I held in my head what Pinky told me afore she headed off home earlier. “You get into a situation,” she said, “you gotta hold this thought in your head: ‘It don’t matter if I live or die.’ That’s what gives you the edge. Bullies, they’re pretty much all the same. Scared under all that meanness and bluster. But they can read you good, smell the fear on you like an old coon hound.” She grinned. “But they can smell the fearlessness, too. They know when you don’t give a shit what happens to you. So you hold your head up, Raylene. Look ’em in the eye and remember what the Injuns say: ’It’s a good day to die.’”
I said that to myself as I stood there with that red-handled switchblade in my hand, moonlight coming in through the window glinting on the blade.
“It’s a good day to die.”
And damned if it didn’t feel that way. Part of me was still a little girl, scared as all get out, but part of me was something else. Part of me was a piece of the night, lying in wait for the monster to come. Lying in wait with a big shiny knife in my hand, and wasn’t it a pretty thing?
The door opened without a creak. Del oiled those hinges on a regular basis his own self. I stood there against the wall by the door, watching him creep across the floor to my bed.
“Hey, there, Ray,” he whispered. “Rise and shine, little sister. I done got you a present.”
He was fumbling with his zipper when I stepped up behind him. He smelled of beer and cigarettes and something else. A dark, animal smell.
“You playin’ shy?” he said, reaching out with his free hand to give me a shake.
But there weren’t nobody there. Just some bunched-up old jeans and shirts to make it look like I was sleeping.
“I’m right here, Del,” I said. “And I got me a present for you tonight.”
I let him turn around. I let him see the moonlight in my eyes and the shine on that blade. I tell you, I was feeling big and tall, like one of them mountain men you’d see come down from the real hillbilly hollers. I wanted to drive that new knife of mine right in his gut, just like Pinky done with Russell, but all my courage drained away at the look on his face. I never seen him so mad. I was froze solid, like I had roots growing outta the bottoms of my cowboy boots.
He was drunk and I guess that’s what saved my life, though it didn’t seem so at first. He just up and backhanded me across the face. Split my lip and sent me skidding back against the window frame. Then he stood over me and laughed. I was so scared I maybe did wet my panties some and I was gripping the handle of that switchblade so tight my knuckles were whiter than the moon hanging outside the window.
But he was swaying while he laughed. Hurting something always made him giddy and I guess being drunk just made everything seem funnier to him.
“Lookit you, Ray,” he finally said. “Damned if you ain’t a sight. I think maybe I’m gonna take that little knife away and stick it up your hole. Whatcha think about that?”
He crossed the floor and I didn’t know what I was doing, just knew I had to do something. So I swung out with that knife of Pinky’s, honed sharp as a razor. I caught him in the back of his knee, slicing through his jeans and skin and muscle like it was butter. He howled and went down and I scrabbled out of the way.
“Jesus, fuck!” he cried. “You cut me, Ray!”
Something went click in my head then, changed me. He reached for me and I slashed again, opening up the palm of his hand. And it felt good. Seeing his blood. Hearing him moan.
Big, bad, scary Del. He was just lying on the floor, whimpering now.
“You sound like a girl,” I told him.
“I …”
I bent down so my face was close to his, but not so close he could grab me.
“This is gonna be our little secret, ain’t that right?” I said, echoing the words he done told me more times than I can ever remember.
“I … I’ll fuckin’ … kill you …”
I’ll give him this. He was hurt bad, but he wasn’t scared. Maybe he was too drunk and mad to be scared. Or too dumb. I don’t know. I didn’t much care.
“I’m right sorry to hear you feel that way,” I said.
I stood up again and I give him a kick. Those cowboy boots of mine have got them a point, so I know it hurt. He just cried out, backed away. Dragging his leg. Cradling his hand where the blood come bubbling up, making a slick mess.
