The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “Let’s see what the cards can tell us,” she said.

  She knelt on the floor across the coffee table from where Wendy was sitting and cleared a space between them.

  “This won’t be an absolute answer,” she said as she undid the rubber band and placed the cards in a neat stack on the table. She slid the rubber band onto her wrist where it joined the half-dozen brightly colored plastic bracelets she was already wearing. “But it may give us a better idea as to where we can direct our attention to learn more.”

  The cards didn’t seem to be anything special, but Wendy had seen them in action before and knew there was far more to them than an initial appearance might let on.

  “You’ll have to turn the cards,” Cassie said.

  Wendy gave her a surprised look. “Me? Why me?”

  “I don’t like to use them for myself.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, it would be too easy to get dependent on them and want to use them for every little thing that might come up in my life. You’d be surprised how quickly that sidles up on you. And the other is, I’m too attuned to them and they’re more likely to show me what I want to see than what we’re actually looking for.”

  “Everything’s got a limitation, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t think of it as a limitation,” Cassie said. “More a protocol. A right way to do things. The world always seems a little brighter when we do things for each other instead of just for ourselves. I don’t know that I can explain it better.”

  “It’s okay,” Wendy said. “I can do it.”

  She shuffled the cards, then set them back on the table and turned the topmost card over. An inadvertent gasp escaped her lips as the blank face of the card slowly resolved into an image. She could just never get used to magic.

  She and Cassie both leaned closer to make out the image that was taking shape. It was murky at first, showing a small, unlit bedroom, night skies lying beyond its window, starlight shining in on its basic furnishings. They saw figures on the bed and as their eyes adjusted to the bad lighting of the image, they realized what the two figures were doing. It was a teenaged boy, abusing a much younger girl, no more than a child really.

  The image was so graphic that Wendy quickly pulled her gaze away from it.

  “Did you recognize those people?” Cassie asked.

  Wendy swallowed hard. “I think so. Do you know anything about Jilly’s childhood?”

  “We’ve talked about it,” Cassie said. “And about her life on the streets, after she escaped.” She was still studying the card, leaning even closer to it. “It’s hard to tell, but the hair, if nothing else, makes me think of Jilly.”

  “I’m sure that’s who it is.”

  It was such a heartbreaking reminder of how Jilly had begun her life.

  “I can’t imagine having had to go through that as a kid,” Wendy added.

  Cassie nodded. “Turn another card.”

  Wendy didn’t want to, but she did. And then she didn’t want to look at it, but she did that as well. She’d come here to learn something, to see if she could help, so it would be stupid to turn back now, for all that she wanted to step inside that card, smash that horrible brother of Jilly’s, gather the child Jilly had been into her arms and hold her safe from all the hurts in the world.

  The next image was innocuous and confusing. It showed a pink Cadillac convertible, parked on a city street that she couldn’t recognize.

  “Could that be the car that hit Jilly?” Wendy asked.

  Cassie shook her head. “Lou said that according to the forensic evidence it was a dark blue. They’re still waiting to get the results back to see if they can make a match between the paint flecks that were recovered and a particular manufacturer. The trouble is, it’s not exactly a priority. But Lou’s pushing.”

  “So I wonder what the card means?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the last card will make it clearer.”

  “We only do three?”

  “This isn’t a traditional oracular device,” Cassie said.

  Wendy had to smile. “No kidding.”

  “Everything I do with them works on an intuitive level, and threes are what feels right to me—have been since the first time I used them.” Her gaze clouded, as though at a painful memory, before they focused on Wendy again. “Joe’s always pushing for four cards—to get the word from each of the four quarters of the world, he says—but that’s something that answers to his Kickaha heritage, not mine.”

  “So what does your intuition tell you about this pink Caddy?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “The same.”

  “Let’s do the last card,” Cassie said.

  Wendy took it from the pack and turned it over, bracing herself for she wasn’t sure what. But when the image began to resolve, it didn’t make any more sense to her than the pink Caddy. This time the card showed them a couple of wolves, close-ups of their lupine features. Superimposed over the wolf heads were the faces of two very different women. One appeared to be Jilly. The other looked like a trailer park version of Farah Fawcett, a television actress from the seventies. It was the hairstyle that did it.

  “Are they supposed to be wolf people?” Wendy asked.

  Cassie looked up from the card. “Wolf spirits move in them. That much I can tell.” She sighed and sat back on her heels. “This hasn’t been much of a help, has it? The same thing happened when I did a reading for Joe, just before he went back into manidò-akì.”

  “Say what?”

  “The spiritworld.”

  “Maybe the card’s telling us that the dark Jilly is—” Wendy shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Some kind of animal person.”

  “With a friend.”

  “A friend with badly dated hair.”

  That called up a smile on Cassie’s lips. She left the cards on the table, the three of them laid out in a row beside the rest of the deck, and returned to her seat on the end of the sofa.

  “Can I pick them up?” Wendy asked.

