Newford Stories (11 page)

I was so good at it that, eventually, I fell
asleep.

* * *

When I woke, it was dark. Chlöe was still
standing on the peak of the Rookery, and the trees around me were
now filled with sleeping black birds. Above, the sky held a wealth
of stars only slightly dimmed by the city’s pollution. I looked for
Zia. She wasn’t back yet, so I slid down to the edge of the roof
and dropped the remaining distance onto the dew-damp lawn. Cousins
stirred in the trees at the soft thump of my landing on the grass,
but went back to sleep when they saw it was only me.

I left the grounds of the Rookery and walked
along Stanton Street heading for downtown, where I supposed I’d
find Zia. I wondered if she’d actually had any success getting her
silly plan off the ground, or if she’d gotten distracted after
leaving me and was now up to who knew what sort of mischief.

I could understand her getting
distracted—it’s such an easy thing to have happen. For instance,
there were so many interesting houses and apartments on either side
of the street as I continued to walk through Lower Crowsea. It was
late enough that most of them were dark, but here and there I found
lit windows. They were like paintings in an enormous art gallery,
each offering small and incomplete views into their owners’
lives.

Zia and I like to visit in people’s houses
when they’re sleeping. We slip in and walk through the empty rooms,
helping ourselves to sweets or fruit, if they’re the sort of people
to leave them out in small welcoming bowls or baskets. There might
as well be a sign that says, “Help yourself.”

But we really don’t take much else when we
go inside. A bauble here, some unwanted trinket there. Mostly we
just wander from room to room, looking, looking, looking. There are
whole stories in the placement of vases and knickknacks, in what
pictures and paintings have been hung, where, and in what order. So
we admire the stories on the walls and windowsills, the shelves and
mantles. Or we sit at a desk, a dining room table, or on the sofa,
leafing through a scrapbook, a school yearbook, a magazine that’s
important to whosever home this is.

We’re curious, yes, but not really all that
snoopy, for all that it might seem the exact opposite. We’re only
chasing the ghosts and echoes of lives that we could never
have.

So, as I continued past Stanton Street, I
forgot that I was looking for Zia. My gaze went up the side of an
apartment building that rose tall above me and I chose a unit at
random. Moments later I was inside, taking in the old lady smells:
potpourri, dust and medicine. I stood quietly for a moment, then
began to explore.

* * *

“Maddy?” an old woman’s voice called from a
room down the hall.

It was close enough to my name to make me
sit up in surprise. I put down the scrapbook I’d been looking at
and walked down the short hall, past the bathroom, until I was
standing in the doorway of a bedroom.

“Is that you, Maddy?” the old woman in the
bed asked.

She was sitting up, peering at me with eyes
that obviously couldn’t see much, if anything.

I didn’t have to ask her who Maddy was. I’d
seen the clippings from the newspaper pasted into the scrapbook.
She’d been the athletic daughter, winning prize after prize for
swimming and gymnastics and music. The scrapbook was about half
full. The early pages held articles clipped from community and city
newspapers, illustrated with pictures of a happy child growing into
a happy young woman over the years, always holding trophies,
smiling at the camera.

She wasn’t in the last picture. That photo
was of a car crumpled up against the side of an apartment building,
under a headline that read, “Drunk Driver Kills Redding High
Student.” The date on the clipping was over thirty years old.

“Come sit with Mama,” the old lady said.

I crossed the room and sat cross-legged on
the bed. When she reached out her hand, I let her take mine. I
closed my fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she said.

She went on, but I soon stopped listening.
It was much more interesting to look at her because, even though
she was sitting up and talking, her eyes open as though she were
awake, I realized that she was actually still asleep.

Humans can do this.

They can talk in their sleep. They can go
walking right out of their houses, sometimes. They can do all sorts
of things and never remember it in the morning.

Zia and I once spent days watching a woman
who was convinced she had fairies in her house cleaning everything
up after she’d gone to bed. Except she was the one who got up in
her sleep and tidied and cleaned before slipping back under the
covers. To show her appreciation to the fairies, she left a saucer
of cream on the back steps—which the local cats certainly
appreciated—along with biscuits or cookies or pieces of cake. We
ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn’t help her with her
cleaning. That would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the
fact that we weren’t fairies at all.

After a while the old woman holding my hand
stopped talking and lay back down again. I let go of her hand and
tucked it under the covers.

It was a funny room that she slept in. It
was full of memories, but none of them were new or very happy. They
made the room feel musty and empty even though she used it every
day. It made me wonder why people hung on to memories if they just
made them sad.

I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got
off the bed.

When I came back to the living room, there
was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the
sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook
earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that
seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he
grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.

Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto
the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He seemed surprised that I could see him,
but made a quick recovery.

“Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the
other child.”

“The other…”

“Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything.
I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”

There didn’t seem much I could add to that,
so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial
enough, for one thing.”

“That’s true. Normally, people can’t even
see me, never mind talk to me.”

“And for another,” I went on, “you’re
usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any
fun.”

He didn’t argue the point.

“Well, I know why I’m here,” he said,
“haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing
here?”

“I like visiting in other people’s houses. I
like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they
were mine.”

I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee
table.