“’Cause now I’m gonna have to kill you,” I told him. “And that worries me, ’cause I’m thinkin’ it could be a sin. What do you think, Del? Is killin’ your brother a sin? And if it is, what I’m workin’ on here is tryin’ to decide if it’s a bigger one’n the things you done to me, your own little sister.”
“You … you get me a doctor …”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that, Del. I’m too scared to go walkin’ around a big dark old house like this, all on my own like.”
I didn’t know it could feel so good, standing over someone like this and knowing you had the power of their life or death in your hands. If I’m a broken thing, like one of them shrinks at the jailhouse told me once, then this is the place I got broke. Not all those other times, when Del came sniffing ’round me, but that night. The night I learned how to hurt back.
I coulda killed him. Maybe I should have. But I guess I still didn’t have it in me yet. There was a shake starting up in my legs and I knew I had to get me outta there afore I fell down my own self. He made another grab at me and I kicked him again, waving the knife in his face. He went down and I turned, grabbed the bag I’d packed before he got home, and I lit outta there, pounding down the stairs in my boots, the bloody knife still in my hand.
I made it maybe as far as the end of the lane before I got all weak in my knees. My legs went to jelly and I dropped down on all fours, my head bent down in the ditch, puking up beer and liquor and whatever sour crap was left when the alcohol was gone. I wasn’t no pretty sight by the time I’d dragged myself down to Pinky’s house and banged a handful of gravel up against her window.
“Damn, if you ain’t a quick study,” she said when I managed to tell her what I’d done.
That was the first time I run off from home, same as my sister afore me.
But that was a long time ago, some thirty years or better now, I guess.
Russell survived the cutting Pinky give him and he and his hardcase buddies kept up their wicked ways, but they never come ’round bothering us again. Oh, they beat the crap outta Lenny and a couple of the other guys’d been there in the field that night, and I heard they had themselves a party with Cherie, but they stayed clear of Pinky and me.
Del didn’t die.
He told our parents and the police that he’d come upon a burglar, sneaking in through my bedroom window. He couldn’t tell the truth. The can of worms that would’ve opened wouldn’t have let him come out smelling like a hero the way his own story did. Course Jimmy and Robbie backed him up.
When the police found me at Pinky’s and dragged me back home, I said I didn’t know nothing neither. I stood there in Pinky’s front hall, my own eye half shut and swollen from where Del’d hit me. It was just coincidence I picked that night to run off like I did, I told them, and they swallowed the lie. What were they supposed to think? That the slip of a girl I was, bra size notwithstanding, coulda beat up a big ol’ boy the size of Del?
Del didn’t bother me for a while. But he’d give me looks. Ma’d give me looks. Jimmy and Robbie. Only the old man went on the way he always did, pretending nothing was wrong.
I still hate them all. Del, well, he goes without saying. Pa for being so pussy-whipped and not protecting me. Ma for taking Del’s side, blaming me when I first ran crying to her, a little scared girl, looking for comfort. Jimmy and Robbie, well, they was always no-account. I don’t know that I hated them. I don’t know that they even registered at all. I mean we was all victims, right? Just like our sister afore us.
I think maybe I hate her the most of all, for running off the way she did. If she hadn’t lit out, De
l would’ve stuck with her and never took up with me. I know that’s true. He told me often enough.
Jilly
NEWFORD, APRIL 1999
Sophie found Mona Morgan waiting for her by the mouth of the alley that ran along Jilly’s building on Yoors Street. The comic-book artist had her hands in the pockets of her green cargo pants, her head tilted back to study the second-floor window that Jilly used as a door to her fire escape “balcony.”
“I would’ve given you the key last night,” Sophie said when she joined Mona, “if I’d known you’d be early.”
“I just got here,” Mona told her. She ran a hand through her hair. The short blonde spikes were showing an inch of dark roots. “That’s where they went in, I guess,” she added, indicating the window.
Sophie nodded. “Lou said he boarded it up before he left last night.”
