The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  “Not exactly. But it does take a certain way of observing the world, an ability to look sideways and find those places where the borders are thin enough to slip through from one world to the other. That’s how we do it,” she explained before Wendy could ask. “Those of us who don’t have magic of one kind or another in our blood.”

  “Can we try it now?”

  Cassie laughed. “Hardly. We’re both tired and we have other commitments we need to deal with first.”

  “Helping Jilly,” Wendy said. “Finding Joe.”

  Cassie nodded. “And it might be a good idea if Joe was the one to show you how to cross over.”

  “I thought you said you could.”

  “I can, and I will, if need be. But Joe’s got a better eye for how you’ll do on the other side. He’ll be able to prepare you better.”

  “Prepare me for what?”

  “The spiritworld’s a confusing place,” Cassie told her. “Time runs differently there and it’s all too easy to get lost in otherwhens. You know the old story: those who cross over return either mad or as a poet.”

  “I thought that was from fairyland.”

  “Which is just another name for the dreamlands.”

  “Well, I’m already a poet,” Wendy said.

  Cassie smiled. “There’s that.” She finished her tea and stood up. “I think you should stay here tonight. I can make up a bed for you on the sofa.”

  “I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You won’t be. Besides, I could use the company.”

  “What about contacting Joe?”

  Cassie shrugged. “Like I said earlier. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’m going to do what I usually do when I need him to come back from the dreamlands and that’s think really hard about him while I’m going to sleep.”

  “Does it work?”

  “It seems to. He usually shows up within a day or two whenever I’ve done it before.”

  “I don’t know if we have a day or two.”

  “Let’s worry about that in the morning when we’re more awake. Now I’m just going to get some bedding and a pillow.”

  Wendy brought their teacups and the pot back into the kitchen when Cassie left. On her return, they took the back cushions off the sofa and made up a bed on the seat cushions.

  “I’m going to think about him, too,” Wendy said.

  Cassie smiled. “Let’s just hope he’s listening tonight.”

  5

  I still don’t know what to do when I wake up the next morning. Wendy comes by on the way to work and tells me that Cassie’s sending a message to Joe, but that there’s no guarantee that he’ll get it anytime soon, deep as he is in the dreamlands. She doesn’t stay long.

  “I can’t be late again this week,” she says before she hurries off.

  It’s not until she’s gone that I realize there was something different about her—a vague feeling of reticence in her manner, like there’s a distance growing up between us. Then it’s too late. I’m trapped in my bed and I can’t follow after her to ask about it. I wonder if I’ve done something to annoy her, but nothing comes to mind. If I have, I guess it’s lost in one of my little memory black holes.

  Sophie’s by next and tells me about this new messenger service in Mabon and that, at least, gives me a smile. I love the idea of all these punk elfin sprites, dressed up like bicycle couriers as they flit about the dreamlands, delivering messages. She also insists again that we can’t wait to hear from Joe; that we have to tell Lou before something even worse happens.

  “Those wolves tried to kill us,” she says.

  “We don’t know it was my sister leading them,” I argue, but without a lot of conviction. I’m pretty sure it was, and Sophie knows it. “And besides, what do we tell Lou? Well, we were sharing this dream and then these wolves jumped us. How’d we get away? Oh, we woke up.”

  “What if they can cross over?” Sophie asks.

  That’s treading too close to my own fears.

  “We don’t know that they can,” I tell her, but I can’t even convince myself, never mind her, and Sophie picks right up on that as well.

  “Someone trashed your studio,” she says. “That was physical, here and now. Not in the dreamlands.”

  “But they did it with a knife, you said. A very sharp knife. Not wolf’s teeth and claws.”

  Sophie nods. “And if she comes for you here with that knife? You can’t wake up and escape her from here, Jilly.”

  I know. The Broken Girl can’t do anything.

  “Okay,” I say. Finally. Reluctantly. “But don’t tell him you know it’s her for sure. Just that maybe it could be.”

  “We can’t tell him about the dreams anyway,” she says. “But I can make a case for her being mad at you for abandoning her all those years ago.”

  “How could she not be?”

  Sophie sighs. “You’re probably right. But if we’re wrong … I mean, if Lou does manage to track her down and it’s not her, maybe you’ll at least get the chance to talk to her.”

  “And I’ll really have endeared myself to her, then, siccing the police on her and all.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Sophie agrees.

  “Nothing ever is.”

  “But at least you’ll get to explain yourself.”

  I think about the look in that wolf’s eyes.

  “What makes you think she’d even listen?” I ask.

  Sophie doesn’t have a response for that.

  After she leaves, I don’t want to think about this anymore. I do my therapy and all my exercises and purposely focus on anything but my sister and wolves and the dreamlands and all. Angel comes by for a visit while I’m having lunch and she takes over from the nurse that’s helping me eat. Angel doesn’t know about all these weird things that have crept into my life—it’s not the kind of thing I’d ever talk to her about anyway; Angel’s too intent on what’s happening in this world with her charges to even consider anything that might exist on the periphery. So it’s easy to stay on safe topics.

