The Onion Girl (29 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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Sophie woke with a jerk, disoriented, her heart beating wildly in her chest. It took her a long, frightening moment to realize that the wolves were gone, that they'd left them behind in the dreamlands and they were safe now, here on Jilly's bed in the rehab.
“I do always forget that I can just wake up,” she said as she turned to look at her friend
Her voice trailed off. Jilly was still lying there, eyes closed. Asleep.
“Jilly!” she called, pitching her voice firm, but low enough to not attract attention from the nurses' station out in the hall.
She put her hand on the shoulder closest to her, the one that wasn't paralyzed, and gave Jilly a little shake.
“Jilly,” she repeated. “Wake up!”
But there was no response.
I mean to go with Sophie, but there's something about that lead wolf that won't let me go. I need to understand it.
“You know me, don't you?” I tell the gray-furred creature with the human mind behind its eyes. “You know me and you really don't like me much.”
The wolf makes no response, but it doesn't need to. That hatred's plain in its eyes.
Great, I think. Someone hates me enough in the World As It is to destroy all my faerie paintings—maybe they were even the same person who ran me down with their car. Maybe the accident was anything but. And now I've got someone in the body of a wolf, hating me here.
I guess I should be more scared than I am. But a kind of fatalistic indifference to danger has come over me. I don't just
want
to know who this is, what they've got against me. Why the mind behind those eyes seems so familiar. I
need
to know.
But then the wolf lunges at me and self-preservation takes over. I wake up and instantly I'm back in the rehab, in the body of the Broken Girl, with Sophie leaning over me, shaking me.
“Why didn't you come back with me?” Sophie is asking. “You had me scared to death.”
I give a small nod, the most I can do here, in the World As It Is with the limitations of the Broken Girl's body.
“Jilly?” she says.
I finally focus on her.
“What happened back there? What kept you?”
“It was that wolf,” I say finally. “She was so familiar.”
Sophie gives me a blank look.
“She reminded me of my sister,” I explain.
I realize it's true the moment the words come out of my mouth although this is the first time I've actually stopped to consider that. It's like some deep part of my subconscious has spit the information out between my lips and my brain's only catching up with it now.
“Your sister? But you haven't seen her …”
Sophie's voice trails off and she gets this awkward look. Not a whole lot of people know that whole story. What I did, the guilt I carry. But Sophie does. She probably knows all my secrets—even the ones I've never told her. It's her faerie blood, though she'd never admit to that. At least she wouldn't have before tonight. Who knows how she'd deal with it now that she's decided not to hide from the truth anymore.
“I know,” I say. “It doesn't make any sense. What would she be doing in the dreamlands, running around like a wolf?”
“What even got you thinking about her?” Sophie asks.
“I don't know. I wasn't thinking about her, though obviously some part of me was. I guess some part of me's always thinking about her.”
“You were just a kid yourself,” Sophie says. “There's nothing you could have done.”
“Maybe.”
It's true. I was just a kid. And then there was all that time I lived on the streets—a whole lifetime compressed into a few short years. It wasn't until I came out of the far side of all that pain and misery that I could even start to think about what I'd left behind in an old farmhouse in Tyson.
“But it would make sense,” I say. “For her to still hate me after all these years.”
Sophie just looks at me. I can see she's still struggling with the very idea of someone hating me. It's good to have such loyal friends. But she has no idea how bad it was in that house of my childhood, how leaving my sister behind was the most awful thing I could ever have done.
“You know,” I add. “She looked just like me when I was her age.”
“You mean … ?”
I nod. “My sister.”
I can see it when understanding dawns for Sophie. This doesn't necessarily explain the wolf part, out there in the dreamlands, but it makes a good argument for what's been happening closer to home, here in the World As It Is. The hit-and-run. All those faerie paintings destroyed. Even the doppelgänger.
“We have to tell Lou,” Sophie says, but I'm already shaking my head.
“I've been responsible for enough pain in her life,” I say. “I won't add any more.”
“You didn't hurt her.”