“So you were brother and sister?” I
asked.

He nodded.

“Does she ever come back here?”

He laughed, but without any mirth. “Are you
kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any
school club and sports team that would have her? She’d do anything
to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that
she couldn’t fart without first asking for permission.”

“But you’re here.”

“Like I said, I died here. In my own room. I
got stung by a bee that came in through the window. No one knew I
was allergic. My throat swelled up and I asphyxiated before I could
try to get any help.”

“It sounds horrible.”

“It was. They came back from one of
Madeline’s games and found me sprawled dead on the floor in my
bedroom. It did warrant a small notice in the paper—I guess it was
a slow news day—but that clipping never made it into a
scrapbook.”

“And now you’re here…”

“Until she finally notices me,” he finished
for me.

“Why did she ignore you?” I asked. “When you
were alive, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Madeline said it’s because I
looked too much like our dad. We were in grade school when he
walked out on her, leaving her with a mess of debts and the two of
us. I guess her way of getting over it was to ignore me and focus
on Madeline, who took after her side of the family.”

“Humans are so complicated,” I said.

“Which you’re not.”

“Oh, I’m very complicated.”

“I meant human.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

He kept count on his fingers. “One, you can
see me, which most people can’t. Two, you can talk to me, which
most people really can’t. Three, you’re sitting there all calm and
composed, when most people—most
human
people—would be
flipping out.”

I shrugged. “Does it matter what I am?”

“Not really.”

He looked down the hall as though he could
see through the walls to where his mother lay sleeping. The mother
who’d ignored him when he was alive and, now that he was dead,
still ignored him. Her mind might be filled with old memories, but
none were of him.

“Can you help me?” he asked.

“Help you with what?”

“With…you know. Getting her to remember
me.”

“Why is it so important?”

“How can I die and go on if no one remembers
that I was ever alive?”

“Lots of people don’t remember me,” I said,
“and it doesn’t bother me.”

He chuckled, but without any humour. “Yeah,
like that’s possible.”

“No, it really doesn’t.”

“I meant that anybody would forget meeting
you.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, then
shrugged.

“So will you help me?”

I nodded. “I can try. Maybe it’s not so much
that your mother should remember you more, but that she should
remember your sister less. The way it seems, there’s no room inside
her for anything else.”

“But you’ll try?”

Against my better judgment, I found myself
nodding.

He did a slow fade and I was left alone in
the living room. I sat for a while longer, looking at the place
where he’d been sitting, then slid off the coffee table and walked
back into the hall. There were two closed doors and two open ones.
I knew that one led into the old lady’s bedroom, the other into a
bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room
that was like stepping inside a cake, all frosty pinks and whites,
full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline’s room. Closing
its door, I continued down the hall and opened the other one.

Both rooms had the feel of empty places
where no one lived. But while Madeline’s room was bright and
clean—the bed neatly made, shelves dusted, trophies shined—the
boy’s room looked as though the door had been shut on the day he
died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.

The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box
spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters of baseball
players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust
covered every surface, clustering around the model cars and plastic
statues of movie monsters on the bookshelves and windowsill. More
planes hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines
strung with cobwebs.

Unlike the daughter, he truly was
forgotten.

I walked to the desk where a half-finished
model lay covered in dust. Books were stacked on the far corner
with a school notebook on top. I cleared the dust with a finger and
read the handwritten name on the “Property of” line:

Donald Quinn.

I thought of bees and drunk drivers, of
being remembered and forgotten. I knew enough about humans to know
that you couldn’t change their minds. You couldn’t make them
remember if they didn’t want to.

Why had I said I’d help him?

Among the cousins, a promise was sacred. Now
I was committed to an impossible task.

I closed the door to the boy’s room and left
the apartment.

The night air felt cool and fresh on my
skin, and the sporadic sound of traffic was welcome after the
unhappy stillness of the apartment. I looked up at its dark
windows, then changed my shape. Crow wings took me back to the
Rookery on Stanton Street.

* * *

I think Raven likes us better when we visit
him on our own. The way we explode with foolishness whenever Zia
and I are together wears him down—you can see the exasperation in
his eyes. He’s so serious that it’s fun to get him going. But I
also like meeting with him one-on-one. The best thing is, he never
asks me where Zia is. He treats us as individuals.

“Lucius,” I said the next morning. “Can a
person die from a bee sting?”

I’d come into his library in the Rookery to
find him crouched on his knees, peering at the titles of books on a
lower shelf. He looked up at my voice, then stood, moving with a
dancer’s grace that always surprises people who’ve made assumptions
based on his enormous bulk. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight
streaming in through the window behind him.

“What sort of a person?” he asked. “Cousin
or human?”

“What’s the difference?”

He shrugged. “Humans can die of pretty much
anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, take tobacco. The smoke builds up tar
in their lungs and the next thing you know, they’re dead.”

“Cousins smoke. Just look at Joe, or Whiskey
Jack.”

“It’s not the same for us.”

“Well, what about the Kickaha? They
smoke.”

He nodded. “But so long as they keep to
ceremonial use, it doesn’t kill them. It only hurts them when they
smoke for no reason at all, rather than to respect the sacred
directions.”