Authors: Charles de Lint

The Onion Girl (8 page)

BOOK: The Onion Girl

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“Am I a cousin?” I find myself asking Jolene.

She gives me a long, slow study. “Well, now. You've got something bright in you that makes a cousin sit up and notice, but I can't tell what it
is. If you were here in body and not just spirit, you'd be calling all sorts of things to youâcousins, spirits, friendly beings, and those with more hunger in them than you'd care to feed.”

“That's what Joe says.”

“But even just dreamwalking, you've got a shine. It's what let me find you so easily.”

“But I'm not a cousin.”

“Didn't say that. Truth is, I can't tell. Usually we can smell each otherâexcept it's with some kind of inner senseâbut when I look at you the shine gets too bright and I just can't see far enough.”

We sit quietly for a while and now I don't feel the need to fill the silence with words. This little bit of time we've spent together, talking, getting to know each other, seems to have been enough to set me at ease.

“So what're you doing here?” Jolene asks after a time. “AnimandegâJoe says you're mending, but you don't look too hurt to me.”

“It's my body that needs the mendingâback in the World As It Is. I need a break from what's happening to me there.”

“So you're just messing around here.”

“I guess. Though I want â¦”

My voice trails off.

“What do you want?” she asks.

Her voice is gentle, comforting, like a warm rain, like the mother's touch I never knew. And maybe it's because of that, or maybe it's the air in this place, but I find myself telling her the things I've only told Joe and Geordie, about the safe haven I know's waiting for me somewhere here, somewhere in the otherworld.

“You can find that place,” she tells me, with a slow thoughtful nod. “But it's not here, not in this wood. This is just where the story begins.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiles. “What do you think this forest is?”

“I don't know. But I feel like I could live off the air forever and never have to eat or drink.”

“Maybe. But it's more than that. I've heard it called Nemetonâan old word in some other old tongue which means sacred place or groveâbut most people just call it the Greatwood. It's the forest perilous. The dark wood that you have to get through. Like I said, the story begins here, but where it takes you, you can only find out by putting one foot in
front of the other and see where you end up. This is the forest of dark journeys and memories, and you have to be brave and steadfast to travel through it to the other side.”

“Like in a fairy tale.”

She nods, then says, “And if you're ready to take the journey, you should just go.”

“Joe says I should heal my body first. But it's complicated.”

“Joe would say that. And he's probably right. But if it was me â¦” The massive shoulders rise and fall and she smiles. “Well, I've always been more impetuous myself.”

Regarding the solid bulk of her, I can't imagine it. But then I remember those stories Jack told me about when she's the other Jolene, small and wilder even than the crow girls, and I see something of that side of her in her eyes. A mad-happy light. Joe has that same look in hisâpart clown, part shaman.

“So you think I should go,” I say. “Start my journey now.”

She shrugs. “Only if your heart tells you it's time. It's not a matter of the sooner you start, the sooner you'll get there.”

“Because it's the journey that matters.”

She gives me an approving smile. “Exactly.”

“I think I'd better wait on Joe's say-so. He's never given me bad advice before.” I laugh. “Mind you, I won't say I've always
liked
his advice.”

“As I said,” Jolene tells me. “You must do what you feel is right. But don't forget, Joe feels what he feels, not what you do.”

She gets to her feet then and it's like a mountain standing up. Like one of the giant trees around pulling up its roots and going walkabout.

“Time I was moving on,” she says.

I stand up, too. “Thanks for looking in on me.”

“I always have time for Joe's friends,” she says.

She reaches out and tousles my hair, and I get that I'm-only-a-kid feeling again. A last smile, then she does Joe's disappearing act, takes a step behind an invisible curtain, and she's gone. I stand there feeling the tremors fade underfoot. So that's how she slipped up on Toby and me earlier. It's a trick I want to learn, but before I can, I have to fix the Broken Girl.

I know I should be getting back, but I take the time to do some sketches of Jolene from memory. The light never seems to change here, so
it's hard to tell the passage of time. I'm probably at it longer than I should be because I've filled a half-dozen pages before I finally put the sketchbook and pencil back in their plastic bag and stash it away in a nook made by some roots. I brush my hands and let myself go back.

When I wake up as the Broken Girl it takes me a moment to get used to the fact that I'm trapped in my bed again. It always does. The paralysis on my right side is the hardest to reconcile. And the numbness. That half of my body's just flesh on bone, nothing I can actually feel or relate to. Mobility and free will only exist in the dreamlands. I know that. But every time I come back, I have a little panic attack all the same. Then I remember and all the colors of the world go gray once more. That's how I see life as the Broken Girl. In shades of gray.

I think about my encounters in the wood. Randy little Toby in his leathers and tattoos. Jolene, as enormous in her serenity as she is in size.

“Well, that was weird,” I say.

“What was?”

I manage to slowly turn my head and see that Wendy's sitting in the visitor's chair. She has her journal open on her lap, her fountain pen in her hand.

“My latest adventure in the dreamlands,” I tell her.

She caps her pen, then uses it to keep her place in her journal.

“So tell me about it,” she says.

I smile. There's magic in this world, too, I remind myself. I've seen faerie girls who call themselves gemmin, living in an abandoned car in the Tombs. I've been to an underground kingdom of goblinlike creatures called skookin that exists beneath the city. I've met crow girls who can shift from one shape to another.

