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She knows three things about her mother.
(It’s always three in these stories, isn’t it? Try as she might, she can never escape the story. No one can.)
First, her mother has magic. Trees fruit at her touch: plums as dark as the hellebore that grows in the northeast corner of the garden, along the fence. Cherries so bright that they shimmer like stars in the night sky. Crimson apples whose juice drips from your lips like blood.
When she snaps her fingers, the trees part with agonized creaks and clear a path. Storm clouds may thunder in the distance, but the only rain that falls is gentle and brief, long enough to water the plants and no more.
The beans grow on a trellis precisely in the middle of the garden, and all paths lead to them.
Second, her mother hates answering questions.
“Do I have a father?” she asks one day while her mother brushes her hair. She is five years old and already ashamed of her tangled, curly hair. Her mother had tried a spell to turn her hair lush and golden, but it failed. She is not as susceptible to her mother’s magic as the trees and sky are.
“Do you see anyone around here?”
“It’s just that everything has a mother and a father, doesn’t it? The cats, the mice, even the plants.”
The vicious tug on her hair brings tears to her eyes before her mother says bitterly, “What good are fathers anyway? Do they feed their children? Do they protect their wives?”
That tells her all she needs to know about her father, and she never asks again.
Three, her mother does not love her.
They live in a tower, deep in the forest. Her mother grows vegetables in the garden, harvests fruits from the orchards, sets snares for rabbits and squirrels and quail. The child is often set to picking blackberries from the thorny bushes that grow around the tower, and her mother says nothing when she comes inside with scratched hands and arms.
Her mother never teaches her anything except by threat and punishment.
“You foolish child, that’s not black nightshade, that’s deadly nightshade! Are you trying to kill both of us or only me?”
“If you haven’t learned this spell by the time I return, you’ll be scrubbing the floors by hand. Don’t expect me to do your work for you.”
“None of your business how those beans are magical. If anything ever happens to them, you won’t like what happens next.”
It’s many years before she learns why the beans are special, and by that point, events are already in motion. The man steals the beans, the witch is cursed, the witch casts a curse in return. If she had known more about the beans, would she have prevented the theft? Could she? Or was the story of her life already written, a tale that would be told for centuries to frighten children?
Her mother leaves when she is twenty. She wakes up in the morning to find her gone. Her mother gives no warning and leaves no note. She sits on the less rickety of the two chairs and is torn between feelings of sadness and relief, abandonment and freedom. No one else to worry about, no one to placate, no one to please except herself.
But the tower is cold, even without her mother there to ration firewood. The dank stone smells of moss and dirt. The fruit trees shiver when she touches them, but she doesn’t want them to fear her. She doesn’t want to force the rain away when it threatens. She quickly tires of being alone.
She walks to the village, a place she’s only been to a few times, and never without her mother. It’s insular, but close enough to the royal city that one of the princes passes through occasionally.
The cottage she finds is small, but the garden has room for her favorite plants. Most villagers look at her suspiciously, but they still sell her rabbits and squirrels at the village market. Her hens lay eggs. No one lives in the house next door, but she makes a few friends, especially when she knows a trick for getting stains out of sheets or has advice on the best growing conditions for white asparagus. (Cover them. Shelter them. Deprive them of the sun and watch them grow, pale and precious.)
She carefully transplants her mother’s beans, digging out the delicate roots. Ultimately, her care is wasted. She should have spent the effort on a higher fence, maybe gotten a watchdog. But someone always has to be the villain, don’t they? No happy endings without sad beginnings and middles.
For years, she lives the quiet life of a village witch. Lovesick young men and women pester her for love potions; wives seek ways of ridding themselves of abusive husbands. She makes nectarine jam and pickled cabbage, and those earn more money than potions or poisons.
Occasionally a young man catches her eye, but never one who would bed the village witch. Only fools try to woo her, and she can’t be bothered, even though she wants a child. Someday. There is no rush.
Until. Until a man and his wife move in next door, a son with them and a daughter on the way. Quiet neighbors until the woman’s belly grows big. Until the man takes the easy way out and steals from her garden, rather than knocking on the door and asking. She’d probably have given him anything he wanted.
But he takes from her, so she takes from him. You pay for poisons with years of your life. You pay for love potions with spit and seed. You pay for theft with blood.
And losing the beans? She discovers the cost: her youth and beauty. In exchange, she gets herself a child. Her mother was right—fathers are useless. The one next door does nothing to stop her when she takes his newborn daughter, nothing to comfort his sobbing, screeching wife.
Maybe she loses a bit of her mind, along with her beauty. What does it matter? What is parenthood but sustained madness, believing you can shape a person's life and somehow not make the same mistakes made in shaping you?
She’ll be better than her mother. She’ll keep Rapunzel safe in the tower, Rapunzel with her beautiful golden hair, and she’ll be all her daughter ever needs. She’ll build a little world just for the two of them, and with a firm hand, Rapunzel will never be alone, never unloved, perfect and untouched, happy forever after.