“And then we take them down,” he says.
I’m still thinking about those wolves. There was something that bothered me about them, something familiar, but I still can’t place it. I only know it’s going to prove that old truism once again: if it can get complicated, it will. Story of my life, lately.
But I give a slow nod in agreement.
“Then we take them down,” I say.
I only hope we’re not making the mistake that Cody always makes: trying to do what you think is right, but only screwing things up until they’re worse than they ever were.
Jilly
NEWFORD, MAY 1999
Sophie couldn’t explain why she invariably went into immediate denial mode the moment the subject of the dreamlands came up. No matter what she might tell anybody else, she knew they were real. She just couldn’t talk about them as if they were.
Sometimes she wondered if this inability was pure selfishness on her part, that admitting they were real to anybody else wouldn’t make them special for her anymore. Wouldn’t make her special. In her heart she knew that wasn’t true. Other people had access to the dreamlands—a lot of them more so than her. She only had to think of someone like Joe who moved as easily back and forth between the worlds as anybody else might cross a street.
But still she couldn’t shake the thought that by admitting they were real rather than simply dreams, she might lose her own connection to them.
It was an awful thing to contemplate. She liked to think of herself as a generous person, especially when it came to Jilly and Wendy. She honestly believed that she was willing to share anything and everything with them, and it would be so much fun to have them with her when she crossed over to Mabon. But every time the subject of the reality of that other world came up, she could feel something close up inside her and denials came swimming up into her side of the conversation.
The rational part of Wendy’s mind seemed happy to accept these denials—yes, the world is what we see, no more, no less, and everything else belongs to illusion and dream—but Sophie knew that it drove Jilly a little crazy sometimes. And maybe even hurt her as well, though she never said as much. Still, Jilly rarely talked about anything that really troubled her, not the old hurts or any new ones that might come up, so that wasn’t something this could be measured against.
The accident that had put her in the hospital and what had happened to her faerie paintings were perfect examples, Sophie thought as she entered the rehab building and walked down the hall to Jilly’s room. It was close to the end of visiting hours and night’s quiet was stealing back into the building. Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor and she could smell a faint whiff of incense as. she neared the room of the practicing Buddhist who was Jilly’s neighbor.
Jilly was sleeping when Sophie stepped into her room, or at least her eyes were closed. Sophie paused for a moment in the doorway, remembering again that odd feeling of the world going a-kilter when she’d thought she’d seen Jilly coming out of her Yoors Street loft the other day. Impossible, of course. It hadn’t been Jilly.
“Are you coming in?”
Sophie blinked to find Jilly looking at her, a slightly lopsided smile tugging at her lips. The paralysis had mostly left her face and her speech was now as clear as it had ever been. If only the rest of it would go away.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said.
Jilly gave a small shake of her head. “Just resting. I had a busy day.”
Sophie came into the room and sat on the side of the bed. Knowing what she did of Jilly’s exercise schedule, the comment wasn’t an overstatement.
“I half expected to still find a gang of people in here,” she said.
“It’s been quieting down a little,” Jilly told her. “Which is kind of a relief. I mean, I love that everybody’s been so supportive and everything, but the broken body’s pretty obvious lying here on the bed and it gets in between any chance of relating with people on any kind of a normal level.”
“They’re looking at you, but not looking.”
“Exactly. It’s a really weird feeling. And people you wouldn’t expect, either. Like Isabelle. The whole time she’s visiting, she’s just focused on my face.”
“I guess it makes some people uncomfortable.”
“I suppose. But enough about the trials and tribulations of the bedridden. What brings you back today?”
Sophie had already visited this morning.
“I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things,” she said.
Jilly made an exaggerated grimace. “Uh-oh.”
“Nothing too serious,” Sophie said, then corrected herself. “Well, maybe a little.”
“I had nothing to do with it. I was somewhere else. I’ve never even met whoever it is that claims I did it.”
Sophie had to laugh. “You don’t even know what it is that I want to talk to you about.”
“I know. But I thought I’d get my excuses in first.”
“It’s nothing you need to be excused for.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Sophie shook her head and regarded her friend for a moment. It was nice to see that Jilly had regained a bit of her silly good humor. Sophie had missed that these past few weeks. It made it feel a little bit like old times, except Jilly wasn’t bouncing around the room while she was declaiming her innocence, or sitting sideways on some easy chair, limbs dangling over its arms, displaying all the nonchalance of a drowsy cat. The return of her good spirits was more than welcome. That they seemed genuine as well was even better.
“I was wondering about the dreamlands,” Sophie said. “You haven’t really been talking about them as much lately.”
“Ah, the dreamlands,” Jilly replied.
Something guarded came into her eyes and Sophie felt a twinge of disappointment that there could be secrets between them where there never had been before.
“Wonderful place,” Jilly told her. “Though they’re not real, of course.”
Sophie’s twinge became the point of a knife darting straight for her heart.