And even my friends aren't immune. Sophie has faerie blood. Geordie once dated a woman that he lost to the past, while the KelledysâCerin and Meranâcame here out of the past. Sue had her dog Fritzie talk to her one Christmas Eve. Christy and the professor have had more magical encounters than I've got fingers and toes. And Wendy â¦ Wendy grew a magical Tree of Tales from an acorn one winter and fed it on stories. Come spring she had to move it from the pot in her house to Fitzhenry Park where it's this huge spreading oak now. But she still feeds it stories.

“It's one for the tree, all right,” I say and tell her about Toby and Jolene and all.

Wendy watched Jilly's face as her friend spoke. Sharing her adventures in the dreamlands was about the only time Jilly had any animation in her features or voice these days. But while Wendy was as afraid as Sophie of losing Jilly to the dreamlands, she didn't begrudge the time Jilly spent there. At least the dreamlands were giving her some happiness in a world that had otherwise gone all desperate and miserable.

Wendy had a different concern about the place that Sophie, and now Jilly, could visit in their dreams. It made her listen to Jilly's latest adventure, half caught up in the marvel of it all, half in wonder at just how vivid Jilly's imagination could get. Because the truth was, Wendy wasn't quite so sure about the dreamlands herself. When she and Jilly listened to Sophie's stories about Sophie's time there, it was different. Then she had Jilly's enthusiasm and unqualified belief to dispel any reservations about how real or not it might be. She was able to simply go with the flow of the story and it didn't matter whether the dreamlands were a place that existed independent of the World As It Is, or only in Sophie's imagination.

But with Jilly telling the story, and no one sitting with Wendy to nod and smile and clap her hands in wonder, it was harder. Little nagging “as ifs” kept getting in the way of her enjoyment. But after a while she realized that today her discomfort didn't have so much to do with believing or not believing, as it did with trying to listen and at the same time deal with the worries of Jilly's injuries and what had happened in her studio. It was hard to hear about little elfish men with tattooed hands and enormous earth spirit mamas when she knew that all of Jilly's faerie paintings had been destroyed. Perhaps even by the same person who had put Jilly in the hospital in the first place.

“What kind of an animal would I be?” Jilly asked and Wendy sat up with a guilty start. And the context of that odd little question was â¦ It took her a moment to make the connection.

“You mean as in Jack's animal people?” she said.

“I'm not saying I am one of them,” Jilly said. “But if I was, what kind do you think I would be?”

This was more like the old Jilly, Wendy thought.

“Probably a monkey,” she said. “Or a cat. Or a crow, since you're so
enamored with them these days. Maybe a black monkey-cat with crow wings. What do you think I'd be?”

“Oh, definitely a hummingbird.”

“A hummingbird?”

“Don't pull that face,” Jilly said. “Joe says that they're considered to be one of the creator animal spirits, and you're a born poet and storyteller, so that fits. They're very powerful and beautiful, and harbingers of joyâall stuff that you do.”

It was odd how other people saw you, Wendy thought. She didn't feel like any of those things herself.

“I don't care,” she said. “I'd rather be a mouse or a mole. Something small and unassuming that lives in a cozy little burrow.” Then she smiled. “Or I could be a mouse with hummingbird wings to go with your winged monkey-cat, though you'd have to promise not to eat me.”

“But I could chase you sometimes, just in fun.”

Wendy smiled. “Only until I ask you to stop, and then you'd have to stop right away.”

“Oh, I'd love to draw the pair of them,” Jilly began. “Buzzing around in the air like â¦ like â¦”

Her voice trailed off and her gaze went down to her hands.

“You'll be able to draw again,” Wendy said.

“But what if I can't?”

Wendy thought of those ruined paintings that Sophie and Mona had put away in the basement of Jilly's building. Bad enough that they were all destroyed, but the thought of Jilly never being able to bring all her magical characters back to life again in other paintings was too depressing to contemplate.

“You have to,” Wendy said. “You just can't not get better.”

“Maybe I don't have a choice.”

Wendy shook her head. “I hate it when you talk like that. It's so not you. Where's the fierce and positive musketeer who never lets anything keep her down?”

“She turned into the Broken Girl,” Jilly said. “Who, whenever she finally does get out of here, is going to be the seriously Broke Girl because I don't know how I'm even going to start paying for all of this.”

“Your health insurance is covering it,” Wendy told her.

Jilly gave her a puzzled look. “I don't
have
health insurance.”

“You do, actually. The professor first got it for you when you were in university and he's been keeping your policy up-to-date ever since.”

“Butâ”

“You just never knew because you never get sick.”

“I can't believe how good he is to me,” Jilly said. “Why's everybody so good to me?”

“Because like attracts like,” Wendy told her. “I've never met anybody who does as much for other people as you do.”

Except as she spoke, the ruined paintings came to mind again and she felt her chest tighten. No, like didn't always attract like because there was no way Jilly could have done something so bad to someone to make them retaliate in that way.

“You're making me blush,” Jilly said. Then she looked more closely at Wendy. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“No, there is. You're keeping something from me.”

“It's not for me to tell,” Wendy began.

But if not her, then who? No one wanted to tell Jillyâwhy would they? It was such a horrible thing to have to relate on top of everything that Jilly was already going through here in the hospital. But sooner or later someone was going to have to.

Wendy got up from her chair and came to sit on the edge of the bed. She took Jilly's left hand and stroked the fingers where they came out from under the cast.

“I'm going to hate this, aren't I?” Jilly said.

Wendy nodded. “But you've got to be strong.”

“Oh, god. It's about the paralysis. It's permanent.”

“No, it's not about any of this,” Wendy said. “It's about your paintings. Someone broke into your studio after the accident.”

BOOK: The Onion Girl

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