They (fairy tales) make rivers run
with wine only to make us remember,
for one wild moment,
that they run with water.
C.K. Chesterton,
from Orthodoxy
It was you, it was you, who said that dreams come true
And it was you, it was you, who said that mine would, too
And it was you who said that all I had to do was to believe
But when your ivory towers tumbled down, they tumbled down on me
Fred Eaglesmith,
from "It Was You"
It's the family you choose that counts.
Andrew Vachss
Jilly
Newford, April 1999
Once upon a time...
I don't know what makes me turn. Some sixth sense, prickling the hairs at the nape of my neck, I guess. I see the headlights. They fill my world and I feel like a deer, trapped in their glare. I can't move. The car starts to swerve away from me, but it's already too late.
It's weird how everything falls into slow motion. There seems to be time to do anything and everything, and yet no time at all. I wait for my life to flash before my eyes, but all I get is those headlights bearing down on me.
There's the squeal of tires.
A rush of wind in my ears.
And then the impact.
- 2 -
Once upon a time...
That's how they always start, the old fairy tales that I read as a child. It's the proper place for them to start, because right away you know you're going to be taken somewhere else.
So.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who wished she could be anywhere else in all the wide world except for where she was. Or more preferably still, she wished she could find some way to cross over into whatever worlds might lie beyond this one, those wonderful worlds that she read about in stories. She would tap at the back of closets and always look very carefully down rabbit holes. She would rub every old lamp that she came across and wish on any and everything...
* * *
I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of faerie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our head for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.
In terms of what Professor Dapple calls consensual reality--that the world is as it is because that's how we've all agreed it is--I seem to carry this magical bubble world around with me, inside and hidden from the world we all inhabit. A strange and wonderful world where the implausible becomes not only possible, but probable. It doesn't matter if, most of the time, I'm the only one that can see it, though that's probably why I paint what I do; I'm trying to show the rest of the world this weird little corner of reality that I inhabit.
I see things from the corner of my eye that shouldn't be there, but are, if only for a brief, flickering moment. At a flea market, an old black teapot turns into a badger and scurries away. Late at night, a lost boy sits on the windowsill of the secondfloor nursery in the apartment beside the Chinese grocery down the street from my studio, a tiny spark of light dancing about his shoulders as he peers in through the leaded panes. Later still, I hear the muted sound of hooves on the pavement and look out to see the dreadlocked gnome that Christy calls Long, his gnarled little fingers playing with a string of elf-knots that can call up the wind as he rides his pig Brigwin to the goblin market.
Oh, and the gargoyles...sitting high up on their perches, pretending to be stone while having long conversations with pigeons and crows. I've caught them twitching, moving from one position to another, the sly look that freezes mid-wink when they realize I'm watching.
But then I've always had a fertile imagination and it was many years before I realized that most people don't experience these extraordinary glimpses the way I do. For the longest time I thought they simply wouldn't admit to it.
But the trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix.
When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
- 3 -
The world feels all mushy when I open my eyes. My eyelids are sticky, encrusted with dream sand, and nothing has a defined edge to it. Colours are muted and my ears are blocked. I feel dislocated from the rest of my body. I'm aware of it, but it doesn't seem to really be connected to me anymore. That's part of the blur. I have the sense that I don't really want to connect with my body because that'll just open me up to a world of pain.
I'm vaguely aware that there's something pushed up my nose. An IV drip in my arm. Limbs weighed down with I don't know what.
I realize I must be in a hospital.
Hospital? Why would I be in a hospital?
I hear a small pathetic whimper and realize that I made that sound. It draws a huge face into my line of vision, features swimming. Slowly the face becomes normal-sized, though still blurry.
"S-sophie
?"
My voice comes out in a weak, slurred rasp. My mouth doesn't seem to work properly anymore.
"Oh, Jilly," she says.
My ears pop at the sound of her voice. My hearing clears. There's something I need to tell her. A dream I had.
"I...feel
weird."
"Everything's going to be okay," she says.
