just seen photos of the handsome, slender Jim, Fazire knew he was tall, Lily was curvaceous with a very small waist and a lovely hourglass figure.
She’d matured into her plain face. Her skin was always impeccable but once the baby fat left it, her intelligence and humour fixed it with extraordinary elegance and beauty.
And now, with those miraculous eyes, well…
She was, quite simply, stunning.
Lily was the pride of all of them, Sarah, Becky, Will and Fazire.
And she had absolutely no idea. None whatsoever.
Lily looked in the mirror and saw the old Lily not the beauty she’d become.
So really Fazire had done his job, she definitely had humility and not the barest hint of conceit.
But now Lily looked beaten and he was very certain that this was the worst time in her entire human life as well.
She was sick every morning, he could hear her vomiting in the bathroom and he’d go in just like he did when she was a little girl and had the flu or one of her awful headaches that gave her so much pain she would get violently ill. Then he would stroke her back and hold her long, thick, glorious hair.
Fazire understood why she was ill, she was heartsick at losing her parents so close after her grandmother.
A plane crash. A horrible, hideous plane crash. They didn’t even have the bodies.
One day Becky and Will were in Hawaii for a much needed vacation. They were taking a day trip to another island on a small twin-engine aircraft (this, Fazire could not imagine, a plane, he thought, always needed a lot more than two engines).
The next day, they were gone.
Fazire had had to use the phone to call Lily in England. He knew how to use it, of course, he hadn’t been living like a human for years and not learned how to order a pizza. But it had taken a long time to track her down. She had some job in a shop and bought a rundown house in some seaside town in Somerset called Clevedon for what she called “no money at all” which, Will said, laid testimony to just how rundown it was. A house which she was determined to restore to its full Victorian beauty.
Call after call, she didn’t answer and Fazire finally decided she was not at her ramshackle abode.
She’d graduated from Oxford and declared she could not leave England. She loved it there. Fazire could see why from the pictures she sent home. It looked beautiful.
Nevertheless Fazire hated it. It took away Lily and he wanted her home.
And now she was home, though he would never have wanted her home like this.
After contacting one of her friends who Becky had in her address book, a woman named Maxine, Fazire had eventually found Lily. Maxine said she was staying somewhere in London and gave Fazire the number.
Lily had answered the phone and had been so excited to tell him something, her voice just dripping happiness. He couldn’t bear it, the sound of her happy voice while he was carrying his terrible news. He’d cut her short before she could put three words together and told her his grim tidings.
She’d, of course, taken the first flight home.
She sat next to him at the memorial service wearing a very smart, black suit that looked stylish and cultured and all the people around her didn’t know what to make of her. She was very much not the Lily who had left at sixteen to go to Oxford. She was like a modern day princess, graceful, beautiful, refined and untouchable.
She held herself in a regal way that made Fazire so proud to have her on his arm it nearly edged away his bitter sadness at losing his Becky and Will.
Lily was very brave and kind to people, she nodded and smiled. After the service they went back to Sarah’s limestone house which was now Lily’s and she played hostess beautifully, making people feel comfortable and at home even though Fazire knew from her pale skin and sunken eyes she was exhausted.
There was so much food, it was everywhere and the first time in his life he didn’t eat a bite. Nor did Lily.
Everyone knew Fazire, he’d been around for decades and, of course, not aged a single day. They thought this strange but they figured he was from some foreign land and many of them never left the Midwest so what did they know about how foreigners aged? So they’d accepted him. Being a genie and thus above mere mortals, he didn’t mix with them very often and now he did it only as his duty to Becky and Will and, of course, Lily. He helped Lily by playing host and kindly uncle-type figure (“uncle” was the term Sarah had come up to explain his presence in the family and Fazire liked it, always had).