“I suppose I deserved that,” she said.
Jilly gave her a puzzled look, then smiled. “Oh, I see. You think I’m just saying that because you’re always denying them being a real place.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Maybe a little.”
Jilly’s gaze went past her, as if looking at something that lay far beyond the wall behind her.
“But it’s funny,” Jilly went on. “I find that the more time I spend there, the more reluctant I am to talk about them. Or at least talk about how they relate to the World As It Is, or whether or not they’re real.”
“Because you think, if you do, they might be taken away?”
Jilly’s surprise was plain. “Something like that. How did you …” Her voice trailed off and then she grinned. “You feel the same way, don’t you? That’s why you talk about them the way you do … or rather don’t.”
Sophie gave her a reluctant nod. Even that seemed to be too much conversation about them. She could feel a tightening in her chest, but under it was another, almost alien feeling. The sense that she’d stepped up to a door in a locked room only to find that it had opened under her touch and freedom lay just beyond. She took a steadying breath.
“I can’t explain it,” she told Jilly.
“I don’t think you have to,” Jilly said. “At least not to me, because I know exactly what you mean.”
“Why do you think it’s like that?”
Jilly slowly shook her head and Sophie found herself focused for a moment on how wonderful it was that Jilly had that much motion back.
“Who knows?” Jilly said. “Maybe it’s some kind of a safety mechanism for the place itself. I imagine that if too many people believed in the dreamlands and realized how they can manipulate what they find there, the place would turn into total chaos.”
“It already is in a lot of places.”
Jilly smiled. “That’s
what Joe says when he’s in teacher mode. And maybe that’s another reason we find ourselves kind of denying the dreamlands. Maybe it’s a safety mechanism put in place by our brains. You know how the old stories go—when you come back from fairyland, it’s either as a poet or mad. I’d think our brains would be scared about the madness part.”
“Left side, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Though that would mean that Wendy’s already been there,” Sophie said.
“She probably has—in dreams she can’t remember. Joe says everybody spends some time there when they’re asleep and dreaming, but most of us just accept it as part of the dreams that our brains come up with to amuse our sleeping minds.”
“That’s sounds like Joe.”
Jilly smiled. “Pretty much a verbatim quote.”
Sophie sighed. “But it doesn’t answer why we find it hard to talk about our experience there as real. To just come out and say that the dreamlands themselves …” She found herself hesitating, still. “Are, you know. Real. Or why we can’t find each other when we’re there.”
“So why do you think that is?” Jilly asked. “And don’t you dare say it’s because we’re having different dreams or I’ll smack you. Once I can smack people again, that is.”
Sophie felt her heart go out to her friend. She couldn’t begin to imagine how someone as active as Jilly was coping with all of this.
“I really don’t know,” she said. She fiddled with the end of Jilly’s sheet, then lifted her gaze to Jilly’s face. “I’m supposed to be checking up on you there, you know.”
“Wendy?”
Sophie nodded. “Our resident poet is worried about you. She thinks you’re just going away into the dreamlands forever.”
Jilly looked past her, out the window. Her gaze took on a faraway gleam.
“If I could, I would,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Not in dreams,” Jilly said, her gaze returning to Sophie. “But like Joe does. Crossing the border in my body—being there in flesh and blood. If I could step across for real, I don’t know that I’d ever come back.”
“But … why? Are you so unhappy here? Or is it the magic thing?”
Jilly was forever talking about how she’d like to be magic. To live inside a story, instead of always standing on the outside of it. To know what magical beings did when they were just hanging out—and did they even hang out? What would it be like to be a part of that world?
“A bit of both,” Jilly said. “Well, no. That’s not really true because I’m not really unhappy, per se. Or at least I wasn’t before the accident. These days, just a smile can be a real challenge sometimes.”
Sophie nodded, understanding.
“But I’ve always had this sense that there’s something out there, waiting for me. Not here, in the World As It Is, but in the dreamlands. That there’s a place for me in Faerie and I’ll be there one day if I can just be good enough, or patient enough, or tenacious enough. Or …” She gave a small smile. “It’s a place where I’d be home, really home. I want it so badly sometimes that just thinking about it hurts.”
Sophie regarded her for a long moment.
“I … I never knew,” she said finally. “You’ve never talked about anything like this before.”
“And say what?” Jilly asked. “How do you even begin to explain this sort of thing without sounding crazy?”
Sophie gave her a look.
“Okay,” Jilly said. “Even crazier than people already think I am.”
“I didn’t think that mattered to you.”
“It doesn’t. Not really. But this idea of a home waiting for me, somewhere in Faerie, it’s so private and special that I couldn’t bear to have anybody laughing about it.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“No,” Jilly said. “And you’re not even pretending that it’s something that can’t be true, either.”
Sophie would have started to feel bad all over again, but she knew Jilly hadn’t meant that as a recrimination.
“So,” Jilly went on. “I’ve been wanting to compare notes with you.”
