Newford Stories (3 page)

They giggle, leaning into each other,
tottering back and forth on their perch. Crow girls can’t be
touched, can’t hardly be seen, except someone’s standing down there
on the sidewalk, looking up through the falling snow, his worried
expression so comical it sets them off on a new round of
giggles.

“Careful now!” he calls up to them. He
thinks they’re on drugs—they can tell. “You don’t want to—”

Before he can finish, they hold hands and
let themselves fall backward , off the fence.

“Oh, Christ!”

He jumps, gets a handhold on the top of the
fence and hauls himself up. But when he looks over, over and down,
way down, there’s nothing to be seen. No girls lying at the bottom
of that big hole in the ground, nothing at all. Only the falling
snow. It’s like they were never there.

His arms start to ache and he lowers himself
back down the fence, lets go, bending his knees slightly to absorb
the impact of the last couple of feet. He slips, catches his
balance. It seems very still for a moment, so still he can hear an
odd rhythmical whispering sound. Like wings. He looks up, but
there’s too much snow coming down to see anything. A cab comes by,
skidding on the slick street, and he blinks. The street’s full of
city sounds again, muffled, but present. He hears the murmuring
conversation of a couple approaching him, their shoulders and hair
white with snow. A snowplow a few streets over. A distant
siren.

He continues along his way, but he’s walking
slowly now, trudging through the drifts, not thinking so much of
two girls sitting on top of a fence as remembering how, when he was
a boy, he used to dream that he could fly.

* * *

After fiddling a little more with her sketch,
Jilly finally put her charcoal down. She made herself a cup of
herbal tea with the leftover hot water in the kettle and joined
Geordie where he was sitting on the sofa, watching the snow come
down. It was warm in the loft, almost cozy compared to the storm on
the other side of the windowpanes, or maybe because of the storm.
Jilly leaned back on the sofa, enjoying the companionable silence
for a while before she finally spoke.

“How do you feel after seeing the crow
girls?” she asked.

Geordie turned to look at her. “What do you
mean, how do I feel?”

“You know, good, bad…different…”

Geordie smiled. “Don’t you mean
‘indifferent’?”

“Maybe.” She picked up her tea from the
crate where she’d set it and took a sip. “Well?” she asked when he
didn’t continue.

“Okay. How do I feel? Good, I suppose.
They’re fun, they make me smile. In fact, just thinking of them now
makes me feel good.”

Jilly nodded thoughtfully as he spoke. “Me
too. And something else as well.”

“The different,” Geordie began. He didn’t
quite sigh. “You believe those stories of Jack’s, don’t you?”

“Of course. And you don’t?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied, surprising
her.

“Well, I think these crow girls were in the
Cyberbean for a purpose,” Jilly said. “Like in that rhyme about
crows.”

Geordie got it right away. “Two for
mirth.”

Jilly nodded. “Heather needed some serious
cheering up. Maybe even something more. You know how when you start
feeling low, you can get on this descending spiral of
depression…everything goes wrong, things get worse because you
expect them to?”

“Fight it with the power of positive
thinking, I always say.”

“Easier said than done when you’re feeling
that low. What you really need at a time like that is something
completely unexpected to kick you out of it and remind you that
there’s more to life than the hopeless, grey expanse you think is
stretching in every direction. What Colin Wilson calls ‘absurd good
news.’”

“You’ve been talking to my brother.”

“It doesn’t matter where I got it from—it’s
still true.”

Geordie shook his head. “I don’t buy the
idea that Maida and Zia showed up just to put your friend in a
better mood. Even bird people can get a craving for a cup of
coffee, can’t they?”

“Well, yes,” Jilly said. “But that doesn’t
preclude their being there for Heather, as well. Sometimes when a
person needs something badly enough, it just comes to them. A
personal kind of steam engine time. You might not be able to
articulate what it is you need, you might not even know you need
something—at least, not at a conscious level—but the need’s still
there, calling out to whatever’s willing to listen.”

Geordie smiled. “Like animal spirits.”