  “Of course. They won’t change until they’ve been returned to the deck.”

  Wendy ignored the first card, but picked up the other two.

  “I wonder what Jilly would say if she could see these cards,” she said. “If they’d mean anything to her.”

  “The first card …”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t show her that one. Like she needs any reminders of that time in her life. But maybe she’d recognize the other woman in this.” She held up the card with the wolves. “Or can tell us what the pink Caddy means. What time is it, do you know? I’m always forgetting to wear my watch.”

  Cassie looked at hers. “Almost nine.”

  “Which means visiting hours are just about over,” Wendy said. “Or will be by the time we could get there. Still, we could sneak in. You know how Jilly likes any sort of an intrigue. It’ll make her night.” She glanced at Cassie. “Will the images hold until then?”

  “They should.”

  “I’ll keep these two out,” Wendy said, holding the last two cards in her hand, “but I don’t want to have to look at that other one ever again.”

  She began to turn the first card face over, back onto the deck.

  “Don’t,” Cassie started to say.

  But it was too late. The card fell into place on the top of the deck. As it did, the images on the pair Wendy was holding faded away. Wendy sighed.

  “Well, I screwed that up, didn’t I?” she said. “The pictures on those cards were the best clues we’ve had so far and now they’re gone.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Cassie said. “You couldn’t have known.”

  Wendy appreciated her kindness, but really. What else was she going to say? The truth was, Wendy had blown it, and she knew it.

  “We can still describe them to Jilly,” Cassie added.

  Wendy gave her a glum nod. Sure, they could. But it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. Description couldn’t come close to the immediate impac
t of an image. Showing the cards to Jilly might have surprised something out of her that words couldn’t.

  “I’ll try when I go see her tomorrow,” she said.

  “I thought you wanted to go tonight.”

  Wendy sighed. “Without the cards it doesn’t seem so pressing anymore.”

  5

  As my dream life becomes more magical, my life in the World As It Is grows all that much more stupifyingly mundane. Being in the rehab is like the Worm Ouroborus, a serpent eating its own tail. You do all this physical therapy, but the end result is this circle leading you to only more of the same. I think the endless routine of it all is what’s going to kill me in the end.

  I’ve always been pretty much the least organized person you’d ever know—flighty would probably be the kindest way to put it. It’s not that you couldn’t count on me. Whatever I’m involved in, I give it all my. attention, whether it’s a painting, a customer at the restaurant, one of the old folks I’m visiting in St. Vincent’s, or just hanging with my friends. But I was always all over the place, flitting from this to that. Here it’s the same routine, day in and day out.

  They say I’m getting better, and maybe there’s been some improvement—the muscles in my face are hardly drooping at all anymore and the feeling’s almost completely returned all the way down to my shoulders—but I still can’t walk. I can’t paint. I can’t even eat or go to the bathroom by myself. And that’s just the physical side of things. There are other problems that I don’t even let on to anyone. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re even more scary than the idea of never being able to paint again, to walk or take care of myself. They’re things inside me, under my skin, inside my head. Things you can’t see. Holes in my memory and something worse: my mind doesn’t work the way it used to.

  I was ambidextrous as a child, but like I’ve said, that got whupped out of me pretty early on. It started in school, but my mother took it up with a vengeance. Both my little sister and I were the same, the boys were all right-handed. Just one more thing she had to hold against us, I guess, don’t ask me why. There was never any rhyme or reason to why she hated us, me especially. I like to think it got better for my sister when I finally got away, but who am I kidding? I should never have left her there, but what did I know? I was only ten myself when I first started running away, and then out on the street, I was too screwed up to take care of myself, never mind anybody else.

  But back then, well, most of the time it was okay. So long as we didn’t step out of line, just did what we were told. But if we tried to do anything with our left hand—cut a pork chop, use a pair of scissors, write or throw a ball—that was a sure way to guarantee we’d get a lickin’.

  Whupped. Lickin’.

  It’s funny. I haven’t used those words in years. But just thinking about when I was growing up brings the twang back into my thoughts—the twang and all those hillbilly words that even back then I was trying to erase from my vocabulary. I wasn’t ashamed of being poor. I was ashamed of the ignorance that surrounded me. The pride that was taken in being ignorant because anything that smacked of manners or learning was considered putting on airs.

  I mention this because of those theories that left-handed people are more likely to be drawn toward the arts while right-handed ones are more analytical. Even though I seemed right-handed, I was actually comfortable using either, especially as a child. And my thinking’s been the same. I have the spontaneity and intuitiveness that helps create good art, but I’ve always been good with linear thinking, too. With maths and logical problems.

  That’s pretty much gone, now. Numbers don’t work in my head at all anymore.