Then I remember the dream. The fuzziness and strange feelings go away, or at least distance themselves from me like I'm experiencing them through the wrong end of a telescope. I try to sit up, but I can't even lift my head. Not even that troubles me.
"I've been there," I tell her. "To Mabon. I finally found a way into your dreamlands."
She looks like she wants to cry. I thought she'd be happy for me. I've been wanting to go there forever, into her cathedral world where everything feels taller and bigger and brighter--more than it is here. She visits the city of Mabon in her dreams and has a whole other, really interesting life there. Christy calls it serial dreaming, where every time you fall asleep you pick up where you left off in last night's dream, but it's more than that. What, exactly, none of us really know. But I've always believed it was a real place and now I know for sure because I've been there, too.
"I couldn't find you there," I tell her. "I wandered around for ages. Everybody I asked knew who you were, but they couldn't tell me where you were."
"I was here," Sophie says. "With you. In the hospital."
I don't clue in at all.
"I was wondering about that," I say. "Who's sick?"
"There was an accident," Sophie begins. "A car..."
I tune her out. I don't like cars. There's something bad about cars, but I can't remember what.
"Jilly?"
I try to focus on her voice, but suddenly there's this great abyss inside me and it just keeps pulling me down into it.
Down and down and down...
- 4 -
Where is that nurse? Sophie Etoile wondered, looking over her shoulder at the door to Jilly's room. It felt like ages since she'd pushed the call button.
She turned her attention back to Jilly and brushed a damp lock of curly hair away from her friend's brow. Jilly was gone again, but at least her breathing seemed more normal. The doctor had said that when she came out of the coma, she would probably fall into a second period of unconsciousness, but it would be more like sleep. Now all they had to worry about was the possibility of paralysis when she came around again.
The call Sophie had gotten three nights ago had been her worst nightmare come true. The way Jilly was forever wandering around the city at all hours of the day or night, not caring about the danger, Sophie'd always worried that it would only be a matter of time before Jilly got hurt, though she'd been thinking more along the lines of a mugging rather than this--an early evening hit-and-run on a Lower Crowsea sidestreet. Sophie had often joked that Jilly must have a guardian angel looking out for her. Well, if that was true, either her angel had taken the other night off, or Jilly's run of blind good luck had finally run out.
It broke Sophie's heart to look at her friend. Always lively and vibrant, Jilly was almost unrecognizable at the moment. Her skin was sallow, except for the bruising on the left side of her face where she'd struck the pavement. They'd had to shave the hair on the side of her head to properly clean her scalp. Her left arm and right leg were encased in plaster casts. Her torso was wrapped with bandages because of the ribs that had been cracked. Tubes from her nostrils tied her to an oxygen unit in the wall. More tubes were plugged into her body, running from an IV pole that held plastic bags of fluids. Wires connected her to a bank of machines that were gathered near the bed like a crowd of curious onlookers, their conversation conducted in lights and beeps and monitor lines. Her heartbeat was displayed by three waveforms undulating on a screen.
Being in here made Sophie nervous. She and Wendy and a number of Jilly's other friends had taken turns sitting with her while she was in the coma, and Sophie was more than happy to do her part. But Sophie also had a unique problem in that mechanical and electrical devices sometimes developed odd symptoms around her. Digital watches could simply flash a random time while ordinary wrist watches ran backwards. She'd once crashed Christy's hard drive simply by switching on his computer. Though she wasn't connected to a cable service, her television could bring in cable signals, which would be fine except that the TV set also changed channels randomly.
When Jilly first learned about this affliction of Sophie's, she'd insisted that Sophie give it a name. Something fanciful, rather than gloomy.
"I don't know that I want to make friends with it," she told Jilly. "Then it'll never go away."
"It not a matter of going or staying," Jilly had replied. "It's a part of you. This'll just make it easier for us to talk about it. You know, like our own secret code."
