The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  I don’t think I can take any more.

  I find myself wishing I had Rob’s switchblade—the one he liked to push up against my face when he didn’t think I was bringing in enough. I just want to cut something. The cop. Myself. I don’t really give a fuck. I just want out.

  He crouches down so he’s kind of level with me, lying there scrunched up against the door, and says, “How bad is it?”

  I just look at him like he’s from another planet. How bad is it? Can it get any worse? I wonder.

  “I … I’m doing fine,” I tell him.

  He nods like we’re discussing the weather. “What’s your name?”

  “Jilly,” I say.

  “Jilly what?”

  “Uh …”

  I think of my parents, who’ve turned their backs on me. I think of juvie and foster homes. I look over his shoulder and there’s a pair of billboards on the building behind me. One’s advertising a suntan lotion—you know the one with the dog pulling the kid’s pants down? I’ll bet some old pervert thought that one up. The other’s got the Jolly Green Giant himself selling vegetables. I pull a word from each ad and give it to the cop.

  “Jilly Coppercorn.”

  “Think you can stand, Jilly?”

  I’m thinking, if I could stand, would I be lying here? But I give it a try. He helps me the rest of the way up, supports me when I start to sway.

  “So … so am I busted?” I ask him.

  “Have you committed a crime?”

  I don’t know where the laugh comes from, but it falls out of my mouth all the same. There’s no humor in it.

  “Sure,” I tell him. “I was born.”

  He sees my bag still lying on the ground. He picks it up while I lean against the wall and a bunch of my drawings fall out. He looks at them as he stuffs them back in the bag.

  “Did you do those?”

  I want to sneer at him, ask him why the fuck should he care, but I’ve got nothing left in me. It’s all I can do to stand. So I tell him, yeah, they’re mine.

  “They’re very good.”

  Right. I’m actually this fucking brilliant artist, slumming just to get material for my art.

  “Do you have a place to stay?” he asks.

  Whoops, did I read him wrong? Maybe he’s planning to get me home, clean me up, and then put it to me.

  “Jilly?” he asks when I don’t answer.

  Sure, I want to tell him. I’ve got my pick of the city’s alleyways and doorways. I’m welcome wherever I go. World treats me like a fucking princess. But all I do is shake my head.

  “I want to take you to see a friend of mine,” he says.

  I wonder how he can stand to touch me. I can’t stand myself. I’m like a walking sewer. And now he wants to bring me to meet a friend?

  “Am I busted?” I ask him again.

  He shakes his head. I think of where I am, what I got ahead of me, then I just shrug. If I’m not busted, then whatever he’s got planned for me’s got to be better than what I’ve got right now. Who knows, maybe his friend’ll front me with a fix to get me through the night.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “Whatever.”

  “C’mon,” he says.

  He puts an arm around my shoulder and steers me off down the street and that’s how I met Lou Fucceri and his girlfriend, the Grasso Street Angel.

  7

  Jilly sat on the stoop of Angel’s office on Grasso Street, watching the passersby. She had her sketchpad on her knee, but she hadn’t opened it yet. Instead, she was amusing herself with one of her favorite pastimes: making up stories about the people walking by. The young woman with the child in a stroller, she was a princess in exile, disguising herself as a nanny in a far distant land until she could regain her rightful station in some suitably romantic dukedom in Europe. The old black man with the cane was a physicist studying the effects of Chaos theory in the Grasso Street traffic. The Hispanic girl on her skateboard was actually a mermaid, having exchanged the waves of her ocean for flat concrete and true love.

  She didn’t turn around when she heard the door open behind her. There was a scuffle of sneakers on the stoop, then the sound of the door closing again. After a moment, Annie sat down beside her.

  “How’re you doing?” Jilly asked.

  “It was weird.”

  “Good weird, or bad?” Jilly asked when Annie didn’t go on. “Or just uncomfortable?”

  “Good weird, I guess. She played the tape you did for her book. She said you knew, that you’d said it was okay.”

  Jilly nodded.

  “I couldn’t believe it was you. I mean, I recognized your voice and everything, but you sounded so different.”

  “I was just a kid,” Jilly said. “A punky street kid.”

  “But look at you now.”

  “I’m nothing special,” Jilly said, suddenly feeling self-conscious. She ran a hand through her hair. “Did Angel tell you about the sponsorship program?”

  Annie nodded. “Sort of. She said you’d tell me more.”

  “What Angel does is coordinate a relationship between kids that need help and people who want to help. It’s different every time, because everybody’s different. I didn’t meet my sponsor for the longest time; he just put up the money while Angel was my contact. My lifeline, if you want to know the truth. I can’t remember how many times I’d show up at her door and spend the night crying on her shoulder.”

  “How did you get, you know, cleaned up?” Annie asked. Her voice was shy.