  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but just imagine if you’ve always been able to do a certain thing, and then it’s just taken away from you. That describes my body, too, I suppose, but somehow it’s scarier when it’s in your head. I suppose it’s because no matter what happens to us physically, we hold on to this concept that we’re still the same person inside. It can be as simple a thing as aging. You might be forty, but in your head you’re forever fifteen. Who you are inside is who you really are. When that starts to change …

  Today I couldn’t make change for a simple bill, never mind figure out a tip. And my thinking’s gone way intuitive. Where once I could think things out, figure out a logical path from A to B, now my brain just jumps to a conclusion and I’ve no idea if it’s a logical one or not. It just feels right, which is fine for my art—just saying I was able to even pick up a pencil—but not so good for day-to-day life.

  Then there’s all these gaps I’ve got in my memory.

  The big one’s a black hole that contains the week and a half or so before the accident. I can’t remember a thing from that period. Up until that time, sure. And the accident itself. But nothing in between.

  The accident. God, I still hate thinking about it, and not because of any sort of need for denial on my part. It just … hurts to remember. Everything closes up inside me and it all comes back like it’s happening to me all over again. It just won’t fade. If anything, the memories just get stronger. More intense each time they come back.

  The blinding lights that pinned me.

  That moment when I knew this huge monstrosity of metal was really going to run me down.

  The roaring sound in my ears, layers and layers of sound, each superimposed upon the next in this bewildering cacophony.

  The impact itself is the worst. The wet smack of car against my flesh. The crunch of my bones before I was flung into the air. The pain’s like nothing you could ever imagine, not unless you’d gone through something like it yourself.

  In the moments before the actual impact, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. Instead my brain just short-circuited. The memories that make up who I am just kind of shattered, like one of those screen savers on Christy’s computer, where the image falls apart into all its pixilated pieces, except this was a hundred thousand images, all the pieces of my life, all shuffled together in a sharp-edged tangle.

  There was a moment then when it all went away. When I was standing over myself, and all I could see was the unnatural splay of my limbs against the pavement and the blood pooling under my body. Or maybe I wasn’t standing there. Maybe this memory is just something I imagined, something I called up to free me from the pain.

  Because when I looked up from the Broken Girl I’d become, I saw Zinc, this street kid I’d taken under my wing who used to live in a squat with Lucia and Ursula, a couple of performance artists I knew. It was Zinc, standing in the middle of the road, looking at me, except he died back in 1989. He was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. But I could see his lips moving, and I could make out that they were shaping my name.

  I got the sense that he wanted me to go with him. That he was waiting for me. But I couldn’t move. I wanted to go, but right at that moment, time seemed to have come to a sudden halt and I was locked in place.

  Finally he shook his head and started to walk away. I watched him go to the end of the block. The streetlights were all out on this block, but they shone brightly the next street over. Incredibly brightly. Zinc looked back once, this small dark silhouette against the glare. Then he turned again and walked into the light. And here’s the weirdest part. As he stepped into the light, out of all the mouths of all the alleys, up and down the block, these riderless bicycles came wheeling out of the darkness that lay between the buildings, following him until they’d all disappeared into that light.

  I stared at them as they went, feeling this huge swell of loss rear up inside me. Then I looked down again and felt myself falling, back into my body …

  The next clear memory I have of the World As It Is—as opposed to the dreamlands where I’ve been wandering while in the coma—is waking up in the ICU and Sophie’s face, so close to mine.

  None of which is particularly odd, apparently, considering the trauma I’d been through, but the other little blackouts really do scare me. See, it�
��s not just that my mind seems to have cut a new channel for itself in how it goes zipping through my brain. I’ve also got all these little holes to contend with.

  I didn’t really pay much attention to them at first because I was forever drifting in and out of consciousness during those first few days. I had no strength and I’d just fall asleep right in the middle of a visit with someone. Under those circumstances, it’s not something you’d really notice.

  But now, here in the rehab, I’m more alert. Broken, sure. My relationship with pain and helplessness is obviously a long-term arrangement and I’m learning to deal with it. But I know I’m not drifting off every few moments now. So those little black holes in my life that used to get buried in drowsiness and sleepy confusion really stand out.

  They’re not the same as the boxes I learned to build around the bad memories of my childhood and my life on the streets. The boxes keep them at bay, but I always know they’re there. I can open those boxes, if I need to. If I’m feeling masochistic. Or if doing so can maybe help somebody else. But these blackouts are just holes. There’s nothing there, nothing hidden, nothing to recover. They’re pieces cut out of my memory that I can’t recover.

  I’ve been hiding them from everybody and I can’t really explain why except, I guess, with the helplessness I already feel with everybody poking and prodding at my body, I’m just not ready to deal with having the same thing happen to the inside of my head. I already have an endless parade of people constantly looking in on me. Back in the hospital I had my own little team: neurosurgeon, head nurse, physical therapist, occupational therapist, respiratory therapist, recreation therapist. And each of them seemed to have his or her own aide or tech.

  It’s not a whole lot different here with all the nurses and therapists, the case counsellor from the state, psychological counsellor from the hospital, the chaplain who keeps stopping by to see if I want some company. There’s always someone looking in on me, turning me over in the middle of the night, giving me a pill, asking me how I’m doing.