“Crow girls.”

Geordie shook his head. “Drink your tea and
go to bed,” he told her. “I think you need a good night’s
sleep.”

“But—”

“It was only a coincidence. Things don’t
always have a meaning. Sometimes they just happen. And besides, how
do you even know they had any effect on Heather?”

“I could just tell. And don’t change the
subject.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay,” Jilly said. “But don’t you see? It
doesn’t matter if it was a coincidence or not. They still showed up
when Heather needed them. It’s more of that ‘small world, spooky
world’ stuff Professor Dapple goes on about. Everything’s
connected. It doesn’t matter if we can’t see how, it’s still all
connected. You know, chaos theory and all that.”

Geordie shook his head, but he was smiling.
“Does it ever strike you as weird when something Bramley’s talked
up for years suddenly becomes an acceptable element of scientific
study?”

“Nothing strikes me as truly weird,” Jilly
told him. “There’s only stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”

* * *

Heather barely slept that night. For the
longest time she simply couldn’t sleep, and then when she finally
did, she was awake by dawn. Wide awake, but heavy with an
exhaustion that came more from heartache than lack of sleep.

Sitting up against the headboard, she tried
to resist the sudden tightness in her chest, but that sad, cold
wasteland swelled inside her. The bed seemed depressingly huge. She
didn’t so much miss Peter’s presence as feel adrift in the bed’s
expanse of blankets and sheets. Adrift in her life. Why was it he
seemed to have no trouble carrying on, when the simple act of
getting up in the morning felt as though it would require far more
energy than she could ever hope to muster?

She stared at the snow swirling against her
window, not at all relishing the drive into town on a morning like
this. If anything, it was coming down harder than it had been last
night. All it took was the suggestion of snow and everybody in the
city seemed to forget how to drive, never mind common courtesy or
traffic laws. A blizzard like this would snarl traffic and back it
up as far as the mountains.

She sighed, supposing it was just as well
she’d woken so early since it would take her at least an extra hour
to get downtown today.

Up, she told herself, and forced herself to
swing her feet to the floor and rise. A shower helped. It didn’t
really ease the heartache, but the hiss of the water made it easier
to ignore her thoughts. Coffee, when she was dressed and had brewed
a pot, helped more, though she still winced when Janice came
bounding into the kitchen.

“It’s a snow day!” she cried. “No school.
They just announced it on the radio. The school’s closed, closed,
closed!”

She danced about in her flannel nightie,
pirouetting in the small space between the counter and the
table.

“Just yours,” Heather asked, “or Casey’s,
too?”

“Mine, too,” Casey replied, following her
sister into the room.

Unlike Janice, she was maintaining her cool,
but Heather could tell she was just as excited. Too old to allow
herself to take part in Janice’s spontaneous celebration, but young
enough to be feeling giddy with the unexpected holiday.

“Good,” Heather said. “You can look after
your sister.”

“
Mom
!” Janice protested. “I’m not a
baby.”

“I know. It’s just good to have someone
older in the house when—”

“You can’t be thinking of going in to work
today,” Casey said.

“We could do all kinds of stuff,” Janice
added. “Finish decorating the house. Baking.”

“Yeah,” Casey said, “all the things we don’t
seem to have time for anymore.”

Heather sighed. “The trouble is,” she
explained, “the real world doesn’t work like school. We don’t get
snow days.”

Casey shook her head. “That is
so
unfair.”

The phone rang before Heather could
agree.

“I’ll bet it’s your boss,” Janice said as
Heather picked up the phone. “Calling to tell you it’s a snow day
for you, too.”

Don’t I wish, Heather thought. But then what
would she do at home all day? It was so hard being here, even with
the girls and as much as she loved them. Everywhere she turned,
something reminded her of how the promises of a good life had
turned into so much ash. At least work kept her from brooding. She
brought the receiver up to her ear and spoke into the
mouthpiece.

“Hello?”

“I’ve been thinking,” the voice on the other
end of the line said. “About last night.”