  “The first thing is I went into detox. When I finally got out, my sponsor paid for my room and board at the Chelsea Arms while I went through an accelerated high school program. I told Angel I wanted to go on to college, so he co-signed my student loan and helped me out with my books and supplies and stuff. I was working by that point. I had part-time jobs at a couple of stores and with the post office, and then I started waitressing, but that kind of money doesn’t go far—not when you’re carrying a full course load.”

  “When did you find out who your sponsor was?”

  “When I graduated. He was at the ceremony.”

  “Was it weird finally meeting him?”

  Jilly laughed. “Yes and no. I’d already known him for years—he was my art history professor. We got along really well and he used to let me use the sunroom at the back of his house for a studio. Angel and Lou had shown him some of that bad art I’d been doing when I was still on the street and that’s why he sponsored me—because he thought I had a lot of talent, he told me later. But he didn’t want me to know it was him putting up the money because he thought it might affect our relationship at Butler U.” She shook her head. “He said he knew I’d be going the first time Angel and Lou showed him the stuff I was doing.”

  “It’s sort of like a fairy tale, isn’t it?” Annie said.

  “I guess it is. I never thought of it that way.”

  “And it really works, doesn’t it?”

  “If you want it to,” Jilly said. “I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s ups and downs—lots more downs at the start.”

  “How many kids make it?”

  “This hasn’t got anything to do with statistics,” Jilly said. “You can only look at it on a person-to-person basis. But Angel’s been doing this for a long, long time. You can trust her to do her best for you. She takes a lot of flak for what she does. Parents get mad at her because she won’t tell them where their kids are. Social services says she’s undermining their authority. She’s been to jail twice on contempt of court charges because she wouldn’t tell where some kid was.”

  “Even with her boyfriend being a cop?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Jilly said. “And it didn’t work out. They’re still friends but—Angel went through an awful bad time when she was a kid. That changes a person, no matter how much they learn to take control of their life. Angel’s great with people, especially kids, and she’s got a million friends, but she’s not good at maintaining a personal relationship wit
h a guy. When it comes down to the crunch, she just can’t learn to trust them. As friends, sure, but not as lovers.”

  “She said something along the same lines about you,” Annie said. “She said you were full of love, but it wasn’t sexual or romantic so much as a general kindness toward everything and everybody.”

  “Yeah, well … I guess both Angel and I talk too much.”

  Annie hesitated for a few heartbeats, then said, “She also told me that you want to sponsor me.”

  Jilly nodded. “I’d like to.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s to get?”

  “Well, I’m not like you or your professor friend. I’m not, you know, all that creative. I couldn’t make something beautiful if my life depended on it. I’m not much good at anything.”

  Jilly shook her head. “That’s not what it’s about. Beauty isn’t what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It’s a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It’s realizing the goodness of things, it’s leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It’s appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

  “Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians—they’re the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker. It’s the intent you put into your work, the pride you take in it—whatever it is.”

  “But still … I really don’t have anything to offer.”

  Annie’s statement was all the more painful for Jilly because it held no self-pity, it was just a laying out of facts as Annie saw them.

  “Giving birth is an act of Beauty,” Jilly said.

  “I don’t even know if I want a kid. I … I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am.”

  She turned to Jilly. There seemed to be years of pain and confusion in her eyes, far more years than she had lived in the world. When had that pain begun? Jilly thought. Who could have done it to her, beautiful child that she must have been? Father, brother, uncle, family friend?

  Jilly wanted to just reach out and hold her, but knew too well how the physical contact of comfort could too easily be misconstrued as an invasion of the private space an abused victim sometimes so desperately needed to maintain.

  “I need help,” Annie said softly. “I know that. But I don’t want charity.”

  “Don’t think of this sponsorship program as charity,” Jilly said. “What Angel does is simply what we all should be doing all of the time—taking care of each other.”

  Annie sighed, but fell silent. Jilly didn’t push it any further. They sat for a while longer on the stoop while the world bustled by on Grasso Street.

  “What was the hardest part?” Annie asked. “You know, when you first came off the street.”

  “Thinking of myself as normal.”

  8

  Daddy’s Home, by Isabelle Copley. Painted wood. Adjani Farm, Wren Island, 1990.

  The sculpture is three feet high, a flat. rectangle of solid wood, standing on end with a child’s face, upper torso and hands protruding from one side, as though the wood is gauze against which the subject is pressing.

  The child wears a look of terror.

  Annie’s sleeping again. She needs the rest as much as she needs regular meals and the knowledge that she’s got a safe place to stay. I took my Walkman out onto the fire escape and listened to a copy of the tape that Angel played for her today. I don’t much recognize that kid either, but I know it’s me.

  It’s funny, me talking about Angel, Angel talking about me, both of us knowing what the other needs, but neither able to help herself. I like to see my friends as couples. I like to see them in love with each other. But it’s not the same for me.

