The letter looked like a ransom note, each jagged letter traced over and over for emphasis.
The message got straight to the point: “I KNOW IT’S YOU MOM.”
A fourth-grader named Caden had begun to harbor suspicions about the supposedly magical being who left cash under his pillow after each baby tooth fell out.
There had been inconsistencies in the tooth fairy’s behavior: After Caden lost his first tooth, he woke up to a crisp $100 bill.
His mother, Ashley Lee, a chiropractor in California, quickly came to regret that initial gift, delivered in an excited rush, not accounting for the dozens of teeth to come.
For his next teeth, Caden received less, and the variations in bills raised questions in his mind. And so he wrote the accusatory letter.
Now, Ms. Lee wanted to keep him a believer.
So she took a shot in the dark, and dashed off a note to what she figured was a made-up “toothfairy” email address, not knowing if anyone would receive it. “Caden thinks it is me giving him money for exchanging the tooth,” she wrote, asking the tooth fairy to reply and prove him wrong.
Her hope — silly, sweet and a little desperate — was that an “official” email from the tooth fairy might somehow persuade Caden.
Dr. Purva Merchant was sitting in her office at a pediatric dental practice in Seattle when Ms. Lee’s email arrived. It was roughly the six-thousandth such email she’d received in the past 20 years.
She knew exactly what to do:
Dr. Merchant became the tooth fairy by accident.
In 2004, her boyfriend — now husband — made her a new email address that included her nickname, the tooth fairy, to help organize her dental school applications and keep in touch with family abroad.
About three years of mundane email later, Dr. Merchant got an unusual message. The subject line was “Calum’s tooth,” and the message was urgent.
Dr. Merchant realized she was hearing from a frantic parent who had forgotten to tuck a few bills under a child’s pillow and needed to appease that child. She decided to help out.
Dr. Merchant has averaged three to five emails a day in the two decades since, and she has responded to every one of them. (She asked that her full email address not be published, even though she knows it’s easy enough to guess, for fear that she would be too inundated with emails to respond to each one and “keep the magic alive.”)
Each note she writes is an act of reassurance.
That she can find the tooth that was accidentally swallowed or slipped into the drain, even if it happened on vacation. That she has had an unusually busy season and will be sure that the house in question is next on her list. That she can complete the transaction — typically the equivalent of a dollar or maybe five — in Israeli shekels or South African rand.
When she knows she won’t be able to reply to emails for a few days, she puts on the equivalent of an out-of-office note, informing anxious families that she’ll pay them a visit as soon as she can.
And after she reminds each recipient to keep up their brushing and flossing, she ends each note with the same sign-off: “Happy growing up!”
Most of the emails written by children are polite, and occasionally adoring:
Some are more direct:
Markers of Dr. Merchant’s email life are scarce in her real life. Her dental practice bears no mention of the tooth fairy. She describes herself on Instagram only as a “kid’s dentist” and a lover of yoga and travel. Many of her patients don’t even know about her email persona.
“There’s something amazing about doing something for someone, and they don’t know who you are,” she said. “This came from the universe, it came from nowhere.”
Dr. Merchant didn’t have the tooth fairy as a child growing up in India, but she did have pen pals. This isn’t so different. Sometimes, when she’s in a particularly good mood, she answers children’s questions: What does she look like? And what does she do with all the teeth she collects?
She has a few stock answers: She looks like a fairy. She gives extra teeth to babies with no teeth, or sometimes she’ll use them to build a tooth castle.
There are parents whom she has heard from for years, who write to her every time one of their kids loses a new tooth, or who thank her for spending her free time humoring strangers.
But it’s rare that she can get to know an actual child, without their parents as intermediaries. That’s why a recent email from Piya Garg, a 23-year-old living in London, moved her to tears.
Seventeen years earlier, Ms. Garg was on vacation with her family in Singapore in the summer of 2008 when the front tooth that she’d been wiggling for weeks finally fell out.
But amid all the excitement, and all the blood, the tooth fell into a drain outside the hotel restaurant. Ms. Garg, then 6 years old, was devastated. Her father sent an email to the tooth fairy at a few different email domains, hedging his bets, with a message from his daughter, asking that she be reimbursed for her tooth when she returned home to Hong Kong, and in the local currency:
Dr. Merchant replied, and Ms. Garg got her money.
Seventeen years later, on the day that Ms. Garg got her wisdom teeth taken out, she was reflecting on a long adolescence of dental drama: braces, palate expanders, and now a surgery she had been dreading.
She was thinking about that funny email she had received from the tooth fairy when she was a child. She figured this wisdom tooth would be the last tooth that ever fell out.
So after the extraction, she sent a note to the Gmail address, hoping it was still active. She thanked Dr. Merchant for reassuring her about her front tooth all those years ago:
Dr. Merchant replied a few minutes later.
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
The post The Tooth Fairy Is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle. appeared first on New York Times.