Jilly liked codes almost as much as she liked mysteries, and after any number of long conversations on the subject, Sophie finally gave in. They ended up calling it Jinx, because while it was a friendly-sounding word, it still warned of its potential for disaster. And it was easier, at least among their circle of friends, to simply say "Jinx" when Sophie wasn't to be trusted around anything that could possibly be influenced by this peculiar trait of hers.
But giving the affliction an identity didn't make it any easier for Sophie to deal with the way Jinx slipped in and out of her life, or make her any less nervous in situations such as the one she was in at the moment. So while she was here in Jilly's room, she made sure not to touch, or even stand too close to any of the equipment that was keeping her friend alive. Except for the call button. Had she screwed that up as well? Was the nurse now on his way to some room at the other end of the intensive care unit?
She was about to try again when the nurse came hurrying into the room.
"Sorry," he said. "I would have been here sooner but there was a problem with another patient's ventilator and the monitors at the station didn't show an emergency in here."
Jilly was going to enjoy being looked after by this nurse, Sophie had decided when she first met him. Daniel was as handsome as a soap opera doctor, tall, dark-haired, ready smile, gentle eyes. If you had to be sick, you might as well have a dreamboat for a nurse.
"Why did you call for me?" he said.
He didn't look at her as he spoke, his gaze travelling over the array of monitors before settling on Jilly's bruised features. Sophie eased his obvious concern by explaining what had happened.
"Did she seem lucid?" he asked.
Sophie had to smile. With Jilly, how could you even tell? But she nodded.
"She was a little confused," she said, "but she recognized me right away and knew she was in a hospital. She didn't seem to be aware that she'd been hurt."
"That's not too unusual in a case like this," Daniel told her. "There's often a certain amount of disorientation, even amnesia sometimes, but it rarely lasts long. I'll have the doctor come in to check her over."
And then he was gone again.
Sophie looked back at Jilly. She seemed so fragile lying there, like a broken doll, her guileless features no longer so slack now that she'd slipped from coma into a more natural sleep. But it was still heartbreaking to see the damage that had been done to her, to know how much work lay ahead before Jilly might be her old self once again.
The two of them could have been sisters. They were of similar height, with the same slender build, though Sophie was a little bustier. Her hair was a soft auburn, tamed into ringlets, while Jilly's was usually a tangle of darker curls. Wendy likened Jilly's quick, clever features to a Rackham pixie, Sophie's softer ones to a Pre-Raphaelite's painting, and strangers often mistook one for the other, then remarked on the family resemblance when corrected.
Wendy was the missing third member of their little tribe of, as Jilly liked to describe them, "small, fierce women." She was blonde, so less easily mistaken for either of them, but of a similar body shape and height, and just as tangle-haired. Though the three of them were unrelated by blood, they were sisters all the same. In the heart, where it mattered. Others had come to join their tribe--and they had become close and greatly loved, to be sure--but the three of them were its root, the core from which all their other relationships blossomed.
Rising from the bedside, Sophie bent over and brushed her lips lightly against Jilly's brow, then left the room to make some phone calls.
* * *
"Oh, my god," Wendy said. "It's like the best Christmas present anyone could get."
Sophie laughed. "And yet, it's almost summer."
She could feel Wendy's good humour come across the phone line and wasn't surprised by it. Her own body felt lighter with the weight that had been taken from it and she was more than a little giddy herself. Even the phone was behaving for her, allowing her to talk to Wendy instead of trying to connect her to someone in Japan or Germany.
"I'm coming down right now," Wendy said.
"She's asleep," Sophie warned her.
"I don't care. I was so worried."
Sophie understood. None of them had wanted to even consider what would happen if Jilly hadn't pulled through, but it hadn't been far from any of their minds all the same. Life without Jilly in it was unthinkable, but as someone had once said, fair was only the first third of fairy tale, and the world had its own agenda that didn't take anyone else's into account.
"I'm going to make a few more calls," Sophie said. "Would you mind letting Christy and maybe Sue know before you leave? I'll call the professor and the others."
"Don't forget Lou."
"I won't."
"Or Angel or--"
"Wendy."