  Except who am I kidding? I want the same thing, but I just choke when a man gets too close to me. I can’t let down that final barrier, I can’t even tell them why.

  Sophie says I expect them to just instinctively know. That I’m waiting for them to be understanding and caring without ever opening up to them. If I want them to follow the script I’ve got written out in my head, she says I have to let them in on it.

  I know she’s right, but I can’t do anything about it.

  I see a dog slink into the alleyway beside the building. He’s skinny as a whippet, but he’s just a mongrel that no one’s taken care of for a while. He’s got dried blood on his shoulders, so I guess someone’s been beating him.

  I go down with some cat food in a bowl, but he won’t come near me, no matter how soothingly I call to him. I know he can smell the food, but he’s more scared of me than he’s hungry. Finally I just leave the bowl and go back up the fire escape. He waits until I’m sitting outside my window again before he goes up to the bowl. He wolfs the food down and then he takes off like he’s done something wrong.

  I guess that’s the way I am when I meet a man I like. I’m really happy with him until he’s nice to me, until he wants to kiss me and hold me, and then I just run off like I’ve done something wrong.

  9

  Annie woke while Jilly was starting dinner. She helped chop up vegetables for the vegetarian stew Jilly was making, then drifted over to the long worktable that ran along the back wall near Jilly’s easel. She found a brochure for the Five Coyotes Singing Studio show in amongst the litter of paper, magazines, sketches, and old paintbrushes and brought it over to the kitchen table where she leafed through it while Jilly finished up the dinner preparations.

  “Do you really think something like this is going to make a difference?” Annie asked after she’d read through the brochure.

  “Depends on how big a difference you’re talking about,” Jilly said. “Sophie’s arranged for a series of lectures to run in association with the show and she’s also organized a couple of discussion evenings at the gallery where people who come to the show can talk to us—about their reactions to the show, about their feelings, maybe even share their own experiences if that’s something that feels right to them at the time.”

  “Yeah, but what about the kids that this is all about?” Annie asked.

  Jilly turned from the stove. Annie didn’t look at all like a young expectant mother, glowing with her pregnancy. She just looked like a hurt and confused kid with a distended stomach, a kind of Ralph Stead-man aura of frantic anxiety splattered around her.

  “The way we see it,” Jilly said, “is if only one kid gets spared the kind of hell we all went through, then the show’ll be worth it.”

  “Yeah, but the only kind of people who are going to go to this kind of thing are those who already know about it. You’re preaching to the converted.”

  “Maybe. But there’ll be media coverage—in the papers for sure, maybe a spot on the news. That’s where—if we’re going to reach out and wake someone up—that’s where it’s going to happen.”

  “I suppose.”

  Annie flipped over the brochure and looked at the four photographs on the back.

  “How come there isn’t a picture of Sophie?” she asked.

  “Cameras don’t seem to work all that well around her,” Jilly said. “It’s like”—she smiled—“an enchantment.”

  The corner of Annie’s mouth twitched in response.

  “Tell me about, you know …” She pointed to Jilly’s Urban Faerie paintings. “Magic. Enchanted stuff.”

  Jilly put the stew on low to simmer, then fetched a sketchbook that held some of the preliminary pencil drawings for the finished paintings that were leaning up against the wall. The urban settings were barely realized—just rough outlines and shapes—but the faerie ones were painstakingly detailed.

  As they flipped through the sketchbook, Jilly talked about where she’d done the sketches, what she’d seen, or more properly glimpsed, that led her to make the drawings she had.

  “You’ve really seen all these … little magic people?” Annie asked.

  Her tone of voice was incredulous, but Jilly could tell that she wanted
to believe.

  “Not all of them,” Jilly said. “Some I’ve only imagined, but others … like this one.” She pointed to a sketch that had been done in the Tombs where a number of fey figures were hanging out around an abandoned car, pre-Raphaelite features at odds with their raggedy clothing and setting. “They’re real.”

  “But they could just be people. It’s not like they’re tiny or have wings like some of the others.”

  Jilly shrugged. “Maybe, but they weren’t just people.”

  “Do you have to be magic yourself to see them?”

  Jilly shook her head. “You just have to pay attention. If you don’t, you’ll miss them, or see something else—something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Faerie voices become just the wind, a bodach, like this little man here”—she flipped to another page and pointed out a small gnomish figure the size of a cat, darting off a sidewalk—“scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus.”

  “Pay attention,” Annie repeated dubiously.

  Jilly nodded. “Just like we have to pay attention to each other, or we miss the important things that are going on there as well.”

  Annie turned another page, but she didn’t look at the drawing. Instead she studied Jilly’s pixie features.

  “You really, really believe in magic, don’t you?” she said.

  “I really, really do,” Jilly told her. “But it’s not something I just take on faith. For me, art is an act of magic. I pass on the spirits that I see—of people, of places, mysteries.”