I don't say anything. I've heard all the arguments before. From Angel. From Wendy and Sophie. From Geordie. They're very logical, and it all makes perfect sense, but it doesn't change what I did. Nothing can. Nothing ever will.
Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for
The Crowsea Arts Review
, at her Yoors Street studio, on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.
Any regrets? Anything you'd do over again, given the opportunity?
Not really. We are who we are because of our life experiences and I'm comfortable with who I am. I wish I'd never hurt anyone, but I never did so deliberately—which isn't an excuse, really, because we're responsible for all our actions, even the thoughtless ones—but at least it was never my intention to hurt anyone.
Can you give me an example?
I started running away from home when I was ten years old because life there wasn't just unbearable, but dangerous.
So what is it you regret about that?
I left my little sister behind. I was pretty messed up for years after running away. When I finally got my life back on track, I went back to make sure she was okay, but they'd moved, the house was empty, no forwarding address.
Over the years I've tried to find out what happened to her, but I've never had any luck. [Long pause.] Or maybe I just never tried hard enough.
There's nothing worse than the things
we leave undone. No matter how long ago it was we deserted those obligations, they find ways to return, again and again, nagging at us like intermittent toothaches, fermenting a bitter and depressing brew in the shadows of our minds that's one part guilt, one part shame. They sour pleasures and sow a discontent inside us that seems so far removed from its true source, we end up finding other things to blame, creating new problems to stack upon the old. And so we end up with this midden in our heads, hot coals smoldering deep inside the refuse, invisible, but no less dangerous for that. At any moment they could burst into flame, the subsequent conflagration utterly consuming the safe little world we've been pretending to live in for all this time.
And all our kindnesses would come undone …
ON THE ROAD NORTH OF NEWFORD, JUNE 1973
We've no money to speak of and we've borrowed this ratty old car of Christy's that doesn't look like it'll take us out of Crowsea, little say the city, but here we are anyway, Geordie and me, setting out for Tyson like newlyweds on their honeymoon, except we're not even a couple and what's waiting for us at the end of the trip is anything but fun.
We're still learning about each other as we head off on our road trip. We only met a few months ago, two part-timers hired at the post office to help deal with the Christmas rush. That doesn't happen now. Now the union's too strong and they don't bring in casual labor. Their members get the extra hours at time and a half, leaving the art students and street buskers like us to find other ways to augment their meager winter income.
I'm not even sure how Angel got me the job. Even back then there must have been some kind of security check and here's me, not even using my real name. Except Jilly Coppercorn is my real name now. I even have the documents to prove it and I have no idea where Angel got those either. I have a birth certificate and a social security number. I'm on the voter rolls.
“Don't ask,” Angel told me when she handed me the envelope full of documents.
When I looked inside, I understood. And I didn't.
I guess that's another reason she and Lou must have broken up. The true-blue cop he is would never have been able to stand by while she was providing new identities for kids like me. He wouldn't understand how we couldn't bear the idea of ever being tracked down by our old families again. His solution would be by the book. If someone hassled you, call the police. That's what the police were for.
Except all of that just adds to the old pain. Better to be invisible. Better to disappear completely from who you were and be reinvented as a stranger that nobody from your past has ever known. Technically, it's breaking the law, yes. But ask any Children of the Secret, ask the abused wife in hiding, and they'll all tell you the same thing: better to break the law like this than be hurt again. Who knows what'll happen to you the next time? Who knows if you'll even survive? Too many don't.
But anyway, there I am at the post office last November. It's my first day and I stand in the doorway of the cafeteria with my bagged lunch in
hand because there's no way I can actually afford to buy a lunch. I look around at all these people—good, solid, hardworking people, most of them—and all my own attempts at fitting in and making a new life for myself just disappear.
I feel like I'm this runaway junkie hooker again. That they'll look at me and see through the lie of what I'm pretending to be, see right through it to the truth of who I really am. Angel warned me when I first got off the street: the hardest thing would be trying to feel normal again. For some of us, it never happens.