"Okay, okay. I'll make my calls and then I'm on my way."
Sophie smiled as she hung up. She fed another quarter into the phone and dialed the next number on her list.
Be nice to me, phone, she thought. Don't give me any trouble tonight.
For once something mechanical seemed willing to give her a break.
* * *
When Sophie finally returned to Jilly's room she thought she saw two girls peering in through the window, dark faces pressed against the glass, hair standing up in sharp spikes. She hesitated in the doorway, trapped by the impossibility of their presence, then blinked, and they were gone.
She crossed to the window and looked out, but there was no one there, of course. The ICU was on the third floor and there was no fire escape outside the window. When she lifted her gaze she saw a pair of crows in the distance, winging off against the Crowsea skyline.
Jilly would say it was the crow girls, but Sophie knew better. All she'd seen was an odd reflection on the glass. She might have an active dream life, but she didn't let it carry over into what the professor called the World As It Is. It drove Jilly crazy, but the only magic Sophie saw in the world was what people made for each other. Still, what she thought she'd seen had been disconcerting, if only for a moment.
You're just not getting enough sleep, she told herself, rubbing at her temples.
The doctor came in then and she concentrated on what he had to tell her after he'd examined Jilly.
- 5 -
Once upon a time...
The forest seems familiar to me right away, but it takes me a moment to realize why. I stand there, absorbed by the towering trees that surround me on all sides, trees bigger and stranger than they have any right to be. There's next to no undergrowth, just these behemoths, their trunks so wide that five of me couldn't touch hands around them. Light pours down from the dense canopy above in golden shafts and that's when I know where I am. The cathedral effect reminds me of what I call the place that Sophie goes travelling to at night.
I'm back in the dreamlands again. The cathedral world.
It's not the city of Mabon that Sophie founded with her faerie blood, but a magic place all the same. It would have to be, wouldn't it, with trees like this. They must be close cousins of what Jack Daw used to call the forever trees, the giant growth that made up the first forest when the world was born.
I can't believe that I'm finally able to cross over into the otherworld like this. While I'd prefer to be able to go in my body, dreaming my way across is certainly the next best thing. But I would like to learn how to choose where I end up, the way that Sophie can. I'll have to ask her how she does it.
Thinking of Sophie reminds me that I just saw her
or was that a dream, too? She really didn't seem herself. Way too sad, for one thing. I know everyone can't be as exuberant as I tend to get, but couldn't she have shown just a little more enthusiasm about me learning how to cross over, too? Because now we can have adventures in the dreamlands together. And I'll finally get to meet her mysterious boyfriend Jeck, that handsome crow boy that she can only be with in Mabon.
Sometimes I just don't get her. How can someone be so full of magic and still deny it the way she does? You only have to look at her to see the faerie blood, to know that she's as magical as anything you could find in or out of the cathedral world.
A little niggling thought comes worming up through my happiness. It's got to do with that last time I saw her. I remember her starting to say something about accidents and cars, but I don't want to go there. I don't want the World As It Is to intrude on the magic I'm experiencing right now.
I take a deep breath and look around some more, trying to empty my mind of everything except for what's happening at this moment. I want to exist in Zen time. No past, no future. Just now. Just being here.
I think I'm alone until I smell the cigarette smoke. I turn in a slow circle and finally see a thin drift of it coming from the far side of one of the nearby trees. I head over, happy to have something new to focus on. When I get there it's to find a guy sitting with his back against one of the trees, legs sprawled out in front of him. He's wearing jeans, scuffed workboots and a T-shirt with faded writing on it that I can just make out. Oh, and he's got the head of a coyote or wolf, but I know who he is all the same.
"Hey, Joe. I haven't seen you for awhile."
Joseph Crazy Dog's the only guy I know who'd be wearing that "Don't! Buy! Thai!" T-shirt in the dreamlands. Like they have boycotts here.