“This is so awful,” Mona said. “I just dread going up there.”
“Me, too.”
Mona had offered to help clean Jilly’s studio loft when she’d heard Sophie and Wendy talking about it at the hospital last night. Wendy would have come as well, but she had a regular job writing copy and doing proofreading at In the City now. The weekly arts and entertainment newspaper ran on a tight schedule that didn’t leave a whole lot of room for creative time management. It wasn’t like the old waitressing days when she could simply trade off a shift with someone and make it up later. These days, only Jilly still worked part-time at Kathryn’s Café.
Sophie sighed. Or at least she had been up until four days ago.
“Did you go by the hospital this morning?” Mona asked as the two of them returned to the front of the building.
They walked past a few abandoned storefronts to the narrow entranceway that led to the second floor, pausing just inside the door so that Sophie could collect Jilly’s mail. It was mostly junk: flyers, a catalogue. There were also a couple of bills and a letter with an L.A. postmark. From Geordie, Sophie saw when she turned it over to look at the return address. That would have been mailed before the accident, she thought as they climbed the stairs to Jilly’s loft.
“I went by first thing,” she said in response to Mona’s question. “I wanted to catch the doctor while he was making his rounds.”
“What did he say about … you know …”
“The paralysis?”
Mona nodded.
“Pretty much the same as last night,” Sophie said. “Every case is different. She could shake it off today, in a week, in a month …”
“But she’s going to be okay.”
“Of course she is,” Sophie lied, as much to Mona as herself.
The truth was she didn’t know if Jilly would ever be okay again. The results of the accident, especially the paralysis, seemed to have stomped Jilly’s normally irrepressible spirit right into the ground. Understandable, of course, considering what she’d been through, but it was so disconcerting to see Jilly like this, lying there, staring up at the ceiling, answering in monosyllables, her few words mumbled because the paralysis had also affected one side of her mouth.
“Is she a fighter?” the doctor had asked Sophie before they parted this morning.
Four days ago Sophie would have had no trouble answering yes.
“Because it’s the ones who are most determined,” the doctor went on, “who recover most quickly …” He gave a sad shake of his head. “When they give up, nobody can help them.”
“I won’t let her give up,” Sophie had told him.
But that was easier said than done. How did you make someone want to live?
“I don’t want to be here,” Jilly had said, lying there, broken and pale. Half her head shaven, the words spilled out of a crooked mouth. At least the tubes had been removed from her nose and she was no longer dependent on machines to breathe.
“I know you don’t,” Sophie told her. She was sitting on the side of the bed, wiping Jilly’s forehead with a damp cloth. “None of us wants you to be here. But you don’t have any choice right now.”
“I do have a choice,” Jilly said. “I can go back to sleep. I can go back to the dreamlands.”
It was the most she’d said to Sophie all morning.
“That’s not a solution,” Sophie said. “You know that, don’t you?”
But Jilly only closed her eyes.
“Sophie?” Mona asked. “Are you okay?”
Sophie had paused halfway up the stairs, tears brimming in her eyes. She shook her head. Mona came down to the riser she was standing on and put her arms around her. For a long time they stood there, holding on to each other.
“Thanks,” Sophie said finally, stepping away. “I needed that.”
“Me, too.”
Sophie’s gaze went past Mona, up the stairs to Jilly’s door.
“Let’s get this done,” she said.
It was both worse and not as bad as Lou had made it out to be. At least half the paintings were untouched, so the loss wasn’t as complete as when, years ago, Izzy had lost all her work in the fire. But looking at the art that had been damaged, it was difficult for either woman to understand the sheer savagery of the sick individual responsible for the wreckage. There would be no fixing those paintings. Most of them hung in tattered ribbons from their frames. The remainder had even had their frames broken and splintered. Fifty or sixty of Jilly’s gorgeous paintings, all destroyed beyond repair. Some were works in progress, but most were ones she’d just loved too much to be able to sell.