I've been doing pretty good. Finished high school through an adult education program and I'm halfway through my first year at Butler U. as an arts major. I'm off the streets—living in a boardinghouse, it's true, but I'm paying my own way now, not scrounging a living from the goodwill of others. Angel's found me a sponsor to pay for my courses and books and art supplies. Everything else I pay for with waitressing, modeling for artists, and part-time jobs like this.
I'm saving up to get myself one of those run-down lofts on Lee Street, or Yoors. It'll be a studio and place to live, two in one. My own place. My own space. No more sharing bathrooms and kitchen facilities. No more coming downstairs in the morning to find that the small bag of groceries you managed to buy the day before has been used by somebody else. No more creeping in late at night, shoes in hand and holding your breath, hoping you don't wake the other boarders, because then the landlady will be on your case. Instead, I'll have a place where I can stretch and breathe, leave a work-in-progress on the easel, and if I don't feel like doing my dishes for three days, I don't have to. A place where I can play my music as loud as I want and actually have friends in for a visit or a party, anytime of the night or day.
These are the things that hundreds of other students are thinking about, right now, right across the country. It's normal. I can be normal, too.
Except the past still comes rearing up inside me—unbidden and certainly unwanted. Usually at times like this, when I'm facing a room full of strangers. You should have seen me in my first class at the beginning of the year. If it hadn't been for Sophie making friends with me while I was sitting on the floor in the hall outside the lecture hall, too scared to step through the door, I might never have gone in at all.
And the weirdest thing is, it catches me off guard. It always catches me off guard. The fear that somebody in this room could've been one of my johns. One of the women might have dropped a quarter in my grubby hand when I was panhandling. They might have seen me huddled in a doorway, shaking with the need for a fix, or stumbling down the street, high on some cocktail mix of alcohol and pills.
So I turn away and bump right into the only other person who looks as out of place here as I'm feeling. Geordie.
Let me describe Geordie Riddell at the time: he's all arms and legs, tall and gangly, with long, long brown hair and kind brown eyes and a big hurt inside him walled off from the world the same as I have, though that last thing I don't know yet. Or maybe I do, maybe I recognize a kindred spirit beyond the outward scruffiness we share, only the recognition is still working on a cellular, unconscious level. He's wearing raggedy bell-bottom blue jeans, a collarless, plain cotton Indian shirt with a tweed vest overtop, and desert boots that have salt rings from the slush outside.
Of course I'm no fashion plate myself. I've always been somewhat of a rake, albeit a small one, and baggy is my usual style choice. Today it's cotton trousers with ties at the ankles and tights underneath for the warmth. A long-sleeved jersey and a shapeless sweater that hangs down almost to my knees. Black cotton Chinese slippers, though I did wear boots for the walk to work, which are now stored in my locker along with a dark brown duffel coat.
We're like bag people in training. All we need is the shopping carts.
I've got my own reasons for wanting to look shapeless. As for Geordie, well, this was the early seventies, after all, so he was pretty much in style for the time. The sixties, really. When most people talk about the sixties, they really mean from about 1966 through to 1974. The early sixties had the Beats, but otherwise it was all ducktails and bobby-soxers.
But the one thing is, no matter how raggedy we look, our clothes are clean and so are we. After all those years of living on the street with grimy skin and crusty clothes, I've promised myself that I'll never have to live like that again. When I can't afford to go to the laundromat now, I wash my stuff in the bathtub at the boardinghouse and hang it up to dry on the backs of chairs and the like. Mind you, I can't seem to keep paint off my hands, or out of my hair for that matter, but at least it's clean paint.
Anyway, I bump into him and we do that fumble people do when
they're both off balance, but being polite and not trying to grab at each other. Neither of us manages to fall, though I do drop my sandwich in its brown bag. Ever the gallant, Geordie picks it up and offers it to me.
“Thanks,” I say.
I find myself considering his features. Now that I'm studying art and have started drawing and painting for real, I see everything in how it will translate into art. How the light falls, how lines and shading can define character. Geordie's features are strong rather than handsome, but I like that better than a pretty choirboy look. There's a shyness in his face, as well. When I meet his brother Christy later, I see it's a family trait, or at least one that the two of them share, though with Christy it comes off more as this distance he puts between himself and everything else.