Heather had to smile. Wasn’t that so Jilly,
calling up first thing in the morning as though they were still in
the middle of last night’s conversation.

“What about last night?” she said.

“Well, all sorts of stuff. Like remembering
a perfect moment in the past and letting it carry you through a
hard time now.”

If only, Heather thought. “I don’t have a
moment that perfect,” she said.

“I sort of got that feeling,” Jilly told
her. “That’s why I think they were a message—a kind of perfect
moment now, that you can use the same way.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“The crow girls. In the café last
night.”

“The crow…” It took her a moment to realize
what Jilly meant. Their complexions had been dark enough so she
supposed they could have been Indians.

“How do you know what tribe they belonged
to?”

“Not crow, Native American,” Jilly said,
“but crow, bird people.”

Heather shook her head as she listened to
what Jilly went on to say, for all that only her daughters were
there to see the movement. Glum looks had replaced their earlier
excitement when they realized the call wasn’t from her boss.

“Do you have any idea how improbable all of
this sounds?” she asked when Jilly finished. “Life’s not like your
paintings.”

“Says who?”

“How about common sense?”

“Tell me,” Jilly said. “Where did common
sense ever get you?”

Heather sighed. “Things don’t happen just
because we want them to,” she said.

“Sometimes that’s
exactly
why they
happen,” Jilly replied. “They happen because we need them to.”

“I don’t live in that kind of a world.”

“But you could.”

Heather looked across the kitchen at her
daughters once more. The girls were watching her, trying to make
sense out of the one-sided conversation they were hearing. Heather
wished them luck. She was hearing both sides and that didn’t seem
to help at all. You couldn’t simply reinvent your world because you
wanted to. Things just were how they were.

“Just think about it,” Jilly added. “Will
you do that much?”

“I…”

That bleak landscape inside Heather seemed
to expand, growing so large there was no way she could contain it.
She focused on the faces of her daughters. She remembered the crow
girls in the café. There was so much innocence in them all,
daughters and crow girls. She’d been just like them once and she
knew it wasn’t simply nostalgia colouring her memory. She knew
there’d been a time when she lived inside each particular day, on
its own and by itself, instead of trying to deal with all the days
of her life at once, futilely attempting to reconcile the
discrepancies and mistakes.

“I’ll try,” she said into the phone.

They said their goodbyes and Heather slowly
cradled the receiver.

“Who was that, Mom?” Casey asked.

Heather looked out the window. The snow was
still falling, muffling the world. Covering its complexities with a
blanket as innocent as the hope she saw in her daughters’ eyes.

“Jilly,” she said. She took a deep breath,
then smiled at them. “She was calling to tell me that today really
is a snow day.”

The happiness that flowered on their faces
helped ease the tightness in her chest. The grey landscape waiting
for her there didn’t go away, but for some reason, it felt less
profound. She wasn’t even worried about what her boss would say
when she called to tell him she wouldn’t be in today.

* * *

Crow girls can move like ghosts. They’ll slip
into your house when you’re not home, sometimes when you’re only
sleeping, go walking spirit-soft through your rooms and hallways,
sit in your favourite chair, help themselves to cookies and beer,
borrow a trinket or two which they’ll mean to return and usually
do. It’s not break-and-enter so much as simple curiosity. They’re
worse than cats.

Privacy isn’t in their nature. They don’t
seek it and barely understand the concept. Personal property is
even more alien. The idea of ownership—that one can lay proprietary
claim to a piece of land, an object, another person or
creature—doesn’t even register.

“Whatcha looking at?” Zia asks.

They don’t know whose house they’re in.
Walking along on the street, trying to catch snowflakes on their
tongues, one or the other of them suddenly got the urge to come
inside. Upstairs, the family sleeps.

Maida shows her the photo album. “Look,” she
says. “It’s the same people, but they keep changing. See, here’s
she’s a baby, then she’s a little girl, then a teenager.”

“Everything changes,” Zia says. “Even we get
old. Look at Crazy Crow.”