The reek of turps and solvents that stung their nostrils when they entered the loft came from some bottles that had been broken near Jilly’s easel, almost as an afterthought, it seemed. The sharp sting in the air was enough to burn their eyes, but at least they hadn’t been poured over the furniture the way Sophie had feared from Lou’s terse description the night before.
Jilly’s other belongings—her clothes, books, everything—were scattered around as though a squall had blown in off the lake and through the apartment. Only the kitchen area was relatively untouched. Some glasses and mugs had been broken there—they must have been in the drainer which Sophie found lying on the floor under the kitchen table. Except for that small bit of damage, the doors of the cupboards and fridge were all still closed, guarding their contents.
After a quick circuit of the loft to assess the damage, they opened the windows facing onto Yoors Street to help air the place out, removed a couple of boards from the back window to create some airflow, and got to it. They began with picking up the broken glass and porcelain, mopping up the turps and solvents from around Jilly’s painting area.
“At least no one had a dump on the floor,” Mona said as she wrung out the mop in a bucket.
Sophie turned to her with a handful of fired clay and porcelain fragments that had once been mugs and raised her eyebrows.
“Like what happened to Miki last year, remember? The people that trashed her place peed on her clothes and furniture and smeared feces everywhere.”
Sophie grimaced. “God, I’d forgotten about that.”
“It’s the kind of thing you want to forget,” Mona said. “Like this.” Her gaze traveled the length of the room. “All these beautiful paintings …”
“I don’t know how we’re going to tell her,” Sophie said.
“Or who’s going to tell her.”
Sophie nodded glumly. She rose to her feet and dumped the handful of mug fragments into the big plastic cooking oil container that Jilly used as a garbage bin. When she glanced back at Mona, it was to find the other woman still gazing at the paintings.
“This is weird,” Mona said, finally looking over at Sophie.
“What is?”
“The paintings that are destroyed. They’re all Jilly’s faerie paintings. The landscapes and city scenes—none of them were touched.” She crossed the room and laid one of the damaged paintings on the floor, arranging the torn strips so that its subject could be seen. “You see? This has got a couple of those gemmin of hers in it. That one’
s of a dandelion sprite.”
Sophie joined Mona and looked down. The painting Mona had roughly reconstructed was one of Babe and Emmie—a couple of faerie that Jilly claimed she had met in the Tombs, that junked-out part of the city north of Grasso Street that looked like it had been bombed. Sophie lifted her gaze and regarded the other paintings with a new eye. It was true. Whoever had done this really hadn’t cared for the faerie art, destroying it, while leaving the rest untouched.
“So what are we supposed to think?” she said. “That it was some critic?”
“I can’t imagine that,” Mona told her. “But then I can’t imagine anybody doing this kind of thing in the first place, so what do I know.”
Sophie sighed. “I can. All you have to do is open the newspaper and you get a daily dose of all the horrible things people can do to one another.”
Mona laid the ruined painting on top of another.
“What are we going to do with them?” she asked.
“God, I just don’t know. But we have to do something. I don’t want them to be the first thing Jilly sees when she gets back.”
If she got back. It might be a long time before Jilly was able to navigate the stairs leading up to her loft. Maybe never. The professor had already offered his house for her convalescence, though how well Jilly and Goon, the professor’s cantankerous housekeeper, would get along was anyone’s guess. Goon was impossible at the best of times.
“Is there room in that closet?” Sophie added.
Mona went to look and gave a start when she opened the door.
“What?” Sophie began, then saw that it was only the life-size fabric mâché self-portrait Jilly had made in art school that had startled Mona.
Mona gave her an embarrassed grin. “I forgot about the mâché clone.”
“Is there room in there for the paintings?”
“Not really. What about the storage area in the basement?”
“We can only go check,” Sophie said. “Let’s finish cleaning this stuff up first.”
The Onion Girl Page 4