  But once she goes, when I’m alone and resting, it’s pretty much impossible. I stare at the ceiling and see those wolves. I turn my head to look at the wall and there’s my sister, waiting for me, accusation plain in her eyes. I close my own eyes and jerk awake with a start as I begin to drift off. Finally a nurse comes to take me for another rehab session and I can forget for minutes at a time.

  It’s strange. I forget things I don’t want to forget. But the things I do want to forget just stay with me, wrapping me in onion layers that get so tight sometimes I can hardly breathe. And then I get a completely unexpected visitor and my life acquires another layer of complication.

  “Well, look at you,” I say when Daniel comes into my room that afternoon.

  I’ve just gotten back from an intensive rehab session and my muscles are all limp and weary—the ones that I can actually feel, at least. It takes me a moment to figure out what’s different about him, then I realize it’s that he’s in civvies. A pair of faded jeans, an old Hawaiian shirt, and sandals have replaced the pale green scrubs and soft-soled shoes which is all I’ve ever seen him in before today.

  He smiles when he sees the brooch he gave me, still pinned to my pillow, and the room kind of lights up a notch or two.

  “How’re you doing, Jilly?” he asks.

  “I’ve been better,” I tell him, then before he can jump on me about my attitude like he used to do when I was under his care, I quickly add, “but I’ve been worse, too.”

  He pulls a chair over so that he can sit near the head of the bed and we talk a little about how things are going, some of the old patients that were on the ward when I was there, that sort of thing. Then he surprises me.

  “So maybe you’ll think this is inappropriate,” he says, “seeing how you were under my care and all, but I was wondering if you’d maybe want to go out with me sometime.”

  Go figure. It looks as though Sophie was right about him after all. Except he’s
so nice and so handsome, there’s got to be some catch.

  He sits there waiting for my answer, but I don’t know what to say.

  “Why’d you become a nurse?” I finally ask.

  He doesn’t respond, doesn’t’say anything for a long moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I guess I’m prying. And all you wanted to do was ask me out.”

  “No, it’s okay,” he says. “You just surprised me and it’s not something I’ve thought about for a long time.” He pauses for a long heartbeat before going on. “My dad died of cancer—when I was a kid. I used to go to the hospital to sit with him every day after school and it just, I don’t know, really made an impression on me, I guess, the way the nurses would take care of all these dying people. By the time my dad died, I knew that was what I wanted to be: a caregiver. To help people when they’re in this scary place when everything seems out of control and even their own bodies are betraying them.”

  “Why not become a doctor?”

  “No disrespect intended, but doctors don’t really do the same thing. Sure, they perform the surgery, prescribe the treatments and all, but they’re not on the front lines, twenty-four/seven the way we are. When some poor kid’s just puked up his guts, it’s not the doctor who cleans it up, eases the kid’s embarrassment, makes him feel like he’s still normal. We’re the ones who assure him that he’s not some freak, that it’s the disease messing with his body and nothing he can control.

  “We’re there for all of them, all the patients, all the time.”

  I look at him and all I can think is, wow. He’s too good to be true.

  “So are you gay?” I ask.

  He frowns. “Why? Because I chose to become a nurse?”

  I shake my head. “No. I know I’m guilty of generalizing here, but all the single, smart and gorgeous guys I seem to meet are inevitably gay.”

  “You think I’m smart and gorgeous?”

  “Well, yeah. They don’t have mirrors in nurseland?”

  He’s blushing, but I know he likes it. He clears his throat.

  “So what about that date?” he asks.

  “Look at me,” I say. “I’m not playing the pity card now—so don’t lecture me about my attitude—but really, let’s face it. I won’t be going out on the town anytime soon.”

  “I meant when you’re feeling up for it,” he says. “We could watch a movie in the common room, or have dinner in the cafeteria … or something …”

  His voice trails off—I guess it’s because I’m just staring at him.

  “What?” he asks.

  “I didn’t think they still made guys like you,” I say.

  I can see the hint of another blush crawling up under his collar again, but he ignores it and plays it cool.

  “But that’s a good thing,” he says. “Right?”

  “Sure,” I tell him, though I’m not certain of anything these days.

  His interest in me right at this time is an enormous complication. Never mind him dealing with the Broken Girl—though he seems to be okay with that. What happens when he meets the Onion Girl that lives inside her? When he finds out what’s going on in my head? The memory losses, my relationship issues, and—here’s a big one—my trips into the dreamlands. He seems like a nice, normal kind of funky guy. Smart and gorgeous, like I already told him. Good heart, cares about people. Everything a girl could want.

  But how soon before he goes running for shelter after he takes his first stroll through my head? We’ve never talked about that kind of stuff at all.

  Well, why put off the inevitable? Might as well get it over with now.

  “Do you believe in magic?” I ask.

  He gets this big smile. “Do you mean, do I already know that you really believe in faerie?”

  I blink in surprise. “Okay. That, too.”

  “I have a confession to make,” he says. “I already knew who you were before you were admitted to my ward.”