Sophie could feel what was coming, and already her chest was starting to feel tight, her pulse quickening, but she was determined to fight the urge to close up. She was going to be completely open. Surprisingly, simply deciding that made the tension ease a little.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Well, do you have to actually think about crossing over when you’re falling asleep, or do you just go there automatically?”
“I just close my eyes,” Sophie said, “and I’m there—usually in the same place I was the night before. You know, wherever I was when I last left. If I want to start off somewhere else, I have to be concentrating on it when I fall asleep. You?”
“Pretty much the same, though it took me a while to get the hang of it. At first I just kept showing up in any random place—well, mostly Mabon and the Greatwood. But I was wondering, can you go to sleep and not cross over?”
Sophie slowly shook her head. “It doesn’t seem to be something I choose to do. The only choice I get is where I end up, and even that doesn’t work all the time.”
“What if you could decide to stop it? To never cross over again. Would you do it?”
Sophie thought of the strange alternate life she had in the dreamlands, starting with the fact that her boyfriend only existed there, in Mabon.
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“But would you like to have the option to choose when you go and when you don’t? Don’t you ever get tired of always being awake?”
It did feel like that sometimes, Sophie thought. You were always awake. You closed your eyes here, and when you opened them a moment later, you were over there.
“Although it doesn’t exactly feel like it,” she said. “Does it feel like it to you?”
Jilly shook her head. “But then before the accident I never slept much anyway.”
That was true. Before the accident Sophie had sometimes thought that Jilly never slept at all.
“I guess what I’m wondering,” Jilly said, “is how we cope without sleeping. People are supposed to need their sleep to stay healthy.”
“And dreams,” Sophie said. “We’re not having dreams, we’re going someplace else that’s just as real as here, except we’re going in our sleep.” She smiled. “Or maybe because our dreams are so true, that makes us superhealthy.”
“Yeah, right,” Jilly said, pointedly looking down at her broken body.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
“I thought of going to a sleep clinic once,” Sophie said. “To let them measure my brain waves, or whatever it is they do in there, while I’m gone—into the dreamlands.”
“I remember you talking about that. But you never went, did you?”
Sophie shook her head. “I got scared. What if they found something weird about me? Or what if they explained it all to me and by doing that, by knowing the physiology of how it works, I couldn’t do it anymore?”
“Because of Jeck.”
“I know it’s pathetic to only have a boyfriend in the dreamlands, but it’s better than not having one at all.”
“I could have a boyfriend there, too,” Jilly said. “Or I could have up until yesterday.”
She told about her last trip there and what had happened with Toby while they were climbing the great tree, questing for these wizardly twigs.
“Mind you, he doesn’t do it for me in that way,” she said.
Sophie didn’t say anything and they fell quiet for a time. Sophie had no idea where Jilly’s thoughts were taking her, but Sophie’s were worrying at that last thing Jilly had said, how this Toby Childers didn’t really do it for her. In the long run, no one did it that way for Jilly, except for Geordie, and she often wondered if the feelings Jilly carried for him were able to survive only because they were unrequited. An actual relationship never worked out
for Jilly and she’d long since given up on trying to find one. That was the legacy she carried from her old hurts—what had happened to her as a child and then her life on the streets.
Sophie wondered if she was all that much better. Her real world relationships never worked out either, though she didn’t have the same issues to deal with. Being abandoned by your mother wasn’t the same thing as spending the first decade and a half of your life being abused.
“So was that what you came to talk to me about?” Jilly said.
Sophie blinked, startled out of her reverie.
“How you’re supposed to be checking up on me in the dreamlands?” Jilly added.
“Partly,” Sophie began, but then she didn’t quite know how to go on. This whole business with the doppelgänger was just too weird, if anything could be too weird considering how their conversation had been going so far.
“And then she stopped talking,” Jilly said, “and everybody wondered where her mind had gone.”
Sophie smiled. “It’s just that I don’t know how to explain this without sounding crazy.”
“You see? It is all poets and mad people. No more dreamlands for you, m’dear.”
“It’s not a dreamlands thing,” Sophie told her. “It’s something from right here and now, in the World As It Is.”
“Oh, do tell.”
If Jilly hadn’t been bedridden, Sophie knew she’d be leaning forward now, a gleam of anticipation in her eyes. The gleam at least was there.
“We’ve been seeing your double,” Sophie said. “Or at least Isabelle and I have. One time for each of us.”
She went on to explain and though it took a little effort, she didn’t try to explain it away with any sort of logic. No more secrets between them, she vowed. No more denials.
“You’re sure about this?” Jilly asked.
“I can’t answer for Isabelle—although she’s certainly sure—but I know what I saw. It might have been just a glance, but you know me.”
“Ms. Takes-It-All-In.”
“But I also know it can’t have been you, unless … you can’t travel back from the otherworld in your dreamland body, can you?”
The Onion Girl Page 25
