“Maybe. But it’s more than that. I’ve heard it called Nemeton—an old word in some other old tongue which means sacred place or grove—but 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 …” 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 his—part 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 Kelledys—Cerin and Meran—came 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 … 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.
5
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 … 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 joy—all 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 … like …”
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.”
“But—”
“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 Jilly—why 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.”
6
I don’t know why I don’t take it worse than I do. I guess it’s because I already feel so divorced from my life here in the World As It Is, that when more horrible things happen, they don’t feel like they’re happening to me. They’re happening to the Broken Girl.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
Wendy repeats the question for about the hundredth time while she puts on her coat and stows her journal away in her backpack.
“I’m not even close to okay,” I tell her and offer up a weak smile. “I mean, look at me, lying here like a lump.”
“I meant about the paintings.”
“I know you did,” I say.
Somehow, losing the faerie paintings doesn’t feel like much of a surprise when I’ve already lost my painting arm. The truth is, I can even detect an element of relief welling up from underneath the initial shock that hit me when Wendy first gave me the awful news. Because that’s one more tie connecting me to the World As It Is that’s gone. But I can’t tell her that. It’ll just make her worry even more.
“Things’ll work out the way they’re supposed to in the long run,” I tell her. “We might not like all the details, and the trip’s not always fun, but we’ll make do. That’s part of the blessing and curse of being alive.”
Wendy looks so small and sorrowful, standing there by the door, her backpack trailing on the floor as it hangs forgotten by one strap from her hand.
“God, you sound so fatalistic,” she says.
“I know. And it’s not me,” I add before she can say it.
“Well, it isn’t.”
I give her a sympathetic look. “I’ve been through worse,” I tell her.
“I can’t imagine worse,” she says.
Then she’s gone, swallowed by the hallway.
“I’m glad you can’t imagine worse,” I say softly to the empty room. “No one should have to. But that doesn’t stop it from happening to us all the same.”
I stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes when I lie here I try to count the dots in the ceiling tiles. If I can ever count them all in one tile without losing track, then I can multiply the dots by the number of tiles in my room and I’ll know just how many dots there are up there. Maybe I can even figure out how many there are on this floor. Or in the whole hospital.
It’s something to do when I’m lying here in the bed. It’s either that, or remembering, and remembering always seems to take me too far back in my life, back to the dark ages, before my life began again.
This evening the dots don’t hold my attention. Instead I start thinking about how I first started drawing. Not the pathetic little sketches I tried to sell for spare change when I was living on the street, but further back, when I was just a child.
Sometimes I think children want to paint and draw more than they want to learn how to talk. I don’t know what it is that seduces them—my memory doesn’t go that far back, or at least it isn’t that clear. I remember doing drawings, but not the impulses that had me pick up the crayons. Maybe it was as simple a thing as the colors. Crayons and water-based paints, all bright and impossible to resist. But I was just as happy with a pencil and an old shopping bag. So maybe it was seeing the world and having this urge to put a fragment of it down on paper. I can even remember using twigs to scratch out drawings in the dirt in the yard behind our house.
Lucky kids get born into families where their messy attempts at art are praised and cherished, taped up on refrigerator doors, maybe even put into a frame and hung on the wall. They live with people who care about them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I wasn’t a lucky kid.
I don’t say that for sympathy. It’s just the way it was.
Today my memory takes me back to this one afternoon, I guess I was five or six. Probably six, because I was already in school, or at least kindergarten. We were doing what I liked best, using poster paints on great big pieces of newsprint. I remember the teacher was so nice to me that day. We were supposed to paint what we liked best and there were kids around me doing their pets or their family or whatever. I was painting this old tree that’s in the fields behind our house. Whenever I could, I’d sneak out of the backyard and lie in the grass under that tree and stare up into its branches, imagining faeries.
The teacher came by and stood behind me for a while, watching me work. I’m looking at this memory through the gauze of a lot of years, so I don’t remember the real details of my painting, but I guess there was something in it that impressed her.
“You have so much talent,” she said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you become an artist when you grow up.”
“I love art class,” I told her.
“What are these?” she asked, pointing to little globs of yellow paint that were clustered around the tree.
“Faeries,” I said. “But they’re so small I can only show them like dots.”
She ruffled my hair. “Don’t ever lose your sense of wonder,” she said as she went over to look at another kid’s work.
I rolled that newsprint up very carefully and brought it home, just bursting with pride. When I got in the door, I wasn’t thinking and ran into the kitchen with it, calling out to my mother. It wasn’t until I was in the kitchen that I realized the mistake I’d made. It was only midafternoon, but she was already drunk. She yelled at me for running in the house, yelled at me for making noise, then wanted to know what that was that I was holding. I tried to hide it from her, but it was too big. She unrolled it on the kitchen table.
“This what they’re teachin’ you in that school?” she demanded. “Paintin’ pitchers instead a somethin’ useful like keepin’ your head outta the damn clouds?”
Then she tore it up. Tore it up, threw the pieces on the floor, and slapped me for crying.
“Now, little missy,” she said. “You all just put that in the garbage where it belongs and don’t you never be bringin’ crap like this home again.”
That memory has never lost its ability to hurt. Not because it happened to me, though every time those events come back, I want to take that little girl I was and just hold her tight against my chest, kiss the top of her head like it never happened to me, and tell her that she’ll get through this. If she hangs in there, things’ll get worse for a while, but then they’ll get better again. All those images will get put down on paper and canvas.
It hurts because it reminds me of all the other kids who’ve had that kind of experience and worse. Who are still having it today, right now, right at this moment. Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they’re not treating them as possessions or toys.
And people wonder why I prefer drifting off to the dreamlands to being in this world.
I sigh. This is depressing me. I should just go to sleep and cross over into the cathedral world. But I’m beginning to recognize that Joe’s right. My crossing over as much as I am isn’t to give myself some breathing space. It’s escape, pure and simple. Now that I can do it, I could just pack up and go there forever. Let the world carry on without me.
The Onion Girl Page 8