Unlike Sophie, he's upfront about his otherworld origins. The funny thing is, no one pays much attention to that. Most people just assume he's this city Indian come down from the rez, living on the street and he won't take his meds. Or they know him as Bones, sitting in Fitzhenry Park, telling fortunes with a handful of what gave him his name, scattering the rodent and bird bones on a piece of deerskin, reading stories in how they fall. Stories about what's been, what is, or what might be.
The wolf head shimmers while I'm standing there, morphing into the face I know with its dark, coppery cast and broad features. Square chin, eyes set wide, nose flat. His long black hair's tied back in a single braid festooned with feathers and beads. I've always loved his eyes. They shift like mercury, one moment the clown, one moment the wise man. Impossible to capture in a painting. I know; I've tried.
Joe shrugs in response to my greeting. He takes another drag from his cigarette as I sit down beside him.
"You know how it is," he says. "I'm always crossing back and forth and you've been busy."
"It seems like I'm always busy. Maybe I spend too much time trying to be too many things for too many people."
"You wouldn't be the first, though you do seem to have made more of a career of it than most. Could be this accident of yours is the spirits's way of telling you to spend a little time on yourself for a change. Kind of like forcing the issue."
"What accident?"
"See, that's what I mean. You just don't pay enough attention to yourself."
Sometimes Joe can drive me crazy with his obliqueness.
"Is this one of your lessons?" I ask.
Joe's been working with me on and off for a couple of years now to prepare me to be able to cross over into the spiritworld like he does, walking in my body. The way that came about was out of this long conversation we had, back when Zeffy and Nia got lost in the otherworld. I wanted to accompany Joe while he was looking for them, but he wouldn't let me.
The way he put it was, "It's dangerous for anybody, walking there in their own skin, but especially for someone like you. You're like a magnet for the spirits, Jilly. Got a light inside you that shines too bright. I've told you, I can teach you how to navigate that place, but you've got to give me a few years so you can study it properly."
"But Sophie just goes there," I'd said to him then.
"Sure she does," he told me. "Only she doesn't go in her skin. She dreams her way across--she'd have to, seeing how she shines about as bright as you--and that's the only way you can go, too, until you learn more."
"I don't have those kind of dreams."
"Maybe you just don't remember them." He'd smiled at me, those crazy eyes of his grinning. "That light you carry's got to have come from somewhere. I don't know many people shine so bright without having touched a spirit of two along the way."
"I guess," I said. "I only wish I could be the one to decide when it happens."
"You've got to accept your blessings as they come. Most people don't even get one, and when they do, they ignore it, or explain it away."
"I'm not ungrateful to be here," I tell him now. "No matter how I got across. But I can't help wanting more. I want to know that I can keep doing it. I want to be here like you. For real."
"This doesn't feel real to you?" he asks.
"You know what I mean."
He nods. "I guess I do." He puts out his cigarette on the heel of his boot and stows the butt away in his pocket. "We always want more than what we've got."
"I don't mean to sound greedy," I tell him. "But I don't want two lives like Sophie does--one in the World As It Is, and one here. I'd feel too schizophrenic. I don't know how Sophie does it."
"One's real for her," Joe says, "and one's a dream. She puts each experience in what she figures is its appropriate compartment and it all comes out tidy."
That describes Sophie to a "T." She's as neat as I'm messy. I don't know how she does that either. I can't open a tube of paint without some of it immediately migrating to my fingers, my hair, my jeans
"Tidy," I repeat. "That's sure not me."
Joe laughs. "You don't have to work at convincing me about that."
I could just whack him sometimes.
"I mean I can't divide my life up neatly like that," I say. "If I'm going to have access to the spiritworld, I want to be able to bring my sketchbook across with me and then bring it back again. I'd like to carry over a tent and food and things so that I could stay awhile and not have to worry about shelter or eating roots and berries."
The thing about travelling to the dreamlands the way Sophie does is that you can't bring anything with you. You can't bring anything back. Only the experience.
"I hear you," Joe says. "And we've been working on that with what I've been teaching you."
"I know. But finally being here, even just like this
"
I see the understanding in his eyes. That understanding's been there all along, but I had to explain how I feel all the same.