  “You did?”

  He nods. “I even own one of your paintings—‘The Yellow Boy,’ the one with the little dandelion faerie man leaning against the hubcap of a junked car.”

  “You bought that one? Albina lost her copy of the receipt so we could never figure out where it had gone.”

  “Albina?

  “Albina Sprech. She owns The Green Man Gallery where the show was.”

  “Okay. I remember her now. I just didn’t know her name.”

  We look at each other for a moment, then he clears his throat.

  “So,” he says. “You were asking me if I believe in magic and faerie and all … Let me put it this way: I don’t not believe in it.”

  “That’s a double negative.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I nod. I’ve been there, wanting to believe—in my case, desperately—but unable to completely let go and accept the peripheral world until the empirical evidence was laid out in front of me. I could imagine the denizens of it, but it was a long time before I was actually seeing them.

  “It seems to me,” he goes on, “that there’s more to the world than what we can see. Or at least there should be. But the trouble is I’ve never experienced it. I guess I’m too wrapped up in the world that everybody agrees is here.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  He nods. “I know. And that’s what first attracted me to your work. I read this interview with you—years ago in The Crowsea Arts Review—and it just spoke to me. This idea that whole worlds exist on the periphery of the way we think, or expect, or are told the world should be.”

  “Ever go looking for magic?”

  He smiles. “All the time. But I get the sense that it’s the kind of thing that you either stumble across, or it’s got to come looking for you first.”

  “That’s a good way to put it,” I say.

  “Though it seems you have to stay open to it as well, and that’s hard. Your paintings make it easier to stick with it.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says with a kind of enthusiasm that warms my heart. “When I look at your paintings, it always seems so possible again.”

  I get this sharp stab of regret. It’s the first time since I got the news about what happened in my studio that it really hits me. All those paintings, forever gone. I never stopped to think that they meant as much to anybody else. I mean, unless the black holes come up and swallow them, I’ll always have the memory of them. But what he’s telling me now—that’s half the reason I did those paintings.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Daniel asks.

  I shake my head, but I can’t stop the tears building up in my eyes.

  “I did,” he says. “I can tell. I just talk too much. You probably think I’m just some rabid fan now …”

  I try to snag a tissue with my left hand, but I can’t reach it. I can’t make my arm move properly. Daniel goes into nurse mode and gets the tissue, wipes my eyes, doing it all in such a way that it seems like a casual thing, no big deal, I could do it for myself but he wants to do it for me. I don’t know quite how he pulls off this sort of thing, but it just blows me away that anyone can.

  “No,” I finally say when I feel I can trust my voice. “It’s not that at all. I just started thinking about all those paintings I lost, that’s all.”

  “What paintings?”

  I realize then that I never told him. My friends know, but we don’t talk about it and I didn’t tell anyone else. So I tell him now and he gets this stricken look on his face that makes me want to comfort him, but I’m still the Broken Girl and all I can do is lie here and talk.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Well, it’s not okay, but I can deal with it. I have to deal with it.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” he says.

  Well, when your sister hates you enough, I think, but I don’t even want to get into that.

  “Who knows?” I say.

  “Do the police have any leads?”

  I shake my head. “Nothing concrete.”


  It’s funny. He’s always been perfectly okay with my injuries. But this has really thrown him and I can tell he’s feeling all awkward now. He never pitied the Broken Girl, but his sympathy for the loss of those paintings is close to pity—this knowing that I might never be able to paint their like again—and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.

  “Let’s do that date,” I tell him, as much to change the topic of conversation as that I’d like to get to know him better. I don’t hold out any real hopes—you can’t when you’re a Broken Girl—but I can’t seem to let it go, either. I want to explore the “what if” that lies between us, though I already know where it’s going to take us in the end. Why couldn’t I have met him a month or so ago?

  “When’s your next night off?” I add. “Because my calendar’s pretty much clear these days. We could do the movie thing.”

  I say it like a joke and he accepts it that way. I see him put away the shock of all those paintings having been destroyed and give me a smile. Another point for him. What I don’t need from anyone right now is more pity.

  “How about tomorrow night?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow night’s perfect.”

  “Anything you’d like to see?”

  “Something light and silly,” I tell him.

  After he’s gone, I lie there and stare up at the ceiling. But I’m not counting the holes in the ceiling tiles this time. Instead, I find myself looking forward to tomorrow evening and that’s weird, because I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to anything. I wish I could pick up the phone and talk to Sophie or Wendy, but even not being able to reach for the receiver and dial doesn’t bring me down.

  It takes Lou to do that.

  “Raylene Carter,” he says after he’s asked how I’m feeling and takes a seat in the chair Daniel so recently vacated. “Turns out your sister’s got a record.”

  “How high did it get on the charts?” I ask.

  “Ha, ha. I ran her name and came up with a solicitation charge in L.A. for which she pleaded guilty and did six months in county. That was back in ’81. Since then, she’s kept her nose clean—at least on paper.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’ve got a friend on the LAPD—you remember Bobby Kansas? We used to call him Oz.”