With Geordie the shyness is coupled with this feeling of kindness and a good heart that draws people to him. I'm sure it's why he does so well when he's busking. People hear it in his music, stop to listen, see it in his eyes. He rarely comes away with an empty fiddlecase.
But I don't know any of that right now. All I know is that he seems safe. That the kindness I sense draws me to him. I find myself asking his name and after work we go for a coffee together.
We end up becoming pretty much inseparable, certainly during lunch breaks, but away from work as well. He becomes an honorary member of the close sisterhood I share with Sophie and Wendy—“our boy mascot,” as Wendy put it once when he wasn't around.
I suppose people think we're a couple, but it isn't really like that. We never kiss, or even hold hands. We just hang together, and talk forever, about every and any thing. I realize now that he was simply too shy to make a romantic move—those Riddell boys are seriously bad at initiating an intimate relationship, or at least they were back then. But that suits me well because I don't want a boyfriend, though I do like having a friend that's a boy.
It's a novelty for me. Being with a guy I actually like, I mean. And being relaxed in his company because there's no pressure, no worry about things going any further, or getting complicated, or anything really. Until that day we borrow Christy's old clunker of a Chevrolet and start our trip to Tyson.
Geordie knows about my past, just as I know about his—in a general way, not all of the exact specifics. We didn't go through exactly the same thing by any means, but his wasn't even remotely a happy childhood
either. The only thing he took away from his family was his father's old Czech fiddle and this awkward relationship with Christy that they were both determined to maintain.
The fiddle had been their grandfather's and once their father knew Geordie was interested in it, he'd locked it up in his tool chest, down in the basement of their house, just for meanness' sake. Geordie learned to play on a sixty-five-dollar fiddle he bought with money he'd earned doing chores for their neighbors. The day he left home for good, he broke into the tool chest and took his grandfather's fiddle with him. He was fifteen at the time and lived on the street for a lot of years before we met. He has an apartment up on Lees now, but he still spends more time on the street, busking, than he does at a regular job.
As for his relationship with his brother Christy, that's a kind of complication I don't understand. They like each other, anyone can tell, but they are forever pushing each other's buttons. The thing that drives Geordie craziest is how his brother has escaped into fairy tales, the way Geordie has into music. Christy collects the strange and odd things he hears on the street and weaves them into stories that are sometimes simply anecdotal, sometimes containing braids of traditional folklore and fairy tales as well. He isn't really selling them these days, but they appear from time to time in the Crowsea community newspaper and he's always happy to let you read the ones that haven't yet been published.
Naturally I'm delighted with these stories of his and I like him, too. That quirky way he has of looking at the world coincides perfectly with my own little worldview. But as I said, it drives Geordie crazy. Not the fact that Christy writes these stories, but that he believes in them. Utterly and completely.
I do, too, of course, though back then it's more wishful thinking on my part. It's another six years before I find the stone drum down in Old Town and find out for sure that magic is real. But I like to tease Geordie about magic and ghosts and faeries living in those places you can only see out of the corner of your eye. For some reason, he takes it better from me than he does his brother. Maybe it's because I don't push other buttons as well.
But that's where we are when he comes by the boardinghouse to pick me up, that old Chev coughing a blue cloud of exhaust as we pull away from the curb. It's a half day's drive to Tyson by the highway, but we have to go by the back roads since the Chev won't go over forty and with
a missing headlight and no rear bumper, we'd just be asking to get stopped by the police if we took a busier road. That's saying we make it out of the city without getting stopped.
But we do.
Soon we're putt-putting along back roads, raising a cloud of dust, side panels flapping, feeling every bump on the road, our teeth chattering when we come to one of those washboard sections. After two hours of these country roads, we top a rise and the engine splutters, coughs, and then it just dies. The silence is almost a relief. Geordie gets out and pops the hood and then we both stare down at the greasy engine with its fine coating of dust.

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