"It's hard to be patient," he says.
I nod.
"We can work on it," he says. "Being able to dream yourself over's going to make everything go a lot quicker."
"When can we start?" I ask.
He gives me an unhappy look.
"First we have to deal with that accident," he says.
I start to shake my head. I don't want to talk about it, whatever it is. But Joe's not one to let you bury your head in the sand.
"You've got a hard road ahead of you," he tells me. "Maybe your being able to cross over like this is compensation for all the work you've got waiting for you back in the World As It Is. Or maybe that bang on the head knocked loose whatever it is that lets people cross over in a dream."
I am shaking my head now. Joe just ignores it. He fixes that steady gaze of his on me, the clown gone. He's all serious.
"I brought in a couple of different healers," he says. "Even asked the crow girls to look in on you. They all say the same thing. You've got to do the mending on your own. See, the problem is, there's an older hurt, sitting there on the inside of you, and it's blocking anybody's attempts to speed the natural healing process of what's wrong on the outside."
"What are you saying?"
I don't admit to anything, but some part of me knows what he's trying to tell me. Just thinking about it makes me feel the pull back to the world I've left behind. I don't want to go back.
Joe hesitates, then tells me, "It's like a part of you doesn't want to get any better."
"I'm not even sick."
"Well, you don't have the flu," he says, "but you got banged up something bad. There's no point in either of us pretending otherwise. And you and I both know there's old hurts you've just hid away. Maybe you can turn up the wattage of that shine of yours to fool most people, but you don't fool me."
"What kind of hurts are you talking about?"
"If I knew, maybe I could help."
"You know the story of my life," I say.
He gives a slow nod of his head. "But I don't know how you feel about it."
"This is such bullshit."
Joe sighs. "I'm just telling you how it is. If you didn't want to know, you shouldn't have asked."
It's true. Joe rarely offers advice without first waiting to be asked. The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.
I have to look away. I let those wonderful trees fill my vision. Already they seem less present. Or maybe I am. I can feel the tug of my body, and it's stronger. I don't want to go back. I know what's waiting for me now.
"I'm sorry it worked out this way," Joe says.
I nod. "Me, too," I tell him.
"You deserve better."
I shrug. I don't think the world works on merit. At least, not as much as we'd like it to.
"We'll find a way to beat it," Joe tells me.
And if we can't?
But I don't say the words aloud. I touch his hand.
"Don't you worry about me, Joe," I say. "I'm a survivor."
Then I let the pain reach across into the dreamlands and pull me back to that hospital bed. I hear his voice as I go, a faint sound, growing fainter.
"There's more to life than just surviving," he says.
I know that's true. But I also know that sometimes just surviving is all you get.
- 6 -
It was getting to be like old home week, Wendy St. Clair thought as their friends continued to arrive. The waiting room was crowded, getting close to standing room only as the last seats were taken. There were so many familiar faces, Wendy felt she was at one of Izzy or Sophie's gallery openings, except for the fact that everyone was far too glum.
And Jilly wasn't here.
If there was something special going on in your life--a reading, a book signing, a gallery opening, a gig--you could always count on Jilly to be there to help you celebrate. Just as she was also there when the world bore down too hard and you needed a friend, someone to commiserate with. But tonight Jilly was a couple of rooms away, wires and tubes connecting her to the life support and monitoring machines, the Rackham pixie transformed into a creature from an H.R. Giger nightmare, and it was her friends who had gathered to lend each other what support they could, and to celebrate, in their quieter way, Jilly's having come out of the coma.
Professor Dapple, Christy, his girlfriend Saskia and Alan were on one couch at the end of the room, with red-haired Holly sitting on the coffee table in front of them, looking perfectly at home between the piles of old magazines stacked on either side of her. Sophie, Sue, Isabelle and Meran had commandeered the other couch that ran along the longer wall. Desmond and Meran's husband Cerin were sitting on the floor between the two. Cassie had a Formica and metal chair that must have been borrowed from the cafeteria, while Wendy herself was sharing the only other seat with Mona. It was a stuffed chair with squared cushions and arms that was a really dreadful colour of olive green. The two of them were taking turns sitting on one of the arms and the seat cushion.
While they were missing a few faces--Geordie and Tanya were still in L.A. and Cassie's husband Joe
well, who ever knew where Joe was?--it was still quite the turn-out. But then Jilly inspired this kind of loyalty. If she was to die, half the city would probably show up for her funeral.
Wendy put her hand to her mouth, even though she hadn't spoken the words aloud.
Oh, god, she told herself. Don't even think such a thing.
Mona touched her arm. "Are you okay?"
Wendy nodded. Before she could fumble an explanation as to what had made her suddenly go so pale, the door to the waiting room opened and Lou Fucceri and Angel came in. Lou smelled like cigarette smoke, Angel of a blend of cardamom and ylang ylang oils.
It was odd seeing the two of them like this. They hadn't been an item for almost twenty years, but whenever Wendy saw them together, it was impossible for her not to think of them as a couple. Neither had gone on to get married, or even had a long-term relationship since they'd broken up, but they hadn't tried to fix whatever had gone wrong between them either.
Wendy thought it was their jobs. They both had careers rooted in heartbreak and frustration, neither of which allowed much emotional strength left over to work on a relationship. Because of those careers they had locked horns more often than not, disagreeing on the letter of the law and how the people who broke it were best served.
Lou was a career policeman. He'd risen to the rank of lieutenant since Jilly first met him as a rookie street cop--when "my life began again," as Jilly put it--without asking for or taking favours. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Italian whose people had a long history of either entering law enforcement or working for the Cerone family on the other side of the law, which could make holidays and birthdays strained affairs at the best of times.
Angela Marceau was a counselor for street people and runaways. She had a walk-in office on Grasso Street and wasn't above bending, if not outright breaking, the law if the safety of one of her charges was at stake. Wendy had first met her years ago and Angel was as gorgeous now as she'd been back then. She had a heart-shaped face, framed by a cascade of curly dark hair, and deep warm eyes. Her trim figure didn't sport wings, and she leaned more towards baggy pants, T-shirts and hightops than she did harps and shimmering gowns, but some of the street people claimed she really was a messenger from God, come down to help them. She certainly had the Botticelli image down, updated for present times.
"Has she come to again?" Angel asked after she and Lou had said their hellos.
Sophie shook her head. "But she's out of the coma. The doctor said she's just sleeping now."
"She'll need all the rest she can get after that sort of trauma."
"Rest, Jilly," Mona murmured from beside Wendy. "Somehow you don't expect to hear those two words in the same sentence."
"Has there been any word on the driver of the car?" the professor asked Lou.
Everyone fell quiet to hear his response. Lou got an uncomfortable expression and a horrible feeling shivered through Wendy.
Don't tell us, she wanted say. If it's more bad news, just don't tell us.
But they had to know. That was the only way to face your fears. You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows, someone had told her once.
"There's been a complication," Lou finally said. "Dispatch got a call late this afternoon from Jilly's landlady
" He looked old, sagging in on himself, as though having to describe what had happened was more than he could bear. "Somebody trashed the studio. I mean they really had themselves a time. They cut her paintings into ribbons, pulled everything out of her drawers and shelves and went to town tossing it around. The place looks like a hurricane hit it. Everything reeks of turpentine and solvents. But it's the paintings
"
He shook his head. All those years on the street, with all he must have seen, and still this had obviously gotten to him. Maybe because it was personal, Wendy thought. Because it had happened to a friend.
"Who could ever do this to Jilly?" he said. "Who could hate her that much?"
His last few words were drowned in a general hubbub of disbelief and concern. Wendy glanced at Isabelle and saw the pained look on the artist's face. They were all upset, but Isabelle, who'd lost most of her paintings in a fire years ago, was the one who knew better than any of them just how devastating this would be for Jilly.
"This is connected, isn't it?" Sophie said. "To the hit-and-run."
Lou turned to her. "What makes you say that?"
"I can see it in your face."
"You think someone ran her down deliberately?" Meran asked. Her voice echoed the shock they were all feeling.
No, Wendy thought. That couldn't be true. It was just too awful to contemplate.
"Until we find the driver," Lou said, "it's impossible to say." Then he sighed. "But it doesn't feel right to me. First the car, now this business with her studio. The incidents are just too close to each other to feel like a coincidence."
"But you're talking about someone actually trying to kill her," Saskia said.
Angel shook her head. "No, they want to erase her. Her and her work
To make it be like she never existed."
"I don't believe it," the professor said.
He took off his glasses and gave them a brief cleaning they didn't need before putting them back on, his gaze fixed on Lou's grave features.
"No, it can't be true," Cassie said. "How could it be true?"
Lou just gave them all a tired look.
"Does she have enemies that any of you know about?" he asked.
There was a long moment of silence.
"This is Jilly you're talking about," Sophie said.
"I doubt she's ever hurt anyone in her life," Meran added.
"Certainly not deliberately," Lou agreed.
On the other couch, Christy nodded. "Which would mean you're looking for someone with an intense dislike for the relentlessly cheerful."
That woke faint smiles throughout the room, but they didn't last long as Jilly's friends considered the idea of someone hating her so much that they would want to cause her this much pain. Enough so that they would destroy her life's work and deliberately run her down with a car.
"Just think about it," Lou said. "Keep your eyes and ears open. And if you think of anything that could help us, if you hear or see anything, call me. I don't care what time of the day or night it might be."
- 7 -
Once upon a time...
I open my eyes and I can't move. It's not just because of the casts on my left arm and right leg. There's no feeling under the leg cast. There's no feeling in my right arm either. That whole side of my body is paralyzed and numb. It's so weird. I can feel the fabric of my hospital gown and the bedclothes against my skin--but only on the left side. On the right, there's nothing. I can move my head, stiffly, with an effort, my left leg, the arm in the cast, though that sends a shiver of pain through me.
I remember how it was before, when Sophie was looking down at me. I couldn't move then either. Now I know why. I remember the car and the impact.
There's no one in the room with me, but I can hear voices from nearby.
I look down at my useless right arm, my hand, my drawing hand, willing it to move. I can't even feel it.
There are lots of fairy tales. I remember the professor telling me once how people need to be storied to get over their fears. We were talking about the elements of fairy tales and their relevance to the World As It Is, the here and now in which we all live. It was just the three of us, Christy, the professor and me, sitting in that old-fashioned drawing room of the professor's that he uses as a study.
People who've never read fairy tales, the professor said, have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don't have access to all the lessons that can be learned from the journeys through the dark woods and the kindness of strangers treated decently, the knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. I'm not talking about in-your-face lessons, but more subtle ones. The kind that seep up from your subconscious and give you moral and humane structures for your life. That teach you how to prevail, and trust. And maybe even love.
The people who missed out on them have to be re-storied in their adult lives.
Maybe that's what's happening to me. Faithfully though I read them when I was a kid, and have kept reading them all my life, maybe I need to be re-storied again anyway. Because there's something missing in my life, too. I don't need Joe or anyone else to tell me that. I've always known it.
I'm an onion girl, like in that song Holly Cole sings. And what I'm most afraid of is that, if you peel back enough layers, there won't be anything left of me at all. Everyone'll know who I really am. The Broken Girl. The Hollow Girl.
Maybe the stories can fill me up.
So.
Once upon a time...
I try to move my right hand again. It's like it doesn't exist.
I can't imagine a life in which I can't paint and draw.
Once upon a time...
I'm in the fairy tale where the girl gets hits by a car and then lies in the ICU ward of the hospital, waiting to die. Or at the very least, life as she knew it is over and everything is forever changed.
I'm not sure I want to know how the story ends.
Once upon a time...
Copyright © 2001 by Charles de Lint